Why teach phonics when the English spelling system is so irregular?

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Louisa Moats: The English writing system is complex, but it's not crazy. It's much easier to understand it and teach it if you know about the ways that our spelling system represent language. The letters we use to represent the speech sounds are a start point for teaching how the code works. But the way it really works is through a system of what we call phoneme-grapheme correspondences. And a grapheme is not just a letter, it's a letter or a letter combination that represents a speech sound. English has a lot of those graphemes with more than one letter in them. All of that is very teachable, but it means that we need to teach more than just a sound ... a sound that goes with a letter. The system is quite predictable. At least half the words in English can be spelled accurately if you know phoneme-grapheme correspondences and teach those to kids. For example, that the word "supper" probably has two 'p's in it because there's a short vowel in the first syllable, and that is a closed syllable.

If you also know something about how spelling represents the language that a word came from, that also can help you explain why words are written the way they are. We talk about angles or lenses for viewing words and understanding words in English. And in any one moment as a teacher, you might need to appeal to not just phonics, but also some of this other information about where words came from, what language they came from, what they mean. And if we look at words from those other angles, we can pretty much explain at least 90% of the words in English. There's really no reason why a teacher should be up in front of a class teaching a word and having to say, "oh, I just think English is crazy." That's the last thing you want to convey, because if you know a lot about it, you can reassure students that there is a way to learn and remember almost any word in the language.