Writing and phonics

[Notcontent]

Background is that I am a bit annoyed at dd's teacher who seemed to suggest that dd's spelling is not great because she needs to improve her knowledge of phonics.

Dd is 7 and her reading is great, as acknowledged by her teacher, but her writing is not as good as her reading. Before Christmas at meeting teacher said that her spelling is letting her down and gave me a sheet with the phonics sounds to practice with dd. But the fact is that there are so many exceptions to English spelling that a lot of it is just memory work. I think that needs to be acknowledged. We have been doing lots of writing at home and I think her spelling is pretty good actually.

I do agree that phonics helps with reading, and helps a bit with spelling, but that's not the whole story, is it?

often get double letters/single letters wrong
That's the most common spelling mistake committed by English-speaking adults.

This is because in words of more than one syllable consonant doubling is completely random (merry - very, ballad - salad), sometimes combined with irregular spellings for short vowels too (penny - many, teddy - steady).

In the 7,000 most common English words which I analysed, I found:

 423 words which have them after short, stressed vowels (banner, manner, pennant),
 554 which do not (banish, manor, penance) and
 195 words which have them for obscure grammatical reasons (annoy, tyranny),

unrelated to keeping a stressed vowel short.

If doubling was used consistently for keeping stressed short vowels short (as children are taught to with words like big + er = bigger, finer + er = finer), it would be easy to apply, and it would also help with learning to read less familiar words like 'latent, lateral, famous, famished, ravenous, raven....) just as it does with 'dinner, diner; stammer, stamen; holy, holly'.

Johnson is chiefly responsible for the current mess, because he excempted many words of Latin origin which earlier had more sensible spellings (pitty, citty) from the English doubling rule and added them to ones like 'annoy' which don't need them.

It's the area of English spelling which is crying out for a tidy-up more loudly than any other.

column
Then there's the wether/whether/weather - practise/practice and heaven knows what else. The whole sound/spell thing is just never going to work.

Unless you are a sheep farmer how likely are you to need to know how to spell 'wether'?

That leaves 2 options. I teach exercises called 'homophones'. Words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings. Children are taught these over the years and gradually, for most, they stick.
It takes practise.

And speaking of which, one is a noun practice and one is a very practise. Once you understand that then it's easy to choose the correct one.

very- verb.

same as in advice and advise.

Well, yes. If anyone is intimately familiar with individual words, of course that helps tremendously. We've been having the debate about why beautiful is spelled in such stupid fashion. We blame the French. We haven't yet got to the debate about why the English didn't respell it properly, though.

Not quite sure what you mean by 'intimately familiar? Rather an odd way to describe an understanding of everyday words ( apart from wether).

You see without different spellings there would be great confusion: ' Great wether today' - sheep shagger or weather forecaster???

Homophones account for a tiny percentage of the thousands of words we use. Most people learn the differences quite easily.

I think what annoys me about this whole debate about phonics from the anti-phonics brigade is that they seem to patronise people and think they are unable to learn. No one challenges the need to learn the rules of physics, or the periodic table, or the rules of algebra- but if someone says you have to actually learn how to spell, hands are thrown up in horror.

You'd only unintentionally get mixed up with sheep shaggers in the example above because you've forgotten your indefinite article. The real confusion might occur if someone drew attention to the generally good wethers to be found there.

We haven't yet got to the debate about why the English didn't respell it properly, though.

Or perhaps we should be debating why the English don't say it properly.

I presume that's because we don't know. The French make their adjective by removing their x from the noun. We stick all kinds of letters onto their adjective to create one of our own. (I don't know why we do that. I suspect we got our Latin knickers in a twist.

Seems as though Old French got its Latin knickers in a twist before we got ours in one (or rather I suspect that we inherited the bad etymology from them.) And we say they never did anything for us!

I suspect we got our Latin knickers in a twist.
That's part of the reason. But I gave the main reasons a few pages ago as follows.

Until 1430, when English became the official language of England again, English spelling was as consistent as other European writing systems, apart from the use of o for u next to m, n and v which had been adopted by monastic scribes as early as the 9th C, because they did not like having lots of short strokes next to each other (e.g. munth).

When after nearly centuries of Norman rule English became the official language of England again around 1430, the court scribes who had to switch from French and Latin to English were not very happy. They gave vent to their anger about having to change to this previously despised, lowly English by messing up its spelling.

They deliberately destroyed earlier phonetic distinctions, such as ‘mene – ment, rede - red’, by adopting ‘mean, meant’ and ‘read now / read yesterday’. They deliberately wrecked the earlier consistent spelling of the long ee sound (nere, here, speke, beleve, reson) and made short e less regular at the same time (bed head, fret threat, went meant...).

In the 16th century, English spelling was messed up still further by early printers.
Firstly, by the foreign printers who printed the first English bibles without speaking a word of English. - Tyndale's translation of the New Testament (the most popular book of the 16C) was first published in Belgium in 1526, because in England the printing of English bibles remained illegal until 1539.

Additionally, early English printers were paid by the line and were therefore fond of making words longer. They inserted extra letters simply to earn more money or to make margins neater: olde, worlde, shoppe, hadde, fissche ...

Mercifully, because the pamphleteers of the English Civil War (1642-9) wanted to squeeze the maximum of information onto a single page, they dropped most of them again (old, had, shop), but many (especially -e) are still with us (are, have, imagine, promise, delicate) and undermine words in which -e has a useful role (care, save, define, surprise, inflate).

Sam Johnson then gave English spelling consistency a final hefty blow with his dictionary of 1755. He more or less destroyed the English short and long vowel spelling system, as in 'bit – bite – bitten'.

Because he had far more respect for Latin than English, he removed doubled letters from many words of Latin origin which earlier had been spelt with them (e.g. Lattine, pittie, cittie, verray...) – to show their short vowels - and inserted them where they serve no phonic purpose (arrive, account, afford...).

He was also chiefly responsible for standardising the 335 sets of totally pointless heterographs like 'practice/practise' and 'it's/its' which make learning to spell English almost more time-consuming than anything else.

More than 2,000 homophones (words with more than one meaning) get by perfectly well with just one spelling (mean, lean, found, round, ground, bark, lark....) including 'to promise' / 'a promise' and 'to notice'/ 'a notice'.

English even has 111 pairs of different words which have to share a spelling, e.g. 'minute', 'second', 'wind'.

I would ask for specifics from the teacher. One biter was way out in front with her reading but her writing was markedly behind her reading age. This is quite common and just requires a switch focus to help them 'catch up'.

Luckily we were at a splendid school who adjusted the literary focus for her work and explained that I could help through play (scrabble for example) and concentrating more on accurate spelling and punctuation whilst checking her homework.

As her teacher said "She won't forget how to read while we push writing skills".

Column You'd only unintentionally get mixed up with sheep shaggers in the example above because you've forgotten your indefinite article.

You don't need an indefinite article in the example I gave- that's the whole point.

In US English they now get by perfectly well with 'a/to practice', just as we do for hundreds of words which can be both nouns and verbs, including: promise, notice, service, surface, menace, process, progress, access, harness, witness
and dozens and dozens like sleep, doze, work, play, act, shoot, ring, hang, hand....

But lots of teachers clearly like to keep putting children through the pointless, endless mill of word by word memorisation, to ensure that they leave school knowing as little as possible.

I don't know if they are too dumb to see that having a highly irregular spelling system entails enormous costs, or if they are merely scared of change.

Great Wether is a place, (alongside Little Wether and Nether Wether.)
A wether is a great big, hairy sheep.
Wether is a noun (which refers to a great big, hairy sheep.)

reading, phonics and writing are all complicated and it takes time and practise to get it 'right' regardless of the teaching methods.

Even then there are always anomalies.

Anyone for a scone for example?

Is that the scon/scone split?

you got it merrymouse.

You can apply all the rules you like but there will always be a scon/scone divide.

And then you have to decide which way you're going to go on the whole cream/jam/butter order thing. Life is so bloody stressful .

Butter, jam, *cream of course. I know I'm right because I use synthetic phonics

*clotted; no other cream will do...

scone
butter
LOTS OF CLOTTED CREAM
jam
butter
scone

EVEN BETTER!

masha But lots of teachers clearly like to keep putting children through the pointless, endless mill of word by word memorisation

I find your posts very irritating because you clearly have no idea about how phonics, reading and spelling are taught in schools and for a supposedly intelligent person, you seem unwilling to listen and learn from people who are at the chalk face- or whiteboard face.

Why is that?

The whole point of phonics is that is dispenses with the need to learn thousands of words by solely visual memorisation.

You keep coming back posting lists of words, but I don't see why you bother frankly.

There are very good reasons why words such as practice and practise need to be spelled differently- to avoid confusion.

I don't give a toss what they do in the US- they have adulterated the English language and why should we aspire to be like them?

And by the way there is no such word as its'

There are 2 versions of the word- it's ( apostrophe showing omission) and its - possessive.

Tut tut- didn't you know that?

She never said there was a word called its'

She has provided apostrophes on both sides of her word pairs.

Just to clarify, is Masha's argument that the English language should be changed to make the spelling more regular?

Yes it is.