In my opinion, the A-B-C’s of English are not very phoentic, and some words are difficult to spell, because the word is not spelled like it sounds.
Simple example, the word THROUGH. Why not spell it THRU, which is the informal spelling of the word? Or COLONEL, which sounds nothing like it spells. KNIFE, why the K in the word?
English is more or less a salad of words from many other languages.
Spelling does evolve. Look at Middle English. Most words can be read, but are spelled differently.
I was taught to read at an early age (three) by a Garandmother who had been a teacher. She also taught me to count to 100 and write my name in "cursive’. I started Kindergarten at about the second grade level of reading and math.
The school refused to allow this and forced me to move at the speed of the rest of the class. Within a couple years I was so bored I just gave up trying, and by Jr. High I was actually behind in many areas. (Math! ICK!)
But I read (and continue to do so) like a fiend, with the result being that I “see” words. I’m now in my late 40’s and my spelling skills have diminished considerably, along with the fact I never could type worth a crap. (Thank the Gods for “backspace” and the edit function)
However, constant reading has given me an edge. I may not know the correct spelling of something (and can seldom type it on the first try when I do) but I CAN recognise when something is spelled WRONG.
Then it’s a simple matter of deciding whether or not it’s worth looking it up.
Yesterday I observed the second-grade class again. During the writing lab part of the day I had a kid ask me to read his story and help him make it better. I had done this before, and just as with his previous story, he only had a few misspellings. (But there was one sentence where he had written the town that they went to as simply “w” because he didn’t know how to spell “Walhalla”. More on that later.) So I decided (again, I’m an education student, never married with no children, so I don’t necessarily know what I’m doing and just try not to interfere with the teacher while trying to earn my keep) to write the correct spellings off to the side for him to refer to when he was rewriting or “publishing” his story. I looked up to find myself surrounded by children asking me how to spell words. Some of the students misspelled every third word. One kid’s writing was unreadable, (and reminded me why I asked for a 5th grade classroom.) But what really struck me was that some really wanted to know how to spell words correctly. Fortunately for me, lunch time was fast approaching and I had an out, otherwise I could have been there all day just correcting spelling. I had gotten myself into a situation that a real teacher would not have the time to deal with. I didn’t have the time to deal with it, and I’m just “observing”.
Later, during a Social Studies Quiz, the students were asked to write their address. The same boy from before just put 3 initials. He told me that his older sister had told him to just write the first letter if he didn’t know how to spell it, and he asked me how to spell it. Since this was a quiz and I wasn’t familiar with the street anyway, I told him to sound it out and spell it the best he could. He seemed confused and bewildered by this. Which demonstrated that Invented Spelling was not actually “taught” to him, or at least not taught strongly enough to override his sister’s advice.
I’d like to point out that letters don’t make sounds at all. Ink on a page and pixels on a screen are silent. Letters are arbitrary symbols we use to communicate in print. Rucksinator, this is something you must always be cognizant of as a language teacher: competent spoken language is a natural aptitude of normally developed humans; reading and writing are artificial. The fact that written language draws so much upon speech as a means for readers to recognize language unfamiliar in print doesn’t change the fact that the two are processed very differently by the human brain. If we took seriously the notion that letters intrinsically “make sounds”–and that the correlation of the symbols to the sounds of speech is the basis for successful communication through written language–then we’d conclude that Chinese writing can’t work. Nor could things like arrows or the the prohibition sign (a red circle around an image with a diagonal slash going through it). While reading, the human eye takes in on average three words at a time and the brain processes all of them as a chunk in a single instant. (The degree to which sub-vocalization is used toward comprehension, of course, varies greatly depending on the individual and the circumstance. But it clearly is not the primary basis for comprehension.) For this reason, too, reading “out loud” doesn’t truly demonstrate reading capability–if for no other reason than that it’s muddled by motor-physical demands. Also for this reason: pure phonics-based reading instruction could never produce competent readers.
No reading curriculum could ever achieve success without some kind of “whole language” component, simply because real reading is in essence ultimately a use of whole language. (Reading is not about producing “correct” sounds based on printed inscriptions as though it were some form of singing with musical notation.) The well-known commercial product, “Hooked on Phonics,” itself has an integral whole-language component.
These points inevitably circle around to the issue of spelling. The idea that mastery of spelling (especially with English orthography) somehow is cognitively linked to “sounding out” words while reading is belied by the obvious fact that adults who otherwise are competent with a language–but who for whatever reason struggle with accurate orthography while writing–nevertheless can recognize and comprehend those words while reading, as with Mozart1220, above. Spelling is more convention than anything, and–individuals master it correctly to varying degrees, depending not only upon their ability and desire for communication, but their motivation to conform.
And probably more to the point, irregular past forms are inevitably acquired by children very early on (unless they are part of a discourse community for which they are marked–a dialect). The kid will eventually start saying “ran” no matter what the mother/teacher does.
All of the words that that boy had misspelled were exceptions to rules (except the “I before E, except after C…” which they had not yet learned), so there was no correcting by having him sound it out; I had to simple say “this word is a strange one. You spell it like…”
Most of the 2nd graders were not as good at spelling and he was. This boy might have simply skipped over the Invented Spelling phase.
The above idea from Quartz was an integral part of my elementary school studies in English. Most of our work was creating stories and editing them, with little focused teaching on language use. Our ‘first drafts’ were usually covered with red marks, as our work was generally corrected by students/teachers proof reading our creations, and for spelling exercises we were each given lists of words that we had misspelled in our stories/reports. We generally learned by making mistakes, as improper grammar and spelling were corrected after we made the mistakes, so I guess we used ‘invented spelling’, in a way, and this was over 25 years ago.