Make it Make Sense! What To Do About English Spelling and How Structured Word Inquiry Can Help

There’s a poem you may have seen before whose first stanza reads:

I take it you already know

Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you

On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,

To learn of less familiar traps?

The writer of the poem is anonymous, perhaps because they feel some trepidation at admitting just how difficult they find their (presumably) native language to be! They certainly wouldn’t be alone! English has a reputation for being a notoriously difficult language to become literate in, even for its own native speakers, and spelling is perhaps the most challenging element of it to master.

Phonetics and Spelling

Although spelling has a reputation for being “crazy,” this reputation is actually very unfair. I should know; I have spent most of the past two years, and a good part of the five years before that, digging into English spelling and the teaching of it, and I have discovered something that rather amazed me; English spelling is actually a very logical and ordered system which just takes a bit more time and effort to understand. If you can approach spelling with an open mind and allow your perspective to shift, you will discover that under the apparent chaos is actually a high degree of calm and order.

Perhaps the primary reason that spelling has the reputation it does is because for many decades now we have been teaching it in a way that relies on a highly flawed premise. That flawed premise is this; that the main job of letters is to represent sounds, and that you can spell words by “sounding them out.” For many other languages, that approach works very well. But anyone who has studied English spelling for more than ten minutes realizes right away that this approach works only rarely with English words. Consider this very short list of words with silent letters; sign, comb, answer, talk, knife, doubt….how could anyone possibly be expected to correctly spell these words when the approach to spelling they have been taught instructs them to spell by putting a letter on paper for each sound they hear? Or consider these high-frequency words that are often considered “irregular;” words like been, said, people and they. Generations of frustrated students have resorted to what amounts to repeated drills and memorization just to get by. When you consider that the average English speaker has a vocabulary of around 20,000 words, (https://www.dictionary.com/e/how-many-words-in-english/) you can see that memorizing the spelling of each word individually is not sustainable for the human brain.

The problem lies in that flawed premise. Let’s imagine for a moment that spelling were actually a branch of science. If a scientist made the statement: “English spelling is based on the sounds made by letters,” would they be able to prove it conclusively? As we have already seen, this would clearly be impossible. You would have to conclude that their premise was flawed.Yet we continue to teach spelling as if this premise were true, despite thousands of pieces of evidence to the contrary. There must be a different premise at work that does explain the system we see being used across the entire English-speaking world.

What if we shifted our perspective? What if, instead of relying only on the sounds made by letters, we acknowledged that there could be more going on beneath the surface? What if, for example, letters had other jobs than just to make a sound? Just as one human being might be an accountant and a little league softball coach and a parent, so too could letters have more than one job. If we accepted this possibility, then a whole new world of clarity and understanding could open up before us. Enter Structured Word Inquiry.

What is Structured Word Inquiry?

Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) is a fresh approach to spelling and the English language as a whole. Rather than focusing simply on sounds, SWI operates on the premise that the English spelling system is in fact an intersection of etymology (word history and origins), morphology, (the system of parts that are used to construct words,) as well as phonology (the sounds that letters can sometimes represent.) It is a system designed to communicate meaning to speakers of English. It is only when we see spelling from this expanded perspective that spellings which were previously baffling begin to make sense.

Take the word sign as one example. The silent g is never going to make its way into that word by a learner who has been taught from a phonics-first perspective. Its presence in the word is a complete mystery to most, and the majority of learners get by just memorizing that the word needs a g in it without really understanding why it's there. However, when we recognize this word sign as the base of a word family that includes relatives like signal and signature, the presence of that g begins to make much more sense. While silent in some family members such as assignment and designing, it is most certainly not silent in other members of the family. The g functions as a grapheme that joins all members of the word family and helps us understand that all these words share connections in meaning as well as spelling. It is the morphology - the understanding of the bases, prefixes and suffixes at work to build these words - that help us understand the presence of the silent g in sign.

Let’s see how examining etymology can help us understand a mysterious spelling. Consider the word doubt. I doubt many of you could think of a stranger or seemingly more unnecessary silent letter in a word than the b in doubt Yet when we look into the history of this word, we see that it is a direct descendent of the Latin word dubitare, which meant - you guessed it - “to doubt, hesitate, or waver in opinion.” (https://www.etymonline.com) As we look further into the word’s history, we would discover that for hundreds of years, it actually was spelled without the b and that it was only later, around the 14th century, that English scribes chose to bring it back to show the connection with its Latin parent. What is also fascinating to discover is that the English word double comes from the very same Latin root. Consider some of the expressions we have in English that show both a historical, and meaning connection, between the words doubt and double, such as “being of two minds,” or “second guessing myself.” Our language reveals connections and understandings that our ancestors saw clearly, but which we have forgotten with the passage of time.

"But WHY is it Spelled Like That?"

Having a strong basis in phonics and letter-sound correspondence is crucial for all learners and spellers. But many spellers find that phonics runs into limitations that some can find frustrating, especially for those learners who crave understanding the why of things, including spelling! Consider a message I received recently from a parent, who told me that her son insists on spelling the word phone as fone. Phonics-only approaches to spelling would have no answer as to why we spell phone the way we do. How is a learner meant to choose the correct spelling when we have multiple means of representing the same sound? Again, it’s Structured Word Inquiry that can supply an answer, and hence an understanding. A dive into the word’s etymology shows us that the word phone comes from the Greek word phone meaning “sound or voice,” and that the use of the ph digraph to spell an /f/ sound is commonly used in English words of Greek origin. It’s the word’s history that helps us understand its spelling and to choose the correct grapheme, ph rather than f, to spell it.

SWI is an excellent approach in particular for learners who are overcoming dyslexia or other learning differences that can impede learning to read and spell. SWI offers explicit instruction, and removes the need to rely heavily on visual memory, something that can be difficult for dyslexics. Rather than studying lists of words that are related only tenuously (bread, head, dead, or other lists of rhyming words, for example), SWI reveals the underlying connections among words that leads to true understanding and an ability to make practical applications. Consider the word pleasant Often challenging for learners to spell! Students of SWI will know to look for the base in a word like this and they’ll soon find it; please. Yes, pleasant comes from please + the -ant suffix (seen also in words like hesitant, dominant, radiant, etc). The spelling pattern of the base is retained in all words of the family, even when the pronunciation shifts. This lets us see that words like pleases, pleasantly and pleasurable will all have the letters <pleas> in their spellings, and all share a connection in meaning as well, which means that studying SWI is also an exceptional way to build vocabulary. Rather than having to memorize the spellings of approximately twenty different words across the please family, we need know only the spelling of the base, of the suffixes that are used across the spelling system, and the suffixing rules that are applied consistently in order to spell all these words successfully.

I hear from a great many parents who tell me their learner has done phonics-based programs, often for years, and often with at least some, if not great, success. But as their learner moves through school they find that their progress with spelling has plateaued. Or that they are increasingly encountering spellings for which phonics has no explanation. Or that their learner has questions about a word that their teachers cannot answer. Or that their learner is tired of memorizing lists of exceptions to all the rules they worked so hard to understand in the first place. Or that their learner is a great reader but still just can’t spell. If any of these sound familiar, Structured Word Inquiry can help by broadening your perspective and helping your learner see English in a whole new light that brings understanding and confidence.

The poem from the beginning of this article ends with the lines:

A dreadful language? Man alive.

I’d mastered it when I was five.

I can tell you I am much older than five and I am still learning new things about this amazing, interesting, complex language all the time. I can also tell you that English spelling makes sense. Every word is spelled the way it is for a reason. Every letter has a job. Let me prove it to you! I offer a number of small group classes around SWI, as well as asynchronous classes and 1:1 tutoring, all designed to help your learner make sense of English!

https://www.indyed.com/secular-curriculum/andrea-dalland