![]() The method has had some success when matched by adequate teaching resources, but, like all other methods, it can’t overcome the amount of memorisation required for irregularities. It is thought to be particularly useful for children at the earliest stages of reading and is based on teaching the child to put together different sound / character patterns to assemble simple words. The chances are that the method used in your child’s school will be based on synthetic phonics, because this is the Government’s present preferred method. Various teaching methods have been tried over the years to help children master English spelling and to cope with the fact that ours is one of the most irregular of modern spelling systems. What kind of methods are used at school? 2 Of course we don't want our child to be one of these, do we – which is why the Spelling Society has caused this booklet to be published. But they tend to take up to three years longer to complete this process than those speaking other languages (at massive cost to the educational budget and therefore the taxpayer), and an unacceptably high proportion (about 23%) never master the process at all causing all kind of social problems. Most children in the English Speaking World do eventually learn to master spelling more or less satisfactorily. Understanding this fundamental problem will help you to understand the difficulties your child may be facing – as indeed you probably did in your youth! ![]() This is because English has many different ways of representing the same sound AND has some letter combinations as well that can represent more than one sound. Unfortunately, good old English, for all its many pluses (one gender, simple plurals, few inflexions etc) suffers from a "double whammy" when it comes to spelling - not merely can't you predict spelling from pronunciation but you can't always predict pronunciation from spelling. ![]() With most other languages you can at least predict the pronunciation from the spelling, even if the sound can be represented in more than one way (eg French). In certain languages such as Spanish and Italian, we can usually predict the pronunciation of a word from seeing the spelling as well as predict the spelling of a word from hearing it pronounced (so called "two way phonemicity"). That means that a letter or letter combination stands for a particular sound. With a few exceptions, such as Chinese and Japanese, most modern languages adopt the alphabetical principle for their writing systems.
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