How much to change?

To some extent, the burdens of learning to read and write English can be expressed in numbers. By analysing the 6800 most used English words, I identified 3695 words which contain one or more spellings which make learning to write slow and difficult. Of those, 2032 words also have letters with irregular sounds (e.g. only, once, other). - Roughly half of all English words contain one or more irregular letters, and half of those cause reading difficulties too.

But even if the aim of reform was to make English spelling completely regular, not all of the 3695 words with tricky spellings would need changing. When a spelling pattern has many exceptions, such as those for the long oo-sound, for example, (fool, rule, stoop, soup, room, tomb, root fruit, tooth, truth...), the regularly spelt words become unpredictable too, but only the exceptions need amending to improve matters.

For this reason improving the spellings of roughly just 2000 of the 3695 English words which retard literacy progress, would make learning to read and write English much easier and less time-consuming than it is now. But even eliminating irregularities from just the few hundred words which most impede learning would greatly help learners.

Yet for proficient users of the current English spelling system, even the prospect of having to remember spelling changes for several hundred words may seem daunting. This is, however, much easier if amendments address only a few types of spelling inconsistencies.

If it was decided, let us say, to adopt a single spelling for the long oo-sound (fool, rool, stoop, soop, room, toom, root, froot, tooth, trooth...) there would be no need for any word-by-word memorisation of new spellings by people used to the currently irregular ones. They would merely have to remember that the spelling of the long oo-sound has been regularised, eliminating the need for children to memorise, word-by-word, the now 189 unpredictable spellings for it.

They may want to look at the list of words with a long oo-sound, to see which words contain it. But all they would need to learn, if they wanted to start adopting the new spellings, is the rule ‘the long oo-sound is spelt oo’. I have already explained in one of my earlier blogs that many people could continue spelling the way they have become used to. After reforms in other countries, the majority of adults have carried on spelling the way they were first taught, merely learning to read the regular new spellings, such as ‘rool, soop, froot...’, without any difficulties.

Because English spelling is exceptionally irregular, it is easier to make a big difference to children’s literacy progress by means of spelling reform than is still possible in other languages. It has several inconsistencies, such as spellings for the long oo-sound, which affect large numbers of words. Tackling just a few of them would change English literacy learning dramatically.

In other languages such problems were tackled long ago. Their recent reforms, like the German one of 2005, dealt with assorted problems which affected only a few words each. Such changes make less of a difference to learners and are more difficult for practised users, because they necessitate remembering numerous short lists of changed words.

I will next begin to explain which spelling inconsistencies consume most teaching and learning time, and cause most spelling errors and reading difficulties.