Which English spelling irregularities should be tackled first?

Because major improvements to English spelling stopped at around 1700, it now offers far more scope for regularisation than other systems did when their deficiencies first began to be tackled: 80 of its 91 basic rules now have exceptions. No other European orthography was allowed to become so unsystematic before it began to be amended. So even just deciding what to change first requires some consideration.

Tackling all 80 English spelling irregularities in one go would be ideal for learners but just too challenging for current users. There will therefore have to be compromises. The changes must make a noticeable difference to learners, but without overloading proficient users of current English spelling conventions. For this reason, the following points need to be taken into account.

Not all spelling irregularities are equally bad. Some cause only spelling difficulties (note coat). But uniquely among alphabetic languages, many irregular English spellings hinder progress in both reading and writing (oath – both – froth).

Spelling irregularities also vary in the amount of word-by-word memorisation they necessitate. Some patterns have very few exceptions. ‘Cat, sat, mat...’ has just one exception: plait. Consonant doubling and spellings for the ee-sound, on the other hand, are unpredictable in hundreds of words (shoddy body, very merry, mellow melon ... meet, mean, me, machine, fiend...).

Some irregularities are more problematic for fairly proficient spellers than beginners. Unpredictably doubled consonants and the irregular suffixes -ent/-ant (dependent/defiant), for example, have little impact on beginners’ literacy progress because they are less prevalent in young children’s vocabulary or the texts with which they learn to read and write, but adults keep being tripped up by them.

Beginning readers are most handicapped by irregularities in the most often used English words, such as ‘you, said, one, do, are’. Letters with changing pronunciations, such as ‘you/young, said/paid, one/gone, do/go, are/dare), make even learning to read English much harder than other languages. They impede their progress most of all. Proficient adult readers are so used to them that they can generally no longer even see that their spellings are irregular. They are likely to find suggestions for changing them the most off-putting.

The irregular spellings of the most frequently used words are, however, most responsible for making initial English literacy teaching exceptionally slow. Bringing more order to them would therefore reduce teaching and learning time most of all. It would also help to loosen many of the constraints on initial English literacy teaching which make it much more contrived and tedious than in other languages.

Nearly all schools start the teaching of reading and writing with regularly spelt words, such as ‘a cat sat’ or ‘stop on hot spot’, to give children a basic understanding of letter usage, without letting them become too confused by irregularities from the beginning. Because more than half of the most used words contain irregularities, they are kept out of English beginners’ reading programmes, making the texts with which young children learn to read rather dull and repetitive.

Young children’s writing is even more impeded by spelling irregularities in the most used high frequency (HF) words. They want to use such words as soon as they start to write their own stories, instead of the contrived ones they first learn to read with. They try to apply their newly acquired grasp of English sound-to-letter rules to all words. But because many HF words have irregular spellings (love, brother, many, pretty, two), they keep misspelling them (luv, bruther, menny, pritty, too).

With fewer irregularly spelt HF words, young children would commit far fewer spelling ‘errors’ when they first start learning to write. There would be much less need for teachers to keep correcting their perfectly logical ‘misspellings’, because the basic rules would apply to more words. In many children, this would help to prevent loss of interest in all learning soon after starting school. So while amending irregularities in HF words might seem least palatable to currently proficient readers, improving them would undoubtedly help young children most of all.