It's a problem which has frustrated generations.
Dr Bernard Lamb from Imperial College London recently revealed in the Yorkshire Post that even many of our brightest graduates still have spelling problems, but this poor standard of literacy is not new.
Examiners have been drawing attention to i
t ever since the introduction of general schooling in 1870, and employers' concerns about it were already highlighted by the Newbolt committee in 1921. Relatively high levels of functional illiteracy also afflict not just the UK but all English-speaking countries.
Poor literacy inevitably has a detrimental effect on all learning. Those who cannot read cannot easily cope with other subjects either, including maths. Literacy is essential for all other learning and Dr Lamb is right to be concerned about it.
Unfortunately, the best means of enabling more people to become literate is unpalatable to most educated speakers of English. They have difficulty acknowledging the cause of the problem, let alone addressing it, because the only certain way of raising English literacy levels is to improve English spelling.
Most spelling errors in English are due to just three inconsistencies: irregular consonant doubling, or short vowel marking, (poppy – copy, fidget – digit), the occasional use of different spellings for different meanings (their/there, here/hear)and random spellings of the "ee" sound (speak, speech, eke, shriek, sheikh, chic, quay).
In my research I have identified 3,695 common words that contain spelling traps of some kind. The three inconsistencies above account for over half of those difficulties. Consonant doubling alone affects a quarter of them and explains why the most common error committed by
Dr Lamb's students was failing to double the "right" letters, as in "aplied, suposed" or doubling wrong ones, such as "coppy, dissapearance".
Our habit of spelling a few hundred words differently for different meanings also led to numerous spelling mistakes among Imperial's students, for example, "peace" for "piece" and "compliment" for "complement".
The 2,500 English words that also have at least two meanings but get by perfectly well with just one spelling, such as arm, arch, bar, barge, bark, ground, sound, don't cause any spelling difficulties.
After 20 years of teaching English, I can't help wondering what is the value of insisting on a spelling practice that absorbs so much of teachers' marking time and is so resistant to learning? I know that even many teachers often misspell "to practise" and "a practice". So why do we maintain the distinction?
In America, they now use "practice" for its use as verb or noun, and it's causing them no more problems than our use of "service" and "promise" for both.
In context, the different meanings of a word are always obvious, in a piece of writing even more than in speech. Spelling differentiations don't aid communication. They hinder it. They make schoolchildren nervous, stop them learning the English language as well as they might and impede their powers of expression.
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