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Spelling out the case for reform of written English
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 it 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.
Young children grasp the different meanings of "their" and "there" long before they learn to read or write, but many start losing interest in all learning when they have to start decoding "there" and "here".
Many more become disaffected when they are taught how to spell them as well.
Learning the different unpredictable spellings for the 456 common words with the "ee" sound also takes a great deal of time. Despite much effort expended on them, "perceived, achieved, proteins, fetal" kept defeating Dr Lamb's students, just as they do many others. If we still used mainly just one spelling for the "ee" sound as first devised by Chaucer (deel, heer, seege, preest, yeer), this source of spelling errors would not exist either.
HW Fowler, the author of the still much-consulted Modern English Usage, wrote in 1926, "the substitution for our present chaos of a phonetically consistent method that did not sacrifice the many merits of the old spelling would be of incalculable value... not revolutionized... but amended in detail, here a little and there a little as absurdities become intolerable..."
But how much longer will it take before enough native speakers of English decide that certain absurdities of English spelling are intolerable and need amending, and start calling for spelling reform? Other countries with alphabetic writing systems started improving theirs long before they got into the chaotic state that English spelling is in now, and consequently none has as many functionally illiterate adults as the English-speaking ones, or as many intelligent, highly educated people continuing to commit spelling errors.
I have identified the three absurdities which cause most spelling errors. If we did no more than tackle the worst of them and just allowed consistent, rule-governed consonant doubling to be regarded as acceptable, learning to write English would already become vastly easier than it is.
We have more than a century of evidence that nothing else can improve writing standards substantially.
It simply takes a very long time to memorise individual spelling quirks in 3,695 words.
By the age of 16 most pupils are still a long way off knowing them all. They improve if they go on to A-levels and at university, but if they study subjects which don't involve much essay writing, not even then. That's why many employers have to give literacy training to their new recruits.
This is a cost of the English spelling system; as is the need to give individual literacy support to many pupils and students, from primary level up to university. When something is exceptionally difficult to learn, mastering it is time-consuming, costs a great deal of money, and still defeats many.
Finland, Korea, Spain, Sweden, Germany and many others don't have them because they have kept their spelling systems more learner-friendly with regular spelling reforms.
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