P is for Phonics???

I have heard so many people say that English is impossible to learn. It is true that English has what is called an (highly!) opaque orthography. Transparent orthographies (like Spanish, for instance) have a 1:1 (or nearly so) correspondence between letters and the sounds they make. If you’re trying to learn Spanish like me, you probably know that “e” makes the A sound (A like as in day or weigh). So if you see an “e” in a Spanish word, you know to say A and if you hear an A in a Spanish word you know to write e. English, on the other hand, has at least 7 different ways to spell the A sound: ei (weigh), ay (way), ey (they), a_e (wake), a (baby), ai (pail), ea (steak).

And it’s not like it’s even a one-way street! Take “ea”—It says A in steak, but listen to it in these different words: streak, bread, earth, pageant, near, heart, or yeah. It makes a different sound in each of those words.

So we should just give up now? Of course not! (Although, I think some of my former graduate students wished I would!) Fun Fact: Ben Franklin and Noah Webster actually tried to standardize English spelling but people weren’t interested.

English is a morphophonemic language. That’s a fancy way of saying that English maintains a ton of information in the spelling. Let’s take my favorite example: sign vs signature. If we just heard those words, we wouldn’t necessarily know they had anything to do with each other. But because of English’s propensity for hoarding, if we know what the word “sign” means, we have an advantage when we come across the word signature.

Let me guess, you’re thinking: “Ok, great. So now I know why English is so hard, but that doesn’t help my kid with reading or writing.” Diana Hanbury King in English Isn’t Crazy puts it well: “English has amassed this vast vocabulary by its capacity to absorb elements from other languages.” Spending some time learning a word’s etymology (where the word came from) can not only be fun, but it can also really help with learning to spell (and spelling helps with reading). If we give students some insight into the why words are the way they are, we can help to dispel the idea that English is impossible (Unlocking Literacy by Marcia Henry and Maryanne Wolf).