The Atlantic on "How Spelling Keeps Kids From Learning"

Our class discussion about English spelling, efforts at spelling reforms, and social judgments based on spelling prompted me to find this Atlantic story from last month about how the quirks and puzzles of English spelling might be putting students in English speaking countries at a disadvantage compared with students in, say, Finland or Korea, where the primary spoken language has a more straightforward spelling system.

The article's lay overview of the issue is an entertaining and efficient summary of some of what we have been considering:

"Adults who have already mastered written English tend to forget about its many quirks. But consider this: English has 205 ways to spell 44 sounds. And not only can the same sounds be represented in different ways, but the same letter or letter combinations can also correspond to different sounds. For example, "cat," "kangaroo," "chrome," and "queue" all start with the same sound, and "eight" and "ate" sound identical. Meanwhile, "it" doesn’t sound like the first syllable of "item," for instance, and "cough" doesn’t rhyme with either "enough," "through," "furlough" or "bough." Even some identically spelled words, such as "tear," can be pronounced differently and mean different things."

Perhaps more interesting, the piece goes on to discuss current efforts at spelling reform intended to help students master literacy more easily. For instance, the vice chair of the English Spelling Society, is quoted as saying that she, "doesn’t believe a total overhaul of the language is needed; rather, she says a good "tidying" will suffice while ensuring that nearly 600 years’ worth of modern English literature remains accessible. She advocates tweaking the 2,828 most-common irregularly spelled words to align them to conform with the main English spelling patterns."

The article also highlights a more thorough going reform effort: 

"Meanwhile, engineer and applied linguist Dmitry Orlov has come up with another solution: Eliminate the need to learn English spelling, temporarily if not permanently. The human brain is primed to memorize groups of speech sounds, not sequences of letters, he says. With this in mind, he developed his own writing system, Unspell, which is more or less a phonetic rendition of spoken English. It treats words as sequences of sounds rather than sequences of letters, so what you see is what you get: How a word is written is how it’s pronounced, and vice versa."

The likelihood that Unspell or the Spelling Society's "tidying up" (ahhh, that verbal hygiene!) efforts take hold is not explored. But the Atlantic writers do acknowledge the failure of prior reform efforts, invoking a really great/odd metaphor of standard language ideology as being like a kind of prideful home ownership:

"But various proposals for spelling reform—with names such as Neu Speling or NuEnglish—have, for a variety of reasons, failed to take off. People who have already mastered written English are reluctant to invest time in learning a new spelling system—and many of those who haven't mastered it are loath to admit it, having internalized the message that it’s a personal failing. Defenders of the status quo also maintain that today’s written English is worth preserving—it’s like the drafty old house that requires a lot of work but has history and character." 

[Emphasis added.]