The whole weight of the English literacy learning burdens

My Dec 2009 blogs show the 228 different ways in which 80 of the 91 basic English spelling rules get broken and also the 69 spellings which can have different pronunciations. For some children, even just learning those lists is a big challenge, but they give only a glimpse of the total English literacy learning burden.

I have established that by age 16 schoolchildren meet at least 3695 relatively common words which contain one or more unpredictable letters (such as ‘blue shoe flew through too’ or ‘leave sleeve even’ and ‘believe’), and that over half of those words also have not entirely decodable pronunciations (such as ‘any, able, father’). - All the words with potential to cause reading difficulties are listed on the Sight Words page at www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk . The words with unpredictable spellings are shown on the other pages.

For learning to read and write English, children must not only learn to decode more spellings for reading and internalise more spelling rules for writing, they also have to memorise unpredictable spelling quirks and idiosyncrasies for far more words than in any other alphabetic language.

While other European languages use an average of 50 spellings, English-speaking children have to learn to sound out and to use 185 graphemes. Finnish children don’t need to learn any unpredictable spellings in addition to their 38 letter-to-sound correspondences, and no other Europeans have to memorise irregularities for more than a few hundred words, whilst English-speaking children have to tackle nearly 4000 unpredictable spellings in the course of their ordinary schooling.

All this is in addition to the much greater reading difficulties posed by the 69 spellings with variable sounds (sound soup shoulder) which no other European child experiences. The 2000 common words which contain letters that can have different sounds make English reading as well as spelling progress much slower and harder.

After spending a few weeks learning the sounds for their 50 or so graphemes, other European children can go on to improve their reading ability without much further help from adults. When stuck, they can simply refer to their reliable one-page letter-to-sound correspondence chart, consisting of a few dozen simple words with illustrations.

They don’t need to spend years progressing from simple, especially constructed texts which use only words with the main letter sounds (a fat cat sat; keep sleep deep) to normal stories which include horrors like ‘plough through’, as English-speaking children do. Once they have learned to read a few hundred words, they can decipher all other words.

In English, at least 2000 words keep tripping children up for a long time (said, beautiful, woman...). Unless they are regularly listened to by an adult who gently helps them and who encourages them to keep going for several years, it is easy to give up on learning to read English as simply too difficult.

I hope I have managed to give at least some idea why English literacy acquisition is much harder and slower than in all other alphabetic languages.