Teaching English Spelling and Pronunciation

Abstract

The teaching of English to speakers of other languages has, in recent years, rightly given emphasis to the student's mastery of the sound system of the language. In contrast, English orthography is not emphasized, and is in part often replaced by a more regular transcription in which each graphic symbol has a consistent value and every unit of the sound system has a consistent representation. Yet the new speaker of English will eventually need to deal with the spelling system-to translate graphic symbols into sound-and he should be taught to do this. Failure to provide instruction and guided practice in pronouncing written English words may result from an erroneous notion that there is little or no system to teach. It is shown, to the contrary, that the value of a graphic symbol depends on a complex of interrelated facts: the inner structure of the word in which it occurs, the stress pattern, and the part of speech to which the word belongs. English orthography is complicated, but not very irregular. The most complex part of our spelling system is the representation of vowel sounds, for which there are three patterns of vowel letter employment. These are described. To show how necessary information about the values of certain graphemes can be formulated, three explorations are made: cf the values of OW in, for example, slow, now, and knowledge; of TI in tin, time, Christian, Christianity, initial, and initiate; and of TU in tug, tune, tuition, institute, statue, and spatula, as examples. Suppose you have a new class of absolute beginners in English as a second language. Suppose your textbook has been selected for you. And suppose that when you open the book you find-right on page 1-the information that the letter a has five sounds, as in mate, mat, father, fall, and soda; that the letter e has three or four sounds; and so on for all the vowel and consonant letters in the alphabet. Fifty years ago the chances of finding such a textbook would have been very great. Today, fortunately, the chances of finding, or being issued, such a book are slim. I hope that the teaching procedures which such a book would imply are equally rare or even nonexistent today. If we have done anything right in the field of language teaching in the last thirty or forty years, it has been in putting emphasis where emphasis belongs-in recognizing that the learning of a language begins with learning speech, not writing. We have learned to attach great importance to the student's systematic listening and imitation, to his acquisition of the rhythm and intonation of the new language, and to his learning to discriminate relevant sounds through minimal pairs (sheep/ship, leak/lick, clique/ click, etc.), with complete disregard for the way such words are spelled.

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