Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Box 5.3 Structure word spelling rules
1 The three-letter rule
Structure words have fewer than three letters; content words can be any
length, from three letters upwards (but must not have fewer than three let-
ters):
so:sew/sow
to:two/too
we:wee
oh:owe
by:bye/buy
no:know
an:Ann
I:eye/aye
in:inn
be:bee
or:ore/oar/awe
2 The ‘th’ rule
In structure words, the initial 
th spelling corresponds to /ð/, ‘this’ and
‘they’; in content words, initial 
th corresponds to /θ/, as in ‘thesis’ and
‘Thelma’.
the:therapy
than:thank
thou:thousand
this:thistle
thy:thigh
though:thought
that:thatch
those:thong
them:thematic
3 The titles rule
In titles of books, films, and so on, content words usually start with capital
letters, structure words with lower case.
The Case of the Stuttering
Handbook of Bilingualism
Bishop
The Tragedy of King
Strangers on a Train
Richard the Second
I Wish I could Shimmy like my Sister Kate

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derived forms: ‘receive’, ‘ceiling’, ‘receipt’, ‘perceive’, ‘conceive’, ‘deceive’, ‘con-
ceit’, ‘transceiver’, ‘fluorescein’ and ‘ceilidh’.
Nevertheless, there are rules that do work better for English. One set is the struc-
ture word rules, given in Box 5.3. Teachers are usually aware how structure words
such as ‘of’ and ‘the’ behave in English sentences compared to content words such
as ‘oven’ and ‘drive’; how they are pronounced in specific ways, such as the voiced
/
ð/ ‘these’ compared to the unvoiced /θ/ in ‘think’ and ‘thesis’; and how they have
stressed versus weak forms, /
θi/ versus /ðɘ/, as mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3,
but they are unaware that they are also spelt in particular ways.
The three-letter rule describes how only structure words can consist of a single
letter – ‘I’ and ‘a’ – or two letters – ‘an’ and ‘no’; content words have three letters
or more. If a content word could be spelt with one or two letters, extra letters have
to be added to make it up to three or more – ‘eye’, ‘Ann’, ‘know’. While this three-
letter rule seems perfectly obvious once it has been explained, most people have
no idea it exists. There are exceptions, of course: ‘go’ and ‘ox’ have two letters but
are content words (even if ‘go’ can act like an auxiliary ‘I am going to see him’);
American ‘ax’ is an exception, British ‘axe’ is not. Nevertheless, the rule is a small
generalization about English spelling that works nearly all the time.
The ‘th’ rule for structure words similarly reflects the fact that the only spoken
English words that start with /
ð/ are structure words like ‘these’ and ‘them’; hence
the spelling rule that in structure words alone initial 
th corresponds to /ð/, all
the rest have /
θ/. Again, this fact about the spelling of structure words seems obvi-
ous once it is understood. The exceptions are, on the one hand, a small group of
words in which initial 
th corresponds to /t/ such as ‘Thai’ and ‘Thames’, on the
other, the unique structure word ‘through’ in which 
th corresponds to /θ/.
The third rule of spelling that affects structure words is the titles rule. This affects
the use of capital letters in titles of books, songs, and so on, where content words
are given initial capitals but structure words are not, as in 
Context and Culture in
Language Learning
, Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition and
Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development, to take three
books that happen to be lying on my desk. This convention is not always adhered
to and some book lists avoid all capitals in book titles. But if you cannot identify
structure words you will not be able to apply it at all.
Perhaps the most complex set of spelling rules in English are the vowel corre-