Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

spondence rules, from which Box 5.4 gives a small selection. As RP English has 5
vowel letters and about 20 vowel phonemes, considerable ingenuity has been
devoted over the centuries to telling the reader how vowel letters are said. The silent
‘e’ rule gives the sound correspondence of the preceding vowel. If there is a silent
e following a single consonant, the preceding vowel is ‘long’: the letter a will
correspond to /
ei/ ‘Dane’, e to /i/ ‘Pete’, i to /ai/ ‘fine’, 
o to /ɘ / ‘tote’,
u to /ju/ ‘dune’. If there is no e, the vowel is ‘short’: a corresponds to //
‘Dan’,
e to /e/ ‘pet’, i to /i/ ‘fin’, o to /ɒ/ ‘tot’, u to // ‘dun’.
The terms ‘short’ and ‘long’ vowels do not have the same meaning here as in
phonetics, since three of the so-called ‘long’ vowels are in fact diphthongs. For
this reason, some people prefer to call the five short vowels ‘checked’, the five
long vowels ‘free’. This rule has become known as the Fairy E rule, after the way
that it is explained to children: ‘Fairy E waves its wand and makes the preceding
vowel say its name’; the long vowel sounds here happen to be the same as the
names for the five vowel letters. People who attack silent 
e, like the e in
‘fate’ /
feit/, as being useless are missing the point: the silent e letter acts as a
Acquiring and teaching a new writing system
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marker showing that the preceding 
a is said /ei/ not //, that is, it is different
from the 
a in ‘fat’.
The same relationship between long and short vowels underlies the consonant
doubling rule in Box 5.4. A doubled consonant in writing, say 
tt in ‘bitter’ or
nn in ‘running’, has nothing to do with saying the consonant twice, but shows
that the correspondence of the preceding vowel is short: the 
pp in ‘supper’
shows that the preceding 
u corresponds to /i/, the p in ‘super’ that u is
the long /
u/. This version of the doubling rule is highly simplified and ignores the
fact that some consonants never double, 
h, j, or rarely double, v and k
(‘revving’ and ‘trekker’), and that British and North American spelling styles are
slightly different, as we see below. As always, there are exceptions, such as doubled
consonants after long vowels, as in ‘small’ and ‘furry’. What the rules we have dis-
cussed show, however, is that there is a system to English spelling. It may be com-
plicated, but it is probably simpler than the system for speaking English.
SLA research has mostly tackled the problems which arise in acquiring a second
language that has a different overall writing system from one’s first language,
whether going from a meaning-based route to a sound-based one, as in Chinese
students of English, or from a sound-based route using only consonant letters to
one using both vowels and consonants, as in Hebrew students of English, or from
one type of alphabetic script to another, say, Greek to English or English to
German. Chikamatsu (1996) found that English people tended to transfer their L1
sound-based strategies to Japanese as an L2, Chinese people their L2 meaning-
based strategies. In the reverse direction, the Chinese meaning-based system
handicaps reading in English; upper high school students in Taiwan read at a speed
of 88 words per minute, compared to 254 for native speakers (Haynes and Carr,
1990). Students’ difficulties with reading may have more to do with the basic
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