Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Focusing questions

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So what should the language teacher do about teaching the writing system? This vital
and complex area has been virtually ignored by teachers and coursebook writers.
One possibility in English is to exploit the two routes: the lexical route and the
phonological route. Most high-frequency words in English are stored as wholes
and not treated by the correspondence rules. So the best course of action may be
to check whether the students know how to spell the most frequent words and the
most often misspelt words by getting them to memorize and practise the words
they do not know as one-off items – ‘there/their’, and so on. Eliminating mistakes
with a few hundred words would wipe out most of the glaring mistakes in stu-
dents’ work. For instance, the verbs that FCE students made most mistakes with
were forms of ‘choose’, ‘study’, ‘travel’, ‘develop’, ‘begin’ and ‘plan’. This could
simply be dealt with on a one-off basis, or it could be related to the rules for con-
sonant doubling, not changing
y to i, and so on. Certainly students have to
learn many idiosyncratic words as wholes, whether high-frequency words such as
‘of’ /
ɒv/ and ‘there’ /ðεɘ/, or lower-frequency oddities such as ‘sandwich’
/
smwid / or place names ‘Edinburgh’ /edimbrɘ/. Again, there is little that stu-
dents can do other than memorize these words individually; there is no point in
trying to relate them to spelling rules.
Many student mistakes relate to their L1 writing system. Arabic speakers reveal the
syllable structure of Arabic, not just in their pronunciation, but also in their use of
written vowels as in ‘punishement’. The Greek tendency to substitute one consonant
for another, as in 
d for t in ‘Grade Britain’, is due to the phonology of Greek.
Japanese difficulties with spoken /
l/ and /r/ extend to spelling, as in ‘grobal’ (global)
and ‘brack’ (black). Inevitably, teachers need to pay attention to L1-specific spelling
problems, caused by the phonological system and the spelling of the students’ first
languages, directly, by explaining to students the link between spelling and their L1
phonology and writing system; and indirectly, by practising their typical errors.
Other mistakes reflect the complexity of the rules of English spelling for natives
and non-natives alike. Indeed, one piece of research found that English children
learning German made fewer spelling mistakes in German than in English
(Downing, 1973). Both natives and L2 learners have particular problems with con-
sonant doubling. 
l is wrongly doubled by both groups, as in ‘controll’, ‘allready’,
‘carefull’ and ‘propell’, the first two being from L2 learners, the second two from
natives;
l is also left out of doubled l as in ‘filed’ for ‘filled’ (L2 user) and
‘modeled’ (native speaker). Vowels are substituted for other vowels, for example, in
word endings with ‘-an’ or ‘-en’ such as ‘frequantly’, ‘relevent’, ‘appearence’ and
‘importent’, with ‘-el’ or ‘-al’ as in ‘hostal’ and ‘leval’, and with ‘-ate’ or ‘-ite’ as in
‘definately’ and ‘definetely’. Again, in general, the choice amounts to explaining
rules directly – safe if the teacher has a grasp of the descriptive rules of spelling
beyond the school tradition – or to carrying out specific practice with spelling rules.
The discussion of pronunciation in Chapter 4 raises the issue of which accent to
use as a model. For English, the choice in spelling comes down to British style or
North American style. Box 5.10 tests which style people use; a fuller version is
online (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/TestsFrame.htm). Mostly the dif-
ferences of American English style from British style come down to Noah Webster’s
decision to emphasize USA identity when he chose spellings for the first edition of
his dictionary in 1828. The main differences are:
●
-er versus -re: American ‘center’, ‘theater’, ‘fiber’ versus British ‘centre’,
‘theatre’, ‘fibre’
The writing system and language teaching 99

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In many cases, British style has two spellings for a word, often with different
meanings – ‘meter/metre’, ‘kerb/curb’ – where American style has one. There is
also variation between the conventions adopted by particular publishers, say over
-ise⬃-ize in words such as ‘socialise’.
The American/British divide in spelling affects most countries in the world that
use English. For example, Australia uses both British ‘labour’ and American ‘labor’
in different contexts; Canada laid down the spelling ‘colour’ by Order-in-Council
in 1890. Yet the number of words that differ between the two styles is a handful
compared to the totality of the language. The choice of which style to teach usu-
ally comes down to overall attitudes towards British and American culture within
a particular educational setting. And any computer spell-checker will soon alert
you if you are not conforming to a particular spelling style.
Spelling is hardly ever covered systematically in language teaching, vital as it may
be to the students’ needs. The extent of the help in the beginners’ book Changes
(Richards, 1998) is practising names for letters, and occasional advice such as ‘Listen
and practice. Notice the spelling’. Little specific teaching of the writing system
appears in main coursebooks. New English File (Oxenden et al., 2004), however, does
have a useful chart of correspondences between ‘Sounds and spelling’. A supple-
mentary book for an EFL context, called Making Sense of Spelling and Pronunciation
(Digby and Myers, 1993), is concerned with the links between sounds and letters to
the exclusion of other aspects of spelling. A typical section first explains ‘th’ (‘At the
beginning of a word th is usually pronounced /
θ/ (e.g. thing …) …’, then practises
it through labelling and distinguishing /
ð/ and /θ/ in pictures (‘thumb’, ‘tooth’, etc.),
and matching words with definitions (‘thorough’, ‘athletics’, etc.). In terms of the
Acquiring and teaching a new writing system
100
American
British
1
color
❒
❒
2
theatre
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3
catalyze
❒
❒
4
labor
❒
❒
5
travelling
❒
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6
moustache
❒
❒
7
dialogue
❒
❒
8
molt
❒
❒
9
sulphur
❒
❒
10
vigour
❒
❒
11
skeptic
❒
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12
catalog
❒