Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Box 5.4 Vowel correspondence rules
1 Silent ‘e’ rule
A silent 
e following a single consonant shows that the preceding vowel
letter corresponds to a long vowel; lack of an 
e shows a short vowel.
long free vowels
short checked vowels
‘a’
/
ei/ Dane
/
/ Dan
‘e’
/
i/ Pete
/
e/ pet
‘i’
/
ai/ fine
/
i/ fin
‘o’
/
ɘ / tote
/
ɒ/ tot
‘u’
/(
j)u/ dune
/
/ dun
2 Consonant doubling rule
A double consonant shows that the preceding vowel corresponds to a short
vowel rather than a long one.
Single consonant
Double consonant
‘a’
/
ei/ planing
/
/ planning
‘e’
/
i/ beta
/
e/ better
‘i’
/
ai/ biter
/
i/ bitter
‘o’
/
ɘ / hoping
/
ɒ/ hopping
‘u’
/(
j)u/ super
/
/ supper

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characteristics of their L1 writing system than with grammar or vocabulary.
Indeed the characteristics of the writing system you learn first may affect you in
other ways; Chinese people, for example, are more visually dominated than
English people, probably due in part to their character-based writing system.
Box 5.5 gives examples of the spelling mistakes made by L2 users of English.
Many of them are similar to those made by native speakers. This tends to show
that the English spelling system itself is to blame rather than the difficulties of
writing in a second language. ‘accommodate’ is often spelt wrong because people
are unsure of the consonant doubling rules and gamble that consonants would
not be doubled twice in the same word – similarly for ‘address’. The vowel corre-
spondence rules cause problems for native speakers as well as non-native users of
English; what does the final spoken /
ɘ/ in ‘grammar’ correspond to in writing?
ar, a, ah and er would all be equally plausible if sound correspon-
dences were all that mattered. Research of my own showed that adult L2 user uni-
versity students made about as many spelling errors as 15-year-old English native
children. In one sense this is disappointing in that they are not writing like native
adults. In another way it is encouraging; the students would probably be very
pleased to be told that they spoke English as well as 15-year-old native children.
Acquiring and teaching a new writing system