Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Box 5.11 Spell it Right/Write/Rite/Wright
Word Test 1
1 He is a very
(a) careful driver.
(b) carefull
2 She
(a) payed the bill.
(b) paid
. . .
Remember the right spelling
1 careful
[one
l in words that end in ful, two ls in the word ‘full’ itself.]
One careful man is worth two full of care.
2 paid
[a small group of irregular verbs in 
ay have aid in the past tense]
He paid the fine out of his pay.
…
Which past tense in each pair is spelt right?
paid
❒
payed
❒
staid
❒
stayed
❒
prayed
❒
praid
❒
layed
❒
laid
❒
Reason: a small group of verbs have irregular past forms with 
aid in written
English; ‘paid’, ‘said’, ‘laid’. Be careful about these verbs; English people often
make mistakes with ‘paid’.
Answers: paid, stayed, prayed, laid

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of writing so that they form their letters well’, and learning ‘individual letter
sounds of the alphabet’. However, useful as the names of the letters are for all
sorts of language tasks, they are highly misleading as a guide to their correspon-
dences in speech, as the vowel correspondence rules on page 92 show. Indeed,
some of the letter names vary from place to place. 
z is /zi/ in American, but
not Canadian, style and /zed/ in British style. The name for the letter h is
becoming /
heitʃ/ rather than /eitʃ/; children on a television game called Hard Spell
were penalized for spelling words wrong but allowed to get away with saying
/
heitʃ/, previously considered an uneducated variant. Sticking to letters, the
Common European Framework (2008) goes so far as to mention the need to rec-
ognize the difference between ‘printed and cursive forms in both upper and lower
case’, that is, 
a, a, A and A.
While in general these syllabuses make a start, they reflect common sense more
than ideas about how people use and acquire writing systems. Box 5.12 gives the