Phonetically Justified Spelling Strategies of Good and Poor Readers in the Third Grade.

The non-alphabetic nature of the English spelling system has been extensively researched and debated for some time [4; 5; 6]. Spellingreformers such as Shaw [cited in 8] have stated that there are too many irregular spellings in the writing system to assume that lexical items are spelled according to the way they sound. Chomsky and Halle [3] in contrast, suggested that English spelling is nearly perfect for representing the sounds of oral language. After an extensive examination of English orthography, they concluded that two levels of structure exist for all words. The deep structure consists of an abstract lexical representation of sound while the surface structure represents its phonetic manifestation. The two structures are related by an abstract set of phonological rules that are not evident within the surface appearance of words but are implicitly known by all native speakers of the language. Chomsky [2] has theorized that native speakers tacitly use these rules as a means of acquiring proficient reading and spelling skills. Research by Read [9; 10] tended to support the reality of these rules. He analyzed the invented spellings of pre-school children who had never received instruction in writing or reading. In words such as TABLE and FEEL, the children consistently represented the tense (long) vowels with their letter name as in TABIL and FEL because the letter-sound matches were so evident to them. The children had more difficulty with the lax (short) vowels however, because the letter sound correspondences weren't as obvious. Consequently, lax i [I] was represented as i 65070 of the time while lax e [s] was represented as e less than 37% of the time. The most frequent misspellings for lax i and e were e (23%) and ~ (49.7%) respectively. Read noted that spellings such as FES for FISH and LAFT for LEFT weren't coincidental but were the result of linguistic judgments the children intuitively made. In associating lax i [I] with tense e [I] and lax e [s] with tense ~ [e) the children had tacitly categorized the vowels that were nearly similar in sound and production features. In point of fact, tense e [i) is formed with the tongue in nearly the same position as lax I [I] while tense ~ [e) is usually made with the tongue beginning a little higher than lax e [s] and gliding forward and upwards toward the [I] of bit. By representing the unknown lax vowel sounds with the letter representation of their tense counterparts, the children demonstrated their perceptions of the phonetic relationships between sound and letter. Read [10] and others [e.g., 1] also found that first graders, even while learning to read and write, used similar strategies to spell unknown words. This suggested to him that young children, at least through the first grade, devise a two-part strategy for spelling the vowel sounds: Use a letter to spell a vowel if the sound of the vowel corresponds to the name of the letter; otherwise find a letter name that is phonetically close to the sound of the vowel. It appears then that young children systematically utilize phonetic relationships as their most basic source of spelling information. Although this strategy is ingenious, children need to switch to conventional lettersound associations if they are to learn to spell correctly. As it turns out, some children make this shift quite easily while others have more difficulty. Research has shown during the past decade that children who begin to read and acquire more experience looking at printed words discover the standard spelling patterns on which standard