Phonics is a particularly powerful tool in improving spelling because it emphasizes spelling patterns, which become familiar from reading. Studies show that half of all English words can be spelled with phonics rules that relate one letter to one sound. Thirty-seven percent of words can be spelled with phonics rules that relate groups of letters to one sound. The other thirteen percent must be learned by memorization. Writing, in turn, supports a child's reading development because it slows the process by focusing the child's attention on how print works.
Poor spellers experience difficulties in both writing and reading.
This knowledge of the English language enables the teacher to choose the best examples for instruction, to provide focused instruction, and to better understand students' reading and writing errors in relationship to their developing language skills. I highly recommend that all teachers take a basic course in phonics or linguistics to gain further insights into our language that can be used in the classroom in productive and purposeful ways. For many children, reading long words is an arduous task. For example, it may be efficient for a student to decode text containing simple CVC words such as cat and ran sound by sound, it is not efficient to decode text containing words such as transportation and unhappy sound by sound. Rather, it is more efficient to recognize common word parts such as trans, port, tion, un, and happy and blend these larger chunks to sound out the word.