[senco-forum] Re: How many rules?

There are about 180 common phoneme/grapheme correspondences in English.  Once a reader is pretty well conversant with these they can deal with most words that they meet.  If children are taught these systematically and explicitly they should have few problems; e.g if  'ar' as representing an /ah/ sound is taught to mastery, before introducing 'are' as /air/ then children will not be confused and will have a greater chance of using the orthographic information in front of them to elicit the 'correct'  sound for the grapheme.  If they know that some graphemes represent a number of sounds they know to try each sound until the word sounds correct; at the most they would usually have about 3 choices of sound. 

I often feel that looking at English as 'rule bound' makes learning to read and spell more difficult than it needs to be.  Pragmatism, flexibility and open mindedness are surely the qualities needed for approaching the English language!

Maggie

Jean Hutchins <jeanhutchins1 at ntlworld.com> wrote: Philip EP wrote:
 >The /a/ in mark is an r controlled vowel,<

With exceptions like 'paragon'.
And another rule for '-are' words, like 'care, spare',
with 'are' itself being an exception.
And another rule for 'arr' as in 'marry, carrot'.

 >80% of words
follow the rules, they just need to be learned and then used.<

How many rules do u have to get that 80%?
Even with all those rules, u are saying that
1 word in every 5 is irregular,
often the high frequency words.

And the very people who need the rules the most
are the ones with memory difficulties.

In 1975 I discovered Alpha to Omega
and was amazed by all the 'rules'.
I did not know they existed,
let alone that anyone needed to learn them.

Jean
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Jean Hutchins, SE Surrey DA.
RSA Dip SpLD, AMBDA, retired.
E-mail: jeanhutchins1 at ntlworld.com
British Dyslexia Association Web: www.bdadyslexia.org.uk
Also into spelling reform: www.simplifiedspelling.org
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