[senco-forum] Re: How many rules?

Biff Crabbe <ba at biffc.vispa.com> wrote: Not a piece of research published in a learned journal, but personally I'd
recommend Bill Bryson's 'Mother Tongue' as an excellent and eminently
readable book about the English language.  Populist rubbish in some circles
I'm sure.

It's apparently encouraging that the number of 'rules' in English is finite,
albeit with more exceptions to rules than is comfortable.  But if you're
having to learn how to read and spell via those rules, you're probably not
showing promise of being a 'natural'.  

I'm not quite following your reasoning here, Biff.  How can one learn to read and write *without* being taught how reading and writing 'work' (i.e, the 'rules', if you insist on being rule bound)?  Reading is not a 'natural' process, therefore no-one can be 'a natural' at it...

Surely, those who are slower to learn have a far better chance of learning 180ish 'correspondences', and how to apply them to decode & blend words, than they do of learning 250,000 words as discrete entities?  

Those people lucky enough to just
learn to read and spell fluently without particular difficulty very often
can't articulate the rules, or even recognise that there is a rule governing
something that they know how to do (as Jean has attested).

So while we might be comforted by the finite number of rules to be learned,
we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that those who need to learn in this way
are already at a comparative disadvantage.  And it's certainly not the most
efficient way to grasp literacy.

So, what is the most efficient way to 'grasp literacy'?

Maggie

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