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What's wrong with the way we spell English? The study, "How Do High Achieving Countries Differ from Low Achieving Countries?" by The International Association of Educational Achievement, rated several leading languages on phonetic regularity as follows
The problems with English have not gone unnoticed. Over the past 200 years in the U. S. alone, they have been addressed by many notables, including Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, Mark Twain, Bernard Baruch, Teddy Roosevelt, John Steinbeck and Justice Warren Berger. To quote, in part, an article by The Simplified Spelling Society (SSS), "There are hundreds of different spellings for the 40-odd sounds of English. One spelling often represents many sounds, and letters can vary randomly from one word-form to another. The same ending is spelled differently in different words. English inserts silent letters without justification. It plays havoc with consonants. Such inconsistencies pervade the whole language, because for centuries there has been no effective attempt to remove them. No other major language tolerates such chaos." There are at least four large population segments, three in the U. S. and one worldwide, who could benefit immensely from simplified spelling of English:
Continuing with the SSS article, "Because of English spelling, there have been moves in education to try to teach reading by "Look and Say" type methods that ignore the spelling. These fail unless students themselves somehow work out the relation of letters to language. The next expedient was to hope that print literacy is not really needed. Some quite respectable authors have written that only an elite needs to be able to read - the rest can get by with TV and other forms of "media literacy." Others think that when computers are 'almost as cheap as a packet of crisps, are solar powered and distributed worldwide, then, if you can't read, the computer can read the text for you.' As for writing, you speak the text in and it does the rest. Many schemes have been devised for respelling English as it is pronounced, but apart from some small improvements in America, none has been adopted for general use. Several fully regularized systems have, however, been tried in the past 150 years in teaching beginners, with dramatic success in helping them acquire basic literacy skills. The best known recently was the i.t.a. (initial teaching alphabet.) However, all of these schemes have required the learners to transfer back to the traditional irregular spelling as soon as they can read and write fluently, and much of the advantage is then lost. A new approach is called for if today's readers are not to be alienated, yet learners are to benefit significantly."
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