Tema 10.

- Los códigos ortográficos de la lengua inglesa.

- Relación sonido-grafía.

- Propuestas para la didáctica del código escrito.

- Aplicaciones de la ortografía en las producciones escritas.

Human language is the fundamental vehicle to convey our thoughts, needs

and feelings. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the

communicative process among people by concentrating on its two basic

manifestations: oral and written language. With regard to writing in

English, this must not be seen merely as transcribed speech, as some of the

letters of the English alphabet do not match the sounds of the language .

Due to this irregularity, the sound-grapheme relationships need to be

worked on in the English-classroom.

Based on this view, the present essay aims to study the English spelling

code. For this purpose, I will divide this topic into four main sections. In

the first part, I will clarify the concepts of Graphetics and Graphology

and then I will explain the main writing systems. In the second part, I will

examine the English-spelling system, considering its main spelling rules.

Then in the third part, I will analyse the sound-spelling correspondences in

English as well as the importance of phonological awareness skills, reading

and spelling skills. Finally in the fourth part, I will concentrate on the

teaching of the written code, suggesting several activities to do so.

We deal with an essential topic since, according to The Organic Law of

Improvement on Education 8/2013 (LOMCE) passed on December 9th,

the goal of FLT in Primary Education is the acquisition of CC. According to

1
Canale and Swain, one of the competences derived from this is

grammatical competence, which refers to the correct use of the linguistic

code in both the oral and the written forms. In addition to that, the FL

Curriculum for Primary Education emphasizes the significance of this topic

by including in its 2nd block of contents the association of letters to the

sounds of the alphabet.

FIRST

In order to develop the first part of this topic, I will define the concepts

of Graphetics and Graphology. On the one hand, we understand Graphetics

as the study of the physical aspects of the symbols that constitute writing

systems and its unit is the symbol. On the other hand, Graphology is the

study of the linguistic contrasts that writing systems convey and its unit is

the grapheme which can be defined as the smallest contrastive unit in a

writing system that might produce a change in meaning. As we know, the

main graphemes of the English language are the 26 units that make up the

alphabet. When using these units in writing, we also use punctuation, which

has two functions. These are: to enable stretches of language to be read in

a coherent way and the use of suprasegmental features which give an

indication of the rhythm and tone of speech.

Apart from this, it is worth mentioning that there are several types of

writing systems among which we find on the one hand, there phonological

systems, which show a clear relationship between the symbols and sounds

of language and on the other hand, the non-phonological systems which do

not show a clear relationship between the symbols and the sounds . In this

regard, I must point out that both English and Spanish are phonological

alphabetic systems, which means that they show a direct correspondence

2
between graphemes and phonemes. However, these languages vary greatly

in their regularity and whereas Spanish has a very regular system, English

is notorious for its irregularity as it presents a great lack of

correspondence between graphemes and phonemes which is reflected in

the number of spelling rules that students have to learn.

SECOND

After having considered these general aspects, I will go on to examine

the English-spelling code.

In general terms, English spelling is considered to be difficult and

unpredictable. However, recent studies show that English is approximately

75% regular. The problem is that the 400 or so irregular spellings are

among the most frequently used words, which gives the impression of

irregularity. At this point, looking at the history of the language will help us

to achieve a better understanding of English spelling.

In the Anglo-Saxon period an alphabet of 24 graphemes had to cope

with a sound system of 40 phonemes. Consequently, many sounds had to be

signalled by combinations of letters. Later in the Norman period, French

scribes introduced new orthographic conventions and then during the

printing process many early printers were foreign and used their own

spelling rules.

In the 15th century, the Great Vowel Shift, which was a massive sound

change affecting the long vowels, was the main reason for the diversity of

vowel spellings. Some letters also became silent during this period, such as

the <k> of know. Later in the 16th century a new trend appeared: Latin and

Greek etymology was reflected in the spelling of words. For example, a <g>

was added in reign. Finally in the 17th century a good amount of words were

3
borrowed from French, Spanish and Italian. This caused new patterns of

spelling, like <ll> in armadillo. Therefore, English is an amalgam of different

traditions.

As I said before, as a result of this irregularity and diversity, students

need to learn some spelling rules. In what follows, I will highlight the most

relevant ones.

Firstly, in English, some words are always written with capital letters

such as the days of the week, months and holidays; proper names and place

names, nationalities and languages and titles of books, films and magazines.

Secondly, many English words double their last consonant before

endings -ed, -ing, -er and -est. It happens when the consonant is after a

vowel and the stress falls on the last syllable as in the word “ omitted”.

Thirdly, only nouns have plural and there are several plural formation

rules:

- The 1st one is that most nouns add -s to the singular: cat / cats.

- The 2nd one is that if the singular ends in -s, -ch, -sh, -ss, -x or -z, the

plural ending is –es: bus/buses.

- The 3rd one is that if the singular ends in -o, the plural ending is usually

–es: tomato/tomatoes.

- The 4th one is that if the singular ends in consonant followed by -y,

this is replaced by i, so the plural ending is –ies: spy/spies.

- The 5th one is that if the singular ends in -f or -fe, the plural ending

changes to –ves: wife/wives.

- Lastly, other nouns have an irregular plural: child/children, man/men,

person / people.

However these rules also present some exceptions.

4
 Fourthly, adjectives usually change into adverbs by adding -ly: nice /

nicely.

THIRD

After having considered the English-spelling code, I will go on to analyse

the main sound-spelling correspondences in the English language. For this

purpose, I will look at the main correspondences between the sound of

vowels and consonants and their spelling. The following rules do not intend

to be exhaustive; unfortunately, there are many exceptions.

Regarding vowels, we can distinguish 12 vowel sounds, each of which has

several graphic representations:

or horse

ee tree aw saw

e complete ou bought

/ i:/ ie piece / ɔ: / a talk

ea sea ore before

ey key oor door

ou four

rich,
i, y
city u sugar
e
pretty o woman
/ ɪ / a / ʊ /
village oo good
ie
ladies ou could
u
busy

/ e / e set / u: / oo food

ea dead o do

5
 ou group

u rude
a many
ew knew
ay says
ue blue
ie friend
ui juice

oe shoe

u sun

o son
a cat
/ æ / /ʌ/ ou country
ai plait
oo blood

oe does

a pass ir, yr
bird
ar car er,
her
ear heart ear
/ ɑ:/ / ɜ: / turn
er clerk ur
word
al palm wor
journey
au aunt our

i possible

e gentlemen

o gone a vegetable
/ə/
a was u difficult
/ ɒ /
ou cough ar particular
ure-furniture
au because er mother

or doctor

6
Regarding consonants and semiconsonants we can distinguish 24 consonant

sounds each of which has several graphic representations:

pp apple
/p/ /b/ b ball
p play

t
tea
tt
utter d day
/t/ th /d/
Thomas dd daddy
-ed
jumped
past

k kind

c cake
g ago
/k/ cc occur /g/
gh ghos
qu conquer

ch Christmas

ch chain
j jam
tch watch
g gin
/ tʃ / ture nature / dƷ /
dg bridge
teous righteous
gg suggest
stion question

f foot
v violet
ff off
/f/ /v/ f of
ph photo
ph nephew
gh enough

/θ/ th thief /ð/ th there

s so
s roses
ss pass
/s/ /z/ z zoo
c niece
zz dizzy
sc science

7
/ʃ/
sh shoe

ch machine

s sure

ss Russian si vision

ti nation /Ʒ/ s measure

si mansion ge prestige

sci conscience

ci special

ce ocean

h hat m mum
/h/ /m/
wh who mm swimming

n nose ng sing

nn funny nk sink
/n/ /ŋ/
kn know ck uncle

gn foreign nx anxious

r rat

l colour rr carry
/l/ /r/
ll yellow wr wrong

rh rhythm

y yes w west

i onion wh white
/j/ /w/
u union qu quick

ew new gu language

Apart from these sound spelling correspondences, we must not forget

that there are also some letters in certain words which do not correspond

8
to any sound in the word's pronunciation. These are known as silent letters

and we may highlight the following:

 B (mb, bt) comb, debt, doubt, plumber

 C in muscle, Connecticut

 G (gm, gn) foreign, gnaw

 H in heir, honest, honour, hour, rhythm, vehicle

 K (kn) knee, know

 L (lk, lm, ld) chalk, salmon, could

 N (mn) autumn

 S in aisle, island, isle

 T (stle, sten) castle, fasten; also mortgage, postpone

 W (wr, wh) wrong, who; also answer, sword

After having analysed the main sound-spelling correspondences in the

English language, I will concentrate now on the importance of phonological

awareness skills, reading and spelling skills and the relationship between

them.

On the one hand, phonological awareness refers to the knowledge of the

phonological structure of sentences and words and they constitute an

essential basis to the acquisition of spelling and reading skills although they

do not concern knowledge of letters. It does not develop naturally: like

other metalinguistic knowledge most people do not develop it unless they

are directly taught.

We can distinguish several levels of phonological awareness skills which

develop in a top-down direction: learners begin at the level of the whole

word and gradually move to smaller parts of the word like the manipulation

9
of single sounds in it. In this sense, the levels of phonological awareness can

be classified into shallower, intermediate and deeper.

On the other hand, reading and spelling skills which are connected to

the written word are needed to read and spell successfully . Therefore,

we assume that, in order to be good readers and spellers, knowledge of

letters is needed in addition to knowledge of the phonological structure.

In this sense, spelling and reading skills include aspects like: Understanding

of the alphabetic principle, mastering the regular sound-spelling

correspondences, mastering spelling rules, memorizing irregular words,

decoding, background knowledge and recognizing words as wholes and not as

individual letters.

FOURTH

Once phonological, reading and spelling skills have been considered, I will

concentrate now on the teaching of the written code in English.

According to Matthews, we can distinguish five subskills related to writing,

which are graphic skills, that is writing words correctly including aspects

such as capitalization, punctuation and spelling; grammatical skills, the

ability to use a variety of sentence patterns and constructions ; stylistic

skills, the ability to express precise meaning in a variety of styles and

registers; rethorical skills ,the ability to use cohesion devices in order to

link parts of a text; and organisational skills, writing ideas with coherence

and summarize relevant points.

In the early stages of learning English, students will generally write very

little. Since The FL Curriculum for Primary Education stresses oral skills

over written skills, the approach to teaching the written code must have

10
two principles: every written item must have been introduced orally

before the written form, and writing activities must have a visual

support. Apart from these general principles, we must bear in mind that

spelling is a productive skill, which requires good visual memory and

knowledge of linguistic structure. Thus, to be a good speller, two abilities

are required: phonological strategies, which help us to cope with regular

spelling patterns and visual strategies, which helps us to cope with the

exceptions to regular spelling patterns:

As I said before, English spelling is illogical and difficult for children to

learn. There are four main ways in which children learn the spelling of

words. These are: visual style, learners respond to the shapes of words;

auditory style, learners recognize the relationship between sounds and

letters; kinaesthetic style, learners let the hand remember the kind of

movements made when producing words; linguistic style, learners see the

relationships between words based on grammar, meaning, etc. Because of

that, a multi-sensory approach to the teaching of the written code is

the best option.

After having considered the main aspects that we need to take into

account when teaching the written code in English, I will now suggest

several activities to do so.

As we know, it is very difficult for children to work with abstract

concepts like sounds. In order to understand the sound-grapheme

relationship, they need first to be familiarised with the alphabet. In this

way, they realize that letters, which are something real, are related to

11
the different sounds. In this sense, when selecting writing activities to

practise spelling, the next sequence must be followed:

Firstly, we need to work with word-recognition activities. In this stage,

the students notice the shape of the words and the number of letters so

they can make a mental picture of it. Some activities at this stage include

reading and matching a picture with a word, joining up dots to form

words and putting the letters of a word in order.

Then, we need to work with activities at word level. In this stage, the

teacher will not have to provide the students with the words they need,

they will think about the spelling of words by themselves. Some activities

that can be carried out at this stage are making a list, a personal

dictionary, crosswords, matching labels to pictures, anagrams and also

games like Bingo, Hangman and Odd Man Out.

After that, we need to work with activities at sentence-level. In this

stage, students will write the words they need and also will work with given

sentences doing activities like writing speech bubbles for cartoons,

sequencing sentences and copying and correcting mistakes.

Lastly, the teacher must provide the students with strategies to check

their spelling. In this way, students will be more autonomous in their own

learning process, which contributes to the development of two Basic

Competences: Learning to Learn and Autonomy and Personal Initiative.

These strategies are: using dictionaries (or picture dictionaries in the

early stages), making personal dictionaries and classifying words

according to the similarities in their spelling.

To finish off this section, it is worth mentioning that when analysing or

correcting children´s written work in the activities, it is very important to

12
have a clear approach towards the correction of mistakes: this means that,

instead of trying to correct every single mistake, it is wiser to focus on

those mistakes that are really important to achieve comprehension of the

whole. According to Donn Byrne, we can follow four main correction

procedures which are correcting all mistakes, correcting mistakes

selectively, indicating mistakes so that students correct them and

letting the students to identify and correct their own mistakes.

In any case, we should not be over worried about mistakes since, as

Chomsky argued, “they are something natural and necessary and positive

evidence that learning is taking place”.

Conclusion

To conclude, I would like to remark that, as I have proven in this topic,

learning to write is a difficult achievement in life. As English teachers,

we must bear in mind that in the early stages of learning English, students

will generally write very little. Moreover, the youngest ones may be still

coping with some features of the writing process in their native language.

Therefore, we must be especially sensitive to the different writing

demands which we may find in our classroom and the different strategies

of supporting their writing.

In this topic, I have studied the English spelling code. Firstly, I have

clarified the concepts of Graphetics and Graphology and I have explained

the main writing systems. After that, I have examined the English-spelling

code, considering its main spelling rules. Then I have analysed the sound-

spelling correspondences in English as well as the importance of

phonological awareness skills, reading and spelling skills and I have

13
concentrated on the teaching of the written code in English, suggesting

several activities to do so.

In order to develop this topic, the following bibliography has been used:

 BREWSTER, J. et al. (2003): The Primary English Teacher’s Guide.

Penguin English.

 HARMER, J. (2003): The Practice of English Language Teaching.

Longman.

 LARSEN-FREEMAN, D. (2003): Techniques and Principles in

Language Teaching. Oxford University Press.

 VARELA, R. et al. (2003): All About Teaching English. Centro de

Estudios Ramón Areces.

 DONN BYRNE: “Teaching writing skills” Longman, London 1988.

 DANIEL MCLAREN AND DANIEL MADRID: “TEFL in Primary

Education” Universidad de Granada, 2004

 Organic Law of Improvement on Education 8/2013 (LOMCE)

passed on December 9th
 Royal Decree 126/2014 passed on February 28h which
establishes the minimum requirements of Primary Education
nationwide.
 Decree 2016 passed on July 21th which establishes the
curriculum in Primary Education and the evaluation in The
Autonomous Community of Castilla y Leon.
 Decree EDU/593/2018 passed on May 31th which establishes the

attention to diversity in The Autonomous Community of Castilla y

Leon.
 Decree EDU / 1330/2009 passed on June 19th, which
established the teaching of the second foreign language in the
third cycle of primary education, in schools supported by public
funds in the Autonomous Community of Castilla y León.

14
15