1 The three-letter rule
Structure words have fewer than three letters; content words can be any length, from three letters upwards (but must not have fewer than three let- ters):
so:sew/sow to:two/too we:wee oh:owe by:bye/buy no:know an:Ann I:eye/aye in:inn be:bee or:ore/oar/awe
2 The ‘th’ rule
In structure words, the initial th spelling corresponds to /ð/, ‘this’ and ‘they’; in content words, initial th corresponds to /θ/, as in ‘thesis’ and ‘Thelma’.
the:therapy than:thank thou:thousand this:thistle thy:thigh though:thought that:thatch those:thong them:thematic
3 The titles rule
In titles of books, films, and so on, content words usually start with capital letters, structure words with lower case.
The Case of the Stuttering Handbook of Bilingualism
Bishop The Tragedy of King
Strangers on a Train Richard the Second I Wish I could Shimmy like my Sister Kate
derived forms: ‘receive’, ‘ceiling’, ‘receipt’, ‘perceive’, ‘conceive’, ‘deceive’, ‘con- ceit’, ‘transceiver’, ‘fluorescein’ and ‘ceilidh’.
Nevertheless, there are rules that do work better for English. One set is the struc- ture word rules, given in Box 5.3. Teachers are usually aware how structure words such as ‘of’ and ‘the’ behave in English sentences compared to content words such as ‘oven’ and ‘drive’; how they are pronounced in specific ways, such as the voiced /ð/ ‘these’ compared to the unvoiced /θ/ in ‘think’ and ‘thesis’; and how they have stressed versus weak forms, /θi/ versus /ðɘ/, as mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3, but they are unaware that they are also spelt in particular ways.
The three-letter rule describes how only structure words can consist of a single letter – ‘I’ and ‘a’ – or two letters – ‘an’ and ‘no’; content words have three letters or more. If a content word could be spelt with one or two letters, extra letters have to be added to make it up to three or more – ‘eye’, ‘Ann’, ‘know’. While this three- letter rule seems perfectly obvious once it has been explained, most people have no idea it exists. There are exceptions, of course: ‘go’ and ‘ox’ have two letters but are content words (even if ‘go’ can act like an auxiliary ‘I am going to see him’); American ‘ax’ is an exception, British ‘axe’ is not. Nevertheless, the rule is a small generalization about English spelling that works nearly all the time.
The ‘th’ rule for structure words similarly reflects the fact that the only spoken English words that start with /ð/ are structure words like ‘these’ and ‘them’; hence the spelling rule that in structure words alone initial th corresponds to /ð/, all the rest have /θ/. Again, this fact about the spelling of structure words seems obvi- ous once it is understood. The exceptions are, on the one hand, a small group of words in which initial th corresponds to /t/ such as ‘Thai’ and ‘Thames’, on the other, the unique structure word ‘through’ in which th corresponds to /θ/.
The third rule of spelling that affects structure words is the titles rule. This affects the use of capital letters in titles of books, songs, and so on, where content words are given initial capitals but structure words are not, as in Context and Culture in
Language Learning, Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition and
Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development, to take three books that happen to be lying on my desk. This convention is not always adhered to and some book lists avoid all capitals in book titles. But if you cannot identify structure words you will not be able to apply it at all.
Perhaps the most complex set of spelling rules in English are the vowel corre-
spondence rules, from which Box 5.4 gives a small selection. As RP English has 5
vowel letters and about 20 vowel phonemes, considerable ingenuity has been devoted over the centuries to telling the reader how vowel letters are said. The silent
‘e’ rule gives the sound correspondence of the preceding vowel. If there is a silent
e following a single consonant, the preceding vowel is ‘long’: the letter a will correspond to /ei/ ‘Dane’, e to /i/ ‘Pete’, i to /ai/ ‘fine’, o to /ɘ / ‘tote’, u to /ju/ ‘dune’. If there is no e, the vowel is ‘short’: a corresponds to // ‘Dan’,e to /e/ ‘pet’, i to /i/ ‘fin’, o to /ɒ/ ‘tot’, u to // ‘dun’.
The terms ‘short’ and ‘long’ vowels do not have the same meaning here as in phonetics, since three of the so-called ‘long’ vowels are in fact diphthongs. For this reason, some people prefer to call the five short vowels ‘checked’, the five long vowels ‘free’. This rule has become known as the Fairy E rule, after the way that it is explained to children: ‘Fairy E waves its wand and makes the preceding vowel say its name’; the long vowel sounds here happen to be the same as the names for the five vowel letters. People who attack silent e, like the e in ‘fate’ /feit/, as being useless are missing the point: the silent e letter acts as a
marker showing that the preceding a is said /ei/ not //, that is, it is different from the a in ‘fat’.
The same relationship between long and short vowels underlies the consonant
doubling rule in Box 5.4. A doubled consonant in writing, say tt in ‘bitter’ or
nn in ‘running’, has nothing to do with saying the consonant twice, but shows that the correspondence of the preceding vowel is short: the pp in ‘supper’ shows that the preceding u corresponds to /i/, the p in ‘super’ that u is the long /u/. This version of the doubling rule is highly simplified and ignores the fact that some consonants never double, h, j, or rarely double, v and k (‘revving’ and ‘trekker’), and that British and North American spelling styles are slightly different, as we see below. As always, there are exceptions, such as doubled consonants after long vowels, as in ‘small’ and ‘furry’. What the rules we have dis- cussed show, however, is that there is a system to English spelling. It may be com- plicated, but it is probably simpler than the system for speaking English.
SLA research has mostly tackled the problems which arise in acquiring a second language that has a different overall writing system from one’s first language, whether going from a meaning-based route to a sound-based one, as in Chinese students of English, or from a sound-based route using only consonant letters to one using both vowels and consonants, as in Hebrew students of English, or from one type of alphabetic script to another, say, Greek to English or English to German. Chikamatsu (1996) found that English people tended to transfer their L1 sound-based strategies to Japanese as an L2, Chinese people their L2 meaning- based strategies. In the reverse direction, the Chinese meaning-based system handicaps reading in English; upper high school students in Taiwan read at a speed of 88 words per minute, compared to 254 for native speakers (Haynes and Carr, 1990). Students’ difficulties with reading may have more to do with the basic
Spelling 93