Reading Education in The United States - Alphabetic Principle and English Orthography

Alphabetic Principle and English Orthography

Beginning readers must understand the concept of the alphabetic principle in order to master basic reading skills. A writing system is said to be alphabetic if it uses symbols to represent individual language sounds. In comparison, Logographic writing systems such as Japanese kanji and Chinese hanzi use a symbol to represent a word. And both cultures also use syllabic writing systems such as Japanese kana and Chinese Yi script, there are also many Chinese alphabets.

English is one of several languages using the Latin Alphabet writing system. The orthographic depth of such languages varies. The Italian and Finnish languages have the purest, or shallowest orthographies, and English orthography is the deepest or most complex. In the shallow Spanish orthography; most words are spelled the way they sound, that is, word spellings are almost always regular. English orthography, on the other hand, is far more complex in that it does not have a one-to-one correspondence between symbols and sounds. English has individual sounds that can be represented by more than one symbol or symbol combination. For example, the long |a| sound can be represented by a-consonant-e as in ate, -ay as in hay, -ea as in steak, -ey as in they, -ai as in pain, and -ei as in vein. In addition, there are many words with irregular spelling and many homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings and often different spellings as well). Pollack Pickeraz (1963) asserted that there are 45 phonemes in the English language, and that the 26 letters of the English alphabet can represent them in about 350 ways.

The irregularity of English spelling is largely an artifact of how the language developed. English is a West Germanic language with substantial influences and additional vocabulary from Latin, Greek, and French, among others. Imported words usually follow the spelling patterns of their language of origin. Advanced English phonics instruction includes studying words according to their origin, and how to determine the correct spelling of a word using its language of origin.

Clearly, the complexity of English orthography makes it more difficult for children to learn decoding and encoding rules, and more difficult for teachers to teach them. However, effective word recognition relies on the basic understanding that letters represent the sounds of spoken language, that is, word recognition relies on the reader's understanding of the alphabetic principle

Further information: History of the English language