ENGLISH SPELLING: THEORIES AND APPROACHES TO SPELLING TRAINING

Abstract

The article deals with theories and approaches to teaching English spelling, which has been shaped over centuries and is the result of the country’s long history of becoming a nation. The history of the English language and borrowings is closely linked to three conquests of the British Isles: the Anglo-Saxon, the Scandinavian (Vikings) and the most significant – the Norman one in the 11th century, after which the dominance of the French language began. The complexity of English spelling is characterized by a dichotomy: graphic and pronunciation correspondence/graphic and pronunciation discrepancy. The graphic and pronunciation discrepancies that constitute the main difficulties of English orthography, include: representing different phonemes with the same letter; representing the same phoneme in different graphic ways; existence of “silent” letters, existence of historical and traditional spellings. New theories of spelling acquisition show that learners must simultaneously use linguistic and written knowledge, including phonological and morphological awareness, as well as orthographic knowledge, to achieve success in spelling. The English spelling system is designed to encode both the pronunciation and meaning of words, and, as a result, English spelling reflects the relationship between phonology, morphology, semantics and etymology. Etymological awareness of words is one of the important factors for understanding the features of spelling and phonetic adaptation of borrowed words. Most of all, in modern English spelling, the historical (traditional) principle of orthography dominates, when spelling does not correspond to the morphological, phonetic facts of the modern language, but it can be explained only by the history and the development of words. The influence of historical factors such as the Norman Conquest (11th century) and the scientific and technological leap (starting with the spread of printing) is one of the reasons for the rejection of the phonetic principle in English orthography and the emergence of graphic and pronunciation discrepancies.