Spelling for Learning

Spellling for Learning: English Spelling for Teachers and Others is intended as a short and inexpensive, but inclusive and systematic, description of English spelling—shorter and less technical than my American English Spelling, fuller and more systematic than other descriptions. Its major intended readership is elementary and secondary teachers, and instructors of college remedial courses. It would also be a good supplementary text in teacher education programs. And it should interest mentors of home schoolers and other people who have more than a passing interest in how English is spelled and why it is spelled that way.

Spelling for Learning draws from four of my works: (i) American English Spelling (Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, 2003), (ii) the teacher's edition of an unpublished elementary spelling textbook series I have been working on for several years, (iii) Elements and Procedures: A Basic Speller, a text that has been used primarily in college-level remedial courses, and (iv) the Lexis and CommonWords computer database projects, in the first of which 129,000 English words are analyzed into their prefixes, bases, suffixes, and orthographic procedures and processes; and in the other of which 6,100 high-frequency words are analyzed into their sounds and affixes and described in a number of different ways.

The following samples are intended to show something of the range and tone of the discussion:

Table of Contents ( 60 KB)
Preface ( 104 KB)
from Chapter Two: Elements: Bases and Affixes ( 127 KB)
(Elements vs. Syllables, Elements vs. Spellings, Bases, Free and Bound, Elements and Etymology, Elements and Meaning) 2-1 - 2-5.
from Chapter Three: Simple Addition and the Three Changes ( 139 KB)
(Simple Addition, The Three Changes, The First Change: Insertion, Twinning) pp. 3-1 - 3-9
from Chapter Four: Processes: Assimilation, Palatalization, Shortening ( 139 KB)
Assimilation, The Prefix com-) pp. 4-1 - 4-4 (Palatalization, Palatalized Spellings, The Suffix ion and [shËn]) pp. 4-15 - 4-17 (Shortening Rules, The Suffix ity Rule) pp. 4-23 -4-25
from Chapter Five: The Sound-to-Spelling Correspondences ( 109 KB)
(A Note on Silent Letters, The Front Stops--Especially [t] (pp. 5-1 - 5-3) The Short Vowels--Especially [e] (pp. 5-8 - 5-9 (The Elusive Schwa, Schwa and Stress-shifting) pp. 5-12 - 5-13
from the Workbook: Chapter Four ( 73 KB)
(Assimilation in the Prefix com-, Assimilation in the Prefix ad-, Assimilation in the Prefix ex-) Arrays 4.1 -4.3 Answers

Single downloads of Spelling for Learning are available for $10.