Spelling in a Complex Orthography: Can knowing better really help do better?

Don’t use phoneme-grapheme charts! I just love orthography and can already see mistakes I have made in my practice. It was fascinating to listen to this webinar, and hearing about the habits of poor spellers, and the misinformed tendency in education to teach English orthography as a transparent orthography. It is not. There are many layers, which I connect with Louisa Moats calling this the language layer cake. Educators must move past teaching only the many many phoneme-grapheme correspondences. We know that it is very difficult to teach orthographic rules – not just patterns -especially in addition to morphology and etymology. But the only way out is to embrace it and dive in. To learn them ourselves and ensure the rules and layers are taught. We simply cannot rely on massive charts of spellings as it taxes cognitive load. We can get false information that leads us to question whether students have issues with working memory. There are many misconceptions that arise when we attend to only the 180 phoneme-grapheme correspondences that we need to address. This is only one layer. Educators must know all the layers and teach them to avoid essentially blaming children for memory issues, and other issues in learning to spell.