Notes from Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom
Shift 3: A Common Practice to Reconsider
Misunderstanding: Phonics isn’t really worth teaching because English is unpredictable and its spellings are unreliable
It’s deep…
Orthography: The way that words are spelled – letter patterns- in a particular alphabetic system is referred to as its orthography.
Deep Orthography: An orthography that has many ways to spell the same sound, or many sounds for some spellings, is referred to as deep.
City, Cat, and Chew —one letter, 3 different pronunciations…
English’s orthography is very deep —with 44 phonemes represented by 200+ letters and letter combinations known as graphemes.
What is a grapheme?
A grapheme is a written symbol that represents a sound (phoneme).
Example:
| Phoneme | Number of spellings | Graphemes | Example |
| /b/ | 1 | b | ball |
| /k/ | 5 | K, c, ck, ch, que | Kite, cat, black, choir, plaque |
But it’s not impossible for children to learn…
In fact, 50% of words use only the most common sound spelling (regular).
So words that may not appear to be decodable at first glance, actually do have very reliable sound spellings.
