At its core, Beneath the Surface of Words by Sue Scibetta Heglund argues that we’re teaching spelling all wrong by focusing on sound to symbol correspondence. After all, even in the widely cited Hanna and Hanna paper (full text here), only about half of English words can be spelled correctly using phonetics. To focus merely on phonetics still means that a huge number of words have to simply be memorized.
I’ve been using Logic of English Essentials with my older elementary children for the past four years – and that program leans heavily into sound to symbol correspondence. I’ve seen great improvement in spelling from my dyslexic student since beginning the program – but then again, it’s also been four years with lots of growth in lots of areas! One of the hallmarks of the “sound to spell” in Logic of English is overpronouncing sounds that we normally use the schwa for in order to cement the spelling into our heads. The problem is that in order to “say-to-spell”, we need to first know the spelling. I may think “Be-ay-yu-tiful” when I say “beautiful”, but that’s because I already know how its spelling. Same with “cray-on” or “roy-al.”
In addition to the difficulty of the schwa, a sound-to-symbol approach to spelling requires the memorization of lots of words where the sound could be represented by several different phonograms. For instance, the sound /er/ can be represented by ER, IR, UR, or EAR. Logic of English teaches each of these and their frequencies (ER is the most common), but ultimately the student either needs someone or something to prompt them (“Use IR the /er/ of bird” or looking it up in a dictionary or online) or needs to memorize which /er/ is used in each word. There are dozens of other sounds that can be represented by multiple phonograms.
The reality is that English pronunciation and spelling isn’t one-to-one. Depending on the dialect, many sounds go unpronounced or are pronounced in unexpected ways. If children (and adults) are going to learn to spell well, they need something beyond JUST sound to symbol correspondence.
Enter the relatively new discipline of “Structured Word Inquiry”, which Beneath the Surface of Words (BtSoW) describes. BtSoW posits that English is not primarily a phonetic language but a morphonemic language. That is to say, spelling expresses the meaning of words beyond just the sounds of words.
As a result, to learn to spell a word, we can benefit from looking at the meanings of words and of their “morphemes” – the smaller units of words, including stems (what many of us grew up referring to as “root words”), prefixes, and suffixes. We can look at related words that use the same stems. And we can look at the etymology (the history) of the word as it moves from language to language. All these will help us understand both the meanings of the words and the way they are spelled the way they are.
Beneath the Surface of Words gives dozens of detailed examples of words that are hard to spell from a phonemic standpoint but that make sense once one has explored related words and/or etymology of a word. For example, I loved the illustration of a student who had a hard time keeping a list of literary terms straight until she analyzed “personification” and saw “person” in it. (Does that seem “well, duh” to you? That’s probably because you already have an morphophonemic understanding of each of those words – but since “person” is pronounced with the schwa as persun, a child, especially one with a language learning disability like dyslexia, may struggle to make this connection without help.) Another fun example was learning why there’s an “l” in yolk – it traces way back to Old English when the yolk (geolca) literally meant the “yellow” (geolu) part of the egg.
So am I ready to throw away or resell my Logic of English curriculum?
Nope, not at all. I still find great value in the systematic teaching of the phonetics of the English language, including the phonograms and the general rules (BtSoW would call them conventions) of spelling. Furthermore, Logic of English isn’t just spelling (maybe not even primarily spelling?) So I’ll continue using Logic of English with my elementary school students. But I’ll probably be working harder to look at and explore the morphology of the English language as we go through Logic of English together.
And for my rising middle schooler (how the time has flown!)? We’ll be doing Structured Word Inquiry to help her grow in spelling and in vocabulary as she’s encountering more and more complicated words that don’t necessarily easily translate from sound to spelling.