We all know, and teachers of reading know better than anyone, that English is not an easy language to learn. Most linguists claim there are between 40 and 45 phonemes in the English language, yet the sounds these phonemes make can be spelled out in more than 400 different ways. With emailing and text messaging, shortcuts for spelling some words, such as info, thru, and thanx are becoming more and more commonplace. This surely compounds the difficulties teachers face in teaching spelling.

It may comfort some of you to know that there is a small group of very persistent advocates of simplified-English who continue to push for the creation of a much more phonetic system of written English. They claim, rightfully in my opinion, that children learning English as a second or native language would have much less difficulty if we removed the confusing elements of the language. For example, they would ensure there would be no inconsistencies such as those that make comb, tomb and bomb all sound differently.

This movement isn’t new. Even Andrew Carnegie attempted to introduce a system of simplified spelling. And Teddy Roosevelt was known to use simplified spellings in his presidential correspondence.