English Orthography and Reading

Abstract

One of the most fundamental aspects of learning to read is understanding how printed text relates to spoken language (Perfetti, 2003). When learning to read in English, a learner must view printed letters (graphemes), decode their sounds, and combine those sounds together to form words. For example, to read the word cat, a beginning reader must understand that the grapheme c makes a [k] sound, the grapheme a makes an [æ] sound, and the grapheme t makes a [t] sound, before combining them into [kæt], a word which they already know the meaning of orally. This process of decoding graphic forms into phonological forms is a key component of word recognition, which itself is a key component of learning to read. The specific patterns of correspondences between the graphic and phonological forms are the orthography of a language. Each language has its own unique orthography. Thus, all learners who are learning to read in English, no matter their first language background, need to develop their knowledge of the orthography of English. The writing system of a language is a related concept, but is distinct from its orthography. A language’s writing system defines the linguistic unit that is represented by the graphemes of a language. There are three main types of writing systems: alphabetic, syllabic, and morphographic (Coulmas, 2003). In alphabetic languages, graphemes represent phonemes or individual sounds. English is an alphabetic language, like many other European languages such as Spanish, German, French, and Italian, but also languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Korean hangul. On the other hand, in a syllabic writing system (such as Japanese kana or Cherokee), each grapheme represents a syllable; for example, the sounds ba, bi, bu, be, and bo would each be represented by single graphemes. In a morphographic writing system (such as Chinese, Japanese kanji, or Korean hanja), each grapheme represents a morpheme or a unit of meaning. Within each system type, variation exists in the specific details about the correspondences between graphic symbols and language. Orthography refers to this language‐specific variation. Lastly, script refers to the specific symbols that are