What is the transparent code? Well, in English it consists of the “regular” spelling patterns. We know that some words are spelled completely regularly, but many others aren't. The regularly spelled words are words such as: bat, contact, plants, etc. All the letters in the word are pronounced with their most common pronunciation. We can group words by how many of its letters fall into this “regular” group. Some words will have 100% of its letters belonging to this group, others less. The first two charts below answer the question: Where do all the regular spelling patterns occur and how often do they occur in words which are not spelled completely regularly?
The first chart represents words which all have 7 sounds and reveals how many words have a given number of “regular” letters. The black letters in the sample words are the “regular” letters; the red letters are the ones which are not pronounced with their most common pronunciation in that word.
What is the significance of this to teaching literacy? Synthetic phonics teaches students to sound out the letters in a word. The reason this is so effective is not only because there are many words that are completely regular, but also these regular spelling patterns occur in many thousands of other words, even if they are not spelled completely regularly. In fact, most words in my database contain a high percentage of these letters in their most common pronunciation. Very few words consist of completely irregular spelling patterns.
The next chart below maps out the same analysis for words with different number of sounds. Each line refers to words with a certain number of sounds. The height of the lines indicates the number of words containing a certain number of regular spelling patterns.
The next chart illustrates how many words become available if you would introduce the most productive spelling pattern at each step. Each time you introduce a new letter or spelling pattern you increase the number of words that can be spelled and pronounced with the patterns you have at your disposal.
