Here are 3 things about the English language, that you may not have heard explicitly stated, that can help inform your writing instruction:

1 – The English writing system is morphophonemic.

The spelling of an English word indicates both phonology (the distinct sounds or phonemes in spoken words) and morphology (the structural components that form the meaning of words; suffixes or affixes like pre-). These two components collaborate, enabling us to understand text more rapidly and effortlessly compared to if words were spelled solely based on their pronunciation.

(Hegland, 2018)

2 – English spelling optimizes comprehension, not pronunciation.

Written words in English do not always directly reflect their pronunciation. For instance, the word “says” does not phonetically match its spelling and is deemed “irregular.” However, considering how spelling can help English speakers to quickly comprehend words while reading, we can appreciate why “irregular” words like “says” are spelled in the way they are. In “says,” the graphemes represent the phonology not only of the word “says” but also of all words within the same morphological family, such as “say” and “saying.”

(Hegland, 2018)

3 – English grapheme-phoneme correspondence is the key to reading and writing comprehension.

In her article, Linnea Ehri discusses how although words may be read by decoding letters or by predicting words, reading words by sight contributes the most significantly to reading and comprehending a text. Words can be read from memory when graphemes (written symbols that represent a sound) are connected to phonemes (the smallest units of sounds). So, grapheme–phoneme relations should be explicitly taught in the classroom.

(Ehri, 2020)

References

Ehri, L. (2020). The Science of Learning to Read Words: A Case for Systematic Phonics
Instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S45–S60. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.334

Hegland, S. (2018). Comprehending spelling. Learning About Spelling. https://learningaboutspelling.com/2018/11/06/comprehending-spelling/