In English, 26 letters represent 44 phonemes. Children need to make decisions about whther individual graphemes ( unit of written sound, used to represent a phoneme) represent the sound, or whether a digraph (two letters produced as a single sound, such as 'sh') is needed to create a single sound.
The sounds of letters are often affected by their position in the word or by the surrounding letters. Therefore, phonetic strategies are often insufficient for accurate spelling.
Problems also arise because of the number of homophones in English. Here are some examples of homophones beginning with the letter 's':
sea/see - sale/sail - stare/stair - son/sun - some/sum - steak/stake
Another difficulty is the addition of inflections, which can affect the phonology of a word, as in 'house' and 'houses'.
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