When it come to difficulties with reading and writing, blame the complexity of the English language and the vagaries of its spelling, rather than poor pupil or teacher performance, says Ken Spencer, lecturer in educational media technology at Hull University, who argues in favour of a rationalisation of the language. There are 44 sounds in the English language and 300 ways of representing them. "Our research suggests that we actually have a dyslexic language, and that it is so complex that it is a miracle that anyone ever masters it. Take the ee sound in pleaded. Between 20 and 50 per cent of the time this sound is spelt ea, ee or with a y at the end of a word. It is spelt ie 5 to 20 per cent of the time, and i, ey, eo or ae less than five per cent of the time. Words like through, though and thought present huge problems for children." The word nose presents its own problems. "The o sound is controlled by the e at the end, which means that when reading it, the child has to skip forward. This is impossible for a young child. If we put a dot over the o, it would be immediately recognisable."

Three factors account for the relative ease with which students can spell words, Spencer says. These are: the length of the word, the frequency of its use in the language and its phoneticity. Spencer spent two years classifying 20,000 words and analysing them statistically. "We are now getting to the point where we can predict difficulties for children within a word." Many other languages, he says, are devoid of the spelling problems, which are inherent in the English language. "They have about 30 sounds but they have a consistency between spelling and pronunciation." A study of American students and Turkish students on words of more than three letters has found that Turkish children are better readers. In Turkey, Spencer says, "once you know your letters you're set up for life. You can read from the word go. English children have problems with three syllable words, Turkish children don't". It was under Ataturkthat the Turkish language was rationalised in the 1920s. A study of German and English children with dyslexia shows that English children have far greater reading problems than have German children.

The English language was fixed in the eighteenth century when Samuel Johnson produced his dictionary and spelling became standardised. However, the Simplified Spelling Society in Britain will vote shortly on the replacement of the present system of spelling, Spencer notes. Following rationalisation, the Japanese language now contains some 2,000 symbols, while the rest of the words are phonetic, he says. Spencer favours similar changes for English. "We can't change the most common words," he says. In the English language, "we have about 1,000 words which can be rote learned". If students learned ten words each day, as they do in Japan, they would quickly be able to cope with the difficult spellings. "Everything else should shift to phonetic spelling." In English, "teaching children phonetics doesn't work, but it does for children in Turkey. If we reconstructed the language, at one stroke, we would make reading difficulties much less common."

In bilingual families, where children find reading in English a problem, parents should encourage their children to read in the other language. "They can often make rapid progress and this gives them a lot of self-confidence," he says. * Ken Spencer is an educational technologist, studying the technology of education rather than technology in education. Teaching he says is a very inefficient process, simply because so many children fail at school. Spencer looks at what can be done to boost performances. He is an adherent of mastery learning.

"There's a huge amount of evidence to show that you can take a student whose performance is average, and turn him or her into a top performing student." What, then, is mastery learning? "Most courses are broken down into three teaching units," Spencer explains. "To understand units 2 and 3, you need to understand unit 1." Children who have difficulty mastering the first unit flounder in the later units. As a result, they can lose interest in school and even drop out. Mastery learning ensures that children have mastered unit 1 before they move on to unit 2. "You need to give a test which requires students to be at least 80 per cent correct. If it's 90 per cent plus, so much the better," he says. "Students who don't meet the criterion level have to spend extra time on unit 1."