/er/
This is the sound heard in words like her, firm, fur, word, and early.
This sound can be spelled five different ways:
er, ir, ur, -or, and ear-.
In her excellent book on beginning reading instruction, The Writing Road to Reading, Romalda Spalding offers a useful memory device for learning the five spellings of /er/:
Her first nurse works early.
The words in this mnemonic are in the order of the most common spellings. When teaching the memory device to the beginning reader, point out that the spelling or stands for the /er/ sound only if it is preceded by the letter w,as in work.
The spelling ear for the sound /er/ will cause a few giggles at first, but the beginner will quickly learn that the pronunciation of the body part (ear) is an exception to the pronunciation of the spelling in words like early and earth.
There you have it, the 47 sounds of English and most of the ways to spell them.
A few more letter combinations remain to be learned. You can find all the ways the 46 sounds can be spelled in an article called Alternate Spellings (as soon as I post it).
English grammar, on the other hand, is much simpler to learn than that of other languages. And English has a larger and more flexible vocabulary than other languages.
Many people who study English as a second language consider that these advantages compensate for the extra effort one must exert to master the English writing code.
How can people born into an English-speaking culture make such heavy weather of learning how to read and spell their native language?
