As a specialist teacher of science from the late 1960s through to today, I ran across a number of unusual words in each topic and was enjoined by my subject head and senior teachers to highlight these to the students in my class and help them learn the meaning, the spelling and the use of these technical words.

As Head of Science from 1988, I made sure that that every unit of Years 7 to 10 Science had a full suite of Language Development Activities, including a writing task and a context-driven list of words to be learnt, whose meanings were to be mastered and whose spelling was to be learnt and tested as part of the end-of-unit test. In this test, marks were deducted for incorrect spelling. This was accepted by colleagues, students and parents.

Following my move to Queensland in the mid 2000s, I started a PhD in Science Education, looking at the ways that science teachers [8-10] and primary teachers of science to their classes [5 to 7] developed literacy in the students they contacted, including spelling.

I can assure Chris Nugent that I have never encountered a school in which spelling was not taught and tested. What I did notice was that words were not tested in isolation from their meaning and their context: when there was a need for students to recognise, use and spell a word, it was taught and tested.

His references to “whole-word” approach, while meant as a criticism, neatly reflects the point that English is not, and never will be, a phonetic language. This explains why the spelling of many words has to be learnt by heart as the sound does not match the shape of the word. Teaching, and learning, the meaning and spelling words in the context in which they are used is all important.

I urge Chris Nugent to read the learned journals available to him before he writes a similar, conceptually inaccurate article again.

Reply to BRIAN OF BUDERIM
Such a long and critical 'reply' that seemed to aim at almost everything that I didn't write. If the learned academic really desires to be relevant, he should first carefully read as well as understand the material that he criticizes before giving vent to a rampant pen.
Sincerely: Chris Nugent

To 'orient' is a verb. To 'orientate' is to get confused with orientation, which is a noun.
Candide,
So, Agatha Christie was wrong. It should have been the oriented Express. And, the East was wrongly called the Orient ? Many of the early explores got lost in the East because they became disoriented & not disorientated ?
I'm confused now or rather dis-oriented after getting totally disorientated. I always thought it The orient & To orientate. Silly me.

Candide: U ask how updated spelling would cope with dialects. and quote "dans or darns" (probably u meant dahns) as examples. My anser: As we do now.

I grew up in Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand, and on Saturday nites often went to the "Town Hall 'dans' ", which was the local pronunciation. I later moved to the North Island, where they said "dahns". I married a local and now am a "dahnser", even tho we moved south to Christchurch!

In effect, the spelling is seen as representing "standard English". by both the "dans" and "dahns" factions. So it would be with logical, predictable, learner-frendly spelling – based on standard English (an amalgam of the RP-British and General American varieties) and accepted by us non-British and non-American riters.

Candide
Allan has explained very well that accents would be no barrier to modernising English spelling.
Perhaps u imagine that spelling reform must inevitably be a radical transformation of English spelling. Please have a look at what i am actually proposing: http://improvingenglishspelling.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/modernising-english-spelling.html
I am merely suggesting tidying up and regularising the very worst spelling irregularities – the ones which are chiefly and needlessly responsible for making English literacy acquisition exceptionally slow. The surplus endings on 'arE, gonE, promisE', for example, do nothing but make learning to read harder (cf. car, care, on bone, tennis surprise). We could surely at least get rid of those?

The clearest proof that consistent alphabetic spelling enables children to read far more easily comes from China. Chinese children are now first taught to read using phonically spelt Chinese, with Roman letters, which they are able to do very quickly.
They then spend several years learning to read the traditional characters, with Roman letters as subtitles (or learning aids), until they don't need them any more.

Finnish and Korean children just learn to read with their simpler spelling systems. They do so exceptionally quickly, like Chinese learning to read with phonic spellings. They regularly beat the rest of the world for educational attainment.

Learning to read English could be made much easier with just some tidying up. Once children can read, they have a better chance of learning to spell too.

It could be a misquote but apparently Noam Chomsky thinks English spelling is about 'optimal' for meaning.

The idea that there is something wrong with English spelling is unhelpful.