It is undeniable that written and spoken English vary quite dramatically. There are a number of ways and a number of reasons why the way in which we transcribe language and we voice it differs. The progression of spoken and written language take place at contradictory rates and as a result the English spelling system is inefficient, especially for a child learning to write or a newcomer to the English language. .
There are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet and approximately forty-four phonemes, which are the distinct units of sound' (Hawker 2001: 664) that make up words. This automatically means that there must be a mismatch between the spellings and sounds of words simply because there are not nearly enough letters to spell each sound. There are no letters to represent the sound made by two consonants being joined together such as ch'. Those who can easily speak and write English will of course automatically know what sounds these spellings make. However, for someone learning the spelling conventions of English there could easily be complications. For example the three words charade', cholesterol' and church'; they all begin with the identical spelling of ch' but .
have three different sounds at the beginning. By using the International Phonetic .
Alphabet (IPA) they can be distinguished. Charade begins with a [á] (Davenport and Hannahs 1998) sound, cholesterol with [k] and church with [tá]. Speakers of English only know how to pronounce these words because as children they were taught to learn spellings off by heart' (Crystal 2003: 272), they know from memory which sounds to use for each word. Rather than relying simply on spelling speakers of English must use their memory of individual words. Real problems arise when coming across unusual words such as scientific terminology. An example could be the word chitin' which has a dictionary reference (Hawker 2001: 144) of n.