In November 2012 we wrote about the absolute futility of trying to figure out how to pronounce an American English word by the way it is spelled and, we can add, of trying to pronounce a word using speech patterns based on one's native language, if it is not English. We used the example of "o" in  move ("oo"), stove ("oh"), love (strong "uh"), the verb project (weak, quick, short "uh")  and the noun project ("ah"). We included a second paragraph demonstrating that the letter "i" is almost always pronounced "ih" and almost never pronounced "ee." Examples would be sit, city and million.

Immersion vs. the "A B C's"

   By the time a child enters kindergarten and encounters some "pre-reading" or "sight" reading activities, he or she has already effortlessly absorbed the sound patterns of the native language and has connected them with meanings. When she hears, "Let's run through the tunnel on the playground," she runs through. He sands his wooden block and the teacher says, "The sandpaper feels rough but it can make the wood smooth!" Mom says, "Cover your mouth when you cough."  No one is talking about "ough" at this point.  But keep in mind that this young child has an entire "dictionary" of words and their meanings, but it is a "sound" dictionary and it is "in his mind." 

  When in the first or second grade, which is when some of my clients had their first exposure to the English alphabet, the American child will eventually come across the words through, rough and cough in print.  There is no way, I repeat, no way to sound these out! However, once the teacher reads each word, the child remembers the playground or the sandpaper or the coughing and attaches her internalized sound image to the printed word.  The spelling is simply learned as an add-on skill.