Re: Is spelling important?
I think we can relate some of the problems in English spelling to the large number of sounds that can be spelled two or more different ways:
bear
bare
lie
lye
site
sight
and hundreds more. When children learn phonics they can read most text, but to write it correctly they need to have memorized, consciously or not, which of the alternate spellings apply to the sound they wish to record on paper.
For me it is a matter of visual memory based on years of reading correctly-spelled text. At one time I was teaching 9th grade English and encountered so much misspelling in student writing that after a while I could not sort out the no-know-now confusion.
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