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The most influential person on my work that doesn't share a surname with me is Pete Bowers. He and his colleagues have created the WordWorks Literacy Centre in Kingston, Ontario, providing tutoring and workshops, with emphasis on problem-solving and becoming effective word detectives. Their web-site is packed with practical ideas and experiences.
Dick Hudson, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University College London, has a rich web site with much interesting information about English spelling. He has a special interest in grammar and is "keen to see more linguistics in schools".
The approach I've adopted here is an interpretation my brother Melvyn Ramsden's experiences in teaching English spelling. Teachers and anyone with dyslexic concerns will find his Real Spelling web site worth a visit.
This page is part of my own Neil Ramsden web site:
Words! Literacy Club is a club for students in Geneva to improve their use of the English language and most particularly with spelling. Run by Lesley Catterall, it has "an information site for anyone wanting to understand more about the English language", created to act as a communication medium for both students and their parents. One of their recent projects was an investigation into the suffix <-ion> and the common word ending <-tion>.
The best reference to complement this site and to help investigate spelling is probably a good printed dictionary with etymologies. If you prefer electrons to paper, here are some reference pages available on the Internet.
These (currently) have free access but for fuller usage they and other similar references may require payment or at least registration. None is deeply aggressive in its advertising.
There's a mix of British and American English sources.
AskOxford -- a free dictionary resource from Oxford University Press at www.askoxford.com.
The DICT Development Group -- a web interface to several freely available dictionaries at http://www.dict.org, perhaps of especial interest to programmers.
LingualLinks -- a glossary of linguistic terms at www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms.
Merriam-Webster OnLine -- dictionary and thesaurus at www.m-w.com.
The Online Etymological Dictionary -- a free and open dictionary of etymology at www.etymonline.com.
Wikipedia -- an openly collaborative encyclopaedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, including a growing 'wiktionary'.
Wordsmyth -- a dictionary-thesaurus aiming to be simple, clear and accessible at www.wordsmyth.net. It also contains various pattern searchers.
If you're curious to see an important but slightly esoteric area where morphology meets ICT, try searching the web for "stemming" or "suffix stripping". There is also a maturing linguistic branch of "computational morphology".
Both topics emphasise denotational rather than connotational meaning of words.
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