What's involved in acquiring a second writing system?
This is a challenge, and it is being faced by a majority of today's new learners of English. These are the learners who are coming into our alphabetic script from very different writing systems - Chinese, Arabic, Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Ge'ez etc.
What do they need to (re-)learn?
1. the formation of the letters and numerals - handwriting - the 'stroke order' of English letters and numbers
2. the sound system of the English alphabet - via phonemic awareness and phonics instruction
3. the ways in which English words are formed - word families, word roots, word origins, grammatical additions
