  Literacy, or the ability to read and write, is a crucial indicator of success
in life and greater society. It is estimated that 85% of people in juvenile
delinquent systems cannot adequately read or write, that more than half of
those with substance abuse issues have complications in reading or writing and
that two-thirds of those who do not complete high school lack proper literacy
skills. Furthermore, young children who do not possess reading skills matching
grade level by the fourth grade are approximately 80% likely to not catch up at
all. Many may believe that in a developed country such as the United States,
literacy fails to be an issue; however, this is a dangerous misunderstanding.
Globally an estimated 1.19 trillion dollars are lost every year due to issues
in literacy; in the USA, the loss is an estimated 300 billion. To put it in
more shocking terms, one in five American adults still fail to comprehend basic
sentences. Making matters worse, the only tools available now to correct a lack
of reading and writing ability are found in expensive tutoring or other
programs that oftentimes fail to be able to reach the required audience. In
this paper, our team puts forward a new way of teaching English spelling and
word recognitions to grade school students in the United States: Wordification.
Wordification is a web application designed to teach English literacy using
principles of linguistics applied to the orthographic and phonological
properties of words in a manner not fully utilized previously in any
computer-based teaching application.
