McGuinness has suggested that there 'is no diagnosis and no evidence for any special type of reading disorder like dyslexia', and that poor teaching accounts for low levels of English literacy performance, rather than inherent personal deficits. Implicit in this is the assumption that some languages have simple grapheme-phoneme codes in which there is a one-to-one mapping, making them easy to teach and learn, while others have more complicated structures and are more difficult for teachers and students. There is now an increasing number of studies which demonstrate that readers in more transparent orthographies such as Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek and German have little difficulty in decoding written words, while English children have many more problems. Increasingly, lack of orthographic transparency in English is seen as having a powerful negative effect on the development of reading skills in English-speaking children. There is evidence that English-speaking children who fail to acquire reading skills may fall into two distinct categories: those who would succeed in languages, other than English, that have greater orthographic consistency; and those who would still have problems even with perfect orthographic transparency. The first, larger, group is let down by the interaction of poor teaching methods and an incomprehensible system of orthography. The present study examines word factors associated with poor spelling and reading that have been identified. Three factors account for the relative ease with which pupils can spell words: frequency of the word in the English language; length of the word; and the presence of 'tricky' letters or letter combinations. Data are presented illustrating the predictive model of spelling and reading which enables word difficulty to be calculated from the characteristics of English words. The implications the model has for teaching and learning English are elaborated, with reference to the possible benefits to be derived from mother-tongue teaching in British schools.