Although spelling instruction has traditionally treated almost every spelling word as requiring a separate learning act, recent research indicates that over 90% of American-English orthography actually is determined by a set of rules for unit phoneme-grapheme relationships, based with decreasing productivity upon three levels of analysis--phonological, morphological, and syntactical. The phonological level of consistent sound-to-letter relationships can be further examined in terms of the components of position, stress, and environmental factors; and the morphological level can be subdivided into components of compounding, affixation, and word families. These new insights into the nature of American-English orthography, provided by statistical analysis, modern computer technology, and field work in linguistics, should make a profound difference in a linguistically oriented spelling program, both in what is learned and in how that learning is accomplished. (See ED 026 361 for related papers.) (JB)