English spelling is reputedly full of irregularities and therefore not a safe guide to pronunciation. Most modern teaching of English pronunciation to adult speakers of other languages has relied on some kind of ancillary device, variously called a special alphabet, broad phonetic notation, or phonemic transcription. Such devices have been successful because they deal with the phonology of the language in isolation, as the beginning student needs to deal with it. Eventually, however, the student must make his way with the conventional orthography. Attempts to lead the student from sound to spelling by describing "phoneme-grapheme correspondences" are erroneous and futile. English orthography provides information which is much more than phonological, in the narrow sense. Interpretation of written English depends on grammatical, etymological, tactic, dialectal, and morphophonemic considerations. The student needs to learn the orthography for what it is, in a systematic way. This article provides specific suggestions, illustrated by contrastive analysis of pairs of words, for developing the student's competence in this area. (Author/RL)