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.

翻译：识字能力，即读写能力，是衡量个人在社会及更广泛领域取得成功的关键指标。据估计，青少年犯罪系统中85%的人无法充分读写，超过一半存在物质滥用问题的人群在读写方面存在困难，而三分之二的未完成高中学业者缺乏基本识字技能。此外，到四年级时未能达到年级对应阅读水平的儿童，约80%的可能性将无法追赶。许多人可能认为，在美国这样的发达国家，识字问题并不突出；然而，这一危险的误解亟待纠正。全球每年因识字能力不足造成的经济损失约为1.19万亿美元；在美国，这一损失约为3000亿美元。更令人震惊的是，每五名美国成年人中仍有一人无法理解基本句子。雪上加霜的是，目前矫正读写能力不足的唯一途径依赖于昂贵的辅导或其他项目，而这些项目往往难以触及目标群体。本文中，我们团队提出了一种面向美国小学生的新式英语拼写与单词识别教学方法：词汇化（Wordification）。词汇化是一款基于语言学原理，结合单词正字法与语音特性的网络应用，其应用方式在此前的计算机辅助教学工具中尚未得到充分利用。