If there’s one thing that’s apparent about many kids, it’s that they don’t hear words correctly. Therefore, they don’t say them correctly. They repeat what they hear, and if what they hear is wrong, they repeat what is wrong.
But knowing what’s wrong should make it easier to fix.
Many children lack familiarity with words because they do not read enough.
Whether to use this word or “weather” depends largely upon how often, and in what context, students see both. But if they are not reading, they simply don’t encounter those varied, visual uses and don’t learn to choose between them.
Once, they had to learn that difference.
Lacking visual familiarity and audial discernment, students say they’re going to a “carnation” instead of a “coronation” ball.
Into their adulthood, people often fail to hear the audial distinction between pitcher and picture, or want and won’t, and never distinguish between them.
Furthermore teachers no longer emphasize that there is a direct connection between the order of the letters that you place in a word and how the word sounds when you say it.
Students who know the word is “frame” will write it as “farme” because no one makes them pronounce the word they have written instead of the one that they meant to write.
Many kids are encumbered by a heavy tongue. They can’t hear or replicate the differences in sound between “marry” and “merry”.  Or “on” and “own”. They never learn, in speech or in writing, that “gonna” is never “going to.”  And they don’t use the past tense “ed”s.
And with the loss of dexterity in what we write and speak, we also lose figurative language, — and a whole lot of literature with it.
Our children have to learn the language.
Otherwise, they won’t; they can’t succeed.
Yolande Robbins
Vicksburg