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The most influential person on my work that doesn't share a surname with me is Pete Bowers. He and his colleagues have created the WordWorks Literacy Centre in Kingston, Ontario, providing tutoring and workshops, with emphasis on problem-solving and becoming effective word detectives. Their web-site is packed with practical ideas and experiences.
The approach I've adopted here is an interpretation Real Spelling, which provides resources for teaching English spelling. Teachers and anyone with dyslexic concerns will find the Real Spelling web site worth a visit.
This page is part of my own Neil Ramsden web site:
The best reference to complement this site and to help investigate spelling is probably a good printed dictionary with etymologies. If you prefer electrons to paper, here are some reference pages available on the Internet.
These (currently) have free access but for fuller usage they and other similar references may require payment or at least registration. None is deeply aggressive in its advertising.
There's a mix of British and American English sources.
AskOxford -- a free dictionary resource from Oxford University Press at www.askoxford.com.
The DICT Development Group -- a web interface to several freely available dictionaries at http://www.dict.org, perhaps of especial interest to programmers.
LingualLinks -- a glossary of linguistic terms at www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms.
Merriam-Webster OnLine -- dictionary and thesaurus at www.m-w.com.
The Online Etymological Dictionary -- a free and open dictionary of etymology at www.etymonline.com.
Dick Hudson, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University College London, has a rich web site with much interesting information about English spelling. He has a special interest in grammar and is "keen to see more linguistics in schools". Some members of the Real Spelling community have highlighted difficulties with this site, while I've found it useful in soaking up and interpreting different ideas.
More technically, if you're curious to see an important but slightly esoteric area where morphology meets ICT, try searching the web for "stemming" or "suffix stripping". There is also a maturing linguistic branch of "computational morphology".
Both topics emphasise denotational rather than connotational meaning of words.
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