"There is a direct correlation between spelling ability and reading comprehension" - yes, there is. The more you read, the better your spelling gets, because the words look wrong when they are spelt wrong.

It's unfortunate in a way that the language that seems set to become the world language has such crazy spelling. It would have been easier if the spelling had been settled by people who were good at spelling, rather than oddballs like Chaucer and Shakespeare and the Bible translators who seem to have made it up as they went along.

I expect that in time a lot of the weird spellings so prevalent in English will sort themselves out, and some of the examples of bizarre mispellings included in the thread are an indication of how that is going to happen. The electronic spellcheckers actually are the best defence of current English spelling, because they'll hold the line better than teachers could ever do.

They will have the effect that, no matter how people mispell when they write, what appears in print will keep to the present spelling - and that will ensure that the wrong spellings will continue to look wrong. And that will feed back into the way people who read will tend to spell.

And for an example of how seeing a word printed differently feeds back into whether it looks right or wrong, thing of "beatle" and "beetle". For a whole generation at least, the latter spelling is the one that looks odd.