There's a new trend in the teaching of primary school English language here. Until recently spelling was taught by looking at lists of words, based on the frequency of their occurrence in normal English. In Edinburgh one of the teachers devised a way of teaching spelling based much more on understanding the rules of spelling.
She divided words into list with similar endings to show word families. Words which sounded the same as the other words in the family but were spelt differently were highlighted in red. Similarly, words which were spelt the same but pronounced differently were also highlighted as "red" words. This, relatively traditional method was put together for "special needs" children who were not coping with the usual teaching. It is more like teaching English as a foreign language.
After a relatively short time her "special needs" children were spelling better than the children in the "normal" groups. The local authority decided to try out the system in all the schools and so far, it seems to be paying off with more confident spellers.
So I disagree about English not having rules for spelling - a lot of words do conform to expected spellings, its just that we have a large number of exceptions. The problem with the old method used here was that children didn't know what the expected spelling might be, so couldn't spot the exceptions.
