Introduction

Abstract

In January 2016, a 10-year-old boy, probably like many other children his age in primary schools across the United Kingdom, and no doubt in other countries as well, was providing an account of life at home. The point of the exercise was for the children to practise their writing skills and to put into effect the phonetic method of spelling that they had been taught. In describing his house, the 10-year-old, who happened to be Muslim, labelled his home a ‘terror-ist house’, which using the phonetic technique is not a bad attempt in spelling the word ‘terrace’. Rather than this being seen just as a product of the spelling approach adopted in the education system, and simply corrected by the teacher with a wry grin, this boy and his family became the subject of a counter-terrorist investigation (BBC, 20/1/16).