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There’s been a lot of ink spilt recently on the subject of the best way to teach children how to read (or more accurately to decode) written English, and how large a role phonics should play in that process. I’m not going to enter that fray today, except to point out that long before phonics there was another system that promised to get children up and reading in super-quick time. Its name was ITA, or the Initial Teaching Alphabet.
ITA was invented by a member of the Pitman family, whose shorthand system has underpinned the work of secretaries for generations, and like shorthand it relied on the sounds of words rather than on their spellings. Since English sounds don’t correspond to letters, at least in a consistent way, Pitman was obliged to create new characters for children to learn, producing books for five-year olds that looked like the example above. (Being Englished, the text reads: Paul said to his mother, “Jet has taken the meat. Oh look, Jet has eaten the meat.” Paul said to Jet, “Bad dog, Jet.”) The idea was that, once children grew confident in reading using ITA, they would graduate smoothly to standard English spelling.
ITA flourished in the 1960s, when it was taught to many of my own generation (although not to me). Did it work? That it is now a historical curiosity suggests not, and a quick straw poll of my peers reveals that many feel it badly affected their ability to spell in later life. Others, however, are more sanguine, so who knows? Did you learn using ITA - and, if so, how was it for you? I cite it here simply to offer a long perspective on present controversies. We have always had trendy reading schemes to deal with, and children have generally muddled through despite our best efforts. If that's not a positive message, what is?
For all the trouble it causes, I’d be sad to lose the strange system that is English spelling, just as I was sad to lose imperial weights and measures, and pounds, shillings and pence. Like these, English spelling offers a window onto our past and those who lived there. Each word is like a stone that breaks to reveal a fossil, a sudden glimpse of a world in which "k-n-i-g-h-t" really is a phonetic spelling. What is ugly when seen in two dimensions, in four may be a thing of beauty.
Thought for the day:
Though you plough thoroughly through the rough, you should expect the odd hiccough
11 Comments on Alphabet Soup - Cathy Butler, last added: 9/8/2012
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It's all a bit vague, as I learned ita fast, and then learned conventional reading within about two weeks of that. As to whether it wrecked my spelling, for years we thought that was the case, but it turned out what it actually did was mask the dyslexia (diagnosed at 20) as I seem to have learned "look say" naturally, happily switching between ita, English and Hebrew (which is phonetic) without ever quite grasping the notion of phonemes.
It's all a bit vague, as I learned ita fast, and then learned conventional reading within about two weeks of that. As to whether it wrecked my spelling, for years we thought that was the case, but it turned out what it actually did was mask the dyslexia (diagnosed at 20) as I seem to have learned "look say" naturally, happily switching between ita, English and Hebrew (which is phonetic) without ever quite grasping the notion of phonemes.
My abiding memory of ITA was how boring and tedious the reading books were - no mysterious words, humour or poetry just Jet and his sodding car. it was a relief to stop.
I had to use ITA on my first teaching practice with six-year-olds in 1971. It was easy to learn, the children could all read, and the headmaster said they would transfer with no trouble. However,the big disadavantage, it seemed to me, was that until they were about seven they couldn't go home or to the library and pick up and read anything they fancied.
I never did become a teacher, but I do hold a Bronze Medal in Pitman's Shorthand! I think shorthand has been of more lasting use than ITA.
It always seemed a bit odd to me: surely it teaches you how to read one way, then you in effect have to learn all over again. Not that I know as I'm not a teacher and so have no professional or first hand experience of it. When I look at phonetic passages, I struggle to read the text!
Yet I do enjoy reading the odd and entirely variable spellings of early writing, and which don't trip me up at all, straunge and wunderful to relate ...
No comments on ITA, but I don't agree with you, Cathy, about spelling, and in fact I've written a whole ABBA post on the subject! http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/down-with-spelling.html
You say children have generally muddled through despite our best efforts and there's where I disagree. Lots of children don't muddle through. Even where they do, they have spent hours and hours of their primary school lives mugging up on spellings and being tested on it. Whereas in a phonetic system, like Italian, they can move on to actually reading books they enjoy!
Lovely image of the fossil being cracked open - but I reckon fossils are for scholars - language is for communication and should be as clear as transparent as possible!
Luckily, missed out on teaching ITA.
Yes, it sounded "logical" but I am not sure how many children it truly helped or how many its coded system muddled or held back, especially with its need for special reading books too.
Literacy is about more more than the phonic code, but even real books can be overused in the need for definite educational outcomes. For example, a small 8 year old holidaying person has been totally engrossed in reading & re-reading The Jolly Pocket Postman to herself over three days.
We chatted. She said (with a shrug and a look of sadness and boredom) that yes, she knew the Jolly Postman because a Year 1?/Year 2? teacher had showed it to them in class so that they could learn about letters.
What children need is a full experience of language - and that includes playful activities like the word games/songs that young person and younger brother were making up in the car on the way to swimming, not just an easy-to-mark phonic code.
I get worried that emphasis on one set of skills is absorbing the time that should be used for enrichment too.
Also, wasn't ITA a fashion/feature of an age with fewer visual distractions than children have at their fingertips now? Aren't there so many other ways to meet the need for story and information that reading answers?
Emma, I think we clashed swords (or sords) in the comments on that post, too!
I suspect we're divided by ideological differences on this one, but even at a practical level, spelling reforms are very difficult to implement. Not only would phonetic spelling necessarily stamp one particular way of speaking English as "correct" (and who gets to choose which one?), it would render the entirety of existing literature more or less incomprehensible. Lack of a native literature has always been the stumbling block for new languages such as Esperanto (I speak as the grandchild of an Esperanto translator), and many of the same problems would apply to reformed spelling, at least of a thoroughgoing variety (and what's the point of a half-hearted reform? That after all is something we already have in the form of American spelling, thanks to Noah Webster).
Have you ever come across John Wilkins' Essay towards a Philosophical Language and Real Character? It's charming, but a cautionary tale...
blogwalking mr.
One trouble with phonetic spelling is that both US and British English are spoken so differently in different parts of the country. That this can sometimes cause a lot of problems, I realised when trying to teaching reading (in the US) to a lady in her fifties whose pronunciation of 'hat' sounded like 'HAY-at'.
I take your point, Cathy. But it's sad, watching those children who are really struggling to get to grips with an incredibly illogical system.
It's not about spelling per se, but I thought this article by Vivian French article was very inspiring and insightful about the difficulties that so many children - however imaginative and articulate - have getting to grips with the written word.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/15/vivian-french-dyslexia