SoylentNews

chromas [soylentnews.org] writes:

Here's an interesting story someone dropped in IRC:

The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet – and left thousands of children unable to spell [theguardian.com] (and yes, I tweaked the sub title to fit into SN's tiny title limit):

The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a radical, little-known educational experiment trialled in British schools (and in other English-speaking countries) during the 1960s and 70s. Billed as a way to help children learn to read faster by making spelling more phonetically intuitive, it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight. And then it vanished without explanation. Barely documented, rarely acknowledged, and quietly abandoned – but never quite forgotten by those it touched.

Why was it only implemented in certain schools – or even, in some cases, only certain classes in those schools? How did it appear to disappear without record or reckoning? Are there others like my mum, still aggrieved by ITA? And what happens to a generation taught to read and write using a system that no longer exists?

[...] Unlike Spanish or Welsh, where letters have consistent sound values, English is a patchwork of linguistic inheritances. Its roughly 44 phonemes – the distinct sounds that make up speech – can each be spelt multiple ways. The long “i” sound alone, as in “eye”, has more than 20 possible spellings. And many letter combinations contradict one another across different words: think of “through”, “though” and “thought”.

It was precisely this inconsistency that Conservative MP Sir James Pitman – grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand – identified as the single greatest obstacle for young readers. In a 1953 parliamentary debate, he argued that it is our “illogical and ridiculous spelling” which is the “chief handicap” that leads many children to stumble with reading, with lasting consequences for their education. His proposed solution, launched six years later, was radical: to completely reimagine the alphabet.

The result was ITA: 44 characters, each representing a distinct sound, designed to bypass the chaos of traditional English and teach children to read, and fast. Among the host of strange new letters were a backwards “z”, an “n” with a “g” inside, a backwards “t” conjoined with an “h”, a bloated “w” with an “o” in the middle. Sentences in ITA were all written in lower case.

[...] The issue isn’t simply whether or not ITA worked – the problem is that no one really knows. For all its scale and ambition, the experiment was never followed by a national longitudinal study. No one tracked whether the children who learned to read with ITA went on to excel, or struggle, as they moved through the education system. There was no formal inquiry into why the scheme was eventually dropped, and no comprehensive lessons-learned document to account for its legacy.

The article has a few stories of ITA students who went on to have poor spelling and bad grades in school from teachers who didn't seem to know about ITA.

Original Submission