Simplified Spelling= ITA II ?
I’ve had a bit of a deja vue moment in reading on the BBC news site proposals to employ
simplified spelling in order to get young minds latched onto reading at a faster rate and then to integrate ‘real world spellings’ at a later date. With simplified spelling learn would become lern and slow would be spelt slo (you get the idea). I knew people who went through the old I.T.A reading system many moons ago and which was a very similar concept in that words were spelt as they sounded in special I.T.A books. Some of those people can’t spell to this day. Despite I.T.A’s origins in shorthand, its use as a an early learning system petered out.
The universal adoption of text-speak looms ever nearer.
Categories: Education, Random
Early learning, I.T.A, Initial Teaching Alphabet, Linguistics, Simplified Spelling, Spelling
That woman in the BBC article wound me up in the suggestion that there was an anomaly of pronunciation between ‘and’ and ‘ask’; not to me, with my Northern accent. There were some good points made along those lines by some of the commenters, that it really would depend on your accent as to how you’d spell things.
I spend all day with people who spell phonetically (beginner writers!), so I’m used to reading ‘byootiful’ and ‘frend’.
English *is* hard to learn, but the majority of us get there in the end.
Hello Kirsty-yes the regional accents element was a bit overlooked there. I guess the same ideas keep coming around if you wait long enough. It didn’t seem to work with I.T.A all those years ago. I’m sure phonetics has its place in the language learning process (no doubt you know much more than me on that).
Learning X in order to learn Y is always a dubious principle. It has been applied to foreign languages too. One of the claimed justifications for teaching Latin was that “it made it easier to learn other languages”. (Tell that to a student of Chinese.)
As an ex-language teacher (and language learner) I know that the crucial aspect of language learning is time and practice. Someone spending two years learning French will get much further in French than someone spending a year learning Latin and then a year learning French.
The problem with simplified or any other alternative spelling schemes is that the first scheme children learn is the one that influences them most deeply. To my mind it is mad to teach them one scheme and then “unteach” it to replace it with another. Teachers would do far better to bite the bullet and spend the whole time teaching standard spelling.
The government has often shown itself vulnerable to the blandishments of trendy new theorists whose methods are untested and unsupported by any evidence.
Who now remembers the “direct method” in language teaching or the hours students were forced to spend doing drills in “language laboratories”?
Never mind, new methods need new books and new equipment so someone will get rich as a result.
Silvertiger,I could not agree more with your comments.
My sister was taught ITA at school.she is 18 months younger than I am so I just ‘missed’
(thank god)being taught to read by that ‘method’.
I remember her asking me to help her with her reading but I couldn’t understand a word of it,neither could mum or dad!
I was taught the traditional way and I have never had any problems with my language or spelling.My sister on the other hand still to this day spells in ITA and has difficulty pronouncing some English words she is not familiar with.
She was unable to un-learn what she had been taught by the ITA ‘method’,If anyone were to read anything she had wrote they would think it had been written by a 7 year old child.
I was educated to high school level and she went on to finish college,but I honestly believe teaching her ITA had a detrimental effect on her education and her employment prospects.
These ‘trendy new theorists’you speak of should be very careful what ideas they think up next and the government should take anything they say with a pinch of salt unless they have proven scientific data and proper analysis of that data.
I don’t suppose these people who introduced ITA or the governments have any data on how detrimental this teaching ‘method’ was to childrens education!Of course they don’t!
But I suspect you may be right,someone WILL get rich at the expense of childrens education…again.
i have found it difficult to learn to spell not useing ITA as it was easy for me to use this system as my english language is very bristolian and the way that i speek is very much like the way you read ITA for exsample in a centance i am often told i say hav not have and yes my spelling is awful and i love spellcheck on a computer even though i do not always pick the correct word and it confuses me.
I learned ITA in the US (Minnesota) in about 1971 and have had no problems with either reading, writing or spelling. This in spite of poor grades in English throughout primary and secondary school.
I am currently querying my wife and family as to their ITA experience (if any) growing up in Scotland.
They are great readers, writers and spellers as well.
Even if they don’t speak English very well (ha, ha).
Hi Craig- glad to hear a positive encounter with ITA. Maybe it was implemented differently in the States or the success of the transition from ITA to English might be down to the individual teacher to standard English, who knows.No doubt ITA problems were easily overcome if enough help was available at home. Thanks for taking the time to comment.