It's this right here that is the real sticking point. I'm a primary school teacher (prek, 4-5 yo, have been in the field over a decade) and it's often difficult enough for children to learn the...
Any advantage of the I.T.A. in making it easier for children to learn to read English was often offset by some children not being able to effectively transfer their I.T.A.-reading skills to reading standard English orthography, and/or being generally confused by having to deal with two alphabets in their early years of reading.
It's this right here that is the real sticking point. I'm a primary school teacher (prek, 4-5 yo, have been in the field over a decade) and it's often difficult enough for children to learn the alphabet, let alone 2 separate sets. This is ignoring the fact that our standard alphabet doesn't have 26 letters, it has 42+, depending on how generous you want to be in making distinctions between upper and lower case letters.
Let's first understand how language works. There are phonemes, which are distinct sounds a language has. There's also graphemes, which are the ways those phonemes are written. Phonemes are constructed to form words (semantics) which is then assembled with syntax into sentences and paragraphs. Syntax derives from grammar, which is the entire construction of language as a whole. Graphemes fit in when language gets written, and that is what this teaching alphabet is trying to do - reduce the amount of graphemes in the English language.
English has 44 phonemes and 250 graphemes. In comparison, Spanish has 22 phonemes and 28 graphemes. Should should illustrate how complex English language can be.
When teaching literacy to children, we start first with language skills and emergent reading skills. Language comes through interaction and observation. Emergent reading skills (and by extension, literacy skills) come through interaction as well, but through the written or spoken word - reading stories, environmental print, songs, rhymes, and direct instruction.
Children exposed to more words and reading/writing experiences tend to develop literacy skills more quickly than peers who do not. There is also a strong link between verbal communication skills and literacy skills at an early age - that is, children who develop language skills early will often also develop reading skills early.
I want to point out that I keep mentioning "skills" - this is important, because each phoneme, grapheme, and letter is it's own individual skill which then gets connected to other skills to form literary ability. Now we get to why I laid all this out...
This teaching alphabet, while interesting, is terrible for learning to read. It requires skills which will be discarded. It means children will learn to make connections that will later need to be severed. This will confuse and stress children, since they will be asked to take the understanding they have come to and wholly discard it.
It's this right here that is the real sticking point. I'm a primary school teacher (prek, 4-5 yo, have been in the field over a decade) and it's often difficult enough for children to learn the alphabet, let alone 2 separate sets. This is ignoring the fact that our standard alphabet doesn't have 26 letters, it has 42+, depending on how generous you want to be in making distinctions between upper and lower case letters.
Let's first understand how language works. There are phonemes, which are distinct sounds a language has. There's also graphemes, which are the ways those phonemes are written. Phonemes are constructed to form words (semantics) which is then assembled with syntax into sentences and paragraphs. Syntax derives from grammar, which is the entire construction of language as a whole. Graphemes fit in when language gets written, and that is what this teaching alphabet is trying to do - reduce the amount of graphemes in the English language.
English has 44 phonemes and 250 graphemes. In comparison, Spanish has 22 phonemes and 28 graphemes. Should should illustrate how complex English language can be.
When teaching literacy to children, we start first with language skills and emergent reading skills. Language comes through interaction and observation. Emergent reading skills (and by extension, literacy skills) come through interaction as well, but through the written or spoken word - reading stories, environmental print, songs, rhymes, and direct instruction.
Children exposed to more words and reading/writing experiences tend to develop literacy skills more quickly than peers who do not. There is also a strong link between verbal communication skills and literacy skills at an early age - that is, children who develop language skills early will often also develop reading skills early.
I want to point out that I keep mentioning "skills" - this is important, because each phoneme, grapheme, and letter is it's own individual skill which then gets connected to other skills to form literary ability. Now we get to why I laid all this out...
This teaching alphabet, while interesting, is terrible for learning to read. It requires skills which will be discarded. It means children will learn to make connections that will later need to be severed. This will confuse and stress children, since they will be asked to take the understanding they have come to and wholly discard it.
It's a neat idea, but utterly pointless.