The .i/t/a  provides a way to introduce reading using a writing system for English that is as consistent as the writing systems for Spanish and Italian.  With a complete alphabet [40+ sound-signs rather than 26] and a consistent orthography, children can achieve literacy twice as fast as in the traditional writing system.   Using the i/t/a with an optimal teaching method, it may be possible to master the basic code four times as fast as when starting out with the irregular traditional code.  Flynn [2000] conducted one study where achievement of the i.t.a. group was five times as fast as control groups using the best phonics programs.  

What does a consistent code look like?

A consistent code looks like the pronunciation guide spelling in a dictionary.  With a consistent code, the vowels in words that rhyme are spelled the same.  Homophones become homographs:  riet = rite, right, write, wright. There are hundreds of possible consistent codes.  Three are shown below in a story that contains most of the sounds of spoken English. 

IPA transcription	i/t/a	New Spelling
Can you read any of these without a key?  Word recognition is possible because the sounds assigned to individual letters match the traditional writing system about 80% of the time. Most consonant and short vowel pronunciations are familiar. The traditional writing system, however, assigns more than 1 sound per symbol.
--more transcriptions		..the buetifwl dauter uv a graet majishen waanted mor purlz tu put among hur trezherz. "Luuk thru dhe senter uv dhe moon...

Most writing systems are learned faster than English

Recent cross cultural studies indicate that Italian children achieve a level of literacy at the end of their first year of school that is unmatched by children in English speaking schools until their third year. [Science ref.] [JSSS ref.] ipa-writing.htm

Most Anglophone children take 3 years to reach a literacy standard that children in languages with relatively consistent spellings can reach in one. JSSS30, p. 30 [Seymour, 2002]

It may be  possible to match this performance in English using an i/t/a under optimal conditions.  A consistent code can be learned in 3 weeks or less and mastered or over-learned in 3 months.  Code literacy in the i/t/a means that the child has learned one of the 4 or so different ways available in the traditional writing system to represent a spoken sound. 

As originally taught, the i/t/a, failed to match student performance in Italian and Spanish classrooms.  The purpose of the first experiment in the early 1960's was to determine if just changing the medium [the alphabet] would accelerate literacy.  No attempt was made to change the way reading teachers taught.   Transcribing the basal readers that were used in the U.K.  did reduce the time required to complete the series by half.  It did not, however, seem to have much of a lasting effect.  The gains achieved in the first two years were usually lost when the child had to transition to the more complicated writing system. 

To be proficient in the traditional polyvalent writing system, one has to learn at least 4 additional ways to spell or represent the same sound.  Knowing the basic code or the most dominant spelling pattern is not enough.  This is not much of a problem in reading but having five ways to spell a sound means that half of the words in the dictionary have to be memorized to be spelled with any confidence.  Half of the words have to be memorized as sight words because they contain one or more irregularities (Bell, 2002).

i/t/a phonograms or sound-signs

The i/t/a has 44 phonograms for 36 uncombined phonemes plus a few combinations.  [uu-29ways] [Downings list of 44 phonograms]

The i/t/a retains the ambiguous <c> which can represent s before e, i, and y as in city and <k> in all other positions. The i/t/a does not have a unique symbol for schwa or the the sound in urge. Some spellings in the readers are distorted to match traditional spellings: e.g., 
the word <or> is not sound spelled as aur or oer.  The spelling in the children's reader suggests that it has the same pronunciation as <are>. Truespel gets around the problem by making /or/ a phonogram unrelated to the sounds assigned to the component letters. Truespel does the same to avoid problems with <er> and <air>. 

Pitman's i/t/a or augmented roman was not the first time that schools had experimented with phonemic writing.  There were a series of experiments around 1940 in British schools and an experiment in St. Louis that lasted as long as the superintendent who supported it.  Both reported favorable results such as the following:

(1) That children learn to read fluently matter in a simple phonetic spelling, and to write correctly according to the system, in the course of a few months;

(2) that, as a consistent spelling presents no bar to free expression, the original compositions of children who use a phonetic spelling are markedly superior in matter and manner to the compositions of children of the same age who use the traditional spelling;

(3) that, in reading aloud, the children who use a phonetic spelling acquire a clearer enunciation than children taught to read throughout in the current orthography;

(4) that, contrary to expectation, the transition from the Phonetic to the ordinary spelling is attended by no difficulty, and indeed, that children who pass from the former to the latter, acquire something like proficiency in the ordinary spelling sooner than children do who are familiar with no other;

(5) that the better mental discipline introduced into the reading and writing lesson leads to improved work in other subjects of the School course.

These experiments more than confirm the almost self-evident proposition that it takes longer to learn to read and write in an inconsistent orthography than in a consistent one. 

The benefits of using a consistent orthography go beyond saving time and enhancing efficiency.  There is an educational advantage in substituting a logically sound for an unsound mental discipline at the very beginning of the child's school life. With an inconsistent spelling the appeal must be almost throughout to memory, and to memory alone. The child must memories the visual appearance of every word he meets; must carry in his mind a host of contradictory statements, seemingly irreconcilable, which the philologist can doubtless account for, but of which the explanation is probably outside the School teacher's knowledge, and certainly beyond the pupil's comprehension.

With a simple phonetic orthography the appeal is to observation and reason first of all, and to memory only after the observed fact is understood. Further, it is no small advantage to the method we recommend that it fosters habits of independence and self-reliance in the child; that it sets before him tasks which, with guidance and encouragement, he can largely carry out for himself, and from which he can derive a fruitful pleasure in the discovery of powers that steadily increase as they are applied, and are subject to no unexpected and disappointing set-backs.

What children learn with the i.t.a. is the basic code.  In most cases they learn one of the four or five high frequency spellings of a particular sound.  In English, vowel sounds are spelled one of four ways about 75% of the time.  [uu-29ways]

There are 36 uncombined sounds in spoken [22 consonants, 14 vowels].   If we represent the combinations /tS/ and /dZ/ as Ch and J, then there are 24 vowels as shown below.  

i/t/a© 42 of the 44 phonograms in the initial teaching alphabet.  This chart shows how the traditional alphabet has to be augmented in order to have a symbol for each speech sound or phoneme. The i/t/a has a couple of duplicate sound signs.  The <c> has been assigned to the same cell as /k/.  /z/ has two forms.  The er and /r have been assigned to the same cell. The i/t/a has redundant duplicates to be more like TO.  At the current time there is no digital font available for the i/t/a characters.

The augmented ordered alphabet above is a little different from the one that Pitman provided.  Pitman listed the traditional consonants first followed by the vowel letters which Pitman assigned to the short vowels.  To the 24 traditional looking letters, Pitman added 20 slightly modified ones to complete his Augmented Roman.  Five long vowels were all marked with an embedded e:  ae, ee, ie, oe, ue.  oo aa ur and the diphthongs oi and ou are also long vowels but not identified as so.  ur is not a listed phonogram altho the syllabic /r is included.

Most of the added complexity is with the vowels, 17 instead of 5. The consonants include five digrafic sound signs: ch sh zh th dh Two more than found in the traditional alphabet.  ALC-soundspel alphabet

Is this a throw-away code?

The critics of the i.t.a. have called it "a waste of time."  They ask, "Why learn a system that is discarded after the second grade?"  The critics believe that teaching two codes [the bicodal approach] is a detour ...  not a short cut. It takes time away from the important task of teaching traditional spelling.

The answer is that over 70% of what is learned using an i.t.a. is not discarded.  While the regularity of the i.t.a. is compromised and degraded with the transition to the traditional writing system, most of the sound-symbol correspondences remain intact.  Examples of i.t.a. spellings can still be found:  [pie] continues to be spelled <pie>. The difference is that in tradspel, the vowel in 'pie' can now be spelled 20 other ways [pie, pi, pai, py, pi-e, pigh, ...]. After the transition to tradspel, i.t.a. trained students have to learn the additional orthographic options just like everyone else.  

To transition to TO, children have to learn that the [ie] spelling is reserved only for a select group of words. Other words can be spelled in a dozen of different ways. pie-tie, my-sky, buy-guy, isle, aisle-Saigon, . . .  [see polyvalence.htm] for a longer list.]

[see the bicodal approach for the complete argument] 

Educational Lunacy?   a cleer cæs ov edjoocæshinal loonacee?  i/t/a transcription

One reporter called the i.t.a. a "cleer case of educashunal lunacie". The reporter based her conclusion on the number of people who blame the i.t.a. for their inability to spell English words.   Scientific studies failed to find such a connection [Downing, 1973].  Generally those who learned with the i.t.a. became better spellers than those who learned to read and write via a more traditional method but, when taught by the basal reader method, the advantage was not significant .  Poor spelling in English is quite common and cannot yet be associated with a particular teaching medium or method .  [spell-test]

The i.t.a. did fail to teach many students how to spell.  However, more students failed to learn how to spell using traditional approaches.  You probably can't teach unsystematic spelling systematically. You can, however, do a better job if you at least mention the 4 or 5 most probable ways that particular sounds are spelled in English.  The i.t.a. introduced just one.  

A veteran remedial reading teacher noted that not one of her students in 14 years were taught digraphic vowels with the possible exception of [ee].  The teachers of her remedial students said they taught phonics but it turned out that they were unsure about how to interpret two letter vowels so they skipped them.   

The flaw in the implementation of the i.t.a. was its emphasis on learning sight words and the lack of emphasis on writing and spelling. The sight word emphasis does not make sense in a provisional code.  You do not want students to over-learn word shapes that will be discarded after the transition, you want them to over-learn the sound-symbol correspondences.

The i.t.a. program may not have miscalculated how long it takes to master the basic 44 symbol code when it is taught indirectly.  After 2 years with transcribed readers, as much as 40% of the i.t.a. students failed to over-learn the code.  That is, they could not sound-spell many words that were not included in the restricted vocabulary of the basal readers. 

 Laubach said that he could teach anyone to read any highly phonemic written language in three months [2 hours per day].  He proved his point in nearly 300 different languages.  Pitman transcribed a traditional British basal reader and used it for 24 months instead of 3 months.  With that much visual exposure, the spellings "briet liet in the skie" started looking "riet".  However, they did not necessarily learn that <ie> was one of the most common ways to represent the sound /aI/.   They probably could not spell CRISIS and other similar words outside of their sight vocabulary in i.t.a. notation.

A consistent code can be mastered by over 98% of the students in less than 3 months with the appropriate teaching methods.  Once code literacy has been achieved, there is not point in staying with it if the goal is to learn a more complex polyvalent code.  Quicker weaning also prevents learning sound-spellings as word signs.  

i/t/a does not postpone vocabulary, only the introduction of irregularity

SUMMARY :Children who are fortunate enough to speak a language that has a transparent orthography learn to read and write in that language much faster than children who have to contend with an opaque orthography. In addition to attaining specific levels of literacy in less than half the time, children learning with a consistent writing system do not exhibit the same symptoms of dyslexia .  Children with a graphic processing disabilities can usually cope with simpler more consistent codes.

Many approaches to reading attempt to postpone the introduction of inconsistent spelling and irregular words. Since over 50% of the words in English are not spelled consistently, this often results in a very reduced vocabulary.  According to Wijk, some WL [whole language] classes introduce fewer than 250 new words in 2 years.  With i.t.a., children have immediate access to the over 3,000 words that are already in their vocabulary at age 6.  i.t.a. does not postpone vocabulary, it postpones exposure to inconsistent spelling. In addition, an i.t.a. teaches phonemic awareness and eliminates the need for children to invent spellings: A practice advocated in many non-phonic approaches. 

In 1975, the i.t.a. was used in 10% of the primary schools in the U.K. [Hass, 1999] and 30 publishers were printing i.t.a. materials [Pitman, 1967]. Today, less than 300 schools use this particular initial teaching medium.  According to Hass, the drop in popularity has nothing to do with the i.t.a.'s effectiveness.  However, the general public believes that educator's tried to mess with spelling and failed.  

One can argue that the 26 letters are not "the alphabet". The 26 letters  should probably be called an ordered character set. The order comes from a time when the alphabet doubled as a number system.  The real alphabet is the correspondence table used to encode speech [see charts above]. The alphabet is the complete set of sound-signs corresponding to the 40 or so basic speech sounds or phonemes. An ideal alphabet would have a symbol for every significant sound in the language. With only 23 non-redundant letters [c q x are not needed: c=k/s, q=kw, x=ks] for 40 or so sounds, it is clear that some of the letters are going to have to do double duty. When two letters stand for a new sound-sign [eg, Sh, Ch] they are called digraphs.

ALPHABET: A type of writing system in which a set of symbols [letters] represents the important sounds [phonemes] of a language.

DICTIONARY OF LANGUAGE & LANGUAGES

To learn to read and write in an i.t.a., you need to learn only 40 phonograms [Pitman's i.t.a. had 44.  It included combinations such as wh and the redundant c]. To learn to read and write in tradspel [or the traditional English orthography] you need to eventually learn over 400 symbol sound relationships or memorize the dictionary. [According to Wijk, there are only 104 symbols in the English writing system but they overlap and usually represent more than one sound.  Dewey counted 230 symbols with an average of two sounds each.]. An i.t.a. can be learned twice as fast because there is only about a tenth as much to learn: 40 symbol-sound correspondences instead of 461.

According to Downing [1990], the child should learn to read in his or her native language and with a consistent phonemic writing system first. If the the first language is Spanish, there is not need to invent a phonemic alphabet and writing system, Spain adopted one [based on Nebrija's 1490 Castilian sound-symbol correspondences & grammar] in 1713 and have been using it ever since with minor reforms every 50 years or so.

A consistent writing system [with 41 paired associates] can be learned in less than 40 hours.  Laubach [1970] said that the time required for an illiterate to over-learn the code in a highly phonemic writing system was three months or less than 180 hours. 

i/t/a

© 2000 Beta    www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett

A Complete Alphabet for Written English Thu Cumpleet Alfàbet - 44 foenàgramz A key to the 40 sound signs: 17 vowels - 23 consonants An alphabet is a grapheme-phoneme correspondence table: A collection of sound signs linking visible marks to speech sounds  A U G M E N T E D   R O M  A N   ( i. t. a. ) a à   ask ae ape au auto aa ar art b  bib ch  chat d  duk e elf ee eel er /r herder f  fief g  gig h  hot i it ie pie j chaenj k/c caek l  lull m mum n /ng nun ring o top oe toe oi toil ou tout or tore p  pop r roe/r s/c  saus sh  ship t  taut th`th *thy u up oo hook oo hoop ue use v verve w wh  when y  yard z 5 zees 3 zh azure Cells with vowels are color coded yellow or orange.  Cells with consonants are blue.  Cells with semi-vowels and syllabics are green. 44 i/t/a phonograms have been assigned to 40 cells in this chart. 4 cells have 2 ita phonograms:  c is split between k and s. i/t/a distinguishes the voiced and unvoiced th [as is thy thigh] and w [wail-whale].  a reversed z [not shown] is used the end of words such as dogz and boyz. This is called a  morphemic regularity - plurals are spelled with an <s> even if the sound is /z/.  This is not phonemic but easy enough to remember. The i/t/a alphabet has 5 new consonant and 12 new vowel symbols.    Any word in the English language can be spelled with 40 phonograms. i/t/a alphabet graphic  -  ALC-soundspel alphabet

The complete alphabet has twice as many phonograms as the ordered 26 letter character set that we were taught in the 1st grade.  A minimum alphabet would have 36 phonograms but the additional of 4 combinations [ch, j, ie, & or] are useful.  The redundant c is retained but redundant q and x are dropped.  As can be seen in the chart on the left, most of the added complexity in the complete alphabet is with the vowels: instead of 5  there are 17. The consonants include five digrafic sound signs: ch sh zh th dh 2 are new. This alphabet is almost the same as the New Spelling alphabet. Pitman's augmented alphabet had two more phonograms, ng and wh and used different digraphs for the long & short u sounds. [more]

  

  i.t.a.  Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence Table - 17  Vowels

7 short voulz	7 laung voulz	combiend
a - at, ax, cat, ash	a-aa - spa   alms	ar aar - are, far, star	ar - paragraf, car[e]
e - edge, elephant, elbow	ae - sundae, aep [ape]	er - hair, stare, care	/r - uth/r
i -  it, itch, index, pin	ee* - eel, tree, street	or - for, shor [shore]	eer/ir - ear, fear
o - olive pot odd	ie -  pie, siet [sight]	ie -  pie, siet [sight]	ier- ire, fire
au - auto, cost, long	oe - toe, coet [coat]	oi - oil, boi [boy]	oor/wr- toor, jwry, poor
u* - up, ugoe [ago]	oo - blue, yue [you]	ue - ues [use] argue	uer - puer [pure]
w - hook, cood [could]	/r* - her, berd [bird]	ou - out,  our our	ur - urjent [urgent]

*u and er can be stressed (hurt [hert]) or unstressed as in other [uther] and sofa [soefu]
"Where were you going wear it?" = <Wher w/r ue [yoo] goeing too wer it?> werr wer iu going tu werr it
I think the spelling of murder is mixed up as in Unifon - m/rd/r or mcrdcr intead of murd*r.
"shee hurd hur hurderz p*rturbd murd*r urj the burthmuther too disturb the hurd."
 

Unlike traditional English spelling, i.t.a. spelling can be taught in two weeks and mastered in three months.  This is the length of time that it takes a Laubach literacy teacher to teach reading and writing in over 200 languages with a more or less phonemic writing system.  There are 44 i.t.a. characters for the 36 pure sounds, 4 blends,  found in English speech. This quickly enables children to make full use of their existing vocabulary in their writing. Young children like consistency and the confidence that their spelling is correct. With a consistent orthography, it is relatively easy to spell any word you can correctly pronounce and pronounce any word that you see spelled. 

Most countries have a transparent alphabetical writing system which enables them to get a year or two head start on English speaking school children. i.t.a. levels the playing field during the first three months.   The original i.t.a. program used 5 transcribed basal readers for two years.  This tended to make the transition more difficult than similar  programs that transitioned after three months.  The point of the i.t.a. approach is to learn the basic or most common way of representing English speech sounds.  This takes only 3 months in a writing to read program.  When the phonemic spellings are used longer than three months, they tend to become memorized as sight words.  This makes it more difficult to adjust to the traditional irregular spellings.  Reading by sound is not as fast as reading by logograms or sight words. It is a necessary skill in order to sound out and identify new words that one encounters.  

Eventually, the children have to learn to cope with the inconsistencies of English spelling. i.t.a. pushes back this day of reckoning until the child is more confident and better able to cope with the ambiguity.  
 

References <click here for the extended bibliography

• Downing, John. (1967) Evaluating the Initial Teaching Alphabet, London, Cassell.
   
• Downing. (1962) To bee or not to be: The Augmented Roman Alphabet, London, Cassell
   
• Flynn, Jane, (2002) The Use of i.t.a. for Remediation of Dyslexia. Research
   
• fonetic-keyboard.htm l
   
• Johnson, Rachel (2001) - A cleer case of educational lunacie, Telegraph Weekend, 2.6.2001
  (may still be available on the Web)
   
• Pitman, James and John St.John. (1965) Alphabets and Reading, Pitman, London
   
• Upward, Chris (2001) - John Downing's  i/t/a  Evaluation, JSSS 2000/2
   
• Wijk, Axel. 1970 Regularized English
   

© 2000 BETA      www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett

 Links and References

BBC 40 Anniversary of i.t.a. broadcast [transcription]
www.itafoundation.org/bensbook.htm
i.t.a. for the remediation of dyslexia - Flynn 2000
back to the index page
alc fonetic [new spelling updated] see also Zachrissen's Anglic]
truespel - truespel is 90% new spelling + a stress marker [check it out]
see also spelreit for a detailed problem-solution explanation
RITEspelling is a less than phonemic proposal that resembles the traditional orthography
Spanish spanglish
Quick Refrence  [Google Search for Unifon.org]
Resources in Phonetics and Phonemics
IPA transcriber for Word  [Well's Sampa]
Peter Ladefoged's contrasting sets of General American English vowels and BBC vowels

 The page you are viewing is the latest but there are related pages: 

SAUNDSPEL phonology Forum - file section on the i/t/a
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/saundspel/files/ITA/
The i/t/a pages used to be at www.unifon.org

ITA-eval  A brief introduction to the initial teaching alphabet - a medium for teaching a writing
way to reading ita in a nutshell the initial teaching alphabet starting ...
www.unifon.org/ita-eval.html - 55k - Cached - Similar pages

Spelling Society - use search utility to find articles on the i/t/a  "i.t.a."

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... A brief introduction to the initial teaching alphabet - a medium for teaching
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www.unifon.org/ita1.html - 39k - Cached 

ITA Foundation: The Initial Teaching Alphabet is a 44 sound-symbol phonemic 
alphabet that simplifies the beginning stages of learning to read and write in English at ...
There are 44 symbols on the chart [see above] but only 42 sounds.
www.itafoundation.org/ - 13k - Cached - Similar pages

Ozyideas -  home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/         ENgliS