Teaching: TEACHING

the inifhial teeching alfabet too bee, or not too bee: that is the kwestion.

Far from being the work of drunken printers, this is Britain’s Initial Teaching Alphabet −a nue wae too lern too reed and riet that Education Minister Sir Edward Boyle last month pronounced “a remarkable success.” Only about half of Britain’s seven-year-olds now read satisfactorily; one-quarter of its 15-year-olds are semiliterate. But in careful tests of teaching reading with the new alphabet, 20 British schools have cut the usual failure rate by 80%, put most beginners more than a year ahead of their contemporaries. This year 233 schools are following suit. Now ready to back the three-year experiment with government money, Minister Boyle says that “thousands of schools are expected to change over.”

Developed by Sir James Pitman, a Conservative M.P. and grandson of shorthand’s Sir Isaac, the Initial Teaching Alphabet is no Shavian attempt to supersede the regular alphabet. Strictly a teaching tool, it aims to overcome the disparity between the sounds that English-speaking tots know in their heads and the symbols they see on the page. In essence, the child confronts a decoding problem. Unhappily, the code is crazy. The 40-odd phonemes (distinct sound units) of English are spelled in 2,000 different ways, and the letters vary bafflingly in their capital, lower case, printed and handwritten forms.

One Sound, One Symbol. I.T.A. proponents believe that all this sabotages conventional ways of teaching reading. The “look-say” method tries to link the visual pattern of a word with its meaning, only to run up against confusing variations of form (all three letters of “AND” look different from those of “and,” for example). Also difficult is trying to apply the phonic method, which teaches children to single out letters and their phonemic values so that they can read and spell analytically. In the 26-letter alphabet, one letter often represents different sounds in differing words—for example, the o in gone, one, go, do, women. One sound may also be spelled in different ways for example, the sound common to / and eye has 22 different spellings in words from aisle to buy to style.

I.T.A. erases inconsistencies by linking specific sounds to specific symbols. The all-lower-case (to avoid capital confusion) alphabet has 44 characters −24 of the 26 existing Roman letters (no q and x), plus 20 new ones that are mostly typographically linked digraphs, such as —?????. Each of the 44 I.T.A. symbols represents only one sound, and children tackle I.T.A.-spelled words in full confidence that what they see in print is what they say in sound. As for the actual teaching method, teachers may use either phonics or look-say or a blend of both. “I.T.A. is not a new method of teaching,” explains Inventor Pitman, “but it is a new medium of teaching.”

Automatic Transference.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the system spurs children to gobble up I.T.A. books at a phenomenal rate. “Within a month my children refused to go out to play,” says an awed teacher in Oldham, where one five-year-old read more than 200 books in his first year. In the U.S., where about 3,000 children are using the method, Lehigh University has 600 first-graders reading at up to third-grade level. Significantly, the British also find that I.T.A. works seeming miracles with backward children. One group of slow seven-year-olds, who had been unable to read more than three words, soared to normal reading levels after only eight weeks of I.T.A. training.

But how can kids be weaned from the I.T.A. alphabet to the one everybody else uses? Nothing to it, says the University of London’s John Downing, the top I.T.A. researcher. “Automatic transference” seems to occur because I.T.A. children are meanwhile seeing regular spelling on everything from street signs to newspapers. This makes them all the prouder to switch to “grownup writing,” says Downing. Average children do it in minutes after laying aside their I.T.A. books. Those “hopeless” seven-year-olds did it in two hours.