ITA: Initial Teaching Alphabet
I wrote a little while back about my opposition to simplifying the spelling of English, but today one of my colleagues mentioned that he remembered a simplified spelling system that was brought in at his school for a year or so. This must have been back in the late 60s.
The Initial Teaching Alphabet, or ITA, relied on more than 40 characters (our alphabet plus a number of other characters to represent different vowel combinations and sounds such as the 'ng' of 'ring') to spell words in a more consistent, phonetic way. My colleague recalls entire books being written in ITA.
The idea was that children would initially learn to read in ITA, then move over to conventional English spelling. A number of schools brought ITA in, but it was never considered a resounding success. Many people who used ITA seem to blame it for their poor spelling in later life.
Incidentally, all ITA text was written in lower case, so I suppose it should really be called ita.
My colleague later found a BBC article about ITA that is of interest if you want to find out more. Or you can also see the full ITA alphabet online.
I'd be interested to hear from any Engine Room readers that have memories of ITA. Bonus points for anyone who writes in using the ITA alphabet!
7 comments:
I've never heard of this, and I can't help but wonder what kind of educational genius thought it would be a good idea to teach kids to spell things incorrectly before teaching them how to do it right. I mean, honestly...
He's right JD, what's wrong with just getting it right in the first place?!
I was also taught ITA at infant school. I remember being very cross when the teacher told me to write Jane as Jaen. As I remember, the a and e were linked together to form one letter making that 'a' sound, then at a later date you'd be told to move the 'e' to the end of the word. It seems very complicated but when we moved to junior school there were only three people in our class who had problems reading, and they'd all come from a different junior school. It's meant to help the slower readers and not hinder the quicker ones. It worked for my class anyway!
I'm 47 and was raised in a suburb of Chicago and learned to read using ITA (or as you note, ita). Consequently, I'm a very fast reader but a lousy speller (whether this is due to ita I don't know, but I have to blame something and ita is as good a culprit as anythng). My most vivid memory of it is that I was forced to spell my name - then it was Danny; now it's a more manly Dan - using ita-centric characters. I can't do it here given the limited typography, but it was sort of (lowercase) "dancc" with those last two letters having a "strikethrough" connecting them. I think I was in an experimetal class (this would have been about 1966/67) because it was abandoned by my school district rather quickly.
I heard that a headmaster in a school near us got the sack for using some weird way of teaching kids how to spell, long after everyone else had decided it was stupid. That was in the 80s, and kids who went to that school blamed their poor spelling on it. I guess this was ITA.
Some children have no problem learning to read the standard alphabet. They don't need ITA.
For those who would have a hard time learning to read a standard alphabet, how are they expected to have an easier time with learning to read TWICE? How are they expected to transition?
I am SO grateful to my mother for having taught me to read in kindergarten, before I was subjected to ITA in first grade. Few of my classmates were so lucky, and became terrible spellers when they transitioned. For me, it was merely a huge waste of time and effort to learn something completely useless, and sometimes rather frustrating as I tried to decipher foreign-looking misspelled words. (Probably the same feeling anyone reading this article who did not grow up with ITA experienced with the example at top, except imagine you're six and just learned to read.)
Interesting theory, but in practice it just doesn't work.
Give children a little more credit for being able to learn to read the right way in the first place, and be patient with individual learning differences (one of the smartest young women I know didn't learn to read until she was almost 8). Be supportive and encouraging rather than critical, and make it fun. And never, never force them to learn garbage like this first so they have to un-learn and re-learn to be able to communicate with the rest of the world.
Who the hell had the right to use us as guinea pigs! How dare they teach us an alphabet that would only be used in one particular classroom setting. How dare they take young ESL students and totally disrupt the rest of their school career. In my own life it caused confusion, disappointment and ultimately a sense of failure. Did anyone think that the fundamentals of the English language would ultimately have to be taught to these children? Instead, they ruthlessly threw us into the regular English curriculum without any formal training. How was this suppose to help us read or for that matter further our future academic endeavors. When I look back to my youth and think of the hardship it caused in my life I become overcome with anger and regrets. The anger comes from the pain this program inflicted on me; the regret is the mourning of a future and career I could have had. I will never understand how this program was ever accepted by our schools. Shame on them all!
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