A note on phonics and literacy
The difficulties of English spelling are obvious. Counts differ, but there are over forty
'speech-sounds' in 'Standard English', each one of which can be represented by one,
two, or three letters. For example:
- One letter in the first sound in John, jam, gypsy and ciao, and in
the final sound in raj;
- Two letters in the first and last sounds in George and church;
- Three letters in the last sounds in hedge and witch.
As is obvious, there are many ways English speech-sounds can be shown by letters.
On one count, there are
over 250. On another, there are over 500. The bottom line is that there aren't enough
letters to go round.
Not only is there sometimes more than one sound for a letter or more than one letter for
a sound, but X and NG are to be found only at the end of the word,
or the part of a word, known as a syllable. Worse, in TION in station,
it is not clear where the speech-sounds begin and end. Sometimes,
as with the T in picture, the NG in king, the NCE in prince,
there are different pronunciations in different places.
The issue isn't just the way the sounds are written, but the sounds themselves.
The first T in ointment is often said with a sudden closure in the throat -
a 'glottal stop'. In some cases, as in the words,
little and castle, the order of the letters is different from the order of the sounds.
In centring and castling, one of the sounds disappears
in the writing. American spelling has "centering" and a few other improvements,
but this still leaves over 90 percent of the difficulties.
First a child learns to talk, then to draw, and then to read and write.
Humans have been drawing and painting for over forty thousand years.
But we've only been writing with an alphabet for three thousand years.
It is natural to use the more basic skill to support the one that comes later.
Children want to illustrate their writing. And they want to choose the colour.
Pigeon Post lets them do so - and makes it fun.
Other ways of supporting work on phonics are under development - to become available
as free up-grades to registered users for a year from the time of activation.
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