Fulfilling the "Science of Reading" in Education with Truespel Phonetics 
By Thomas E Zurinskas, Creator of Truespel Phonetics
The Most Important Thing in All of Education – Teaching Reading
What's the most important thing to teach in all of education? The answer is reading. Nearly 90% of kids that drop out of high school struggled with reading in 3rd grade according to Gov. of Florida, Jan 2022. Unfortunately, 3rd grade US reading scores show a "failure" rate of over 20%, meaning these children can't read and need remediation. Also, up to 80% are not proficient in reading http://bit.ly/2xNWRbm . This is HORRIBLE and dangerous. Kids that fail reading are 4 times more likely to drop out of high school and are crime prone after school costing social turmoil and distress. But there is a better way to teach reading.
The New and Old Approach - Simplified Phonetics
The "major issue of education" is the need for drastic improvement for teaching reading. Actually, the answer is clear, but educators are not taught it and given no means to do it. The National Reading Panel laid it out. The answer is "phonemic awareness". Yet there is no good phonetic system available to teach it, because present phonetics uses special symbols for phonograms that are not keyboard nor English friendly and actually THWART teaching pronunciation to kids or everybody else. This also affects ESL teaching in that ESL teachers are hesitant to teach pronunciation because they are uncomfortable with the phonograms of phonetics http://bit.ly/2k8s48A . Thus, someone needs to step forward and solve this, but linguists are linked to their 1886 IPA phonograms and are not interested in changing.
A Simple Phonetic Notations is Needed
The worst problem with English is its spelling, https://justpaste.it/spellingenglish . It is correlated to dyslexia. But there are two ways to spell a word, traditionally and phonetically. To provide "phonemic awareness" to our burgeoning readers we need a simple phonics-based system to spell our phonemes, and it's not there now. If you ask any reading teacher to spell "ah" "uh" and "awe" phonetically in phonograms, they can't do it. So teachers cannot teach phonemic awareness. The problem is the phonograms.
After vetting the phonograms of truespel, I took a couple years to translate the spoken words of the “talking” American Heritage dictionary into truespel. This created a current and accurate database that is the basis of the truespel converter at truespel.com , a free site with free tutorials online that teachers and ESL adepts can learn in hours using tutorials at http;//justpaste.it/course2 and YouTube videos. Truespel phonograms are easy to learn and remember because the link to most typical spelling where possible.
Phonetics Links to Phonics for Teaching Reading
The bottom line is: Can truespel phonetics be used to teach US English reading in k-1? History shows that it can and should be so used. This follows a trend in England using synthetic phonics to teach k-1 reading and it has success, especially helping boys http://bit.ly/1sri7tr . But phonics is more complicated than phonetics because it shows as many as 10 ways to spell each sound where phonetics shows only one phonogram. Thus, phonetics is a true alphabetic system where letters stand for sounds. Children in a few weeks with practice can be taught to write and read the sounds they hear with a typeable alphabetic phonetic system such as truespel. And writing really helps learning.
Phonetics First Method Works Well
Is there proof that a phonetics-first teaching method in k-1 really works? Yes, and the best proof is IBM’s “Writing to Read” phonetic system set in the 1980’s using PC Jr. computers. These early PC’s enabled typing a phonetic system with one symbol per sound. The K-1 students learned to write as they learned to read. It worked very well as judged by Princeton’s ETS evaluation http://bit.ly/17frEJc , and had no residual effect on regular spelling. The system was discontinued after the death of its creator, but 100,000 kids used it. See http://justpaste.it/trueproof . “Writing to Read” was way ahead of its time prior to the internet and passed popularity when its founder died. But it showed the way, overwhelmingly approved by teachers in the ETS evaluation.
Benefits of Truespel
- IBM’s Writing to Read (W2R) was pricey, proprietary and developed prior to the internet, while truespel is free on the internet for everyone and will elicit better benefits than W2R with today’s kids http://bit.ly/17frEJc
- The academic standard IPA phonograms are not used for school children.
- Truespel is great for ESL pronunciation training http://justpaste.it/k-3andell
- Truespel uses no special characters so it’s easy to type and looks a lot like regular spelling. In fact, a tilde (~) is used to differentiate truespel, the only phonetic system with a designator
- Truespel is spreadsheet compatible allowing unique and original data studies of phoneme prevalence in text. See many such studies at https://bit.ly/2D7V3CH All English teachers should know these data.
K-3 Readers Struggle after Covid 19
“By some estimates, nearly 66 percent of third graders in Tennessee are not meeting English language standards and would be flagged for automatic retention under the new law. Other states have similarly staggering figures.” From Politico reporting: https://politi.co/3vr0wdl
In Florida 25% of 3rd graders can't read in 2022mand it's worse for ESL's.. https://justpaste.it/FSA3rdreading2022
Proposal to Develop Truespel Phonetics
The quest is to establish truespel as a phonetic system to:
- Teach children phonemic awareness in a phonetics-first writing and reading approach. This can be done in a matter of months in k-1 and last a lifetime. Writing helps learning to a great extent.
- Populate truespel phoneme frequency analyses to teachers for knowledge of the relationships of phoneme spelling and pronunciation.
- Use truespel to teach ESL pronunciation of US English because such teaching is thwarted by complex phonograms like the IPA. https://justpaste.it/phonograms
- Use truespel as a speech assessment tool.
- Adopt truespel instead of VOA official phonetics https://justpaste.it/voaspel . Note, the VOA Beginner’s Dictionary is deficient in lacking a phonetic guide, but is now redone with a truespel guide (truespel book 3).
- Because English is the lingua franca of the world, develop truespel phonetics as an intermediary phonetic spelling for all languages.
Truespel has a 37-year history and thousands of international followers. It is obvious that the world needs a simple English-compatible notation. Truespel accomplishes this. It needs independent development and testing to realize its potential. I offer it and my services for free for this purpose. Truespel is free.