English Reading Instruction Upgrade– The Phonograms Are the Problem
By Tom Zurinskas
It’s time to cast off our tired old phonograms. They’ve been unfriendly to English keyboards too long, over 136 years now. Instead, we need to use truespel phonetics phonograms that are keyboard friendly and based on English, the lingua franca of the world. The science of reading for children demands it and the lack of ESL pronunciation guidance demands it as well. Both problems can be fixed with truespel phonetics.
The spelling of phonograms is the problem. So, what is a phonogram? Phonograms are the written speech sounds for language. Thus, there are two ways to spell a language, traditionally and phonetically using phonograms.
The term “phonogram,” according to google search, was coined in 1845 as, "a written symbol or graphic character representing the sound of the human voice," from phono- "sound, voice" + -gram "a writing or recording”. Words are broken up into strings of sounds (phonemes) and these phonemes are written as phonograms in a phonetic system.
For US English there are 40 sounds and thus 40 phonograms make up the US English “phonabet” (my term). Different phonetic systems use different phonograms. Examples are the listings of sounds in various dictionary pronunciation guides. The Voice of America (VOA) has its own English based standard. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) of 1886 is so vastly different from English that it is not used in USA for teaching reading. Unfortunately, there is no standard English based set of phonograms for teaching reading.
Note that an alphabetic spelling means that letters stand for sounds. If letters do so consistently, they can serve as phonograms. But English has many ways of spelling sounds. These are called “graphemes,” and there are hundreds of ways to spell English sounds. My data on graphemes shows that consonants are spelled by the most frequent grapheme 90% of the time in media print, while vowels are spelled by their most frequent grapheme only 50% of the time.
The study of graphemes is called phonics. Truespel phonetics links to phonetics. To see the linkage, teachers and learners can check out the truespel studies and free tutorials and converter at truespel.com . These studies count 15.4M words in print media and back up the fact that truespel phonograms are based on most popular graphemes where possible.
The big takeaway is this.
- English has become the lingua francs of the world. It is the future basis for phonogram spelling
- It is obvious that using special symbols as phonograms needs to be replaced by English based ones using regular keyboard letters.
- Truespel provides a scientifically determined list of phonograms to spell the sounds of US English.
- Good phonograms are needed for teaching "the science of reading" instruction according to the National Reading Panel of 2000.
- With keyboard friendly phonograms kids can learn to read and write at the same time, as was proven by IBM’s “Writing to Read” program and others ( http://justpaste.it/trueproof ).
- Adult ESL teachers need an easy-to-use phonogram list for adequate pronunciation training.
Truespel can be learned online in hours by adult ESL’s. Children can be taught truespel in a few weeks by progressive course instruction. Truespel is easy to remember and lasts a lifetime. We need to throw off our faulty reading instruction for one based on better phonograms. I appeal to school boards to upgrade reading instruction to the “science of reading” phonetic format with truespel https://justpaste.it/FSAappeal .