Upgrade Reading Instruction to Simplified Truespel Phonetics for K-1 and ESL

by Tom Zurinskas, creator of truespel

Sometimes it's hard to change teaching materials. For instance, a big change for some k-1 teachers is from whole word to phonics. It's being done in UK now http://bit.ly/2p1lDSS for phonics. I hold that better than phonics is the use of phonetics that's based on phonics - with truespel phonetics that simplifies and integrates this entire area.
Note that most of the 40 sounds of US English are spelled consistently with just a few rules. For instance the 23 consonant sounds have 21 very common spellings (~b, ~ch, ~d, ~f, ~g(hard), ~h, ~j, ~k,~ ~l, ~m, ~n, ~p, ~r, ~s, ~sh, ~t, ~th (voiced as in "the"), ~v, ~w, ~y, ~z. (missing are "~zh" as in "vision" and "~thh" for "voiceless th" as in "thin".
My data show that consonant sounds are spelled 90% of the time in their most popular form in typical text. But vowels are spelled in their most popular form only 50% of the time. See vowel data for the 17 US English vowels at http://justpaste.it/17vowels .
Thus, phonetics has only 40 sounds-spellings to learn to spell any word in US English (plus a glottal stop and stress rule), and because truespel phonetics links to phonics it is much easier than explaining the myriad phonic forms.
Currently the US English language is transcribed into truespel with with free tutorials and a free two-way converter at http://truespel.com . Also at that site, there is much more phoneme usage data for teachers as well.  See truespel.com resources tab http://www.truespel.com/resources/
Sometimes it takes new material to make the needed progress breakthrough for k-1 US English reading and ESL.   And simpler is better for kids as well as adults.