............ Conventional Spelling
  Spelling as currently taught in the public schools

"Reading is the most important academic skill and the foundation
or all academic learning. If our children cannot read, they are on
the road to academic failure. Teaching children to read must be
our highest priority."
             --California Task Force on Reading, Every Child a Reader

The U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services asked the National Academy of
Sciences to establish a committee to examine the prevention of
reading difficulties. Their findings indicate that effective reading
instruction is built on the following foundation: students must
understand the alphabetic principle, read sight words, and be
proficient in reading words by matching speech sounds to parts of
words. Mastering these essential reading concepts through direct
instruction enables students to achieve fluency and comprehension.

  1. Coding Chart - vowels
  2. Coding Chart 3?
  3. Unigraph Chart

  4.  
Since the 17th Century, Spelling has been taught more or less the same way.  The presumption is that English has 10 vowels, 5 short and 5 long. 


The 17th Century instruction did not quite match the earlier Saxon alphabet.  Until 1400, A was the Latin or Italian A.  What we call the sound in ax was represented with ae [the ash].   The long A was ei as in THEY not ai as in DAY and PAIL, although the two are close.  

Unifon identifies a few more English vowels [16 vowels instead of 10].
The four additions are car/all, her/urn,  hook, out, oil, and hoop.
In the chart, the vowels are listed in AEIOU or alphabetical order with the 
short vowel folowed by the long vowel and other related vowel sounds. 
APT-APE-ALL   ILL-EEL-URN   PICK-PIKE   ON-OWN-WOOD-WOW-OIL
UP-HOOP-SOUP

xl Dc apt Aps wil fEl hcrt if DA xr not on DAr On Tin tin bIks. [unifon]
aol tha aept eyps wil fil hrrt iff they aar not on theyr own thin tin baiks. [spangish]

AKSES is a candidate for lower case Unifon.
The bar is not integrated into the lower case letter as in the Unifon upper case.
Keyboard AKSES would be quite similar the Unifon with the upper case used to access the letters with the overbars.

Dis iz ekzampul tekst az it wCd upEr in EDcr hand-printcd or tIpset format.
What is EAR?  why not either Er or ir?  No schwa?  her=? hur.
R combinations ier, aar, ear, air, our? or? awr? errors=airorz.


SS-innstitut for mvltisensory edyucaeshan
ai dont waant tu go aol tha wey to [key] for twu rizonz: it riqairz a vaul cheynj & tha cheynj conflicts with the traditional spelling of kiy.
Saxon iz a tranzitory or initishal alfabet - but wan thaet shwd bi kept az a paralle fonemic transcripshan.

                          Student performance, based on percent mastery, on "red
                          words" is higher than that on the nonsense words. This
                          verifies the importance of teaching meaningful language;
                          however, the improvement demonstrated in reading nonsense
                          words suggests the importance of teaching phonics for
                          helping students decipher unfamiliar words. [Axelrad-Lentz, 1998]

SS taught students would be able to sound out nonsense words, but they would not always be the same pronunciations as the Orton group.

                     As a part of a comprehensive reading
                     program, these practices have potential for improving district
                     elementary school student's reading skills. 

I think we could say the same about studying SAXON.

                     Every fall, fourth graders across America negotiate an unofficial,
                     yet important milestone in their intellectual development. It is
                     during this year that these young learners are expected to make
                     the transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Yet 30-40%
                     of these students are ill-equipped to make that leap, because they
                     are reading below grade level. Somehow, in their early elementary
                     years, these children did not master the skills they need to become
                     proficient readers. What did these students miss out on, and why?

                     What they're lacking, according to Jeanne Liuzzo,  is explicit
                     instruction the reading skills. "Current research indicates that
                     organized, direct instruction in linguistic understanding, phonetic
                     rules and word attack strategies are essential components of a
                     successful reading program, but many of today's teachers have not
                     received the necessary training to promote those skills in their
                     students

The followers of Orton also use more than 10 vowels.  They concentrate on 72 of the 106 symbols used in the English writing system.

Kates Quote: If you could teach someone a writing system in 4 hours - which we nearly can - it would not count as literacy.  The i.t.a. achieved very rapid literacy in a consistent augmented roman alphabet.  It was abandoned because this did not seem to significantly improve the ability to master the traditional writing system.

Spanglish uses another augmented roman alphbet, the original one adopted by the Anglo Saxons in the 9th Century.  [750 AD is usually given as the date when St. Augustine converted the AS King to Christianity and England adopted the Roman alphabet replacing the Runic script.  It was another 100 years, however, before conventions of court became widespread.

LINKS

Bird's Converter    http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/sb/orthography/convert.cgi
Quayle's Errors    http://www.xmission.com/~mwalker/DQ/quayle/qq/spelling.html
   http://www.oingo.com/topic/242/242695.html

Quale-Spell:  Dan's spelling of "potato" is one of the many orthographically correct options in English.  I'd like to see a spelling bee run off between Dan and Dubya.  The moderator could say well that is orthographically correct but does not match traditional dictionary spelling.  He could also add that spelling ability is not correlated with intelligence.  personality and spacial memory skills seem to be more related.

Orton phonograms
 http://www.ciera.org 
 http://www.orton-gillingham.org 

commonly mispelled words  http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/spell/error.html
Geek code http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html
Problemwith spelling  http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa735/eng_sp.html
bnolfi@reformedorthography.cjb.net

 


Google
Search WWW Search www.unifon.org 
© 2000 BETA Information Design