The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a spelling system devised by Sir James Pitman in England about 1960 to help children to learn to read and write.
ITA used a list of 44 symbols to represent the 44 sounds (phonemes) of English. The list included most of the traditional alphabet, plus some special combination symbols which were used to represent the long vowel sounds in 'mate', 'bite', 'home', and 'rule'. There were also special symbols to represent the sounds 'ng', 'oo' as in 'good' etc.
ITA was a consistent, phonetic system of spelling, each sound being consistently represented by a certain symbol. For example, the long 'o' sound in traditional English can be spelt in many ways - such as in 'hoe', 'though', 'poke', 'oh', 'slow', 'yolk', 'sew' and 'no'. But in ITA this sound was represented consistently by just one combination symbol.
The idea was that children would begin to read and write using the ITA method of spelling, and using books written with ITA symbols. This would allow children to progress quickly and to gain confidence in the practice of reading and writing. Then they would be "switched over" to the traditional way of spelling which would be required for their future lives.
The first bit of this theory worked brilliantly. Children learnt to read and write very easily and quickly. By 1965 over 1000 schools in Great Britain were using ITA. Variants of the method spread to other countries, including the U.S.A. - where the idea is still used today in some schools.
But it was found that the difficulty of "switching over" from ITA to traditional spelling was greater than anticipated. One reason for this seemed to be that it was easy to learn a logical, consistent method of spelling but much more difficult to learn an inconsistent, illogical one - particularly after the child's mind had come to accept the former. So ITA has not retained the popularity that it enjoyed in 1965.
But valuable lessons have been learnt from the ITA experiment. ITA showed that children can learn to read and write English very easily, quickly and accurately when the spelling system is logical and consistent, and based on the sounds of the words.
In the book, "The Initial Teaching Alphabet" (1966), the authors describe a research project which showed that children learnt to read and write about twice as quickly using ITA compared with traditional spelling.
For example, the study showed that at the end of the first school year of the research project, 62% of the group of 413 students using ITA had passed the beginning of book 2 of a reading primer, compared to only 23% of a control group of 687 students using traditional spelling.
The research project also demonstrated other advantages of using a logical spelling approach. For example, the ITA group was much more proficient and accurate at understanding the meaning of written words - the percentage of words that they recognised was much higher, and mistakes in reading were much lower. Also, speed in reading was much higher in the ITA group, while creative writing projects gave results of a much better quality. It was also found that the ITA method was very successful with children who had previously had difficulty with traditional spelling.
So the experience of ITA shows conclusively that a logical, consistent system of spelling offers
tremendous advantages for students and teachers - provided the students don't need to transfer to the
"proper" spelling system later.
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