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...from being the work of drunken printers, this is Britain's Initial Teaching Alphabet −a nue wae too lern too reed and riet that Education Minister Sir Edward Boyle last month pronounced "a remarkable success." Only about half of Britain's seven-year-olds now read satisfactorily; one-quarter of its 15-year-olds are semiliterate. But in careful tests of teaching reading with the new alphabet, 20 British schools have cut the usual failure rate by 80%, put most beginners more than a year ahead of their contemporaries. This year 233 schools are following suit...
Developed by Sir James Pitman, a Conservative M.P. and grandson of shorthand's Sir Isaac, the Initial Teaching Alphabet is no Shavian attempt to supersede the regular alphabet. Strictly a teaching tool, it aims to overcome the disparity between the sounds that English-speaking tots know in their heads and the symbols they see on the page. In essence, the child confronts a decoding problem. Unhappily, the code is crazy. The 40-odd phonemes (distinct sound units) of English are spelled in 2,000 different ways, and the letters vary bafflingly in their capital, lower case, printed and handwritten...
...confusing variations of form (all three letters of "AND" look different from those of "and," for example). Also difficult is trying to apply the phonic method, which teaches children to single out letters and their phonemic values so that they can read and spell analytically. In the 26-letter alphabet, one letter often represents different sounds in differing words-for example, the o in gone, one, go, do, women. One sound may also be spelled in different ways for example, the sound common to / and eye has 22 different spellings in words from aisle to buy to style...
I.T.A. erases inconsistencies by linking specific sounds to specific symbols. The all-lower-case (to avoid capital confusion) alphabet has 44 characters −24 of the 26 existing Roman letters (no q and x), plus 20 new ones that are mostly typographically linked digraphs, such as -?????. Each of the 44 I.T.A. symbols represents only one sound, and children tackle I.T.A.-spelled words in full confidence that what they see in print is what they say in sound. As for the actual teaching method, teachers may use either phonics or look-say or a blend of both. "I.T.A...
...given power of 2 is part of the number with which the computer is dealing (see diagram). Numerical information, such as figures from a payroll, can be easily translated into binary notation for storage in a computer's memory. Written English requires another step. Each letter of the alphabet, for example, might be assigned a decimal number (A=l, B = 2, C = 3, etc.). Whole words would be translated into decimal numbers, and the decimal numbers, in turn, translated into binary for the computer...