“A series of brilliant innovations that will revolutionize language teaching”
UNSW Prof Emeritus
John Sweller, Founder of
Cognitive Load Theory
English spelling does not contain enough information to accurately figure out the correct sound of many English words
“signed can make
76,800” different sounds!
Here is an historical example showing how adding information made reading MUCH easier
HISEYESOPENWIDEASIFINSHOCKHESSAD
French monks added
1. Word spaces,
2. Upper and lower case letters and
3. Punctuation
His eyes open wide as if in shock. He’s sad.
As you can see, the additional information makes reading MUCH easier
Phonics 1.0 provides a little additional information
- Phonics 1.0 is the system used in schools in many countries to teach student how to decode English spelling
- Phonetic words are sounded out phoneme by phoneme,
- Decoding rules can be applied to some words, and
- Exceptions are learned by rote
- Phonics 1.0 works better than rote learning, but students learning to read English learn much more slowly than students learning to read a phonetic language
- If an English student sees a NEW word, the student does NOT KNOW
- If it is phonetic and can be sounded out character by character
- If a pronunciation rule applies, and which rule (there are at least 8, some complex)
- If it is an exception and must be learned (inefficiently) by rote – over 50% of English words appear to be exceptions
- Trying to read, and using Phonics 1.0 to decode the sound of new words, requires a lot of working memory that cannot be used to understand the meaning of the text being read
- Phonics 1.0 does not work very well: about 40% the population of many English speaking countries read at or below grade 5 level
Information needed to sound out English words
- What sound each characters makes, including which characters are silent
- Where the syllable breaks are: bâkeď vs √nâ…ked
- Which syllable is stressed for the correct pronunciation and meaning:
√con…tract (a document) vs con√tract (get smaller)
English letter Sounds
Every English letter has a name e.g. A, B, C. But the sound letters make when spelled in a word is not their name, but their usual sound
For example, in the word “cat”, the letters C, A and T make their usual sound.
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish will test students to find out what letter sounds they need to learn, and a student will be taught the sounds they don’t know, not the sounds they already know.
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish is Phonics 2.0
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish em√beds āll tңê in…for√mâ…ťiòn yoů nêed tȷ √qüick…lý, in√tů…it…ive…lý and √acc…ů…rate…lý sijund ijut √än…ý √Ēng…lish wòrd, which is tңè √rê…ál ob√jec…tive of √Рho…nics 1.0. With Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish, thẂre iş next tȷ √nò…thing tȷ learn! √Män…ý √pêo…ဇle can √fig…ure ijut Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish just bΥ √sêe…ing text in Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish.
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish rules can be learned in a few minutes
√bűş…ý
frñit
√bū…rý
qüick
ůşe
pùt
√än…ý
tңem
√dou…Εle
√â…Εle
yoů
- Letters with no superscripts make their usual sound
- Greyed out characters are silent
- Letters with superscripts make the superscript sound
- Capitalized vowel superscripts say their name: ý makes the sound/ee/ as in “see”, “you” becomes yoů
- Stressed syllable breaks are shown as — and unstressed syllable breaks are shown as –
- ō and ù make the sound “oo” in “foot” and “u” in “put”, and tң is voiced
- The superscript “u” over a consonant (√dou … Εle, √â…Εle) adds the “u” sound to the syllable (√dou…bul, √â…bul)
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish Dictionary
- Extensive list of English words marked up in Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish
- Comprehensive list of definitions for each word are written simply for each different meaning of the word (e.g. “star” has 5 different meanings and 5 different definitions)
- For each definition, 2 examples of the word used in a sentence are included
- Examples can be translated into the native language of the student
- Comprehensive list of definitions for each word are written simply for each different meaning of the word (e.g. “star” has 5 different meanings and 5 different definitions)
- A photo of a cat is easier to understand than a written definition of a cat
- “Star” has 5 images displayed – one for each definition
-
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish allows students to hear any English word pronounced in multiple accents in 4 different ways:
1. normal speed,
2. slow speed (continuous),
3. short breaks between syllables,
4. longer breaks between syllables
- Slower speeds with pauses give foreign language students time to accurately discriminate the syllables in a word
- The phonemes in each syllable have been recorded and can be played progressively as /c/, then /ca/and then /cat/, which is the traditional sounding out method: /c/ then /a/ then /t/ is /cat/
Reading Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish Text
- Automated text conversion
- Upload a document in standard English
- Receive back a PDF in Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish library
- A comprehensive graded reading practice library with interactive comprehension questions is under development
- An online system where text is read to the student word by word, with the text highlighted as it is pronounced is also under development
Reading is the process where you:
- See written words
- Silently “hear” these words in your mind
- Understand what these words mean
Humans have not evolved to read
So there is no brain region specifically for reading
So reading needs to repurpose other parts of the brain and link these parts in a network
FLUENT reading with silent words
Reading needs new, high speed links between these different parts of the brain
These high speed networks physically change the brain – it gets heavier
Silent reading repurposes the speech part of the brain to “hear” silent words you say in your mind
This is why you understand more when you read at the speed that you speak and listen, which is called FLUENT reading
Fluency: Better understand what you read
- Silent reading repurposes the auditory speech part of the brain
- So people understand more when they read at the speed people talk (called fluent reading)
- To read fluently, you don’t have time to decode the sound of a word
- You need to look at a word and instantly recognize its shape and know its sound and meaning, like hearing STOP in your head when you see a STOP sign
- Seeing and word and knowing its sound is called a sightword
- The best strategy to quickly develop reading fluency and comprehension is to quickly acquire sightwords
Its hard to remember random information
-
Here are some random
letters:
n r o g d a
- They are hard to remember because they don’t make sense….
- Humans have evolved a filter that makes it hard to remember random or irrelevant information which can clog up our memory and slow down our decisions
- Randomly spelled words need a lot of repetition to remember the spelling and sound of a word
-
What about these same letters but in a different order:
d r a g o n
- The letters in “dragon” are easy to remember because they make sense and humans have evolved to remember what makes sense
Quickly acquiring sightwords with Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish
- Phonetic languages are much easier to learn to read because the words are pronounced as spelled – the shape of the word and the sound make sense
-
The shape and sound of a Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish word makes sense because Fo√ne…tic
√Ēng…lish makes every English word phonetic – you can sound out any word character by character with no rules or exceptions
- So you can quickly remember Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish words and syllables as sightwords by sounding out the word, maybe only 2 to 5 times
Learning sightwords can be even faster using syllables
- If you know the syllables making up a word, you can quickly sound out the word syllable by syllable and remember its shape by sight, because the sound and the shape make sense
- There are more letters in a word than syllables, so it is faster to sound out syllables than it is to sound out all the letters in a word
- A large number of words are made up or contain common syllables
- If you encounter a new word, you may already know all the syllables and can sound it out quickly or
- You may need to sound out just one or two new syllables to sound out the new word
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish teaches the most common syllables first
Hearing words syllable by syllable
Au…tom…á√ti…çi…tý
A better way to sound out words and syllables
- /c/, /ca/, /cat/
Humans have evolved to recognize the shape of hiding predators, especially snakes
The colour of the snake is the same as the background, so it is the shape of the camouflaged snake that we can recognize. And we can recognize camouflaged snakes in all sorts of different positions. This is a pretty amazing skill we humans have evolved.
Read Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish, read standard English
So once you can recognize the shape of a word by sounding out the letters in the word, you can use our evolved predator recognition skill to read that word no matter how the word is written. It can be printed normally, can be in a curly type, can be printed badly, or the letters can be handwritten, and we can still recognize it by its shape.
In fact, being able to recognize disguised words is how we can prȷve to some websites that we are humans, not com√půt…ers.
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish improves spoken English
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish mark up gives students all the information they need to decode the sound of a written English word, so they know what to listen for
- Have you heard a foreign name, were not able to clearly discriminate the name, and then see the name written, and miraculously you can discriminate the sounds of the name?
- The same can happen with students seeing a word written in Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish
- Students will be tested on their ability to recognize the sound of English phonemes, and individualized lessons will be created to explicitly teach students the sounds of the letters they don’t know
- Teaching missing sounds using syllables that contain phonemes that are common to both languages, then progressively move to phonemes pairs with a common phoneme, and then to the single phoneme
- 60 foreign languages are being analyzed to see what phonemes are an exact match in English and in the foreign language, which phonemes are close, and which English phonemes are not in the foreign language
- The aim is that students can discriminate English sounds without thinking
- Students will be provided with information and exercises to pronounce English words
- Providing precise information about the sound of a word boosts confidence and is likely to boost participation
- Mouth movements instructions to make the sound of English phonemes will be provided
- When auditory discrimination is sufficiently developed, students will be given access to online tools to quickly and repeatedly compare their pronunciation to a native speaker, so they can self correct
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish
- Dashboard
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish improves spoken English
- Human Cognitive Architecture
- Cognitive Load Theory
- Fonetic English font and markup
- Fonetic English Sounds or Phonemes
- Names of Fonetic English Letters
- All the ways learning syllables can help you
- How Fonetic English helps students improve their auditory discrimination of English phonemes, syllables and words
- How Fonetic English helps students improve their pronunciation
