Initial Teaching Alphabet

In 1959, the Conservative MP James Pitman initially promoted the ITA as a stepping stone to full literacy. The idea was that children would switch to the conventional alphabet after a few years.) were found to have some of the advantages of the ITA without most of the disadvantages. Although the ITA was not originally intended to dictate one particular approach to teaching reading, it was often identified with phonics methods, and after the 1960s, the pendulum of educational theory swung away from phonics. The ITA was very rarely used by the 1970s. ==Details==

The ITA originally had 43 symbols, which was expanded to 44, then 45. Each symbol predominantly represented a single English sound (including affricates and diphthongs), but there were complications due to the desire to avoid making the ITA needlessly different from standard English spelling (which would make the transition from the ITA to standard spelling more difficult), and in order to neutrally represent several English pronunciations or dialects. In particular, there was no separate ITA symbol for the English unstressed schwa sound , and schwa was written with the same letters used to write full vowel sounds. There were also several different ways of writing unstressed / and consonants palatalized to , , , by suffixes. Consonants written by double letters or "ck", "tch" etc. sequences in standard spelling were written with multiple symbols in the ITA. The ITA symbol set includes joined letters (typographical ligatures) to replace the two-letter digraphs "wh", "sh", and "ch" of conventional writing, and also ligatures for most of the long vowels. There are two distinct ligatures for the voiced and unvoiced "th" sounds in English, and a special merged letter for "ng" resembling ŋ with a loop. There is a variant of the "r" to end syllables, which is silent in non-rhotic accents like Received Pronunciation but not in rhotic accents like General American and Scots English (this was the 44th symbol added to the ITA). There are two English sounds which each have more than one ITA letter whose main function is to write them. So whether the sound is written with the letters "c" or "k" in ITA depends on the way the sound is written in standard English spelling, as also whether the sound is written with the ordinary "z" letter or with a special backwards "z" letter (which replaces the "s" of standard spelling where it represents a voiced sound, and which visually resembles an angular form of the letter "s"). The backwards "z" occurs prominently in many plural forms of nouns and third-person singular present forms of verbs (including is). Each of the ITA letters has a name, the pronunciation of which includes the sound that the character stands for. For example, the name of the first letter, looking like a "b", is "bee". A special typeface was created for the ITA, whose characters were all lower case (its letter forms were based on Didone types such as Monotype Modern and Century Schoolbook). Where capital letters are used in standard spelling, the ITA simply used larger versions of the same lower-case characters. The following chart shows the letters of the 44-character version of the ITA, with the main pronunciation of each letter indicated by symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet beneath: Note that "d" is made more distinctively different from "b" than is usual in standard typefaces. Later a 45th symbol was added to accommodate accent variation, a form of diaphonemic writing. In the original set, a "hook a" or "two-storey a" (a) was used for the vowel in "cat" (lexical set ), and a "round a" or "one-storey a" (ɑ) for the sound in "father" (lexical set ). But lexical set (words such as "rather", "dance", and "half") patterns with in some accents including Received Pronunciation, but with in others including General American. So a new character, the "half-hook a", was devised, to avoid the necessity of producing separate instructional materials for speakers of different accents. A series of international ITA conferences were held, the fourth being in Montreal in 1967. == Academic research on ITA ==

After the implementation of ITA, research was conducted to study its effect on children's learning. In 1960, the University of London Institute of Education and the National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales began a 6-year investigation into the initial teaching alphabet. The investigation found that using ITA is clearly superior to traditional orthography in the initial stages of learning. However, the research results are less clear with regard to the effectiveness of ITA in transfer to traditional orthography. Another research paper published in 1966 showed that the value of the ITA as a symbol system to be incorporated into speech therapy seemed promising. A quantitative research study compared teaching in ITA compared to traditional orthography in the first grade in the Pittsburgh public schools in 1966. It showed superior achievement for ITA students. However, the researchers also cautioned that their results were restricted to the first year and it was unclear whether ITA students could retain the advantage later. In 1974, a quantitative study on students' spelling was conducted for grades 3, 4, and 5 in a rural area in western New York. The study found no significant difference in spelling achievement between ITA and traditional typography students. The study concluded that "the evidence obtained from the spelling attempts of the children who were taught the initial teaching alphabet tends to show that little would be gained from teaching patterns of sound-to-symbol generalizations." ==Legacy==

Some adults who were taught with ITA when they were children felt that they had been disadvantaged, as they remain poor spellers, while some teachers have thought that it had been successful for some children. While the study is not specific to ITA, he thinks ITA is regarded as an experiment that didn’t work due to difficulty in transition to the standard alphabet. Professor Rhona Stainthorp, a professor of literacy at the University of Reading, believes that ITA is "a perfect example of someone thinking they’ve got a good idea and trying to simplify something, but having absolutely no idea about teaching." There have been attempts to apply the ITA using only characters which can be found on the typewriter keyboard or in the basic ASCII character set, to avoid the use of special symbols. ==See also==