Confusion and the
phoneme machine
Letters,
The Psychologist, June 2007
Vol 20 No 6, p348, ISSN 0952-8229
Alan Davies,
THRASS UK, Chester
Valerie Yule is right that the cause
of reading difficulty is confusion (Can literacy be made easier?,
April 2007). But the confusion is largely caused by the way that
children are first taught about the forty-four sounds (phonemes) of
spoken English and the one-hundred-and-twenty main spelling choices
(keygraphemes) of written English - by well-intentioned hard-working
teachers who should know better.
For the last
twenty years, I have pioneered the English phonics programme THRASS
(Teaching Handwriting Reading And Spelling Skills), which is now
used widely in schools in the UK, Europe, Africa and Australia.
For the last two
years, Foundation Phase student-teachers at the University of the
Witwatersrand and the University of Pretoria, in South Africa, have
attended a compulsory two-day course on THRASS, based around the
Phoneme Machine software programme (free and downloadable from
www.phonememachine.com). At the time of writing, a large
corporate sponsor is set to help finance the implementation of
THRASS in South African government and independent schools, with the
main focus being on high quality phonics training for
student-teachers and teachers. It is my view that, in years to come,
the world will visit the universities and teaching colleges of South
Africa to see how they managed to remove the main cause of reading
difficulties - teachers with poor subject knowledge for the graphs,
digraphs, trigraphs and quadgraphs (the one-, two-, three- and
four-letter spelling choices) in the English written system.
Valerie is right
that there should be international research by psychologists, to
‘reduce this serious problem’. But I believe the focus should be the
relative effectiveness of English phonics programmes that to not
depend on learners having to ignore the misleading advice that, when
reading, each lower-case letter has a specific sound and, when
spelling, each sound has a specific letter - along with having to
ignore any associated physical actions, alliterative characters
(such as “Alan Ant”) and/or explanations relating to letters being
‘silent’, ‘magic’, ‘soft’, ‘tricky’ or ‘irregular’. It is
all-the-more important that in countries like South Africa, with 11
national languages, widespread poverty and a relatively poor state
education system, that the children should not be misled when it
comes to learning the building blocks of the lingua franca.
Source: The Psychologist
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