I was a teacher-training student living in Chiswick, London, in 1970 and we were the first people to buy up one of the cottages near Strand on the Green primary school. The start of “gentrification” of the area. Families at the other end of our road had been moved out during, or shortly after, the war from the East End of London and were working in a local factory. They were totally confused by the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), were keen to help their children with school but couldn’t read it themselves and were distressed by the system and lack of understanding from the school (The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet – and left thousands of children unable to spell, 6 July). They hadn’t the money to buy the special extra reading books, which could have been used at home.
ITA was a stupid experiment that bore no relation to people’s lives and, as your article underlined, had many negative long-term consequences for those children. Children learn to read in a myriad of different ways (reading the print on the breakfast cereal packets, for example) and ITA deprived many children from using the real-world experience.
Harriet Gibson
Wezembeek-Oppem, Belgium
I was a student teacher in the 1960s when James Pitman, the inventor of the ITA, came to Bulmershe College in Reading to give a lecture on it. He was most insistent then that it was not a means of early reading. It was intended to be an early recovery system to be used at about what is now known as Year 3. As has always been the case, teachers grasped ITA and used it in reception in the hope that this would be a magic solution.
I loved teaching my reception children to read, but was only too aware that children learn in different ways and different strategies need to be applied. I am not surprised that the current emphasis is “not underpinned by the latest evidence”.
Janet Mansfield
Aspatria, Cumbria
The creators of the ITA and the modern purveyors of primary-school phonics miss the most obvious fact about young children: they are already fluent speakers and listeners, with a natural and unrivalled command of the vocabulary and grammar of their native language. Any teacher of a second language will tell you that it is precisely this, the learning of thousands of words and the complex grammatical rules to stitch them together, which requires all the learner’s time and effort, not the language’s orthography.
Therefore teaching reading should begin with what the children already know. Show a child a picture of a woman, or a hat, and they will tell you what it is. Prompted by a picture, they will also tell you that the plural of woman is women, without being conscious of the fact that the “o” sounds in woman and women have different phonetic values. Did that stop you pronouncing the word correctly? Of course it didn’t. There is no need to teach you, or indeed children, phonetics.
Dave Hughes
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
In your article about the ITA experiment, no mention was made of the ability to write stories as soon as the phonetic alphabet was mastered. My eldest daughter was taught by this method in 1970. She started writing entertaining and imaginative stories as soon as she learned to read and went on to win a prize from Lego at the age of five for inventing (and explaining) a unique machine. At the age of seven, she was resentful at having to switch over to the traditional alphabet. Her spelling remained erratic until the age of 11.
Patricia Mary Pressler
Solihull, West Midlands
One of the many flaws of the ITA was that it encoded received pronunciation and took no account of regional accents. Most people in the north of the UK would pronounce “castle”, for example, with a short “a”, but in ITA the word was written with the sign for a long “a”. Why that problem wasn’t spotted straight away is a mystery.
Caroline Westgate
Hexham, Northumberland
After learning very quickly with ITA, I still remember the shock of discovering that I couldn’t actually read at all. Not to mention the humiliation of being told in front of the whole class at my new, traditional, school that “u cat” should be “a cat”. Although it didn’t put me off reading, there have been lifelong consequences and 60 years later I still can’t spele.
Katherine Speed
Poole, Dorset