Calling all English teachers!

It's been brought to my attention that English teachers are not immediately receptive to Unspell. When presented with a copy of Unspeller, they ask the rather obvious question: Why do my students need to learn this? And so here is the answer. If you are an English teacher, please read this. And if you know any English teachers, please send the link to them, and tell them that this is something they need to read. Thank you.

[Download printable PDF] [Japanese version]

The Unspell Teaching Method

1. Problem Statement

Students in English-speaking countries do significantly worse in learning to read and write than students in most other countries with comparable educational systems. Whereas in most countries it takes just 2-3 years to learn to read arbitrary texts with good diction and to take dictation accurately (although comprehension may lag), in English-speaking countries this process takes on the order of ten years. What's more, often it never completes: the failure rate is unacceptably high, resulting in functional illiteracy rates that approach 50% in some countries. The effects of such systemic failure are wide-reaching. There is the opportunity cost: students waste years attempting to acquire rudimentary skills instead of learning something interesting. There is the hit to economic productivity from so many people incapable of retraining themselves on their own but requiring oral instruction. There is an adverse effect on health and public safety from so many people unable to read safety instructions and brochures. Functional illiteracy is especially widespread among the prison population and hampers the efforts to rehabilitate prisoners upon release.

In spite of the vast resources and effort directed at achieving basic literacy in English-speaking countries, and in spite of the excessive failure rate of these efforts, few people have dared to ask the simple question: Why is this? Yet all you have do is look, to find both the source of the problem and its solution. It is curious how a culture that embraces radical change in some ways chooses to remain tradition-bound in other ways, even where these old ways inflict great harm.

English spelling presents a unique set of challenges to any child learning to read, because written English is an opaque code. Unlike most other languages, it is not a rendering of speech that is based on orthographic rules but a hodgepodge of orthographic styles collected over the centuries from an assortment of languages, most of them extinct. Some 40-50% of English spellings displays some degree of irregularity; as for the rest, the student has to explicitly memorize the fact that they are unexceptional. For instance, having learned the words “over,” “open,” “only” and “okra” as unexceptional, the learner then has to discover by trial and error that “oven,” “other,” and “osprey” do not follow the same pattern. In essence, the only way to learn to read English is to memorize both the spelling and the pronunciation many thousands of words—a task that calls for more rote memorization than just about any other task in which humans regularly engage.

What makes this task even harder is that the learner isn't being offered any way to directly translate English spellings into sequences of phonemes, for ease of memorization. The human mind is a thirsty sponge for spoken words, which are sequences of phonemes. It is neurally wired for the two very complex, distinct tasks of speech perception and speech production, and phonemic memory is the vital link between the two, for which human mind is wired for it as well. In essence, every child comes equipped for building a mental dictionary, and the symbols that comprise this dictionary are not letters but phonemes. In languages where letters map directly to phonemes this distinction is largely irrelevant, but an opaque code such as written English is a major impediment to learning. This is because the human mind, and especially a child's mind, is not especially good at memorizing sequences of abstract symbols, such as phone numbers, lists of random pictures or the spellings of English words. Thus, the task of learning English spelling relies on something that is essentially a talent worthy of a savant, which much of the population does not possess.

A second challenge posed by English is that there is no easy bootstrapping mechanism for learning to read it. The typical sequence of events in learning to read an alphabetic language is as follows:

1. learn what sounds the letters make
2. learn to form syllables out of these sounds
3. learn to form words out of the syllables

Instead, the student has to memorize the spelling of each word as a whole and then look up its sound in non-verbal memory. Any unfamiliar word becomes an indigestible blob, because the student is afraid to sound it out for fear of making a mistake and remembering it incorrectly.

The only work-around, or fallback, that is currently made available is for the student to “spell out” words. This sort of “spelled-out” English is, in essence, a language that consists of just 26 words. All human languages share some important commonalities—they all have both vowels and consonants, and they all have words that consist of syllables. Beyond these commonalities there is a wide variety of linguistic forms, but to date no human language has been found to consist of just 26 different words. The reason for this is simple: such a language would be far too long-winded and far too lacking in variety to be easily learnable.

“Spelling out” explodes a monosyllabic word like “strengths” into “Es, tee, ar, en, gee, tee, aitch, es”—a perfect example of the weakness of this system. “Spelling out” is not a mnemonic technique but a bizarre parlor trick for those who have already memorized words as sequences of abstract symbols. It is like speaking in Morse Code: another savant-type skill of which few people are naturally capable. No other language has anything similar; the usual way to convey how a word is written in an alphabetic language is simply to pronounce it carefully, placing equal stress on each syllable.

In summary, the problem with teaching written English is this: the student's mind is naturally adapted to memorizing words as sequences of phonemes; instead, it is being forced to memorize words as sequences as abstract symbols that have no direct and unambiguous relationship to phonemes. The student is not being provided with something vital: a way of converting between sight and sound, and back, that can quickly become effortless and automatic. This is the main cause of trouble with basic education in English-speaking countries—adequately accounting for both its inefficiency and its unacceptable failure rate.

2. The Unspell method

The Unspell teaching method offers a way to cleanly circumvents all of these difficulties. Unspell consists of a minimal set of symbols which directly represent generalized speech sounds of the English language in a way that is maximally independent of accent or dialect. These symbols are largely disjoint with the Latin alphabet, eliminating interference effects with spelled English. Each symbol directly represents a specific sound. The student learns to sound out each symbol, then group these sounds into syllables, syllables into words, and words into phrases in what is essentially a self-governed, self-motivated process. The role of the teacher is to guide the student through this process, and does not involve imparting any specialized knowledge. Virtually all that needs to be memorized is presented on the following wallet-sized card:

It is important that the symbols used by Unspell are not referred to as “letters” because that causes confusion between spelled and unspelled English. Rather, they should be referred to as “shapes,” and it should always be stressed that “shapes” make “sounds.” Each shape makes a different sound, and to read unspelled English all you have to do is drag your finger along, making the sound of each shape. The sounds should not be syllables. This is easier with vowels, liquids such as L, N, M and fricatives such as S and F, which can be sustained. It is harder with affricates such as P, T, and K. But it is important that they be taught as pure sounds, not as sounds embedded in nonsense syllables, because the nonsense syllables can mask the distinction between unvoiced and voiced consonants (P, T, K vs. B, D, G).

Classwork can proceed as follows:

1. The students are introduced to the 13 basic shapes of Unspell, and learn to draw them in chalk, crayon, ink brush or by finger-painting. (The term “draw” is helpful, to differentiate Unspell from “writing” English, since most children enjoy drawing but don't enjoy writing.) If they learn to appreciate the shapes of Unspell as a sort of abstract design they can embellish, so much the better. The emphasis need not be on correct form or penmanship, but on what distinguishes each shape from the rest: this is the only kind of “mistake” that a student can make. However, it should be stressed that all the shapes are formed along a horizontal line, hanging down from it. How far they hang down distinguishes consonants from vowels; how wide they are along the line distinguishes stressed vowels form unstressed ones.

2. The students work through the Unspeller booklet, learning all of the sounds made by all of the shapes. There are 12 lessons, but some of them are quite short, and so anywhere between 5 and 7 sessions may be sufficient. The exercises at the end of each lesson are cumulative, incorporating the knowledge gained in the previous lessons. Repeating the last few exercise at the beginning of each session may be helpful.

3. The students start reading unspelled texts; first, by chanting out the sound of each shape, rhythmically, first in monotone, then giving stressed vowels a higher pitch. Second, by going over the same text, but now grouping the sounds into syllables, stressing each syllable. Third, by grouping the syllables into words. Fourth, by grouping the words into phrases. This sets up the basic pattern for conquering the unfamiliar without the teacher's assistance: whenever a student encounters an unfamiliar word, the approach to it is to drop down as many levels as needed to learn to say it.

3. Learning spelled English

Once the student is proficient in reading Unspell, the process of learning English spelling becomes greatly simplified. This because now the student cannot help but sound out spelled English one letter at a time. Of course, it sounds all wrong, because spelled English represents how English sounded centuries ago, if at all, and is essentially a dead language. (Since children like dinosaurs, it may be useful to explain to them that written English is like the dinosaurs—long extinct, but we still admire their majestic skeletons, and try to imagine what their mighty bellows might have sounded like.) Just as with dead languages like Latin and Classical Greek, the fact that we don't really know how they sounded does not make the trick of sounding out Greek and Latin words any less effective in helping to remember them. To help the student get the general knack of this entirely informal, subjective and, in the end, private skill, it is helpful to introduce the student to the Pseudolatin Alphabet presented below, in which each letter or letter combination used in written English has been assigned a unique sound.

Note that although the “names” of the Latin letters and letter combinations are presented above as syllables, this is only so because English spelling cannot express sounds except as syllables; the unspelled versions of them are simply sounds.

Also note that although this mapping is largely arbitrary, there is a principle involved: it cannot destroy information. For instance, C cannot be conveyed to either a “keh” sound or a “seh” sound because remembering it that way would preclude going back from sound to symbol; would it be K, C, or S? Similarly, although Ph is phonetically equivalent to F, it is mapped to puheh, because otherwise arbitrary spelling distinctions (“fantasy” vs. “phantasm”) would be impossible to convey in sound.

Lastly, it is helpful to stress that double-consonants, which abound in English, should be pronounced with a sort of stutter. They are largely meaningless, having no phonetic reality in contemporary spoken English. They used to be related to a short/long vowel distinction which no longer exists, were blindly carried over from Latin and French, or were thrown in haphazardly by Dutch typesetters who used them to pad the bill for the job because they were paid by the letter. The stutter makes them easier to remember.

4. Conclusion

The Unspell Teaching Method reduces the problem of teaching students to read and write English to the problem of teaching students to read and write a largely phonetic form of modern English, then using it as a basis for teaching them an archaic dialect of English, in which most words have one-to-one translation in contemporary spoken English but sound somewhat different. This is by no means an insurmountable task.

5. Computer teaching tools

 The task of teaching Unspell, then teaching English spelling, can be enhanced through the use of the following online tools:

1. A tool that presents a table of Unspell shapes, and sounds out each one when touched or clicked on.

2. A tool that pronounces arbitrary sentences written out in Unspell, by sounding out each shape while highlighting each Unspell symbol as its sound is being played.

3. A tool that pronounces arbitrary spelled English sentences using the Pseudolatin Alphabet shown above, highlighting each letter as its sound is being played.