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Experiments on Phonetic Literacy
issues, designs, plans
Why Experiments?Noone can believe that a piece of paper could make such a difference. I think if you find this paper on your truck seat in India and you are an Roman-illiterate truck driver who may or may not have gone to school in Hindi learning only Devanagari script, then you have a non-zero chance to learn to read enough IPA to make sense of Hindi words written in Roman on Indian street signs.Well-meaning super-literates have lost intuition and direct perception about their own mouths; how can they believe that phonetic drawings can communicate anything? My Liz says, We will have to agree to disagree. Even Pratibha says, without sitting down in a proper classrom for an actual course, this will never help anyone. Thus, questions arise, and experiments must be done. The basic proof of an intervention is from before-and-after competency tests. Competences and their tests are many in the literacy space:
1) Script RecognitionWill you orient the page right side up when given it up-side-down? If not, you must be quite unfamiliar with the letters on the page. Forget school exposure, you have not been interested or curious about the letters on the signs around you, enough to look at them long enough to remember which way is up. No on this test proves, I think, absolute zero script knowledge.
2) Letter recognitionLetter recognition is one level of competency, because without ability to recognize letters and assign any accepted sound or name, one certainly cannot read.Letter recognition by names: The ABC song, with pointer on letters, teaches confusingly the NAMES of the English letters. Hindi does better using names like u-ullu (owl), i-imli (tamarind), because the confusion does not arise, is this letter name the same as its sound? Letter naming is probably responsible for more ignorance than any single act of mankind, even more than the nearly-useless pronunciation-hiding system, or better chaos, that is English spelling. When a student learns the letter names then that confusion imposes unbounded frictions on reading. Someone who learns letter names is not thereby made capable of reading anything. "aitch ey aitch ey" does not bring laughter to mind, not in many lifetimes, even though it is a way of talking about the letters in "haha". Aargh! Yet when a subject says letter names for letters, we must accept and assume they have some degree of literacy instruction. [i:] (the sound of the name of the letter "e") gives them credit for non-zero English literacy. [ullu] (Hindi for "owl", the traditional name for Devanagari's letter for [u]) gives credit for non-zero Devanagari literacy. This information is mostly negative, though. Show a few cards each with one letter, if they refuse or shrug shoulders or guess wrong on all, that's good enough for me to call it No Letter Recognition, and the subject is placed in a specific place on the Literacy Hierarchy. A gray-scale of intermediate outcomes wcan occur with close-but-imperfect naming, or some-but-not-all letters recognized. If all prompts are named with recognized names, Full Letter Recognition is generally applicable but this does NOT imply higher levels such as even merely sounding out words according to letters, or certainly up to fluent newspaper reading.
3) Sound transliterationSound trsnaliteration is the capability of assigning sounds to letters.English readers, like Chinese readers, are able to read out loud, therefore necessarily using sounds, but one keeps learning word pronunciations well into maturity and even old age. If teachers falsely were to believe that sounding out one's letters is a hard prerequisite to be perfectly conquered before reading for interest and understanding, then English readers confined to sounding out the letters would be truly blocked in their education. Sadly this is often the case in US education. Thus passing a sound transliteration test on English newspaper text is a very high bar. Therefore IPA First! On the other hand, if IPA is learned first then sound transliteration of any IPA text is directly and easily done, because the principle of 1 sound 1 letter is respected. The only higher thresholds are functional reading, then fluency and comfort in reading.
4) Functional Reading.Reading can be both functional and even excellent with imperfect pronunciation. A reader's purpose is FIRST to get the writer's meaning, and INCIDENTALLY to learn more about pronunciation, words, grammar, and clear thinking. Strangely, a teacher may believe in the opposite priority: FIRST to teach all that and INCIDENTALLY to attend to the content of the writing. Actually, the wise teacher achieves the learning by supporting the interested student to reach the interesting content. Thus when an IPA-trained reader encounters English orthographic text or Hindi language text written in English script, although they may be doomed to imperfect pronunciation since 1 sound 1 letter is NOT respected in written English, still they can read it one way or another and assign SOME pronunciation to it. The developing reader, just like an excellent expert reader, can make sense of the writer's meaning, given not-too-difficult content using the context within and outside the writing; one quickly triangulates back to what else must be so, which gives increased knowledge of unknown vocabulary, grammar, AND content.` For example, reading "The man, he went", one learns the pronoun's gender from the written context, without teacher effort or explicit teaching. In fact of the million linguistic facts in the head of mutre excellent educated readers, almost all of that reading skill comes from such implicit learning. Why? We must recognize that study is effective most (only!) when fun for the student, and recreational reading is what brings this comfortably and effectively. Therefore content should be at the student's level but also should be intrinsically interesting, therefore fast moving, not boring, at the edge of students' knowledge and abilities. In a proper teaching trajectory, the transition from sounding out letters to fluent reading is made early and easily, by linguistically- or context-redundant content. Perfectly sounding out letters is NOT a long term goal, and very quickly becomes EXTREMELY BORING after the first introduction to phonetic training. Instead, from a few known letters and words, the eyes scan back and forth, locking cognitively on unambiguously understood elements and the mind constructs the most consistent understanding from the whole text, by filling in the gaps by redundancy, even by guesses, and thereby learning more -- implicitly! -- while attending to the content of what they are reading. For this reason IPA First! Get it into the head as the toolkit of decipherment, then get out of the way while offering content. Given a small spark the fire of learning grows. The teacher's job is to spark the student with tools to learn, and to give level-appropriate interesting content and occasional expclit support at blocking pointst. Then the student will learn actively by themselves simply to experience that interesting content. What tests for Function Reading? Even a few IPA letters and their sounds, a decent subset, plus the 1 sound 1 letter principle, allows a reader to read functionally. So do an IPA sound transliteration test after doing the IPA training course, or more than once if there are multiple phases, using a sufficient sample of letters to believe you are sampling their learning level. Test also by prompting with different levels of words from easy to hard, short to long. If they can work out a word, they can work out a text, and they are functional readers.
5) Excellent (fluent and comfortable) readingExcellent readers can prove it with just a few sentences, also starting from easy and short to harder or longer. If they can read them with fluency and comfort, they are Excellent readers.It is not the goal of IPA First to make fluent/comfortable readers merely by IPA training, but only to achieve Functional Reading. Howeever, after some time, students may achieve Excellent Reading, and my job as IPA First advocate should include explaining how to search for appropriate content and where to get help when blocked, and to suggest that reading is FUN and reading expands your world and read for interest and keep reading for interest. But a few tests for fluency and comfort are also not out of order, particularly for student populations that have had some time to assimilate and practice reading. Probably a month, quarter, years, or two years later, some tests could be given to subjects and perhaps some will have achieved Excellent Reading, as compared with others who did not receive the intervention of the Instrument and its various levels of explanation.
No Teaching Required?This section is very drafty. Expect an update.I argue elsewhere that since the Instrument is intended and designed to be as self explanatory as possible, it can be delivered by leaving papers out, that is, without explanation. Skepticism on this point is rampant. Consider an experiment to prove them right and me wrong. Well, no, not so fast. It's on me to prove that it CAN be effective. I only need to prove that someone or some few under some conditions are able to get it. But before and after tests are not possible without interaction. The test setup must pre-test, deliver, and post-text.
Do you read? No.THe question is, how to return to test identified individuals. I need to know where they are. Shop staff will be in the same place, if still employed. Villagers in a village could potentially be identified again. What about customers of a business. Let a Mobile shop do this experimentally on their new and illiterate customers. THen we have them! If I do go to a village say by walking say from Delhi to Banares, and I ask the village leaders to do a census on all the people, testing everyone, and give it to each, all without instruction, then go back on the next year's pilgrimage, maybe. What if I go to Kumbh Mela and get test results and mobile contact details for devanagari literates before giving the instrument, and follow up after some time with post test? Maybe. The Instrument communicates the sound for each letter unambiguously. Does it do so without a teacher? This use case has not been proven futile, yet. How will it be proven futile? It's up to me.
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