What is to be done to offer basic phonetic literacy to all?

After making the instrument, it needs methodology exploration and refinement, experimental validation, and finally rollout. Let's look at the human side: who all might be involved in these aspects.

There are several different kinds of participants and constituencies in this project.

• Refiners. Teachers, technical partners, consultants: The phoneticians who advised on improvements of the drawings. Perhaps there will be software developers involved if this will use a database. Scientists, Experimenters, Teachers to run exploratory and validation experiments to refine how it works and how to give it out and what actual hands-on teaching if any that it needs, and how much of a textbook if any will be required to make it work.

• Spreaders. They might speak and read English, they might not. Spreaders need enough support so they can spread this thing.

• Illiterate speakers of unwritten languages. This is our target. We want to give them some kind of literacy.

• Illiterate speakers of written languages. If we can help these people too, that's great. Let's try! Just because a language is written doesn't mean that the country it is in can afford public school teachers for all the speakers of that language. So self-study materials, along with a script transliteration table to support learning their native-language script, may open the doors of literacy for those people, including integration into the economies compatible with that written language.

  Don't worry, folks, people can learn to read multiple scripts.

• Other users. Anyone writing literacy materials ought to consider licensing the BPLI since it might help their materials become more effective. Any child learning to read ought to learn the IPA first; those skills transfer nicely to orthographies of any language. Home schooling parents ought to have their kids look at this, it might open up their eyes, and make reading a lot easier.

Project Phases

Phases of this project would seem to include development of the instrument, validation, and rollout.

Instrument Development

As a project, the key IP, which is at this point a third draft of the instrument, is well up the learning curve of improvements in the glyphs.

Version 0.1 for Tamil. I did a version in 2002 for Tamil Nadu, but those drawings were pixelated and difficult to see and interpret, leaving a lot of room for improvement. Still, a good number of testers used the on-line experiment page and guessed the sounds for each symbol, with the result that about 75% of guesses were correct. So it was already pretty great.

Version 0.2 for IPA. Now this January I converted it from a Tamil alphabet instrument into an IPA instrument, but with the same poor drawings. By the time I was about to return from India it was in good enough shape to pass the originl sniff test, that it contains the information required to learn this subset of IPA from.

Version 1.0 for IPA. Between 1/29/24 and 4/06/24 I spent my spare time making it better, and it was ready to start to share with phoneticians, at least. The UW Phonetics Lab meeting on that date gave 10 refinements and a correction.

Version 1.1. These fixes and improvements are implemented and integrated as of 4/20/24, when I took it back to the lab and got no objections. It's ready for wider feedback solicitation on the instrument, which can go on in parallel with the next phase.

It is now time to round out the supporting aspects of the project, give it a public face and a rational web presentation, and to start planning and working on validation.

Validation

The Validation phase will explore if it works, or rather how to make it work.

By "work" I mean, a certain intervention will deliver a certain impact. The intervention must be small enough to be universally deliverable. The impact must be a functional improvement in the lives and capabilities of the recipients. If the intervention is small enough to be affordable to send it everywhere, and the impact is large enough that recipients recieve a functional improvement in their lives and capabilities, then I'll say, it works.

Today it is ready for efficacy experiments first by asking subjects to fill in the blanks on a letter-less copy of each table, second by an online survey to regularize responses. Assuming reasonable frequency of correct guessing (the Tamil online survey found about 75% correct guesses using the first-draft, low-resolution drawings I had made at that time), the next question is, In terms of literacy skills and social impact, how much improvement can we give to recipients for how small an intervention.

Subject testing requires qualification, pre-assessment, intervention, re-contacting, post-assessment.

Potential subjects will not qualify if lacking interest, if already literate, or if not able to be located again for followup.

Each experimental subject needs to be pre-assessed as to reading skills, first by offering a written page upside down to see if they turn it right side up, and second by a challenge to read some range of prompts. I don't propose to assess writing skills, if they can read that's enough for me.

A sequence of interventions from the minimum possible (mere delivery, putting the instrument in their hands) to the minimum required to achieve meaningful impact, which I would define as being able to functionally read some range of sample texts. The sequence should start with the least, and be aimed to finding the least that must be done to produce a life-changing functional impact. At the high end of requirements might be the need to sit with them to explain all the letters, to provide paper and pencil and a quiet place to practice and teacherly instruction. But that is hardly less than providing primary education itself and not much of a win unless the amount of handholding with the instrument should be significantly less than the amount required otherwise.

It is possible that a few rounds of instrument refinement and repeating of experiments may be necessary to establish a sweet spot. My hope is that a single piece of paper, printed on two sides, could be enough to transmit the necessities, but that may be too optimistic; a booklet, perhaps with practice pages and a pen or pencil may be a minimum requirement for practical success; and a hierarchy of levels of explanation may need to be explored, if "take this home to teach your kids to read" is not enough.

Rollout

After efficacy studies define intervention scope, it will be time for rollout. Presently I'm thinking the printable PDF will be available for free download to whoever puts in their email address, GPS location, and an estimate of how many copies they intend to print and distribute. Those volunteers will become potential pollsters and teachers and and a global reach and penetration map and measures could be derived from their data. I believe perhaps a billion humans could benefit from basic phonetic literacy, from illiterate speakers of any and every written language even in big cities like Delhi where many deny that illteracy occurs, to speakers of unwritten languages in the remotest forests and mountains. Reaching them all will be the job of a social media operation, For the subset, probably the large majority of such people, who are on the internet with smart phones and computers with audio and video, other resources such as teaching apps and teaching videos will be available on this website; obviously those teaching methods will be superior where tech is available, yet I insist, let's not forget and ignore the hidden and invisible people who still cannot afford the tech, who live far away, untaught, disconnected from modern life. Where nothing else is available, paper delivery is still possible. So let's not forget them.

For readers and writers

If you read and write, then you can help others to learn to read and write. Bless you and please help. Print this out, give us your contact details so we can check in after a while, share it with whoever might need it, and give them enough of an idea about how to learn that they can successfully use it to learn their letters and start to read and write on their own. Please help!

For speakers of unwritten languages

You surely cannot read this, but someone will translate and give you the message. This is for you, and I hope that you will become the fahter or mother of your people by being the first to write your language. For illiterate people whose language has a written form. This will help you too!

For Everyone

Just pass it on. Use it, come back to get more, and pass it on. We will ask some of you to survey literacy in the area so we can track if this is helping. And we hope everyone that this message reaches will become a teacher of reading and writing to everyone who doesn't already know. Be kind, be loving, be helpful: teach reading! With great love and great respect, Yours, Tom Veatch

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