Phonics Too Capitalizes on the Power of the Expanded Teaching Alphabet

What is the Expanded Teaching Alphabet  (ETA)?

The Expanded Teaching Alphabet is a phonetic alphabet which represents the 51general American speech sounds from which most of our words are made. Phonics Too also uses real letters and combinations of letters from the English alphabet to represent the sounds which children already know orally.

Why use ETA with beginning readers and readers who need to reinforce their decoding and encoding skills?

Children come to school knowing the  sounds of their language, and they are able to pronounce them. When children begin trying to understand the  correspondence between oral sound and written letters, over 800 spelling variations in English confront them.  ETA offers a way to reduce these variations in spelling for beginning readers.  This makes beginning reading much easier.

Exactly how does ETA make beginning reading easier?

ETA simply reduces the number of spelling variations confronting the child.  ETA methods, as used in Phonics Too, show these letter-represented sounds in common words which the children already know orally, just like they know the oral sounds themselves. Once the children recognize the written sounds in the lesson words, they can recognize the written sounds (letters) in other written words.  The growth of their written vocabulary is exponential just as the growth of their oral vocabulary was exponential during  a previous stage in their development.  Once the code is broken, children will always be readers. Through their writings (fully one sixth of Phonics Too is dedicated to composition), students make words from letters representing sounds.  They become encoders  who make letters and words from the inside to the outside--from their minds to the paper. They will always be writers. Learning the many variations in spelling becomes easy after students learn the secret of encoding and decoding using the ETA methods.

How does ETA differ from the phonetic systems used in most schools?

Most school reading programs base their phonetic systems on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).  IPA is an excellent phonetic system which can represent all the sounds of the languages of the world.  Its symbols and names are different from the symbols and names of the plain English alphabet.  What modern text books and the IPA system do with the scope and sequence of all that children need to know is extremely useful. For beginning readers and writers, ETA should be your tool of choice.  ETA and IPA are complementary in schools and homes where all children become effective and enthusiastic readers.

What are the letters and combination of letters used by ETA to represent the oral sounds, and what are the lesson words used to represent these sound letter correspondences?

By the  37th and final Phonics Too lesson, all of the sounds are on the Tree of Sounds and all of the words are in the completed Word Wall. By this lesson the children have mastered each of the letters and their corresponding sounds.  Most should be capable of reading and writing hundreds, if not thousands of  words.