Talk:Initial Teaching Alphabet

experiences ("t.o." = traditional orthography)
There needs to be more material on the I. T. A.'s effectiveness or lack of it. As I recall it was very controversial in its day. Parents couldn't understand it and kids had difficulty adjusting to the 'proper' alphabet when the time came. Lee M 23:53, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I was one of the lucky individuals to be able to benefit from the use of i.t.a., as were my four younger brothers. In the mid-sixties and early seventies, we were a part of a study to evaluate the use of i.t.a. All five of us were always above average students, have a much more in depth sense of the English language, have all graduated from a university, and have done very well. My parents had no difficulty assisting us with our homework, and we had no difficulty adjusting to the T.O.

My experience with ITA was not a very good one. After excelling in Kindergarten and 1st grade, our family moved to a different Elementary in the same school district. The first day of 2nd grade was horrific; the “Alphabet” above the blackboard was foreign to me. It was close to what I knew but had weird and different letters and combinations of letters. Everyone else knew this strange “Alphabet” but me. When I finally approached the teacher and told her that I didn’t understand the new “Alphabet”, she understood that I already knew the correct ABC’s. She then told me that she didn’t have the time to teach me separately and that we would get to the real Alphabet in a few months. The rest of the children thought I was mentally challenged and ridiculed me for the rest of the year. ITA was a failed experiment for myself and should be banned in English speaking countries. Lark22 (talk) 15:56, 24 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Are you serious? ITA was not your problem, your teacher was. ITA (or something similar) should be used everywhere and the "correct ABC" forgotten.--90.179.235.249 (talk) 13:46, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

2021

 * It's quite wrong to dismiss someone's lived experience like this. It doesn't matter if it was the system or the way the system was implemented, it still destroyed people's lives.SandrinaHatman (talk) 19:31, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

2017
I am also a product of I.T.A. which was taught at Cerritos Elementary in Cerritos, CA from 1969 to 1976. It was of no help to me. I.T.A. was a complete failure to me, compounded with the fact that I also turned out to have mild dyslexia, which I.T.A. only made worse, I ended up self teaching myself how to read in 8th grade when we moved to Irvine, CA. The Irvine Unified School District (IUSD) one of the top school districts in the Nation, it teaches the traditional way learning English. To this day, I have problems with spelling and grammar because of my early experience with I.T.A. I did go on to earn a BA at CSU Long Beach, but it was a big struggle for me when it came to writing term papers, essays, and reports. I do not believe that the way I was taught in Cerritos had anything to do with bad teaching. But making students guinea pigs in an experimental learning program should never have been allowed. I do believe that if I had not been exposed to I.T.A. in my early learning years, I would have had a more successful and productive life both educationally and professionally. Subjecting young minds to this teaching program can be more detrimental than helpful, especially because many young children have not been identified at that stage with potential learning issues. I.T.A may work well with a child who does not have learning issues, but for those that do have learning difficulties, such as myself, it can make the problem worse and the transition to standard English reading and writing is like trying to learn a whole other language. Grades and class participation take a nose dive do to the student having to start over again at ground zero when introduced to standard English after several years of learning the I.T.A. method. English is English. It should be taught in the traditional manner period. There should be no room for confusion, especially in the minds of young learners. - Former Instructional Assistant for eight years, Special Education Department (mild to moderate), high school level.--CoastKing (talk) 21:01, 14 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Some people had highly-positive experiences with I.T.A., but there were others who were not really helped by the greater phonemic nature of I.T.A. (as compared to standard spelling), and were troubled by having to deal with two different writing systems in their early school years... AnonMoos (talk) 13:45, 15 February 2017 (UTC)


 * P.S. I was exposed to the "color" method during my first grade (and maybe part of my second grade), and don't consider myself to have been a "guinea pig" at all... AnonMoos (talk) 13:48, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

2020
2020: My brother and I both were exposed to the ITA ("Insane Teaching Attempt") in the late 60s (Missoula, MT). My older brother, who already knew how to read, was forced to participate and essentially gave up on spelling for the rest of his life. I found it horribly complicated and illogical, and knowing that by the end of the 1st grade we would "graduate" to the real alphabet, had my mother teach me to read. By Thanksgiving I had proven to my teacher I could be moved to the "advanced" group of students. In the two years between when my brother had been part of the initial group and when I was exposed to it they had already learned that trying to force someone who already knew how to read to temporarily unlearn the real alphabet was a disaster. Within 5 years of implementing the ITA system they discontinued it; reading ability had gone down dramatically and it showed on test scores. Without doubt it was one a total disaster - parents hated it, had campaigned against it before it was implemented (only to be told they were stupid hicks and to listen to the "experts"), the students hated it, and, finally, the teachers hated it.

Pretty much the only thing worse is they way they "teach" math now. -- Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.19.228.194 (talk) 04:18, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

2021

 * ITA was abusive in my opinion. I joined school in UK able to read and write well, and was told to forget that and learn ITA. After 3 years of correcting my incorrect English (you know the stuff that is everywhere else in the world) they then said right it's time now to learn English! It was confusing, it had lasting ill effects on spelling and English confidence. We were the poor school and we were used as some sort of experimental animals. The kids at the rich primary didn't have to have this and they had 3 years advantage over us learning English. That then impacted on 11+ selection 3 years later because we still hadn't caught up. And that had a whole-life effect on our outcomes. I was the *only* child to pass 11+ out of 40 because one whole paper was on English. I was reading books from the library in real 'illegal' English and that's why I passed but so many of my contemporaries had their lives effectively destroyed by this. They lost confidence in their ability to read, were told they were dumb, failed their exam etc. Years later with an MA in English Language under my belt I worked for the adult literacy scheme in my county which was full of ex ITA learners who were functionally illiterate. I know first hand how ITA destroyed confidence and lives.SandrinaHatman (talk) 19:28, 6 March 2021 (UTC)


 * ITA was taught in one school in the education district I grew up in (Eastwood, just south of Glasgow, Scotland). Children who transferred to other schools had a really hard time adjusting, and were often placed in remedial classes, with all the stigma that came along with that. ITA didn't map well to Scots pronunciation, since it was based on RP. scruss (talk) 21:36, 27 March 2021 (UTC)


 * By the time it was expanded to 45 characters, it was based on a kind of compromise between RP and "General American", but you're right that it was not greatly influenced by Scottish English... AnonMoos (talk) 00:10, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

c versus k
Why does the ITA have distinct consonants for the c in cat and the k in key? Aren't they the same sound? http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ita.htm LGM&#5762; 16:44, 7 July 2006 (UTC)


 * It was intended to be a teaching/learning aid, not strictly phonetic. AnonMoos (talk) 13:51, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Characters
This article needs a picture of the characters of the ITA. -SpellcheckW7 (talk) 17:19, 10 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Done... AnonMoos (talk) 13:50, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Unicode
Seems there's no Unicode encoding of the special ITA characters at all... AnonMoos (talk) 12:33, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * There's no Unicode encoding for i.t.a yet. . Piaractus (talk) 18:27, 10 March 2017 (UTC)


 * That's a kind of meta-proposal to clear space for various possible things, one of which might be a (future) I.T.A. proposal... AnonMoos (talk) 03:10, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

If ITA will encoded, what about capital letters? Should they be encoded separately (as some sort of "reversed small caps" ("big smalls"))? 217.118.83.239 (talk) 21:34, 18 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Not sure what they'll do, but that sounds uneconomical to me... AnonMoos (talk) 19:16, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

order of characters in chart
The order in File:Initial_Teaching_Alphabet_ITA_chart.svg is not the official I.T.A. alphabet order, but is more useful for presenting the characters in four rows of eleven... AnonMoos (talk) 23:01, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Russian Wikipedia
There appears to be very intensive discussion of the I.T.A. on Russian Wikipedia at ru:Обсуждение_проекта:Графемы, but I'm not having much luck running it through Google Translate (which appears to have a somewhat different interface than when I last used it, several years ago). I'll try again in a few days on another computer which has the Chrome browser installed... AnonMoos (talk) 14:03, 5 December 2017 (UTC)


 * I managed to get it translated (the current version of Google Translate only really seems to work on Chrome, as far as I can tell), and I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the discussion, but it mainly seems to be about what the Russian translation of Unicode character names would be if Unicode covered the ITA... AnonMoos (talk) 15:46, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Arabic Wikipedia
There's now a translation of this article on Arabic Wikipedia, but it doesn't show the shapes of the I.T.A. letters, which is rather baffling... AnonMoos (talk) 21:06, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

ITA simulation
Here's a Wikipedia user's attempt to simulate the ITA with current Unicode characters. It doesn't belong on the article, but is fine here: AnonMoos (talk) 23:13, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

2024
This was recently re-added, but will not be useful in the article until actual Unicode characters for ITA are available. AnonMoos (talk) 19:09, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

"half-hook a"
This one's short and simple. Half hook a needs an image. I don't know how it looks like! I've tries looking it up, but to no avail. 89.114.75.97 (talk) 19:16, 17 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Sorry I didn't see your question before. I don't think the 45th letter was included in the John Downing book I relied on, and it's not included in the Lars Törnqvist font or the Unicode encoding proposal (22286), or the images of I.T.A. characters on Wikimedia Commons.  It was probably introduced as the I.T.A. was going out of use... AnonMoos (talk) 02:04, 14 March 2023 (UTC)


 * ill try:
 * _
 * ɑ GabeNugget (talk) 15:00, 26 September 2023 (UTC)
 * The font "pitmanita" is available to download, which I have done but since forgotten where. It has the half-hook a in it. Assorted-Interests (talk) 20:15, 18 March 2024 (UTC)


 * "Pitmanita Medium" is the Lars Törnqvist font, but the 2003 version which I used, and is available for example at, does not have the "half-hook a"... AnonMoos (talk) 19:05, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Here's the font I have which has the A in it: https://mega.nz/file/kGVjGZhb#s6_4B5NZcJHTnHc3oTHKtBwbc39mBJ5qeuD0YzSPzgs Assorted-Interests (talk) 22:43, 23 March 2024 (UTC)


 * The TTF file at that link is exactly the same as the one in the ZIP file downloadable from the other site. That site has elaborate documentation on the font (two PDF files in the ZIP and a GIF on the download page), none of which mentions or shows half-hook a, so I assumed it was not included in the font, but after your latest comment, I started poking around in the TTF file, and it turns out it's included as character 227 (small a with tilde diacritic).  (Slightly annoying, Lars...)  I extracted the shape as an SVG file, and I'll upload it to Commons within a few days, but it won't be included on the main I.T.A. chart (Initial Teaching Alphabet ITA chart.svg), and I'm not sure what would be the best way to include it on the article... AnonMoos (talk) 23:45, 26 March 2024 (UTC)