Talk:Old Unifon

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UNIFON is a phonemic alphabet developed by John R. Malone in the early 1950's on a contract from the Bendix Corporation. A phonemic writing system promised fewer spelling and teletype errors in aviation communications. In addition, the spelling system could be mastered by non-native speakers in about 3 months. Most transparent orthographies can be learned by speakers in 3 months or less. English does not have a shallow orthography so it takes much longer.

Image:Unifon chart SB.gif

When the International Air Transport Association selected English as the international airline communication, the particular market that Bendix had seen for Unifon ceased to exist.

Malone taught the code to his young son who taught it to his peers at his preschool. The University of Chicago Lab school picked up on the idea because the kids quickly became code literate and were using Unifon to write messages to each other. The kids went from Unifon to reading comic books. When the kids started the first grade, they were reading at a 3rd grade level. By learning and using a dictionary key based writing system, kids acquired a high level of phonemic awareness in a very short time. Becoming code literate helped them become literate in the traditional writing system.

Malone entered Unifon in the Shaw alphabet competition but since it ignored the requirement that the new alphabet be non-roman, it was disqualified.

For 23 upper case Roman letters, Unifon assigns the usual sound. Many of the 17 new characters were just modified sans-serif capitals of Latin alphabets. The most common modification was an embedded macron. (see graphics and tables at http://www.unifon.org and http://www.omniglot.com/writing/unifon.htm)

.HIR IZ U SIMÚLÁTUD EGZAMPUL UV ÚNIFON. (simulated display Unifon)

.hir iz u simYlAtud egzampul uv Ynifon. (keyboard map)

Although Unifon was made available to a number of schools in the late 1950's and early 1960's, it was overshadowed by another initial teaching alphabet, Pitman's Augmented Roman. This came to be known as the i/t/a and was supported with about $20 million in research grants in the US and the UK. Unifon had relatively little outside support.

To complicate matters Unifon was at odds with conventional wisdom. Most educators doubted that preschool children were ready for reading let alone writing. Once the kids learned the 40 sound signs for Unifon, they started writing.

The i/t/a allowed teachers to teach as they had always taught except their basal readers would now be transcribed into Pitman's augmented Roman. Children progressed through their transcribed readers twice as fast as their peers using traditional readers. However, in the 3rd year when students transitioned to traditional spelling, they lost most of their advantage. The i/t/a failed to accelerate conventional literacy.

While i/t/a students learned word-signs, 50% never overlearned the code. Half of the i/t/a/ trained students could not spell words that were not included in the controlled vocabulary of their readers. By contrast, all of the Unifon trained students could spell any word they could pronounce and pronounce any spelling by the 3rd month. They were code literate.

Although upper case Unifon did not resemble traditional spelling nearly as much as lower case i/t/a with its ligatured digraphs, children were still able to make the transition.

Downing had predicted that if the code was overlearned, the skills developed learning the simple orthography would transfer. The i/t/a failed to accelerate literacy because at least half of the students did not overlearn the code and because the teaching method used was designed to promote whole-word recognition. Students who learned that "show your shoes" was spelled "[sh][oe] ywr [sh][oo]z" had some unlearning to do. Simulated Unifon: $Ó Y3R $ÚZ. [edit]

External link

To see how "Show your shoes" would look in Unifon, cut and paste the text into the transliterator here [1]. You may also download the font.

Unifon students were focused on sequencing sound-signs and never overlearned very many word-signs. Once learned, word-signs are often difficult to unlearn.

Unifon teachers defined literacy as the ability to understand what you read as well as you would if the text was read to you.

As a symbol system, Unifon is probably no better than any other dictionary key. What made the program work was the writing to read approach. Once 40 paired associates were learned, the students could start using them to write messages. Some students picked up the code in 15 minutes. They were paired with the slow learners so at the end of the week, everyone was experiencing success in writing messages. Most of the learning was peer to peer. The teacher became a guide on the side and did little more than make copies of the student messages so they could be shared.

Some history:

Another acquaintance of Mr. Malone's was a producer for the local ABC TV affiliate in Chicago. In 1960 he was assigned the task of producing a summer show about what was happening in Chicago. Having heard of the success of Dr. Ratz at Principia College, he and Mr. Malone devised a bold and daring experiment. Dr. Ratz was put on the payroll of ABC TV in Chicago for three months during the summer of 1960. In front of live cameras, she would teach four pre-school children to read. Three of the children were entering first grade. The fourth was entering kindergarten. None of them could read when they began the program. Dr. Ratz proposed to teach for one hour a day for 17 days—as Mr. Malone describes it, “17 hours with cookies and milk.” After only 17 hours of instruction, on live TV, all four children could read third, fourth or fifth grade books in traditional spelling. Based on the success of her summer TV program, Dr. Ratz and John Malone were able to acquire grants from Ford Foundation, Western Publishing Company, Mott Foundation, Lilly Foundation and the federal government, among others. The funds were used to conduct Unifon projects in Indianapolis and Hammond, Indiana, in New Orleans, Louisiana, in Washington, DC, and at several locations in the Chicago area. The Hammond project was funded for a three-year period by a Title III grant under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Dr. Ratz spent the first year (1972) of the Hammond project training and preparing teachers in the effective use of Unifon, and making the teaching materials for the classrooms. (In the age before home computers, everything had to be done by hand.) In the second year, seven classrooms in three elementary schools started using Unifon to teach first graders to read. By March, most of the children in the room were reading regular books on their own. The third year the Hammond schools added another eight classrooms to the Unifon project. Comments from teachers involved in the Hammond project were uniformly positive. Children could write any word they could say. Some children would make the transition to traditional spelling before Thanksgiving. Children didn't feel frustrated. They were enthusiastic, and so were the teachers. What Dr. Ratz brought to this project and others was the fact that Unifon could be taught by anybody with the proper preparation. Dr. Ratz proved that anyone with proper preparation could teach using Unifon. The 17 hours with cookies and milk, aired on ABC Chicago in 1960, marked the beginning of the Unifon phenomenon. The producer of that program later moved to CBS, where he produced another program, “The Day They Changed the Alphabet,” a portion of which aired as a featured segment on the Charles Kuralt program “On the Road,” in 1973.

Unifon examples

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