Initial Teaching Alphabet

Based on Wikipedia: Initial Teaching Alphabet

The Alphabet That Was Supposed to Save English

Imagine walking into an elementary school classroom in 1960s England and seeing children reading books that look almost, but not quite, like English. The words are recognizable. The sentences make sense. But the letters themselves are strange—some joined together in unfamiliar ways, others reversed or adorned with hooks and loops. This wasn't a foreign language. It was English, written in a special alphabet designed to do something that had frustrated educators for centuries: make English spelling actually make sense.

This was the Initial Teaching Alphabet, usually called ITA or sometimes written in its own playful lowercase style as i.t.a. It represented one of the most ambitious attempts in educational history to solve a fundamental problem: English is absurdly difficult to learn to read.

The Problem With English

Consider for a moment how strange English spelling actually is. The same letters make completely different sounds depending on which word they appear in. Think about the letter combination "ough"—it sounds different in "through," "though," "thought," "tough," "cough," and "bough." That's six different pronunciations for the exact same four letters.

Or take the letter "c." Sometimes it sounds like a "k," as in "cat." Other times it sounds like an "s," as in "city." There's no reliable way for a beginning reader to know which sound to make just by looking at the word.

This isn't accidental. English absorbed vocabulary from Latin, French, Greek, Norse, and dozens of other languages over the centuries, often keeping the original spellings while the pronunciations shifted. The result is a writing system that linguists politely call "deep orthography"—meaning there's no simple relationship between letters and sounds. Less politely, you might call it a mess.

Languages with "shallow orthography" are much easier. In Finnish or Italian, for instance, each letter almost always represents the same sound. A child learning Italian can sound out almost any word correctly once they've memorized the alphabet. An English-speaking child faces years of memorizing exceptions and irregularities.

Sir James Pitman's Radical Solution

James Pitman came from a family obsessed with making English easier to write. His grandfather, Isaac Pitman, had invented a famous system of shorthand—a way of writing rapidly using simplified symbols—that's still used today. The younger Pitman turned his attention to a different problem: not faster writing, but easier reading.

In the early 1960s, Pitman developed what he called the Initial Teaching Alphabet. The name reveals the key insight: this wasn't meant to replace English spelling permanently. It was a stepping stone. Children would learn to read using ITA's simplified, consistent system, build their reading confidence and skills, and then transition to regular English spelling once they were fluent readers.

The alphabet started with forty-three symbols, eventually growing to forty-five. Each symbol represented one sound. No more guessing whether "c" sounds like "k" or "s"—ITA used different symbols for different sounds. The confusing "ough" combinations disappeared, replaced by simple, predictable letters.

A Tour of the Alphabet

Some ITA letters looked familiar. The basic consonants like "b," "d," "m," and "n" remained largely unchanged. But others were strange and wonderful inventions.

Take the two "th" sounds in English. In "thin," the "th" is voiceless—you don't vibrate your vocal cords when you make it. In "this," the "th" is voiced—you can feel your throat humming. English uses the same two letters for both sounds, leaving readers to guess. ITA created two distinct symbols, one for each sound.

There was a special symbol that looked something like an "ng" merged together, resembling the phonetic symbol "ŋ" with an added loop. This handled the sound at the end of words like "singing" without ambiguity.

The vowels got particularly creative treatment. English long vowels—the sounds in "bee," "bay," "bye," "bow," and "boo"—were written as ligatures, where two letter forms joined together into single symbols. These looked elegant on the page and made it immediately clear which vowel sound was intended.

One clever feature addressed dialect differences. The forty-fourth symbol handled the "r" sound at the end of syllables. In some accents—like most British English—this "r" is silent. You pronounce "father" as "fathuh." But in American English and Scottish English, you clearly sound the "r." By having a special symbol for this syllable-ending "r," ITA could work for students regardless of their accent.

The Curious Case of the Backwards Z

English has a peculiar habit of using the letter "s" to represent the "z" sound. Think about plurals: "cats" ends with an "s" sound, but "dogs" ends with a "z" sound. We write them the same way, which is confusing for beginning readers.

ITA solved this with a backwards "z"—a symbol that looked something like a mirror image of the letter, or perhaps an angular form of "s." Every time standard English uses "s" but pronounces it as "z," ITA used this backwards letter. The word "is" used it. So did "dogs" and "runs" and countless other common words.

Each ITA letter had a name that demonstrated its sound. The backwards z was called "zess," making its pronunciation unmistakable.

No Capital Letters, but Bigger Ones

The designers of ITA made an interesting typography decision: there were no capital letters. Instead of learning two forms of each letter—uppercase and lowercase, like A and a—children only learned one. When English would use a capital letter, ITA simply used a larger version of the same lowercase symbol.

This cut the number of letter shapes children had to memorize roughly in half. The typeface was specially designed, based on clear, readable fonts like Century Schoolbook. One notable touch: the letter "d" was made more distinctively different from "b" than usual, since confusing these mirror-image letters is a classic struggle for beginning readers.

The Schwa Problem

Linguists have a name for that lazy, unclear vowel sound that appears in unstressed syllables: the schwa. It sounds like "uh" and appears everywhere in English. The second syllable of "sofa." The first syllable of "about." The last syllable of "letter."

In the International Phonetic Alphabet—the universal system linguists use to represent sounds—the schwa has its own symbol: an upside-down "e." But ITA didn't create a special symbol for it. Instead, it wrote schwa sounds using the same letters as the full vowels they resembled.

This was a deliberate compromise. Pitman's team wanted ITA to look as much like regular English as possible, making the eventual transition easier. Creating too many unfamiliar symbols would solve one problem while creating another. So they accepted some inconsistency in exchange for familiarity.

The Dance and Father Dilemma

The forty-fifth and final symbol added to ITA addressed a peculiar split in English pronunciation. Consider words like "dance," "rather," and "half." In American English, these use the same vowel sound as "cat"—linguists call this the "trap" vowel. But in British Received Pronunciation, they use the longer vowel sound of "father"—the "palm" vowel.

Which pronunciation should ITA represent? If you wrote these words with the "cat" vowel symbol, British children would learn incorrect associations. If you wrote them with the "father" vowel symbol, American children would be confused.

The solution was the "half-hook a"—a character halfway between the two vowel symbols. This meant the same ITA books could be used on both sides of the Atlantic without requiring separate editions. It was an elegant diplomatic solution to a problem that only exists because of the strange evolution of English pronunciation over the past few centuries.

The Rise: A Revolutionary Moment in Education

In 1959, James Pitman—now a Conservative Member of Parliament—began promoting ITA through the British political system. The idea caught fire with remarkable speed.

By 1966, an astonishing 140 out of 158 education authorities in the United Kingdom were teaching ITA in at least one of their schools. That's nearly ninety percent of the country's school districts participating in what was essentially a nationwide educational experiment. Australia, New Zealand, and other English-speaking countries also adopted it.

The University of London and the National Foundation for Educational Research launched a six-year investigation. Early results looked promising. Children learning with ITA seemed to progress faster in the initial stages of reading. They gained confidence. They enjoyed reading more. Teachers reported fewer struggling students.

Research from Pittsburgh public schools in 1966 showed "superior achievement" for first-graders taught with ITA. The alphabet appeared to be doing exactly what it promised: removing the obstacles that made English reading so frustrating.

International conferences on ITA were held, with the fourth gathering in Montreal in 1967. For a brief moment, it seemed like this peculiar alphabet might actually revolutionize how English-speaking children learned to read.

The Fall: Why It Didn't Work

But there was a problem. Actually, there were several problems.

The most obvious one emerged when children tried to transition from ITA to regular English. Some made the switch smoothly. Others struggled terribly. Having learned to read with one set of symbols, they found it genuinely confusing to encounter a completely different system. It was as if someone had told them, "Good news! You've learned French. Now forget all that and learn Spanish instead."

A 1974 study of students in grades three through five in rural New York found no significant difference in spelling ability between children who had learned with ITA and those who hadn't. The researchers concluded that "little would be gained from teaching patterns of sound-to-symbol generalizations." The supposed advantages in early grades had evaporated by the time children were eight or nine years old.

Some adults who had been taught with ITA as children remained poor spellers throughout their lives. They blamed ITA for their difficulties. The simplified alphabet that was supposed to help them had, in their view, sabotaged their relationship with standard English.

There was also a practical problem. ITA required special books, special materials, special training for teachers. It was expensive. And if a child moved to a different school that didn't use ITA, they might suddenly find themselves unable to read anything in their new classroom.

The Pendulum Swings

Something else was happening in the 1960s and 1970s: educational theory was shifting away from phonics entirely.

Phonics is the approach to reading instruction that focuses on the relationship between letters and sounds. You learn that "c" makes a certain sound, "a" makes another sound, and together "ca" makes a predictable combination. ITA was deeply connected to this approach—in fact, it was essentially phonics taken to its logical extreme, with every sound getting its own dedicated letter.

But a competing theory called "whole language" was gaining influence. This approach argued that children should learn to read by recognizing entire words as meaningful units, not by sounding out letters. Reading should be natural and intuitive, like learning to speak. Children should be immersed in real books and stories, not drilled on letter-sound correspondences.

As whole language rose, phonics fell from favor. And ITA, associated as it was with phonics, fell along with it.

By the end of the 1970s, ITA had essentially disappeared from schools. It was never formally discontinued—there was no moment when authorities announced "we're stopping this." It just quietly faded away, replaced by other methods and other priorities.

Alternative Approaches

Some educators found middle-ground solutions that captured ITA's benefits without its drawbacks. One clever approach used colors rather than special symbols.

In systems like "Words in Colour" and "Colour Story Reading," the regular English alphabet was used—but letters were printed in different colors depending on their sounds. When "c" makes a "k" sound, it might be blue; when it makes an "s" sound, it might be red. The letter "s" making an "s" sound would also be red, showing the connection.

This meant children could read regular English books, without any transition period. They weren't learning a whole new alphabet. They were just getting extra visual cues that would gradually become unnecessary as they internalized the patterns.

The Professional Judgment

Looking back from the twenty-first century, educational researchers are not kind to ITA.

Rhona Stainthorp, a professor of literacy at the University of Reading, called it "a perfect example of someone thinking they've got a good idea and trying to simplify something, but having absolutely no idea about teaching." That's a damning assessment—the suggestion that Pitman, for all his good intentions, fundamentally misunderstood what made reading difficult.

Dominic Wyse of University College London, who led a major 2022 study on teaching children to read, considers ITA "an experiment that didn't work." The difficulty in transitioning to the standard alphabet was too great. The promised benefits didn't last. The practical challenges were insurmountable.

Interestingly, Wyse's study also criticized the British government's current mandated approach—synthetic phonics—arguing that decisions about reading instruction should be left to teachers' professional judgment rather than imposed from above. The echo of the ITA debate is clear: top-down educational reforms, even well-intentioned ones, often fail to account for the complex realities of actual classrooms.

What We Learned

The ITA experiment, for all its failure, taught us something important about the nature of learning and language.

English spelling is genuinely difficult. That's not a myth. Children learning to read English face a harder task than children learning Italian or Finnish. The irregularities are real, the exceptions are countless, and the frustration is legitimate.

But the solution isn't necessarily to create an artificial intermediate system. The transition problem—moving from the simplified system to the real one—may simply relocate the difficulty rather than eliminate it. You're not making reading easier; you're just postponing when it becomes hard.

There's also a lesson about educational experiments in general. ITA spread remarkably fast, adopted by nearly ninety percent of British education authorities in just a few years. But the research on long-term outcomes wasn't complete when these decisions were made. Everyone was excited about early results—faster initial progress, more confident young readers—without fully understanding what would happen later.

A Lasting Legacy

Despite its failure as a teaching method, ITA remains relevant in one ongoing debate: should English spelling be reformed?

The arguments haven't changed much since Pitman's grandfather's day. English spelling wastes time, causes confusion, creates unnecessary barriers to literacy. Other languages reformed their spelling—German did it in 1996, Dutch has updated its spelling rules multiple times—so why can't English?

The counterarguments are equally familiar. Spelling reform would make all existing books and documents obsolete. Different English dialects pronounce words differently, so whose pronunciation would the new spelling represent? And there's something to be said for the way English spelling preserves the history of words, showing their origins and connections.

Some enthusiasts have tried to create versions of ITA using only standard keyboard characters, avoiding the special symbols that required special typewriters and printing equipment. These efforts continue into the internet age, where typing special characters remains awkward.

The Children Who Remember

Scattered across Britain and other English-speaking countries are adults in their sixties and seventies who learned to read with ITA. Some remember it fondly. They recall the satisfaction of a writing system that actually made sense, where sounds and letters matched up reliably.

Others remember only confusion. Two alphabets competing in their minds. The frustration of being good at reading in school but lost when confronted with a street sign or a birthday card or a comic book.

And some don't remember it at all—it was just how they learned to read, a detail of childhood education that faded into the background like finger painting or nap time.

The ITA was, in the end, a beautiful idea that didn't survive contact with reality. It assumed that the hard part of learning to read was the irregular spelling system, and that fixing the spelling would fix the problem. But learning to read is more complicated than that. It involves memory and pattern recognition and cultural immersion and a thousand other factors that no simplified alphabet could address.

Still, there's something admirable about the attempt. James Pitman saw children struggling and wanted to help them. He applied logic and design to create a more rational system. He convinced a nation to try something new.

It didn't work. But the next idea—or the one after that—might.