Dear Parent-Colleagues,
I have been thinking about using IPA to teach our DD phonics via a whole-word method. She’s only about 1wk old now, but I’m planning for a few months ahead.
IPA is basically the academic linguists’ standardized version of the pronunciation keys you see in dictionaries, etc. In addition to academic use, many “English as a Foreign Language” textbooks use IPA to shift students toward a desired accent. It also has “widespread use among classical [opera etc.] singers for preparation.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Classical_singing
There are now websites that will auto-convert English text to IPA, and they do a pretty good job. My favorite is Lingorado, which claims to do American and “British” accents. I think I can read enough IPA to feel comfortable that it’s doing a good job with the American accent.
http://lingorado.com/ipa/
I am considering taking our word-list and dumping it into Lingorado, and using that to make the cards. Maybe we could include IPA script to replace one out of the 3 reps/day/word in a typical schedule. Or maybe we could do one set of 5 IPA words just two times per day, with two words swapped in/out per day. This could be done either with LR’s great customization systems, or with regular cardstock.
I imagine that a whole-word system like this might possibly pre-empt the necessity for teaching phonics directly?
Do any parents on the forum have experience with designing infant flashcard curricula for alternate scripts of the same language? In general? Like a Hindi-speaking family teaching a child both Devanagari and Urdu scripts, for example? I’m also considering doing a similar process with Gregg Shorthand.
FYI, here are some links to a parent of some older homeschoolers who is teaching them Gregg Notehand (a style of shorthand). I think there might be something awesome lurking in the idea of using EL to teach shorthand…
http://greggshorthand.blogspot.com/2015/09/shorthand-in-homeschool-curriculum.html
http://greggshorthand.blogspot.com/2015/09/notehand-dictionary.html?showComment=1441578366852
Cheers,
Steven