Most of the parents have learnt the alphabet in a non-phonetic way and wonder why we are stressing so much on phonics. To bridge this gap we had a phonics workshop where kids and parents were guided through the process of understanding phonics.
Our belief is that when kids are taught phonics early, they will be able to spell better as they grow older.
Let us start with a simple exercise: Try to read the following images.
In Telugu
In Hindi
In English
99.99% of us would have pronounced the first two as ‘seate’ and the last one as ‘/kæt/’. If English was a phonetic language all the above three images would have been pronounced in the same way.
English(Phonetic Script)
English is a non-phonetic language where the written alphabet is not pronounced as individual alphabets ‘C’ is pronounced as ‘K’ in ‘Cat’. Whereas Telugu, Hindi, German are phonetic languages where we exactly pronounce what is written. When a student with a native phonetic mother tongue learns English he is perplexed with questions such as why is ‘C’ is pronounced as ‘K’ in ‘Cat’ while it pronounced as ‘S’ in ‘Ice’. That is why teaching the alphabet in phonetics helps young children learn the spelling and not memorize it. A lot of children and adults still make spelling mistakes because they forget some spellings, but when taught phonetics they rarely make these mistakes as there is no memorization involved.