Introduction to

QikitLiit

Our children’s reading and learning weakness is directly related to our complex spelling system. It’s particularly stressful for kids who may get behind and have little support at home. It slows their learning and hinders them through life.

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The first step in prevention should come from parents. They should read to their young children regularly to develop a culture of books and reading. The second step is to provide a simple and consistent spelling system that doesn’t have 900 unreliable rules for spelling. Consistency with phonics soon leads to intuitive spelling and sounding out words.

Once the child can read confidently with phonics, they can gradually start reading non phonetic words.

Parents are crucial to the effort. Educators must find a way to get parents or other family members involved in reading to children and helping them learn the alphabet.

“A study which investigated how long pupils in 13 European countries needed for rudimentary literacy acquisition found that English-speaking ones took an average of two and half years, while speakers of the other 12 languages became fluent in three to 12 months.”

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Most parents aren’t fully aware of the complexity of spelling for new learners.

Here are 112 different ways of spelling the same sound: from Masha Bell of England

3 ways of spelling the (ch) sound: Chat, picture, clutch.
Qikit simply uses (ch)

6 ways for the (oo) sound: blue, shoe, flew, through, two, to.
Qikit simply uses (oo).

6 ways for the (au) sound: sauce, caught, bought, always, crawl, hot.
Qikit simply uses (o).

7 ways for the (air) sound: air, care, bear, aerial, their, there, questionnaire.
Qikit simply uses (air).

7 ways for the (k) sound: character, kangaroo, queue, clap, stomach, neck, cheque.
Qikit simply uses (c or k).

8 ways for the (e) sound: End, head, any, said, Wednesday, friend, leopard, bury.
Qikit simply uses (e).

9 ways for the (ou) sound: out, soul, soup, touch, could, four, journal, cough, famous.
Qikit simply uses (ou).

15 ways for the (ay) sound: plate, wait, great, vein, reign, table, dahlia, champagne, fete, play, they, weigh, ballet, café, matinee.
Qikit simply uses (aa).

16 ways for the (ee) sound: Eel, eat, even, ceiling, field, police, people, me, key, ski, debris, quay, jolly, trolley, movie, corgi.
Qikit simply uses (ee or y).

17 ways of spelling the (eye) sound: bite, might, style, kind, eider, height, climb, island, indict, sign, my, high, pie, rye, buy, I, eye.
Qikit simply uses (ii or I).

And, 18 ways of spelling the (x) sound: sax, doxxing, forecastle, accent, tachs, backs, sacques, sacs, eczema, burkes, yaks, caulks, toques, excel, axe, exsert, exscind, coxswain.
Qikit simply uses (x).

The above spellings take a lot of extra time to learn. If children need to learn the 16 ways to spell the ee sound, they also need to know which words each ee spelling applies to.

Learning the above spellings will take a long time, so that takes away from other learning in those important early years. Don’t waste those years with confusion.

Try our translator on your phone or desktop to see the ease of use. It is a lifelong support tool for pronunciation and spelling.

Qikit Liit Translator

The following websites provide a compelling story of people not able to read even at a grade 6 level.

Literacy in Canada by Donald G Jamieson, PhD

What’s at Stake?

“More American children suffer long-term life-harm as a consequence of reading difficulties than from parental abuse, accidents, and all other childhood diseases and disorders combined.  In purely economic terms, reading related difficulties cost more than the war on terrorism, crime, and drugs combined.”

Children, ESL, and dyslexic’s first introduction to spelling should be consistent and intuitive so they develop confidence instead of indecision.

For spelling to be intuitive each sound must be represented by a consistent letter or letters, so that when the child thinks of a sound, they quickly identify a correlating letter, and conversely when they see the letter, the sound is identified without confusion. It will provide clarity before the child is struggling. It is much more difficult to correct after the child gets behind.

Reading is the most important learning tool that people have through life, and writing should not be troublesome. Qikit Liit provides a soft introduction to written words and takes away the confusion for new learners. It will serve as a base to rely on through life. The Qikit alphabet uses our 26 letters for 26 sounds, and it also uses consistent multiple letters for the other 17 sounds.

In the following interview David Boulton explains the complexity for children.
https://childrenofthecode.org/interviews/fisher.htm

In the following interview David Boulton explains the complexity for children.

Alphabet Wasn't Created For English

David Boulton:

But today the struggle that our children face in learning to read is that there’s a lot of, at least as perceived by them, confusion, and ambiguity in the relationship between letters and sounds.

John Fisher:

Because the alphabet wasn’t created for English.

David Boulton:

If we step back from the history for a moment and we just look at it in terms of code processing, the challenge that children are faced with today is a challenge that the human brain never really experienced before, which is to read in these code elements and rather than being able to immediately express them as sounds, having to, in computer terms buffer them, hold onto them, and instead of reading being something that can be totally produced in response to the code, the code now has to be interpreted by processing what the reader has already comprehended as well as the spelling and phonical rules that evolved to try to correct for this confusion.

John Fisher:

Yes.

David Boulton:

And that is an incredibly complex technological brain process that four- and five-year-old children are struggling to learn and it’s all but fating their lives. We have researched both Benjamin Franklin’s work, Noah Webster’s work, Melville Dewey, the whole simplified spelling thing that had Darwin and Mark Twain and Bernard Shaw and the work by Alexander Bell’s father.
So many people have tried to address this problem and always hit their head against the wall when it came to the institution saying, ‘look we’re not going to change our libraries because some kids are having trouble reading’. End quote.

Difficulty doesn’t mean we should give up. We can temper “an incredibly complex technological brain process” with the Qikit alphabet for young students. They will read fluently when spelling is consistent. They don’t need to know the exact spelling of troubling words until later grades.

One spoken language with supplemental spelling is not new; it has been practiced in China for 60 years very successfully. Children in China learn Pinyin first and use characters when appropriate. Road signs in China are in both spellings. Pinyin reduced illiteracy from 85% to 5%.

There are many philosophies, but Qikit is a solution.

Learn to read & read to learn.

Literacy, a 5-step process.

    1. Parents reading to children.
    2. Learn a consistent phonetic alphabet (Qikitliit.ca).
    3. Learn to read and write phonetically.
    4. Slowly transition to traditional spelling.
    5. Don’t correct for spelling until grade 7.