Literacy tools for planet earth

The vision

The human brain is the most powerful pattern detector in the universe. Within a few short years it manages to master two very complex systems: verbal communication and the visual domain. Most children learn to speak any language they are exposed to and they learn to identify objects in their surroundings with ease. Literacy combines the verbal and visual skills. Writing is spoken language made visible. Literacy could very well be the most powerful tool mankind has ever invented.

SynPhony makes the acquisition of literacy skills as easy as possible by finding and displaying the patterns used for written language. But instead of exposing children to the full range of symbols used to represent their language, SynPhony introduces one symbol at a time and finds the words that match their reading ability. It finds the signal (the letter that is being taught) and removes the noise (all of the letters the student doesn't know yet).

The vision behind SynPhony is to provide both print and computer-based resources for everyone involved in teaching others to read. It is a platform for producing powerful applications to teach reading skills in any alphabetically written language on earth.

SynPhony is a search engine for literacy that can
match the words and texts of any language
to the reading ability of any student.

Demos

Want to try out SynPhony? Here are several instances of SynPhony in different languages. They contain the core functionality of creating word lists and checking texts, not all of the features available in the full program. Please read the description on how the word lists page and story checking page work before you try them out. Each link opens in a new tab.

1. Swahili (Tanzania, Kenya)
2. Wolof (Senegal)
3. Urdu (Pakistan)

What can the SynPhony demos do?

Create word lists

SynPhony loves to create word lists. But not just any old word lists. Each word in the list is selected based on the range of letters you control. (Read the description on how this feature works. You must choose either search mode 2 or 3 for this to work correctly!) SynPhony ensures that each selected word contains only those letters that have been taught already and the letter for the current lesson. At the same time it rejects any words which contain letters that have not been selected. This gives the teacher material that is suited to the reading level for each lesson. Each successive word list increases the range of letters one at a time. So the student needs to learn only one new symbol at a time.

“ The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed,
is to attempt but little at a time. ”
— Samuel Johnson, 1751.

Want to try a different sequence? Easy as … a few clicks. This can save you hours of time trying to find an optimal sequence for teaching the letters. The computer does the hard work of finding suitable words. This allows you to focus on the things only humans can do: design a curriculum. That's the way it should work. Now it does.

Restrict your word lists by syllable length at any time. Find the easiest words to read first—the short ones. Add, remove or mix shorter and longer words at will. The great thing is, the longer words are always composed of the same group of letters as the shorter words. Sort the list in a variety of ways: frequency of occurence in text, alphabetically, number of letters, randomly, alphabetically from the end of the word, or by the syllable shape of each word.

Help compose readable stories

SynPhony lets you check a sentence or a story to see how much of it is readable for each lesson. Readable words are coloured differently from those that are not readable. Edit the text until it is suitable for use in the current lesson.

You can also get detailed statistics on a sentence, paragraph or entire story. You can get charts of letter, syllable, and word frequencies, as well as average word and sentence length among many other metrics.

Contact Us

Please  to inquire about creating a version of SynPhony for your language.

If you are working in a minority language you may qualify for a free version of SynPhony. If that applies to you please provide details about your project. I am also available to provide training workshops for situations where it is needed.

Current Limitations

The program that imports your language data processes text as if it has a completely consistent orthography. Some languages, however, have varying degrees of inconsistencies between the symbols they use and the sounds they represent. If such inconsistencies exist in the language you wish to process it will take more time and work to analyze the data until it reflects actual pronunciation and spelling usage. If this applies to you, contact us for more information on what is involved in this process.

Guidelines for collecting data for SynPhony

• Collect or write stories that children can understand, especially young children, because we want to use words that young children will recognize when they learn to read.
• Quantity of text: the more the better. As a minimum we recommend to collect at least 1000 unique words. Aim to collect at least 20-50 pages of text. If more is available then send more. SynPhony can handle more than 30,000 unique words.
• Save each story as a separate file. If you have a collection of random non-connected sentences then these may be stored in a single file.
• Give each text or story a difficulty ranking. Eg: group “1” = easiest; group “2” = medium; group “3” = difficult; etc. The difficulty ranking should be indicated in the file name. Eg:
  

  “1 The little dog named Boo.txt”
  “1 The cat called Meeow.txt”
  “2 Mary goes to school.txt”, etc.
  

  One suggested rubric for ranking texts is to use grade levels. 1 is for Grade 1, 2 is for Grade 2, etc. The important thing is to distinguish easy texts from more difficult ones.
• Spell-check the stories before sending them. If no electronic spell checker exists for the language then have 1-2 people carefully read through all the stories to check for spelling. Please ensure that proper punctuation is used, especially for the end of each sentence. SynPhony uses sentence final punctuation to identify sentences.
• Files must be either in Word or text format (PDF is not a reliable or predictable format for extracting textual data). Do not use (or send) documents that contain a variety of text such as title page, table of contents, introductions, instructions to teachers, pictures, tables, page numbers, headers and footers, etc. You may copy sentences or stories from these documents that children are expected to read, but place them into another document.
• If the language uses special characters or uses a non-Roman script then the data must be encoded in UTF-8. The easiest way to test this is to change the font (for example, in Word). If you can change the font and the text is still readable then it is probably in UTF-8. If the text must use one particular font to be readable then it is using a “legacy font”. The data will have to be converted to UTF-8. This can be a time-consuming process and can cost more. To avoid this problem ensure that all people involved in data entry (typing of stories into the computer) use the same virtual keyboard that generates UTF-8 characters. If this applies to you and you are not sure if the data is in UTF-8 format please contact us for more information and send us some sample data.
• Create a separate document that categorizes all letters as either vowels or consonants, including all multigraphs. Specify only multigraphs that represent single sounds, not clusters of sounds or “blends”. For example, English multigraphs include: “th”, “ee”, “ou”, “sh”, etc. Separate each letter or multigraph with a space. This can be done in a table such as this:

  Spelling patterns used in this language	Vowels	Consonants
  Single characters
  Multigraph characters

• If diacritics are used please explain their meaning. For example, do they represent tone or stress or do they make distinctions between vowels? Do they only appear on certain letters?
• Orthography: If there is a published orthography description then please send it. If there is no established and accepted orthography then please describe the situation.
• For languages using the Arabic script ensure that all the words are written with all the vowels (since most texts have been written by and for fluent readers they can leave out some of the vowels). Since children must learn all the vowels our texts need to contain all the vowels. This may mean having to do extensive editing of existing stories, but this work must be done in order to make the stories usable for SynPhony and teaching early grade literacy.