Unifon

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Unifon is a phonemic orthography for English designed in the mid-1950s by Dr. John R. Malone, a Chicago economist and newspaper equipment consultant. It was developed into a teaching aid to help children acquire reading and writing skills. Like the pronunciation key in a dictionary, Unifon matches each of the sounds of spoken English with a single symbol.

Beginning before 1960 and continuing into the 1980s, Margaret S. Ratz used Unifon to teach first-graders at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. By the summer of 1960, the ABC-TV affiliate station in Chicago produced a 90-minute program in which Dr. Ratz taught three children how to read, in “17 hours with cookies and milk,” as Malone described it.

In a presentation to parents and teachers, Dr. Ratz said, “Some have called Unifon ‘training wheels for reading,’ and that’s what it really is. Unifon will be used for a few weeks, or perhaps a few months, but during this time your child will discover there is a great similarity between Unifon and what he sees on TV screens, in comics or road signs, and on cereal boxes. Soon he finds with amusement that he can read the ‘old people’s alphabet’ as easily as he can read and write in Unifon.”

Within two years, Unifon gained national attention. Hugh Downs featured a six-year-old student of Unifon on NBC’s Today Show.

By 1973, Dan Shuffman, who produced “17 Hours” in Chicago, had moved to CBS in New York City, where he revived the program. It formed part of a featured segment of “On the Road with Charles Kuralt” called “The Day They Changed the Alphabet.”

One person who saw this program was a former Jesuit priest and Harvard School of Education graduate, Dr. John M. Culkin. Dr. Culkin was a respected media scholar and a colleague of Marshall McLuhan. In 1974, he visited the Howalton Day School, a private school in inner-city Chicago that used Unifon to teach reading and writing to first-graders, and was inspired to write many articles about Unifon, in various periodicals.

Perhaps the most concise description of teaching Unifon is offered by Steve Bett, PhD, a linguist and former professor at The University of Texas at Austin. “Unifon uses a well tested teaching method that for some reason, is not widely used. It is the method that linguists usually use when teaching foreign languages, and almost all foreign languages (other than French and English) are highly phonemic. ... The kids memorize the 40 sound-symbol correspondences and start writing messages by stringing the sounds together. By the end of 3 months, they are code-literate and have achieved a high level of phonemic awareness in over half of the traditional writing system.”

[edit] The Unifon alphabet

Under a contract with the Bendix Corporation, Dr. John R. Malone created the alphabet as part of a larger project. When the International Air Transport Association selected English as the language of international airline communications in 1957, the market that Bendix had foreseen for Unifon ceased to exist, and Malone’s contract was terminated.

Unifon surfaced again when Malone’s son, then in kindergarten, complained that he couldn’t read yet. Malone recovered the alphabet to teach his son. A month later, the boy had taught his whole kindergarten class how to write to each other in their “secret code.” By the time they started first grade, they could read plain English. The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools used Unifon for a while.^{[citation needed]}

In 2000, a Unifon web site was formed as part of an English spelling reform ring. Various resources are now offered, free of charge, for anyone interested in learning or teaching Unifon. They include a growing inventory of flash cards, word lists, jokes, books, and other classroom aids.

As early as 1987, Unifon was considered as a superior substitute for ordinary English spelling. As of 2007, a few web sites feature Unifon, and it has found a niche in comics, manga, and science fiction stories as the alphabet of the future.^{[citation needed]}