BAN, BAN, BAN THOSE BOOKS

If I had my way, I’d ban alphabet books for all pre-schoolers.  Ideally no child should see an alphabet book until it’s at least eight years old and had learnt to write and read. And as for the Alphabet Song!!  Grrrr! But we’ll come to that later.

“Why on earth?”  I hear you say. Or are you quietly thinking to yourself, “Poor thing, she’s finally lost it”? Or (somewhat more kindly) “Years and years of teaching small children has got to her.  Stress, you know.”

Au contraire. It’s the years and years of teaching all those children who came to school singing the Alphabet Song; minds stuffed full of alphabet books with their pages and pages of pretty pics; confident of their ability to master all this reading and writing stuff…  Then they get as confused as all get up.

Confused? you say. How come? Isn’t the alphabet the basis of our written language? Yes indeed – but only in a way.

You see the letters of the alphabet are symbols; mere squiggles if you like; that we use to represent the sounds of our spoken language. It’s a code, but sadly, not a straight-forward one for a number of reasons.

Aeons ago, when mankind first sought a way to record information that did not rely on memory (and therefore personal contact) they drew pictures on whatever came to hand using whatever they had that worked. Over time the pictures became stylised until eventually some bright spark got fed up with the labour involved in learning the meaning of thousands of picture-symbols. Whoever it was, they were obviously a radical and an original thinker with particularly good hearing ability in the way of auditory discrimination.  He/she realised that it was only a small number of different sounds that were put together in a myriad of diverse ways to make up all the words used by his/her community.

Yes, I know – a flight of fancy. We’ll never really know for sure how it happened, and I seriously doubt if it was that simple. Rather than a single bright spark, I’m sure it was more a process of refinement over dozens of decades with contributions from many as well as adoption by neighbours who adjusted, adapted, added to, subtracted from… to suit their own situation and language.

And this is still happening today – we add words; we invent new ones; we drop ones we see as no longer useful, pretentious, or “bad” or we change the meaning…  When I was young and went to a beaut party where I’d had a lot of good, clean fun with laughter, friends, food (really yummy food, that is!) I usually reported that “We’d had a gay old time.”  No longer would I dream of saying such a thing. Back in Elizabethan times (the Francis Drake/Walter Raleigh ones, that is) “nice” was a far from complimentary word. Only two, of but many examples.

Anyway, back to my entry point: banning books for babies (alphabet books, that is), if you’ll remember.

Rather than learning the alphabet, it is much more important for little children to learn to differentiate the sounds we use to make up the words we use to communicate with others. Once they can do that, it is an easy matter to learn an appropriate symbol (squiggle!) to match each one. At which point they can write. And reading will follow on. Simple.

Sadly, not so simple because our alphabet is full of glitchy bits: some letters can be used for more than one sound; several letters are used for the same sound; some letters in some words do not represent any sound at all (blame history for that one because they once did). Additionally, we don’t have enough letters to represent all the sounds we use so we solve that problem by putting two together (e.g.: ch/sh/th).

Another problem with these books for babies is that they always partner the two forms of the same letter (upper case/lower case) side by side along with the picture it “illustrates”.  This gives the impression that the two forms of that letter are interchangeable which is not so – not at all.  Capitals (upper case) should only ever be used when there is extra information to be conveyed.

You’ll notice I put “illustrates” in quotes.  This is because one of my pet hates is that so many pictures have little connection with the actual beginning sound of the letter they are meant to represent.  To use egg/ostrich/cat is OK.  But eagle or eight/owl or orchestra/ chair or centipede is quite definitely NOT.  Books using such as these are concentrating on the names of the letters and letter names are no help at all when learning to write and read.  They are more a source of confusion and, therefore, frustration. 

Reciting the alphabet, singing the song (which means we’ve learned the names of the letters in a particular order) is a handy skill but one we only need when called upon to search for information in written material arranged alphabetically – which no child will need to do until it is able to read competently.  To make things worse, the middle bit of the Alphabet Song gets run together, coming out as a single word (elemenopee) so many children think of it as needing only one single letter to represent it.  Which is very confusing for them.

To wind up: my biggest hate of all; my absolute bete noir?  Alphabet books that have come to us from the USA.  The reason: over there what we on this side of the Pacific call a ‘bucket’ they refer to as a “pail”. Which, because a small child’s vision often does not fully stabilise until seven or eight years of age, can lead to awful confusion between p and b for our littlies. This lack of stabilisation can take the form of visual reversals, both side to side or top to bottom, resulting in, for instance, ‘was’ for ‘saw’ or ‘p’ for ‘b’ (or vice versa).  

So: “Down With Alphabet Books” I say.

© Mary McDee 2024

Feature Photo: Those Alphabet Books © A. MacDonald 2024