Since the original inception of the OpenWay approach to teaching children how to more easily learn to read English, an approach integrating the method with digital devices, using games, was developed to facilitate learning. Children increasingly use digital devices such as cellular phones or tablet computers to play games or for other uses. This interest can also be directed toward learning to read their native language, English — which is difficult due to its irregular spelling.
Literacy levels in the US, in particular, continue to decline. This article from Forbes explains that literacy levels are lower than ever. The need for addressing literacy problems has never been more urgent. Just as pinyin was used in China to provide a phonetic bridge to written language, resulting in a dramatic increase in literacy from around 20% in the 1950s to over 95% today, we believe OpenWayEnglish can offer a similarly transformative scaffold for English learners — especially in their early years.
Expanding the range of color signals necessitated using bicolors, as single colors were not enough, or were too similar to be easily distinguished. To account for this, to be able to properly signal more extensive vocabulary, we developed an expanded use of colors. First, we needed to increase our color range, so bicolors were created for this purpose, as too many single colors were hard to recognize when just shades of a primary color. We developed an automatic transcribing site that automatically colorizes vowels and irregular consonants. As a result of these developments, there are now the beginnings of game development for young children to use digital devices to more easily learn to read English.
The project is to use this method combined with text with a variety of games. Below are some examples of how this would work:
1. A matching game in which four phonemes are practiced with simple phrases. In this variation, only colors and their matching sounds are practiced.
2. Bouncing balls game in which the phonemes are chosen by grouping with three or more same colored balls. When the balls are all removed, an image appears in which each appropriately colored ball is dragged into the right place
3. A song game, in which the order of target phonemes is practiced
4. Phoneme pop, a simple game in balls are removed by grouping them
5. Phoneme game index, a site with sample text at the start and then a variety of basic game structures to help children learn to read the target vocabulary. These are not finished games and at present they are not associated with the text in the reading section. However, one can see here that games can be produced in various ways to help children navigate the difficult process of reading English, in which irregular spelling patterns are not the exception, but the rule.