Introduction

This BetterThanaBook.org website contains a library of literary works (novels, poetry, drama and non-fiction) which are encoded into BetterThanaBook Enhanced Text© - a rich interactive multi-media form of text which uses sound, color and other aids to help people learn the phonic rules of the English Language while they read. (This site is still under construction so features that are not yet available are greyed out.)

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History of BetterThanaBook Enhanced Text©

BetterThanaBook Enhanced Text© was developed in Australia by leading educator Chris Brooks to make it easy for people to learn the letter-sound relationships of the English Language (otherwise known as the phonic rules).

Sound

  • The sound of each letter or letter-group can be heard by clicking on it.
  • The sounds in a syllable can be heard by clicking on the syllable marker.
  • The sounds in the whole word can be heard by clicking on the space after the word.
  • The accent of the person saying the sounds can be changed.
  • Selected passages have been recorded - click on the Speaker icon to hear the audio  

Color Codes

  • The color-coding system used in BetterThanaBook Enhanced Text© enables readers to become familiar with the phonic rules.
  • The colors are interactive so they can be turned off when they are no longer needed.
  • The color gold is used to mark letters that do not follow the standard rules of English. Clicking on a gold letter plays its sound and displays a re-spelt version of the word.

Syllables

Syllables are small puffs of air. On a physical level we talk in syllables rather than words. An understanding of which sounds are in each syllable greatly aids the decoding of unfamiliar words. BetterThanaBook Enhanced Text© gives readers the opportunity to display syllable markers if they wish.

The Sound-Letter Code of the English Language

We say the million or so words in English using different combinations of just 44 different speech sounds.

We use 26 letters to write down all the words we say in English. There is a code - the phonic code - which represents the 44 speech sounds by various combinations of the 26 letters. BetterThanaBook Enhanced Text© has been designed to enable readers recognise and learn the phonic code of English as they read.

The phonic rules for the English Language are made more complicated because the coding of sounds to letters is not entirely consistent - there is more than one way to spell some sounds; and some letters (and group of letters) can represent a variety of sounds.

The Modern English Language that we speak today is about 500 years old. It is primarily descended from the ancient versions of five languages - Latin, Greek, German, French and Norse. Consistent spelling rules for English only became established in the last 300 years or so. When these rules were being determined it was decided to spell words to reflect their language of origin - hence the problems with the consistency of the code already mentioned.