Why Don’t Food and Good Rhyme?

By Tim Slavin / Notebook / August 2021 Issue

English is a difficult quirky language to learn. Noah Text patterns help people learn English more easily.

Do you know what country the English word piano comes from? Italy. How about the English word garage? The French language.

The English language is an amazing mix of words from many languages. This makes the language confusing to learn to read, for example, the different pronunciations of related words like heal and health or nation and nationality. The letter A also has at least five possible sounds, such as apple, safe, acorn, alive, and wash.

This mix of words makes English a very expressive tool to describe the world. However, it makes learning English unpredictable for readers who memorize the sound and meaning of words. And readers who are dyslexic — who struggle to decode letters and words as they read — for them English is so hard they may give up reading.

Noah Text is a specialized text that highlights critical word patterns. These patterns include linguistic rimes and long vowels in early readers with one-syllable words such as, -al in pal, -ate in late, and -ight in night, as well as syllables and long vowels in more advanced texts such as calculate and highlight. A rime is a linguistic term that refers to the vowel going to the end of the nearest syllable. The vowel in a rime is underlined, for example, ight in the word night.

Teaching reading by highlighting linguistic rimes and syllables helps readers recognize them in more complex words for better decoding. Syllables, syllable segmentation, linguistic rimes, and vowel sound awareness all enhance reading skills, and these are the features highlighted in Noah Text.

Sarah Blodgett created Noah Text while helping her son learn to read, starting in first grade. Like many schools in the United States, her son was taught reading under the whole language method, memorizing lots of words and phrases.

Helping her son overcome his reading problems, she found Dr. Miriam Cherkes-Julkowski, an expert in literacy, learning, and rime-based reading instruction which uses logic to focus on language patterns instead of memorization.

While using a rime-based program with her son, Sarah took a pencil and marked up one of her son’s reading books, breaking up any multi-syllable words he might struggle to understand, to see if it helped him read. It worked.

Through her research into European languages, she also found that reading is a new human activity. Our brains have not yet evolved a dedicated part of the brain to handle reading. “Instead, when we read,” Sarah says, “our brains use a primitive part that recognizes patterns. Babies use the same part of the brain to identify people visually. When learning to read, and for those who struggle to read, turning texts into more predictable visual patterns help us process texts.”

Noah Text can be used online by copying and then pasting text into their website, at app.NoahText.com for the advanced syllable/long vowel version. There’s also a web browser bookmark in the works that will convert web page text into more easily readable text. The conversion software tool on the website is available with a free online account.

And, if you’re wondering, Noah Text is named after Noah Webster, an 18th century American whose Blue-backed Speller books taught five generations of American kids how to spell and read.

Korean, Finnish, Greek, and a few other languages use predictable patterns that make them easier to read than English. Noah Text provides the English language with similar predictability and ease of learning. Noah Text markup highlights the predictable parts of English, making it easier for readers to notice and learn the common patterns in the English language.

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Readers often guess at words they do not know or skip over these words. NoahText highlights critical patterns in the English language which enables readers to learn through repetition of these patterns.

Here’s how Noah Text converts the word overcompensate — overcompensate — with the bolding and unbolding of syllables and long vowels underlined. The yellow highlight is added only to show how the er pattern appears in a multitude of English words.

The letter combination er is used in 84,092 English words, according to The Free Dictionary. This combination is found in simple words like her and per but also complex words where the pattern might get in the way of the reader’s understanding of the word. Without Noah Text conversion, all parts of these words have equal weight. With bolding, unbolding, and underlines, readers get help to sound out and learn these more complex words.

Noah Text is a great example of a technology — human language — using software technology to help readers learn English, especially people with dyslexia who struggle to read.

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Tim Slavin

Tim is an award-winning writer and technologist who enjoys teaching tech to non-technical people. He has many years experience with web sites and applications in business, technical, and creative roles. He and his wife have two kids, now teenagers, who are mad about video games.

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