Over the past 25 years my wife and I have helped to settle refugees and exchange students from around the world. In this experience we have worked with people speaking different languages and helped them learn English as a second language.
15
Refugees Helped
4
Different Countries
3
Exchange Students
4
Languages
Teaching English as a second language has been challenging, rewarding, and sometimes humorous. In spite of our struggles we have been able to communicate with each other fairly well.
🎯 The Core Challenge
The biggest difficulty the students and refugees expressed was the multiple spellings of the same phonemes, or individual sounds, in the English language. For instance the long vowel sound of letter "a" can be spelled 8 different ways. This makes it very difficult for students to learn the English language.
As a reading teacher of learning disabled students I understood this problem very well and was able to offer some assistance. Kword is the result of my efforts to create a simplified, phonetic approach to English spelling that helps learners overcome these challenges.