People Who Learn English as a Second Language

The following is an excerpt from Ziyuan Yao's free ebook Breaking the Language Barrier: A Game-Changing Approach. The excerpt provides an in-depth analysis on how PIE helps an ESL/EFL learner to acquire both a word's pronunciation and spelling.

Why PIE?

To learn a new word, two tasks, among others, are involved: learning its pronunciation and its spelling. These two tasks are related, and choosing which to do first makes a lot of difference. If we learn spelling first, we'd be memorizing a (usually long) sequence of letters, which is as tedious as remembering a long telephone number. But if we learn pronunciation first, we'd be memorizing a much shorter sequence of syllables, which can be done in a breeze; then pronunciation can serve as a good catalyst for the subsequent memorization of spelling.

Therefore pronunciation plays a prominent role in word acquisition, and it is worthwhile finding out a good method to learn it.

A big drawback of IPA is that, because it shows pronunciation separately from spelling, it gives the user a chance to skip learning pronunciation at all. This is especially the case when the user encounters an unknown word in reading an article: at that moment, the user cares most about the meaning of that new word, not the pronunciation, as he doesn't have a need to hear or say that word in real life in the near future. Therefore he is very likely to skip learning the word's true pronunciation in a dictionary, but instead assume a pronunciation on his own. Assuming a pronunciation will then lead to two new problems:

1. Because the user is a non-native speaker of English, his assumed pronunciation will be error-prone, and therefore he won't commit this assumed pronunciation to his long-term memory very firmly, lest it would be difficult to “upgrade” the assumed pronunciation to the correct pronunciation in the future.
2. The longer the word is, the more uncertainties there are in guessing a pronunciation, making the guesswork more error-prone, and therefore it's very likely that the user won't guess a complete pronunciation; he would only guess the first two syllables and then jump to the end of the word. For example, I used to memorize “etymology” as just “ety...logy”, “ubiquitous” as just “ubi...ous”, “thesaurus” as just “thes...us”, and so on; this results in both an incomplete, assumed pronunciation and an incomplete spelling in the user's memory.

PIE, on the other hand, eliminates the problems discussed above. Correct pronunciation is made immediately available to the user as he scans through a word's spelling; there is no need to assume a pronunciation at all. The user will memorize the correct, complete pronunciation firmly, which in turn will facilitate memorization of the complete spelling.