The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is the biggest scandal in the history of English language teaching. Almost nobody who teaches the IPA can fluently read and write it and, for this reason, they have no idea what they’re talking about and simply parrot what they’ve heard.

Almost everyone in the world has to learn English and the hardest thing about English is pronunciation, because we make 35-37 sounds (depending on the accent) but we only have 26 letters. There is enormous potential for a phonetic alphabet in which there is one symbol for one sound. Almost everyone has a better sense of sight than hearing, and if you can learn to see a symbol for each sound then you can learn to hear those sounds more clearly. Then you can learn to make those sounds better. 

Unfortunately, the current phonetic alphabet is a disgrace. It’s not just inaccurate, it’s almost unusable to anyone who understands it. Currently, there are 5 kinds of teachers with regards to teaching English pronunciation with the IPA.

1. teachers who do not know the IPA and do not teach it. This is currently a good kind of teacher to be
2. Teachers who know the IPA, but they can’t read and write it fluently so they don’t realise how wrong it is. These teachers are all over YouTube and writing many text books. This is the worst category to be in.
3. teachers who know the IPA is wrong and refuse to teach it
4. teachers who know the IPA is wrong but try to get some value out of teaching it anyway by clarifying what’s accurate and what’s not 
5. Teachers who modify the phonetic alphabet to make it highly accurate and useful and advocate for this new model to overthrow the old one

I, Alex Penman, have passed through all 5 of those stages. I first discovered the IPA while I was working as an English language teacher and studying a Master of Teaching to become a high school French and Spanish teacher. My teaching studies emphasised learning things in context and developing fluency, so it seemed clear to me that I should get my students to learn the IPA by reading texts written in it. This effectively taught them the symbols, but as I myself became fluent at reading it, I started to realise it didn’t accurately describe the way I speak. However, I’m Australian, and the standard English teaching IPA is technically for American and British English, so I ignored it.

During the long COVID lockdown in Melbourne, I started to watch and listen to many YouTube videos teaching English pronunciation with the IPA, primarily with British and American teachers. I gradually became convinced that the IPA doesn’t just fail to describe Australian English, it doesn’t describe the way anyone speaks English. There is not and there never has been an English speaker who speaks the way you see in phonetic transcriptions in dictionaries.

It’s very hard to trust your own ears more than a native teachers. This is what I wrestled with as I listened to American teachers and British teachers saying “this is how we speak” as I heard something completely different. This fact is actually very relevant because if it was hard for me, a native Australian English speaker, to believe my own ears more than American and British native speakers regarding their own accent, then it’s almost impossible for a non-native English speaker to do it. English learners have to trust the teachers. This is the problem: the students trust the teachers, the teachers trust the system, and the system fails everybody.

These are the reforms that we demand must be made to the system:

1. aɪ must be changed to ɑy
2. aʊ must be changed æw
3. The fact that a t is pronounced as a CH before an R must be recognised in phonetic transcriptions.
4. Phonetic transcriptions must show that a consonant that comes after an s and before a vowel is always pronounced with the voiced equivalent of whatever letter is written. For example, SP is pronounced SB, SK is pronounced SG and ST is pronounced as SD, except for when it's before an R. In the STR letter combination, the R turns the T into a CH and the S turns the CH into a J (which the voiced equivalent of a CH).
5.