Phontasia - a game for training German orthography

For the English language, decades of research have gone into the study of phonics, the systematic instruction of letter to sound connections in context, culminating in the National Reading Panel in 2000 that anchored phonics in the US elementary curriculum. It has affirmed that phonics is an important ingredient in standard teaching methodologies for English. No similar approach exists today in German elementary school books. Recently, the syllable method is starting to grow next to other popular methods like whole-word approach or teaching that there is a 1-1 Grapheme-Phoneme correspondence. In our work, we have started to look at structured teaching of German orthography through a game that uses speech synthesis and pre-structured syllables in order to teach regular patterns of grapheme usage to children. Previous publications have shown some success. The game will be available for users to test out their German skills.