Creating a Research-based Alphabet Book for Tibetan

Traditional pedagogy for learning alphabetic principles focuses on introducing the alphabet a letter at a time in a traditional order—the ABCs for English speakers; ཀ་ཁ་ག་ང་། for Tibetan. What educational research has shown, however, is that this form of education can actually be disadvantageous to the beginning reader. Instead, students benefit most from explicit instruction that concretely makes the connection between sound​ (phoneme) and ​text (grapheme). We’ve made these connections explicit by (1) ​disambiguating graphemes​ by using an appropriate CPS; (2) disambiguating consonant clusters​ by using bold, color­-coded grapheme-­to-­phoneme connections; (3) ​disambiguating word-­level meaning​; and (4) disambiguating letters and their sounds​ by using frequency analysis. By modeling a systematic set of introductory lessons on the Tibetan alphabet using these (and other) modern pedagogical principles, our aim is giving the student of the language the best possible start for later literary achievement