History of Phonics

In the year 2000, the US congress had that all children had to learn phonics* in school, based upon the research the Harvard University and the Carnegie Foundation.  But about 1.5 of the biggest countries in Asia - China, Japan, Thailand and Korea are still using IPA* as their official phonetics to acquire the English language. In the past 100 years, there was a fierce battle between phonic and IPA in the English phonetic world. it had all started by the British claiming that their own phonics was too simple and unscientific (inaccurate), so replaced it by a British pronounced, accurate but much more complicated  IPA ( the other reason might be trying to protect the British pronunciation from the elimination by the stronger American’s). A lot of countries had followed the Britain switching to IPA officially (Oxford dictionaries, biggest one in Britain are using IPA). But the biggest English speaking country USA haven’t changed, oppositely around the years of 1940,* she quietly absorbed the schwa sound ∂ from IPA, then the phonics had turned to be a very complete and powerful tool with both accuracy and simplicity.

Now all the American dictionaries are using phonics with ∂. I had checked 22 biggest English dictionaries in the world, 15 of them are using phonics, more than 2/3 in majority, become the true winner of the battle. Only 7 are using other phonetics including IPA.  So the little soldier ∂ had helped phonics winning the big battle over  IPA miraculously.