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MaryBeth Guinan is an artist, and inventor and patent holder of the first icon language. In Instant English, every word is an icon, and every icon generates a spoken word. Teachers can drag icons into new sentences, choosing from 50 dictionaries and 5,000 icons. Guinan believes illustrated speech can rewire damaged brains, revive disappearing languages, bring literature to the non-literate and generate a new form of visual poetry.

About reading pictures..

.....We normally teach English through a a book. But the textbook method is too slow and piecemeal. ESL speakers take a shortcut. They adapt English words to their own accent and syntax. The result is "broken English".

There is no one-to-one map between a sentence in English and a sentence in another language. Trying to learn a language through translation slows us down because the map doesn't work. Translation is also impossible in a multi-cultural classroom.

The immersion method works because it replicates our first language learning experience. The way we learned our mother tongue was by connecting a visual memory with a speech sound. We connected "bye bye" with putting on a coat and going toward the door.

But immersion requires temporarily inhibiting expression in the first language. New Americans hear English on the street, but they express themselves in their first language at home and at work.

So what is the fastest, most efficient method of learning English?

Learners can "read" picture sentences almost immediately. We are wired to interpret images as we are wired to learn grammar. Adults have been raised in an image-rich environment that has much cross-culture redundancy, so there is a comfort level with many symbols, such as an arrow for next and a slash mark for negatives.

Adults are also problem solvers and are not as literal-minded as children, so they can handle even English rebus symbols such as an eye for an "I". They enjoy both metaphor and the experience of a direct link between picture and thought.

Early civilizations used picto-graphic languages. Over time, the visual references became obscure and literacy became esoteric. Languages like Hebrew, that used a phonetic code, had a huge evolutionary advantage in learning efficiency. It was a kind of "just-in-time" way of noting down what people said, and of course, was not metaphorical, like signs, but a real transcription of the actual utterance.

But when languages merge and spelling rules proliferate (English is the best example), literacy again becomes a long formal process. So we need a short cut.

Just as wireless technology can skip over generations of infrastructure, we can skip the painful steps needed to learn the alphabet and phonics. Using multimedia, we can simultaneously present an image, a sound, and a label. It is this simultanaity that provides the brain with a network of meaning, pronunication, text and grammar.

1980 Woman of the Year, Coalition of Labor Union Women
1980 HEW Summer Institute for Labor Leaders
1997 CCC, Excellence Award for Professional Achievement
1998 AWCC, Woman of the Year
1999 US Patent
2002 Archworks, David Award
2002 Icon Poetry, Literature for the Illiterate, AEQ (Academic Exchange Quarterly)
2003 Highest Leaf Award, Women's Venture Fund

AE Coordinator, Technology Learning Center, Truman.  Developed 3 laptop classrooms. Presented, TechEd Chicago, and CCC Adult Education Conference. ICCB grant for e-classroom practicum. Mentored teachers. Stories by Channel 20, WBEZ.