by Rudolf Flesch (1955)
Dear Mary:
I have decided to start this book with a letter to you. You know that the idea came to me when I offered to help John, with his reading. It's really his book -- or yours. So the only proper way to start it is with the words "Dear Mary."
You remember when I began to work with Johnny half a year ago. That was when he was twelve and they put him back into sixth grade because he was unable to read and couldn't possibly keep up with the work in junior high. So I told you that I knew of a way to teach reading that was altogether different from what they do in schools or in remedial reading courses or anywhere else. Well, you trusted me, and you know what has happened since. Today Johnny can read -- not perfectly, to be sure, but anyone can see that in a few more months he will have caught up with other boys of his age. And he is happy again: You and I and everyone else can see that he is a changed person.
I think Johnny will go to college. He has a very good mind, as you know, and I don't see why he shouldn't become a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. There is a lot in Johnny that has never come to the surface because of this reading trouble.
Since I started to work with Johnny, I have looked into this whole reading business. I worked my way through a mountain of books and articles on the subject, I talked to dozens of people, and I spent many hours in classrooms, watching what was going on.
What I found is absolutely fantastic. The teaching of reading -- all over the United States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks -- is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense. Johnny couldn't read until half a year ago for the simple reason that nobody ever showed him how. Johnny's only problem was that he was unfortunately exposed to an ordinary American school.
You know that I was born and raised in Austria. Do you know that there are no remedial reading cases in Austrian schools? Do you know that there are no remedial reading cases in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Norway, in Spain -- practically anywhere in the world except in the United States? Do you know that there was no such thing as remedial reading in this country either until about thirty years ago? Do you know that the teaching of reading never was a problem anywhere in the world until the United States switched to the present method around about 1925?
This sounds incredible, but it is true. One of the articles on reading that I found was by a Dr. Ralph C. Preston, of the University of Pennsylvania, who reported on his experiences on a trip through Western Germany in the April, 1953, Elementary School Journal. Dr. Preston visited a number of classrooms in Hamburg and Munich. "After the experience of hearing these German children read aloud," he says, "I began to attach some credence to a generally expressed opinion of German teachers that before the end of Grade 2 almost any child can read orally (without regard to degree of comprehension) almost anything in print!"
Of course, Dr. Preston, being an American educator, didn't draw the obvious conclusion from what he saw. The explanation is simply that the method used over there works, and the method used in our schools does not. We too could have perfect readers in all schools at the end of second grade if we taught our children by the system used in Germany.
Now, what is this system? It's very simple. Reading means getting meaning from certain combinations of letters. Teach the child what each letter stands for and he can read.
Ah no, you say, it can't be that simple. But it is. Let me give you an illustration.
I don't know whether you know any shorthand. Let's suppose you don't. Let's suppose you decide to learn how to read English shorthand.
Right away you say that nobody learns how to read shorthand. People who want to know shorthand learn how to write it; the reading of it comes by the way.
Exactly. That's why shorthand is such a good illustration of this whole thing. It's just a system of getting words on paper. Ordinary writing is another such system. Morse code is a third. Braille is a fourth. And so it goes. There are all sorts of systems of translating spoken words into a series of symbols so that they can be written down and read back.
Now the way to learn any such system is to learn to write and to read it at the same time. And how do you do that? The obvious answer is, by tacking up one symbol after another and learning how to write it and how to recognize it. Once you are through the whole list of symbols, you can read and write; the rest is simply practice -- learning to do it more and more automatically.
Since the dawn of time people have learned mechanical means of communication in this way -- smoke signals and drums in the jungle and flag language and I don't know what all. You take up one item after another, learn what it stands for, learn how to reproduce it and how to recognize it, and there you are.
Shorthand, as I said, is an excellent example. I don't know any English shorthand myself, but I went to a library and looked up the most widely used manual of the Gregg system, the Functional Method by L. A. Leslie. Sure enough, it tells you about the symbols one after the other, starting out with the loop that stands for the long a in ache, make, and cake. After a few lessons, you are supposed to know the shape of all the shorthand "letters," and from there on it's just a matter of practice and picking up speed.
Our system of writing -- the alphabet -- was invented by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians somewhere around 1500 b.c. Before the invention of the alphabet there was only picture writing -- a picture of an ox meant "ox," a picture of a house meant "house," and so on. (The Chinese to this day have a system of writing with symbols that stand for whole words.) As soon as people had an alphabet, the job of reading and writing was tremendously simplified. Before that, you had to have a symbol for every word in the language -- 10,000, 20,000 or whatever the vocabulary range was. With the alphabet, all you had to learn was the letters. Each letter stood for a certain sound, and that was that. To write a word -- any word -- all you had to do was break it down into its sounds and put the corresponding letters on paper.
So, ever since 1500 b.c. people all over the world -- wherever an alphabetic system of writing was used -- learned how to read and write by the simple process of memorizing the sound of each letter in the alphabet. When a schoolboy in ancient Rome learned to read, he didn't learn that the written word mensa meant a table, that is, a certain piece of furniture with a flat top and legs. Instead, he began by learning that the letter m stands for the sound you make when you put your lips together, that e means the sound that comes out when you open your mouth about halfway, that n is like m but with the lips open and the teeth together, that s has a hissing sound, and that a means the sound made by opening your mouth wide. Therefore, when he saw the written word mensa for the first time, he could read it right off and learn, with a feeling of happy discovery, that this collection of letters meant a table. Not only that, he could also write the word down from dictation without ever having seen it before. And not only that, he could do this with practically every word in the language.
This is not miraculous, it's the only natural system of learning how to read. As I said, the ancient Egyptians learned that way, and the Greeks and the Romans, and the French and the Germans, and the Dutch and the Portuguese, and the Turks and the Bulgarians and the Estonians and the Icelanders and the Abyssinians -- every single nation throughout history that used an alphabetic system of writing.
Except, as I said before, twentieth-century Americans -- and other nations in so far as they have followed our example. And what do we use instead? Why, the only other possible system of course -- the system that was in use before the invention of the alphabet in 1500 b.c. We have decided to forget that we write with letters and learn to read English as if it were Chinese. One word after another after another after another. If we want to read materials with a vocabulary of 10,000 words, then we have to memorize 10,000 words; if we want to go to the 20,000 word range, we have to learn, one by one, 20,000 words; and so on. We have thrown 3,500 years of civilization out the window and have gone back to the Age of Hammurabi.
You don't believe me? I assure you what I am saying is literally true. Go to your school tomorrow morning -- or if John has brought home one of his readers, look at it. You will immediately see that all the words in it are learned by endless repetition. Not a sign anywhere that letters correspond to sounds and that words can be worked out by pronouncing the letters. No. The child is told what each word means and then they are mechanically, brutally hammered into his brain. Like this:
"We will look," said Susan.
"Yes, yes," said all the children.
"We will look and find it?"
So all the boys and girls looked.
They looked and looked for it.
But they did not find it.
Or this:
"Quark, quark," said the duck.
He wanted something.
He did not want to get out.
He did not want to go to the farm.
He did not want to eat.
He sat and sat and sat.
All the reading books used in all our schools, up through fourth and fifth and sixth grade, are collections of stuff like that. Our children learn the word sat by reading over and over again about a duck or a pig or a goat that sat and sat and sat. And so with every word in the language.
Every word in the language! You know what that means? It means that if you teach reading by this system, you can't use ordinary reading matter for practice. Instead, all children for three, four, five, six years have to work their way up through a battery of carefully designed readers, each one containing all the words used in the previous one plus a strictly limited number of new ones, used with the exactly "right" amount of repetition. Our children don't read Andersen's Fairy Tales any more or The Arabian Nights or Mark Twain or Louisa May Alcott or the Mary Poppins books or the Dr. Doolittle books or anything interesting and worth while, because they can't. It so happens that the writers of these classic children's books wrote without being aware of our Chinese system of teaching reading. So Little Women contains words like grieving and serene, and Tom Sawyer has ague and inwardly, and Bulfinch's Age of Fable has nymph and deity and incantations. If a child that has gone to any of our schools faces the word nymph for the first time, he is absolutely helpless because nobody has ever told him how to sound out n and y and m and ph and read the word off the page.
So what does he get instead? He gets those series of horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers, the stuff and guff about Dick and Jane or Alice and Jerry visiting the farm and having birthday parties and seeing animals in the zoo and going through dozens and dozens of totally unexciting middle-class, middle-income, middle-I.Q. children's activities that offer opportunities for reading "Look, look" or "Yes, yes" or "Come, come" or "See the funny, funny animal." During the past half year I read a good deal of this material and I don't wish that experience on anyone.
Who writes these books? Let me explain this to you in detail, because there is the nub of the whole problem.
There are one or two dozen textbook houses in America. By far the more lucrative part of their business is the publication of readers for elementary schools. There are millions of dollars of profit in these little books. Naturally, the competition is tremendous. So is the investment; so is the sales effort; so is the effort that goes into writing, editing, and illustrating these books.
Now, with our Chinese word-learning system you can't produce a series of readers by printing nice, interesting collections of stuff children of a certain age might like to read. Oh no. Every single story, every single sentence that goes into these books has to be carefully prepared and carefully checked to make sure that each word is one of the 637 that the poor child is supposed to have memorized up to that point -- or if it's the 638th word, that it appears in just the right context for optimum guesswork and is then repeated seventeen times at carefully worked-out intervals.
Naturally, the stupendous and frighteningly idiotic work of concocting this stuff can only be done by tireless teamwork of many educational drudges. But if the textbook house put only the drudges on the title page, that wouldn't look impressive enough to beat the competition. So there has to be a "senior author" -- someone with a national reputation who teaches how to teach reading at one of the major universities.
And that's why each and every one of the so-called authorities in this field is tied up with a series of readers based on the Chinese word-learning method. As long as you used that method, you have to buy some $30 worth per child of Dr. So-and-so's readers; as soon as you switch to the common-sense method of teaching the sounds of the letters, you can give them a little primer and then proceed immediately to anything from the Reader's Digest to Treasure Island.
I have personally met some of the leading authorities in the field of reading. They are all very nice ladies and gentlemen, and obviously sincere and well meaning. But they are firmly committed to the application of the word method, and it would be inhuman to expect from them an objective point of view.
Consequently it's utterly impossible to find anyone inside the official family of the educators saying anything even slightly favorable to the natural method of teaching reading. Mention the alphabetic method or phonetics or "phonics" and you immediately arouse derision, furious hostility, or icy silence.
For instance, in the May 1952 Catholic Educator, Monsignor Clarence E. Elwell published an article "Reading: The Alphabet and Phonics." Monsignor Elwell is Superintendent of Schools of the Diocese of Cleveland and knows what he is talking about. He says: "In a language based on an alphabetic (that is, phonetic) method of coding the spoken word, the only sensible way to teach how to decode the written symbols is (1) by teaching the phonetic code, that is, the alphabet, and (2) the manner of coding -- letter by letter, left to right. It is as nonsensical to use a whole word method for beginning reading as it would be to teach the Morse code on a whole word basis. ... A child who has been taught the code and how to use it ... gains a confident habit in attacking words. Instead of guessing when he comes to a new word, as he did when taught by the sight word method, he now works through a word and to the surprise of the teachers usually comes up with the right answer. ... After four years' experiment with the introduction of a strong program of phonics at the very beginning of grade one, the experimenter finds teachers convinced and children apparently happier in their success."
What do you think happened when Monsignor Elwell said publicly that our whole system of teaching reading is nonsense? Absolutely nothing. So far as I know, none of the reading "experts" has paid the slightest attention to the Cleveland experiment.
Or take the case of the late Dr. Leonard Bloomfield, professor of linguistics at Yale. Dr. Bloomfield wasn't just any scholar in the field of language; he was universally recognized as the greatest American linguist of modern times. His masterpiece was a book simply called Language, published in 1933.
In the last few pages of that book, Bloomfield dealt with the teaching of English and reading in our schools. "Our schools," he wrote, "are utterly benighted in linguistic matters. ... Nothing could be more discouraging than to read our 'educationalists' treatises on methods of teaching children to read. The size of this book does not permit a discussion of their varieties of confusion on this subject."
Several years later, Bloomfield took time out to prepare an alphabetic-phonetic primer, based on strictly scientific principles. It was an excellent piece of work, carefully designed to teach children quickly and painlessly. After Bloomfield's death in 1949 his literary executor offered the manuscript to every single elementary textbook publisher in the United States. Not one of them considered it. As I am writing, the book is still unpublished. *
* (The primer was published in 1961 : Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949), Clarence Lewis Barnhart, Let's Read, A Linguistic Approach, Wayne State University Press, 1 Jan 1961 - 465 pages).
The introduction to this Bloomfield primer was, however, published as an article in the Elementary English Review in April and May, 1942. I ran across that article eight or ten years ago and that's what started me on this whole business. Taking the ideas of that article and applying them in homemade fashion, I taught my eldest daughter Anne to read when she was five years old. Well, you know Anne: she's ten now and reads anything and everything, all the time. Here is what Bloomfield told the country's elementary English teachers twelve years ago: "The most serious drawback of all the English reading instruction known to me ... is the drawback of the word-method. ... The child who fails to grasp the content of what he reads is usually a poor reader in the mechanical sense. ... If you want to play the piano with feeling and expression, you must master the keyboard and learn to use your fingers on it. The chief source of difficulty in getting the content of reading is imperfect mastery of the mechanics of reading. ... We must train the child to respond vocally to the sight of letters. ..."
And what did the teachers and reading experts do after the greatest scientist in the field had explained to them their mistake? Absolutely nothing. Except that several years later, in 1948, Dr. William S. Gray, of the University of Chicago, published a book, On Their Own in Reading. There, in the first chapter, was a lengthy quotation from Bloornfield's paper, followed by this statement: "The recent trend toward ... the old alphabetic or phonic methods is viewed with alarm by educators. ..."
The most conspicuous example of this deadly warfare between the entrenched "experts" and the advocates of common sense in reading is the reception of the primer Reading With Phonics by Hay and Wingo, published by the J. B. Lippincott Company. By some miracle, this textbook company decided to jump into the fray and publish the Hay-Wingo book, the only primer on the market today that is based firmly on the alphabetic-phonetic principle. Well, the book was duly reviewed in Elementary English magazine by Dr. Celia B. Stendler of the University of Illinois. I quote: "Reading With Phonics does not fit the modern conception of the place of phonics in a reading program. ... One wonders at the naïvete of the authors. ... One wonders, too, whether the authors have ever had the thrill of seeing a group of children learn to read by the use of modern methods. The zest with which these children approach reading and the zeal with which they read will aknost certainly be lost if we turn the dock back twenty years with Reading With Phonics." (This from someone who is all for turning the clock back 3,5oo years!)
I'll have more to say later in this book about the Hay-Wingo primer which produces first-graders reading news items from the daily paper -- and about the zest and zeal with which our children read:
Jack ran out to see the truck.
It was red and it was big --
very, very big.
It had come to take Jack
far away to his new home --
far away to his new home
on a big farm.
In doing research for this book, I ran into exactly the same kind of hostility. I wrote a letter to the National Council of Teachers of English, asking for information on the phonetic method of teaching reading. I got a brief reply, referring me to Dr. Paul Witty of Northwestern University (one of the top word-method people) and to a pamphlet "What About Phonics?" by Dr. Alvina Treut Burrows of New York University, which turned out to be violently anti-phonics. I also wrote the U.S. Office of Education. That time I got a somewhat longer reply, referring me to Dr. Edward W. Dolch of the University of Illinois (another well-known word-method man) and to the same biased pamphlet by Dr. Burrows.
At a later stage in my research I found an excellent paper by a Dr. Agnew who had compared the results of teaching reading in the schools of Durham and Raleigh, North Carolina. The monograph was published in 1939, at which time the schools in Durham produced splendid results by teaching phonics. So I wrote to the Superintendent of Schools in Durham, asking for information. The answer was that the teaching of phonics there had been discontinued seven years ego.
Then I ran across a book by the Italian educator Dr. Maria Montessori, published way back in 1912. Dr. Montessori, who was a world-famous progressive kindergarten teacher, taught her little Italian four-year-olds (!) the shapes and sounds of the letters of the alphabet and had them reading within weeks. I found that there was a Child Education Foundation in New York City carrying on Dr. Montessori's work. I wrote to them, asking about their method of teaching reading. The answer came back: "For a number of years we have found other methods to be more effective, so have not used Montessori."
Now that I have gone through dozens and dozens of books on reading, I know how well it all fits together. The primers and readers are keyed to the textbooks on how to teach reading, and the textbooks are all carefully written so that every teacher in the land is shielded from any information about how to teach children anything about letters and sounds.
It's a foolproof system all right. Every grade-school teacher in the country has to go to a teachers' college or school of education; every teachers' college gives at least one course on how to teach reading; every course on how to teach reading is based on a textbook; every one of those textbooks is written by one of the high priests of the word method. In the old days it was impossible to keep a good teacher from following her own common sense and practical knowledge; today the phonetic system of teaching reading is kept out of our schools as effectively as if we had a dictatorship with an all-powerful Ministry of Education.
And how do you convince thousands of intelligent young women that black is white and that reading has nothing to do with letters and sounds? Simple. Like this: First, you announce loudly and with full conviction that our method of writing English is not based on pronunciation. Impossible, you say? Everybody knows that all alphabetic systems are phonetic? Oh no. I quote from page 297 of Reading and the Educative Process by Dr. Paul Witty of Northwestern University: "English is essentially an unphonetic language."
This is so ridiculous that it should be possible to just laugh about it and forget it. But the reading "experts" have created so much confusion that it's necessary to refute this nonsense. Well then: All alphabetic systems are phonetic; the two words mean the same thing. The only trouble is that English is a little more irregular than other language. How much more has been established by three or four independent researchers. They all came up with the same figure. About 13 per cent of all English words are partly irregular in their spelling. The other 87 per cent follow fixed rides. Even the 13 per cent are not "unphonetic," as Dr. Witty calls it, but usually contain just one irregularly spelled vowel: done is pronounced "dun," one is pronounced "wun," are is pronounced "ar," and so on.
So our English system of writing is of course phonetic, but has a few more exceptions to the rules than other languages.
The next step in this great structure of nonsense and confusion is careful avoidance of the teaching of the letters:
"Current practice in the teaching of reading does not require a knowledge of the letters," says Dr. Donald D. Durrell of Boston University. "In remedial work, such knowledge is helpful."
"The skillful teacher will be reluctant to use any phonetic method with all children," says Dr. Witty.
"The child should be allowed to 'typewrite' only after he has a certain degree of ability in reading," says Dr. Guy L. Bond of the University of Minnesota. "Otherwise he is apt to become too conscious of the letter-by-letter elements of words."
And Dr. Roma Garas of Teachers College, Columbia University, tells us simply and starkly: "In recent years phonetic analysis of words at any level of the reading program fell into disrepute."
If they had their way, our teachers would never tell the children that there are letters and that each letter represents a sound. However, that isn't quite possible for the simple reason that a good many children are bright enough to find this out for themselves. So, if systematic phonetics or phonics from the outset is taboo, there has to be some sort of an answer when a child in second or third grade begins to notice that the first letter in cat is different from the first letter in sat. This is called "phonetic analysis" and -- lo and behold, -- it does get mentioned in the textbooks. For instance, if you turn to the index in Learning to Read: a Handbook for Teachers by Carter and McGinnis of the Psycho-Educational Clinic of the Western Michigan College of Education, you will find one lonely page reference to "phonetic analysis." Turning back to that page, you will learn that phonetic analysis "grows out of the fact that words are made up of letters or letter combinations that have known sounds. Phonetic analysis, then, is the process of associating the appropriate sounds with the printed forms. At this stage of development [third and fourth grade] emphasis should be placed upon beginning consonant sounds."
Otherwise, phonics is usually discussed in this literature as something that stupid and ignorant parents are apt to bring up. Yes, I am rot joking: Our teachers are carefully coached in what to answer parents who complain about the abandonment of phonics.
For instance, let me quote from an "official" pamphlet on Teaching Reading by Dr. Arthur L Gates (of Teachers College, Columbia University) published by the National Education Association. "When a mother storms to the school," writes Dr. Gates, "to protest delaying the starting of the child to read or what she imagines is the failure to teach good old phonics, it is likely that things have already happened in the home which are having a disadvantageous -- indeed, sometimes a disastrous -- influence on the pupil's efforts to learn. Had the mother understood the school's policy, provided it is a good one, the home life might have been organized in such a way as to assist the pupil greatly." In other words, if a parent complains that you don't teach her child the sounds of the letters, tell her the child can't read because she has made his home life unhappy.
That's what you get on the subject of phonetics in our literature on the teaching of reading. And what do the books contain instead? With what do they fill all those fat volumes with hundreds of pages if they don't mention the letters and sounds of the alphabet? Very simple: Those books are not about reading at all but about word guessing.
Because, you see, if a child isn't taught the sounds of the letters, then he has absolutely nothing to go by when he tries to read a word. All he can do is guess.
Suppose a child tries to read the sentence "I saw a kangaroo." Suppose he has never seen the word kangaroo before. If he has been trained in phonics, he simply "sounds out" the k, the a, the ng, the a, the r, and the oo, and reads "kangaroo" as easy as pie. ("Ah, kangaroo!" he says. Of course he has known the meaning of the word for years.) But if he has no training in phonics, if the meaning of the letters has been carefully hidden from him, he can only guess. How can he guess? Well, the educators say, he can guess from context. With the sentence "I saw a kangaroo" that is extremely difficult, however, because it could just as easily mean "I saw a giraffe" or "I saw a flea" or "I saw a piano." So, the next best thing, the child looks at the top of the page to see whether there is a picture. Usually in those factory-produced readers, when an animal is mentioned there is a picture of it somewhere on the page, so ten to one he'll find that the word means "kangaroo." And what if there isn't any picture? Well, then he has to rely on the sound of the first letter k if he knows that -- or the length of the word -- or its general shape -- or just sheer luck. He might guess "kangaroo" or he might guess "plumber" or he might guess "forget-me-not" or -- most likely -- he might just sit there with a vacant look, waiting for the teacher to tell him what the word is. He knows very well she'll tell him eventually. Learning to read, he knows, is guessing or waiting until you are told what the word means.
You think I exaggerate? On the contrary: I am describing exactly what I saw in one classroom after another and what is detailed endlessly in all the textbooks on how to teach reading. Listen to them:
"Little is gained by teaching the child his sounds and letters as a first step to reading. More rapid results are generally obtained by the direct method of simply showing the word to the child and telling him what it is." (Irving H. Anderson and Walter F. Dearborn, The Psychology of Teaching Reading. Anderson is at the University of Michigan, Dearborn is a professor emeritus of Harvard.)
"The simplest solution when a child does not know a word is to tell him what it says." (Teaching Primary Reading by Professor Edward A. Dolch, University of Illinois. The triumphant italics are by Dr. Dolch)
"If the word is daddy, the pupil may give the word father, or papa, or man, since the basal meaning is the same. If the word is the noun drink, the pupil may say water or milk or some other fluid. Similarly, words related to a common situation or to a general topic, such as cow, horse, pig, sheep, chicken, are likely to be mistaken for each other.
"Errors of this type are frequently regarded as evidence of carelessness on the part of the pupil. In some instances he may be reprimanded for having made a 'wild guess,' when in fact, from the point of view of meaning the guess is not at all wild. In the early stages of learning to read frequent errors of this type are to be expected. They are ... evidence of keen use of the device of guessing words from context." (Professor Arthur I. Gates, The Improvement of Reading, pp. 184-185. This is generally considered the most authoritative text of them all.)
And finally, here is a perfect summary of the situation from Teaching the Child to Read by Bond and Wagner. Professor Guv L. Bond is at the University of Minnesota.
The usual first unit of reading material is short and simple, rarely running more than four or five pages and introducing but few words. It is concerned with the common experiences of boys and girls of first-grade age whose activities are to be followed throughout the first year. Usually the boy and girl are introduced and some little story or incident told about them, mainly through the pictures with but little reading material. The pictures in the initial unit carry the story, and the words are so closely allied to the picture story that they usually can be guessed by the children. The teacher's major tasks during this time are to introduce the words in a meaningful fashion so that the children have contextual clues to aid them in "guessing" the word and to give repetition of the words so that those words may become the nucleus of a sight vocabulary. The words should be recognized as whole words. It is detrimental indeed to have the children spell or sound out the words at this stage.
Most of the modern readers have carefully worked out vocabulary controls so that the child will not encounter many new words in comparison to the number of words he actually reads. In various ways, which have been mentioned, the child is prepared for reading those words. In fact, he has been either given the name of the word or has been led to recognize the word before he meets it in his purposeful reading activity. When, however, he does have trouble with a word, that difficulty should not be focused upon as a difficulty. The teacher should at this stage tell him the word or lead him to guess it from the context.
What does all this add up to? It means simply and clearly that according to our accepted system of instruction, reading isn't taught at all. Books are put in front of the children and they are told to guess at the words or wait until Teacher tells them. But they are not taught to read -- if by reading you mean what the dictionary says it means, namely, "get the meaning of writing or printing."
Now you say that all this applies only to first grade. Not at all. If you think that after this preparatory guessing game reading begins in earnest in second grade, or in third, or in fourth, you are mistaken. Reading never starts. The guessing goes on and on and on, through grade school, through high school, through college, through life. It's all they'll ever know. They'll never really learn to read.
When I started to work with Johnny, I didn't quite realize all this. In my innocence, I gave him what I thought was an easy word for a twelve-year-old: kid. He stared at it for quite some time, then finally said "kind." I tell you, it staggered me. Nobody born and raised on the continent of Europe can easily grasp the fact that anyone can mistake kid for kind.
Later on, when I had done a good deal of phonics work with Johnny, I gave him, as an exercise, the word razzing. He hesitated, then read it as realizing. I said, "Don't guess, Johnny." I don't know how many hundreds of times I must have said to him, "Don't guess, Johnny." To my mind, a remedial reading case is someone who has formed the habit of guessing instead of reading.
You see, remedial reading cases are harder to teach than first-graders for the simple reason that they already have four or five or six years of guessing behind them. It usually takes at least a year to cure them of the habit. There wouldn't be any remedial reading cases if we started teaching reading instead of guessing in first grade. (Did I say this before? Forgive me. I have fallen into the habit of telling people the simple facts about reading over and over again. It seems to be the only way.)
And how do the educators explain all the thousands and thousands of remedial reading cases? This is what really got me mad. To them, failure in reading is never caused by poor teaching. Lord no, perish the thought. Reading failure is due to poor eyesight, or a nervous stomach, or poor posture, or heredity, or a broken home, or undernourishment, or a wicked stepmother, or an Oedipus complex, or sibling rivalry, or God knows what. The teacher or the school are never at fault. As to the textbook or the method taught to the teacher at her teachers' college -- well, that idea has never yet entered the mind of anyone in the world of education.
In the book How to Increase Reading Ability by Professor Albert J. Harris of Queens College, New York City, there are long descriptions of remedial reading cases with all sorts of supposed causes and reasons -- except the fact that Jimmie "confused m and n, u and v, b and d, p and q, k and f, and y and w," and Bruce "was unfamiliar with all of the short vowel sounds and with some consonant sounds." Fortunately Dr. Harris hit upon a phonics book, the Hegge-Kirk Remedial Reading Drills, and that was enough in most cases to bring those unhappy children up to par in their reading. (The Hegge-Kirk drills are what I finally used with Johnny. I'll come back to that book later on.)
There are also detailed case descriptions in The Improvement of Reading by Dr. Arthur L Gates, the widely used text that I mentioned before. For instance, he tells about a ten-year-old girl who "often confused the sounds of m with n and had difficulty sounding the letter y. She also confused l with i." A seven-year-old boy, in a "test of ability to give sounds for individual letters, did not know the following: f, d, z, r, m, l, q, u, w, h, n, and v." An eight- year-old girl, "in a test where she was asked to give the sounds for individual letters, missed the following: e, x, z, q, and g."
And how do. Dr. Gates account for all this? He obliges us by giving each of his cases a simple explanatory label.
The first of the cases is labeled Good Intellect, Poor Reading Techniques; Sibling Rival, a Causal Factor.
The second case is headed Reading Difficulties Resulting From Parental Interference.
The third is a case of Poor Reading Resulting Largely From Parental Anxiety and Family Conflicts.
Dr. Gates, in contrast to Dr. Harris, didn't give his remedial cases phonics and consequently didn't help them; apparently he just gave the parents a good bawling out and let it go at that.
Most educators, however, don't go quite as far as that. They do use phonics in remedial cases -- in dribs and drabs, testily, and rather furtively. Ordinary children, they say, shouldn't be deprived of the privilege of guessing words; but those poor unfortunate ones who didn't catch on to the guessing game -- well, let's teach them the sounds of the letters as a last resort, purely as an emergency measure. (Remember the dictum by Dr. Durrell: "Current practice in the teaching of reading does not require a knowledge of the letters. In remedial work, such knowledge is helpful") And so you find phonics discussed, if at all, tucked away in a section dealing with remedial reading with a careful explanation that this rather nasty medicine shouldn't be given to nice, average children who can guess the few hundred words contained in the "basal series."
The irony is that phonics is also recognized when it comes to the children above average -- those that somehow learn to read properly and effectively in spite of the way they were taught. Those boys and girls, the reading experts tell us, have unusual phonic ability -- which means that they managed to figure out by themselves which letter stands for which sound. Of course, you can't really read at all if you don't know that; but for our reading teachers it's a miraculous achievement, only to be explained by special gifts and extraordinary graces.
Not long ago, in January, 1954, Dr. Ruth Strang of Teachers College, Columbia University, published an article on the "Reading Development of Gifted Children" in Elementary English. "It may be," she wrote, "that the phonetic approach is more appropriate for the quick-learning than for the slow-learning and because of the former's greater analytical ability." (How she reconciled this observation with the fact that phonic methods are the only thing that works with retarded children I don't know.)
The article was based on statements by gifted boys and girls in junior high school. Here are some of them:
"How did I learn to read? First my grandmother taught me, then I caught on to certain words and got accustomed to sounding out words."
"By very small words and sentences. Also by syllables and the letter's sound."
"In first grade the teacher was dismissed for teaching phonetics, but I think phonetics has helped me very much in sounding out new words."
It seems clear to me that those bright twelve- and thirteen-year-olds know more about reading than all the faculties, students, and alumni of all of our teachers' colleges and schools of education taken together. And I don't think that those children are a bit more gifted than your John. They were just luckier. Just lucky enough to find out in time that learning to read means learning to sound out words.
Phonics isn't a word that is in common use. You probably think it's a technical subject that an ordinary person would find difficult to understand. Nonsense. Phonics is perfectly simple. Any normal adult can grasp it in one easy lesson.
Let's begin by distinguishing between phonics and phonetics. Phonetics, the dictionary says, is "the science dealing with speech sounds." It is a technical subject. Studying phonetics means studying a phonetic alphabet, diacritical marks, technical terms, and many other scientific tools and techniques. Phonetics is definitely not the thing to use if you want to teach small children to read and write. Therefore, about fifty years or so ago, those who believed in teaching reading by the phonetic method invented a way of doing it without using any special symbols or special terminology. They called this phonics; according to the dictionary, phonics is "simplified phonic for teaching reading."
To understand phonics, forget all about our Chinese method of teaching reading and, in your imagination, start from scratch. Imagine, for instance, you are a Hottentot and want to learn how to read and write the Hottentot language. The natural method will be this: First your teacher will make you aware of the individual sounds you make when you talk Hottentot. Second, he will show you the letter symbols that represent each of those sounds. Third, he will teach you how to write these symbols and combine the into words -- and at the same time, how to read them.
In a language with a perfectly phonetic alphabet, this is a very short and simple process. Dr. Frank C. Laubach, famous for his work in teaching half the world to read and write, always starts by working out a phonetic alphabet for the language he is dealing with, and then teaches the natives in very short order how to read and write it. For instance, in his book Teaching the World to Read, he write of the application of the method to the most widely spoken dialect of the Philippines. "It is easy," he write, "for a man with average intelligence to learn to read in one day by using these lessons. Many people have learned to read all of the letters in two hours, some even in one hour."
Yes, if you have a language with a perfectly phonetic alphabet, you are in a sort of dream world, where teaching to read and write is no problem at all. This is true, for instance, in a few European languages that are blessed with an almost perfect system, namely, Spanish, Finnish, and Czech. (Many years ago, when I was about fifteen, I took a semester's course in Czech; I have since forgotten everything about the language itself, but I still remember how the letters are pronounced, plus the simple rule that all the words have the accent on the first syllable. Armed with this knowledge, I once surprised a native of Prague by reading aloud from a Czech newspaper. "Oh, you know Czech?" he asked. "No, I don't understand a word of it," I answered. "I can only read it.")
But let's get back from this dream world to the harsh reality of English. Let's begin with the sounds you make when you talk.
How many of those sounds are there? Scientists don't fully agree on that point; besides, not everybody speaking English makes the same sounds. However, if you want to arrive at a practical number, there is a simple way: Count the items in the pronunciation key of an ordinary desk-size dictionary or handbook of English and see how many different sounds have a special symbol assigned to them. For example, the pronunciation key in the Thorndike-Barnhart High School Dictionary has 43 items; the pronunciation key in Perrin's Writer's Guide and Index to English has 43. However, each of these books includes one item the other does not: Perrin lists hw for the first sound in wheel and whether, which isn't given in Thorndike-Barnhart; and Thorndike-Barnhart has the a sound in care and air, which isn't in Perrin. (Perrin adds at the end of his list: "An r following a vowel changes the vowel's sound, as in care, sere, core, sure, but a separate symbol is not used to represent the change.")
From these two typical sources you therefore get forty-four sounds that can be distinguished in English -- or rather forty-four symbols that you would need if you wanted to construct an English phonetic alphabet.
Actually, as you know, we have not forty-four letters but twenty-six. Not only that, three of our twenty-six are superfluous, namely c, q, and x. (C has the sound of either k or s, qu stands for kw, and x sounds like ks in six and like gz in exist.) This leaves us with twenty-three letters to represent forty-four sounds. And there you have the basic reason for our whole reading problem.
Nevertheless, ridiculous as this setup is, it's the system we've got, so let's see how it can be taught. Let's begin, like the Hottentot, the Filipino, or the lucky Finnish, Czech, or Spanish-speaking child, but learning the letters or letter combinations that stand for each of our forty-four sounds. Here they are:
Twenty-five of the forty-four sounds are consonants. Eighteen of these come in pairs, "soft" and "hard":
Then there are six consonants often called semivowels: l as in lull, m as in ma'm, n as in nun, r as in rare, y as in yo-yo, and ng, which is not a combination of n and g but an altogether different sound. (Listen to yourself when you say singing or banging.) The sound of ng also occurs before the sound of k in words spelled with nk -- drink,mink, pink.
Eighteen plus six makes twenty-four consonants. The twenty-fifth consonant is h -- as in his or hers.
Now let's look at the remaining nineteen vowel sounds and the symbols that represent them in writing. Before we do that, however, let's do a simple bit of arithmetic. So far we have used up nineteen letters to write our twenty-five consonants, namely b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, and z. In addition, there are two more superfluous letters that also represent consonant combinations: q and x. In other words, we have used up twenty-one of the twenty-six letters to write the consonants, which leaves us with exactly five -- a, e, i, o, u -- to deal with nineteen vowel sounds. And this is where English spelling gets really nasty.
Here are the nineteen vowel sounds:
And that's the end of our forty-four-item list -- a highly imperfect system, to be sure, but nevertheless a system that can be explained and taught without throwing up your hands in despair and going back to chinese learning.
What's the best way of teaching this system? To find out, I compared the most important methods used during the past 170 years -- Noah Webster's Blue-Backed Speller, the McGuffy Readers, the once-famous Beacon Readers, today's Hat-Wingo method, Bloomfield method, Hegge-Kirk method, and others. I discovered a great family resemblance among all the methods and a common sequence underlying them all. This is not surprising since it's a natural sequence based on our imperfect system of spelling.
As I showed you, there are two main things wrong with our alphabet and our system of spelling. One is that we have only about half as many letters as we have sounds -- which means that half the symbols a child has to learn consist not of one letter letter but two -- like ay, ea, sh, ch, and so on. The other trouble is that some of our most important single letters are used to spell two or more entirely different sounds, namely, the five vowels a, e, i, o, u, and the consonants c and g.
Therefore, if you want to teach a child to read without utterly confusing him, you have to start him with single letters that stand for single sounds, then go on to sounds spelled by two-letter or three-letter combinations, and finally teach him that some of the letters do not spell one sound but two.
The catch in this, however, is that you can't teach a child to read without letting him read the words. And every word in English contains a vowel. So you have to start with teaching that child the letters a, e, i, o, u in spite of the fact that each of them spells a long and a short vowel. The only way to solve this problem is to begin by teaching the child only the five short vowels (which are far more common than the long ones) and postpone the long vowels until a much later stage.
All of which means that the natural sequence of any phonic method is this:
These five steps, as I said, occur in all phonic systems of teaching a child to read English. (There are some so-called phonic readers on the market that do not follow this pattern, but they can hardly be called phonic by any proper definition of the word.
Naturally I don't expect you to be satisfied with this brief description. You are entitled to a reasonably complete recipe for teaching a child to read -- a section of this book that you can put to immediate use. So here is a simple system that will do the job. I don't offer this system as "the Flesch method" or anything like that; as I explained, it is simply the common core of all major phonic systems ever offered to the public.
To teach Johnny to read, do this:
Teach the vowel letters a, e, i, o, u and their short sounds. The classic way of doing this is to show the student each letter with a picture of a familiar object. (As you realize, the names of the letters A, E, I, O, U are not the short vowel sounds but the long vowel sounds. Since this is apt to confuse the student perhaps it is better not to teach him the alphabet until a little later.)
With the five short vowels, teach the student the following seventeen consonants: b, d, f, g, h, j, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z. Again, you might use pictures like bell for b, a doll for d, a fish for f and so on. Teach the "hard" sound of g as in girl and don't confuse him with words like gem or gingerbread. (He'll learn those much later.) Similarly, teach him only the s that sounds like ss and not the s that sounds like z. Teach him only the consonant y as in yes, yet, and yesterday, and not the y vowel that sounds like i.
To fix these twenty-two sounds and letters in Johnny's memory, let him read and write from dictation as many one-syllable words as possible that contain these sounds. (Use words that begin with the vowels or with any of the consonants and end with b, d, g, ll, m, n, p, ss, or t.) This first step is tremendously important because Johnny must learn, once and for all, that words are written by putting down letters from right to left, and that they are read in the same direction. [Exercises 1-9]
After Johnny has gone through pup, Sam, him, Bill, pad, run, bib, tub, web, Ted, and so forth, and has reached the point of reading these words without trouble, given him one more simple consonant sound -- the sound of k. Explain to him that before a, o, and u this sound is spelled c, but before e and i it is spelled k. After a short vowel it is usually spelled ck. [Exercises 10-12]
Now Johnny has reached the second step: combinations of consonant sounds. Those at the end of words are easier for him than those at the beginning of a word. So start him with two-letter consonant combinations at the end of words: ft as in lift, lk as in milk, lm as in elm, lp as in help, lt as in belt, mp as in lamp, nd as in hand, nt as in tent, pt as in kept, sk as in desk, sp as in lisp, st as in nest. [Exercise 13]
At this point explain Johnny the rule about the letter s as the end of a word: After the consonants f, k, p, and t, it stands for the hissing ss sound, but after all other sounds it stands for the z sound. [Exercise 14]
Next, teach him the following consonant combinations at the end of words: ng as in ring, nk as in pink, x as in fox, sh as in fish. [Exercise 15. Exercise 16 is a Review of ending consonant combinations.]
Next, take up consonant combinations at the beginning of words. Here is your list: bl as in blink, br as in brag, cl as in clash, cr as in crack, dr as in drink, fl as in flag, fr as in frog, gl as in glad, gr as in grab, pl as in plug, pr as in press, sc as in scamp, sk as in skip, sl as in sled, sm as in smack, sn as in snap, sp as in spill, st as in stamp, sw as in swim, tr as in trip, tw as in twin. Then there is scr as in scrap, shr as in shrimp, spl as in splash, spr, as in spring, and str as in stretch. To teach the student these sound combinations, give him words that become other words when a second consonant is put in front: lap and slap, ring and bring, rug and drug, nip and snip. Johnny will like reading aloud words like snack, crack, and plop. [Exercises 17-18. Exercise 19 is a Review of these beginning consonant combinations.]
Next, take some other consonant sounds and combinations at the beginning of words: qu as in quack, wh as in whiff, "voiced" th as in that and "unvoiced th as in thick. [Exercise 20] Then take the ch at the beginning of a word and the tch at the end. [Exercise 21. Exercise 22 is a Review of all consonant combinations.]
Now Johnny is through with the second step. He can read or write from dictation all regularly spelled words that contain any consonant and any of the five short vowels. There are also a number of two-syllable words you can give him at this point: basket, redskin, frosting, lemon, napkin, rabbit, chicken, locket, wicked, robin, and so on. [Exercise 23]
First, the ee sound, spelled ee as in sheep or ea as in meal. This is your chance to tell Johnny about words that sound alike but are spelled differently to distinguish between different meanings, like meet and meat, feet and feat, see and sea, flee and flea. (He'll like learning these pairs and make a game out of it.) Tell him also about the words rhyming with ee but spelled with only one e -- be, he, me, she, we. [Exercises 24-25]
Next teach Johnny:
By now, Johnny has a tremendous reading and writing vocabulary. He can also figure out a long list of two-syllable and three-syllable words like oatmeal, mailbox, swallow, sheepish, murmuring, sunbeam, untrue, leapfrog, murderer, bamboo, cartoon, grandfather, hamburger, restlessness, flamingo, kangaroo, curlicue, and Easter bonnet. [Exercise 39]
Next comes Step Four: The long vowel sounds, spelled a, e, i, o, u. The easiest way to teach Johnny these is to show him the effect of a silent e added to a word. In other words, teach him to read and write fad -- fade, pet -- Pete, pin -- pine, rob -- robe, cut -- cute. (If he has learned the alphabet by now, tell him that the silent e "makes the letter say its name."). [Exercise 40 for long a; Exercise 41 for long a and long e; ] Exercise 42 for longi; Exercise 43 for Review; Exercise 44 for long o; Exercise 45 for Review; Exercise 46 for long u; Exercise 47 for Review.]
After Johnny has learned the silent e, show him that the syllable ing will also make the vowel sound long: rate -- rating, file -- filing and so on. Explain to him the important rule that if you want to keep the vowel short in such ing words, you have to double the final consonant before adding ing. For example: bedding, shipping, trapping, humming, brimming, trimming. [Exercise 48]
Next teach Johnny final y as in lady, rainy, handy. Show him that the double-consonant rule applies here too, as in nutty, sunny, and foggy. Explain to him that the plural of lady is spelled ladies, of body, bodies, and so on. Tell him about lazy, lazier, and laziest. [Exercise 99. Exercise 50 for Review of Exercises 48-49.]
Next, take up the ending ed, again with the double-consonant rule, as in matted, rugged, robbed. [Exercise 51. Exercise 52 for Review.]
Then, final er and le, again with the double-consonant rule as in rubber, trigger, settle, middle. [Exercise 53. Exercise 54 for Review of Exercises 48-53.]
Finally, teach Johnny ce as in rice, ge as in age, se as in cheese, and the as in loathe. Give him pairs like pack and pace, hug and huge, bath and bathe. [Exercise 55] Give him also some examples of dge as in badge and hedge. [Exercise 56. Exercise 57 for Review of Exercises 55-56.]
Now you are through with the fourth step. Johnny has learned to read and write practically all the words that follow some rule. The fifth step will be easy for him. He'll learn words in sion and tion, words in igh, ought, and caught, silent k as in knife, silent w as in write, silent t as in whistle, silent l in calf, silent g in gnu, words like head and bread, word and worm, chief and thief, break and steak, and so on. [Exercises 60-72.]
And that's all. Everything else will come to Johnny automatically, because he can now read anything.
It took me five pages to set down the phonic method of teaching Johnny to read. Complicated you say? I don't think so. I have seen six-year-olds getting the hang of it in a few months.
Anyway, it's not a question of speed. The point is that this method is guaranteed. A child who has been taught this way can read. Millions of children taught the other way can't.
You were probably surprised to see so much about spelling in the last chapter. All the spelling rules that I told you to teach Johnny, and my emphasis on letting him not only read the practice words but also write them from dictation -- why, you may have thought that I am mixing up two things that have nothing to do with each other. Reading is one thing, you thought, spelling is another. It's enough of a problem to bring Johnny up to par with his reading, so why try to make a crack speller out of him at the same time?
Yes,, that's the common attitude. Reading and spelling are considered two different "subjects." To learn reading, you do this; to learn spelling, you do that.
It is one of the main points of this book that that attitude is all wrong. Reading and spelling are two sides of the same thing, and the trouble starts as soon as you separate the two. The only way to teaching spelling at the same time.
The primitive people taught all over the world by Dr. Laubach were not really "taught to read": they were taught to "read-and-write." With a phonetic alphabet and the phonic method it's simply a question of overcoming illiteracy and learning which letter stands for which sound. Once you know that, you can read and spell.
I am sure the same thing is true in such languages as Spanish, Finnish, and Czech. I know that this is so because it's even true in German, which has a far from perfect alphabet and quite a few irregular spellings. Even so, spelling difficulties are as rare in Germany and Austria as serious reading problems. To be sure, lots of people in those countries occasionally misspell some of the more outlandish words; but the ordinary person is hardly ever bothered by spelling difficulties in ordinary German words. A German typist has a little book on spelling, syllabication, and punctuation in her desk drawer, but if she is any good at all, she hardly ever refers to it.
As to German children, they do sometimes ask their parents how to spell a certain word. The usual answer is "Why, it's spelled just like it sounds" and that takes care of the matter. In our country, a mother who has been taught by the phonic method and is asked "How do you spell Amazon?" may also answer "Just as it sounds, dear." But she'll hardly give that answer more than once. The blank look she gets in return will make her realize that such an answer means absolutely nothing to a child who has never heard of the phonic principle. The average child is like the G.I. "non-reader" whose telling remark is quoted in an article on remedial reading in the January 1952 Independent School Bulletin: "Until I had the sounds for the letters I had never known that the letters in a word had anything to do with pronouncing it"
Of course, it is true that we don't have a perfect phonetic alphabet and that even the phonic method will only get you that far in spelling. But how far is "that far"? If you look into the history of English spelling, you will learn that "that far" is very far indeed. Up until about 1600 a knowledge of the letters and the sounds plus a few basic spelling rules would take anybody all the way. Equipped with this basic knowledge he was sure to be free from spelling problems for the rest of his life.
How come? The answer is simple, but rather startling to a modern person to whom correct spelling is something as fully accepted as not eating peas off your knife or being quiet in church. Literate English-speaking people were perfectly free to spell the words they wrote any which way, as the spirit moved them. Spelling was a means to an end, a device to make words understandable to a reader. Nobody cared about correctness -- in fact, as I said, the concept of correctness was totally unknown. Shakespeare spelled freely; so did Milton, who had a way of writing mee instead of me and shee instead ofshe whenever he felt the pronoun needed special emphasis.
To make this quite clear to you, I dug up some good examples of sixteenth-century English spelling. The first is from the diary of Henry Machyn, quoted in Henry C. Wyld's History of Modern Colloquial English. "Machyn's work," says Wyld, "is a priceless monument of the English of the Middle Class Londoner, with no particular education or refinement." This is what Machyn wrote in his diary in 1557:
The xvj day of June my yong duke of Norfoke rod abrod, and at Stamford-hylle my lord havying a dage hangyng on ys sadylle bow, and by mysse-fortune dyd shutt yt, and yt on of ys men that ryd a-for, and so by mysseforten ys horse dyd flyng, and so he hangyd by on of ys sterope(s), and so thatt the horse knokyd ys brayns owt with flyngyng owt with ys leges.
Last day of June. The sam day the kyng grace rod on untyng into the forest and kylled a grett stage with gones.
The iiij day of August was the masse of requiem for my lade prenses of Cleyff ... and ther my lord abbott of Westmynster mad a godly sermon as ever was mad, and the byshope of London song masse in ys myter; [and after] masse my lord byshope and my lord abbott mytered dyd the corsse; and afterward she was caried to her tomb, [where] she leys with a herse-cloth of gold, the wyche lyys [over her]; and ther alle her hed offesers brake ther stayffes, [and all] her hussears brake ther rodes, and all they cast them in-to her tombe; the wyche was covered her corsse with blake, and all the lordes and lades and knyghtes and gentyllmen and gentell-women dyd offer, and after masse a grett dener at my lord abbots; and my lade of Wynchester was the cheyff [mourner], and my lord admeroll and my lord Darce whent of ether syde of my lade of Wynchester, and so they whent in order to dinner.
You see what I mean about freedom in spelling? Machyn spells it twice abbott with two t's and the third time he writes abbots with one t; he writes mysse-fortune, and a few words later in the same sentence he spell it mysseforten; he writes dener and at the end of the same sentence he makes it dinner. And of course since he drops his aitches in speaking, cockney-fashion, he writes ys for his, and untyng for hunting; then adds an h where it doesn't belong and writes hussears for ushers. Having never heard of "correct" spelling, he spells stirrup"sterope," princess "prenses," and admiral "admeroll."
Machyn, however, was not an educated man. The argument wouldn't be complete if I couldn't prove to you that educated sixteenth-century Englishmen too spelled any which way, whatever letter combinations happened to suit their fancy. So here are the first few paragraphs of the last will and testament of Sir Thomas Gresham, the great banker and financial adviser to Queen Elizabeth. His will is dated July 4, 1575:
In the name of God, Amen. The fourth day of June in the seaventene yere of oure Souvereyen lady Elyssabethe, by the grace of God quene of Ingland, France, and Ireland, deffeander of the faith etc., and in the yere of our lorde God 1575, I Sir Thomas Gresham, knighte, calling to minde howe certteyne it is that all mankinde shall leve and departe ought of this transsitorye lieffe, and how uncerteyne the tyme and manor thereof is, and for dispossinge of siche goodes as it haithe pleassed Almighttie God to make me posseas in this worlde in soche wysse as the same maye be to Godes glorye and to the quyeat of soche as after my death shalbe intiteled to have the same with ought contencion, doe therefore macke and declare my teastament and last will in manner and form folloinge.
First, I bequeath my sowle to Almyghttie God my Creator and Redeemer, trustinge by the meritts onely of Cristes passion and death to be saved. My boddy I doe bequeathe to the yerthe, to be burryead in St. Tellyns in the parrishe that I doo now dwele in, in soche wysse as seame good by the discreassione of my welbeloved wyffe my sole executrixe. And I geve and bequeathe to my welbeloved wiffe the lady Ann Gresham, towardes the payments of my deates and for the perfformans of this my last will, all my hoole goodes, as reddy monny, playte, jeuellis, chaynes of golde, with all my stocke of shepe and other cattayle that I have wythe in the realme of Inglonde. Item, I geve and bequeathe to my prentysse Phillipe Celye fourtie poundes. To my preantysse John Smythe fourtie poundes. To my preanrisse Phillipe Gilmor fortye poundes. ...
You would expect, wouldn't you, the last will of one of the leading men of Elizabethan England to be a model of correct spelling, But, as I said, Sir Thomas Gresham was as unfamiliar with the idea of correctness in spelling as everyone else in his day. So he writes preantysse in one sentence, prentysse in the next, and preantisse in the third. He writes certteyne and uncerteyne in the same sentence; he spells mannor and Manner, wythe and with, wyffe and wiffe, fourtie and fortie, I doe and I doo, And without the slightest self-consciousness he spells yere, quyeat, perfformans, and shepe.
Why am I giving you these quaint old examples? Because to understand the problem of spelling you have to realize what it was like when English spelling was absolutely free. There simply was no set way to spell princess or abbot or sheep, but everybody who was literate at all was expected to know his letter sounds and to spell solely by ear. Consequently he was also expected and accustomed to "read by ear," that is, to pronounce the words aloud or at least to sound them out in his mind.
There were two stages in the transition between the happy spelling freedom of sixteenth-century England and our fixed word-picture reading and spelling of today. The first was the limitation of writers to one spelling only for each word. No more choice between fourtie and fortye and fourtye and fortie: the spelling is now forty and everything else is wrong.
The one man mostly responsible for this change was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the dictionary maker. Somehow or other people took to Johnson's spellings, and the notion sprung up that all other spellings should be abandoned. Not that Johnson was particularly consistent, though: he spelled it moveable but immovable, downhill but uphill, distil but instill, install but reinstal, sliness but slyly, deign but distain, and conceit and deceit but receipt. As you can see, quite a few of his inconsistencies are still with us today.
After Samuel Johnson came Noah Webster, who was quite fanatical about his "correct spellings" and made Americans even more "correct-spelling-conscious" than Englishmen.
And so here we are today, with free and easy spelling long forgotten and everybody fully obedient to the spellings given in the dictionary.
However, if we still had the phonic method of teaching reading -- together with teaching spelling, of course -- it would still be possible to become an almost perfect speller without too much effort. We would just have to learn which letter stands for which sound, plus a few basic spelling rules, plus the one among several possible spellings that is given in the dictionary. That's a tougher job than the one Henry Machyn and Sir Thomas Gresham were faced with, but it's not insuperable. Anyone with a firm phonic foundation can pick up the accepted spellings in his reading, without laboriously fixing each individual word picture in his mind.
But we don't teach reading by way of phonics anymore. So how do today's American children learn to spell? Even after I found out about the whole word method of teaching reading and was about halfway through the research for this book, I still in my ex-European innocence believed that when it comes to spelling, our children finally get some phonics. I simply couldn't imagine that anyone can learn to spell at all without learning the pronunciation of the letters.
Well, I learned different. We have reached the point where phonics has been driven out even of the teaching of spelling. Then how can you teach a child that princess is spelled p, r, i, n, c, e, s, s? Like this ( I am quoting from the latest edition of the official manual for elementary-school teachers, published by the Education Department of the State of New York):
Following are proposals for conducting a spelling program.
As you can see from this, the currently accepted teaching of spelling (and surely new York State is typical of the nation in this matter) consists in teaching first the meaning of the word -- which hasn't a thing to do with the spelling -- and secondly, its pronunciation. Now the pronunciation, of course, is a help in spelling, but only if you know how to transcribe the sounds into letters. This the children in the State of New York -- and in the other forty-seven states -- are not taught; in fact, teachers are warned against giving them any phonics in connection with spelling. Says the State of New York manual (and I still quote): "Phonetic analysis is not a very effective way to teach the spelling of words. English is a notoriously non-phonetic language."
Which brings us right back to where we started in the first chapter. And what's the result of this modern method of teaching spelling? Look into any college handbook of English and you'll find a long list of common spelling errors college students are apt to make. Here are some current campus favorites:
accerate (for accurate) miricle (for miracle) Britian (for Britain) ocassion (for occasion) buisness (for business) preperation (for preparation) calvary (for cavalry) privalege (for privilege) considable (for considerable) proffessor (for professor) definate (for definite) reconize (for recognize) differnt (for different) seperate (for separate) dispite (for despite) similiar (for similar) docter (for doctor) suceed (for succeed) Febuary (for February) suprise (for surprise) fourty (for forty) tendancy (for tendency) grammer (for grammar) tradegy (for tragedy) irrevelant (for irrelevant) villiage (for village) libary (for library) visable (for visible) medecine (for medicine) writting (for writing)
I give you this list of familiar mistakes because it shows quite clearly what's the trouble with our teaching of spelling. The trouble is not that people can't spell the famous bugaboos and spelling-bee words like caoutchouc, eleemosynary, pterodactyl, or tintinnabulation. The trouble is that with our system of teaching, even the simplest words present difficulties that should never arise. A person who was taught phonics in first grade wouldn't misspell any of the words on my list. Let me show you why this is so. Let's look at a few of these words a little more closely.
There are, for instance, the common misspellings "writting," "ocassion," and "suceed." The reason for "writting" is of course that written has two t's and so the poor speller has a dim notion that there are also two t's in writing. Occasion, he knows, has two c's or two s's. But which? He guesses, and nine times out of ten he guesses wrong. As to succeed, he has a feeling that there can't be a double c in English; isn't it always ck? So he writes "suceed."
A person trained in phonics can't possibly make any of these mistakes. He knows. He knows that a double consonant results in a short vowel sound and that therefore "writting" would rhyme with sitting; he knows that the zh sound in ocassion can only be spelled with a single s and that "ocassion" would rhyme with fashion; he knows that the sound of ks as in success is sometimes spelled cc as in accent, flaccid, and accident.
Next let's take misspellings like "Britian," "tradegy," and "similiar." Here again, the person who knows phonics can't go wrong. He knows that "Britian" would rhyme with mission, "tradegy" with strategy, and "similiar" with familiar. Why do people make mistakes like that? The only explanation, again, is our method of teaching spelling. Remember Point 3e. of the benighted spelling program of New York State: "Urge the children to notice carefully the way the word looks." Our children, in other words, are deliberately trained to spell by the eye rather than by the ear. The result is that they become so familiar with certain common endings that they think they see them even in words where they don't fit the pronunciation. The ending ian is far more common than ain; the ending gy occurs in elegy, prodigy, energy, and effigy; the ending liar seems more "probable" than lar because it occurs in peculiar and familiar. I deliberately said "seems more probable" in the last sentence. Our spelling, just as our reading, is wholly based on word guessing. For a guess, "Britian" isn't at all bad; the only trouble is that it's wrong.
And now let's look at some other words on our list. "Febuary," "reconize," "considable" -- all the books will tell you that the reason for these misspellings is poor pronunciation. Teach the children to say "Febrrew-ary," "recogg-nize," and "consid-urrable," they tell you, and that will take care of the misspellings. Unfortunately it isn't so, and people go through their whole lives spelling it "libary" although they have been told a thousand times that it is "librrrary." Why do they? And -- what's even more remarkable -- why do they write "definate," "grammer," and "miricle," although their eyes have looked at definite, grammar, and miracle millions of times.
They do so because their whole-word training makes a tremendous difference in their mental habits. Anyone who has started with phonics in first grade goes through life reading every single word he reads letter by letter. He does this fantastically fast, and quite unconsciously, but nevertheless he does it. Every time he reads miracle, he sees the a; every time he reads definite, he sees the second i. No wonder he knows how to spell these words; he simply can't read without taking in every single letter. He has done this since he was six years old and he never in his life read a single word, by just taking in its general shape and guessing what it might mean.
But our schools, as I said before, train our children in just that -- word guessing. The whole literature on the teaching of reading deals basically with the problem of how to make a child read miracle without seeing the a, and definite without seeing the second i. It's possible to do that -- the majority of today's Americans have never done anything else -- but the results are disastrous. They can't read; they can't spell. Not only that, they can't even learn how to spell properly because they have been equipped with mental habits that are almost impossible to break -- except by starting all over again from scratch and relearning to read and write English with phonics.
How did this whole thing come about? Here I have spent a good many pages telling you that there is only one way to teach reading and that all our schools obstinately persist in using another method that doesn't work. On the face of it, that's an incredible accusation. Surely, you say, modern education is based on science: there must have been experiments and tests of the new method and the disadvantages of the old one. This vastly important shift cannot just have sprung full-grown from the brain of some educator; it must be the result of modern educational psychology.
Which is exactly what you will find in the books and articles of the educators. Here, for instance, is a brand-new book, Educational Psychology by Dr. Lee J. Cronbach of the University of Illinois, published in 1954. The teaching of reading is discussed right in the first chapter," How Psychology Contributes to Education." This is the story, according to Dr. Cronbach:
It once seemed completely obvious ... that you have to read words before you can read sentences, and that the way to learn to read words is to learn letters first. No one questioned this. Everyone agreed on the teaching method this conception suggested ... This logic dominated the teaching of reading until the reading process was studied in the psychological laboratory. The psychologists who became interested in reading about fifty years ago set out to determine how people actually read. They found that good readers do not actually notice the letters or syllables that make up a word. The good reader takes a whole word or phrase at a single glance, recognizing it by its outline ... Now we teach pupils to recognize short words as units from the very beginning. Sentences and short stories are introduced as soon as the pupil knows just a few words. Spelling-out and analysis of syllables used to be the beginning of instruction. Now they are taught later as reserve techniques, to be a "low gear" that the reader uses when he encounters a word that defies instant recognition.
Sounds very clear and convincing. In the horse-and-buggy age they taught the letters and sounds; then the men in white went to work in their laboratories and found something much superior; so now research has driven out the old-fashioned, pre-scientific procedure.
The trouble with this beautiful story is that it is wholly untrue. The word method was not adopted as a result of laboratory findings. Far from it. It started with a cow.
Before we get to that cow, let's look a little into the history of teaching reading. Let's begin at the beginning. What was the original method? How did those sixteenth-century free spellers become literate in the first place?
Well, in the beginning, school children were taught first the alphabet, then little syllables like ab, ac, ad, and then the words, going from the simple to the more complex. Then they started reading the Bible. And that was that.
In colonial times in America, this system was incorporated in the famous New England Primer, the first American "best seller."
Then came Noah Webster. Webster, who was one of this country's great geniuses, made up his mind to replace the New England Primer with something better. In 1783, when he was twenty-five years old, he published his famous Blue-Backed Speller, which went into innumerable editions and was the universally used American primer for almost a hundred years. Eventually, an estimated hundred million copies were sold -- one of the most astounding figures in the whole history of printing and book making. The price was fourteen cents. Webster supported his family with the income from his spelling book for about twenty years, while he was working on his great dictionary.
What was the difference between the New England Primer and Webster's Blue-Backed Speller? The difference was essentially that Webster was the first man who realized that an English primer has to be based on phonetics. In his preface he wrote.
Among the defect and absurdities found in books of this kind hitherto published, we may rank the want of a thorough investigation of the sounds in the English language, and the powers of the several letters -- the promiscuous arrangement of words in the same table. ...
In attempting to correct these faults it was necessary to begin with the elements of the language and explain the powers of the letters.
And so Webster's book begins with an explanation of "the powers of the letters" -- what we would call today the elements of phonetics or phonics. "Language is the expression of ideas by articulate sounds. ... Letters are the marks of sounds. ... Letters are of two kinds, vowels and consonants. A vowel is a simple articulate sound formed without the help of another letter, by opening the mouth in a particular manner, and begun and completed with the same position of the organs. ... A consonant is a letter which has no sound, or an imperfect one, without the help of a vowel. ... A diphthong is a union of two simple sounds uttered in one breath or articulation. ..."
After that short preface begins the book -- the book that was used well into the second half of the nineteenth century to teach American children to read -- children in one-room school houses, children on pioneer farms, children in log cabins that contained no other books than the Bible and Webster's Blue-Backed Speller.
Was Webster's book primarily a reading book or a spelling book? The question cannot be answered. In Webster's time, reading and spelling were inseparable; nobody thought of teaching a child to read without teaching him or her to spell at the same time. The Blue-Backed Speller was a fourteen-cent medicine that cured you of illiteracy. Nobody dreamed of criticizing it as wrong, unscientific or ineffective.
But that doesn't mean that nobody tried to compete with that fabulously successful book. There were any number of other primers that tried to capture the market and failed. Among them, inevitably, were some that offered an entirely different approach -- starting with whole words rather than individual letters. There was such a primer by Worcester in 1828 and another one by Bumsted in 1840. But the time hadn't come yet. The time came in 1846 when a young man named John Russell Webb published a primer called The New Word Method, which completely discarded the principle of "letters first" and was based on nothing but whole words.
And how did John Russell Webb arrive at his new method? Did he carry on tests and experiments? Did he utilize the results of research in psychological laboratories? Of course not. As I said before, it all started with a cow. In a later edition of Webb's primer, the story is told in complete -- and highly plausible detail.
(The following brief history of the Word Method is published at the request of many friends of this method of teaching. Its author, Mr. Russell, is a nephew of the man after whome our author was names. -- PUBLISHERS.)
On an early summer evening in 1846, a young man, barely twenty-one years of age, was reading a newspaper in the sitting-roomof his boarding place. He was the teacher of the village school.
From early boyhood he had been regarded as "odd." He did not do, he did not think, as boys of his age generally did. Often he was reproved for finding fault with what others considered "well enough." He would reply: "If we could see no defects, we would make no improvements." Many were the little devices, to save labor and give better results, seen on the home farm.
While awaiting breakfast, as already mentioned, a little girl, four or five years old, climbed into his lap as she had often climbed before. Her mother was in the kitchen preparing the breakfast; her father, in the yard milking the cow.
The teacher laid down his paper and began to talk to the child. The father was mentioned, what he was doing, and the cow was talked about. Just then his eye caught the word cow, on the paper he had laid down. He took it up and pointed out the word to the child, again calling attention to the cow, and to this word as the name of the animal her papa was milking. Soon she looked up into the teacher's face; her eyes kindled with intelligence; she caught the paper, jumped out of his lap and ran to her mother, exclaiming as she ran: "I know what it means; I know what it means. It is a cow, just like what papa is milking!" and she pointed out the word to her mother.
Many a boy and many a man before Newton had seen an apple fall. It may be that many a teacher had done just what this teacher did; but into him the circumstances had flashed an idea. He at once began to experiment, not only with the little four-year-old girl, but with the beginners in the school. The lessons were prepared in the evening, and in the morning printed on the blackboard, and he, himself, taught them to the children with the most marked -- the most wonderful success. There were no unpleasant tones, no drawling. On the contrary, the children read in pleasant natural tones, giving the emphasis and inflections of the playground.
From time to time these lessons were printed and formed pages or hand cards. The children became much interested in reading them. They read them in and out of school. They read them anywhere -- everywhere one would listen. They took their cards with them to the table -- to bed, as little girls sometimes do their dolls.
At first all the parents were very much pleased. But, alas! there was trouble ahead. It was soon discovered that the children could not spell the words -- that they did not even know the names of the letters! Some of the parents "waited on the teacher," and left him with unpleasant memories. Others had faith that "That teacher knows what he is about." There was a good deal of talking, and what "the teacher" was doing became noised abroad.
That fall a Teachers' Institute was held at Watertown, twelve miles away. Our teacher was sent for. They wanted to know what the "new thing" was. For a week it was explained, illustrated, discussed. Then the following resolution was passed.
Resolved, That having heard an exposition of a new method of teaching children to read, by J. Russell Webb, we are of opinion, that the interests of our schools require its publication, and we pledge ourselves to use efforts to introduce its use into our schools should it be published.
Resolved, That a copy of this resolution be signed by our chairman and secretary and presented to Mr. Webb.
E. S. Barnes, Chairman
J. L. Montgomery, SecretaryWatertown, N.Y.
October 20, 1846A Watertown bookseller (Joel Green) was present. He offered to publish an edition at his own expense -- and he did, that fall, 1846. This edition bore the title: "John's First Book; or The Child's First Reader."
The New York School Journal says: "That book was the means of a great reform. Millions of children have been saved years of drudgery by the use of the method it proposed, and Mr. Webb is entitled to unlimited praise."
And this is how the Word Method originated, and how it was born into the world. Since then it has written its own history.
Jay Russell
I don't doubt the truth of this charming story. After all, Mr. Jay Russell in 1855 had no earthly reason to make it up out of whole cloth. No, no, that's what happened: Twenty-one-year-old Mr. Webb ate his breakfast, the child climbed onto his lap, the cow was outside the window, and -- lo and behold! -- the word method was born. There was no new psychological theory, no years spent in the laboratory. It started with a cow.
And as soon as it did start, trouble started too -- the kind of trouble that is still with us more than a hundred years later. Parents complained, the children didn't know the letters, and young Mr. Webb was exposed to some abuse. But he persisted -- unfortunately -- and Webb's Normal Reader was on its way -- the first successful primer based on the word method.
Not that the word method immediately swept the field. From from it. In those early years Webb's primer -- like other primers based on the word method -- was a novelty taken up only by experiment-minded teachers and schools. The phonetic method was still very much in the saddle and, as the word method gained ground, the phonetic method too became embroidered with all sorts of new experiments, like teaching children novel phonetic symbols, diacritical marks, and so forth. The word-method people replied that this sort of stuff was ridiculous -- which it was -- and proclaimed the blessings of the whole-word approach more loudly than ever.
Most American children, however, in the second half of the nineteenth century, were taught to read neither by the word method nor by the more extreme phonetic systems. They learned to read from Webster's Blue-Backed Speller and, after that fabulous best-seller had finally run its course, they learned from the almost equally famous McGuffy Readers. As everybody knows, several generations of American children wer brought up on the McGuffy Readers. And what system was used in McGuffy's primer? I went to the library and looked it up. Sure enough, it starts with letters and sounds.
After McGuffy -- in the first quarter of the twentieth century -- came several competing sets of readers, all firmly based on the phonetic approach. Even those books and systems that favored the word method offered instruction in phonics too. The idea of dropping phonics completely and relying solely on the "This-means-a-cow" approach still was far from anybody's mind. Around 1910 and 1920, the leading system was that used in the Beacon Readers, published by Ginn & Company in Boston -- an efficient and intelligent sequence of systematic phonics, leading quickly to the reading of folk tales, fairy stories, and so on.
By the end of the 1920's however, it was all over. No new phonic readers were published: Ginn & Company stopped revising the Beacon Readers, and finally all phonic readers went out of print. How come? For the answer to that question we must go back again -- and this time to the psychologists.
The psychological theory back of the current way of teaching reading is very conveniently summarized in The Psychology of Teaching Reading by Irving H. Anderson and Walter F. Dearborn (Ronald Press, 1952). I quote from page 212:
Psychological Rationale of the Word Method
The psychological rationale of the word method has been demonstrated numerous times by laboratory studies of the psychology of reading. Cattell's study, reported in 1885, is a landmark. Using the tachistoscopic or short-exposure technique, Cattell found that the adult reader could, in ten minutes of exposure time, apprehend equally well three or four unrelated letters, two unrelated words(or approximately 24 letters if in words). If the limit for unrelated letters was only three of four, the words obviously were not perceived in terms of letters. The experiment definitely proved that we do not ordinarily read by letters but by whole-word units.
Cattell's results were confirmed by Erdmann and Dodge in 1898. These workers found that the span for unrelated letters was only about four or five when a very brief exposure was used. Six or seven letters were often reported correctly when a longer exposure time was used, but that was about the limit for unrelated letters. Whereas familiar words, containing twelve to twenty letters, were easily read during an exposure time of 100 milliseconds.
These finding of Cattell and of Erdmann and Dodge delivered a damaging blow to the alphabet method and gave support to the movement already under way to revolutionize methods of teaching reading. The older notion had been that words are read by combining the letters. That this is not the case was clearly demonstrated by the finding that words can be read when there was not time to grasp all the letters. Words must, therefore, be perceived in some other way. Cattell believed that the cue for recognition was the "total word picture," while Erdmann and Dodge used the expression "general word shape."
If we do not ordinarily read by spelling out the word or even by sounding it out in detail, little is gained by teaching the child his sounds and letters as a first step to reading. More rapid results are generally obtained by the direct method of simply showing the word to the child and telling him what it is.
I quoted this whole passage because it is extremely important to what I am talking about. Mind you, this is the sum total of the scientific basis for the word method as offered in the latest and most comprehensive book on the psychology of teaching reading. This is it; this is the whole psychological basis for the way your child is taught to read today -- or, more exactly, trained to become a lifelong word guesser.
Let's look closely at what the psychologists are telling us here. They tested adult readers (not children) in a laboratory. They found that these adults could read letters that formed words faster than letters that did not form words. Therefore, they say, it is "obvious" and "clearly demonstrated" that readers don't read the letters that make up words but "perceive words in some other way." So -- let's forget about teaching children the letters and simply tell them what the words mean.
You don't need to be a trained psychologist to see that this doesn't make sense. Naturally, a grown-up person who has been reading English for some thirty or fifty years has gotten used to the combinations of letters in common words. He does an extremely fast job of reading these familiar letter combinations,"compounding the letters" as automatically and unconsciously as he does everything else he has been doing for a lifetime. Does this mean that you can skip the whole process and teach a small child to perceive words in some mysterious "other way"? It does not. If you don't teach a child the letters, he'll always be stumped when he sees a new word.
In spite of what Anderson and Dearborn say in their book, this absurd theory was not very influential in the change-over from the phonic method to the word method. The primer writers and the classroom teachers at first did not much care for the fancy new theories -- particularly since they flew in the face of all common sense. (A small minority, though, stuck to Webb's cow primers and similar ventures.) Things began to change in earnest only in 1908 when a man by the name of Dr. Edmund Burke Huey published a book called The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. Huey was a tremendously persuasive evangelist for the whole word method. He preached the new gospel as vigorously as nobody preached it before or since. For him, the word method was the dawn of a new world. Writing as if in a fever, he would raise himself to such incredible flights of fancy as this one:
Even if the child substitutes words of his own forsome that are on the page, provided that those express the meaning, it is an encouraging sign that the reading has been real, and recognition of details will come as it is needed. The shock that such a statement will give to many a practical teacher of reading is but an accurate measure of the hold that a false ideal has taken of us, viz., that to read is to say just what is upon the page, instead of to think, each in his own way, the meaning that the page suggests. Inner saying there will doubtless always be, of some sort; but not a saying that is, especially in the early reading, exactly parallel to the forms upon the page. It may even be necessary, if the reader is to really tell what the page suggests, to tell it in words that are somewhat variant; for reading is always of the nature of translation and, to be truthful, must be free. Both the inner utterance and reading aloud are natural in the early years and are to be encouraged, but only when left thus free, to be dominated only by the purpose of getting and expressing meanings; and until the insidious thought of reading as word-pronouncing is well worked out of our heads, it is well to place the emphasis strongly where it really belongs, on reading as thought-getting, independently of expression.
This is the purest statement of the word method that I have seen anywhere -- carried to almost insane lengths ("Reading, to be truthful, must be free of what is on the page"). It's persuasive all right, though, and Huey's book -- written throughout in the same hectic tone -- began to be read and talked about in teachers' colleges and schools of education. Here at last was an apostle who seriously suggested that phonics should be discarded altogether. It seemed unimaginable in those years that classroom teachers would ever actually do that -- but still, here was someone who said loudly that it could be done and should be done.
And now the curtain rises on the last act of this long drawn-out drama. We are in the middle of the 1920's, and here is Dr. Arthur I. Gates, doing research in reading at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Gates is a true believer in the whole-word method; what's more important, he is also filled with the fervent belief that systematic instruction in phonics is a pure, unadulterated evil that must be destroyed. At this point in history, the word method is in the ascendant, but most schools still haven't up good old-fashioned phonic drills. So Dr. Gates tackles the problem by proposing something that will take the place of the drills. Of course we need phonics, he admits; by all means, he's all for it. But let's give children phonics in such a way that they hardly notice it; let's make it unobtrusive; let's sneak it in casually, while the children are paying attention to something else. Let's not teach them systematically that the letter m says mmmm and the letter s says ssss; let's teach them the sound of m while they are reading about a monkey and the sound of s when they get to the word sit.
And so the great idea of "intrinsic" or "incidental" phonics is born. Dr. Gates set up an experiment: one first grade is taught by his new "incidental phonics," another first grade -- the control group -- is exposed to conventional phonic drills. After a few months, the two groups are tested. Hurrah! the new method has won. And Dr. Gates is on his way to drive phonics out of American schools.
As I am going to show in the next chapter, this Gates experiment was the only test ever made in which systematic phonics came out second best. I studied Dr. Gates' book, New Methods in Primary Reading, carefully to see how this result came about. Apparently there were several reasons: For one thing, of course, the fifty children (twenty-five in each of the two classes) were tested after only a few months of instruction; to really find out which system is better, tests should be made after two or three years, in third grade, or perhaps in sixth grade, or even at the end of high school. Only then will the difference between the two methods really show up. But even aside from that, let's consider the situation in the Gates experiment. On the one hand, there is "old-fashioned" phonics -- the thing to be disproved; on the other hand, there is the brand new method of "incidental" phonics. The teacher in the experimental class naturally had to pay special attention to the presumably casual aspect of her teaching; the "incidental" element for her was the main element, the thing she knew Dr. Gates was eager to prove to the world. No wonder she did a good job of it; her mind was on it -- in complete contrast to the mind of the average teacher in a typical school today, who has been told over and over again that phonic is something hardly worth mentioning in class at all.
And on top of all that, there was a special joker in all the Gates experiments: every test was timed. What does that mean? It means this: You give a child, say, two minutes to read aloud a group of twenty words. If the child has been taught systematic phonics, he'll tackle each of these words letter by letter, sounding it out if necessary to make sure he reads the word that's actually there. Within the two minutes this first-grader may manage to read in this fashion eight of the twenty test words, each perfectly right. But a child who has been taught by the whole word method (plus "incidental" phonics) isn't concerned at all with getting the words right. He has been trained to guess, and guess he does. he races through all twenty words, guessing wildly, and by pure chance combined with his memory of words he has "met," he guesses 50 percent right. Result: The first child's score is eight, the second child's ten. I analyzed Dr. Gates' test scores, and found that they were all of this type. New Methods in Primary Reading is filled to the brim with these spurious statistics, "proving" Dr. Gates' case.
The book was published in 1928, but Dr. Gates summarized his findings in an article which appeared in April,1927, in the Journal of Educational Psychology. The article claimed in the following sentence: "That it will be the part of wisdom to curtail the phonetic instruction in the first grade very greatly, is strongly implied; indeed it is not improbable that it should be eliminated entirely."
By the time the book came out more that a year later, Dr. Gates had apparently realized that he had gone too far. Page 102 of New Methods in Primary Reading simply says, "That it will be the part of wisdom to curtail the phonetic instruction in the first grade very greatly, is strongly implied" -- leaving out the bland suggestion of throwing phonics right into the ashcan. But the deed had already been done: every educator in the land who was interested in reading had read the article with its plain conclusion. Now it was at last official. Word had gone out fro Teachers College, Columbia, that phonics was out. The hour of triumph for the word method had arrived.
From there on the great battle turned into just a mopping-up operation. Phonics had now been officially pushed up into second grade, and it was to be "incidental" instead of systematic. During the 1930's phonics drifted from second into third grade and finally out of the primary grades altogether, until it became something just barely good enough for remedial reading in fifth and sixth grade; and "incidental" phonics got "incidentaler" and "incidentaler" until nobody could notice any trace of it in an ordinary classroom. It became officially accepted in the literature on reading that phonics was nothing but a "reserve technique" in "word recognition," just one out of many methods of learning how to read -- and the very poorest and last one at that. In 1949, Dr. David H. Russell of the University of California published a book, Children Learn to Read, in which he described "seven different way to recognize new or partly known words." Here is his list:
You see? Phonetics has become a tool to be used only after everything else has failed. The child is supposed to go through six different ways of guessing before he is allowed to try actual reading.
Dr. Gates, who in 1927 rather modestly proposed "incidental" second-grade phonics instead of systematic first-grade phonics, has long since gone the whole way and now treats phonics with complete contempt. In June,1953, he wrote an "official" pamphlet on Teaching Reading for the National Education Association. Under the heading "Skill in Word Recognition" he lists the following "good technics": "Skill in observing the word as a whole; then, if necessary, quickly searching for major parts, such as component words; then, if necessary, isolating and pronouncing syllables; then, if necessary, isolating easily sounded letters and familiar phonograms, such as th, ain, etc. ... and finally a shrewd knack of shifting from one approach to another. ..."
You will observe that according to this latest word from on high, phonetics -- aside from "easily sounded letters and familiar phonograms" -- doesn't come into the business at all any more. The child is not even supposed to fall back on phonics, even "if necessary" -- clearly because phonics has long ago ceased to be taught.
For to understand fully what has happened, you have to realize that since the 1920's we are not only without phonic primers and readers;we are also without textbooks and courses in teachers' colleges that include phonics; and consequently we are now, in the 1950's, without elementary-school teachers who know anything about phonics except that it is "outmoded." The vast majority of our school children today have never heard of the difference between a long and a short vowel; but there are by now thousands and thousands of elementary-school teachers who couldn't tell you the difference either.
And what did happen in the field of reading since phonics died in the 1920's and early 1930's? Let's bring the story up to date. Naturally, after the great debate over phonics had died down and the word method -- or "sentence method" or "story method" -- was firmly in the saddle, the time had come for all sorts of refinements and elaborations. I won't go into all of those theories and fads, but two are worth mentioning. One is the movement toward fewer and fewer words. Once it was accepted that children must learn to read, Chinese fashion, by memorizing words, the race was on for making the job easier and easier and easier. Let's give the poor little tots only four hundred words instead of six hundred in first grade; let's further simplify the second-grade readers and the third-grade readers and the sixth-grade books and the junior-high-school books and the senior-high-school books -- there is no end to what can be accomplished by a ceaseless, determined campaign against all "unfamiliar" words. I'll have more to say about all this in a later chapter, but there is no doubt that the great game of vocabulary cutting has been the main idea of the reading "experts" for the past ten or fifteen years.
The other "great new theory" that blossomed in the 1930's was the teaching of silent reading. You don't hear much about this particular fad any more, but it's so typical of the upside-down logic of the educators that it ought to be mentioned here. Briefly, the idea is that a good adult reader reads silently, without moving his lips; a poor reader or a remedial reading case usually moves his lips and mutters. Ah! said the educators, there's the trouble. We have to teach children to read silently. Of course, anybody with a modicum of common sense knows that a beginner naturally reads aloud and that the habit of silent reading develops gradually, as reading becomes faster and smoother. But no, the educators insisted: Let's start with silent reading, and the whole trouble of "vocalizing" will never arise. And how do you stop a child from his natural tendency to read aloud? Like this (I am quoting from Improvement of Reading by Dr. Louella Cole, published in 1938):
The simplest method is to render the speech mechanism incapable of pronouncing words, even partially. A simple and effective means of bringing about this result is to have the child put two fingers into his mouth, using them to separate his upper and lower teeth and to hold down his tongue. Nobody cab articulate words with his mouth hanging open. If the child, through force of habit, moves his jaws to articulate, he bites his fingers. With the tongue and the jaws both out of commission, there will be no pronunciation. Instead of his fingers a child may use his ruler or a large-sized eraser. The fingers are better than either wood or rubber, however, partly because the pupil is unwilling to bite them and partly because he always has them with him!
Another, if even less elegant procedure, is to let the child chew gum while he is reading. His speech mechanism is out of commission not because it is at rest but because it is doing something else. No one can pronounce words and chew gum simultaneously. Naturally, a pupil should not persist in these techniques until they become habits. They should be used only until the tendency to pronounce words has been broken.
As I said, the fad of "silent reading" seems to have subsided in recent years. I doubt whether any school in the country today follows Dr. Cole's brilliant suggestions on the use of fingers, pencils, erasers, and chewing gum. But that doesn't mean that common sense has returned to our schools.
Very recently, though, the pendulum began to swing in the other direction. Not that there is much change to be noticed in the classrooms, but the clamor of parents about their non-reading, non-spelling children seems to have gotten on some educators' nerves. A defensive note has crept into the educational journals whenever the word phonics is mentioned. Witness Dr. John J. DeBoer, editor of Elementary English, reviewing a book on Emotional Difficulties in Reading in February, 1954. "The book," writes Dr. DeBoer, "should serve as a powerful corrective for the view that the answer to more reading problems is 'more phonics'." And Dr. Emmett A. Betts of Temple University, Philadelphia, in the January 1954 issue of Education, has this to say:
For the past 150 years, the phonics fad has come and gone. Right now, the fad has again taken over reading. While there is a need for improving the phonics programs through the teachers, it should be obvious that this gimmick will not make much of a dent in the reading problem.
Quite a change in attitude between 1783 and 1954. In 1783 Noah Webster proclaimed that "it is necessary to begin with the elements of the language and explain the powers of the letters." Now we are told that phonics is just a gimmick.
Which wouldn't really matter if our children were taught to read. But they are not.
Thomas H. Huxley once described the scientific attitude like this: "Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."
The attitude of our experts on reading is quite different. Their minds are filled with preconceived notions, they have an utter disregard for facts, and they are unwilling to learn anything.
I said in the last chapter that whenever the results of phonics and of the word method were compared by tests and experiments, phonics came out on top. (I tried to explain why Gates' experiments were an apparent exception.) Let me repeat that statement and amplify it: In every single research study ever made, phonics was shown to be superior to the word method; conversely, there is not a single research study that shows the word method superior to phonics.
I know that this seems an unbelievable claim. Let me explain why I feel justified in making it. Every researcher in every field of science begins his work by surveying the previous research literature in the field. Consequently, almost all research reports are equipped with footnotes and bibliographical references that cover everything that has been done up to that point. A few hours in a library, working back from the latest studies in a given area, are therefore usually enough to check the sum total of research done to solve a problem.
A few weeks ago I spent two days in the library of Teachers college, Columbia University, tracking down every single reference to a study of "phonics vs. no phonics." I carefully read each one of those papers and monographs. Naturally, it is possible that some item or items in the bibliography have escaped me; but I honestly don't think so. I covered the ground as diligently as I possibly could, looking for scientific evidence in favor of the word method.
There was none.
In the books and pamphlets by the "experts" there are plenty of statements referring to those research studies. Usually the findings are "contradictory." Sometimes a few stray statistics are quoted out of context; sometimes the actual findings are boldly misrepresented. The result is always the same: the preconceived notions are endlessly repeated, the true facts are concealed.
The true facts are these, in chronological order:
In 1913, Professor C. W. Valentine of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland published in the Journal of Experimental Pedagogy the results of a brilliant experiment. He had hit upon the idea of solving the "phonics vs. no phonics" problem by teaching his college students to read English words written in Greek letters. So he transcribed a passage from Robert Louis Stevenson in Greek letters and gave two groups of twenty-four students each two minutes to decipher it. One group had first been coached in the Greek alphabet, the other had been coached in recognizing the whole words in the Stevenson passage, as they looked in Greek letters. Result: Those who had learned the alphabet did 200 percent better.
Professor Valentine then tried a similar experiment with eight-year-old children at the University Training School in Dundee. The result was the same. It all added up, he reported, to "a striking victory for the phonic method."
In 1916, Miss Lillian B. Currier, a teacher in the public school of Tilton, New Hampshire, wrote a paper called "Phonics or No Phonic?" for the Elementary School Journal. (in 1923 she followed it up with another paper under the same title.) Miss Currier had taken two groups of children in first and second grade, and taught the one group with phonics and the other group without phonics. She had no statistics to offer but reported that the "non-phonic" children read with more expression and interest, but the "phonic" children were more careful and more accurate in reading the words that were on the page.
Next we come to a report by Mr. W. H. Winch, Teaching Beginners to Read in England, published in this country in 1925. Mr. Winch, a leading British educator, carried out a number of statistical experiments with children in first grade. (English children start going to school at five, so that they start to read at what is kindergarten age over here. I'll come back to that difference in Chapter 6.) There were two groups of children, one taught by the phonic method, the other by the "look-and-say" (that is, whole word) method. After two months the children were given four tests. The look-and-say group scored 62.8, the phonic group 79.1. Mr. Winch summarized these results simply: "The phonic group has scored a complete victory."
Next study: In the Elementary School Journal of May, 1928, Elmer K. Sexton and John S. Herron report on "The Newark Phonics Experiment." Sexton and Herron tested a thousand school children in Newark, New Jersey. In spite of a rather confusing experimental setup, they concluded that the results favored instruction in phonics.
Next: In the October 1930 Journal of Education Psychology, Raymond M. Mosher and Sidney M. Newhall report on "Phonic vs. Look-and-Say Training in Beginning Reading." Fifty children in New Haven, Connecticut were taught by the word method and seventy-three children by the phonic method. The two groups were given ten tests. Eight of the ten tests favored phonics.
Now comes a very interesting story (from New York State Education, October, 1930): Miss Helen R. Braem is Head Teacher at Letchworth Village, a state institution for mental defectives. The inmates of that institution are boys under sixteen with an I.Q. of from 30 to 75. Naturally they are very poor readers; they make very little progress at their school which, following the New York State Department of Education, uses the sight-reading (whole-word) method. One nice day Miss Braem hits upon the idea of giving those boys phonics. She digs up some phonic primers and readers and goes to work on an experiment, forming a "Sight Reading Group" and a "Phonic Group." The results are amazing. After one year she observes: "The Sight Reading Group had started reading for two years; the Phonic Group had started it for one year; yet the Sight Reading Group made three times the number of mistakes and took almost three times as long to read the same test." Now that Miss Braem has found the answer to her problem, she decides to help the poor Sight Reading Group, who were the victims of the experiment. After three years of sight reading she gives them instruction in phonics. Another eight months go by and they have caught up with the boys who got phonics right from the start.
Next 1931: In the Peabody Journal of Education Mr. S. C. Garrison and Miss Minnie Taylor Heard write of "An Experimental Study of the Value of Phonetics." They experimented with about one hundred school children in first and second grade; one half had phonics, the other half had none -- or rather, they had the so-called "intrinsic" phonics invented a few years earlier by Professor Gates of Teachers College, Columbia University. At the end, there was a series of tests. Total result: The phonics group scored 58.5, the other group 55.5. Three points in favor of phonics. And, Garrison and Heard report, the phonics group was also considerably better in spelling.
Several years pass. Then Mr. Harry L. Tate publishes a paper on "The Influence of Phonics on Silent Reading in Grade I" (Elementary School Journal, June 1937). A group of thirty-six first-graders were taught by the look-and-say method, another group of thirty-seven children were given exactly the same instruction plus fifteen minutes each day of drill and practice in phonics. After two months they were given three tests. Two of the tests ("silent reading" and "paragraph reading") were tests of guessing rather than reading and the word-method children scored slightly better. The third teat, however, was a test of "word recognition." In this test the score of the phonic group put them 4.6 months ahead of their "normal reading age," which means, according to Mr. Tate, that they scored 270 percent better than the word-method group. In other words, fifteen minutes of phonics for eight weeks had pushed them half a school year ahead of children taught by the usual method. Mr. Tate comments that this result is "overwhelming proof of a reliable finding," and adds: "Phonetic instruction and drill, as judged by the results of the Gates Primary Reading Test, Type I, is far superior to the look-and-say method in developing the ability to recognize words."
Let's proceed to another study in a somewhat different setting. Sister M. Dorothy Browne, of St. Joseph's College, Adrian, Michigan, writes her doctor's dissertation on "Phonics as a Basis for Improvement in Reading" (Catholic University of America,1938). How about using phonics for remedial reading? she says. Let's see what phonics can do for sixth-graders. So she gives a ten-minute phonic drill to the 160 sixth-graders in six parochial schools in Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. Another 160 students form a control group with no phonic drill. After nine months the two groups are tested. The "reading age" of the control group is 154.9 (that is, the norm for a child of twelve years and eleven months), that of the phonic-drill group 162.73 (thirteen years and seven months). Ten-minutes-a-day of phonics for nine months has put them eight months of "reading age" ahead of their fellow students. On the basis of her findings, Sister M. Dorothy Browne comes to this conclusion:" The study of phonics is helpful not only to the pupil who is deficient in reading, but is even more effective in stimulating the better reader to further growth."
And now we have arrived at 1939, the publication date of the most extensive and conclusive study of them all. It is the dissertation of Mr. Donald C. Agnew, taking his doctor's degree at Duke University. Mr. Agnew sets out to settle the old controversy once and for all. Those limited experiments with experimental and control groups of first-graders are inconclusive, he feels. Let's take all the children in all the schools in a city, he says, and find out where they stand at the end of third grade when the effect of reading instruction can really be effectively measured. So one spring he gives tests to all the third-graders in all the schools in Raleigh, North Carolina. Before he does that, he gives to all teachers who ever taught these children an elaborate questionnaire; from the answers he figures for each teacher the exact degree to which she uses phonics in her teaching. Then he works out the statistical relationship between children's test scores and the amount of phonics they presumably got from their teachers.
The results are a terrific disappointment They hardly show any differences. Mr. Agnew, in danger of not getting his Ph.D. degree, goes home and ponders. What went wrong? He comes to the conclusion that his basic assumption was wrong, namely, that a little phonics would go a long way. After all, the supervisors of the Raleigh schools are word-method people; they frown on phonics, and there is not one among their teachers who would dare to do a real job of phonics in her class. The value of phonics can only be proven when it is taken seriously and taught systematically.
Fortunately, there is the city of Durham, North Carolina, whose superintendent of schools is a pro-phonics man. All teachers in Durham schools have to teach phonics whether they like it or not. So Mr. Agnew gives another series of tests to some three hundred third-graders in Durham. Their teachers have all been teaching more phonics than even the most phonics-minded teacher in Raleigh. (Mr. Agnew has established that fact again with questionnaires.) Nothing could be more conclusive than a comparison of those third-grade test scores in Raleigh and Durham.
Here is the lineup of Mr. Agnew's average test results:
Name of Test Score of Children
in Raleigh
(Word Method)Score of Children
in Durham
(Phonics)Gates A 4 63.31 79.50 Gates A 5 23.85 32.17 Gates B 2 18.11 29.29 Gates B 3 9.29 15.20 Word Pronunciation 53.15 70.17 Gates Type A 4.03 4.08 Gates Type B 4.18 4.18 Gates Type C 4.11 4.61 Gates Type D 4.15 4.38 Pressey Vocabulary 59.26 71.85 Eye-Voice Span 31.89 37.94
As you can see, the Durham children scored higher in every on of these tests (except Type B, where the scores were even). In addition, Mr. Agnew also gave them the "Gray Oral Reading Check Test," Set II and Set III. This is a test where the results are measured by the number of errors made in reading. On Set II, the Durham children made on average 2.35 errors, the Raleigh children made 8.79. On Set III, the Durham children made 7.05 errors, the Raleigh children 17.50. (The time scores on these tests showed that the phonics-trained Durham children took a little over a minute to read each set, while the little Raleigh word-guessers took considerably less than one minute to make two to four times as many errors.)
Mr. Agnew'sconclusions were clear and emphatic:
Should phonetic methods be employed in the teaching of primary reading? The answer to this question can be given only when the purposes for teaching primary reading have been agreed upon. If the basic purpose in the teaching of primary reading is the establishment of skills measured in this study (namely: independence in word recognition, ability to work out the sounds of new words, efficiency in word pronunciation, accuracy in oral reading, certain abilities in silent reading, and the ability to recognize a large vocabulary of written words), the investigations would support a policy of large amounts of phonic training. If, on the other hand, the purposes of teaching primary reading are concerned with "joy in reading," "social experience," "the pursuit of interests," etc., the investigations reported offer no data as to the usefulness of phonetic training.
I can fully understand Mr. Agnew's outburst of sarcasm, since I worked my way through the same literature. It's exactly as he says: If you want to teach children how to read, you need phonics; if you just want to make them feel good, you don't.
After Mr. Agnew's definitive study, research in "phonics vs. no phonics" came practically to an end. Not, of course, because his conclusive results had made further studies unnecessary -- rather, I suppose, because later potential researchers realized that if the Durham-Raleigh results couldn't change the educators' minds, then obviously nothing could.
I have only one more item that will bring the story up to date:
In December,1943, Dr. David H. Russell reported in the Journal of Education Research a study of first- and second-grade children in Vancouver, British Columbia. There were sixty-one children who were given day-by-day phonic work on sounds and extra practice in handwriting; fifty-five other children were taught little or no phonics. At the end of the experiment both groups were given twelve different tests of reading and spelling. The phonics-trained group did better on every one of those twelve tests. "The table [of test results] clearly reveals," comments Dr. Russell, "that the early and rather direct type of instruction in the phonics group has a favorable influence on achievement in spelling and reading."
Ironically, this same Dr. Russell is the man whom I quoted in an earlier chapter as the author of Children Learn to Read(1949), one of the leading word-method texts. I can't offer any explanation for this astonishing reversal; but then, it's inexplicable anyway how the high priests of the word method have managed to disregard and by-pass the unanimous findings of Valentine, Currier, Winch, Sexton and Herron, Mosher and Newhall, Braem, Garrison and Heard, Tate, Browne, Agnew, and Russell.
After all this, you probably expect me now to recite the evidence in favor of the word method. But, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, there is none. The story as I told it here is complete; this is the sum total of all experiments ever made. I have left out nothing and I have misrepresented nothing -- to the best of my knowledge as a researcher.
The record is perfactly clear. The facts have been available to anybody in the field for many years. Our "scientific" educators simply don't want to know the truth.
If you are a mother and have a child in second or third grade who can't read and spell, you'll sooner or later go to the school and complain that your child isn't taught the letters and sounds. You'll then be told, one way or the other, that phonics is utterly out of date; just wait, and your boy or girl will suddenly catch on.
But if your child is in first grade, the answer you'll get will be considerably shorter, strongly resembling a brushoff. The teacher will tell you, with a rather indulgent smile: "He isn't ready, you know."
When you get to the subject of readiness," you approach the holy of holies, the inner sanctum of the whole "science" of reading. In each of the fat tomes on how to teach reading, pages and pages are filled with profound discussions of what makes a child ready for reading, when does he get ready, how to tell whether he is or not, how to speed him up or slow him down, what to do with him before he gets ready, how to instill readiness, how to make it grow, how to use it, treat it, protect it, diagnose it, improve it, ripen it, and direct it. Deep mystery covers this whole recondite subject, and work has been going on for decades to explore its inner recesses.
One of the "authorities" in fact went so far as to devote a whole book to the subject of "reading readiness." I went through that whole book in search of a definition of "readiness," being sincerely curious to know what was meant by the word. But there was no definition to be found. So, since the experts don't deem able to help us, I'll offer my own definition. "Reading readiness" means the readiness of the teacher to let the child start reading.
If there was ever an example of reasoning in a vicious circle, this is it. You take a six-year-old child and start to teach him something. The child, as often happens, doesn't take to it at once. If you use a common-sense approach, you try again and again, exert a little patience, and after some time the child begins to learn. But if you are twentieth-century American educator, equipped with the theory of "readiness," you drop the whole matter instantly and wait until he's seven -- until he's eight -- until he's nine. We've all the time in the world; it would be a crime to teach a child who isn't "ready."
Some time ago, more or less by accident, I ran across what I'm sure is the first statement of the theory of "reading readiness." It's in Rousseau's Emile, the book that is the basis of all modern theories of education. This is how jean Jacques Rousseau put the matter in 1762:
People make a great fuss about discovering the best way to teach children to read. They invent 'bureaux' and cards, they turn the nursery into a printer's shop. [The French "bureau method" was a sort of anagram game by which French children were taught to read.] Locke would have them taught to read by means of dice. What a fine idea! And the pity of it! There is a better way than any of those, and one which is generally overlooked -- it consists in the desire to learn. Arouse this desire in your scholar and have done with your 'bureaux' and your dice -- any method will serve.
Present interest, that is the motive power, the only motive power that takes us far and safely. Sometimes Emile receives notes of invitation from his father or mother, his relations or friends; he is invited to a dinner, a walk, a boating expedition, to see some public entertainment. These notes are short, clear, plain, and well written. Some one must read them to him, and he cannot always find anybody when wanted; no more consideration is shown to him than he himself showed to you yesterday. Time passes, the chance is lost. The note is read to him at last, but it is too late. Oh! if only he had known how to read! He receives other notes, so short, so interesting, he would like to try to read them. Sometimes he gets help, sometimes none. He does his best, and at last he makes out half the note; it is something about going tomorrow to drink cream -- Where? With whom? He cannot tell -- how hard he tries to make out the rest! I do not think Emile will need a "bureau." Shall I proceed to the teaching of writing? No, I am ashamed to toy with these trifles in a treatise on education.
I will just add a few words which contain a principle of great importance. It is this -- What we are in no hurry to get is usually obtained with speed and certainty. I am pretty sure Emile will learn to read and write before he is ten, just because I care very little whether he can do so before he is fifteen. ...
Now this, to be sure, makes a great deal of sense. Learning is most effective when there is strong motivation. If you are willing to wait five or ten years until a child is eager to read, then the teaching of reading will perhaps offer no problem.
But our educators, though in theory they are followers of Rousseau, would hardly say out loud that they would postpone the teaching of reading until the age of ten or fifteen. They know very well that people wouldn't stand for it. So, the next best thing, they use any device they can find to postpone the teaching of reading one, two, three years in the hope that by that time the child will be a little more eager to learn how to read. The most convenient of these devices is the theory that a seven-year-old child is unable to learn how to read.
Please note that Rousseau didn't say any such thing in the passage I quoted. He obviously took it for granted that you can teach a small child to read, but simply said that he thought it better to wait. The idea that a six-year-old child can't learn to read is quite new, and a purely American invention.
To be quite fair, I should explain at this point that our educators don't actually say that. They say -- unanimously as far as I can see -- that a first-grader is able to grapple with some three or four hundred "sight words" and can memorize those in the course of one year. Then at the"Mental age of seven" -- that is, in second grade -- he will develop "phonic readiness": he will be able to start learning a little something about letters and sounds. Phonics-- any kind of phonics -- before second grade is too much for a child, the educators say: they consider it an established fact that six-year-olds cannot learn phonics.
I have seen this statement repeated -- and explained at length -- in every single book on teaching reading that I have studied. The statement is always backed up by scientific evidence. There is always a footnote or bibliographical reference in those books when the subject of "phonic readiness" is discussed. The footnote id always the same. It refers to one single experimental study in which the onset of phonic readiness at seven was discovered. That study was made by Professor Edward W. Dolch of the University of Illinois and a graduate student of his, Miss Maurine Bloomster. It was published under the title "Phonic Readiness" in the November 1937 Elementary School Journal.
How did Professor Dolch and Miss Bloomster make their epochal discovery? You'd think it would be rather difficult to set up an experiment to prove that six-year-olds can't learn phonics, considering the fact that all over the world and through most of recorded history they have done just that. The only way to prove the point, logically, would be to do a bang-up job of teaching phonics in the first grade, the give the children tests at the end of the year, and show, statistically, that phonics, with most of the children, "didn't take." In 1937, with the word method prevailing almost everywhere in the country, this would have meant going back to old-fashioned phonics and experimentally exposing a class of children to it for a year.
But Dr. Dolch didn't dream of doing anything like that. He experimented in a school where "phonics had had some emphasis, though not an unusual amount," Does that mean systematic phonics? It does not. It doesn't even mean "incidental" phonics. Dr. Dolch's experimental school -- probably the University of Illinois Training School -- was a school where phonics was something the children had to learn by themselves, if at all. "Phonics," in Dr. Dolch's meaning of the word, "means the use of generalizations ... learned inductively. After the child has perceived that four or five words beginning with a certain sound begin with the same letter, he is supposed to have learned the generalization that all words beginning with that letter begin with the associated sound, and he is supposed to use this generalization in new word situations." Which makes it quite clear that the "not unusual amount of emphasis on phonics" in that school consisted in leaving the children completely to their own devices and teaching them no phonics whatever.
Having picked this school to test their theory of "phonic readiness," Dr. Dolch and Miss Bloomster proceeded to test how much the first- and second-graders knew of phonics. The tests were of the most primitive kind -- the type of problem that a phonics primer presents on the first few pages. The children were given lines of four words like "cap nap tap lap" or "cap cape tap tape" or "lap clap slap flap," and were asked to tell the words apart. The first-graders -- who had never been told anything at all about letters and sounds -- turned out to be completely helpless; the second-graders managed to figure out a word here and there. Whereupon Dr. Dolch and Miss Bloomster announced to the world: "Children wit mental age below seven made only chance scores; that is, as far as this experiment indicates, a mental age of seven years seems to be the lowest at which a child can be expected to use phonics."
And that, if you please, is all the scientific basis of the great discovery of "phonic readiness." First graders can't take it, the educators tell us: see the report by Dolch and Bloomster in 1937.
The truth is, of course, that any normal six-year-old loves to learn letters and sounds. He is fascinated by them. They are the greatest thing he's come up against in his life. He loves making noises; he loves taking things apart and seeing what they are made of. So here is a wonderful new game where you take words apart to learn what they are made of. And you learn how to make signs on paper that stand for certain sounds and noises. The child thinks this is the greatest invention ever made. (He's right in that.) He plays with this new toy endlessly. There are endless combinations of these sound-signs -- and they make words, words that he knows and can recognize. He reads street signs -- he writes words on every surface he can find -- he works out sentences in the newspaper -- finally he reads a book. Motivation? Rousseau was wrong when he relied on the necessity to get information. A normal child is ready and eager to learn to read because it's mankind's most fascinating game.
But then, you will say, what's the explanation of the obvious fact that our first-graders don't get on with their reading -- that they often show hardly any interest in it-- that they take years before they "discover" books, if they ever do it at all? My answer to this is again the difference between phonics and the word method. Start a child with letters and sounds, make him understand the basic principle underlying all alphabetic writing and reading -- and pretty soon he will be on his way, having discovered that reading is fun. But start a child far a year, two years, three years with the senseless, stultifying activity of staring at a collection of letters memorizing that it means "chicken" or "funny" or "walked," and he'll never develop the slightest interest in reading. Why should he? The fun in reading lies in the great game of deciphering a hidden meaning -- just as the fun in writing lies basically in the game of encoding a message. With our system, it is many years before the child even realizes that this is what the game is about.
Mr. Winch, the British schoolmaster whose book on Teaching Beginners to Read in England I quoted in the last chapter, had some wise things to say on this point: "The argument for the look-and-say method is tainted by the limited-adult view of the child-mind. Our own psychological processes are put into the child, diminished in strength, but similar in form. We are getting old and worn, many of us. We do not like the mechanical acquisition of things; it is hard for us; so we say children do not like it. As a matter of fact, they do. Repetition bores us; so we say it bores the young child. As a matter of fact, he loves it."
Exactly. The real reason for the horrible fiasco of the word method is that it looks at a child as if it were a small-size adult. So the child is forced, by hook or crook, to grasp words as wholes like an experienced grown-up reader, to read silently without moving his lips, to act as if it were a shame to play with words and letters and sounds. To an adult, the ABC is something childish; so the child is taught to refrain from such childish habits and to concentrate on reading as "thought-getting." He is praised and rewarded if, after weeks and months, he has learned to say "dog" while looking at the letter combination"d-o-g"; but he is never once given the opportunity to look at a brand-new word like, say, "fib," to slowly decipher it by sounding it out, and then to repeat happily, with a tremendous sense of achievement:"Fib, fib, fib, fib, fib, fib!! It means fib! It means fib!"
Six-year-olds can do that. They are doing it, today, at the very moment that you are reading these words, in Germany, in France, in Norway, in Spain, in South America -- all over the civilized world. The problem of "reading readiness" or "phonic readiness" has never for a moment troubled any of the inhabitants of those countries. They decided, long ago, that in order to educate their children, they had to start them on the Three R's at six. So, all over the world, reading starts at the age of six.
Except -- and this may shock you -- in Great Britain, where it starts at the age of five. Yes, it's an old, time-honored British custom to teach five-year-olds to read.
When I discovered this fact in Mr. Winch's book, it was news to me. So I checked and made sure that it was true -- and is still true today. The information I got was perfectly clear: Reading in England starts in the first year of Infant School, and Infant School starts at the age of five. There are two years of Infant School, covering what is here kindergarten and first grade. Then come four years of Junior School, beginning at the age of seven, what is here second-grade age. Reading and writing, I repeat, start at the age of five.
Why do the English do that? Why do they start their children a year earlier than is customary on the European Continent? I have never seen an explanation anywhere, but I think the answer must lie in the wretched system of English spelling. Most European languages are reasonably phonetic in their spelling, but English, as we have seen, is saddled with 13 percent irregular spelled words.
Probably any other nation in the world would have reformed its spelling under these circumstances. But the English are not like that; if the whole world has decimal units of currency, they hang on to their pounds and shillings and pence. If English spelling adds a year to the job of learning how to read and write, why, then English children have to start when they are five. Very simple solution, really. By the time they are six or seven, they'll be just as far advanced as children in Germany and France.
And so we have the ages of schooling pretty well standardized all over the world, with school beginning at six in most countries, except in Great Britain where it starts at five. Achievement in the grades and at high school and college is pretty much the same the world over.
In the United States the picture is entirely different. Generally speaking, students in our schools are about two years behind students of the same age in other countries. This is not a wild accusation of the American educational system; it is an established, generally known fact. I know of innumerable cases of young Austrians and Germans who applied for admission to college or university in this country. The standard practice is to give those students credit for two years of college if they have finished what corresponds to our high school abroad. And that rule of thumb works: if you assume that a foreign student is about two years ahead of an American his age, you are usually just about right.
What accounts for those two years? Usually the assumption seems to be that in other countries children and adolescents are forced to study harder. Now that I have looked into this matter of reading, I think the explanation is much simpler and more reasonable: Americans take two years longer to learn how to read -- and reading, of course, is the basis for achievement in all other subjects. One of those two lost years is the year they lose by starting at six instead of, like the English, at five. The other is the year lost through using the word method instead of phonics.
Look at it this way: English spelling takes about a year longer to learn than the spelling of most other languages. The British recapture that lost year by starting tolearn a year earlier. But the American attitude is entirely different. If English spelling makes it hard to learn how to read, let's do the job someother way. Let's invent a new gadget by which we can teach reading without teaching the letters at all. If the word method takes a year longer and is only half as effective -- so what? This is the richest country in the world; we can afford it. Let's not think of spoiling the happy year in kindergarten with teaching reading; and let's shield our children from the dangers and confusions of English spelling by giving them a substitute way of reading whole words. And so, what takes one year in the rest of the world and two years in England takes at least three years here. At twelve, American children know as much as other children at ten; at twenty, they are matched with foreign eighteen-year-olds.
As I said, it's the typical American attitude that we can afford this tremendous waste of our resources. We treat those two years in the lives of our children as we treat our soil, our timber, our oil. Perhaps we can. But at least we should realize what we are doing. We take two years, which we could save by starting with phonics at the age of five, and spend them on games, toys, and coloring books.
If our educators are really in favor of this system, they should say so. But they shouldn't insult our intelligence and that of our children by brandishing the word "readiness" as if it had any real meaning.
The other day I attended a meeting at our local school at which parents discussed reading problems with the school librarian and the remedial reading teacher. One of the mothers stood up and made an interesting point. "Why is it," she asked the librarian," that my two boys, who are in first and second grade, never bring home any library books that they can read themselves? My husband and I have to read those books to them. Can't you give them books that they can read themselves?"
There wasn't much the librarian could say in answer to that question. She just didn't have any such books in her library, she said. Publishers didn't put out any books simple enough for first- and second-graders to read alone. Sorry, but the lady and her husband would just have to go on reading aloud to their boys.
All of which was perfectly true. What was also true, but what of course nobody said, was that first- and second-graders in our public schools are not taught to read at all, as shown by the fact that there isn't a single book on the market that they can manage to read by themselves. Instead, they are taught to memorize the words contained in their readers.
To understand what exactly is happening in our schools, it is necessary to understand clearly what those readers are, how they are produced, and what effect they have on our children. Let's look at them in some detail.
To begin with, you have to realize that what is now commonly known as a reader is not at all the kind of thing a reader used to be thirty or forty years ago. In those days a reader was simply a collection of reading matter suitable for children in school. Today a reader is something entirely different. It is a special tool for fixing a "sight reading vocabulary" in children's minds. This "sight reading vocabulary" is the essence of the word method of teaching reading. The word method therefore hinges on the use of those readers. Without the readers, the word method cannot be used at all.
According to the basic theory of the word method, children learn to read by looking at words again and again until they know them by sight. It is therefore necessary to make them fix their eyes repeatedly on certain predetermined words. For example, during first grade a reading "expert" decides to give them, say, four hundred words. He draws up a list of those four hundred words and then proceeds to write a books of "stories" containing no word outside that list and repeating each one of the four hundred words as often as possible. He then repeats the process for the second-grade reader of his series: he adds another four hundred words to the first four hundred, draws a list of those eight hundred words, and writes a somewhat fatter book of "stories" staying within his eight-hundred word limit and repeating each of the eight hundred words to the utmost. Now he goes onto his third reader. Another four hundred words are added; the list now contains twelve hundred words; the book is again a little fatter and now contains the maximum variations upon the twelve hundred words. The "expert" proceeds in the same manner with his fourth reader, his fifth reader, and his sixth reader, and winds up with a package suitable for some annual sales.
Naturally, the word lists differ to some extent from one set of readers to another. The sets put out by the various publishers are not therefore interchangeable. If a child has mastered the second-grade reader of the Scott, Foresman set, that doesn't mean at all that he is now ready for the Third Reader of the Macmillan set. All it means is that he supposedly is able to recognize the eight hundred or nine hundred Scott, Foresman words when he sees them.
At this point you may possibly doubt the accuracy of my figures. Let me therefore say right here that I checked the vocabulary contents of the two leading sets of readers: Scott, Foresman Company and Macmillan Company. (This proved to be a very easy research job since all elementary textbook houses proudly include vocabulary statistics in all their readers.) The Scott, Foresman set includes 1,280 words in the first two grades and adds 498 in third grade, reaching the grand total of 1,778 words at the end of third grade. The Macmillan Company, however, is ahead of the game by a considerable margin. The latest edition of their set of readers is pared down to not more than 1,284 words by the end of third grade.
I don't want to bore you with more of these vocabulary figures, but it is important to add that the trend is definitely toward fewer and fewer words. A sharply limited vocabulary seems to be the most potent sales argument for school readers, and since the competition is extremely keen, the figures get lower from year to year.
The effect of this in the classroom is best described in the words of Professor Gertrude Hildreth in Brooklyn College, author of Teaching the Three R's, who seems to be one of the pioneers in the great vocabulary-cutting movement. Professor Hildreth is the senior author of a set of readers that gets along with 1,147 words for the three grades. "Experience has proved," Dr. Hildreth writes, "that keeping the vocabulary of new words relatively small -- even a little below the children's demonstrated assimilation threshold -- without neglecting the other important factors, virtually revolutionizes the teaching of primary-grade reading. A teacher in a southern state reports that the use of books with simplified vocabulary has cut down reading difficulties in the first three grades by 75 percent. Second and third grade teachers, particularly, find the teaching of reading a joy instead of a chore when word difficulties are reduced."
In other words, teaching children 1,147 words in three years is a cinch. Never mind the fact that those third-graders can't read a single blessed book and are unable to decipher a simple note to the milkman -- what does it matter as long as the teacher's work is now a joy instead of chore?
Possibly, however, these figures don't look as ridiculous to you as they actually are. How many words should a child know when he has reached the end of third grade?
To answer that question, I must point out to you that the question itself is meaningless when you teach reading by the phonic method. In that case, you take about two years to give the child such a thorough knowledge of letters and sounds that he can read virtually anything. Then, if you want to, you take a third year for review, making 100 percent sure that the child knows all the important phonic principles and exceptions. So your third-grader will be able to read whatever interests him, whether the vocabulary range is 1,200 words or 5,000 words or 40,000 words. The vocabulary range of the reading material he can master will therefore depend not on the number of "sight" words he has learned -- he hasn't learned words, he has learned how to read -- but on the number of words he knows by sound. That number, according to the researches of the late Dr. Seashore of Northwester University, is astonishingly high. It is, for a third grader, 44,000 words.
You may not believe this figure, of course -- although it was arrived at scientifically by sampling a large unabridged dictionary and asking children whether they could define the words. However, maybe the figure is too large. Maybe the average third-grader's vocabulary is only 34,000 or 24,000 or even 14,000. Whatever it is, there is not the slightest doubt that it is at least ten times as large as the number of words he learned to read in school by any of the methods now in use. After three years of "learning to read", he is totally unable to decipher 90 percent of his own speaking and listening vocabulary when he sees it in print. No wonder the library has no books he can take home and read.
And now let's take a look at what's in those books. Don't underrate their importance in the life of your child. They are all he has to read -- all he can read -- during the first two or three or four years that he comes in contact with books. For all he knows, this is what books are like. The grownups insist that reading books is a terribly important thing; as far as he knows, this means that there is something almost magically significant in saying aloud the words printed in his readers.
Here, for example, is the full text of a "story called "A Funny Ride," taken from the Scott, Foresman First Reader, Fun With Dick and Jane:
Father said, "I want something. I want to get something. Something for the car. We can get it here."
"Oh, Father," said Sally."What do you want? What do you want for the car?"
Father said, "You will see. You will see."
Up, up went the car. "Oh, oh," said Jane. "See the car go up. The car can go for a ride. It can ride up."
Sally said, "Oh! See Tim! He went up too. He and Spot and Puff went up."
Sally said, "Look, Father! Spot and Puff want to jump. Please make the car come down. Can you make it come down?"
"Yes, Sally," said Father. "We can make the car come down. We will get Spot and Puff and Tim."
"Look, Sally," said Dick. "See the car come down. See Tim come down. See Spot and Puff come down."
Sally said, "Down comes the car. Down comes Spot. Down comes Puff. Down comes Tim."
"Oh, Spot," laughed Dick. "You ride up. You ride down. You ride up and down. This is a funny ride for you. A funny ride for Puff. And a funny ride for Tim."
Father went to the car. He said, "The car can go. The family can go. The family can go away."
"Away we go,"said Sally. "We will not ride up and down. We will ride away." Away went the car. Away went the family. Away, away, away.
I hope you see for this why I always put the word "stories" in quotation marks in this chapter. These little somethings are not stories. They are artificial sequences of word. -- meaningless, stupid. Without the pictures they are even un intelligible. In this case, the family stops a t a gas station and the car is jacked up with the dog, the kitten and the teddy bear in it. But the "story" doesn't say so. It concentrates mainly on the repetitious babble of three-year-old Sally.
What it is that makes this "story" so extraordinarily inane and give it its peculiar, vaguely feeble-minded flavor? To answer that, let me analyze the vocabulary. There are altogether 239 running words of text here, but only 47 different words. This means that 80 percent of all the words are repeated words. The clue to understanding what is happening here lies in the element of repetition.
Imagine yourself for a moment in the position of one of the educational drudges assigned to the job of concocting one of those readers. You have, say, four hundred words to work with. You have to fill a book with "stories." That means that each word has to be repeated, say and average of twenty-six times. How is this to be done? The only possible way to accomplish that result is to repeat, repeat, repeat words, phrases, sentences endlessly. "Oh, oh! Come, come! Look, look! You will see. You will see. See the car come down. See Tim come down. See Spot and Puff come down. Away went the car. Away went the family. Away, away, away."
This sort of strung-out prose has no resemblance any more to normal English. It is word-method-reader idiom, a language to be found solely and exclusively in the books manufactured for use with and on American school children. It is not the language used in telling a story, making a narrative interesting, or conveying information intelligibly. No normal writer ever wrote a book like that, no poet ever wrote such a poem, no mother ever told such a bedtime story. Our literature is composed in English, not in "Oh, oh! Come, come! Look, look!" language.
For a comparison of this language with standard English, I took the story of the three little pigs, as printed in It Happened One Day, the Supplementary Second Reader in the "Alice and Jerry Books" series (Row, Peterson & Company, Evanston, Illinois). In this version the story has 1,245 words and begins as follows:
Once upon a time there was an old mother pig. She had three little pigs.
The three little pigs ate and ate. Then they danced and sang.
The mother pig and the three little pigs lived in one house.
The three little pigs grew and grew. They grew so big that they could not all get into the house.
One day the old mother pig called the three little pigs.
She said, "You are too big and fat to live in this house. You must each have a house of your own."
"Where will we get so many houses?" said the three little pigs.
"You must build them," said the old mother pig. "You must each build a good house. Then the wolf can not catch you."
Now, the three little pigs did not want to work. They did not want to build houses.
They danced and sang and did do as their mother said. Then the old mother pig was angry.
She called the three little pigs to her and said, "You must each build a house. You must build it right away. The the big bad wolf and not catch you."
So the three little pigs went away to build houses.
There are 204 running words in this opening passage and 76 different words, which means that 63 percent of the words are repeated words. (Not as high a percentage as in our first-grade example, but still fantastically high.)
Now let's look at a normal English version of "The Three Little Pigs." This version, containing exactly the same story, gets along with 583 words, as against 1,243 in the word-method-reader version. The corresponding opening passage reads here as follows:
An old mother pig and her three little pigs lived in a very small house.
One day Old Mother Pig said, "This house is too small for us. Little pigs, you must go away. You must each make a house."
So the first little pig went away to make a house.
In this straightforward version with its classic economy of words, there are 51 words and 35 different words. The rate of repetition is 31 percent.
If you want to, you can make this experiment yourself on any kind of writing that happens to be handy. You will find that the normal ratio is about one repeated word to two new ones. A ratio of one new words to two repeated words is highly abnormal. The effect is tiresome and soporific to the extreme. Such a language is not"simplified English or "children's English" or "easily readable English" or any kind of English that can be read with interest and enjoyment. It is diluted English, one part English and one part added repetition.
And now let me explain where I found the original version of "The Three Little Pigs." It appears in Book Two of the Beacon Readers, published by Ginn and Company Ltd. in England. As you may remember from an earlier chapter, the Beacon Readers used to be the leading set of phonic readers in this country until the word method partisans forced them off the market. Well, those same Beacon Readers, twenty-five years out of print in this country, are still going strong in England; in fact, they are the most widely used set of readers over there. I studied those English Beacon Readers. The basic principles are still exactly the same as those of the old American Beacon Readers. There is a little more sight reading now in the first few weeks or months; but after that, phonics is presented as fully and systematically as in any material that I have seen.
"The Three Little Pigs" -- and this is the most significant point of my comparison -- appears, as I have said, in Book Two of the Beacon Readers. Book Two is scheduled to be read at the end of the first year of learning how to read, that is, the first year of Infant School. Which means that English children, trained by phonics, read "The Three Little Pigs" at kindergarten age, when they are five.
And where did I find "The Three Little Pigs" in the Row, Peterson series? I found it in a Supplemental Reader for the second grade. "The Three Little Pigs," in their diluted version, are here considered second-grade material, to be read two years later than in England, at the age of seven.
Of course I talked about that two-year difference in the last chapter. But what I want to point out here is how it works out in actual practice. In England, where the relationship between age and reading ability is normal and undistorted, five-year-olds are able to read nursery tales. They are able to read the material that is natural for their age. The same is true for six-year-olds, for seven-year-olds, and so on. The problem of specially simplified materials for school children doesn't exist. When children are mentally ready for fairy tales, they can read fairy tales; when they are ready for Sir Walter Scott, they can read Scott; when they are ready for Dickens, they can read Dickens.
In fact, the authors of the Beacon Readers found that with their phonic method they ran into the opposite problem of finding material that is interesting to children and challenging enough for their advanced skills in reading. I quote from the preface of Book Four of the Beacon Readers: "A thorough mastery of phonetic principle gives the child such power over new words that it is difficult to find enough reading material properly graded from a phonetic point of view to satisfy his needs."
To read this today, in the United States of the 1950's, makes you almost weep. We have long since reached the point where we reduce not only the vocabulary of all readers in the first six grades, but also the vocabulary of all textbooks in other subjects, of the junior-high-school books, of senior-high-school books, and now even of some college texts. Everybody today accepts it as gospel that all books for children and adolescents have to be thinned, watered, diluted. We do not dare any more to expose our children to normal English.
Which means, as I pointed out before, that the vast majority of our children are unable to read Andersen's Fairy Tales and The Arabian Nights and Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott and Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Dickens and Conan Doyal at the age where they would truly enjoy those books. They may reach the point where they can read those books two or three years later than an English child -- but then it's too late. The golden hour has passed when Treasure Island really means what it should mean to a boy. No. The sad fact is that the word method has alienated most of our children from the books that English-speaking children and adolescents have read and enjoyed for many generations. This is an irreparable damage. It may be possible to restore sanity in the field of reading and return to the teaching of reading rather than word guessing. But it will never be possible to bring back to adolescents and adults the lost hours of magic childhood reading -- and rekindle in them emotions they have never felt.
And now let's have a look at what actually happens in the classroom. Come with me and visit a typical American school.
Let's go down the street to the public school. It's an ordinary Monday morning early in March. The time is 9 A.M. Let's walk into a first-grade room.
There are about twenty-five children in this class. Their teacher is a bright young woman, not too long out of teachers' college, who takes her job seriously.
The children are divided into three groups when it comes to reading -- the upper group, the middle group, and the lower group. In this particular class the three groups are about equal in size, it so happens. Of course the children are not told that are grouped according to their ability; but children always know these things by instinct anyway.
The reading period consists in the teacher calling each of the three groups to assemble on their little chairs around her in front of the room, while the other two thirds of the class do something else -- drawing, it seems, or writing in their workbooks, or nothing in particular. Meanwhile, the reading group performs for about ten or fifteen minutes. The teacher asks them to open their books ("Where were we?") and they start, one after the other, going around the circle. First Tom reads a few lines, laboriously following the words with his finger, then Barbara, then Dick, then Sandra, then Joe, then George, then Louise, the Mary.
Tom reads: "Jack ... Ran ... Out ... To ... See ... The ... Truck ... It ... Was ... Red ... And ... It ... Was ... Big ... Very ... Very ... Big ..."
"Barbara?" says the teacher.
It ... Had ... Come ... To ... Take ... Jack ... Far ... Away ... To ... His ... New ... Home ... Far ... Away ... To ... His ... New ... Home ... On ... A ... Big ... Farm ..."
This is the end of the page. The teacher turns to Dick. "Dick?"
Dick starts at the top: "Jack ... Ran ... Out ... To ... See ... The ... Truck ..."
This is the pattern, repeated day after day. They "read" from their little readers, in small groups, one page at a time, several times over. They do not read a story from beginning to end, as it was so neatly planned in the schools of education and in the publishers' offices. They read two, three, four pages, if that starting from wherever they left off last Friday and reading after fifteen minutes to make way for the next group. As to the performance of the three groups, it's pretty much the same. The top group is a few pages ahead of the second group in the First Reader, and the lowest group is still struggling through the preceding primer.
But the thing that is so characteristic, so unforgettable hallmark of American instruction in reading, is the way they "read." It's a sort of chant, one word at a time, each produced with the same monotone and heavy effort. Tom and Barbara and Dick and Sandra know that they are supposed to say certain words while their fingers move from one group of letters to the next. There is one word out of forty of fifty that is right and all the others are wrong. The game consists in hitting the word that the teacher says is right.
It is obviously ridiculous to assume that these children "read" the "stories" in any acceptable meaning of the words. There is hardly any story to begin with, and whatever there is, is fully shown by the picture on the page they are looking at, in addition to having been told and explained at length by the teacher beforehand. The they "read" -- one, two, three, four times the same few sentences on the page. If the words on the page had any novelty at all for Tom and Barbara, they certainly don't have any freshness whatever for the other six.
Anyway, they don't read. Just listen to them: "The ... Moving ... Men ... Jumped ... Down ... From ... The ... Truck ... They ... Went ... Right ... Into ... The ... House ... They ..."
Of course they make mistakes. That is to be expected, since they are learning. But perhaps you are still not prepared for the kind of mistakes they make. One girl reads "said" instead of "jumped" with full conviction that "said" is the right word. The next child is stumped by the word "truck" and simply stops, completely helpless. Little Jimmy, in the "middle group," reads "I" for"It." The teacher asks him to read the word again. He again reads "I." The teacher reminds him that "We had this word long ago, don't you remember?" But he didn't remember; this is Monday morning in March and maybe "we had the word" in January and he didn't pay any attention at the time. He thinks. Characteristically, he doesn't look at the word in the book, but stares into space trying to revive the dim memory of a morning many weeks ago. Finally he says "At." He is told that this is wrong and that the word is "It." The reading proceeds. "It ... Had ... Come ... To ... Take ..."
Finally, we watch the poorest group. They work on some "story" about who is terribly excited and happy because he has two new caps, a blue one and a brown one. The teacher tries her best, in her preliminary telling of the story, to get the children interested. Unfortunately, they are not. That business of the two caps leaves them utterly cold.
The teacher, following the golden words of the publisher's manual to the letter, puts the new words in the story on the blackboard. There are four new words, and the children are given a little drill in telling them apart. Some are able to do it, some aren't. One boy, confronted with the two words "caps" and "houses"and asked to tell which is "caps," promptly points to "houses."
When they come to the sentence "I have two new caps" in the book, another boy just stops, completely floored by the problem. There is some discussion. Finally the teacher asks the boy what he would say if his father had bought him two new caps. The boy thinks. Then his face lights up. Now he knows what the sentence says: "I got two new caps."
Let's walk into another first grade. There is not too much difference. The teacher is a little younger, the atmosphere is a little more relaxed, and the noise made by the non-reading two-thirds of the class is considerably bigger. But the three groups are there, and the succession of children's voices and the chant. "One ... Morning ... Alice ... Was ... Playing ... With ... Betsy ... Lee ... Betsy ... Lee ... Was ... Alice's ... Doll ... Alice ... Heard ... Mother ... Call ... She ... Jumped ... Up ..."
But little Peter in the poorest group doesn't start with "One Morning Alice." He puts his finger under the first word and begins "One ... Two ... Three ..." The teacher tries to explain to Peter that he has made a mistake. It isn't "One Two Three." It is "One Morning Alice." Peter obediently repeats:"One ... Morning ... Alice ..."
In the best group they are on page 53. "Jerry ... Look ..." "No, it isn't look. What's that word, Charlie?" "Jerry ... took ..." "That's right. The word is took." "Jerry ... Took... Him ... To ... The ... To ... The ..." "What's the next word, Charlie? You know that word, don't you? We've had it several times." Charlie can't remember. Peggy raises her hand and says: "Pet." Charlie continues: "To ... The ... Pet ..." He doesn't know the next word either. The teacher asks him to look at it. The word is show. Charlie looks at it, then searches his memory. "Fish?" he says.
Judy is next. "The ... Man ... At ... The ... Show ..." Judy relapses into silence. The next word is chose. "Oh yes," says the teacher. You were out with the measles when we had that word two weeks ago. It's chose." Judy repeats "chose" and goes on.
Let's walk across the hall and look in on a third grade. Now that we have seen how the system starts in first grade, let's see the results. In third grade, supposedly, children are reading.
As we enter the third grade, we find that what goes on here is surprisingly similar to the work in the first grade. Again there are three groups, the fifteen minutes per group, the chant. They cover more pages now, and they are a little surer of some of the words. But their mistakes are still of the same kind; if they don't know a word, they stop or they say an entirely different one.
The spread between the three groups has widened considerably. The top group is in the second half of their Third Reader, the middle group is way behind in the same book, the lowest group is in the middle of something called a "Readiness Third Reader."
We ask the teacher -- a very pleasant, middle-aged woman -- whether there is any child who is particularly outstanding in reading. Yes, would we like to listen to Gerald? He is really good, and he will read to us out of a volume of Andersen's Fairy Tales that happens to be handy. So we listen to Gerald. Gerald is good; in fact, he seems almost miraculous to us at this point. He reads words like sentry and aristocratic and pronounces them correctly, although it then turns out that he doesn't know their meaning. How come? we ask. It turns out that Gerald is "new." He is not a product of this school.
Meanwhile, the six or seven "poorest" readers have assembled in their little circle and the chant begins. "But ... Miss .. Lizzie ... Was ... Not ... Afraid ... Of ... Any ... Farmer... She ... Shook ... Her ... Head ... Faster ... And ... Faster ..."
End of the page. Harry is asked to start again from the top. "I ... Am ... As ...Sure ... As ...I ... Stand ... Here ... That ... Your ... Dog ... Has ... Been ... Chasing ... My... Turkeys ..." What the book actually says is this:I am assure as I stand here, lady, that your dog has been after my turkeys. The teacher asks Harry to reread the sentence. Harry reads it again, exactly the way he read it before. The teacher tries to make him insert the word "lady" and read "after" instead of "chasing." Why, he has brought out the meaning of this sentence perfectly, he obviously feels. He doesn't understand what more is wanted of him. It's about your dog chasing my turkeys, isn't it? He reads the sentence a third time, with a proud ring of certainty: "I ... Am ... As ...Sure ... As ...I ... Stand ... Here ... That ... Your ... Dog ... Has ... Been ... Chasing ... My... Turkeys ..."
The teacher gives up and calls on little Susan to go on. After all, it's a rainy Monday morning and she has been doing this thing for thirty years. Harry is a poor reader, and she is doing her best. If Harry can't read, it's not her fault. Next year, in fourth grade, Harry will doubtless be classified as a remedial reading case. Perhaps the remedial reading teacher will be able to do something with him. She can give more time to him. There are twenty four other children in this third grade; there is only one Gerald, but there are several Harrys.
Let's thank the teacher and take our leave. Shall we go into another classroom? Or shall we return tomorrow, or Wednesday, or Thursday? Let me assure you that it won't be necessary. We have seen all there is to be seen. This is it; this is what happens day after day. The three groups, and "Let's start at the top of page 53," and the chant. Ever so often the chant contains words that are not on the page, and then comes the vacant stare and the attempt to remember the right word. As to the "stories," they hardly come into the business at all. Even if the children were able to pick an unfamiliar story in the book, read it once from the beginning to end, and understand what it says, still that wouldn't be interested. But they don't read anyway. They perform a daily ritual of chanting certain words while their eyes are fixed on certain marks on paper.
This is the practice that corresponds to the theory of the word method. What I have shown you is not exceptional, it is not an example of misapplying or misunderstanding the word method theory. It is the logical outcome of the premises given: you proceed on certain assumptions and you get children who read at instead of it,one two three instead of one morning Alice, and chasing instead of after. The educators know all about it. It's all described in detail in their books.
"It was found," writes Dr. Arthur I Gates complacently, "that beginning pupils observed primarily the length of words and depended upon the observation of the length for later recognition when they were given such a series of words as cow, postman, dress, duck, football, and dandelion. To these children differences in length were the most obvious differentiating factors. When, however, the words presented at the same time were substantially the same in length, the pupils tended to study the words until they found some small but outstanding detail, such as the dot over the i in pig, the 'funny cross' in box, the similar beginning and ending in window, and the 'monkey's tail' on the y in monkey.
"sometimes," writes Dr. Donald D. Durrell equally complacently, "the
child pays no attention to the word, but notices some other condition
which serves as a cue. For example, a child who had successfully read
the word children on a flash card was unable to read it in a book.
He insisted he had never seen the word before. He was presented with
a flash card of the word and was asked how he recognized the word
"The child's eyes," writes Dr. Edward W. Dolch equally complacently, "just
wandered over the page and back and forth and up and down. The reason for
this habit is most obvious. For years and years the child has got more from
the pictures than from the text, so he has learned to look constantly up at
the picture during the process of what he calls reading. Look at a few
words and then up at the picture, back at the same words or different words
and then up at the picture. And so on. Then if there is no picture,
he looks along the lines from some words he knows to other words he knows
and skips on to others and back to the previous ones, trying to make sense
out of it all. He has the eye movements of doing a jigsaw puzzle rather
than reading. This habit of "jumping eyes" is a tremendous one to unteach."
"A primary grade child," writes Dr. Irving H. Anderson and Dr. Walter
F. Dearborn equally complacently, "was given the following to read:
These sentences werw constructed from words which appeared in the basal
reader materials used in the school. This, however, is the way in which
the child proceeded to read the sentences:
After giving several examples of such results of the word method, Anderson
and Dearborn add calmly: "There is no need to be disillusioned by any of
this."
That's what the word method is like in actual practice. However, this
chapter would be incomplete if I gave the impression that the children are
never given anything else to read but the so-called stories in the sets of
diluted little readers. They are exposed to something else too, at least
in some schools. They read "experience charts."
Experience charts were invented by the word-method educators after it had
become painfully clear that the material in the readers bored children to
death. Somehow the famous "zeal and zest" wasn't forthcoming. What was
to be done? The educational pioneers came up with a beautiful answer:
Let's give the children some reading matter that deals with their own
personal experience.
For an example, here is an "experience chart," as published in The
Teaching of Reading in the Elementary School by Professor Paul McKee:
OUR TRIP TO THE CREAMERY What have we here? We have a little "story" composed by the children
themselves, since each of the sentences was offered by one of the children
and then put on the blackboard by the teacher. Whether it is more
interesting for the children to read about yesterday's trip to the creamery
than about Jerry moving to the farm is doubtful. Anyway, they "read" these
experience charts in exactly the same fashion as they "read" their readers.
"We ... Went ... To ... The ... Creamery ... Last ... Monday ... We ..."
Where is the advantage in that? The minority among educators who champion
the experience approach claim all sorts of miracles. The truth is that
it's just as ineffective as the "story" method, with the added feature that
there is no vocabulary control and no planned repetition
of words.
Nevertheless, experience charts are the latest gospel. In a recent book
by Stuart Chase, The Power of Words, the technique is described
with great enthusiasm:
When I went to primary school in Boston, the teacher would dictate
a sentence and we would try to write it correctly, each at his little
desk screwed to the floor, with inkpot in the corner. Today in a
New York school, the pupils dictate, and the teacher does the writing
-- on the blackboard.
"You tell me the story," she says," and I will put it down. What do
you think is the first thing to tell?"
"That we took a trip," says one child.
"Let's start this way," says another. "'We took a trip to the park
to see if we could find any community helpers.'"
"Good," says the teacher and writes it on the board. "Now think of
the next sentence."
"'We saw the park man.'" suggests a little girl. "'We asked him for
information.'"
Teacher writes again, but takes time out while the children discuss
what "information" means. When they have finished the story of about
ten sentences, they all read it aloud, feeling some of the pride of
authorship, and then copy it into their own books. I am sure this
is a big improvement on my school.
Observe the processes involved: first, the children are making a record
of an experience they enjoyed; telling a simple story that happened to
them, very much as they would tell it to the family at home. They are
shown how the spoken story can be arranged in sentences, and how it looks
when written down. They go over each sentence at least three times.
This is not a lesson in "reading" or "writing" or "spelling" or
"discussion," though all are included. It is the total
communication process.
I think Mr. Chase's enthusiasm for experience charts is misplaced, to say
the least. (A footnote tells that the facts are reported in The New
York Times of April 7, 1953.) Observe, in the first place, that these
New York children have been brought to the point that they voluntarily use
such jargon as "community helpers." Observe, second, that this is not
a lesson in reading, since the children only repeat sentences they themselves
dictated to the teacher a minute or two before. Observe, third, that this
is not a lesson in writing, since the children simply copy in their
notebooks what they see on the blackboard. Observe, fourth, that this is
not a lesson in spelling, since the children dictate to the
teacher and are carefully shielded from the entire experience of recording
their own words on paper. If this is preparation for life, it is at best
preparation for the life of an executive, complete with dictating machine
and private secretary.
It may be true, as Mr. Chase points out, that this is a lesson in
"discussion." But then, parents do not pay schools taxes to have
first-graders taught "discussion." They pay to have their children
taught to read, write, and spell.
This chapter consists of my eyewitness report on the teaching of reading
with phonics.
In the course of my research for this book I came across the book
Reading with Phonics by Julie Hay and Charles E. Wingo, which
I mentioned earlier. I learned that one of the authors of that book,
the late Miss Hay, had been a teacher in the public schools of the
Argo-Summit-Bedford Park school district near Chicago; the other author,
Mr. Wingo, was and is superintendent of schools in that district.
All the schools in that district teach reading with phonics.
I also learned that the phonetic method developed by the late Professor
Leonard Bloomfield was and is used experimentally in some Roman Catholic
parochial schools in Chicago.
In March,1954, after having made the necessary arrangements with Mr. Wingo
and with Father Stanley C. Stoga, Assistant Superintendent of Catholic
Schools in the Chicago Archdiocese, I went to Chicago to see for myself.
I spent Thursday, March 25, 1954, visiting the schools in the
Argo-Summit-Bedford Park district.
The three communities are about ten or fifteen miles outside Chicago. There
is a large plan of the Corn Products Refining Company in Argo; it is a purely
industrial suburb, as are Summit and Bedford Park. The people who live there
are working-class people; there is a sizable colored population, and one of
the schools in the district is all colored. On that Thursday last March the
whole neighborhood looked poor, bleak, shabby -- the last place in the world
where you would expect to find a great experiment in education.
I first went into a first-grade classroom in the W. W. Walker School
in Bedford Park. There were twenty-three children in that class.
The teacher's name was Miss Mary Hletko.
Miss Hletko explained to me that it was the usual practice to work through
the Hay-Wingo primer during the first year and to review it in the second
and then again in the third year. This year, however, with this particular
class, she had finished the book in the first semester.
She had divided the class in the usual manner into three groups. There are
twelve in the top group, six in the middle group, and five in the poorest
group.
The children made an excellent impression on me. They were alert, polite,
and well behaved. During the hour that I spent with them, Miss Hletko had
no occasion to use any discipline. They were not at all fazed by having
a visitor present in the classroom. They were clearly interested in what
they were doing and obviously enjoying themselves.
Miss Hletko first had them write sentences on the blackboard about things
that had happened the day before. This was something on the order of the
experience charts I described in the last chapter. But the difference
was tremendous. These first-graders didn't dictate to their teacher.
They wrote their experience charts themselves!
This is what they wrote on the blackboard, each of five children doing
one sentence, while I was looking on.
I am not pretending that children performed this task quickly and flawlessly.
It took quite some time to get all those words on the blackboard, and in
maybe half a dozen places Miss Hletko had to help them with their spelling
-- not spelling the word for them, to be sure, but reminding them of
phonetic rules they had learned. In each case they finally did remember
the rule and spelled the word correctly.
Naturally, considering the fact that there had been a great storm and a
flood the Chicago area the day before, there was a lot of excited talk about
the subject matter of those sentences, and the children went through this
activity in anything but a mechanical fashion.
Next, Miss Hletko, for my benefit, picked up a copy of that morning's
Chicago Tribune and let the children read sentences from the paper.
However, I wanted to make 100 percent sure of my facts. With her permission
I took the newspaper myself and began to call children at random. Here are
some of the paragraphs they read for me:
Police Commissioner O'Connor said yesterday that policemen will begin
a house to house canvass tomorrow to assure that Chicago dog owners
comply with the rabies quarantine imposed last December.
Suburban Riverside's policemen were ordered yesterday to capture, dead
or alive, a brown squirrel named Marge. The hunt means a great deal
to the 10-year-old girl who was bitten by the creature on Tuesday.
The weatherman is going to get up earlier than the farmer this summer
to give the farmer an up-to-the-minute report on the day's weather
outlook with his breakfast.
The first Midwest postage stamp show, sponsored by the Chicago chapter of
the American Stamp Dealer's Association, will be held tomorrow thru Sunday
in the La Salle hotel. More 10,000 are expected to attend. A part of
the stamp collection of ex-King Farouk of Egypt will be exhibited.
Of course, these first-graders didn't read the newspaper items in the way
an adult would. They a good deal of difficulty. Miss Hletko had to tell
them what the symbol 10,000 stood for. She had to help them over some of
the harder words, and in one instance -- Egypt -- the child was
unable to work out the right pronunciation.
But the fact is, and I testify to it, that those children read what was in
the paper. They were perfectly able to pronounce words they had never seen
before, acceding to reasonable phonetic principles. The child, for instance,
who read the item about ex-King Farouk, pronounced the ou in
Farouk as in house. Another child, who read the headline
REPORTS PROGRESS IN TREATMENT OF ATOMIC SICKNESS, pronounced
the word atomic correctly, but put the accent on the first syllable.
Needless to say, that six-year-old child hadn't the slightest idea of what
the word meant. How could he? My point is that after six months in school
he could read the word off the page.
Another boy read, and pronounced correctly, the word canvass in the first
of the paragraphs I quoted. Just as a check, I asked him whether he knew
the meaning of the word. He thought for a while, then said he had heard
about canvas shoes. Which meant he didn't know the word in the sense
that it was use in the newspaper. What he did know, however, was that the
combination of letters, c, a, n, v, a,
s, s stands for the sequence of sounds that makes up the words
canvass.
After this interlude, Miss Hlekto reverted to her normal procedure.
There followed a period of reading. I learned that the poorest group was
at that time reading the Scott, Foresman readers designed for the first half
of second grade; the middle group was halfway through the Scott, Foresman
reader for the first half of third grade; and the best group -- consisting
of twelve of the twenty-three children -- was reading the Scott, Foresman
reader for the second half of third grade.
The children in the best group started to read. I picked up the book
-- which was clearly marked "32" on the back -- and
asked them to read a story way back which they had never seen before.
They started to read.
What happened the impressed me even more than the astonishing performances
on the blackboard and with the Chicago Tribune. These children did
not go through the ritual that I had seen performed dozens of times
in another school. They did not chant the words, one by one, laboriously
and insecurely, in monotonous, one-word-after-another singsong. Instead,
they did something that I had seen done in no other classroom. They
read the story! They went through the pages, at a pretty fast clip,
with completely natural intonation, laughing spontaneously at one place,
expressing surprise at another, following the thread of the story
with animated suspense.
Afterward they talked a little about the characters and incidents of the
story. (It was something about a pioneer family and a bear.) As a matter
of fact, I myself had paid more attention to the performance of the children
than the contents of the story. I realized with a delighted shock that they
remembered considerably more of the story than I did.
Finally, I left Miss Hletko's first grade and visited some other classrooms
in the same building. I found that another first grade had not yet finished
the Hay-Wingo primer and was reading a second-grade reader. I found that in
second grade they were reviewing the primer and were reading a third-grade
book. I then spent some time in a sixth grade.
The sixth-graders were the products of a school system that starts with
first-graders like those in Miss Hletko's class. They were bright, lively,
and well behaved. Their teacher showed me a chart with the results of a
recent achievement test in all subjects. There was quite a spread
of grade level attainment by the twenty-one students in the class. In the
right-hand lower corner of the chart, however, was a single figure, showing
the average grade level achievement of the whole class in all subjects.
That figure was 7.5. The sixth-graders, by March, had reached the standard
of seventy-graders in other schools reached about January and February.
(Note that this confirms precisely my rule-of-thumb that phonics teaching
saves one year, not only in reading but in all subjects. If the children
in Bedford Park had started first grade at five, they would now be two
years ahead of what is generally accepted as the norm in American schools
-- or on a par with children in England or on the Continental of Europe.
The sixth-graders showed me some of the compositions they had written.
They read a few of those papers aloud. The compositions were competent,
intelligently written and, as far as I could see, practically free of
spelling errors.
The class had copies of My Weekly Reader, which dealt that week with
Pakistan. We got into quite a discussion on the subject, and then somehow
got onto the topic of communism. The children talked about it with
understanding and a good deal of sense.
Then, to finish the demonstration, they read -- fluently-- from junior
high school textbooks in science and social studies.
I took my leave. In the afternoon I spent an hour or two in the Argo school
-- the school that serves the colored section. The picture was much the
same. To be sure, many of those children came from homes without reading
matter; some of the parents were probably illiterate. Obviously, the
children's average I.Q was lower than that of the children of Bedford Park.
But the difference between the Argo school and a typical word-method school
was still striking. I visited a first grade and a second grade. The second
grade the children did a pretty good job of writing on the blackboard.
They can read from a second-grade reader. They read fluently, with natural
intonation, and with much understanding and enjoyment. In other words,
they read the story.
Later the afternoon I talked with Mr. Wingo in his office. He told
me that his primer was used, of course, I all four elementary schools
in the district. The results were always the same: general student
achievement about one grade level above the national norm in all subjects;
no "non-readers" except for children that were clearly feeble-minded.
The situation had also carried over into the high school. The high-school
students performed beautifully; an extraordinary number of them qualified
for scholarships at good colleges and universities; all of them gobbled up
a fabulous number of books. The amount Mr. Wingo -- with the happy approval
of his school board -- spends for library books is five or more times what
is spent by the ordinarily school system: $5 to $8 per children annually.
The parents of Argo, Summit, and Bedford Park are proud that their children
are doing so well. They know that Bedford Park first-graders have exhibited
their reading skills to google-eyed teachers and parents at Oak Park and
other wealthy Chicago suburbs; they also know that nationally known educators
like Dr. William S. Gray of the University of Chicago and Dr. Paul A. Witty
of Northwestern University have visited their classrooms. Mr. Wingo, unlike
practically all other school superintendents in the country, is not on the
defensive.
He also told me something about Miss Hay, the original author of the method
embodied in the primer. Miss Hay never had any other title or office than
that of grade-school teacher in Argo. For twenty years she developed the
system on the basis of her daily classroom experience -- and her deep,
intuitive understanding of the way children's minds works. She herself had
been brought up on the Beacon method, but she felt she could improve upon
that method, -- and did.
When Mr. Wingo came to Argo as the new superintendent, he had a son, then
in fourth grade, who couldn't read. Miss Hay undertook to teach the boy,
giving him half-hour private lessons every morning before school. Young
Mr. Wingo a recent college graduate has not forgotten Miss Hay; neither
has his father. Neither, apparently, has anyone else who ever met her
-- a woman completely devoted to her life's chosen task.
I returned from Argo to Chicago and next morning, with Father Stoga,
visited St. Roman school.
St. Roman is one of eight Chicago parochial schools run by the community
of the Sisters of St. Joseph. (In all of these eight schools the experiment
with the Bloomfield system is in operation.) St. Roman is way over on the
south side of Chicago, the parents are working-class people, mostly of
Polish extraction.
I visited a first grade, a second grade, a third grade, and a sixth grade.
The difference between what I saw there and what I had seen the day before
at Argo was striking. The atmosphere was considerably more formal; there
was a good deal of old-fashioned, unashamed drill; the pace seemed ten times
slower. In the first grade the children, one by one, went through exercises
embodying the loud spelling-out of words; in the second grade they did the
long, patient drill work on suffixes -- the kind of work that most public
school children do in the fourth grade, if at all.
In the third grade Father Stoga asked to have some fourth-grade science and
social studies texts brought in, and called on the children at random to
read aloud. They read fluently and with full understanding. When they came
across a word they hadn't seen before, they instantly and automatically read
it according to phonetic rules. One such word, I remember, was the word
athletics. It took that third-grade boy a little while to pronounce
it right; but as soon as he did so, he knew what he had read.
In the sixth grade Father Stoga asked the students about their
extracurricular reading. Most of them immediately produced some book they
had on their desk -- all sorts of books, of good caliber. At least one of
the boys was reading an adult book -- a fat novel dealing with the life of
fishermen.
Again we had seventh- and eight-grade textbooks brought in, which the
students opened at random and read for us. One was a science text and the
girl who read it stumbled over the word molecular, which of course
she had never seen before. She accented it, with perfect phonetic sense,
on the first syllable. Later she came across the word capillaries.
Without hesitation she read that unknown word off the page, pronouncing it
"capillaries." Millions of sixth-graders across the country would
be utterly unable to read that word.
After we had seen the sixth grade, Father Stoga and I went to lunch. He
filled me in on some details -- the kind of details I was expecting by now.
It is "normal" for pupils at St. Roman school (and the other schools where
the Bloomfield method is used) to be one year ahead of the national norm
in all subjects. In fact, Father Stoga gave me copies of two unpublished
papers of his, filled to the brim with statistics showing that one-year
differential.
There are no "non-readers" at St. Roman. If a child is slow in catching on
to reading, his teacher pays a little special attention to his work in
phonics, and that's that.
The materials used in those schools are those originally developed by
Dr. Bloomfield, printed and adapted for classroom use by the Sisters of
St. Joseph. (I studied the materials later and found them practically
identical with Bloomfield's own, unpublished manuscript.)
Father Stoga told me that the experiment has so far been fully successful
and is to be carried on indefinitely. Years ago, he said, a good many
prominent educators came to see the method in operation; and for the second
time in two days, I heard mention of the names of Dr. William S. Gray and
Dr. Paul A. Witty. But lately, Father Stoga added, the interest seems to
have died down.
And here ends my eyewitness report. What does it prove? I think it proves
conclusively three things:
You may say at this point -- if you are a die-hard defender of the word
method -- that my evidence is still not conclusive. You may ask for
more data more experiments, more statistics. You may
want other rigidly controlled tests to check on the facts that I reported
here, and still ore tests to check on the results of those tests.
There is no answer to this sort of argument. Conclusive evidence, in the
end, means evidence that makes you feel satisfied you have found the truth.
Perhaps you are the kind of person who will never be satisfied, even if
I presented ten thousand cases of phonics-trained mental giants and ten
thousand word-method trained "non-readers" who are their identical twins.
As for me, know that nothing could be more conclusive that those twelve
nice, normal children in Miss Hletko's class who had such fun reading the
bear story in the third-grade book -- in March of their first year in
school. Either that was a miracle or every word in this book is true.
Although you may not think so, my main purpose in writing this book is not
to criticize and attack the doctrines of the educators. What I am really
interested in is a book that will be of practical help to parents.
You are a mother or father. Your child -- or your children -- have trouble
reading. What can you do about it?
Let me spell out in so many words what I am trying to say in this book.
Your child's trouble with reading comes solely from the fact that in school
he has been taught word guessing instead of reading -- and by reading
I mean getting the meaning of words formed by letter on a printed page,
and nothing else. As long as he cannot say out loud what each letter
combination stands for, he cannot read. Memorizing or guessing the meaning
of whole words is not reading; on the contrary, it is an acquired
bad habit that stands in the way of your child's ever learning to read
properly. Therefore, the problem of improving your child's reading cannot
be solved by giving him a more concentrated dose of what he has been
getting since first grade. It can only be solved by making him drop
the habit of word guessing and teaching him to read -- from scratch.
Of course, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. By far
the best thing you can do is to teach your child to read before he ever
gets into the habit of word guessing. My advice is, teach your child
yourself how to read -- at the age of five.
This is wholly in the American tradition. It's what the pioneers did, when
there were no schools for hundreds of miles around. You, of course, are in
a different position: there is a public school within easy reach, supported
by your own taxes. However, the fact is -- let's face it -- that this
school is not doing the job you want to have done; neither does any other
public or private school you can send your child to. You want your child
to be taught reading: instead the schools teach word guessing. So why not
do the job yourself? You paint your living room, you lay tiles in your
kitchen, you do dozens of things that used to be left to professional
experts. Why not take on instruction in reading? Surely you can do a
simple job like that. Millions of English and American parents have done
it before you; all it amounts to is teaching your child the meanings of
twenty-six letters and some fifty letter combinations, in small letters and
capitals. If you start in the fall of the year when your child is five,
you have a whole year to do the job before the school can do any damage
to your child's mental habits. What's stopping you? Do it yourself
-- and the problem will be solved once and for all.
You say your child isn't ready at the age of five? Don't be ridiculous.
Are you trying to tell me that your child is inferior to every single child
born and brought up in Great Britain?
You say you haven't got the time? I don't believe it. Of course you have
the time. You have the time to play with your child, haven't you? Play a
little reading with him. Reading at the age of five is nothing but a game.
You say you are not up to the job? Yes, you are. Let me show you how it's
done.
You start with the letters and what they stand for. Go very slow.
Take weeks or even months for that first step. Make quite sure your
child knows that A means the first sound in apple,
M means mmmmmmmm, and s means sssssss.
When he does know, and can also write each of the letters he has learned,
start with three-letter words, containing the short vowels. Go on from
there, in the sequence shown in this book. Be patient: always wait until
your child has fully mastered the last lesson before you go on with the
next. Always combine reading and writing; if it takes more time to do it
that way, take more time. You have a whole year; a whole year is an
enormously long time in the life of a five-year-old.
You don't have to wait a whole year, though, before you can give your child
stories to read. Let him learn how it feels to read; if you teach him
phonics right along, he won't be confused by "unphonetic" words like
was and done.
What stories should be read at this stage? Obviously not the
Dick-and-Jane or Alice-and-Jerry type of thing. Rather, give him the classic
stories that have always been enjoyed by small children -- nursery tales,
simple fairy tales, animal fables. Give him The Old Woman and her
Pig, The Cat and the Mouse, Henny Penny, The Gingerbread
Boy, The House that Jack Built, The Three Little Pigs,
The Half-Chick, The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Give him Aesop's
The Fox and the Stork, The Milk Maid, The Wind and the
Sun, The Lion and the Mouse, The Fox and the Grapes,
Belling the Cat, and Country Mouse and City Mouse. Pretty soon
the story reading will reinforce the phonics lessons and the phonics drills
will help him read the stories. Before long, and before you really know it,
he will take over and teach himself the rest of the letters and words.
Probably the process will not take a whole year. Remember that so
far in this book I have talked about classroom teaching. Now I am talking
about private, individual tutoring at home -- the most speedy and efficient
method of teaching there is. Chances are that by spring your child will be
a pretty good reader -- like the children in Miss Hletko's class in Bedford
Park.
Then you'll be faced by a problem hardly any American parent has any more:
the problem of how to quench your child's thirst for books. But it's not
really a difficult problem: just give him the books parents usually read
aloud to children of his age. And later, as he grows up, give him the books
children of his age have always liked: fairy tales, mythology, adventure
stories, Stevenson, Mark Twain, Poe ... he'll be all right. Just turn him
loose in the public library, and let him take over his own education.
But let's go back to his -- or her -- kindergarten days. What primer should
you use? Well, naturally I tried to write this book so that in a pinch
it could be used for that purpose. But I am not recommending that to you.
The best available book for the purpose is the one I mentioned several
times before: Reading With Phonics by Julie Hay and Charles E. Wingo.
You can get it for $2.40 from J. B. Lippincott Company, 333 West Lake Street,
Chicago 6, Illinois. There is also a Teacher's Edition at $4.00, which
contains the Pupils' Edition plus 128 pages of suggestions on how to teach
the material. The book is well illustrated. To my knowledge, it is the
only available American phonics primer. (You can also get the Beacon
materials from Ginn & Company in England, 7 Queen Square, London, WC 1,
but there is a whole stack of materials and classroom devices instead of
a single book, and anyway you probably won't want to get your books all
the way from England.)
When your home-taught child enters school at the age of six, he'll know how
to read. He'll be bored stiff during all those hours spent on the diluted
little readers, but there is nothing that can be done about that. What's
more important, he'll be immune to the word-guessing habit from there on.
He'll be safe. As far as he is concerned -- and you-- reading has ceased
to be a problem.
If, at the time you are reading this, your child is in first, second, or
third grade, proceed according to the same plan, with suitable adaptations.
Get the Hay-Wingo book -- or use this book -- and give your child home
lessons in phonics, fortifying him as much as possible against the word
guessing he is exposed to in school.
Beginning with fourth grade, however, your procedure should be somewhat
different. By that time your child will doubtless have become a confirmed,
inveterate word guesser.
Presumably, since you are reading this book, you have a child who is a
remedial case. In a sense that's too bad, since the problem is exactly the
same whether your child is a "non-reader" or a perfect reader according to
current educational standards. I wish the parents of good readers would
also read this book and apply it. They would discover what their
children could really do -- every single one of them could do school work at
least one year ahead of the national norm if he knew how to read properly.
However, let's see what you can do to help your Johnny who is in fourth,
fifth, or sixth grade and can't read. (And at this point I should explain
why I keep talking about "Johnny." It's an established fact that 80 percent
of all the "non-readers" are boys. The educators have dozens of theories
about this mysterious sex differential: girls, they tell us, are more
intelligent, more visual, more verbal, more whatnot. The simple truth is,
I think, that girls are usually a little less revolted by the stupidity
of the word method than boys. Teach children phonics, and there won't be
any sex differential in their achievement, as there is none in England,
in Germany, in France, and in the rest of the world.)
To begin with, let's try to isolate Johnny from his word-guessing
environment. While he is in school, that is difficult or almost impossible.
So the best thing will be to work with him during the summer vacations.
Let him stop all reading -- all attempts to read. Explain to him
that now he is going to learn to how to read, and that for the time being,
books are out. All he'll get for several months are lessons in phonics.
This, incidentally, is important. Take him fully into your confidence and
explain to him exactly what you are trying to do. Tell him that you are
going to do something new with him -- something entirely different from what
his teachers did in school. Tell him that this is certain to work.
Convince him that as soon as he has taken this medicine he will be cured.
Then start him on the phonics lessons. At this stage the Hay-Wingo book
would probably arouse his antagonism. So give him either this book or the
only other book of that type that I know: Remedial Reading Drills
by Thorleif G. Hegge, Samuel A. Kirk, and Winfred D. Kirk. (George Wahl
Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan, $1.50.) Go with him through the
drills, one by one, always making sure that he has mastered the previous
one before you go on to the next.
Only when you are through -- or almost through -- with the drills and
exercises, start him again on reading. At first, let him read aloud to you.
Watch like a hawk that he doesn't guess a single word. Interrupt him every
time he does it and let him work out the word phonetically. He'll never
learn to read if he doesn't get over the word-guessing habit.
There is a real problem in what to give him to read at this time.
It must be something that will interest him, something that he can get
through within a reasonable amount of time, and yet something that won't
frustrate him. If you give him fairy tales, he'll be bored; if you give
him regular books written for a boy his age, he'll bog down.
At the risk of being called inconsistent, I recommend to you The American
Adventure Series, edited by Dr. Emmett A. Betts of Temple University,
Philadelphia, and published by the Wheeler Publishing Company, 2831-35 South
Parkway, Chicago 16, Illinois. This is a series of brief books, specially
written and edited for poor readers in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade.
Naturally, the books are based on the word-method theory, which means that
they have a rigidly controlled vocabulary. However, at least they face up
to the problem. Their prime purpose is to interest boys. If you start
Johnny on one, two, or three of these books, he will learn what it means
to read a book.
After that, you may switch to exciting adventure stories and poetry. With
my own pupil "Johnny," I used, among other things, the famous short story
"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell. It was highly successful.
I also let him read the poem "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley.
I'll never forget the thrill I felt when Johnny read the word
unconquerable off the page.
The reading" experts" of course will say that such a program of remedial
reading is much too simple. What about Johnny's emotional troubles,
what about such nervous habits as reversals, what about correcting his eye
movements? But my answer to all of that is phonics. Phonics is the key.
As to emotional problems, of course, Johnny has emotional problems.
So has every child -- se Gesell and Ild's monumental work. To be sure,
in Johnny's case those problems are aggravated. They are aggravated because
the poor child for years has been treated as an outcast, because everybody
has told him incessantly that he is too stupid to learn the most essential
thing there is to learn, because he has been scolded, ridiculed, badgered,
punished, and made to feel miserable ever since he first came into contact
with books. Naturally he has emotional problems. Teach him phonics,
and most of them will disappear like snow in the sun.
He also may be one of the famous reversal cases -- he may readsaw
for was, nip for pin, and so on. What's so mysterious
about that? He has been taught for years that words must be read as wholes,
that the general shape of a word is the only thing that counts. So, if he
is left-handed, or otherwise inclined to tackle things differently from
other people, he'll occasionally grasp one of those whole-word shapes from
right to left instead of from left to right. What difference does it make?
Nobody has ever told him that it does make a difference. If he had
been taught phonics from the start, if he had never known anything else
than reading words letter by letter from left to right, he would never
have made a single reversal mistake in his life.
And his eye movements? His eye movements correspond to the reading method
he has been taught. Teach him phonics and his eyes will accommodate
themselves to his improved mental habits.
Remedial reading nowadays relies largely on retraining the eyes. The work
done by the eyes is poor, so the theory goes, let's teach the eyes to do a
better job. Hence all the mechanical gadgets, the films, the tachistoscopes,
the reading accelerators, and so forth.
Actually, the relationship of eye movements to reading is very simple.
The eyes wander along a line across the page, stopping from time to time to
pick up a word or two or three. Sometimes the eyes jump back, to correct a
mistake in reading. So, technically speaking, there are only three important
mechanical elements in the reading process: the average duration of fixation
pauses, the width of the average fixation span, and the average number of
regression movements.
Now, it is clear that any improvement in reading will and must reduce
the number of regression movements. The better you read, the less often
you will have to go back to correct an error.
The basic problem of remedial reading therefore boils down to this:
The eyes of the slow, poor reader stop for too long and take in too little.
To improve his reading, he must either shorten his fixation pauses or widen
his fixation span.
Every single one of the current reading improvement gadgets and techniques
is designed to widen the student's fixation span. The word method theory
says you must read whole words; to improve your reading, you must therefore
learn to grab larger gobs of words off the page. In other words, the gadgets
force you to do the same kind of word guessing you have done before, but
do it faster and more of it. You may improve your reading speed that way,
but your reading will doubtless be less accurate than it was before.
If, however, you improve your reading by learning phonics, your fixation
span will probably stay the same, but your fixation pauses will get
shorted; you'll gradually learn to see the letters on the page more
quickly. This fact is known from studies of the way musicians read music;
they learn to read music note by note -- which corresponds to learning to
read words letter by letter -- and the better they read, the faster their
eyes move from one fixation point to the next. Their fixation span,
however, stays much the same. (If you're interested, you'll find
more details on this in "The Study of Eye Movement in Reading" by
Professor Miles A. Tinker, Psychological Bulletin, March, 1946.)
All of which means that remedial reading courses concentrate on exactly the
opposite of what they should: they strengthen the bad habit of word guessing
instead of trying to cure it.
And here let me add a word in case you are interested in improving your own
reading. Obviously I am saying that the currently fashionable speed-reading
courses and programs won't do you much good. What then should you do?
I hesitate to mention it, but what you should do is something you are not
likely do do at all, human nature being what it is: you should learn to read
all over again from scratch. Ideally, you should take timeout from your
reading and begin the phonics exercise in this book, or in Hay-Wingo,
or in Hegge-Kirk, and do them faithfully from beginning to end.
Let me defend this "impossible" suggestion with a simple analogy.
Suppose you are a garden-variety, hunt-and-peck typist -- like me, sitting
here at a typewriter and making innumerable horrible, ghastly mistakes.
You know as well as I do that the only way to improve hunt-and-peck typing
is to start all over again and learn the touch system by dint of pure,
unadulterated, old-fashioned drill. DO I do it? No. I don't expect
you to do it either. But you see what I mean, don't you?
Think about it. Are you a word guesser or a real reader? When you
read something about an ancient, do you tend to read the word "accident"?
When you read something about some sliver, do you tend to read the word
"silver"? Are you a surefooted phonetic speller? Here are a few words
in phonetic transcription. Would you know how to spell them?
Are you sure you would automatically spell those words bazzite,
altricial, rasion, prigress, periclasia,
and uncial? Or could you too use a little phonics?
How about doing those exercise with Johnny?
Dear Miss Smith:
I cannot end this book without a chapter directly addressed to you.
Of course you realize that I am mainly writing for parents. But I know that
a good many teachers will read this book, and there are a few things that
I want to talk to you about specially.
We have met several times during the past year. In fact, I talked with you
once or twice about this book and what I was trying to do. Your attitude
was like that of most teachers, I suppose. You said in effect, "Phonics is
all right, but ..." And your principal, Mr. Robinson, has said much the
same thing to me a number of times. "Oh, but we do give them phonics,"
he answered whenever I brought up the subject. His conscience was clear.
In his school, he explained to me proudly, they use the best features of
all methods. There is a lot to be said for phonics,
and of course phonics is used too.
I am sure Mr. Robinson has said the same sort of thing to parents a thousand
times. It is, on the surface, an unassailable answer. Mothers come in and
complain that their children are not taught phonics. The answer is that
this school does teach phonics. The mother just didn't know; other
schools may be lacking on this respect; but this school, no. What are you
complaining about, lady? We do give them phonics.
The trouble with this is that we are not talking about the same thing:
the phonics the mothers and I are talking about is not the same phonics that
you and Mr. Robinson mean. We mean phonics as a way of learning to read.
We mean phonics that is taught to the child letter by letter and sound
by sound until he knows it -- and when he knows it he knows how to read.
We mean phonics as a complete, systematic subject -- the sum total of
information about the phonics rules by which English is spelled. We mean
phonics as it was taught in this country until some thirty years ago,
and as it is taught all over the world today. There is no room for
misunderstanding, is there? We say, and we cannot be budged, that
when you learn phonics, in our sense of the word, you learn how to read.
We want our children taught this particular set of facts and rules,
because we know that this is and only this will do the job.
But when you and Mr. Robinson talk about phonics, you mean something entirely
different. You mean phonics as one among a dozen things that come into the
teaching of reading. You mean that on a Wednesday in May, out of the blue
and with nothing before and after it, you go to the blackboard and show the
children that the word pin with an e at the end makes
pine. The children there upon dutifully "learn" that fact. They are
not shown that the same principle holds for a, e, o,
and u; they are not shown that it also applies to pining and
tiny; they are not told what short and long vowels there are; they
are not told that i also makes the sound of ir in bird
and the sound of ie in pie. No. They are given "incidental,"
"intrinsic" phonics. On a Friday in June they will be told that tch
in catch stands for the sound of ch. Next year in October
they may hear about nk in pink.
Let's understand each other. Systematic phonics is one thing, unsystematic
phonics is another. Systematic phonics is the way to teach reading,
unsystematic phonics is nothing -- an occasional excursion into something
that has nothing whatever to do with the method used to fix words in the
child's mind. Either you tell a child that the word is trip because
the letter sounds add up to "trip"and nothing else -- or you tell him,
"Don't you remember, we had the word last week, in the story about the trip
to the woods." Phonics isnot" one of many techniques the child can
use to unlock the meaning of words" (you can't possibly imagine how sick
I am of all this jargon) -- phonics is simply the knowledge of the way
spoken English is put on paper.
Among other things, this means that there is an end to phonics. Phonics is
something a child can master completely, once for all, with the assurance
that he has covered everything there is. This is of tremendous emotional
significance to the child -- and to the adult too, for that matter. Reading,
he sees, is something that can be learned from A to Z -- or let's rather
say, from the sound of a in apple tothe sound of zh in
vision. There are a known number of items to be mastered and when
he is through, he knows how to read. You are a teacher, Mrs. Smith. You
must know that when there is an end to the book, when he knows that
at the bottom of page 128, he will be through. So and so many pages covered,
so many pages covered, so and so many still to go. There is a concrete goal.
Talk about motivation -- what better motivation could there conceivably be
than that knowledge that at the end of page 128 he will have learned how
to read?
And now think of your word method. Four hundred words this year, four
hundred words the next, four hundred words the year after that. How many
words are there in the English language? The child doesn't know. What
he does know is that there is an ocean of them. He feels -- correctly --
that this way he'll never get through. No job in the world could be more
heartbreakingly hopeless than learning to read word by word. Will it ever
end? The child knows perfectly well that it won't. He'll go through life
forever trying to learn new words. He doesn't want to learn more
words; there are other things in life he's more interested in; he hates the
whole business; he wants nothing more than to break out of this never-ending
daily routine; and so at one point or other he gives up. If he does it
early -- in first or second grade -- he becomes a "non-reader" (it's your
jargon, not mine); if he does it later on, he becomes just an ordinary
typical American. The other day I talked to a young insurance executive
whom I met in the street. I happened to carry a rather fat book in my hand.
He glanced at it and said, by way of conversation, "It's wonderful how you
can read these things. Would take me a year to get through."
Of course I can understand your attitude toward phonics. Ever since you went
to teachers' college, you have been exposed to derogatory comments on it.
Not once in your life have you heard a good word said about it -- by your
colleagues, that is, by professional educators. Of course parents always
holler about it, but that's just because they don't know any better, isn't
it? As far as you profession goes, phonics is out of date, unscientific,
inefficient, hopelessly defeated and disproven. Oh yes, the books mention
it -- and I suppose the courses in education too, occasionally -- but what
is mentioned is always your kind of phonics and not mine. "One among many
techniques ... another method of word attack ..." -- you know what I mean.
What it all amounts to is insult added to injury. They have thrown phonics
out the window, and now they act as if the evil deed had never happened.
I know how you feel after reading this book. Here is one little book by
another one of those cranks, and on the other side is the whole literature
on reading -- Gates, Gray, Witty, Durrell, and every single one of the
other "authorities." Why should you take me seriously?
I'll tell you why. Because all those professors are experts in reading,
supposedly, but not experts in either of the two sciences that really deal
with reading. Reading isn't a subject that can be studied all by itself.
It's a mental activity connected with one aspect of the English language.
There are only two kinds of experts worth listening to when it comes to
reading: linguistics and psychologists.
As to the linguists, they are unanimous on this matter. They are all on
my side. I have cited the dean of American linguists, the late Professor
Bloomfield of Yale University, repeatedly in this book. Just for the fun
of it, let me quote one more linguist, Dr, Robert A. Hall, Jr., Associate
Professor of Linguistics at Cornell: "Years of each child's school life
could be saved that are now wasted in and inefficient way of learning
to read and spell."
With the psychologists it is different. (By psychologists I don't mean
educators or teachers' college professors who happen to be members of the
American Psychological Association. I mean scholars whose main work is the
study of the human mind.) There are, as you know, all kinds of schools.
Psychologists are not unanimous on reading because they are not unanimous
on anything.
The educators usually say -- I have seen that statement dozens of times --
that the word method of teaching reading is based on Gestalt psychology.
Actually, that statement is completely wrong. The word method is one of
the purest application of conditioned reflex psychology that have ever
been invented.
Let me go into this a little further. The Gestalt psychologists say that
we don't learn things piecemeal, but by suddenly understanding the total
structure of a thing. A face, for instance, or a melody -- we see it or
hear it as a whole, not feature by feature or note by note. Learning, to a
Gestalt psychologist, is not a matter of memorizing the different elements
of the thing to be learned, but of grasping the whole thing at once.
The reading "experts" always say that this is what they mean. Let's not
teach the child one letter after another, let's teach him whole words.
That's Gestalt psychology, they say; teach the whole before the parts.
Actually if you asked a true Gestalt psychologist to work out a system for
teaching reading, he would emerge for his laboratory with phonics. You see,
in this system of psychology the only thing that counts is structure, how
a thing is put together, the unique way the parts make up the whole. So,
if you want to teach a child how to read the word chicken, using a
Gestalt psychology approach, you would try to make him "see" at a glance
that the c and the h belong together, making up the ch,
that the ck also is a close letter combination, that the i
before the ck necessarily must be a short vowel, and that the
en is just an unaccented ending. You would definitely not try
to make the child swallow the word chicken as a whole -- in a lump,
so to speak -- without making him understand the way it is built.
The key to Gestalt psychology is the sudden moment of insight, the flash,
the click, the psychological experience of having everything fall into place.
A phonics-trained child learns chicken that way, and elephant,
and hippopotamus, and internationalism, and every other word
in the English language. He comes across the word for the first time, he
recalls to his mind his knowledge of letters and sound, and something
clicks in his mind. Why, that's what it means! He has learned
to read another word.
You are a teacher, Miss Smith. You must know what I am talking about.
It's what makes teaching such a wonderfully rewarding job. You try to make
the children see and understand, and there comes the moment of insight;
their faces light up, and they have learned. It's the visible sign of the
creative job that makes up your life. Yes, indeed, the Gestalt psychologists
got hold of something very deep and very basic to human experience. Let's
not saddle them with the theory that led to the invention of the word method.
They deserve better than that.
I wish the educators were frank about this thing and admitted that the word
method is a simple application of the conditioned reflex. It goes straight
back to Pavlov and his famous salivating dogs. You remember what Pavlov
did, don't you? He rang a bell whenever he put meat in front of the dog.
The dog salivated whenever he heard a bell. Whereupon Pavlov played his
dirty trick on the poor animal and rang the bell without giving him
any meat. And the dog salivated in vain. Pavlov had given him a useless,
unnatural, totally meaningless conditioned reflex.
It was not long before the conditioned-reflex psychologists -- the
"associationist" or "connectionist" school -- found out that Pavlov's
discovery can be used to train a human being. Expose him repeatedly to
an association of certain things or events, and sooner or later he will
automatically connect them in his mind. Of course you can teach
a child to read that way -- nothing is easier than that. You show him the
word chicken seventeen times in succession, each time in connection
with a picture of a chicken and an explanation by the teacher that this
combination of letters means a chicken. And so with every other word.
Don't you see how degrading this whole process is? The child is never
told why this heap of letters means "chicken," and not "giraffe,"
or "kangaroo,", or "recess period." Don't you know that the main question
in all children's minds is the question why? Maybe the child would like to
know why chicken means chicken, maybe he doesn't ask the question
simply because he feels he won't get an answer. It's "chicken" because
Teacher says so. Conditioning is an authoritarian process.
It seems to me a plain fact that the word method consists essentially of
treating children as if they were dogs. It is not a method of teaching
at all; it is clearly a method of animal training. It's the most inhuman,
mean, stupid way of foisting something on a child's mind.
Gestalt psychologists don't treat animals that way. On the contrary, they
are famous for experiments where they teach chimpanzees to reach bananas
with a stick. Instead of training human beings as if they were animals,
they proceed on the opposite assumption that you can teach animals to
think as if they were human. Gestalt psychologists are humanists,
conditioned-reflexers are authoritarians.
Of course, Gestalt psychology isn't the only thing the educators offer to
justify their methods. To hear them talk, the word method is the only
method of teaching reading that fits into the whole of modern educational
theory. It's all part and parcel, they say, of modern enlightened education.
I say it isn't so. Throughout this book, as you may have noticed, I have
carefully refrained from the kind of attacks on progressive education that
are now so fashionable in certain quarters. The fact is, I am on the whole
on the side of progressive education. I have a Ph,D. degree from Teachers
College, Columbia University, and I am a sincere admirer of John Dewey.
I think education should be democratic, free of senseless formalism and
drill, based on interest and meaningful experience, and inseparably joined
to the real life that goes on around the child. I have four published
books to testify to the fact that I am not a reactionary but a liberal.
But where does all that come into the question or teaching reading?
Who says a progressive, liberal-minded teacher must not tell her pupils
anything about sounds and letters, but must do nothing but condition them
to the sight of certain words? Why is the word method always labeled modern
and phonics always branded as reactionary? There is no earthly reason for
pigeonholing them this way. Phonics is one way of teaching reading based
on certain psychological and linguistic principles, and the word method is
another way -- based on certain other, inferior psychological principles
and no linguistic principles whatever.
To be sure, it so happens that practically all progressive educators
nowadays are also devotees of the word method. But that's simple a
historical accident. It hasn't always been so, and it isn't so today in
other countries. Obviously there are liberal-minded teachers galore in
England, Scotland, Wales, Scandinavia, France, and a dozen other countries,
who swear by phonics and wouldn't think of teaching reading any other way.
As to the past, progressive education hasn't always been wedded to the word
method by any means. I cited earlier in this book the work of the famous
Italian progressive kindergarten teacher, Dr. Maria Montessori. I could have
cited similar statements by other patron saints of progressive education,
like Pestalozzi and Froebel, or by Horace Mann, who observed the teaching of
phonics in Prussia and recommended it enthusiastically for use in American
schools.
What it come down to, when you stop to analyze the philosophical
underpinnings of the word-method gospel, is the repeated assertion that
sight reading leads to joy and happiness in the classroom, playful,
enthusiastic learning, "zest and zeal," a continuous glow of breathless
excitement, and innumerable other priceless spiritual benefits. I ask you,
soberly and sincerely, whether, according to your experience, that is true.
Does all this really happen in classrooms or isn't this just a never-never
land dreamed up by the educators? I certainly haven't seen any of this
glorious joy and happiness on my visits toy our school, and I can't believe
that all those visits of mine happened to fall on off days. No, what I saw
was the average class period, the thing that goes on in your classroom day
by day. They learn the words, they read the "stories" in their readers.
Some are happy, some are not, and most of them don't particularly feel
one way or another.
As to the "stories," they certainly are not calculated to arouse
boundless enthusiasm in the soul of a child. I wonder who ever seriously
thought of that curious notion. Has it ever happened to you that one your
children really got excited about "The Move to the Farm" and waited in
breathless suspense to see what was going to happen next? I bet it hasn't.
I can assure you that none of my own children ever came home from school
and said, "Daddy, we read a wonderful story today in school.
It was all about Dick and Jane's father stopping at a gas station."
Anyway, what can you expect of reading material cooked up to contain 287
words, each repeated 26 times? Considering the circumstances, it's a wonder
those readers are not considerably worse. Just imagine the poor writers,
pressed into service to furnish those wretched little tales. All they
can do is write something or other about that oh, so typical family
with father, mother, a boy and a girl of primary-school age and a little
sister. The little sister has a teddy bear. Father has a fairly good
junior executive job and comes home from the office in a neat business suit.
They live in a colonial house with a medium-sized yard and a white picket
fence around it, about fifteen miles form a large metropolitan city equipped
with a zoo and other facilities for children's reading material. They drive
a Ford, Plymouth, or Chevrolet, and have grandparents devoted to a very
rural type of farming with pigs, goats, geese, and the rest.
Naturally the children are bored -- just as bored as you are yourself,
reading their books with them day after day. The only way to give them
some happiness and joy of achievement is to teach them phonics -- the
only system by which they'll arrive within reasonably short time at the
pleasurable stage of being able to read anything they like. Interest and
motivation -- the great twin magics of progressive education -- cannot be
produced artificially by "story" after "story" about putting away toys or
getting a new hat, but only by equipping the children with a skill that
will help them in their own life. The other day a woman told me that her
nine-year-old boy had finally taken an interest in reading because he
wanted to decipher the television programs in the paper. There you
have an example of real-life motivation.
To me, those artificial "stories" are in themselves proof that the word
method is no good. A natural method of teaching reading should be useable
anywhere, at any time, with whatever materials are at hand. The pioneers,
as I mentioned before, managed with Webster's Blue-Backed Speller
and the Bible. Innumerable people have managed with less -- with the Bible
alone, or just pencil and paper, plus a rudimentary knowledge of phonics.
In fact, thousands of gifted children have learned to read by themselves,
figuring out the basic sound values of certain letters and going on from
there.
This primitive method of learning how to read is a great American tradition.
Lincoln in his log cabin must have learned that way, so did his successor
Andrew Johnson, the illiterate tailor's apprentice who taught himself to
read when he was ten "from a book which contained selected orations of
great British and American statesmen." Can you imagine a poor boy today
who will educate himself by painstakingly working his way through the
three Macmillan readers with their 1,278 words? I can't.
I am not dragging in Lincoln and Andrew Johnson gratuitously. There is
a connection between phonics and democracy -- a fundamental connection.
Equal opportunity for all is one of the inalienable rights, and the
word method interferes with that right.
You don't believe me? Think of the children in your class, think of the way
you grouped them by their reading ability. There are three groups -- aren't
there? -- the good readers, the average readers, and the poor readers. You
know much better than I what are the exact "mental ages" or "reading ages"
of those children. Isn't it true that you have a large group reading at the
level that corresponds to your grade (that's the national norm I am talking
about, two years behind the rest of the world), a somewhat smaller group
reading one grade below, and two or three or four poor Harrys who can't read
at all? Yes, you also have a few children reading above your grade
standard, but aren't they the exceptions? Isn't it true that in your class
-- and in any typical class -- there is a cluster of children who are up to
par in their reading, and a long, long comet's tail of children at all grade
levels below, reaching all the way down to "non-readers"?
I know that educators take pride in just that. We've done away with rigid
grade standards, they say, we now pay attention to individual differences
in ability. We give each child in each class just as much as he can handle.
Frankly, when I first saw this tremendous variety of accomplishment in each
classroom, I was shocked. I don't think at all that this is something to
be proud of, I think it's deplorable. What's so wonderful about teaching
twenty-five children at twenty-five different grade levels, mixed together
in one classroom? How can anyone do an efficient teaching job in a third
grade that contains Harry who can't tell the difference between after
and chasing? The way I look at it, we're getting right back to the
old-style one-room Little Red Schoolhouse, where the village teacher faced
all the children in the community between the ages of six and twelve.
Now we have shiny, sprawling new school buildings everywhere, and each
of the classrooms is a miniature Little Red Schoolhouse open to children
at all grade levels.
And where does this impossible situation come from? It comes directly from
the word method -- the method by which children are exposed to twelve
hundred words in three years and left to learn to read by themselves.
For reading, as I have said before, doesn't mean recognizing twelve hundred
words by sight. It means being able to decipher and understand any
word within one's vocabulary -- and the vocabulary of an average college
freshmen, foe instance, has been estimated by Seashore to be 158,000 words.
How does a child or a teenager learn to read 158,000 words he hasn't
met in his basic readers? There is only one way: he has to know something
about phonics.
Since he isn't taught phonics in school, he has to get it from somewhere
else. If he is a gifted child, he will gradually workout for himself which
letter stands for which sound, and by doing that -- and only by doing that --
he will learn how to read. If, however, he is not the kind of child who
figures things out for himself, he has to learn how to read at home, from
his father and mother. By that I don't mean that his parents will teach him
anything formally and systematically; of course they won't. But if they are
educated people, if there are books and magazines in the home, if there is
an atmosphere favorable to reading, the child will somehow, through his
pores, learn the fundamental facts about English spelling that his school is
denying him. He will ask his parents questions about words, and his parents
will answer those questions. They will answer them invariably in terms of
phonics and never in terms of the word method. They will not tell
him that the word means chipmunk because "You remember the chipmunk
in the story we read last month?" They'll tell him, naturally, "Look at
the first two letters. What does ch stand for?"
And so reading, in so far as it is taught at all today, is taught casually
and unconsciously, by fathers and mothers at home. The child who comes
from an educated book-reading home has a tremendous advantage. The son of
illiterate parents will stumble for three years through the twelve hundred
words without help or guidance and then, as likely as not, develop into a
"nonreader." An Andrew Johnson, with great gifts and perseverance, may
still become President today; but the odds against him are now immeasurably
greater.
I say, therefore, that the word method is gradually destroying democracy
in this country; it returns to the upper middle class the the privileges
that public education was supposed to distribute evenly among the people.
The American dream is, essentially, equal opportunity through free public
education for all. This dream is beginning to vanish in a country where
the public schools are falling down on the job.
It used to be the typical American ideal -- and practice -- to give children
a better education than their parents had had. Fathers who never got beyond
eighth grade sent their children to high school; high-school graduates
proudly watched their sons get college degrees. But things have changed in
the last ten, twenty years. For the first time in history American parents
see their children getting less education than they got themselves.
Their sons and daughters come home from school and they can't read the
newspaper; they can't spell simple words like February or
Wednesday; the don't know the difference between Austria and
Australia. The fathers and mothers don't know the reason for this,
but they know that something terrible has happened to their most precious
dreams and aspirations, that something, somewhere, is very, very wrong.
The educators, of course, deny that anything has happened. They trot out
all sorts of data and statistics to show that American children read, write,
and spell much better than they used to. I am not going to disprove those
data one by one. What I am talking about here are not matters for argument,
but facts -- facts that are public knowledge. The American people know what
they know.
You are a grade school teacher. I know that you are doing a conscientious
job, that you work overtime for very little pay, that you love children and
are proud of your profession. Aren't you getting tired of being attacked
and criticized all the time? Every second mother who comes in to talk to
you tell you that she is dissatisfied, that her child doesn't seem to learn
anything, that you should do your job in a different way, that you don't
know your business. Why should you be the scapegoat? The educators in
their teachers' colleges and publishing offices think up all those fancy
ideas, and you are on the firing line and have to take the consequences.
Have another look at the system you are defending with so much effort.
I know you are an intelligent young woman. You belong on the other side.
Mind you, I am not accusing the reading "experts" of wickedness or malice.
I am not one of those people who call them un-American or left-wingers or
Communist fellow travelers. All I am saying is that their theories are
wrong and that the application of those theories has done untold harm
to our younger generation.
Recently I saw some statistics that between 1945 and 1953, 33 million babies
were born in this country. These children are now -- or are soon going
to be -- in first, second, or third grade.
Let's forget about the past. Let's not argue about doctrines and theories,
about who is to blame for what has happened.
Let's start all over again and do better by those 33 million.
The exercises in this book are for beginning readers or for older children
who need help with their reading. They are for teaching "Johnny," but of
course the book is meant for boys and girls.
Start with the Sounds of each Letter in the letter-picture chart.
The sound to be learned is always the beginning sound of the two words
pictured. Teach Johnny to make the sound when you point to the letter
and to point to the letter or write the letter when you make the sound.
Take as much time as seems necessary for this preliminary work;
a five-year-old may well spend several weeks at it. Be patient:
it will pay off later on. Don't aim for perfection. Rather, make
sure Johnny realizes that letters stand for sounds and is reasonably
good at connecting the right sound with the right letter.
Then, and only then, start Exercise 1.
Let Johnny Sound Out the Words. Whenever Johnny is stumped by
a word in the exercises, let him work it out for himself. Tell him to
sound out the word. If he can't, let him look up the letter that is
puzzling him on the letter-picture chart and refresh his memory of its
sound by naming the two pictures aloud. Let him do this as often as
necessary until he is perfectly sure of the sound of the letter.
Explain about Small Letters and Capitals ... that there is a
small letter and a capital letter for each sound. However, concentrate
on the small letters first. Difficulties with capital letters can be
straightened out later.
Teach Writing and Spelling as well as Reading. You will probably
be tempted to go ahead with the reading and slight the writing and
spelling. Try to resist that temptation. Ideally, Johnny should learn
to read and write each of the exercise words at the same time. Let him
write each of the words from dictation. It is well worth taking the
extra time.
Repeat, Repeat, Repeat. There is a large amount of repetition
in the exercises, and 22 of the 72 exercises are reviews. However,
that does not mean that doing each exercise once is enough. Do each
one of them until Johnny can read and write each word in it without
the slightest hesitation. When you have done all the words horizontally,
from left to right, do them vertically. Do them from right to left.
Do them from the bottom up, diagonally, and picking words here and there,
at random. Make as sure as you can that Johnny can really read all the
words.
Don't Skip or Jump. Do the exercises in the exact order
in which they are printed. Otherwise you will defeat your purpose.
Watch out for signs of word guessing. Whenever Johnny does any
guessing, insist that he sound out the word and, if necessary, look up
the letter sounds on the letter-picture chart.
Here is the natural sequence of all phonic methods, with links to
exercises:
Exercise 1: a + b d f g h j l m n p r s t v w y z
Exercise 2: e + b d f g h j l m n p r s t v w y z
Exercise 3: Review 1
Exercise 4: i + b d f g h j l m n p r s t v w y z
Exercise 5: Review 2
Exercise 6: o + b d f g h j l m n p r s t v w y z
Exercise 7: Review 3
Exercise 8: u + b d f g h j l m n p r s t v w y z
Exercise 9: Review 4
Exercise 10: c k
Exercise 11: ck
Exercise 12: Review 5
Exercise 13: ft lb lf lk lm lp lt mp nd nt pt sk sp st ct
Exercise 14: bs cks ds ffs gs lls ms ns ps ts cts fts lbs
lks lms lps lts mps nds nts pts sks sps sts
Exercise 15: ng nk sh x ngs nks
Exercise 16: Review 6
Exercise 17: bl cl fl gl pl sc sk sl sm sn sp st sw tw spl
Exercise 18: br cr dr fr gr pr scr spr str shr tr
Exercise 19: Review 7
Exercise 20: qu th wh squ thr
Exercise 21: ch tch
Exercise 22: Review 8
Exercise 23: Two-Syllable Words
Exercise 24: ee ... ea as in meal ... e as in he
Exercise 25: ee ... ea as in meal ... e as in he (Continued)
Exercise 26: oo as in moon, book, and poor
Exercise 27: ar ... a as in pa, ma
Exercise 28: or
Exercise 29: er ir ur
Exercise 30: oi oy
Exercise 31: ou ... ow as in cow
Exercise 32: au aw all alt alk
Exercise 33: Review 9
Exercise 34: ai ay air
Exercise 35: ie as in pie ... y as in by ye ... as in rye ...
ind as in mind ... ild as in wild
Exercise 36: oa oe old olt oll ... ow as in low ... o as in so
Exercise 37: ew ue
Exercise 38: Review 10
Exercise 39: Two-Syllable and Three-Syllable Words
Exercise 40: a as in name
Exercise 41: a as in name (continued) ... a as in care ...
e as in Eve and here
Exercise 42: i as in fine and fire
Exercise 43: Review 11
Exercise 44: o as in bone and more
Exercise 45: Review 12
Exercise 46: u as in tune and cure
Exercise 47: Review 13
Exercise 48: ing
Exercise 49: y, ies, ied as in hurry, hurries, hurried ...
y, ier, iest, ily as in happy, happier, happiest, happily
Exercise 50: Review 14
Exercise 51: ed
Exercise 52: Review 15
Exercise 53: er le
Exercise 54: Review 16
Exercise 55: e ci cy
Exercise 56: ge gi gy dge dgi dgy
Exercise 57: Review 17
Exercise 58: se, si, sy as in cheese, rising, ...
rosy the, thi as in other, bathing
Exercise 59: Review 18
Exercise 60: Silent b, g, k, t, w
Exercise 61: Silent gh, h, l
Exercise 62: ph as in phone, orphan ... gh as in rough
Exercise 63: Review 19
Exercise 64: Review 20
Exercise 65: ea as in break, head, and learn
Exercise 66: e as in field ... ui as in fruit ... u as put
Exercise 67: wa swa wor qua squa wha ... ou as in young and famous
Exercise 68: Review 21
Exercise 69: ci, si, ti as in special, pension, vision, station,
action ... su as in treasure ... tu as in nature
Exercise 70: ive as in active ... or ance ence come some
Exercise 71: Review 22
Exercise 72: Three-Syllable and Four-Syllable Words
This is a cow.
The cow gives milk.
Milk is good for boys and girls.
This is the way we wash our clothes,
Wash our clothes,
Wash our clothes."
We rode on a big bus.
Miss Clark and Mr. Stone went with us.
We saw butter being made.
We saw cream being separated from milk.
Each of us drank a glass of milk.
We thanked Mr. Brown for helping us.
Then we came home on the bus.
Chapter 9 - Eyewitness Report
Last night it rained with thunder and lightning.
The footbridge was washed away.
I saw a lot of dead worms on our front porch.
The worms crawled out of the ground to keep from drowning.
The ditches overflowed and the water ran off into all the yards.
Chapter 10 - Word Guessing - Its Cause and Cure
Out of the night that covers me.
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul. ...
baz-ight
altrish-l
rayzh-n
prig-ess
perry-klayzha
unshl
Chapter 11 - A Letter to Johnny's Teacher
Phonics Exercises
Instructions for Parents and Teachers
Step One:
(Advice)The five short vowels and all consonants spelled by single letters.
(Exercises: 1, 2,
3, 4,
5, 6,
7, 8,
9, 10,
11, 12)Step Two:
(Advice)The five short vowels and all consonants spelled by two or three
letters.
(Exercises: 13,
14, 15,
16, 17,
18, 19,
20, 21,
22, 23)Step Three:
(Advice)Vowels and vowel combinations spelled with two or three letters.
(Exercises: 24, 25,
26, 27,
28, 29,
30, 31,
32, 33,
34, 35,
36, 37,
38, 39)Step Four:
(Advice)The five long vowels.
(Exercises:
40, 41,
42, 43,
44, 45,
46, 47,
48, 49,
50, 51,
52, 53,
54, 55,
56, 57,
58, 59)Step Five:
(Advice)Irregular spellings.
(Exercises: 60,
61, 62,
63, 64,
65, 66,
67, 68,
69, 70,
71, 72)
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snowball complain reply yellow herself around shadow November Columbus raincoat pardon leapfrog agreement seaport teaspoon flowers punishment borrow sunbeam butterfly yesterday classroom booklet tower Thursday September banjo smartest Tuesday gardener electric repeat hamburger mailbox return untrue showers always Jefferson toaster awning away confess Saturday cartoons steamboat counter goodness discover numbers Eskimo understand scarlet jeweler shortness sheepish oatmeal swallow Sunday birthday enjoyment Herbert Mexico New York murderer railroad annoy August western Easter lantern burglar window belongs kangaroo mustard unties widow Monday seagull
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folk mighty eighty sleigh sight tight high bright calf calm naughty sigh fight though slight weigh eight brought caught yolk hour bought John slaughter tight honest fright flight might ghost palm eighteen daughter straight thought plight height knight ought freight school sought light though weight half Thomas taught right fought lighting honor straight bright fright thought flight palm caught sought light slight mighty weight yolk eight plight height weigh neighbor night though fight tight though naughty calm hour eighty freight
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field believe siege helpful juice fierce full butcher belief bullet niece careful pull chief pussy awful thieves shriek pudding bush brownie cushion wasteful cheerful suit grateful grief bull bashful priest push thief fiend yield piece pier Charlie nuisance fruitful brownie full awful pudding piece pull bruise thief juicy pushing suit grief believes put bull wasteful fruitful niece shrieked fiend helpfully pussy Charlie butcher belief thieves bullet careful brief siege fierce cheerful bashful bush priest handful pierce shield yield fruit grateful
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innocence difficulty ordinary underneath exclaiming Washington quizzical emergency butterfly passengers jealousy family correction Valentine medicine banisters selfishly exchange impatience emperor refreshments thunderstorm practical banana vinegar Cinderella exciting mysterious entertain fashionable impossible threatening attractive peevishly together wonderful amazing committee permanent tomorrow January surrounded lecturer accident beginning favorite December earnestly conversation merchandise perfection decision awkwardly surprising invitation vanilla newspaper gorilla suddenly miserable musician unhappiness American holiday restaurant president Mississippi afternoon transportation dictionary asparagus understand Thanksgiving Elizabeth secretary February liberty independence blueberries democracy