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APPENDIX 2 The Alphabet Method of Reading Instruction The alphabet (or alphabetic) method used in colonial reading, spelling, and writing instruction is often confused with the phonic approach, but the two were very different, and nineteenth-century sources—which are the earliest to discuss different reading instructional methods—always distinguish between them. No such distinction was made in the eighteenth or earlier centuries because the alphabet method of reading instruction was the only method known. As its name suggests, the alphabet method was dependent on children’s learning to match the shapes of the printed alphabetic letters to their names (not to their “sounds,” as children would have done in a phonic approach). This matching was done orally, without writing the letters. Children learned to recognize each letter and name it, so that “reading” the letters a b of the nonsense syllable ab required them to utter “ay, bee” before saying “ab.” Children’s initial reading experiences, as they tackled syllables, words, and finally sentences, involved this oral spelling and pronouncing in a process that I call “spelling-for-reading.” The syllable was the transitional unit at which a child aimed, and the point at which he or she would move from oral spelling of individual letters to the pronunciation of an entire syllabic unit. Most instructors required the students to spell out words in cumulative syllables, repeating each earlier syllable once they had achieved its pronunciation. The schoolmaster William Kempe, in his Education of Children in Learning, printed in London in 1588, describes the process. The “scholler” should tackle the word mercifulness as follows: “m-e-r [to be read as “em, ee, ar”], mer: c-i, ci, merci: f-u-l, ful, merciful: n-e-s, nes, mercifulnes.”1 Spelling aloud in this way was the key to word recognition. Here, for instance, is a description of how children would have “read” the first lesson that they found in an American edition of Thomas Dilworth’s spelling book of 1747, which Noah Webster later reproduced as the first lesson of his own spelling book, in 1783. (To make sense of this, you will need to read it aloud.) “En-o, No, emm-ai-en, man, emm-ai-wy, may, pee-you-tee, put, o-double-eff, off, tee-aitch-ee, the, ell-ai-double you, law, o-eff, of, gee-o-dee, God.” That was children’s first rendering of “No man may put off the law of God.”2 The limitations of this approach are selfevident : its critics would later say that “tee-aitch-ee” would lead a child more readily to the word “teacher” than to the word the. Nonetheless, it was the only method of “decoding,” as reading professionals call it (cracking the code between the written or printed letters and the speech sounds they represent), that was Appendix Two 387 prevalent during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries on either side of the Atlantic. Children were considered able to “read” satisfactorily once they were able to drop the crutch of oral spelling and pronounce a word at sight. If children were not taught phonics in any direct way under this approach, how did they learn the correspondences between letters and speech sounds? The best explanation is probably that they learned them by association, analogy, and much repetition. If “bee ay dee” was “bad,” then “ess ay dee” must be “sad.” The spelling book, the key innovation of eighteenth-century America, gave children an inordinate amount of practice in pronouncing lists of syllables and words divided into syllables, because the heart of the spelling book lay in these long lists that were to be read out and pronounced aloud, often long before children met up with any connected reading matter. All this recitation was viewed as preparation for teaching children how to divide an unfamiliar word into its constituent syllables as a guide to pronouncing it. A second use of oral spelling, which I call “spelling-for spelling,” proceeded in much the same way, except that it moved from whole to part, from a word pronounced aloud down to the constituent letters of its written form. Once again, these words were presented in groups of syllables. The chief use of this process was in the school spelling competitions that surface early in the sources. The final use of spelling, spelling-for-writing, is the most familiar to us today. Ironically, because of the pedagogical fixation, during the colonial period, on writing as penmanship rather than...

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