ALL ABOUT READING
TEACHING APPROACHES
ABC METHOD
An approach to teaching
Students read the stories they learned when learning their ABC’s from the Bible.
After learning and reading, students knew the Bible stories and the concepts of right and wrong.
PHONICS APPROACH
Historians attribute alphabets (symbols that represent sounds) to Phoenicians (11th century BC), race of commercial traders who needed easier way to communicate and conduct business
Traced back to 1655 Blaise Pascal created synthetic phonics
Letter-sound correspondences, basic patterns of English spelling
Supporters: Rudolf Flesch, Jeanne Chall (Learning to Read: The Great Debate, 1967); National Reading Panel report (2000)
NOAH WEBSTER and SPELLING REFORM
Introduced American English spellings (1806) by changing patterns
Dropping the “u” and “k”
- color for colour
- humor for humour
- Public/publick; music/musick
Adding/Dropping additional letter
- waggon/wagon
- cancelled/canceled
- travelled/traveled
Changing letters
- defence/offence/pretence
- defense/offense/pretense
Rejected spellings: wimmen/women, tung/tongue, soop/soup
WHOLE WORD APPROACH
Traced back to 1826, during Elocution Era
1844, Horace Mann (father of American public schools) wanted to change from bottom up (letters and sounds learned before words) to top down approach (words learned first)
“reading wars” (contest between phonics and whole word approaches)
Also known as “look-say” approach produced “Dick and Jane” readers (1930)
From this came the most popular book on education: Why Johnny Can’t Read, by Rudolf Flesch (1955) which reignited the “reading wars,” it was against the whole word approach
Reminds me of braille contractions (ex: grt = great, brl = braille): students learn the shape of the word