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Beginning of the Elocution Era
During the Elocution Era, public speaking was emphasized. Public speaking required proper gesture, vocal production, and delivery. Teachers were trained to pronounce unfamiliar words for their students. Students were trained to memorize what was in their readers and recite said stories. Spellers were sometimes used in the older grades. -
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The History of Phonics
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McGuffy Readers
A Miami University professor, named Rev. William McGuffy, created the McGuffy readers using a whole-word method. Many words were introduced to beginning readers. Then, these words were put into context through short stories. -
Joseph Rice
"In a survey of Public Schools throughout the United States in 1883, Joseph Rice found that phonics led to better results in reading than word methods. In 1895 and 1896, he gave spelling tests to 33,000 children throughout the United States. He found that the best spelling results were obtained where the phonic method was used." (Brown, 2014, History of Reading Instruction) Thereafter, the whole-word method along with suplementary phonics was used and spelling and reading were excellent. -
The Teacher's Word Book
Edward Thorndike, a psychologist who spent most of his career in the Teacher's College at Columbia University, published "The Teacher's Word Book." This book contained the 10,000 most common words of the English language. From this book stemmed many children's phonics books. -
Dick and Jane
This series of books utilizes the whole word method in which students learn whole words without "sounding them out," but rather through memorization. The key to helping children memorize these high-frequency words was through repetition. -
Why Johnny Can't Read
Rudolf Flesch, writer of "Why Johnny Can't Read", described in his book that students should return to phonics. THe instructional book for at-home teaching was a hot-button issue among educator and parents at the time. -
Jeanne Chall
Jeanne Chall, A harvard Education psychologist, evaluated the teaching of reading of several years and published her accounts in "Learning to Read: The Great Debate." In this book, she claims that children taught through whole-word struggled in later years. She determined that the teaching of phonics was best for the developmental skill of reading. -
Reading Recovery and Lundberg
The new Reading Recovery program offered young struggling readers with the oppotunity to work one-on-one with instructors to learn through phonics to better read. Students could participate in the program for 30 minutes, 5 days a week for 20 weeks. (Reyhner, 2008, The Reading Wars) The same year, Lundberg, after a six-year study, stated that a student's ability to sound words out in 1st grade, directly predicts the success rate by grade 6. -
Hooked on Phonics
Despite Chall's attempt to move the nation towards phonics some 20 years earlier, it wasn't until Shanahan created this audio series to help his own son learn to read that the nation became more aware of phonics as a reading tool. -
Becoming a Nation of Readers
"Becoming a Nation of Readers" focuses of the relationships between phonics and the whole-word method. The authors of this book stated that the early learning of phonics is essential to long-term success of reading. Although this book along with those before were backed up with studies, phonics was still ignored by many. -
No Child Left Behind
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was signed into law and this new law was on phonic's team. The law funded the Reading First Initiative, a federal program that funded reading programs in schools, and sided with the National Reading Panel (1997), who deemed that explicit and systematic phonics instruction was a must.
