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Cover of Teaching to Read, Historically Considered

Teaching to Read, Historically Considered

by Mitford Mathews1966book
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References and Quotes

Reference
The Ignorant Schoolmaster

Teaching To Read, Historically Considered makes a distinction, which I have not seen people persist in using despite its utility, between "words-to-reading" methods, in which one memorizes words and reads with their memorized vocabulary, and "words-to-letters" methods, in which one memorizes a smaller set of words and uses those as anchors for learning and memorizing letters and sounds. He notes that in the 1800's both methods were present in the States, and both would simply get called the "word method", despite being crucially different from each other.

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Reference
Name Sounds, Not Things

Mitford Mathews, Teaching To Read, Historically Considered. A brief, intelligent history of reading. A number of other good treatments are available for the newcomer.

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Reference
The Meatgrinder Classroom

Though Comenius was the first to introduce pictures into reading primers, he's often incorrectly cited as having championed some early version of the word-method. From Teaching To Read, Historically Considered:

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Quote
Used in: Name Sounds, Not Things
The secret of their phenomenal advance was in the vividness of their conception of the nature of a word. They reasoned that words were sounds, or combinations of ascertainable sounds, and they held inexorably to the basic proposition that writing, properly executed, was a guide to sound. (p. 21)
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Quote
Used in: The Meatgrinder Classroom
In Reeder’s treatment of reading this sentence occurred: "The earliest proposed substitute for the alphabet method was the word and picture method suggested by Comenius." Nothing could be further from the truth than that Comenius for a moment thought of setting aside the traditional ABC method for teaching a child to read his own language; but this misleading statement by Reeder has been responsible for including Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670), the celebrated Moravian educator, among the endorsers of the word method. (p. 155)
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