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The chief aim, of course, is literacy. Although our writing is alphabetic, it contains so many deviations from the alphabetic principle as to present a real problem, whose solution has been indefinitely postponed by our educators’ ignorance of the relation of writing to speech. 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. The primers and first reading books which embody these doctrines, present the graphic forms in a mere hodge-podge, with no rational progression. At one extreme, there is the metaphysical doctrine which sets out to connect the graphic symbols directly with “thoughts” or “ ideas" as though these symbols were correlated with objects and situations and not with speech-sounds. At the other extreme are the so-called “phonic” methods, which confuse learning to read and write with learning to speak, and set out to train the child in the production of sounds — an undertaking complicated by the crassest ignorance of elementary phonetics. Pedagogues must determine how reading and writing are to be taught. Their study of eye-movements is an instance of progress in this direction. On the other hand, they cannot hope for success until they inform themselves as to the nature of writing. The person who learns to read, acquires the habit of responding to the sight of letters by the utterance of phonemes. This does not mean that he is learning to utter phonemes; he can be taught to read only after his phonemic habits are thoroughly established. Of course, he cannot utter phonemes in isolation; to make him respond, say, to the letter b by uttering the phoneme [b], which in the English phonetic pattern cannot be spoken alone, is to create a difficulty. The co-ordination between letters and phonemes, accordingly, has to be established as an analogic process by practice on graphs in which the symbols have a uniform value, such as bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat — can, Dan, fan, man, pan, ran, tan, van — bib, fib, rib — and so on. The real factor of difficulty is the host of irregular spellings which will remain, no matter what values are assigned as regular. Two devices obviously demand to be tried. One is to teach children to read a phonetic transcription, and to turn to traditional writing only after the essential reading habit has been set up. The other is to begin with graphs that contain only one phonemic value for each letter — sets such as were illustrated above — and either to postpone other graphs until the elementary habit has been fixed, or else to introduce them, in some rationally planned way, at earlier points.A decade after his book Language, Bloomfield wrote an essay on teaching children to read for Clarence Barnhart. Barnhart hoped to find a publisher who would develop a reading curriculum based on Bloomfield's methods. Many years after Bloomfield's death, Barnhart published Let's Read (1961), inspired by Bloomfield's ideas. Let's Read received critical reviews, e.g., by Henry Smith. In Bloomfield's essay Teaching Children to Read, he explained the essential fact of English as alphabetic and phonetic, combinations of letters and phonemes.
If our system of writing were perfectly alphabetic, then anyone who knew the value of each letter could read or write any word. In reading, he would simply pronounce the phonemes indicated by the letters, and in writing he would put down the appropriate letter for each phoneme. The fact that we actually can do both of these things in the case of nonsense words, such as nin or mip, shows that our system of writing is alphabetic. In order to read alphabetic writing one must have an ingrained habit of producing the phonemes of one's language when one sees the written marks which conventionally represent these phonemes. A well-trained reader, of course, for the most part reads silently, but we shall do better for the present to ignore this fact, as we know that the child learns first to read aloud. The accomplished reader of English, then, has an overpracticed and ingrained habit of uttering one phoneme of the English language when he sees the letter p, another phoneme when he sees the letter i, another when he sees the letter n, still another when he sees the letter m, still another when he sees the letter d, and so on. In this way, he utters the conventionally accepted word when he sees a combination of letters like pin, pit, tip, tin, nit, dip, din, dim, mid. What is more, all readers will agree as to the sounds they utter when they see unconventional combinations, such as pid, nin, pim,mip, nid, nim, mim. It is this habit which we must set up in the child who is to acquire the art of reading. If we pursue any other course, we are merely delaying him until he acquires this habit in spite of our bad guidance.But Bloomfield was wary of some phonic methods that assume they are teaching children how to speak (how to recognize phonemes) at the same time as they are learning to read. By age two or three, most children have learned to recognize and to produce all the sounds of their native language. Learning the sounds actually begins in utero. Producing them begins with children's babbling sounds and is normally complete by the second or third year, at which time they can be taught to read. Bloomfield was critical of some phonics methods.
The letters of the alphabet are signs which direct us to produce sounds of our language. A confused and vague appreciation of this fact has given rise to the so-called "phonic" methods of teaching children to read. These methods suffer from several serious faults. The inventors of these methods confuse writing with speech. They plan the work as though the child were being taught to pronounce — that is, as if the child were being taught to speak. They give advice about phonetics, about clear utterance, and other matters of this sort. This confuses the issue. Alphabctic writing merely directs the reader to produce certain speech sounds. A person who cannot produce these sounds cannot get the message of a piece of alphabetic writing. If a child has not learned to utter the speech sounds of our language, the only sensible course is to postpone reading until he has learned to speak. As a matter of fact, nearly all six-year-old children have long ago learned to speak their native language; they have no need whatever of the drill which is given by phonic methods. In exceptional cases, children get into school before they have thoroughly learned to speak. A child may replace the r-sound by the w-sound, saying wed instead of red, or he may replace the th- sound by the f-sound, saying fin instead of thin, or his speech may be altogether indistinct and blurred. Conditions like these may be due to gross anatomical defects, such as a cleft palate; or to a deep-seated deficiency of the nervous system, such as idiocy; or to minor nervous faults, as is the case in stuttering; or to social maladjustment, which will prompt a child to seek advantage in such things as baby talk; or they may be due simply to the fact that he speaks some language other than English, so that English speech sounds are foreign to him. In all such cases, the economical course and the course that is best for the child, is to remove the defect of speech before trying to make the child read. In some cases, to be sure, this cannot be done. The extreme and typical case of this kind is that of deaf-and-dumb children. Such cases demand very elaborate care and training; they must be dealt with in a manner very different from ordinary reading instruction. In short, the problem of teaching children to speak is entirely different from that of teaching children to read. In all normal cases, the child has learned to speak before we are called upon to teach him to read, and our task is merely to give him the habit of uttering the familiar speech sounds at the sight of the printed or written letters. To ignore this distinction, as the phonic methods do, is to befuddle the whole process. The second error of the phonic methods is that of isolating the speech sounds. The authors of these methods tell us to show the child a letter, for instance t, and to make him react by uttering the t-sound; that is, the English speech sound which occurs at the beginning of a word like two or ten. This sound is to be uttered either all by itself or else with an obscure vowel sound after it. Now, English-speaking people, children or adults, are not accustomed to making that kind of noise. The phoneme [t] does not occur alone in English utterance; neither does the phoneme [t] followed by an obscure vowel sound. If we insist on making the child perform unaccustomed feats with his vocal organs, we are bound to confuse his response to the printed signs. In any language, most phonemes do not occur by themselves, in isolated utterance, and even most of the successions of phonemes which one could theoretically devise, are never so uttered. English speakers do not separately pronounce the sound of [t] or [p] or [u] as in put, and a succession like [s p], for instance, as in spin, does not occur alone, as a separate utterance. Learning to pronounce such things is something in the nature of a stunt, and has nothing to do with learning to read. We must not complicate our task by unusual demands on the child's power of pronouncing. We intend to apply phonetics to our reading instruction; this does not mean that we are going to try to teach phonetics to young children. ln this absurdity lies the greatest fault of the so-called phonic methods.
