Teaching: Sound Over Sight in Reading

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A new way of teaching reading, already in wide use in the U.S., is challenging the "look-say" method that took over the field beginning 40 years ago. Look-say, best known through the "Dick and Jane" readers, counts on sight identification of whole words, using pictures as clues, and brings in phonetics only gradually. The new method, without being a throwback to McGuffey, is centered on phonetics, freely uses picture clues and—most significantly—puts to work on a broad scale the theory of programmed learning.

The switch is the work of California Linguistics Expert Maurice William Sullivan, 40, whose interest in language goes back to his hitch as a marine teaching German to U.S. Navy officers during World War II. Many a degree later (B.A. and M.A. in English at Yale, Ph.D. in linguistics at Madrid, B.A. in Spanish at Puerto Rico, M.A. in Spanish at Middlebury), he took up reading theory at Hollins College and Stanford and then retired to a hilltop in California's Santa Cruz Mountains to develop his books. Distributed by McGraw-Hill, they are now used by 200,000 children in some 2,000 schools in all 50 states.

Consistent Sounds. Sullivan's system requires children to spend their first eight weeks learning the alphabet from their teacher. But they are not taught all the sounds of all the letters. His "structural linguistics" approach keeps children from the confusing phonetic inconsistencies of the language (the 40 different sounds conveyed by the letter a, for example) until they grasp the fact that in general, letters correspond to sounds.

Thus Sullivan students at first learn only the sounds associated with the consonants f, m, n, p, t, th, and the short forms of the vowels a and i. Then they learn, purely by sight, a few such basic words as yes, no, on, the. With this equipment, when they turn to their readers they can read short sentences, sounding out such words as ant, man, pin, thin. In the first seven books, which average first-graders will complete in a school year, they learn roughly 375 words by sounding them out, often using clues offered by simple cartoon-like drawings. None of the words involve a phonetic conflict, such as the long o sound in doe, dough, row or sew.

Sullivan's beginning vocabulary is drawn from the 5,000 to 15,000 words that most five-year-olds already speak and understand, even if they cannot read them. Sullivan contends that most reading primers are compiled from word lists that have no logical basis; each list came from a survey of the most used words in older readers, and all went back to McGuffey, "who must have obtained his list from God." Sullivan and a research team financed by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc. compiled their lists instead by exploring the world of the five-year-old. "A little kid is very sane," says Sullivan. "He just won't pay any attention to something not intrinsically interesting."