Phonics International

Before the invention of the alphabet, there was only picture writing, and beginning readers had to learn a different symbol for every word. As soon as the Phoenicians invented the alphabet, however, the job of learning to read became easier. For the next 3500 years or so, children's lives were much simpler - they had to learn only about 26 letters and their sounds. Until, that is, about 50 years ago!

Then, for no obvious reason, educators began to abandon the old method in favour of a new approach called "look-say". Look-say paid little attention to the letters and their sounds, but rather taught the children to guess at words by their shape, context, initial letter or picture clues. Look-say used readers with a controlled vocabulary to give the children a reasonable chance to memorize the words. It persisted for about 25 years, but it never was a very satisfactory method since the number of words which a child can remember is limited, and even the most gifted memorizers eventually reached their limit. Of course, many children did discover how to sound out words on their own, but some did not. At the end of grade four, look-say children were expected to have memorized only about 1400 words, whereas the children who could sound out new words were able to read any word in their spoken vocabulary - about 40,000 words.

Because of general dissatisfaction with look-say, about 25 years ago it began to evolve into a new method. For a while, it was called "language experience", then "psycholinguistics", and then "Whole Language". Now, it is known as Balanced Literacy.