Pronouncing Orthography

In 1864, Pronouncing Orthography was released as a simplified version of traditional English orthography to help children learn to read more quickly and easily; it became widely adopted by the United States public school system and incorporated into most basal reading schemes of the time. It aimed to improve literacy education by eliminating the irregularities of conventional English orthography and adhering to the alphabetic principle, wherein every letter represented a specific sound. This allowed children to read words by combining elementary sounds using phonics.

William Torrey Harris promoted Pronouncing Orthography after its invention by Dr Edwin Leigh who was inspired by another orthography called Phonotypy. This method resulted in children learning to read approximately 12 months faster than with traditional English orthography.

Children who used this method became self-reliant, diligent, and happy learners. When they transitioned back to traditional English orthography, they were better at spelling and became logical and analytical thinkers instead of relying on learning by rote. Teachers who used the method preferred it over conventional teaching.

Etymology

Although Pronouncing Orthography was the formal name of the new orthography, publishers and educationists recognised that many people did not know what an orthography was; consequently, it was known by many different names, including: – ''Leigh Print,'' ''Leigh's Phonetic Type,'' ''Leigh's Phonetic Method,'' ''Leigh's Pronouncing Edition of...'' after Dr Edwin Leigh, who devised the new orthography. It was also sometimes known as ''Phonetic Orthography.''

Purpose

Pronouncing Orthography was used to teach literacy; children were taught to read and write in a phonemic orthography and then transitioned to conventional English orthography. The concept originated when a predecessor, orthography, English Phonotypic Alphabet aka Phonotypy, was trialled to teach literacy and promote orthographic reform. Surprisingly, the newly literate transitioned effortlessly to conventional English, so the pedagogical theory developed that the best way to teach literacy was through an interim phonemic orthography. To this purpose, many orthographies have been developed and trialled, but only three have been widely adopted by public school systems, and these are: – Phonotypy (1845), Pronouncing Orthography (1864) and the Initial Teaching Alphabet (1960).

Background

Causes of poor literacy

The idea that the phonemic irregularity of the English language was a major cause of the poor levels of literacy in the English-speaking world had been well established in the mid-19th century by works such as Alexander John Ellis's treatise ''Plea for Phonetic Spelling, or the Necessity of Orthographic Reform,'' in 1848. Dr Edwin Leigh himself published a report quantifying the levels of illiteracy in the United States, which he used to advocate for his Pronouncing Orthography.

Precedent

Dr Edwin Leigh enthusiastically adopted Phonotypy as soon as it was published, so in 1846, he taught his daughter to read using Phonotypy; then, in 1849, he taught a class of fugitive slaves in Boston, which led him to set up the Boston phonetic school in 1850 which he used as a springboard to introduce phonetic teaching into the schools of Somerville, Massachusetts. In 1859, he used Phonotypy in evening classes to teach illiterate adults in St Louis, Missouri, where he tried unsuccessfully to introduce Phonotypy into the public school system.

Successor

Leigh was convinced of the efficacy of Phonotypy as a tool to teach literacy but realised that parents, teachers and school district officials were sceptical as they could not read the writing used by their children. Leigh was aware that Phonotypy had been designed for a multiplicity of purposes, but it was never designed to be a transitory mechanism towards literacy. Leigh reasoned that a much simpler interim teaching orthography was needed to improve literacy, which closely resembled standard English orthography for acceptance. Consequently, Leigh spent 20 years designing and refining his own interim teaching orthography.

Introduction

Leigh published his design of Pronouncing Orthography in a pamphlet in 1864, which he then promoted in learned education journals and through touring lectures. Leigh trialled the orthography in a school within his own school district of St Louis in 1866 and published the successful results. Gradually, publishers of the popular basal reading schemes released versions of their reading books in Pronouncing Orthography in tandem with school districts adopting the method, who in return vouched for its success in their annual reports.

Teaching materials

Basal reading schemes

Reading was taught in the United States of America during the mid-19th century using popular basal reading schemes consisting of primers & readers. The majority of which were re-published in Leigh's Pronouncing Orthography, and are listed below:

PDFs

Bible

In the mid-19th century, the bible was extensively read by children in schools; as such, Leigh translated two gospels into Pronouncing Orthography: –
* The Gospel According to Luke, reprinted in Pronouncing Orthography by Edwin Leigh; – Link
* The Gospel According to John, reprinted in Pronouncing Orthography by Edwin Leigh; – Link

Teaching methods

Leigh simply converted existing basal reading schemes to Pronouncing Orthography for expediency. The existing basal schemes were orientated towards various methods, including the phonetic and word methods or combinations of the two. Hence, he was agnostic about how teachers taught literacy as he presumed the benefits of phonetic understanding would be secured by simply using his orthography regardless of how it was taught.

Conversely, the principal advocates of Pronouncing Orthography, superintendents William Torrey Harris of St Louis and John Philbrick of Boston, were both adamant proponents of the phonetic method; they merely considered Pronouncing Orthography as a useful tool in support of phonetic teaching. Other school districts such as New York, followed Leigh's guidance and allowed Pronouncing Orthography to be taught with different methods, but even here, by 1872–73, it was concluded by assistant superintendent Calkins that the phonetic method was superior.

Advantages

Over the period of its usage, Pronouncing Orthography was assessed in education journals, and in reports of the American public school system, where the following advantages were documented: –
# Children learnt to read at least six to twelve months faster.
# Children were better spellers after transitioning to conventional English orthography
# Children were happier as they gained independence from teachers and became self-reliant
# Children spoke with clear articulation and more eloquently after using Pronouncing Orthography
# Teachers who had tried Pronouncing Orthography preferred it to conventional orthography.
# Most importantly of all, children learnt to think logically. William Torey Harris described this further: –

''It is desirable that the child who is just commencing his education should have something consistent and logical, methodical and philosophical to employ his mind upon rather than something without either analogy or system for these first impressions have the power to change and fix the whole bent of the mind...''[Superintendent William Torrey Harris]

The 1878 Boston headmaster survey demonstrated that as schools gained experience of using Pronouncing Orthography so they became in-favour of its use.

Awards

At the Vienna Exposition of 1873, Dr Edwin Leigh was awarded the Medal of Progress as a recognition of merit for his invention of Pronouncing Orthography.

Design philosophy

Phonemic orthography

As with all phonemic orthographies, the principal objective of Leigh's new orthography was to enable children to correctly convert written words to speech regardless of whether the child was pre-acquainted with a particular word or not. A child can quickly and easily learn to read by knowing a consistent set of rules that convert letters to sounds. In contrast, standard English orthography's myriad rules and exceptions made this difficult.

Familiarity with standard orthography

Secondly, Leigh wanted to avoid prejudice similar to that encountered against phonotypy in St. Louis by making his new orthography familiar to standard English orthography, so the Latin alphabet and spelling conventions were fully retained. Instead, Leigh introduced phonetic regularity by making silent letters in words faint, so children were aware they should be ignored. Leigh also subtly embellished other letters so children were explicitly aware of the sound made by those vocal letters. In this way, Leigh hoped that the familiarity of the new orthography would persuade the detractors to accept the new orthography whilst children would still see through this veneer to read with phonetic clarity.

Elocution

The desire to speak eloquently and, in particular, to have correct received pronunciation was common in Britain and America during the 19th century, with the study of English orthoepy at its zenith. One feature of phonetic orthographies was that they converted written words into a single consistent form of pronunciation, which would often differ from the pronunciations used by people with different accents or regional dialects. In the 19th century, this feature of phonetic orthographies was considered a great benefit as children would learn new words in received pronunciation. To this end, Leigh utilised the pronouncing dictionaries of John Walker & Benjamin Humphrey Smart, two of the leading orthoepists of the time to ensure his orthography resulted in correct pronunciation. To emphasise this objective, Leigh called his new orthography, Pronouncing Orthography.

Writing

Controversially, Leigh separated learning to read from learning to write; he described his position in his report to the Boston school committee: –

''As to script, I stated my own conviction that it has no proper connection with learning to read and my desire to know from the writing master whether the habits formed by such writing of such words on the slate by so young learners will not have a bad influence upon their future handwriting and whether they will not acquire the art better at a later period and by exercises designed specially for the acquisition of good habits and skill in penmanship....'' r Edwin Leigh/blockquote>

Leigh also had no hand-written script versions of his letters because he relied on small, subtle embellishments to letters which were identifiable in print but unrecognisable in children's hand-writing. Leigh suggested children should learn to read using his orthography and then transition to standard English orthography, where they would learn to write.

Compromises

In reality, Leigh's orthography did not lend itself to writing because of the asymmetrical application of the alphabetical principle. So every letter (grapheme) equated to a single sound (phoneme), allowing children to read with absolute certainty, but every sound (phoneme) equated to a multitude of possible letters (graphemes), meaning children would not know with certainty how to write an unfamiliar word.' This was necessary to keep words written in Pronouncing Orthography resembling those in conventional English orthography.

Segmentation of sounds

Leigh considered the sequence in which Pronouncing Orthography could be taught when he segmented letter sounds into four utterance categories: –
* Category I – Letter sounds most commonly uttered (99% of instances)
* Category II – Letter sounds which occur once in every two hundred utterances (0.5% of instances)
* Category III – Letter sounds which occur once in every thousand utterances (0.1% of instances)
* Category IV – Letter sounds which occur once in every four thousand utterances (0.025% of instances)

He suggested avoiding teaching category IV sounds using Pronouncing Orthography and instead waiting until the child has transitioned to conventional orthography, whilst the other categories are taught in sequence.

Discontinuation

Pronouncing Orthography started to gradually fall into disuse in the later part of the 1870s and into the 1880s for two main reasons: –

Prejudice

Most people initially learnt to read in early childhood. Subsequently, they read naturally through automaticity in reading, so by adulthood, they were unaware of the complex and abstract nature of learning literacy. Instead, most people had a preconceived notion that learning to read should be a simplistic activity based on reading aloud basic primers with children. When faced with an alternate orthography that many found bewildering and explanations from educationalists they could not comprehend, many people became adamantly opposed, often using anti-intellectual arguments against the evidence.

Discontinuance at Boston

In 1879, the new Superintendent, Samuel Elliott, withdrew Leigh's Pronouncing Orthography, documenting his prejudicial reasons: –

''If the child's home is one which has its books, the use of them will not prepare him for the primer which we put into his hands. It is unlike the nursery stories which he has been looking at, if not reading; it has a strange look, particularly on the inside, where characters he has never seen stare at him out of nearly every line... but the strangeness of any book at all is almost stupefying...'' uperintendent Samuel Eliot

Discontinuance at New York

In New York, there was external pressure from outside the school system from people who did not understand the concept of Pronouncing Orthography and considered it complex, expensive and an unnecessary ornamental branch of education. The New York Board of Education bowed to this pressure despite their previous acknowledgement of the superiority of Pronouncing Orthography.

Pedagogical challenge

The prevailing pedagogical theory that teaching literacy was best achieved through using an intermediate phonemic orthography was challenged by an educationalist named George L. Farnham, who had sponsored the use of Phonotypy to teach literacy in Syracuse, New York. Upon its initial success, he became a staunch advocate but subsequently noticed the main deficiency in the method; this was that children learned to read too quickly and failed to comprehend meaning. To address this perceived problem, Farnham invented the Sentence Method, which he published in 1881, and widely promoted in the learned educational journals of the time. In modern times, the method has been completely discredited.

Teaching usage

Leigh's Pronunciation Orthography became widely adopted in America in the late 1860s. The American public school system was publicly funded so was obliged to keep records, consequently, some public school boards published a detailed account of the usage of Pronouncing Orthography, in particular: St Louis, Missouri, Boston, New York and Washington.

St Louis, Missouri

Dr Edwin Leigh was closely associated with the St Louis public school system, having served as a teacher for seven years. In 1866, Leigh trialled his Pronouncing Orthography in Clay School, where Miss Helen Smith, a recently qualified teacher, carried out a controlled experiment in which she taught two classes, one in pronouncing orthography and the other in standard orthography, allowing a like-for-like comparison. The result was spectacular with children taught in Pronouncing Orthography pulling 3 quarters ahead of those taught in conventional orthography.

William Torrey Harris had been the principal at Clay School during the trial and was later promoted to superintendent of St Louis public schools. Having seen the results of the new method first-hand, he reported upon the marked improvement in children's articulation and spelling and the fact they learnt to read quickly using this method. Based on this success, the St. Louis Board of Education sanctioned the city-wide adoption of the new phonetic system from the 1867–1868 academic year. Harris, summarised the effect of this decision: –

''The introduction of Leigh's Phonetic System into all of the primary departments was followed by better results than could have been anticipated ... the sequel showed that pupils taught by the new system were far in advance of those taught the same length of time by the old plan....''[Superintendent William Torrey Harris]

Throughout his tenure as the Superintendent, Harris advocated for the superiority of Leigh's Pronouncing Orthography and the general advantage of phonetic teaching methods. In 1873, Harris reported that the new method had spread to the main cities of America: – New York, Washington and Boston, as well as other cities in the West. Subsequently, in response to ongoing enquiries from around the country, Harris published a full report on the method in 1877. Harris's successor, Edward Long, continued to use Leigh's method but was not a vocal advocate; in 1884, he stopped reporting on the methods and materials used to teach children literacy, so it is not known when Pronouncing Orthography stopped being used but was definitively used for at least 16 years in St Louis.

Boston, Massachusetts

Dr Edwin Leigh also had close associations with the Boston school system. In the 1867–68 academic year, the Boston Board of Education introduced Leigh's phonic system of teaching the first steps to reading. Some of Boston's teachers had already become acquainted with the method through their teacher training, so they immediately adopted the system and started to report excellent results from this first use.

John Philbrick was the Superintendent of Boston's public schools. He recognised both the importance and the difficulty of initially learning to read. Philbrick strongly advocated phonetics as the best method to teach literacy to children and considered Leigh's print an ingenious contrivance for facilitating the teaching of this method. In 1870, Philbrick described the extraordinary results from using the new method: –

''Such results in teaching the first steps in reading I had never before witnessed in any school whatever, and they certainly afford strong evidence in favor of the new pronouncing type. I am happy to be able to put in this evidence in favor of the pronouncing type which Dr. Leigh has taken so much pains to perfect and make known.... 'Superintendent John Philbrick'''

Philbrick continued to advocate for Leigh's Pronouncing Orthography until he relinquished his position as Superintendent to Samuel Elliott in the academic year 1877–78. In his final Superintendent's report (1877–78), Philbrick published an influential closing report, summarising the outcomes from using Pronouncing Orthography.

New York, New York

Leigh's Pronouncing Orthography was trialled in some New York schools in the academic year 1869–1870. The following year the trial was hailed a success, and all New York schools were permitted to adopt the scheme with their choosing. The Superintendent and his assistants continued to report on the success of Leigh's method in the subsequent years.

Washington, District of Columbia

In 1871, The board of trustees of Washington public schools initiated a new course of study where Leigh's Pronouncing Orthography through Hillard's Primer & Second Readers were mandated along with Leigh's Sound Charts.

Notes

''Citations''

References

PAMPHLETS
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JSTOR JOURNALS
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BOOKS
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PRIMERS
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SCHOOL COMMITTEE – BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

''[Massachusetts public school system published detailed records of the initial adoption and later discontinuance of Leigh's Pronunciation Orthography between 1867 and 1879].''
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BOARD OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS – ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

''[Missouri public school system published detailed records of the initial adoption but reporting of Leigh's method lapsed after 17 years; it was known to be used between 1867 and 1883].''
* Year 1 (1866–67); –
* Year 2 (1867–68); –
* Year 3 (1868–69); –
* Year 4 (1869–70); –
* Year 5 (1870–71); –
* Year 6 (1871–72); –
* Year 7 (1872–73); –
* Year 8 (1873–74); –
* Year 9 (1874–75); –
* Year 10 (1875–76); –
* Year 11 (1876–77); –
* Year 12 (1877–78); –
* Year 13 (1878–79); –
* NOTE: – William Torrey Harris was replaced as Superintendent by Edward H. Long in 1880; the subsequent Superintendent's reports confirm continued usage of Leigh's phonetic method until 1883, after which the granularity of the reporting is reduced, so it is not known when Leigh's Pronouncing Orthography eventually stopped being used.
* Year 17 (1882–83); –

BOARD OF EDUCATION – NEW YORK CITY & COUNTY

''[New York public school system published detailed records of the initial adoption and later discontinuance of Leigh's Pronunciation Orthography between 1869 and 1876].''
* Year 1 (1869–70); –
* Year 2 (1870–71); –
* Year 3 (1871–72); –
* Year 4 (1872–73); –
* Year 5 – 6; – No commentary on Leigh's Pronouncing Orthography.
* Year 7 (1875–76); –

BOARD OF TRUSTEES of PUBLIC SCHOOLS – WASHINGTON
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SCHOOL COMMITTEE – WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS
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IMAGES
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Phonics
Phonetic alphabets
English spelling reform
Learning
Reading (process)
Writing systems introduced in 1864