Whole word methods have failed many students, as shown by studies dating back to Joseph Rice in the 1800s. More recent research continues to support phonics as the better approach. Phonics equips students with the tools to decode new words, opening the door to mastering an entire language.

While reading instruction has often swung between these two approaches, only one consistently leads to lasting literacy. 

The timeline and graph below clearly illustrate the shifts in reading instruction methods over time, highlighting key events that shaped this crucial debate. Explore the links to discover how these changes have impacted generations of students—and why understanding this history is essential for improving education today.

Note: the graph about reading trends below is 40L’s best guess based on the historical records. There is some degree of speculation involved. Even today where more data is available online, there are many different school systems involved, making it difficult to identify and generalize trends in instruction. (1)

95AD:  Quintillion mentions learning to read with syllables in his Institutes of Oratory.

15th to 18th Century: Syllabic Phonics. Hornbooks and Battledores were used to teach reading, followed by Spellers (syllabic phonics, analytic phonics.)

1655: Pascal invents synthetic phonics. (2)

1783: Noah Webster uses synthetic phonics to teach reading in his American Spelling Book.

Early 1800’s: Spellers and then Readers were used to teach reading, syllabic phonics. (3)

1881: J.M.D. Meiklejohn published “The Problem of Teaching to Read,” advocating teaching regularly spelled words first and introducing exceptions later.

1885 - Early 1900’s: Syllable divided books. These readers and story books had words divided into syllables to aid decoding. They were likely used after learning syllables in Spellers.

1887: George Farnham writes “The Sentence Method of Teaching Reading, Writing, and Spelling,” based on the idea that the unit of thinking was a sentence, so sentences as a whole should be taught in reading. This method is a form of whole language based on the whole sentence instead of whole words.

1893: In a survey of Public Schools in the United States, Joseph Rice found that phonics led to better results in reading than word methods. (14)

1895 - 1896: Joseph Rice gave spelling tests to 33,000 children throughout the United States. The best spelling results were obtained where the phonic method was used. (15)

1898: Rebecca Pollard published “First Book for Little Folk,” which combines spelling and phonics. It teaches phoneme awareness and incorporates songs.  Words whose phonics patterns have not yet been taught are inserted into the text with in line pictures in this and her spelling and reading books.

1889 - 1900: The use of elocutionary whole word methods and the sentence method coupled with the loss of the spelling book in many schools led to such a decline in reading and spelling ability that phonics was returned to the schools through spelling lessons. Whole word and sentence methods continued to be used, but phonetic spelling was taught in second grade and above. (16, 17)

1900 - 1930: Whole word methods continue, but supplementary phonics were used as well, resulting in excellent spelling and reading abilities. (17, 18)

1916: Milton Wright, father of Orville and Wilber Wright, wrote a letter where he mentioned teaching to read by sight vs. by letters. He stated that teaching by letters is better, and that is was hard to break the guessing habits caused by sight teaching. 40L transcribed the handwritten letter. (19)

1921: Edward Thorndike publishes "The Teacher's Word Book," a list of the most common 10,000 words in the English language.  (Later editions covered 20,000 words and then 30,000 words.)

1930: Dick and Jane enter the reading scene. Thorndike's word list allows controlled vocabulary readers in upper grades as well, unlike earlier whole word methods where new words eventually had to be taught through diacritical markings or the teaching of phonics in upper grades through spelling.

1930’s: Samuel Orton, a neuropsychiatrist, and Anna Gillingham, an educator, developed the Orton-Gillingham approach in the 1930s to address reading difficulties associated with dyslexia. This method uses multisensory techniques to teach phonics systematically.

1936 - 1938: The Slave Narratives are published. Their education sections contain a detailed account of how spelling books were used to teach reading.

1955: Rudolf Flesch publishes “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” advocating a return to phonics.

1966: The Hanna Study of the most common 17,000 words reveals that English is more phonetically regular than commonly assumed. (20)

1967: Jeanne S. Chall publishes “Learning to Read: The Great Debate,” a comprehensive look at hundreds of studies of reading methods. She found that phonics was more effective than whole word methods.

1967 - 1977 Project Follow Through found Direct Instruction in math, phonics, and spelling to be the best way of teaching for at risk children. However, Direct Instruction was not continued in most schools.

1975: Marva Collins opens Westside Preparatory School. She used long vowel first phonics for all students using copies of the old Open Court series she found abandoned in a school dumpster.  She successfully remediated students using these books and diacritical dictionary markings.

1980's: The use of whole word methods continue; this iteration is called "Whole Language." It adds in the theory of “three cueing” to the whole word practices of the past.  The history of three cueing is described in Emily Hanford’s 2019 article “At A Loss for Words.”

1983: Jeanne S. Chall republishes "Learning to Read: The Great Debate," with new research findings strengthening the case for phonics.

1985: Margaret Bishop publishes “The ABC’s and All Their Tricks,” arranging the results of the Hanna study in a user friendly format; a useful reference book for teaching phonics and spelling.

1985: Flesch publishes “Why Johnny Can’t Read and What You Can Do about It.”

1990’s - Present: Balanced Literacy Era. Balanced Literacy was supposed to be a balance between whole language and phonics, but in practice in most schools it is built upon whole language practices such as sight words and predictable readers, with a bit of phonics added in after the sight word teaching.

1990's: Brain research using functional MRI (fMRI) shows that the brain reads sound by sound.

1993: 40 Professors of Linguistics in Massachusetts write a letter to the State Commissioner of Education to protest the attempted introduction of Whole Language.

2000: National Reading Panel report released. Research was across several years and included thousands of studies; findings include the importance of phonics and phonemic awareness for teaching reading.

2000's: Brain research shows changes in the brain and reading improvement when phonics is taught to poor readers.

2001: Reading First mandated phonics instruction based on  National Reading Panel results. It showed good results for districts like Richmond, Virginia, where scores “rose from the bottom 5% of the state in 2001 to the top 40 % in 2005,” but was abandoned to more popular balanced literacy programs.

This timeline focuses on facts and dates, but reading makes a difference in the lives of actual students. 40L volunteers have seen the change it makes in students—self confidence soars as their ability to read improves. 

When students taught with whole word methods or phonics programs with too many sight words are taught with systematic, explicit phonics, the change is remarkable! A whole new world is opened to them, and they become more confident and excited about the world. 

You can make a difference too! 

40L offers free video lessons that make it easy to teach phonic and spelling. By sharing these video lessons and information about the power of phonics with other parents and educators, you can spread the word about the most effective way to teach reading and create lasting change.

This Webpage was first posted November 2006, last updated January 2025 by Elizabeth Brown, Director of 40L.

1. Rodgers, Geraldine E. e-mail interview with author, Feb 2007. Geraldine Rodgers believes the declines after 1826 and 1930 "were absolutely catastrophic, and the sources I found support that--not the least of which is the terrible spelling disability after each drop. So, at the points on your graph at which the switches occured--1826 to 1830--I think the line should plummet to Code 2. Also, from 1930 to 1935--plummet to Code 2."

2. Rodgers, Geraldine. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, p. 279 - 280.

3. Note: Spelling Books in the 1700's and early 1800's were used for both phonics and spelling purposes, and were used to teach children to read. Noah Webster himself explains this in his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language. The entry for spelling-book reads, "n. A book for teaching children to spell and read."

4. Rodgers, Geraldine. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, p. 357, 712 - 713, 311 - 725.

5. Wickersham, James Pyle. "Methods of Instruction," 1865, p. 168, 208 - 234.

6. Barnard, Henry, "Normal Schools, and Other Institution, Agencies, and Means Designed for the Professional Education of Teachers," 1851.

7. Rodgers, Geraldine. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, p. 564.

8. Rodgers, Geraldine. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, p. 526 - 585, 594, 597-605, 612, 620-626, 632-638, 651, 671, 679-680, 701-702, 706, 709-713, 730, 1267-1273.

9. The Addresses and Journal of Proceedings of the National Educational Association, "Pronouncing Orthography," 1873, p. 207 - 219.

10. Annual Report of the Board of Education, Massachusetts. Board of Education, p. 168 -169.

11. March, Francis A, The Spelling Reform, 1893, p. 7 - 8

12. Rodgers, Geraldine. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, p. 73

13. The pdf version of the McGuffey readers show the diacritical markings.

14. Rice, Joseph Mayer, "The Public-school System of the United States," 1893. He describes the word method on page 38, and 94 - 95.

15. Rice, Joseph Mayer, "Scientific Management in Education," 1912.

16. Rodgers, Geraldine. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, 547 - 548,

17. Rodgers, Geraldine, e-mail interview with author, Feb 2007.

18. Rodgers, Geraldine. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, p. 653, 745, 757, 779, 1009, 1037, 1309.

19. Milton Wright letter on education, January 7, 1916, Box 3, File 15, MS-1, Wright Brothers Collection, Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University Libraries. 40L transcribed the letter.

20. Hanna, Paul R., Jean S. Hanna, Richard E. Hodges, and Edwin H. Rudorf, Jr, "Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences as Cues to Spelling Improvement," U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Education, 1966. 

21. "Training the Brain to Read," Science Vol. 304, no. 5671, p. 677, 30 April 2004.

22. Fletcher, Jack M, Ph.D, "Reading and Response to Intervention: Enhancing Outcomes for all Students.”

23. Dahms, Joel, "Spelling out Dyslexia," Northwest Science & Technology, Fall 2006.

24. Dehaene, Stanislas, "The Massive Impact of Literacy on the Brain and its Consequences for Education," Human Neuroplasticity and Education, 2011, p. 23

25. Meaghan V. Perdue, Kelly Mahaffy, Katherine Vlahcevic, Emma Wolfman, Florina Erbeli, Fabio Richlan, Nicole Landi, ”Reading intervention and neuroplasticity: A systematic review and meta-analysis of brain changes associated with reading intervention,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Volume 132,

2022, Pages 465-494.

26. OIson, Lynn, “New Report Highlights States that Are at the Vanguard of the Reading Revolution,” The74, July 12, 2003.