Sentence Structure in Reading Primers

Later, discussingotherAmerican readers produced as rivals to Webster's he talks of 'the preference of their makers for the productions of American genius'; and remarks of a very popular one-the English Reader of Lindley Murray-that it showed 'little adaptation to the needs of the young'. He notes that Cobb, who began to publish about 1831, was apparently the first to attempt to 'interest the child by means of stories, information about animals, etc.' (p. 251); and that Keagy, in his Pestalozzian primer of 1826, first tried 'to make use of the child's environment in an educative manner'. None of these books, of course, was intended for a beginner: the first stages of reading were concerned with the alphabet, with syllables, and with words either out of context or illustrated by pictures, in the manner of the Orbis Pictus. The position in Britain seems to have been similar. But in 1857 a reading series called Reading without Tears was published. Diack (1965) describes Part One as having the first 117 pages devoted to practice with letters, syllables, short words and sentences, in the familiar manner. The first 'story', however, is worth noticing, for it began with sentences composed entirely of phonically regular words of not more than three letters. The book was in fact one representative of a new species, and by the time Huey was actually writing (i.e. by 1908) the situation in both Britain and America had greatly changed from what it had been some sixty or seventy years before. Primers were now