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the Reading Method in English teaching, helping to give today’s children the best start
with spoken and written language.
The Reading Method, also known as the New Method or the Reading Approach, was
devised by Dr Michael Philip West (1888-1973). During the 1920s, he was working as a
Professor of English in India. Dr West believed that everyone around the world should
learn English. As English was an international language, he argued that it could make it
easier for people from different countries to communicate with each other. He thought
this would have a number of important advantages for people everywhere:
•
To broaden people’s outlooks;
•
To create a feeling of connection between people no matter which country they
came from;
•
To help everybody access and understand the widest possible range of reading
materials, as the majority of both factual and fictional
books at that time were
written in English.
Because he was a respected educator, his beliefs found a following. The Reading
Method became widely used to teach English in India, and also to teach French and
German to American children. “The Reading Method also gained some traction in the
UK as a way of teaching children who were struggling with their linguistic development.
At the time when Dr West was working, the most popular method of teaching English to
students in other countries was the Direct Method, also known as the Natural Method”
6
.
This method focused heavily on spoken words, through students actively participating in
class. They were encouraged to learn English words directly
without translating them
into their first language. Dr West thought this method was too time-consuming, as a lot
6
Strickland, Dorothy S. and Morrow, Lesley M. (2000).
Beginning Reading and Writing
. Teachers
College Columbia University. NY: New York
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of class time was taken up with the teacher talking, so each student didn’t get much time
to practise their speaking skills. He also believed that learning to read English was more
important than learning to speak or write it - he thought the skills of speaking and
writing English would naturally come later if students learned how to read it first.
This belief was at the very core of the Reading Method in English teaching, as the
approach focuses on the “passive”
work of reading, rather than the “active” work of
actually speaking English. This is because Dr West believed that you can’t express
yourself until you know enough words, and reading was, in his opinion, the best way to
learn them. The whole point of the Reading Method was to teach students just enough
words to express themselves, as well as basic sentence structure patterns, which Dr West
believed they could pick up through reading. He stated that people needed a minimum of
1158 words to be able to express their ideas in a normal conversation, and he categorised
these words into two different types:
1.
Form words - these are the grammatical words which connect ideas and form
the building blocks of English.
2.
Content words - these are the words we use to talk and express ourselves.
When it came to reading, Dr West believed that the minimum number of words you
needed to be able to read and understand was 2280. Again,
he divided these words
into different categories:
1.
Essential words (“a”, “is”, “it”, “that” etc.)
2.
Common environmental words (“house”, “car”, “table”, “cup” etc.)
3.
General words (“good”, “bad” etc.)
4.
Specific environmental words (“tree”, “flower”, “sea”, “mountain” etc.)
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Using the Reading Method, these 2280 words would be introduced gradually to students
and learned via a lot of repetition. Students would also be shown pictures to consolidate
their understanding of the new words. The words they were taught tended to be as
phonetically easy as possible, so they wouldn’t have much trouble pronouncing them
when they eventually got to speak English.
Dr West produced a series of graded reading books on a wide variety of different topics.
Each grade of reader would introduce some new words. The reading materials were
designed to be as interesting as possible by covering
a wide variety of topics, and
including both factual and fictional texts. However, the vocabulary was strictly limited
to the words that Dr West thought people needed to learn.
Teachers were given handbooks which contained very definite procedures and
guidelines for them to follow. These handbooks also contained practice exercises which
teachers could give the students to complete.
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