ABSTRACT
From preclassical Greece to the present day, most literate people in the Western world have been introduced to reading through correspondences of letters and sounds. This approach to beginning reading, now called phonics, was at the core of the ABC method that dominated reading instruction in Europe and England until well into the nineteenth century and in the United States until the early twentieth century (Smith, N. B., 1934/1965). By this method, children learned first the letters with their names and sounds, then various pronounceable (and not so pronounceable) bigrams and trigrams, then simple words, phrases, and sentences. For example, in The American Primer, a popular introduction to spelling and reading in use at the beginning of the nineteenth century, children were cycled through items like bu, bo, ob, ub, yb, ic, ec, uc, yc, kni, kno, and knu, before encountering their first real words.
