In the late 1800s, basal reading schemes used Pronouncing Orthography as an enhanced version of traditional English orthography for teaching children to read easily and quickly in the United States. 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.

The new orthography allowed children to read words by combining elementary sounds using phonics. It temporarily corrected the irregularities of traditional English orthography, making it easier for students to learn phonetics.

William Torrey Harris promoted Pronouncing Orthography, the invention of Dr Edwin Leigh, who was inspired by another orthography called Fonotypy.

Compared to traditional English orthography, children typically learned to read 6–12 months faster and became self-reliant, diligent, and happy learners. After transitioning back to conventional English orthography, children were better at spelling. They became logical and analytical thinkers rather than memorizing by rote. Teachers preferred this method after they tried it out earnestly.

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.

Background

The irregular nature of written English 
Modern English orthography has developed over centuries using a version of the original Roman alphabet with spelling conventions formed from the haphazard historical amalgamation of words from different languages, including Greek, Latin & Anglo-Saxon; this has resulted in modern English orthography diverging considerably from the alphabetic principle, whereby the relationship between letters and speech sounds is not obviously apparent; as such English is a complex language to become literate in, with English-speaking people having relatively poor literacy levels.

Alexander John Ellis conducted an extensive study of the problems with English orthography, which he published in his treatise Plea for Phonetic Spelling, or the Necessity of Orthographic Reform, in 1848. This was extensively cited as the philosophical foundation to justify the usage of the Pronouncing Orthography by the likes of William Torrey Harris. 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.

Orthographic reform 

Attempts to remedy this issue have been ongoing without success since the Elizabethan era, when spelling conventions were becoming entrenched due to the printing revolution and the problems from an irregular orthography were being noticed; John Hart was the earliest known proponent of English orthographic reform during the 16th century.

The main attempt at orthographic reform in the 19th century was published in 1844 by Isaac Pitman and Alexander John Ellis, who jointly developed Fonotypy as an exemplar of regularised English orthography. To demonstrate Fonotypy's efficacy and prove the case for orthographic reform, Fonotypy was used to teach children and illiterate adults in Britain and the United States of America; this culminated in a large-scale experiment in ten schools with 800 pupils in Waltham, Massachusetts, between 1852 & 1860. The chairman of Waltham's school committee minuted the result: –       "It has been proved in repeated experiments that if a child, upon first learning letters, is taught the Phonetic Alphabet, and is confined to Phonetic books  for the first 6–8 months of schooling, he will at the end of his first year's schooling read common print and spell in common spelling better than children ordinarily do, at the end of 4–5 years of schooling."...[Reverend Thomas Hill]

Interim teaching medium 

Although orthographic reformers had expected significant literacy improvements from phonetically pure orthography, they had not expected the children and newly literate adults to effortlessly transition to become literate in the standard, irregular orthography and have better spelling than people who had learnt conventionally.  So there emerged the realisation that orthographic reform may be unnecessary since a phonetically regular orthography could be used as an interim teaching medium to achieve the same goals as full-scale orthographic reform at a fraction of the cost.

Leigh's insights

Experience of teaching with Fonotypy 
Dr Edwin Leigh enthusiastically adopted Fonotypy as soon as it was published, so in 1946, he taught his daughter to read using Fonotypy; then, in 1949, he taught a class of fugitive slaves in Boston, which led to him to set up the Boston phonetic school in 1950 which he used as a springboard to introduce phonetic teaching into the schools of Somerville, Massachusetts. In 1959 he used Fonotypy in evening classes to teach illiterate adults in St Louis, Missouri, where he tried unsuccessfully to introduce Fonotypy into the public school system.  His extensive experience of using Fonotypy allowed Leigh to understand its considerable strengths and shortcomings in teaching literacy.

Criticisms 

When Leigh failed to introduce Fonotypy into the schools of St Louis, Missouri, he described the main criticism he encountered: –                          The causes of this ill success are many and obvious.  Among them may be mentioned........                                                                         Fonotypy's departure from common orthography; changing the forms and outlines and spellings of English words, thus offending the eye and arousing the prejudices of the unlettered and the literary; apparently compelling the learner to master two languages, the phonetic and the English; requiring him to become familiar with the wrong spellings in order to learn the right, and to acquire an entirely new language in order to learn the common print. It was hard for men to believe that two languages (as it seemed to them) could be learned more easily than one, and the best way to learn to spell was first to spell wrong....[Dr Edwin Leigh]

Conclusions 

Leigh was aware that Fonotypy had been ambitiously designed for the purpose of orthographic reform, but he reasoned that only a simpler interim teaching orthography was needed to improve literacy.  Fonotypy was designed to handle the speech sounds of European languages, whereas he only needed an English orthography. Fonotypy was designed to be easily hand-written, but Leigh only needed an orthography to be read.  Fonotypy was also designed to be a longhand extension of phonetic shorthand, but Leigh did not need this feature to teach literacy. In addition, Leigh thought an interim teaching orthography was more likely to be adopted if it more closely resembled standard English orthography.  Consequently, Leigh spent 20 years designing and refining his own interim teaching 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 similar prejudice to that encountered against Fonotypy in St. Louis by making his new orthography familiar to the 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 used 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....[Dr Edwin Leigh]

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 hand-written form. Leigh suggested children should learn to read using his orthography and then transition to standard English orthography, where they would learn to write.

Alphabetic principle 
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.

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

The 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 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, 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 conclusion was: - The class that used Leigh's Primer have a surprising degree of accuracy in distinguishing slight shades of different pronunciation, and can readily analyze any word into its elementary sounds, and spell it with its correct letters....[Superintendent Divoli]William Torrey Harris had been the principal at Clay School during the trial and was then promoted to assistant superintendent of St Louis public schools. Having seen the results of the new method at first-hand, he reported the marked improvement in children's articulation, spelling and the fact they learnt to read quicker using this method. 

Based on this success, the St. Louis Board of Education sanctioned the city-wide adoption of the new phonetic system in the seventh grade from the 1867–1868 academic year.  Harris, who had been promoted to Superintendent, later reported on its spectacular success: – 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 Harris's tenure as the Superintendent, up until 1879, he advocated for the superiority of Leigh's Pronouncing Orthography and the general advantage of phonetic teaching methods over word-based 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. In 1877 he then published a full report on the method in response to ongoing enquiries from around the country.  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 definitely 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, an order was passed by the Boston Board of Education authorising the introduction into the schools of Leigh's Phonic System of teaching the first steps of reading. The teachers in the Lincoln district had become acquainted with the method through their teacher training, so they immediately adopted the system and reported excellent results from this first use.

John Philbrick was the Superintendent of Boston's public schools and 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 which was found to produce extraordinary results. In 1870, Philbrick described his observations of 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), Philbrick published a closing report on the trial of Pronouncing Orthography.  In 1879, Superintendent Samuel Elliott withdrew Leigh's Pronouncing Orthography because he supported the whole word method of teaching and objected to phonic teaching which he described as vox et praeterea nihil, a voice and nothing more, sound without meaning. He also objected to the use of a secondary English orthography: – 

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...[Superintendent Samuel Eliot] 

At the time as Pronouncing Orthography was being dropped, a survey was carried out of the Boston teachers using Pronouncing Orthography, which clearly showed the majority of teachers preferred Pronouncing Orthography: -

 Fifteen experienced teachers had used it for > 5 years and universally preferred using Pronouncing Orthography.
 Five teachers had recently started to use it for < 2 years and were uncertain, with one teacher opposed, one in favour, and three still undecided.
 Twelve teachers had not replied to the survey, but four years earlier, nine of those teachers had emphatically supported the orthography.

New York City 

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 if they so chose. The Superintendent and his assistants continued to report on the success of Leigh's method in the subsequent years. Unfortunately, in the academic year 1875–76, the Board of Education came under outside criticism for teaching too many "ornamental branches of study", after which Phonetic teaching and use of Pronouncing Orthography was dropped.

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.

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 tuition would be secured by using his orthography regardless of how it was taught.                                                                                              V. To retain the best features of the different modes of teaching to read and spell, now in use and most approved. This on the above plan, can be fully done, and yet all the advantages of the phonetic method secured to the teacher and learner....[Dr. Edwin Leigh]                                                                                              Conversely, Leigh advised how Pronouncing Orthography could be taught when he segmented letter sounds into four categories: –

 Category I - Letter sounds most commonly uttered
 Category II - Letter sounds which occur once in every two hundred utterances
 Category III - Letter sounds which occur once in every thousand utterances
 Category IV - Letter sounds which occur once in every four thousand utterances

He suggested avoiding teaching category IV sounds using Pronouncing Orthography and instead waiting until the child has transitioned to conventional orthography. He also suggested prioritising Category I over Category II over Category III.                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                                                            
Both Superintendents William Torrey Harris of St Louis and John Philbrick of Boston were adamant proponents of the Phonetic method. They considered Pronouncing Orthography as a useful tool in support of Phonetic teaching. New York, on the other hand allowed Pronouncing Orthography to be used with different methods, which Assistant Superintendent Calkins assessed in the academic year 1872–23, concluding that the Phonetic method was clearly superior.

Advantages 
Over the period of its usage, Pronouncing Orthography was assessed in education journals and by superintendents in the American public school system, where the following advantages were identified: – 
 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]

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.

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

 There was a resurgence in the idea of teaching literacy using whole-word methods; in particular, Farnham's Sentence Method was published in 1881 but had already started to gain publicity through articles in the National Journal of Education. This was exemplified in Boston, where Superintendent Philbrick, an advocate of the Phonetic method of teaching literacy, was replaced by Superintendent Eliot, an advocate of the whole-word method; consequently, Eliot discontinued the use of Pronouncing Orthography despite a majority of practising teachers wishing to retain it.
 In New York, there was external pressure from outside the school system where people did not understand the whole idea 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.

Articles in educational journals, and reports from public school boards universally described Pronouncing Orthography as a practical success and popular in teaching. It was philosophical arguments which disregarded the efficacy of Pronouncing Orthography which resulted in its demise; these were articulated by Eliot: –    Here we fall into the error of putting the parts before the whole... but only to submit to the tyranny of their sounds....[Superintendent Samuel Eliot]

Citations

References 

PAMPHLETS

 
 

JSTOR JOURNALS
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

BOOKS
 
 
 
 
 

PRIMERS

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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].
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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

 (1870–71); -
 (1871–72); -
 (1871–72); -
 (1872–74); -
 Special Report - 

SCHOOL COMMITTEE – WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS

 

GOSPELS

 
 

CATALOGUE

 

THESIS

 

Phonics
Phonetic alphabets
English spelling reform
Language acquisition
Reading (process)