Excerpt
GENERAL DIRECTIONS TO TEACHERS.
How the Teaching of Spelling May be Improved.—The teaching of spelling may be improved in three ways: first, by selecting a better list of words for the pupil to study; second, by placing before the pupils of each grade the words that are most appropriate for them; and third, by introducing economical procedures in learning. The first is the problem of the course of study; the second, the problem of grading; and the third, the problem of method.
The Vocabulary.—To solve the first problem one must insure that the pupils will study all words they are likely to use in life outside the school. One must also insure that the pupils' time will not be wasted through their being required to learn words which they will never use. This problem has been solved for you by the authors of the text. The vocabulary of the lessons is taken from a compilation which Doctor Horn has made of ten scientific investigations of the words used in writing letters. These investigations, taken together, represent the careful analysis of over three-quarters of a million running words of correspondence. If you will analyze one letter, you will see what a very great amount of work these investigations have required. It seems very unlikely that any word commonly and frequently used should have been overlooked in all of these investigations.
These ten studies contain all of the information which is available at the present time concerning what words are likely to be used in writing letters. Accordingly, there is no word in this speller which has not been reported in one or more of these investigations. In addition, this vocabulary has been carefully compared with all of the other types of reading and writing vocabularies.
Among these are the studies of children's themes, such as those by Jones, by the teachers of New Orleans, Kansas City, and Richmond, Virginia; the various studies of adult reading vocabularies, such as those by Eldridge and Knowles, aggregating over 140,000 running words; the studies of the vocabulary of school readers, such as those by Packer, Housh, and Miller, aggregating over one-half million running words. No word has been taken from these studies which did not occur in the investigations of the vocabulary of personal and business letters. On the other hand, these studies showed quite clearly that the words found as the result of the analysis of three-quarters of a million running words of correspondence are really basic in any writing vocabulary.
If you will examine the book, you will see that most of the lessons are numbered with arabic numerals. These lessons contain a minimum list of 3998 words found to be used most frequently. You will notice, also, that beginning with grade three there are in each grade supplementary lessons, marked S-1, S-2, etc. These lessons include 580 additional words which are somewhat less frequently used. The supplementary lessons are distributed by grades, so that pupils who finish the minimum work for any grade will have additional lessons to study for the remainder of the year....