Word: sullivans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...easy leading question. When the student responds with the right answer, he gets a glow of pleasure-his grain of corn. The technique requires some mechanical device (often a teaching machine) to hide the printed answer until the student is ready to compare it with his own. Sullivan's solution is to print answers on the left side of each page, which children can cover with a cardboard slider. So as not to reveal answers to upcoming questions, the left-hand pages are printed upside down, and the child flips the book over after reaching the back page, works...
Consistent Sounds. Sullivan's system requires children to spend their first eight weeks learning the alphabet from their teacher. But they are not taught all the sounds of all the letters. His "structural linguistics" approach keeps children from the confusing phonetic inconsistencies of the language (the 40 different sounds conveyed by the letter a, for example) until they grasp the fact that in general, letters correspond to sounds...
...Thus Sullivan students at first learn only the sounds associated with the consonants f, m, n, p, t, th, and the short forms of the vowels a and i. Then they learn, purely by sight, a few such basic words as yes, no, on, the. With this equipment, when they turn to their readers they can read short sentences, sounding out such words as ant, man, pin, thin. In the first seven books, which average first-graders will complete in a school year, they learn roughly 375 words by sounding them out, often using clues offered by simple cartoon-like...
...Sullivan's beginning vocabulary is drawn from the 5,000 to 15,000 words that most five-year-olds already speak and understand, even if they cannot read them. Sullivan contends that most reading primers are compiled from word lists that have no logical basis; each list came from a survey of the most used words in older readers, and all went back to McGuffey, "who must have obtained his list from God." Sullivan and a research team financed by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc. compiled their lists instead by exploring the world of the five-year-old. "A little...
Holding the child's interest is vital to programmed instruction, since each child works alone at his own pace. Breaking reading down to simple steps that lead a child progressively toward more difficult words, yet do not bore him, was Sullivan's greatest problem. His first attempts failed badly. A member of his team at the time, Psychologist Allen Calvin, tried programming a Superman story, found that it held kids' interest about nine times longer than the reading program. Even a programmed version of a Sears, Roebuck catalogue did five times better. "We were terribly discouraged," recalls...