Why did Americans use spelling to teach reading for nearly 200 years?

If it's not broken, don't fix it; or stated more colloquially: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. This timeless truth applies to the historical role of spelling instruction as the primary tool in reading instruction. To put it simply: for centuries, and more recently throughout American history, from the colonial period through the 19th century, parents and classroom teachers taught kids to spell well so that they could read well. Reading was an inevitable byproduct of spelling words and writing them down from spoken sounds. Literacy rates rose as generations learned to read by spelling and handed their children this simple but effective method. 

Marilyn Adams confirms this tradition in her classical treatise "Beginning to Read." She states: "Prior to this century—in fact for thousands of years—spelling was the principal means of teaching children how to read…For the method to have prevailed for thousands of years, people must have felt that it worked." It did! 

From the Greeks to the Romans to the English, spelling was the precursor to reading throughout Western civilization. It was the foundation for all literacy. Colonial Americans continued this classical tradition by teaching their children how to spell well to read well. After the revolutionary war, Americans followed this time-tested methodology by adopting Noah Webster's American Spelling Book. Webster, who is now known as the father of American English, did not create a radical approach to reading but rather standardized spelling instruction so that reading became an inevitable byproduct of spelling, pronunciation, and writing. Webster defined his "spelling book" as "A book for teaching children to spell and read." Webster's American spelling book taught Americans the principles of pronunciation. His goal was nothing short of unifying America by giving the nation its version of standard English and a standard way of learning it.

From the 1780s through the 1800s, Webster's spelling book was the most effective and prevalent way to teach reading. The results were staggering: literacy rates rose rapidly around the nation. Why? Schools taught children to learn the English writing code through spelling because spelling required children to focus on analyzing, pronouncing, and writing down sounds. First, teachers (or parents) taught children to spell the phonemic sounds represented by letter names. Then they taught them to spell syllabic sounds, which were simple vowel-consonant or consonant-vowel combinations of the phonemic sounds. Teaching and reinforcing phonics through syllables is called "syllabic phonics."

After learning to spell the alphabetic and syllabic sounds, children learned to spell spoken words by analyzing and labeling those sounds according to the phonograms (letter combinations) and syllables that represented those sounds. Finally, after learning to analyze and name the sounds in spoken words, children were taught to apply their knowledge of letter-sound correspondence to decoding sounds represented in print. Reading, or turning printed sounds back into spoken sounds, was much easier because the students had already learned to turn spoken sounds into their printed symbols through spelling and writing. 

Children learned phonics through the principles of spelling. Why did this work? Spelling worked because it focused students on analyzing the sounds of the spoken word so that they could later translate the letter symbols from print back into sounds. 

Educators knew that the English writing system was an alphabetic code—that letter symbols (or phonograms) represented sounds (or phonemes). Therefore, they taught children how to focus on sounds in spoken words, how to analyze and label those sounds by spelling them, and how to write those sounds down as coded symbols in print. 

Because students had already learned that written letters or combinations of letters could represent spoken words, it was easy for them to reverse the process they had already known by spelling. 

Spelling instruction taught them how to turn spoken words into letter names and say and print those sounds by their letter names. When they began reading, all they had to do was turn printed symbols back into spoken sounds. Reading became "easy-peasy"—as the kids say today— because it was simply a reversal of the process they had been learning through spelling. Spelling had taught them to turn sounds into symbols; reading was a simple matter of turning symbols back into sounds. 

Despite this extraordinary legacy of excellence in literacy through spelling instruction, spelling became a sideshow in America's reading curriculum. Adams writes: "Despite our heritage, the word spelling can hardly be found in the indexes of contemporary reading education textbooks." She continued: "In 1980, Richard Venezky wrote that neither spelling instruction nor spelling reform occupy central roles today in education or in public life. Similarly, the public schools exhibit limited enthusiasm for spelling. Some have no systematic spelling instruction at all while the average class offers perhaps a few minutes for it each week."