Ellen Dale (14 February 1865 – 26 February 1967) was a British school teacher who created one of the earliest books on teaching reading. The earliest school-based literacy education was started by Dale at

Wimbledon High School Wimbledon High School is an independent girls' day school in Wimbledon, South West London. It is a Girls' Day School Trust school and is a member of the Girls' Schools Association. History Wimbledon High School was founded by the Girls' Public ...

from 1892 to 1909. Ms Edith Hastings, to whom Dale dedicated her book ''On the Teaching of English Reading'', was headmistress of Wimbledon High School for Girls from 1880 to 1908. Dale published several books, starting in 1898 with ''On the Teaching of English Reading'' (green cover) with J M Dent & Co., London, England. This book taught the

alphabetic principle According to the alphabetic principle, letters and combinations of letters are the symbols used to represent the speech sounds of a language based on systematic and predictable relationships between written letters, symbols, and spoken words. The ...

and phonemic awareness. She taught the voiced and unvoiced consonants, vowels and silent letters by using different colors (black, blue, red and yellow, and she had her students step out the

syllables A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

. She showed her students how to notice voiced and unvoiced consonants. Walter Crane published the ''Readers'' under the title ''The Walter Crane Readers'' in 1899 with J M Dent & Co in London. Dale later moved her books (excluding her first one) to George Philip & Son Limited, London and then called them ''The Dale Readers''. The ''Steps to Reading'' was also her book. To complement it, Dale contemporaneously published ''The Steps to Reading'' (red cover), ''The Dale Readers First Primer'' (blue cover), ''The Dale Readers Second Primer'' (yellow cover) and ''The Dale Readers Infant Reader'' (green cover). In the United States, these books were also printed by D Appleton & Co. Dale later published ''The Dale Readers Book I'' (brown cover), ''The Dale Readers Book II'' (pink cover) and a revised book entitled ''Further Notes on the Teaching of English Reading'' (green cover) covering her original books plus ''The Dale Readers Book I'' in 1902. She intended to print further books, but never did. Her mentor in all of this appears to have been the linguist Walter Rippmann MA (1869-1947) who published ''The Sounds of Spoken English and Specimens of English'' (1911) in her book ''On the Teaching of English Reading''. She also used a ''Tabulating Frame'' and ''Pricked Sounds for Embroidery'', the latter are only found in the Toronto Public Library, no copy of the tabulating frame has been found.

References

English educational theorists Reading skill advocates 1865 births 1967 deaths British centenarians Women centenarians {{UK-child-writer-stub