Nellie Dale

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Nellie Dale was a British educator who created one of the earliest books on teaching reading.

The earliest school based literacy education was started by Dale at Wimbledon High School about the 1890s. She published several books starting in 1898 with "On the Teaching of English Reading" with J M Dent & Co., London, England. This book taught the alphabetic principle and phonemic awareness. She taught the voiced and unvoiced consonants and vowels by using different colors, and she had her students step out the syllables.

To complement this book she contemporaneously published "The Steps to Reading", "The Dale Readers First Primer", "The Dale Readers Second Primer", and "The Dale Readers Infant Reader". All of these were printed by J M Dent & Co. She subsequently changed her printer to George Philip & Son Ltd, London. These were also printed in the United States by D Appleton & Co.

She subsequentially published "The Dale Readers Book I", "The Dale Readers Book II", and a revised book entitled "Further Notes on the Teaching of English Reading" covering her original books plus "The Dale Readers Book I" in 1902. She intended to print further books, but they never eventuated, being "The Dale Readers Book III" and "Notes on Book II". Later I hope to release these as eBooks.

Her mentor in all of this appears to have been the linguist Walter Rippmann MA (1869 - 1947) who wrote "The Sounds of Spoken English and Specimens of English" (1906 - 1911) printed by J M Dent & Sons Ltd, London. I can be contacted at rransley@yahoo.com.au