Joseph Neef (1770-1854): a forgotten pioneer of applying phonetics and regularised phonic materials to the initial teaching of literacy in English

ABSTRACT

Joseph Neef (1770–1854) was one of Pestalozzi’s earliest collaborators in Switzerland (1800). He took his mentor’s ideas and principles first to Paris (1803), and then to Pennsylvania (1806). In 1808 he published the first book on educational method written in English in the United States, and in 1809 opened the first Pestalozzian school in the Americas. He was the first to devise a linguistic phonics approach to the initial teaching of literacy in English based on regular sound-symbol patterns, and published a book setting out his system in 1813. This was based on three main principles: start from the phonemes of spoken English; introduce them and the graphemes used to write them very gradually and practise them intensively; and use, initially, only simple, regularised syllables, words and sentences. His principal innovation was to adapt a phonetic notation for vowel phonemes from a 1791 British book on elocution, and add it to the Pestalozzian approach. He had little impact on the teaching of literacy, but deserves to be recognised as a radical innovator.

KEYWORDS:

• Initial literacy
• phonetics
• phonics
• linguistic approach
• Pestalozzianism

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Notes

¹ This section owes a great deal both to unpublished information provided by Bauke Ritsert Rinsma and to his book on Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (Rinsma 2019).

² Although he is not named in it, Neef’s authorship of the bulk of this is attested by Petitain (1804), as shown above. However, authorship of the Introduction can be traced to its publisher, Karl Ludwig von Haller, and in library catalogues his name appears as the author of both the Introduction and Neef’s text.

³ A personal note: In school year 1957–58 I was taught ‘English’ grammar in what is now called Year 9 in the UK – grade 8. It only made sense because of the Latin I had already been learning for two years (also in a Jesuit school, as it happens). This was the tail-end of the tradition Michael (1987) describes; this form of grammar teaching was abandoned in Britain in the 1960s.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported here was entirely self-funded.

Notes on contributors

Greg Brooks

Greg Brooks is Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Sheffield, UK. He has published widely on phonics and on what works for those with literacy difficulties. In 2010-12 he was one of the 10 expert members of the European Union High Level Group of Experts on Literacy. Since 2003 he has been an Honorary Life member of the UK Literacy Association, and in 2011 was elected to the Reading Hall of Fame.