Nellie Dale


Ellen "Nellie" Dale 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 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 with J M Dent & Co., London, England. This book taught the alphabetic principle and phonemic awareness. She taught the voiced and unvoiced consonants, vowels and silent letters by using different colors 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, The Dale Readers First Primer, The Dale Readers Second Primer and The Dale Readers Infant Reader. In the United States, these books were also printed by D Appleton & Co.
Dale later 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 never did. Her mentor in all of this appears to have been the linguist Walter Rippmann MA who published The Sounds of Spoken English and Specimens of English 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.