Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons-Part 1 The Content

Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons (100EZ) by Siegfried Engelmann, Phyllis Haddox, and Elaine Bruner is one of the most popular choices for home reading instruction.  Its low cost, scripted lessons, unassuming presentation have reassured parents for 30 years that they can teach their child to read.  Let's look a little closer at what 100EZ actually teaches and what makes the program effective (or not).

I'll start with a little background information.  Over the course of 1 year I analyzed over 17,000 words from two children's dictionaries for their sound-spelling correspondences.  Every word was meticulously broken down in order to construct a usable database of the correspondences which make up English.  I identified over 440 unique correspondences for the 40+ sounds of English.  I then analyzed several books from Project Gutenberg to understand how many correspondences are necessary to read adult level materials.  The books ranged from 300-350 correspondences.  These numbers are somewhat muddied by how one parses words (is it w al k or w a lk?) and the composition of  the correspondences being measured, that is, two book which each have 300 correspondences may have a different composition of correspondences. However, these numbers give us some ballpark figures:  300-350 correspondences needed to read adult level text, a minimum of 440 total correspondences.  

So, how many correspondences does 100EZ teach?  It turns out the best possible case scenario puts the number at 80.  I say best possible case scenario (BPCS) because over half of the correspondences (n=45) are introduced in the context of a word or two, without any exposition on their use in the word or their relevancy to other words.   For example, in Lesson  48 the word 'to' is introduced (expanded to 'do' in Lesson 54), without any discussion of the letter o's correspondence with the sound /OO/.  Neither is it discussed that this correspondence, o-/OO/, could be useful in other words, such as prove, approve, movie, move, tomb, womb, zoology, doing, who, whom, whose etc.  So the BPCS assumes (we'll discuss the validity of the assumption later) that children will infer from the instruction that these correspondences can be used in other words.  If we take 300 as our target and using the BPCS number 80, 100EZ teaches 27% of needed correspondences.