You sometimes see parodies of children’s books that are written like the title of this thread, with the ind-i-vid-u-al syll-a-bles spaced out with dots or hyphens. (There’s a passing reference on this Wikipedia page - see “History in Western languages”.)
I certainly never saw books written like this as a child in the 1970s and 80s in the UK. Was it something that died out before then, or is it an American thing, or what?
Not children’s books – basal readers. If you read Dick and Jane or Alice and Jerry books, the early ones broke some of the words into syllable for easier reading. It was generally used only for words that might be unfamiliar to the age level the books were aimed for.
For a joke my wife recently bought me a Dick And Jane compilation, and they don’t use the separating dots between the syllables.
But I have seen old 19th century readers that have that. It’s an old practice, all right, but one that comes from a time probably before any of us, or even our parents, were alive.
[in a large font] See a book. See a book a·bout Dick and Jane. See the words. The words are short. There are no dots. Short words have no dots.[/big clear schoolbook font]
I can’t remember seeing any words that had more than one syllable in a Dick and Jane book, so I wouldn’t know if they separated syllables with dots. (Presumably they had books for slightly older children that would have used longer words, but the ones I saw were all 'See Spot. See Spot run.) I don’t remember ever seeing dots or hyphens between syllables in the primary readers I had in the 80s, or in any other book.
By the 80s, though, I think children were being taught to recognize words by their appearance rather than sounding out syllables, so this sort of book would have become less common. My first-grade teacher, however, believed in phonics, and wrote out every syllable possible within the phonotactic constraints of the English language in primary-teacher letters on an easel. Actually, I can recall at least a few books, or at least a few flash-cards and other teaching aids, where the lengths of vowels were marked, and the words may also have been divided into syllables.
This is “Whole Language”, right? (Apparently based on faulty, old-fashioned ideas about how we read.) Does anyone know anything about how common that was? I was in first grade somewhere around 1990, and we certainly did the whole phonics thing - we were always told “Sound it out” when we didn’t recognize a word. I remember quite a few years later, having a younger cousin whose homework was to read a story aloud, and I gave him the same advice that was given me, and he sounded it out, one letter at a time (which I honestly can’t remember actually doing. In my own childhood memories, I don’t associate any particular meaning or action with the phrase, except basically “Try again.”)
They do have a few two-syllable words–common thing like Father, Mother, little, and so on.
That’s not new either. I went through first grade in 1964, and remember the teacher writing
airplane
on the board and pointing out that it looked like an airplane.
Was it always common practice to use short, single syllable words in firs-grade reading primers? And if so, why? It doesn’t really seem to me to be an effective way to teach children to read. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run! being spoon-fed to kids who already have a substantial speaking vocabulary seems like a good way to bore them so badly that they would never want to read again.
But maybe I’m just weird. By the time I was in the first grade, I was climbing shelves to get at my mother’s copy of The Modern Encyclopedia of Baby and Child Care (which apparently all parents were required by law to own, if not actually read, back in the early '70’s).
Come to think of it, I can’t remember ever not knowing how to read…
Regarding “Whole Language”: I’m 18, and I learned to read by the “Whole Language” method when I was 6 or so (around 1992). I picked up phonics later.
What the… how’s that going to help anyone? Does the word sponge look like a sponge? Does the word tree look like a tree?
How odd.
By the way, it’s spelled “aeroplane”. You crazy foreigners. (I don’t care if you guys invented the thing, that’s the way it is)
First of all, it wasn’t Spot. It was Jip. See Jip Jump. 
I did see a basal reader of an earlier generation that used it. I especially noted the story about “the Burn·ing of the Phil·a·del·phi·a.”
The examples I’ve found online were the earliest books, which stuck with small words. When something larger was needed, they used a picture instead of the word. However, by 3rd of 4th grade, it was usual for unfamiliar multisyllable words to be given a dot.
Kids didn’t mind the books. They were just learning to understand how to read and, believe me, reading, “See Jip Jump” gave quite a feeling of accomplishment.
My school tried to teach me “Whole Language” style. My only memory of it is of thinking that they must be assuming I had already learned some stuff in preschool. I mean, how I am supposed to go from nothing to “now I can read!” in two seconds. Certainly there are rules for all of those symbols, you know…
In the end, my mom had to teach me with phonics over the summer or they were going to hold me back in kindergarten. Then they put me in the “special kids” class for 1st grade, just to have to start sending me over to the normal classroom for the “advanced topics.”
Kindergarten: Zip
1st: Berenstein Bears
2nd: Phantom Tollbooth
3rd: Failed Hamlet
4th: Success reading Hamlet
Pissed me off. Buggers.
(Apparently based on faulty, old-fashioned ideas about how we read.)
Apparently based on faulty, old-fashioned ideas about how we read?
wind/wind
envelope/envelope
entrance/entrance
Polish/polish
are
colonel
often
nation
Because such words are common place in English, I failed to read early because of phonics. 
I didn’t say phonics is perfect. I said whole language is bad. It is. It’s bad and stupid. If you read about “whole language”, the entire philosophy is based heavily around things like guessing words from context, and the notion that just exposing children to text for long enough will somehow magically enable them to read. The idea being that we don’t read by recognizing individual letters, but by the gestalt shape of the word. Which is a common belief, but it’s actually incorrect. Studies based on the eye movements among people reading demonstrate clearly that individual characters are examined, and the whole word shape is not all that important.
But while English spelling is not absolutely phonetic, it’s actually not all that far off. People like to focus in on the worst examples, but most words can be sounded out. All that’s needed for that to work is a close enough approximation that the sounds clue the reader in to the pronunciation, and that’s possible in the great majority of cases.
Huh. I learned by “Whole Language” (although I didn’t realize it was called that, my school called it “memorization”), late 80s and 90s. When I moved to a different school that did both it and phonics, I was put in a phonics 2nd grade class and failed miserably. After a couple months, they finally realized that I wasn’t lying when I said I had no idea in hell what all this sounding-out-syllable crap they were talking about was. I think they finally got the hint when they discovered that I could read and write the words just fine but I couldn’t divide them up into whatever divisions you do in phonics.
We had these papers to do where there’d be a bunch of boxes and the teacher would say a word and you’d write it in the boxes. I still don’t know what you’re supposed to do, but apparently writing one letter in each box then cramming the rest in the last one wasn’t right.
Once I was moved to the other program, I did very well and was no longer accused of being an idiot on a daily basis. For that reason, I don’t consider it bad or stupid.
It wasn’t so much “‘airplane’ looks like an airplane”, we just memorized each new word we came across. The word for an airplane is “airplane” because that’s one of its symbols, same way the symbol for a percent can be “%”. It made infinitely more sense to me than phonics (and still does, really). What does a syllable mean?
Do the studies mention what method these people learned to read by?
I’ve got a 5th grade reader from the 1890s. Its words aren’t divided up. Indeed, it seems as though 5th graders were expected to have a much higher level of literacy back then (it has lots of complex Biblical passages as examples). Maybe books geared toward younger children did.