<P> As a teacher, he had come to dislike American elementary schools . They could be overcrowded, with up to seventy children of all ages crammed into one - room schoolhouses . They had poor, underpaid staff, no desks, and unsatisfactory textbooks that came from England . Webster thought that Americans should learn from American books, so he began writing the three volume compendium A Grammatical Institute of the English Language . The work consisted of a speller (published in 1783), a grammar (published in 1784), and a reader (published in 1785). His goal was to provide a uniquely American approach to training children . His most important improvement, he claimed, was to rescue "our native tongue" from "the clamour of pedantry" that surrounded English grammar and pronunciation . He complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and pronunciation . Webster rejected the notion that the study of Greek and Latin must precede the study of English grammar . The appropriate standard for the American language, argued Webster, was "the same republican principles as American civil and ecclesiastical constitutions ." This meant that the people - at - large must control the language; popular sovereignty in government must be accompanied by popular usage in language . </P> <P> The Speller was arranged so that it could be easily taught to students, and it progressed by age . From his own experiences as a teacher, Webster thought that the Speller should be simple and gave an orderly presentation of words and the rules of spelling and pronunciation . He believed that students learned most readily when he broke a complex problem into its component parts and had each pupil master one part before moving to the next . Ellis argues that Webster anticipated some of the insights currently associated with Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development . Webster said that children pass through distinctive learning phases in which they master increasingly complex or abstract tasks . Therefore, teachers must not try to teach a three - year - old how to read; they could not do it until age five . He organized his speller accordingly, beginning with the alphabet and moving systematically through the different sounds of vowels and consonants, then syllables, then simple words, then more complex words, then sentences . </P> <P> The speller was originally titled The First Part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language . Over the course of 385 editions in his lifetime, the title was changed in 1786 to The American Spelling Book, and again in 1829 to The Elementary Spelling Book . Most people called it the "Blue - Backed Speller" because of its blue cover and, for the next one hundred years, Webster's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words . It was the most popular American book of its time; by 1837, it had sold 15 million copies, and some 60 million by 1890--reaching the majority of young students in the nation's first century . Its royalty of a half - cent per copy was enough to sustain Webster in his other endeavors . It also helped create the popular contests known as spelling bees . </P> <P> As time went on, Webster changed the spellings in the book to more phonetic ones . Most of them already existed as alternative spellings . He chose spellings such as defense, color, and traveler, and changed the re to er in words such as center . He also changed tongue to the older spelling tung, but this did not catch on . </P>

What was the impact of the american spelling book of 1783
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