The Reading Method (or Reading Approach) was a language teaching approach prominent in the United States from the 1930s to the 1940s, advocated by the Coleman Report (1929). It emerged as a practical compromise between the ambitious oral goals of the Direct Method and the reality that most American students would never travel abroad or use the foreign language for spoken communication.
The Coleman Committee, surveying foreign language education in the US, concluded that given the limited time available (typically two years of high school study), the only realistic goal was reading ability. Oral fluency was unattainable in the time available, so programmes should focus on what could actually be achieved.
The Reading Method did not survive as a named method beyond the mid-20th century, but its core insight, that Sustained Silent Reading with graded materials develops language proficiency, has been thoroughly validated by modern research (Day & Bamford, 1998; Nation, 2009). The global graded reader industry (Oxford Bookworms, Cambridge English Readers, Penguin Readers) is a direct descendant of the Reading Method's materials philosophy.