1800 Thomas Dilworth's New Guide to the English Dialogue was being widely used to teach reading in the United States. Dilworth's primer, unlike earlier ones, stressed the importance of children's understanding what they read. While it is in fact unlikely that children would have recognized all the vocabulary Dilworth used, that was at least his stated goal. Dilworth recognized that primers should enable children to decode words from print with the form of language they already knew: speech. In contrast, many earlier authors assumed that, just as introductory Latin texts taught children an unknown language, introductory English texts should teach English as if it, too, were an unknown language – such their esoteric choice of vocabulary, it in effect became unknown.