Class -.-^.r^ iOd^^ 
 Book- .';' w 
 
 Copyright 1\^ 
 
 JO 
 
 COPifRIGHT DEPOSm 
 
TEACHING TO READ 
 
TEACHING TO READ 
 
 JAMES L. HUGHES 
 
 INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS, TORONTO 
 
 A.UTHOR OF " MISTAKES IN TEACHING,'* " HOW TO SECURE 
 
 AND RETAIN ATTENTION,'* ** FROEBEL's EDUCATIONAL 
 
 LAWS," "DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 A. S. BARNES & COMPANY 
 
 1909 
 
i.'i- 
 
 ^ 
 
 v^ , ^* 
 
 Copyright, 1909 
 By a. S. BARNES & COMPANY* 
 
 LiaRARY of CONGRESS 
 Two Co3ies Received 
 
 JUN (i 18U9 
 
 Ik Coyyn^nt Entry 
 
 CLASS A XXL ti'. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 There is no other subject in which the results 
 have been so unsatisfactory as in reading, considering 
 the amount of time devoted to it in school. The 
 chief reason for the failure has been that the aim 
 has been to train the race to read aloud instead of 
 training it to read. The power of reading well 
 means the power of getting thought from visible 
 language rapidly, definitely and comprehensively. 
 Very nearly all reading has to be done silently, yet 
 in the past, the aim of the schools has been to train 
 pupils to read aloud. Tested by the power of their 
 pupils as a whole to read well aloud, or to read well 
 silently, the work of the schools has been a lamentable 
 failure. 
 
 The teachers of the past believed that the way to 
 train a child to be a good silent reader was to train 
 him to read aloud. The reverse is true. The true 
 way to make both good oral readers and good readers 
 is to begin by making good silent readers. 
 
 The aim in the past was to train pupils to read 
 slowly; the true aim is to train them to read as fast 
 as possible. The man who reads only two pages in 
 the time in which he should be able to read three 
 pages is handicapped for life. 
 
 The process of the schools in the past has been 
 yii 
 
viii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 to use expression as a means of developing self- 
 expression. The true process in teaching reading 
 and every other subject is exactly the opposite. The 
 process of the past weakened the power of both 
 expression and self-expression. Expressing the 
 thought of others in their language does not develop 
 our power to express our own thought. On the other 
 hand good training in self-expression — the expression 
 of our own thought in our own language — does 
 develop the power of expressing the thought of others 
 in their language. Expression is not a true psycho- 
 logical basis for self-expression; self-expression is 
 the true psychological basis for expression. 
 
 The aims of this book are : 
 
 1. — To consider the meaning of learning to read, 
 and to decide what new powers the child must gain in 
 order to be a good reader. 
 
 2. — To prevent the weakening of the child's 
 natural power of self-expression by unnatural 
 processes of expression. 
 
 3. — To make clear the relationships between silent 
 reading and reading aloud, between word recognition 
 and thought recognition, between the expression of an 
 author's thought in the author's language, the expres- 
 sion of an author's thought in the child's own 
 language, and the expression of the child's own 
 thought in his own language. 
 
 4. — To apply the same fundamental laws in teach- 
 ing reading, that should be applied in teaching all 
 other subjects; the law of self-activity, the law of 
 self-active interest, the law of development by solving 
 
INTRODUCTION. ix 
 
 a related sequence of appropriate and progressively 
 difficult problems, and the law of repetition of 
 operative processes instead of repetition of words. 
 
 5. — To show that the processes of learning to 
 speak a language and of learning to read it are not 
 similar processes, and that it is necessarily illogical 
 to try to follow the process of learning to speak 
 while teaching the process of learning to read. 
 Speaking is natural, visible language is artificial. In 
 speaking thought suggests language, in reading 
 language suggests thought. 
 
 6. — To prove that a great deal of time has been 
 wasted, and a great deal of power lost in the past by 
 making the process of learning to read a long instead 
 of a short process, an uninteresting instead of an 
 interesting process, a dwarfing instead of a developing 
 process, a process of responsive activity instead of a 
 process of self-activity, and a memorizing instead of 
 an operative process. 
 
 7. — To outline the steps that should be taken to 
 give the child the power of automatic word recogni- 
 tion in a few weeks, so that he may be able to give 
 his undivided attention to the thought of the 
 selection he is reading. The power of expression is 
 inevitably and permanently weakened by allowing a 
 child to try to read aloud, if he has to give conscious 
 attention to the words themselves. 
 
 8. — To suggest simple, interesting and effective 
 plans for preserving and developing the child's 
 natural powers of self-expression. 
 
 9. — To indicate some ways in which an unlimited 
 supply of most useful reading matter may be provided 
 at the lowest possible cost. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Meaning op Learning to Eead 1 
 
 II. The Logical Order of the Steps in Learning 
 
 TO Read — and to Read Aloud 8 
 
 III. General Principles , 29 
 
 IV. Objective Methods op Teaching Word Recog- 
 
 nition ^ 38 
 
 V. The Phonic Method 52 
 
 VI. Teaching how to Recognize Visible Lan- 
 guage , 73 
 
 VII. Expression 117 
 
 VIII. Variety in Reading Matter for Primary 
 
 Classes 123 
 
TEACHING TO READ 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE MEANING OF LEARNING TO READ 
 
 In order to decide wisely in regard to the best 
 method of teaching children to read, it is essential to 
 get a clear conception of the new elements of power 
 the child has to acquire and develop by the process 
 of learning to read. Confused or indefinite ideals 
 naturally lead to incorrect and imperfect methods of 
 teaching. What new powers come to a child when 
 he learns to read? What does it mean to learn to 
 read? 
 
 Reading is generally accepted as meaning to read 
 aloud. Much confusion has resulted from this gen- 
 eral misconception. Reading is the power of getting 
 thought from visible language. ^ It is the power of 
 recognizing in visible form the language with which 
 the child is already familiar in the spoken form.> 
 A child may become a great reader and may possess 
 the highest skill as a reader without being trained 
 to read well orally. A good reader is one who can 
 extract thought accurately, comprehensively and 
 rapidly from visible language. The best reader is 
 
 1 
 
3 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 the man who can most rapidly, most comprehen- 
 sively, and most definitely, get thought from vis- 
 ible language. Few people can read rapidly enough. 
 The schools have made no systematic effort, in the 
 past, to develop the power of rapid, comprehensive, 
 and accurate extraction of thought from written 
 or printed matter. They have wasted the time of 
 the child, and generally dwarfed his powers by tire- 
 some and discouraging attempts to train him to 
 read aloud before he has been trained to read. This 
 error has weakened the power of good oral reading, 
 and what is much more to be deplored, it has pre- 
 vented the proper development of the power of good 
 reading, which means accurate, comprehensive and 
 rapid thought-getting from visible language. 
 
 Oral reading is the power of expressing orally 
 the words of visible language in such a way as to 
 reveal the thought of the author, c^'^eading is a 
 means of gaining thought; oral reading is a means 
 of expressing thought. 
 
 A child may express orally, his own thought or 
 the thought of another person. When the thought 
 of the other person is revealed in visible form, he 
 is called an author. The correct process of train- 
 ing a child to express his own thought orally is 
 very different from the process of training him to 
 express an author^s thought orally. The child may 
 express an author's thought orally either in the 
 language of the author or in his own language. The 
 intellectual operations in these two processes are 
 different, and the essential difference should be un- 
 derstood and remembered by teachers. The distinc- 
 tion between expression and self-expression is vital. 
 Self-expression is infinitely greater than expression. 
 
 The great efforts of teachers in the past, not only 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 3 
 
 in reading but in other subjects, have been put forth 
 to develojD expression, not self-expression. The fact 
 is, that the only true psychological path to good ex- 
 pression is through a well developed power of self- 
 expression. The real power in good expression is 
 self-expression. All expression in which the vital 
 element is not self-expression must be mechanical. 
 The power of oral expression of an author's 
 thought in the authoi-^s language is psycholog- 
 ically very different from the power of self-expres- 
 sion in oral language. Most teachers yet believe 
 that by training children to read orally they are 
 developing the power of oral self-expression. They 
 are really training only the mechanism of expres- 
 sion, and doing even this in the least effective way. 
 The real self-hood of the child is not awakened by 
 the process of oral reading. 
 
 In order to begin to study the true psychological 
 process by which a child should learn to read it is 
 necessary to make a clear distinction between: — 
 1. Word recognition by the child, 
 3. Thought recognition by the child, 
 
 3. The expression of an author's thought in the 
 child's language, 
 
 4. The expression of an author's thought in the 
 author's language, 
 
 5. The expression of the child's own thought in 
 his own language. 
 
 The fundamental error in teaching reading is to 
 compel or to allow the child to try to read aloud 
 before he has acquired two powers: automatic word 
 recognition and accurate thought extraction. A 
 child should read silently as soon as he has acquired 
 control of the elements of word recognition, and he 
 should at first be allowed to sound words aloud in 
 
4 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 order to be able to recognize them as representing 
 the oral words of his language which he already 
 uses. But he should not read orally till he is able 
 to perform the operations of word recognition and 
 thought extraction without conscious effort. So long 
 as a child has to give any part of his conscious at- 
 tention to the recognition of the words in a sentence, 
 he has only a portion of his intellectual power left 
 for recognizing and relating the thoughts which it 
 contains. So long as he has to devote any of his 
 conscious attention either to word recognition or to 
 thought extraction and relationship he has only a 
 portion of his intellectual power left for thought ex- 
 pression. 
 
 It may be laid down as a fundamental law that 
 when a child or a man is asked to perform any com- 
 plex operation, he should be able to give his direct 
 or primary attention to the highest element, or 
 stage, in the complex processes. The processes sub- 
 ordinate to the highest should be so thoroughly un- 
 der his control that he can perform them automat- 
 ically, or without conscious effort. When a child is 
 expressing thought in writing, for instance, he should 
 not require to think about the forms of the let- 
 ters. Letter formation should have become auto- 
 matic, or else the child must give a portion of his 
 mental effort to the construction of the letters, and 
 he will have only a part of his mind left to do his 
 thinking. If a man is able to concentrate his mind 
 fully on his subject while writing, he cannot be 
 conscious of the fact that there are letters or words, 
 or grammatical rules, or laws of style. He thinks, 
 and the language is organized, and the visible words 
 formed, without direct conscious effort on his part. 
 His primary attention is given to his subject; his 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 5 
 
 secondary attention directs all the subordinate ele- 
 ments of expression. The well-trained man is con- 
 scious of the highest element only — his subject. 
 His primary attention should be wholly given to 
 the recognition of the increasingly vivid and pro- 
 gressively comprehensive revelations he is receiv- 
 ings and to definite thinking in regard to them as 
 related to what he already knows about the subject 
 under consideration. His subconsciousness should 
 attend to the language and the letter forms neces- 
 sary to express his thoughts in visible form. After 
 he has concluded his thinking, he should of course 
 go over his written expression of his thought, giv- 
 ing his primary attention to the language he has 
 used, and improving it so as to make it as perfect 
 as possible in definiteness and in style. 
 
 Each child has two styles of writing — the writ- 
 ing he does in his writing book and the writing he 
 does when he is writing an original composition or 
 essay. In the first case his primary attention is 
 given to the form of the letters as he writes them, 
 in the second case his primary attention should be 
 given to the thought he wishes to express. The sec- 
 ond is the only true test of his writing. 
 
 Oral reading is a complex operation, consisting of 
 three processes — the recognition of the words, the 
 recognition of the author's thought, and the expres- 
 sion of this thought definitely with properly related 
 emphasis.) The child's attention should not be dis- 
 tracted from the highest element of his work by 
 having to pay conscious attention to the subordinate 
 elements. He cannot acquire thought as accurately, 
 as comprehensively, and as rapidly as he ought to 
 acquire it, if he has to give part of his primary at- 
 tention to the recognition of the words he has to 
 
6 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 read. Few children ever recover from the dwarfing 
 of their natural powers of expression by the un- 
 natural attempts to read aloud when the primary- 
 attention has to be paid chiefly or in any appreciable • 
 degree to the recognition of the words. The earlier 
 stages of reading aloud are usually mere efforts to 
 sound the words of the selection. Eeading aloud 
 should never be a monotonous droning. It should 
 be oral expression of thought which was first the 
 thought of the author, but which has become the 
 thought of the reader. 
 
 But, it is often urged, that we encourage the child 
 to begin to write his thoughts as soon as he is ac- 
 quainted with enough letter powers to make even a 
 few words. We do not wait till he can write per- 
 fectly before training him to express his thoughts 
 in writing, and both his power of thinking and his 
 power of expression in writing are improved by his 
 effort. Why should we not begin with oral reading 
 as soon as the child can begin to recognize a few 
 words ? 
 
 The supposed parallel between the two eases does 
 not exist. In the first case there is no interference 
 with the child's thinking, except the subconscious 
 effort he has to make in expressing his thought after 
 it has been conceived and is ready for expression. 
 In the second case the distraction is caused through 
 the difficulties experienced before the thought is 
 ready to be expressed. It is perfectly philosophical 
 to train the child to express his thoughts either orally 
 or in writing before the oral means or the written 
 means of expression is perfect. But it is not wise 
 to ask a child to try to express thought which he 
 cannot possibly comprehend clearly and at the same 
 time compel him to give his most direct attention 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 7 
 
 and his best intellectual energy to the recogni- 
 tion of the visible form of the thought he is asked 
 to interpret and express. Thinking and expression 
 are interrelated, and each reacts upon the other, but 
 the dominant element in the relationship is the 
 thinking. The power of expression is the subcon- 
 scious or secondary department, the thinking is the 
 conscious or primary department. The expression 
 cannot be clear unless the thought is clear. When 
 the thought becomes definite, and related, and log- 
 ical in the mind, expression becomes correspondingly 
 clear and logical, and with training and practice and 
 faith it becomes spontaneously responsive to the 
 operations of the mind. 
 
 Learning to read is the process by which the child 
 discovers that the language he uses already orally 
 may be recorded in visible form, and by which he 
 learns to recognize the visible forms of language so 
 as to interpret them readily and get new thought 
 from them. Learning to read orally is the process 
 by which the child is trained not only to recognize 
 language in its visible forms, and get thought clearly 
 from visible language, but also to express the thought 
 orally in the words of the author. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE LOGICAL ORDER OF THE STEPS IN LEARNING TO 
 READ — AND TO READ ALOUD 
 
 The first step in teaching how to read is to guide 
 the child in discovering that its own oral language 
 may be represented in visible form and re-inter- 
 preted into oral language. He knows when he comes 
 to school that mother and father and other adults 
 can look at the marks in a book or paper and tell 
 him the story they find there, but it is an im- 
 portant step in his experience to reveal to him the 
 fact that his own words may be made visMe and 
 then recognized and expressed by others. C^ne of 
 the best plans for doing this is to ask the child to 
 say something about his dog, or the baby, or any 
 of the many interesting things related to his own 
 life and experience. His exact words should be 
 written on the blackboard by the teacher. If there 
 are several pupils about to begin the mysterious 
 process of learning to read, each one should give a 
 short sentence to be written on the board. When 
 all the sentences have been written, the teacher 
 should send to another room for a senior pupil and 
 ask him to tell each child what he said to the teacher. 
 
 In a school where there is only one teacher, a 
 senior pupil should be sent out of the room while 
 the little ones tell their stories. He should return 
 when the stories have been written on the black- 
 board. This exercise will arouse a deep personal in- 
 
 8 
 
TEACHING TO READ 9 
 
 terest in the work of reading and awaken a desire for 
 the possession of the power to make oral language 
 visible and to translate visible language into oral 
 language. It may be made the basis of a perma- 
 nent interest in reading and the^ beginning of a de- 
 sire to read stories for themselves?) Under the guid- 
 ance of a skilful and sympathetic teacher it opens 
 up a new realm of power and of attractive mystery. 
 
 Having developed an interest in the power of 
 finding wonderful stories in the printed marks in 
 the books^ the next step is to reveal the powers 
 of these marks and show how what they say may be 
 understood. Whatever plan or method may be 
 adopted to train the child to recognize language 
 in its visible forms^ it is clear that by some means 
 he must gain the power of word recognition before he 
 can read either silently or aloud. Word recogni- 
 tion is the essential basis of all readings the only 
 possible basis of reading. The various so-called 
 methods of teaching reading are really methods of 
 teaching the power of word recognition. The best 
 method of teaching word recognition is the one which 
 makes the child most independent of the teacher 
 and gives him the power of rapid and accurate wot-d 
 recognition in the shortest time, if at the same time 
 it develops alertness of mind, definiteness in ob- 
 servation and reasoning and relating ability. But, 
 whatever method of enabling the child to recognize 
 words is adopted, the power to do so without con- 
 scious effort must be developed before -the child can 
 read. Eeading and recognizing words should not be 
 confounded. 
 
 When the child is able to recognize words he may 
 at once begin the practice of silent reading, which 
 is the power of gaining thought from visible Ian- 
 
10 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 guage without expressing it. Silent reading should 
 precede reading aloud ; first, because it is a less com- 
 plex process than reading aloud; second, because to 
 be able to read well silently reduces the danger of 
 making reading aloud a mechanical performance; 
 third, because it makes thought-gaining the true pur- 
 pose of reading; fourth, because reading aloud, if 
 practised before the power of rapid, comprehensive, 
 and accurate thought extraction from visible lan- 
 guage has been developed, is the most certain way to 
 prevent the cultivation of this vitally important 
 power, the loss of which robs reading of its supreme 
 Value; fifth, because the power to read well and 
 rapidly silently is the only power that can make it 
 possible to read well aloud ; and sixth, because when 
 children begin to learn to read even at the age of 
 eight or nine, and they should certainly not begin 
 earlier, they are too immature to be able to interpret 
 an author's meaning freely and expressively in the 
 words of the author. 
 
 One of the misleading conceptions of the past that 
 continues to confuse the vision of teachers is that 
 oral reading is more important than silent reading. 
 We forget the changed conditions of life. Individ- 
 ual reading has increased with rapid strides. New 
 conditions have made it impossible and unnecessary 
 that there should be much reading aloud. All the 
 advantages that can be claimed for the practice of 
 reading aloud may be granted without reservation, 
 however, without acknowledging that it is compar- 
 able in value, either educationally or practically, to 
 the power of accurate, comprehensive and rapid 
 thought-getting from printed matter. A very small 
 minority really requires to read aloud ; every one 
 who wishes to increase his store of knowledge or 
 
TEACnmG TO BEAD 11 
 
 to keep up with the progress of the world must read 
 a great deal silently, often in the odd moments on 
 the train or between the hours of work. 
 
 Many of the small minority whose duties require 
 them to read aloud read without notable ease, grace, 
 or effectiveness, and this should long ago have led 
 educators to question the wisdom of continuing an 
 educational practice which so manifestly produced 
 unsatisfactory results. But the great body of edu- 
 cators do not really teach oral reading with the pur- 
 pose of producing a race of good oral readers. Those 
 who think about this matter at all know that com- 
 paratively few will ever be called upon to read 
 much aloud. 
 
 Reading aloud has been practised so universally in 
 schools, because teachers have had the erroneous 
 idea that oral reading is the proper way to qualify 
 the race for proper reading — real reading — reading 
 for clearer intellectual vision, for the kindling influ- 
 ence of literature, and science, and history, and 
 other departments of human knowledge, for the 
 acquisition of the inheritance bequeathed to each 
 individual by the leaders of the past. Silent read- 
 ing has been the real aim of the teaching of reading, 
 but the only path that teachers have taken to reach 
 silent reading has been the wearisome path of oral 
 reading. By being forced to take this path few 
 have ever become good silent readers, able to ex- 
 tract thought rapidly, accurately, and comprehen- 
 sively from printed matter, and fewer still have 
 ever become good oral readers able to reveal to others 
 the full richness and strength and beauty of the 
 thought of the great literary leaders. The popula- 
 tion of North America is now about ninety mil- 
 lions. Are there more than ninety men and women 
 
12 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 in Xorth America who can successfully interpret 
 the true meaning of the masterpieces of literature 
 by reading them aloud? One in a million of the 
 population of what may fairly be considered the most 
 universally educated people in the world, if not the 
 most thoroughly educated, does not seem to be a very 
 gratifying result of the operation of a method, if its 
 aim is to train to read well orally. 
 
 ^^he fact is that the value of real reading, not 
 reading aloud, has been the only ground on which 
 the great amount of time devoted to reading in the 
 schools could possibly be defended. Teachers have 
 worked under the delusion that the true way to teach 
 pupils to read well is to make them read aloud, and 
 this misconception has prevented the proper develop- 
 ment both of good reading and of good oral read- 
 ing. One thing should be remembered by those 
 who still urge that the great aim in teaching readiag 
 should be to make good oral readers, and that is that 
 the only kind of printed matter that is read aloud 
 is what is technically called literature. Books on 
 science, or art, or music, or philosophy, or educa- 
 tion, or even history, are not read aloud in public, 
 and very rarely, if ever, in private. Few readers, 
 comparatively, read much aloud after they leave 
 school, and even the few who do so read within a 
 v^ limited range of literature. 
 
 <CThe true and logical order in teaching reading is 
 to give a thorough training in silent reading before 
 asking the child to read aloud, if we wish to make 
 him either a good reader or a good oral reader. The 
 universal process in the past has been to try to make 
 good silent readers by oral reading, the true process 
 is just the reverse of this. Silent reading is the 
 true way to lead to good oral reading. \ 
 
TEACHING TO READ 13 
 
 But it is claimed by some thoughtful teachers 
 that they must necessarily require the pupils to read 
 aloud in order to discover whether they understand 
 what they are reading or not. The answer to this 
 is twofold: firsts the test proposed is not a reliable 
 one^ many children can read a stanza of poetry with 
 correct expression who cannot give an accurate or 
 adequate idea of its meaning; second, the real test 
 of a child's understanding of a selection is to ask 
 him to explain its meaning in his own words and 
 not in the author's words. This should be the fourth 
 step in learning to read. The pupils should be 
 systematically trained to read with the view of re- 
 porting the meaning of the selections given to them, 
 sometimes in writing, and as often as possible orally, 
 but always in their own language and not the lan- 
 guage of the author. Three definite aims should be 
 kept persistently in view in this department of the 
 work of teaching how to read. The pupils should 
 be trained to discover the author's thought, accu- 
 rately, comprehensively, and as rapidly as possible. 
 In securing these vitally important results the 
 teacher may adopt a variety of plans to awaken and 
 retain the interest of the pupils. One of the plans 
 that may be used in all grades is to have in each 
 class large collections of short clippings from chil- 
 dren's papers, magazines, or newspapers, pasted on 
 cards. These should be distributed on the desks 
 with the clippings on the under side of the cards. 
 When every child has a card a signal should be given 
 and the cards should be turned over. When a suf- 
 ficient time has been given the cards should be placed 
 on the desks, with the blank side upward, and the 
 children asked to stand and tell the class what they 
 have learned from the selections on their cards. 
 
14 TEACHmG TO READ 
 
 Short stories, especially humorous stories, form ex- 
 cellent material for this exercise. As the children 
 grow older, brief statements about science, or his- 
 tory, or biography, or any department of knowledge 
 in which children should naturally be interested, 
 should form part of the reading matter on the cards 
 for the silent sight reading exercises. The whole 
 class may be tested on the same selection by having 
 it clearly written on the blackboard and covered with 
 a curtain. When the curtain has been dropped again 
 over the selection each child may write an account 
 of what he has learned by reading what was written 
 on the board. Other plans for conducting such an 
 exercise will suggest themselves to teachers, but those 
 who are awake to the importance of thought-getting 
 from visible language as one of the most essential 
 elements of a good education, will not be satisfied 
 till they have thousands of card clippings arranged 
 in sets for use in their classes. The pupils will 
 gladly aid not only in cutting and mounting the 
 clippings, but also in gathering material from which 
 the teacher may make the selections. 
 
 It is singular that teachers should so long have 
 overlooked the importance of rapid reading. The 
 man who reads slowly is handicapped through life. 
 Accuracy and comprehensiveness should of course 
 never be sacrificed for speed in reading, but great 
 rapidity of reading power may be developed without 
 loss of the power to gain an accurate and compre- 
 hensive understanding of the meaning of the matter 
 that is read. Indeed those who are trained to read 
 rapidly by proper methods are able to concentrate 
 their attention so definitely that they can take more 
 from a chapter or a book than those who read more 
 slowly. An old rule for good reading ran: — 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 15 
 
 *' Learn to read slow, all other graces 
 Will follow in their proper places." 
 
 This couplet referred to reading aloud, which was 
 the only reading considered until recently. For oral 
 reading the advice is good. The opposite advice is 
 the proper rule to follow in reading. We should 
 train children by every plan we can devise to read 
 well, that is to get as much as possible of the au- 
 thor's thought and emotion from his writings, and 
 each child should be trained to do this as rapidly 
 as possible. If a child has been trained to do as 
 much in four minutes as he would otherwise have 
 taken five minutes to do, his power of accumulating 
 thought from books has been increased twenty-five 
 per cent. All people cannot reach the same stand- 
 ard of rapidity in reading, but each one should be 
 trained to read at his best rate. 
 
 Silent reading at sight, the results of which are 
 to be reported to the teacher and the class, should 
 be a specific department of the training in reading, 
 and one of the best elements in such training con- 
 sists of time tests in which a limited time is allowed 
 to get the full meaning of the selection after the 
 curtain has been removed or the cards turned over. 
 It adds to the interest and the concentration of the 
 class to pass the cards after each child has reported 
 and give the same time as before to the new readers, 
 after which they may report any part omitted by 
 the first readers in the stories or statements. 
 
 When the pupils are able to get thought rapidly, 
 accurately, and comprehensively from printed mat- 
 ter without having to give attention by conscious 
 effort and to use part of their intellectual power in 
 recognizing the words, they are ready to begin to 
 practise reading aloud. They do not need to learn 
 
16 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 to read aloud. Learning to read aloud has been the 
 chief cause of bad oral reading. The early stages 
 of the methods formerly used in what was called 
 ^^ learning to read/' but which was in reality an at- 
 tempt at learning to read aloud^ inevitably inter- 
 fered with the further development of the child's 
 natural power of expression, and worse still, in most 
 cases weakened this power. All teachers recognized 
 this suggestive fact. There was no other advice that 
 used to be so persistently given to children when 
 they had finished their pitiable efforts at reading 
 aloud in school as that contained in the sentences — 
 '' Eead naturally/' and '^ Eead as you speak." All 
 teachers knew that nearly all pupils were dwarfed 
 in their power of thought expression by efforts to 
 read aloud before they were ready to do so, and those 
 who reflected knew that most children never fully 
 regained their lost freedom and force in expression. 
 Yet this blighting performance went on, and in most 
 schools it still goes on. The child is asked to do an 
 impossible thing, and when he inevitably does it in 
 a mechanical way he is asked, often peevishly, why 
 he does not do it in a natural way. If he were gifted 
 with psychological vision he might reply: I am 
 natural. My work is natural. I am doing in the 
 only way a reasonable being could expect the totally 
 unnatural thing you have asked me to do. It is 
 unnatural for me to be able to express the thought 
 of other people in the language of other people as 
 naturally as I can express my own thought in my 
 own language. When I am expressing my own 
 thought I have only to think, and I am not even con- 
 scious of the way in which I am thinking. My mind 
 acts spontaneously and my power of speech responds 
 to my thought automatically, and unless in some way 
 
TEACHING TO READ It 
 
 I have the terrible misfortune of being made self- 
 conscious, my powers of thinking and expressing 
 will continue to act in perfectly interrelated har- 
 mony, and be mutually developing as long as I live. 
 As I am trained to think more logically, and as my 
 mind is enriched and stimulated by the great 
 thoughts of the race, and as my imagination develops, 
 and I gain clearer visions of nature, and my fellow- 
 men, and God, my language and all my powers of 
 expression will improve responsively as my mind de- 
 velops. But you are interfering with Nature's won- 
 derful plan, and then censuring me for not being 
 natural. You plead with me to ^^ read as I talk,'^ 
 carelessly failing to remember that when I talk I 
 speak as I think, and that when you make me try to 
 read aloud before I can recognize the words without 
 conscious effort, I am thinking what the names of 
 the words are and usually trying to say some of them 
 before I have fully decided what even their names 
 are. The thought I could naturally express under 
 such unnatural conditions would not be edifying. 
 In obedience to you I try to report to you the result 
 of my recollections of word forms and my discov- 
 eries of new word forms. I cannot report the vital 
 thought of the selection. I am not able to get it 
 myself. Most of my intellectual power is employed 
 in recognizing the words, and I say them to you as 
 I recognize them. I can say some of them more 
 freely than others, because I remember them more 
 easily. It takes me longer to recognize some of 
 them, or to discover the names of the new ones, so 
 I name them in a mechanical way. I drawl some- 
 times because I have not made up my mind fully 
 what the next word is. I am ordered by you to do 
 a mechanical work and I do it in a mechanical way, 
 
18 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 which is the only possible way that I could do it. 
 I am naturally unnatural when I go through a me- 
 chanical process in a mechanical way. I am not try- 
 ing to express thought, I am trying to recognize 
 words and give you the result of my effort. When 
 you compel me to try to make this process expressive 
 you are asking me to give expression to what can- 
 not possibly be expressive. It is natural to express 
 thought — when it is my own, or has become clear to 
 me. It is not natural to express words as words, 
 and this is what you are asking me to do. When 
 the thought is mine, either mine by origination, or 
 mine by extraction from visible language used by 
 others, I can express it. I can express it clearly and 
 naturally, and with progressively developing power 
 in my own words, and in due time, when I can per- 
 form the essential subordinate operations without 
 conscious effort, I shall be able to express the 
 thoughts of others in their own language. But I 
 cannot do so now because I cannot yet recognize 
 even the words without a conscious intellectual ef- 
 fort. So I fail because you ask me to do an im- 
 possible thing. And the most serious result of your 
 terrible blundering in my education is that my at- 
 tempts at unnatural expression prevent the proper 
 development of my natural powers of expression, 
 and make me self-conscious — ^not of my strength but 
 of my weakness. 
 
 The reading hour should be one of the happiest 
 hours of the day. Even the hour for reading aloud 
 may be made a happy and very profitable hour, but 
 many changes will have to be made before it produces 
 a reasonable amount of happiness or profit. One 
 of the most unreasonable practices in connection 
 with the old-time reading lesson was the thought- 
 
TEACHING TO READ 19 
 
 lessness of teachers in compelling a whole class to 
 attend while one unfortunate pupil was grinding 
 out his allotted sentence or paragraph. This, in 
 most cases, added to the self-consciousness and 
 wretchedness of the temporary victim, and was worse 
 than a waste of time to the rest of the class. A 
 class may gain a small amount of expressive power 
 through unconscious imitation, if it listens to good 
 oral reading, occasionally, but hearing poor reading 
 regularly and listening because of external compul- 
 sion must interfere with the development of the 
 power of good oral expression both in speaking and 
 reading. It would be vastly more profitable for the 
 rest of the class to write, or draw, or do manual 
 training work with cardboard, or raffia, or other avail- 
 able materials while each individual pupil is read- 
 ing. In order to save time three or four may have 
 their readers open and stand ready to read during 
 an oral reading lesson, one new pupil rising in turn 
 when each reader finishes and takes his seat to go 
 on with the other work that has been assigned. In 
 this way the pupils may be engaged at profitable 
 work and receive a training in concentration on 
 specific work under distracting conditions, a very de- 
 sirable training which is generally entirely overlooked 
 in schools. 
 
 " But every reading lesson should be a literature 
 lesson and therefore all pupils should take part in 
 it.^^ Correct ! Some day we shall read orally during 
 the literature lessons only, and then oral reading 
 and reading will both be better. 
 
 The schools have almost universally failed to gain 
 the true pedagogic lesson from the generally ac- 
 knowledged fact that all children are naturally self- 
 expressive. They are naturally self -expressive in the 
 
20 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 readjustment and rearrangement of tablets, blocks, 
 etc., in using plastic material, in the use of pencil 
 or crayon, or brush, and in revealing their thoughts 
 orally. Finding the pupils with this power of self- 
 expression in good working order, the teacher should 
 ask himself the question: Is this power only a 
 temporary power, or should it continue to develop in 
 harmony with the child's development and culture? 
 There can be but one reasonable answer to this ques- 
 tion. Every power for good may be developed, should 
 be developed. But this natural power of expression 
 is practically lost by nearly all children. How is it 
 lost? Here is the teacher's opportunity to investi- 
 gate. The Creator does not take the power away. 
 Some one must be responsible. When power of 
 any kind is lost it is lost by disuse or misuse. The 
 power of free and effective oral self-expression has 
 been lost in schools in both ways. Oral self-expres- 
 sion has not been a definite aim with wise and per- 
 sistent methods for its development by regular and 
 enjoyable exercise, and the oral expression most 
 practised has been oral expression merely in reveal- 
 ing the thoughts of others, and in revealing these 
 thoughts in the language of others. The neglect of 
 proper methods for developing the child's wonder- 
 ful powers of oral self-expression is a serious charge 
 against teachers, but to confine the child's oral ex- 
 pression mainly to oral reading in which every 
 fundamental operation of the child's thinking and 
 oral self-expression is interfered with is a violation 
 of pedagogic principles which cannot be too strongly 
 condemned. Both negatively and positively, both 
 by disuse and misuse, the proper development of 
 the child's natural power of oral self-expression has 
 been arrested and distorted. 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 21 
 
 These lessons should be learned as the result of a 
 careful investigation into the causes of loss of nat- 
 uralness in oral self-expression. 
 
 First, one of the chief aims in primary schools 
 should be the preservation and development of the 
 natural tendency and power of oral self-expression. 
 
 Second, oral self-expression should not be criti- 
 cised by personal criticism of the child either for in- 
 accuracy of language, style of delivery, or erroneous 
 statement. The child should receive credit for his 
 effort. The fact that he thinks incorrectly is not 
 a reasonable ground for censure by his teacher. If 
 he has honestly tried to think about the question at 
 issue, and has freely expressed his views, it is grossly 
 unjust for his teacher to laugh at his errors or cen- 
 sure him for them. His views should be treated 
 with respect. They need not be accepted as cor- 
 rect. The teacher should lead him to see the omitted 
 or unknown step or steps in his thinking, but he 
 should never ridicule or scold him or give him bad 
 marks because he is unable to think as well as an 
 adult. If he could do so he would not need a teacher 
 to train him to think. The important aim should 
 be to preserve the child's self-respect, and self-faith, 
 so that he may not acquire a weakening self-con- 
 sciousness. To censure him arrests the development 
 of both his power to think and his power to give 
 expression to his thoughts. His errors in speech 
 should be noted for the guidance of his teacher in 
 lessons in language to the whole class. Impersonal 
 criticism and full explanations of reasons for reject- 
 ing one form of language and accepting the other, 
 if given to the class, will, in due time, enable each 
 child to overcome his weakness and his errors in 
 the use of language, and by this course his natural 
 
33 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 freedom and force in oral self-expression will be pre- 
 served. 
 
 Third, the child should not be compelled to try- 
 to do any oral work during his early years in school 
 which will interfere with the development of his 
 natural power of self-expression. His oral self-ex- 
 pression should be the expression of thought, of 
 thought that is clear to his own mind, of thought 
 that is really his own whether it is original or not. 
 He must have attained to a high degree of power 
 in several departments of culture before he should 
 be expected to read aloud without loss — definite loss 
 — of the power of oral expression. He must have 
 learned to recognize words instantaneously without 
 conscious effort; he must have acquired the ability 
 to extract thought very rapidly from words, phrases, 
 and sentences, and he must have gained the complex 
 power of accurately using the author's language in 
 expressing the thought which he receives from the 
 selection he is reading. 
 ^ If children w^ere trained to read well without be- 
 } ing asked to read aloud till they were fourteen or 
 / fifteen years of age it would be a great advantage in 
 / many ways. They would enjoy reading as a means 
 I of acquiring thought, they would retain their nat- 
 l ural power of expression, increased by special train- 
 ing and by general intellectual culture, and they 
 should at that age be able to recognize visible lan- 
 guage so rapidly and take from it the shades of feel- 
 ing and depth of thought expressed by it so thor- 
 oughly as to be able to read aloud without injury 
 to their natural powers of oral expression. The 
 limit of their power of oral expression would de- 
 pend on their natural ability and the character and 
 extent of their training in oral expression. 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 23 
 
 As a co-ordinating step naturally leading from 
 free self-expression of thought orally in the child^s 
 own language to free and natural expression of an 
 author^s thought in the author's language, the child 
 should be led to recite brief selections, after study- 
 ing their meaning carefully and committing them 
 to memory so thoroughly that he is not conscious of 
 an effort in remembering the language. Eeciting 
 is more nearly allied to speaking original matter 
 than oral reading is. It is an intermediate step be- 
 tween original speaking and oral reading, and there- 
 fore it should follow original speaking or oral self- 
 expression as a final preparation for oral reading. 
 When a child is reciting, the language and thought 
 expressed have really been made his own language 
 and thought, although they are not his by origina- 
 tion. They come to him, the thought to his mind 
 and the language to his lips, as freely as his own 
 thought and language come to him in oral self-ex- 
 pression, but they come by entirely different mental 
 processes. 
 
 In oral self-expression thought precedes language^ 
 in recitation and in oral reading the language pre- 
 cedes the thought. Language, by the wonderful ar- 
 rangement of the Creator, spontaneously comes to 
 express original thought, but in reciting or oral read- 
 ing, the thought comes from the language. In speak- 
 ing, thought suggests language; in reciting and oral 
 reading, language suggests thought. 
 
 In oral expression, reciting, and oral reading, the 
 thought should be the dominant element in the mind 
 of the child. The language in each case should re- 
 ceive his subconscious or secondary attention; his 
 conscious or primary attention should be given to 
 the thought. In the first case his secondary at- 
 
24 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 tention is given to language as the expression of 
 thought, in the second and third cases it is given 
 to language as the present source of thought to 
 him. In oral expression his primary attention is 
 given to the origination of thought, in reciting it is 
 given to remembering thought, and in oral reading 
 to the comprehension of thought. In each case 
 thought must be clear in the child's mind and must 
 be consciously prepared by him for the enlighten- 
 ment or amusement of those who hear him, before 
 he can properly express it. It is clear, therefore, 
 from these considerations, that reciting is the logical 
 step between oral self-expression and oral reading. 
 
 It is of primary importance that no child should 
 be compelled to recite or read aloud. Good teachers 
 wait patiently till their pupils are willing or even 
 anxious to recite before urging or even suggesting 
 that they should do so. If they have not been made 
 weakly self-conscious, they will be anxious to take 
 their part in the recitation or reading exercises quite 
 as soon as they should be permitted to do so. To 
 urge them to do it before they are ready makes them 
 weakly self-conscious, makes reciting a drudgery in- 
 stead of a joy, and robs them of the development 
 that ought to come from their efforts. There comes 
 a time in the development of every child when he 
 enjoys doing everything that will help to make him 
 stronger in any department of his power. Most 
 teachers unwisely try to make their pupils perform 
 many good operations too early, and evil instead of 
 good always results from such premature efforts. 
 
 The steps in training children to read may be 
 summarized as follows: 
 
 1. Eevealing to the child the facts that its own 
 oral language may be expressed in visible form and 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 25 
 
 re-interpreted orally, and that books may tell them 
 more wonderful and more beautiful stories than 
 even those that have been told by mother and father. 
 
 2. Eapid word recognition. 
 
 3. Power to extract thought rapidly, accurately, 
 and comprehensively from visible language. 
 
 4. Power to express orally and in writing the 
 thought of the author in the child's own language. 
 
 5. From the beginning — and entirely indepen- 
 dent of the reading lessons — the child's wonderful 
 natural powers of oral self-expression should be cul- 
 tivated by methods that will not interfere with his 
 spontaneity, or make him self-conscious. 
 
 6. The recitation of perfectly memorized and 
 well understood selections appropriate to the child's 
 stage of development. 
 
 7. When these six steps have been taken, the child 
 is ready to begin to read aloud. The age at which 
 he may begin to do so cannot be definitely fixed. 
 That depends on his natural ability, his tempera- 
 ment, and the methods of his teachers. He may be 
 permitted to read aloud voluntarily long before he 
 should be required to do so by his teacher. Eeading 
 aloud should never be the nerve-straining, power- 
 arresting process that it has been and still is in so 
 many places. 
 
 While decided objection has been taken to pre- 
 mature attempts at reading aloud, it should be un- 
 derstood that pupils must speak the words, when 
 they are beginning the w^ork of word recognition, 
 until they have become familiar with the way in 
 which the different powers and sounds of letters 
 coalesce to form words. This process of learning to 
 recognize words is not reading, nor oral reading, but 
 a step in learning to read. 
 
26 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 Note 1. The best reading I ever heard a child 
 do was done by a sixteen year old girl the first time 
 she ever read aloud. I found her at sixteen unable 
 to speak without great difficulty on account of stam- 
 mering. She had never answered orally at school, 
 and had never read aloud. I was indignant at 
 teachers who had taught her carefully the correct 
 grammatical forms of speech and yet had left her 
 in a condition of inability to speak. I offered to 
 guide her in overcoming her difficulty, and succeeded 
 in winning her confidence and in enabling her to 
 speak freely. I then without warning her previously 
 asked her to read aloud to me. She at first shrank 
 from the ordeal, but as she was in no sense afraid of 
 me I persuaded her to make the experiment. I told 
 her I wished her to read something entirely new to 
 her. I was delighted to find when I went to my 
 library that she had read very widely — though never 
 aloud. ^^ Have you read Shakespeare ? ^^ " Yes.^^ 
 '' Wordsworth ? '' " Yes.'' Burns, Longfellow, 
 Moore, Bryant, Byron, Whittier, Cowper, Holmes, 
 were offered in turn, but these and others had been 
 read. The first volume of poetry I found that she 
 had not read was the poems of the Carey Sisters. I 
 selected a poem, and she read it at sight with fluency, 
 appreciation, and appropriateness of expression. 
 She read as naturally as a child, free from self- 
 consciousness, speaks, and with the mental concep- 
 tions of a maturing mind. I was charmed and asked 
 her to allow me to call my family to hear her read 
 another poem. Again she shrank from the trial, but 
 finally agreed when I assured her that she read bet- 
 ter than any girl I had ever heard before. Again 
 she read with ease and power. When she was read- 
 ing her second poem two teachers called, one of them 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 27 
 
 a New York teacher who had studied under one of 
 the leading teachers of oratory in the United States, 
 and had read in public herself. I persuaded my 
 pupil to read again a third selection, and they agreed 
 with me that they had never heard any student 
 whose reading was in all essential elements so satis- 
 factory. 
 
 Note 2. The best oral reader of Goethe's Faust 
 or other difficult literature that it was ever my good 
 fortune to hear was the late George Paxton Young, 
 professor of Philosophy in Toronto University. He 
 gave new meaning to an author when he read aloud 
 to his friends. I asked him if he had a good teacher 
 of oral reading when he was a boy. He told me that 
 he never read aloud at school. His great power of 
 expression resulted from two causes: he had more 
 power than most men to see the author's thought 
 accurately and comprehensively, and the natural re- 
 lation between thought and expression had not been 
 interfered with by his teachers. I found by care- 
 fully watching him on many occasions that in silent 
 reading, either of easy or difficult reading matter, 
 he read at least two pages while I could read one, 
 and he found more in each page than I did. 
 
 Note 3. When I was a boy thirteen years old, 
 my father was the teacher of our village school. 
 Two deaf-mute children were brought to the school, 
 and my father, having so much to do in teaching a 
 large ungraded school, could not possibly find time 
 to teach them, so he turned them over to me. I 
 taught them and attended to my own lessons as well, 
 so the deaf-mute boys did not receive a great deal 
 of attention. They knew the double hand alphabet, 
 having been taught it by their mother. I learned 
 their manual alphabet, and I laid the apperceptive 
 
28 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 centres of all the best things I have since learned 
 about pedagogy and psychology in my efforts to find 
 the way to reach their minds and educate them. 
 They learned to read visible language with remark- 
 able ease, and they became very rapid readers. They 
 could read much more rapidly than their compan- 
 ions in school or their brothers and sisters who could 
 hear and speak. They learned to read, not to read 
 orally. 
 
CHAPTEE III 
 
 GENERAL PRINCIPLES 
 
 The fundamental laws to be followed in teaching 
 reading are the same general laws that should guide 
 the teacher in teaching any other subject. 
 
 1. Self-activity. The most important principle 
 to follow in teaching any subject is the law of self- 
 activity. Self-activity means the activity of the pu- 
 pil in independent work. It does not mean activity 
 in imitating the teacher, or in following the instruc- 
 tions of the teacher or even the direct suggestions 
 of the teacher. It means the activity of the pupil 
 in accomplishing his own plans, in solving problems 
 he has found for himself. The teacher can find no 
 other test to decide the real value of her teaching 
 in any subject, that is so simple and so definitely 
 accurate as the question — Am I allowing my pupils 
 the fullest opportunities for independent activity, 
 which is the only real self-activity? The answer to 
 this question should change the ordinary methods 
 of teaching reading in all departments. 
 
 The development of every teacher towards her 
 best power in method is made by taking progressive 
 steps in giving the children more and more inde- 
 pendent work in finding and solving problems. 
 Every time a teacher finds a way to reach a definite 
 result by less work on her part and more vital work 
 on the part of the pupils, she has taken a step in 
 the path of true progress. The child^s real growth 
 
 29 
 
30 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 must be the result of self -activity, his independent 
 effort to solve his own problems. The teacher's high- 
 est skill lies in guiding his efforts without making 
 him conscious of her interference. The wisdom of 
 the teacher is essential in directing the immature 
 minds of her pupils, but true wisdom never stands 
 in the way of the self-activity of the child. The 
 wisest teacher never forgets that the child, and not 
 the knowledge he is to receive, is the centre of cor- 
 relation. Eesponsive activity is better than mere pas- 
 sivity on the part of the pupil, because it develops 
 a more practical and effective type of character than 
 mere receptivity, but activity in response to the sug- 
 gestions or directions of another does little to de- 
 velop the individuality or selfhood in a child and 
 this is the great ideal of true education. 
 
 2. Prollems. The child's power in any subject 
 increases most rapidly and most definitely by over- 
 coming a related sequence of well graded difficul- 
 ties ; by solving a well arranged series of increasingly 
 difficult problems. Problems in word recognition 
 may be given as definitely and as systematically as 
 in arithmetic or any other department of mathe- 
 matics or science. The good teacher will use the 
 largest possible variety of plans for making prob- 
 lems, and the ideal teacher- always trains her pupils 
 to find problems as well as to solve them. All chil- 
 dren who have not been dwarfed by the unwise in- 
 terference of their parents or teachers have the 
 power to discover problems. The child's intellectual 
 growth is so marvellously rapid before he goes to 
 school because he has the privilege of finding most 
 of his own problems. He is in a new world which 
 is full of mysterious joys to him. If he is free, he 
 finds many new problems every day. Most of them 
 
TEACHING TO READ 31 
 
 he solves himself; a few of the more complex he 
 brings to mother or father. He has naturally the 
 power to see the problems related to his stage of de- 
 velopment. His problems may be divided into two 
 classes: those seen generally by nearly all children 
 and those seen only or most clearly by children of 
 his special intellectual organization and tendencies. 
 Before he goes to school he is a problem finder as 
 well as a problem solver. His power to solve prob- 
 lems becomes more effective as his power to see 
 problems grows more definite. His power to solve 
 problems does not increase so rapidly or so truly by 
 solving the problems of others as by solving his own. 
 Speaking generally, the least effective problems for a 
 child are those prepared by an adult. When the child 
 goes to school his teacher usually makes him a prob- 
 lem solver only, and thus his power of discovering 
 problems is lost to an appalling extent. The power 
 of seeing new problems is the most essential power 
 in complete intellectual development. It alone starts 
 the other intellectual powers and keeps them in vig- 
 orous and developing activity. It provides the neces- 
 sary work for the other intellectual powers. It 
 should develop as rapidly as any other intellectual 
 power till in adulthood it becomes insight or vision 
 in relation to the material, the intellectual and the 
 spiritual world. The teacher should aim to develop 
 this power of problem finding as definitely as any 
 other power of the child. Unfortunately it usually 
 decreases as the child grows older. The schools have 
 dissolved the natural and essential unity between 
 problem finding and problem solving, and have made 
 the child a problem solver only. 
 
 But in reading the child has not even been al- 
 lowed to solve problems. He has been expected to re- 
 
33 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 member what his teacher has told him. Eemember- 
 ing and recalling is not a very developing exercise. 
 It is a storing exercise that produces its best re- 
 sults when it acts naturally, as the indirect or in- 
 cidental accompaniment of action which has been 
 originated, directed, and executed by the individual 
 himself who is expected to rememxber. Every subject 
 should be learned so far as possible by operative pro- 
 cesses, both problem finding and problem solving. 
 To make reading largely a direct memory process 
 robs it of its general developing power for the mind ; 
 makes even memorizing a slow and wearisome task, 
 instead of a vital, definite, and interesting process; 
 prevents the development of a true interest in read- 
 ing; and reduces the rate of reading, and the power 
 to get thought accurately and comprehensively from 
 visible language. 
 
 In learning to read the child should be guided to 
 the recognition of a progressive series of definitely 
 related problems, and trained from the first day to 
 solve these problems independently. Learning to 
 read should not be a process of remembering and 
 recognizing word forms, or letter forms. It should 
 be a process of gaining power to use the elements 
 of visible speech either by recognizing their sounds 
 in word combinations, or in constructing visible 
 words to represent the sound words with which the 
 pupils are already familiar. These processes will 
 at first be performed by conscious effort, but they 
 should gradually become automatic and be directed 
 by the subconscious power of the child. The recog- 
 nition and solving of problems is the only way in 
 which the pupil can use his self-activity in learning 
 to read. 
 
 There are two classes of problems in word recog- 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 33 
 
 nition, eye problems and ear problems. Beading 
 has been taught exclusively as an eye problem. The 
 pupils have been shown letters, or words, or phrases, 
 or sentences on the blackboard or tablet, or in the 
 primer, and trained to recognize them by some of 
 the various methods of teaching word recognition. 
 There is another and a much better way of present- 
 ing the problems to the child for his solution. The 
 usual plan is for the teacher to write the words or 
 sentences and ask the pupil to sound them; it is 
 much better for the teacher to sound the words and 
 for the pupils to write them. Both plans should, of 
 course, be used, but the ear problem in which the 
 problem reaches the child's mind through his ear, 
 is much more productive of good results than the 
 eye problem in which the problem reaches the child's 
 mind through his eye. In an ear problem the child 
 has to make a more definite and comprehensive as- 
 sociation of the form of a letter with its power or 
 sound than he does in an eye problem. In the ear 
 problem in word recognition the teacher pronounces 
 the word as in dictating for spelling, carefully se- 
 lecting only words whose visible symbols have al- 
 ready been taught, and the child has to think of the 
 consecutive sounds in the word and associate the 
 proper letter with each sound in successive order to 
 form the visible word. In the eye problem the child 
 looks at each letter or word as it is presented to 
 him in written or printed forms, and unites the 
 sounds of the letters to make the oral word repre- 
 sented by the visible forms. 
 
 The teaching work while the pupils are out in class 
 should consist mainly of ear problems; the work of 
 pupils at the seats must, in the early stage of learn- 
 ing to read, be largely the solving of eye problems. 
 
34 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 Very soon, however, the best seat problems in word 
 recognition are problems in the expression in visible 
 form of the child's own thoughts. The construction 
 of visible language by the child in ear problems or 
 self-expression problems is very much more effective 
 than the ordinary process which consists entirely of 
 recognition of visible language or eye problems; be- 
 cause the child's powers of recognition, relation, 
 construction, and origination are more extensively 
 and more effectively called into activity by the ear 
 and expression problems than by eye problems. 
 
 It will be of great service to the teacher, if she 
 keeps persistently in mind the classification of the 
 problems in the early steps in learning to read, into 
 problems in construction and problems in recogni- 
 tion. Problems in construction are more vitally ef- 
 fective than problems in recognition in all subjects. 
 Whenever it is possible, not only in reading but in 
 all subjects, the child's thought should be construc- 
 tively represented by the child himself in order to 
 secure clearer and more extended thought and more 
 perfect and more lasting remembrance. This funda- 
 mental thought will transform the methods of teach- 
 ing nearly all subjects when it is clearly understood 
 by teachers. Reading is one of the subjects in which 
 it should make most radical changes. 
 
 3. Interest. Truly productive attention depends 
 on the interest of the child. The only interest that 
 retains its vitality is interest based on the child's 
 happiness in solving new problems adapted to its 
 stage of development and its knowledge. The child 
 never loses interest when he is overcoming difficul- 
 ties of an appropriate kind by his own independent 
 efforts. The processes of teaching word recognition 
 afford excellent opportunities for leading the child 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 35 
 
 to recognize and solve constructive problems of un- 
 failing interest. 
 
 4. Repetition of process. The repetition that has 
 been insisted upon, and is still planned for by many 
 excellent teachers, is the frequent presentation of 
 the same words in order that they may be readily 
 recognized by the pupils. This is the weakest and 
 least productive kind of repetition. It depends on 
 mere memory cultivation as the means of making 
 progress. No method that makes memory the cen- 
 tral and direct element in learning can long sustain 
 the vital interest of children in any subject. 
 
 The teacher should be guided by principles di- 
 rectly opposed to the time-honored method of 
 frequent use of the same words in order that the pu- 
 pils may learn to recognize them without conscious 
 effort. If possible the same word should never be 
 seen twice by the pupil while he is gaining the power 
 of word recognition. Instead of repeating the same 
 words frequently in order that the child may be- 
 come familiar with them the teacher should aim to 
 present entirely new words to the child, while it is 
 learning the process of word recognition. The recog- 
 nition of each word should be achieved by the child 
 at first by a conscious process of uniting the powers 
 and sounds of letters in new combinations. This 
 is repetition of processes and not merely recognition 
 by memory. This method develops constructive 
 power, not memory only, and at the same time it is 
 the most effective way of developing a productive 
 memory. The pupil should not merely recognize the 
 words, he should recognize them as the result of a 
 constructive effort. He should independently recog- 
 nize new words, that is words that are new to him 
 in their visible form. Learning to read is not 
 
36 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 learning to use a new vocabulary ; it is acquiring the 
 power to recognize in visible form the vocabulary 
 with which the child is familiar in speech. 
 
 The effort at uniting individual powers and sounds 
 into combinations to form words must at first be 
 made slowly and consciously, and will require the 
 full primary attention of the child. It gradually 
 becomes rapid and automatic, and this stage is 
 reached much sooner than inexperienced teachers 
 would expect. Eepetition of process makes the pupil 
 an independent solver of interesting problems from 
 the beginning, and at each step he gains conscious- 
 ness of new power. 
 
 Many teachers who aim to teach word recognition 
 by a correct method, make the serious mistake of 
 having their pupils repeat and re-repeat the powers 
 and sounds of letters as independent powers and 
 sounds. They often keep lists of the letters already 
 taught on the blackboard for drill purposes in order 
 to fix the powers and sounds in the memories of the 
 children. This kind of drill in any subject is purely 
 mechanical. It deadens interest and even fails to 
 fix facts or elements of power in the memory in a 
 vital or productive way. There are two ways of de- 
 fining truths in the memory. One defines them as 
 facts only, the other defines them as elements of 
 power for constructive use. 
 
 All mere drill in the facts or tables of any subject 
 is comparatively ineffective even for memorizing 
 facts or tables, when compared with the method of 
 using facts or tables as they become known in the 
 accomplishment of definite and interesting purposes 
 by the pupils. 
 
 To become familiar with the powers and sounds of 
 the letters in the quickest, surest, and most produc- 
 
TEACHING TO READ 37 
 
 tive way, the child should use them as soon as he 
 learns them in recognizing new visible forms of 
 words, and especially in making words himself. This 
 is a repetition of processes, and not a repetition of 
 a mere act of memory. What is learned in this way 
 is not merely stored in the memory, it becomes a part 
 of the child's life power. 
 
 By persistently using the self-activity of the child 
 in discovering and solving problems in word recog- 
 nition, the work of investigation, discovery and mas- 
 tery in achieving conquests over the difficulties of 
 learning to read never loses interest, never becomes 
 monotonous, but is always full of the vital interest 
 that keeps the child alert, and hopeful, and happy. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 OBJECTIVE METHODS OF TEACHING WORD RECOGNI- 
 
 TION 
 
 Is there a logical parallel between learning to use 
 oral language and learning to recognize visible lan- 
 guage? Many teachers claim that there is such a 
 parallel. " The logical sequence in learning oral lan- 
 guage is : first, the object ; second, the idea ; third, the 
 word ; therefore the same order should be followed in 
 learning to read written or printed language.'^ This 
 has been adopted by many teachers as the philosoph- 
 ical basis of their methods of teaching primary 
 classes to read^ or more correctly speaking, of teach- 
 ing the recognition of visible language. The fol- 
 lowing are among the objections that may be urged 
 against the acceptance of this as a safe basis for 
 the establishment of a logical parallelism between 
 the mental operations of a child in acquiring the 
 power of oral language, and in learning to recognize 
 language in its visible forms: 
 
 1. Oral language is a new language to the 
 child, when he is learning to use it. Visible language 
 is not a new language. In any of its forms visible 
 language is simply a means of representing the oral 
 language with which the child is already familiar. 
 In learning to read, the child is not acquiring new 
 names or terms for either things or ideas. The 
 words in written or printed language are identical 
 
 38 
 
TEACHING TO READ 39 
 
 with the words of spoken language. Oral and vis- 
 ible language are not two different languages, but 
 one language with two modes of expression or rep- 
 resentation, one recognizable through the ear, and 
 the other, through the eye. Eeading is the art of 
 extracting thought from visible language. He is a 
 perfect reader who can acquire thought from visible 
 language as rapidly, as definitely, and as compre- 
 hensively as from oral language. 
 
 2. The conceptions expressed by oral language 
 are new to the child, when he learns the oral language 
 with which to express them. The conceptions ex- 
 pressed or represented by visible' language are not 
 new. They cannot be new. A word representing an 
 object or conception with which the child is not 
 acquainted suggests no idea to his mind. The ideas 
 recalled to the mind of the child by visible language 
 must have been in his mind previously, or they could 
 not be recalled. The thought and the language must 
 have been learned before a pupil can recognize them 
 in visible form. The thought and the language 
 remain unchanged. In learning to read there is not 
 new thought to require a new language, therefore the 
 new form of the language cannot be learned as the 
 oral form was learned, in direct association with, 
 and as the natural psychological result of, the asso- 
 ciation of new words with the revelation of new 
 thought by new objects and experiences. There can 
 be no vital psychological relationship between learn- 
 ing to express thought by oral language and learn- 
 ing to recognize thought in visible language. 
 
 3. Language lessons should not be confounded 
 with reading lessons. Learning to read is not a 
 means of extending a child^s vocabulary. Eeading 
 will enlarge the child's vocabulary, but the pj:ocess 
 
40 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 of learning to read cannot do so. He may extend 
 his knowledge and his control of language by read- 
 ing, but not by learning to read. 
 
 Even those methods of teaching reading that pre- 
 sent objects to the child which he has never seen 
 before; strange insects, animals or flowers, for in- 
 stance, in order to try to be logical in the hopeless 
 task of making the process of learning to read analo- 
 gous to the process of learning oral language, fail 
 to make their method of learning to read the source 
 of increased acquaintance with language. The few 
 words that may be learned in this cumbersome and 
 illogical way are learned not by the reading process 
 but by the associated objective process. 
 
 It is impossible to teach reading by using new 
 things, and acts, and qualities, and relationships as 
 the basis of the language to be read. The child is 
 already perfectly familiar with the use of most of 
 the language that must be used when it is learning 
 to read; and even if an entirely new language could 
 be used while learning to read, the plan proposed 
 for teaching this new language is the least effective, 
 the most unnatural, and most illogical that could 
 be adopted. 
 
 The child's vocabulary should be increased by sys- 
 tematic language lessons. It will also be necessary 
 to explain to him the meaning and use of some of 
 the words in his reading lesson. Such explanations 
 are in reality not a part of the reading lesson proper. 
 New words — words which the child has not been in 
 the habit of using orally — should not at first form 
 part of the visible language he is learning to recog- 
 nize. When he recognizes a new visible form it 
 should mean something to him. It should recall an 
 idea formerly represented by some oral word. The 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 41 
 
 child when learning to read should not be allowed 
 to try to read any word in visible language until he 
 is familiar with its meaning and use in oral lan- 
 guage. But language lessons and reading lessons 
 should not be confounded. 
 
 4. Oral language is a natural means of communi- 
 cating the child's thought to others; visible language 
 in all its forms is artificial. All children who are 
 not deaf learn to speak without direct training. 
 They not only use articulate language naturally, but 
 acquire the names of things and the forms of ex- 
 pression used by those with whom they live without 
 direct teaching. No thoughtful parent ever gave his 
 child a lesson on the names of things, by saying: 
 " This is a cup, or a spoon, or a doll, or a chair,'^ 
 while pointing to the things named in order that he 
 might learn the names of the things he had to use. 
 Such absurd teaching has been practised only in 
 schools. 
 
 Children use oral language naturally, and learn 
 names of things and language forms naturally. They 
 learn correct language just as readily as incorrect 
 language, if they hear it spoken correctly. Correct 
 construction and correct pronunciation are as easily 
 learned as incorrect construction and pronunciation. 
 If children have definite ideas their language will 
 be correspondingly definite. They learn with equal 
 facility the oral language used by those with whom 
 they associate, English, French, German, etc., as the 
 case may be. 
 
 Oral language, being natural, is learned without 
 conscious effort. Visible language, being artificial, 
 has to be learned by a conscious effort. The process 
 of making this conscious effort is not logically re- 
 
42 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 lated to the natural process of acquiring a means 
 of expressing thought. 
 
 5. When using oral language thought suggests 
 words; in reading, words suggest thought. In oral 
 language the idea must precede the word, because 
 oral language is a means of expressing thought, and 
 a thought cannot be expressed until it has been con- 
 ceived. As the clearest conceptions come to children 
 from real things, the logical order in learning spoken 
 language is naturally object, idea, word. All these 
 conditions are reversed in reading and therefore the 
 process of learning to read cannot logically be the 
 same as the process of learning to talk, or even paral- 
 lel with it and in the same direction. 
 
 It is quite true that visible language, like oral 
 language, is the expression of thought, but reading 
 is the recognition of thought and not the expression 
 of thought. This should be a sufficient reason to 
 show the impossibility of basing a method of recog- 
 nition on a method of expression, especially when in 
 one case it is an expression of oral language, which is 
 learned unconsciously, and in the other case it is the 
 recognition of visible language, which is not a nat- 
 ural form of language and which must be recognized 
 by conscious effort on the part of the child. In 
 reading, the idea is conceived through the word, not 
 the word from the idea, so we must begin with the 
 word instead of ending with it. Of course we can- 
 not get an idea from a word unless we had the idea 
 before, and had it in association with the oral word 
 to which the visible word we are reading corresponds. 
 Words do not create ideas in the minds of children 
 learning to read; they recall ideas already in their 
 minds, and the process of reading consists in look- 
 ing at words and recognizing through them the 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 43 
 
 mental pictures they represent. It is true that the 
 child when older should get many revelations of new 
 facts and new ideals from visible language by read- 
 ing, but reading should not be confounded with 
 learning to read. Even when reading, however, the 
 reader must understand the meaning of the author's 
 words before he can understand the author's ideals. 
 Words in reading should recall conceptions already 
 in the mind. The process of reading intelligently 
 consists in looking at words and recognizing through 
 them the mental pictures they represent. This is 
 true of words, of sentences, of chapters, and of books. 
 The only possible order in reading is from the word 
 or sentence to the thought, and any process that re- 
 verses this essential order retards the progress of 
 the child in learning to read. 
 
 The teachers should most carefully avoid the pos- 
 sibility of suggesting the word by the thing or the 
 conception the word represents, while the pupil is 
 learning to recognize visible language. To do so 
 will interfere with the essential and logical process 
 by which the child should be acquiring power to 
 translate visible language into oral language and 
 ultimately to be able to extract thought automat- 
 ically from visible language as well as from oral 
 language. 
 
 6. The child has to deal solely with words, not 
 objects, in reading, when he is able to read, and 
 therefore our aim should be to give him the mastery 
 over the recognition of words as early as possible. 
 A child can read well, when he is able to extract 
 thought automatically and rapidly from printed or 
 written matter. The teacher's first aim should be 
 to make word recognition automatic. When this is 
 accomplished the child is able to give his full mental 
 
44 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 power to the recognition of thought. So long as 
 any part of his attention has to be given to the 
 recognition of words, he cannot give his whole mind 
 to the recognition of thought. 
 
 C^jie power to recognize words automatically should 
 be developed, as all power must be developed, by 
 repetition of the necessary processes, slowly and con- 
 sciously at first, but with increasing rapidity until 
 it becomes free and automatic. An object should 
 never be used to suggest the name of a visible word. 
 Eeading is not a means of obtaining thought from 
 objects. Eeading is not the recognition of words 
 suggested by objects or by any other way of produc- 
 ing thought. Eeading is a process of recognizing 
 words through their own forms and construction. 
 The recognition is the first and not the last step in 
 reading; and to make it the last step instead of the 
 first step reverses the essentially logical order of 
 development. The use of the object to suggest the 
 recognition of the visible word directly interferes 
 with the development of the power that is absolutely 
 necessary in the recognition of words independently. 
 It retards both the immediate and the ultimate prog- 
 ress of the child. Object lessons are very useful 
 when properly taught, but they cannot be made read- 
 ing lessons. Eeading cannot be confined to object 
 lessons, or to recognizing words suggested by ob- 
 jects. The chief aim of the object lesson is to give 
 power to gain new knowledge from things. The aim 
 of the reading lesson is to give power to extract 
 thought from visible language. 
 
 7. The strongest argument in favor of the use 
 of objects in connection with the reading lesson is 
 based on the absolute necessity for a direct and 
 strong bond of association between the idea and the 
 
TEACHING TO READ 45 
 
 word which represents it. The importance of this 
 association cannot be too strongly emphasized. The 
 misapplication of this correct principle will be evi- 
 dent, however, if we remember that in learning to 
 read the child is not learning a new language, but 
 merely gaining power to recognize in a new form the 
 language he already uses freely. The essential asso- 
 ciation between words and their corresponding ideas 
 becomes definite, when the child is learning to speak, 
 and the only step left for the teacher to take is to 
 make the association rapid and definite between the 
 spoken word and the printed or written word which 
 is the visible representation of the spoken word which 
 the child already understands and uses. The child 
 cannot read intelligently, either silently or aloud, 
 language which he does not speak intelligently. He 
 should not be allowed to try to do so. The child's 
 spoken language corresponds with his ideas, and 
 when he hears it used it recalls these ideas to his 
 mind. He should not try to have two ways of 
 recognizing an idea through language till its recog- 
 nition is accurate and automatic in one way. The 
 oral way of expressing and recognizing ideas is the 
 natural way and should precede the visible method. 
 
 The child begins the process of learning to read 
 with a very large number of conceptions which are 
 represented by him and to him in his spoken lan- 
 guage by corresponding words. Each conception in- 
 stantly suggests its appropriate word when he is 
 speaking; each spoken word suggests its correspond- 
 ing idea when some one else is speaking to him. 
 The conception recalls the object because it is the 
 mental picture of the object. The following is a 
 logical sequence: 
 
46 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 1st. The object — hat. 
 
 2nd. The idea — hat. 
 
 3rd. The spoken word — ^hat. 
 
 4th. The visible word — hat. 
 
 The child is thoroughly acquainted with the first 
 three steps in this sequence before he begins to learn 
 to read. Logically the first two steps are one so far 
 as reading is concerned. Any one of the first three 
 steps instantly recalls the other two to the child 
 without any conscious effort on his part. If we try 
 to take the fourth step before the first three are 
 definitely associated with one another, our course is 
 illogical. 
 
 The only question to be decided by the teacher 
 is, with which of the first three steps can the fourth 
 — the visible word — be most easily, most naturally, 
 and most philosophically associated? The answer 
 to this question will be definitely settled as soon as 
 we decide to which of the other three steps the vis- 
 ible word is most perfectly related. We can have no 
 difficulty in reaching a decision. There can be no di- 
 rect relationship between the shape of a hat and 
 the visible word "hat,^^ nor between our mental 
 picture of a hat and the visible word " hat.^^ No re- 
 lationship whatever exists, or was intended to exist 
 by those who planned our visible language. Our 
 language is not a system of hieroglyphics. Every 
 means used to make our language visible in any 
 form, is based on the philosophical plan of the repre- 
 sentation of the individual sounds of spoken language 
 by corresponding visible signs. The founders of our 
 system of visible language knew that there are only 
 a few sounds in our spoken language, and only a 
 few methods for combining and uttering them, so 
 they wisely decided to design a series of letters to 
 
TEACHING TO READ 47 
 
 represent in visible form the sounds of oral language 
 and the formations of the organs of speech used in 
 uttering these sounds. It was with this manifest 
 and definite purpose that alphabets were constructed. 
 
 Visible language is therefore directly and phil- 
 osophically related to spoken language, and as soon 
 as the relationships between their corresponding ele- 
 ments have been definitely established in the child^s 
 mind, the one form of language becomes convert- 
 ible into the other by a regular and logical process, 
 that is performed slowly and by conscious eifort at 
 first but which soon becomes automatic. On the 
 other hand the association of the visible word with 
 the object or idea directly is necessarily an arbitrary 
 process and must inevitably remain an arbitrary pro- 
 cess with no logical basis whatever. A great many 
 ingenious plans have been adopted to simplify this 
 arbitrary process, and to try to make it conform to 
 natural laws, but however beautifully it may be 
 clothed or padded, its natural deformity cannot be 
 concealed. It must remain an arbitrary process to 
 the end. 
 
 The case, therefore, stands clearly thus: the first 
 three steps in the sequence are indissolubly bound 
 together in the child^s mind before he goes to school, 
 or begins to learn to read. The first two, the ob- 
 ject and the idea, are really one so far as reading 
 is concerned. These two on one hand, and the spoken 
 word on the other hand, are automatically inter- 
 suggestive. Our problem in reading is to make the 
 very same word in another form recall or suggest 
 the very same idea that has regularly been brought 
 to the child^s mind by the spoken word. This must 
 be done by giving the child the power to make the 
 visible word suggest the oral word which always nat- 
 
48 TEACHING TO BEAD 
 
 "urally recalls the corresponding idea or object; and 
 all attempts to associate the visible word with the 
 object or idea by direct process are necessarily il- 
 logical an3 interfere with the essential and logical 
 association of the visible forms of speech with the 
 oral forms which they were intended to represent. 
 
 Questions in regard to the alphabet and improve- 
 ments that might have been made or may yet be 
 made in its construction have no real bearing on the 
 logical method of training a child to recognize vis- 
 ible language. Whether the difficulties arising from 
 an imperfect alphabet be few or many, the child's 
 problem remains logically unaltered and unalter- 
 able. He can read when he has in some way learned 
 to translate the visible forms of language into their 
 corresponding forms in spoken language, and to 
 recognize the combinations of visible forms as repre- 
 senting the union of sounds to form the words used 
 in oral language. 
 
 If there were not overwhelming reasons to show 
 that all objective methods of teaching pupils to read 
 are illogical, there is an insurmountable practical 
 difficulty that makes it impossible to carry out the 
 method beyond a very limited range of words. Only 
 a few objects can possibly be directly associated with 
 visible words in the schoolroom, but all objects and 
 ideas must be represented in visible language. 
 
 8. Expression of thought and recognition of 
 forms of thought have been confounded by those who 
 advocate the same process of learning to speak and 
 learning to read. They are not similar processes 
 psychologically. In the expression of thought the 
 thing and its name are mutually intersuggestive in 
 both spoken and written language. This is not the 
 case in the recognition of visible language. In recog- 
 
TEACHING TO READ 49 
 
 nition the name recalls the object much more cer- 
 tainly than the object suggests its name. We look at 
 thousands of objects every day, and even use them, 
 without being conscious of the fact that they have 
 names at all. Objects were not made for names, 
 names were made for objects. 
 
 These considerations show that it is unphilosophical 
 to use the object as a means of suggesting the name 
 of a word, so as to aid in recognizing it. The name 
 should be recognized independently, and in the 
 practice of reading it must be recognized inde- 
 pendently. It is the duty of the teacher to see that 
 the words recognized recall corresponding ideas in 
 the child^s mind, but the first association of ideas 
 with words should not be made through visible 
 language, and therefore this part of the teacher's 
 work is not connected directly with the process of 
 learning to read. 
 
 9. But it is claimed that the association of the 
 spoken word with the idea was arbitrary and yet it 
 was accomplished in a natural and definite way, and 
 that it therefore follows that the visible word should 
 be directly associated with the idea through the ob- 
 ject in a similar manner. This really means that the 
 names of objects can be associated with the objects 
 through the eye as naturally and as readily as 
 through the ear. This is clearly an illogical assump- 
 tion for several reasons. First, spoken language is 
 natural and visible language is not natural. The 
 eye has in a sense a language of its own, but this 
 language is limited in its range and application. 
 It is manifestly absurd to assume that a race 
 gifted with the power of hearing and with the won- 
 derful power of speech could learn the names of ob- 
 jects as readily through the eye as through the ear. 
 
50 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 Spoken language is learned incidentally without 
 direct effort of any kind on the part either of the 
 child or its parents. The child learns the language 
 of its parents and speaks it as accurately as they do, 
 without any attempt at teaching by the parents or 
 study by the child. The ear is the natural organ 
 through which language power is acquired and de- 
 veloped. Second, it is impossible to have the visible 
 names of all things attached to or directly associated 
 with them. Third, if every object had its name writ- 
 ten or printed on it, the idioms of language would 
 still be lacking. Fourth, in order to communicate 
 through the eye by language every individual would 
 have to carry with him a complete set of words or the 
 means of making them. 
 
 10. The ablest advocates of the object-word 
 method do not really accept it themselves in practice, 
 except for a short period and within a very limited 
 range of words. This is the most peculiar fact in 
 connection with the whole range of the literature 
 written about methods of learning to read. Men 
 write elaborate theories to prove that the whole word 
 method is the proper one, and having established 
 what they regard as a philosophical basis for their 
 method, they immediately repudiate it by limiting 
 its application to a comparatively insignificant num- 
 ber of words. Some use their method for only about 
 sixty words. Very few now suggest its use for more 
 than two hundred words. But even if it were 
 philosophical in its application to a small number of 
 words, as its advocates claim, its pedagogical value 
 would be too insignificant to make it a worthy foun- 
 dation for a method of training a child to read. 
 
 The sum of the whole matter is this: — oral lan- 
 guage is the expression of thought, reading is the 
 
TEACHING TO READ 61 
 
 recognition of thought expressed in visible form. 
 When the child is using oral language his thought 
 suggests his language^ when he is reading, the lan- 
 guage suggests the thought. When the child begins 
 to learn to read, he has already learned his language. 
 Reading is not a method of learning a new language, 
 but of recognizing the child's own language in a new 
 form, and therefore it follows that an analogy be- 
 tween the process of learning to speak and learning 
 to read cannot be logically sustained. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PHONIC METHOD 
 
 To become capable of reading independently the 
 child must in some way gain a mastery of the powers 
 and sounds of the letters, and of the laws by which 
 they are combined to form the words of our lan- 
 guage. He must know that some letters always say 
 the same thing, and that others do not always say the 
 same thing; that some letters always speak in the 
 words in which they occur, and that others sometimes 
 speak and are sometimes silent. He must in short 
 acquire in some way the power to translate the visible 
 forms of language into oral language, and recognize 
 visible words as representing the ideas already repre- 
 sented in his mind by spoken words, so that in time 
 by practice and experience he may be able to extract 
 thought from visible language definitely, compre- 
 hensively, and rapidly. Perfect reading power will 
 be acquired when the race can get thought as fully 
 and as definitely from printed language as from 
 oral language. In order to do this the child must 
 acquire the power of automatic word recognition 
 through ability to combine the sounds and powers of 
 letters into words. This necessarily requires that the 
 child must know, consciously or unconsciously, what 
 the powers and sounds of the letters are, or what the 
 letters say. 
 
 It matters not how the child has been taught word 
 
 53 
 
TEACHING TO READ 53 
 
 recognition^ by the alphabetic, the phonic, the pho- 
 netic, the word or the sentence method, or by any 
 combinations or extensions of these methods, when he 
 has learned to recognize new words independently he 
 has in some way gained the power of automatically 
 associating the letter forms with the various positions 
 of the vocal organs in producing oral language. When 
 a word begins with b, p, or m, he must automatically 
 shut his lips instantly in order to begin to read it ; if 
 it begins with s, he must begin instantly to force air 
 over his lifted tongue and past his upper teeth so as 
 form a hissing sound ; if it begins with t, d, or n, he 
 must intantly place the point of his tongue against 
 the roof of his mouth near his upper teeth ; and so on 
 with all the other letters. As soon as he sees them, 
 his organic formation of lips, tongue and teeth, 
 changes to correspond with the powers, or sounds, 
 they represent. This must be done by whatever 
 system he has learned word recognition. If w^e see a 
 word which we have never seen before we construct it 
 just as readily as if we w^ere familiar with it. If, for 
 instance we met with the word ^^ plobf antsdem,'' (a 
 word form made for the illustration) we instantly 
 perform a successive series of rapid organic forma- 
 tions and make certain sounds so that the whole 
 unites to form what we call a word. These forma- 
 tions of the vocal organs and these sounds made by 
 the vocal chords must follow in definite order, or the 
 word will not be correctly formed and sounded. In 
 speaking this word we make eleven changes in or- 
 ganic construction — lips closed, tongue against roof 
 of mouth, mouth open, lips closed, upper teeth on 
 lower lip, mouth open, tongue against roof of mouth 
 near teeth, tongue near the roof of mouth, tongue 
 against roof of mouth near teeth, mouth open, lips 
 
64 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 closed. There are only eleven formations for twelve 
 letters because " n '^ and " t ^^ come together and 
 they require the same organic construction. The 
 tongue, throat and lips modify the open mouth so as 
 to form different sounds for " a/^ " e/^ and " o." The 
 word begins and ends with the lips closed, but in the 
 one case no sound is made, while in the other case a 
 sound is made which is allowed to pass out through 
 the nose. The letter " b ^' orders the lips to be closed 
 as in the case of ^'p'^ and ^'m.'' Like " m,'' "h'' 
 makes a sound, but the sound of ^^ b ^^ is not allowed 
 to pass out. The letters " d/^ " n/^ and '' t/^ require 
 the same organic construction; "t^' asks no sound; 
 ^^ n ^^ and ^^ d '^ demand that a sound be made. In 
 the case of ^^ n ^^ the sound is allowed to pass through 
 the nose ; in the case of ^^ d '' the sound is not allowed 
 to pass out at all. In the case of ^H/^ a sound es- 
 capes between the tongue and the roof of the mouth; 
 ^' f '^ and ^^ s " order breath alone to escape, — in the 
 first case, between the teeth and the lower lip, and 
 in the second case, between the tongue and the roof 
 of the mouth and past the ends of the upper teeth. 
 
 Every one, by whatever method he learned word 
 recognition, obeys the instructions or signals given 
 by the letters in this word, if he can read. The 
 letters in the alphabet are really a set of shorthand 
 symbols representing a corresponding set of sen- 
 tences. The symbol ^^m^^ says, ^^shut your lips, 
 make a sound, and allow it to pass through your 
 nose.^' The symbol ^' v ^' says, '' put your upper teeth 
 on your lower lip, make a sound, and let it escape 
 through your mouth.^^ The symbol ^' s ^^ says, ^' put 
 your tongue near the roof of your mouth and force 
 a stream of breath, without voice, over the tongue and 
 past the ends of the upper teeth.'^ The symbol " f ^* 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 55 
 
 gives the same order as ^W/^ but it asks for breath 
 only, instead of voice ; and the symbol " z ^^ gives ex- 
 actly the same order as " s ^^ only it requires voice, 
 instead of breath, to be sent over the tongue and past 
 the teeth, and so on through the alphabet. Learning 
 to recognize words — what is commonly called " learn- 
 ing to read ^^ — really means learning to interpret the 
 meaning of the letter signals and to combine the 
 formative results rapidly, and ultimately auto- 
 matically. 
 
 No one pretends that the recognition of all the 
 words in our reading must depend on memory of all 
 the word forms. Whatever method of recognizing 
 words has been used, the reader must have gained 
 automatic control of the powers and sounds of the 
 letters and their various modifications in combina- 
 tion. Every letter in '^ plobf antsdem ^^ must be 
 sounded or formed in regular order, or the word is 
 not correctly spoken. The letters are simply short- 
 hand methods of giving instructions for organic 
 construction, for making and modifying sounds, and 
 for issuing these sounds, or breath alone, through the 
 prepared mouth or nose, when the organic construc- 
 tions are made. 
 
 The best method of teaching word recognition is 
 the one which most easily, most quickly, and most 
 thoroughly makes the child acquainted with the 
 sounds and powers of the letters and trains him to 
 combine them into word sounds, if at the same time 
 it fulfils the fundamentally essential conditions of 
 the self-activity of the child, problem finding and 
 problem solving by the child, the preservation and 
 development of the child^s interest, and repetition of 
 the processes by which words are recognized, and 
 not repetition of mere word forms to be mem- 
 
56 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 orized as word forms. The child will learn to 
 recognize words by any method that may be adopted, 
 but some method must fulfil the conditions speci- 
 fied more perfectly than the others. The method 
 that most completely realizes these conditions must 
 be the best method to use. The chief purpose of this 
 book is to prove that the phonic method, in harmony 
 with true pedagogic principles, is the best method of 
 enabling the child to recognize words definitely and 
 rapidly. 
 
 Little need be said to prove that the alphabetic, or 
 letter-naming, method is not a good method. While 
 it in a sense co-ordinates reading with spelling it is 
 an ineffective method of teaching both subjects; and 
 as a means of teaching reading it is absolutely with- 
 out any logical basis, as in nearly all the words of the 
 language there is no relationship whatever between 
 the sounds of the words and the names of the letters 
 of which they are composed. 
 
 All the methods that lead the child to recognize 
 the powers and sounds of letters through the use of 
 words in association with objects; or by writing on 
 the board words or short sentences used by the chil- 
 dren about objects, or experiences, or myths, or 
 stories, or nursery rhymes or anything else, however 
 interesting the subjects may be; or by giving the 
 children, either in books, or in writing on the black- 
 board, familiar nursery rhymes or similar selections 
 to read which have first been accurately memorized, 
 and which are to be repeated as they look at the 
 words which represent in visible form the words they 
 already use freely orally; in short all the methods 
 that reveal letter powers and sounds by analytic pro- 
 cesses are unnecessarily slow, and they fail in the 
 most essential requirements of high educational value 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 57 
 
 in the general development of the child's powers. 
 They do not make him self-active; they do not give 
 opportunities either for finding, or solving, problems, 
 and they depend on memory and not on operative 
 processes for the development of the child's power. 
 These are sufficiently vital reasons for rejecting a 
 method of teaching any subject, or developing any 
 power. Even if such a method were the quickest 
 method of learning a subject or of acquiring a power, 
 it should not be practised. But the teacher never 
 has to choose between the most rapid method and the 
 most truly pedagogical method. The method that is 
 based on the truest pedagogy is certain to secure the 
 most rapid learning and the most thorough and the 
 most vital development in any subject. 
 
 There is another fundamental objection to all 
 analytic methods of learning word recognition. 
 While a limited number of words may be learned as 
 whole words, the pupil, as soon as he begins to read 
 independently, must recognize all new words by a 
 constructively synthetic process. No one pretends 
 that all words can be, or ought to be, memorized by 
 the pupils. The great body of words in any language 
 must be recognized independently by the child. The 
 advocates of analytic, or whole-word, methods of any 
 kind really claim that analytic methods of learning 
 word recognition are the best methods of developing 
 independent power of synthetic recognition, which 
 is the only possible process by which we can recognize 
 new words. 
 
 When all must learn, in some way, the powers and 
 sounds of letters, in order to read independently, and 
 recognize words whose names they have not memo- 
 rized, it should not require much argument to prove 
 that the method which aims to give the child a defi- 
 
58 TEACHI?fG TO EEAD 
 
 nite and ready acquaintance with these sounds and 
 powers must be the best^ if it conforms with the 
 fundamental laws of true pedagogy, and is therefore 
 adapted to the stage of the child's development. The 
 phonic method is the only method that fulfils these 
 conditions completely. Of course the phonetic 
 method would fulfil these conditions also, if our lan- 
 guage had a strictly phonetic alphabet. It is usual 
 to object to the phonic method because the English 
 alphabet is not a phonetic alphabet. This is not 
 a valid objection, however, because it is possible even 
 with our imperfect alphabet to use a perfectly self- 
 consistent language in which the pupils will be given 
 only one sound for each letter, while they are learn- 
 ing all the processes of word recognition. There are 
 enough words in the child's vocabulary in which the 
 vowels have but one sound and the variant con- 
 sonants but one power, to give all the variety neces- 
 sary in the words to be constructed or recognized by 
 the child, while he is learning the process of word 
 recognition. ; i\Tien the child has acquired the pro- 
 cess of word' recognition with a self-consistent 
 alphabet, his teacher has only to reveal to him the 
 fact that certain letters do not always say the same 
 thing, and to teach him their variations and a few 
 principles underlying these variations, in order to 
 qualify him to read his own oral vocabulary in its 
 completeness. It is not necessary to use diacritical 
 marks or variations of form of the letters to enable 
 the child to sound the words correctly. A few fun- 
 damental laws of variation will guide him to the 
 common irregularities that may be accounted for in 
 a systematic way, and the law of association with 
 the context will enable him to overcome the other 
 irregularities. In reading the sentence, " The cat 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 59 
 
 sat on the table/^ for instance, even before the child 
 has learned that ^' a ^' does not aJways say the same 
 thing, no reasonably bright child would give the 
 same sound to " a '' in '' cat '' and " table/' The ad- 
 justing power of the child through association of 
 ideas is practically unlimited, when the words he has 
 to read are words of his own regular vocabulary used 
 in simple sentences; and no reasonable teacher ever 
 uses words that are not common to a child's vocabu- 
 lary, when the child is learning to read. 
 
 Lack of faith in the adjusting and relating power 
 of the child has led most advocates of the phonic 
 m.ethod to construct various devices of a more or less 
 intricate and confusing character to represent all the 
 sounds and consonantal variations of our language. 
 Such devices interfere with the child's progress, and 
 some of them are so manifestly ridiculous that they 
 have prejudiced thoughtful teachers against the 
 phonic method. The only markings that should ever 
 be used are the mark for the long vowels, and a stroke 
 through a letter to show that it does not speak. 
 These may be used with advantage for a short time, 
 but only for a short time, when the pupil is receiving 
 lessons from the blackboard. 
 
 The phonic method of teaching word recognition 
 should not be confounded with phonic practice for 
 correct pronunciation. Some advocates of the phonic 
 method of teaching word recognition claim as one of 
 the advantages of the method that it corrects provin- 
 cialism by leading the children to give the strictly 
 correct letter sounds in all words. This is claiming 
 too much. It is quite true that learning word recog- 
 nition by the phonic method gives a logical prepar- 
 ation for the practices which must be used later in 
 correcting provincialisms in pronunciation caused by 
 
60 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 giving wrong sounds to certain letters; but word 
 recognition by the phonic method or by any other 
 method will not cause the pupils to change their 
 way of pronouncing words. Word recognition and 
 phonic practice for pronunciation are distinct 
 processes, so distinct, that for practical purposes, they 
 are not directly related. Word recognition by the 
 phonic method makes little, if any, change in the way 
 the children pronounce their words. If two children 
 have been accustomed to pronounce /^blue,*"' or 
 ^' aunt,^' or ^^ f ast,^^ or " calm ^^ in two different ways 
 they will continue to pronounce them in two different 
 ways when they meet them in their reading lessons 
 even though they have been taught word recognition 
 by the phonic method. The power of recognition will 
 not overcome habit, neither will the process by which 
 the power of recognition is acquired. Word recogni- 
 tion simply gives a child the power to recognize, in 
 visible form, the language he has been accustomed to 
 use orally; and, if Tom has been accustomed to say 
 ^' barl,^'^ and Jim to say " bar-rel,^^ each of them will 
 recognize in visible form the word he has been 
 accustomed to use, and will read it accordingly till 
 Tom is trained to do otherwise by specific practice 
 in correct pronunciation. The child, in learning to 
 read, uses the knowledge given him regarding the 
 powers and sounds of the letters to enable him to 
 construct or to recognize words, and not as a guide in 
 pronouncing them. It is probable that in making 
 the word '' barrel ^^ Tom would write '^ barl ^^ because 
 that represents his conception and his use of the 
 word; and when corrected he would learn that he has 
 been in the habit of mispronouncing the word. In 
 a similar way, a London boy might learn that he has 
 been mispronouncing words beginning with ^^v/^ or 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 61 
 
 that he has been misusing the letter "h.'' So far 
 as any system aids in removing peculiarities of speech 
 the phonic system may reasonably claim the advant- 
 age, especially, when the peculiarity depends on the 
 misuse of consonants ; but it is too much to claim for 
 any method of teaching word recognition that it 
 removes provincialisms in mispronunciation. 
 
 It has been stated that the phonic method inter- 
 feres with the teaching of spelling. Compared with 
 any whole word system the phonic method has the 
 advantage on general principles. Spelling necessarily 
 depends on accurate and definite power to see all the 
 letters in a word and to see them in their properly 
 related order. No whole word system can train the 
 pupil to do this so thoroughly as a synthetic or con- 
 structive system must do it. The phonic system 
 taught, as it should be taught, chiefly hy ear proilems, 
 trains the pupil to be able to spell all regular words 
 without any special lessons in spelling, and leaves only 
 the spelling of the irregular words to be learned. 
 Even in learning these, the pupil who has been 
 trained to look definitely at each element in the 
 word in order to recognize it must have the advantage. 
 The efforts of the advocates of spelling reform, so 
 far as they have been, or may yet be, successful, will 
 give the pupil trained to recognize words by the 
 phonic method more and more advantage in the de- 
 partment of spelling over those trained by any other 
 method. 
 
 It is sometimes urged that the sounds of the letters 
 are new to the child, and this is given as a reason for 
 not using the phonic system. Novelty cannot be 
 successfully used as an argument against the use of 
 any method by a child. The child is interested in 
 two classes of things : those with which he is familiar, 
 
62 TEACHI5JG TO READ 
 
 and those which are new to him ; and his interest in 
 both depends on their adaptation to liis stage of 
 development and the uses to which he can put them. 
 Novelty of an appropriate kind always adds to a 
 cliild's interest in a subject, or in the tools he must 
 use in acquiring power. 
 
 " But the power and sounds of letters are unre- 
 lated abstractions to a child, and therefore the phonic 
 method cannot be the right one for him. He should 
 deal with real things, or with words that represent 
 real things to him.^^ 
 
 In a sense the powers and sounds of the letters are 
 abstractions to the child, and this is one of many 
 valid reasons for not teaching children to read when 
 they are too young. It would be much better for 
 their health and happiness as well as for their rapid 
 and intelligent progress in reading, if they did not 
 begin to learn to read till they were nine years old, 
 or even older. They should hear a great deal of 
 good literature appropriate to their stage of develop- 
 ment before they are nine years of age. The most 
 appropriate use of oral reading is when mother or 
 father or teacher reads aloud to the children, and one 
 of the errors of adulthood in the past has been to 
 limit the kind of literature deemed suitable for chil- 
 dren to stories or poems that may properly be called 
 childish. Children of seven, eight, or nine, years of 
 age are capable of enjoying and appreciating litera- 
 ture of a higher class than is usually read to them. 
 But the time for the children to dig for themselves 
 the treasures of literature should be delayed longer 
 than it usually is. The child's life should be so full 
 of play in its varied phases, of constructive experi- 
 ments with the material things of his environment 
 that he may become conscious of his own powers and 
 
TEACHING TO READ 63 
 
 his capacity for transforming material things in 
 harmony with his own plans, and of the joy of ever 
 deepening and ever widening acquaintance with the 
 mysteriously attractive processes of Nature, that he 
 will not have any time left for reading till he is nine 
 years of age. 
 
 But the letters and their sounds and powers should 
 not remain abstractions to the child, and certainly 
 they cannot continue to be unrelated. The letters 
 should always be spoken of, to the children, as if they 
 had personality. They should be represented as say- 
 ing something, as speaking alone, as singing duets 
 w^ith other letters, or as keeping silence to listen to 
 their other little comrades in the words, when they 
 are not expected to speak themselves. This simple 
 practice invests the letters with a real personal 
 power, and arouses a vital interest in them on the 
 part of the children. It adds to the interest, and 
 aids in a natural classification of the letters to speak 
 regularly to the children of the vowels as '' girls,^^ 
 and of the consonants as ^^boys.^"^ The words 
 ^' vowels '^ and " consonants ^' should of course not 
 be used, but to have both ^' girl ^^ letters and " boy *' 
 letters makes the personation more complete and more 
 real, and prepares the way, lays the apperceptive 
 basis, for a logical classification of the letters later. 
 It adds greatly to the interest of the child in any 
 subject to attribute personal power to inanimate 
 things. The child's imagination continually associates 
 the idea of life with inanimate things. A piece of 
 stick readily becomes a mamma who tells endless 
 stories to her stick children. A collection of sticks, 
 or pins, or buttons, or even of marks in a row, will 
 form an army of the bravest soldiers. The child's 
 imagination vitalizes everything it touches with life. 
 
64 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 The child creates his own environment, and sphere, 
 and experiences, if he has favorable conditions, 
 and if his child life is understood and reverenced by 
 the adults with whom he lives. Too often the real 
 child life is dwarfed by the interference of meddlesome 
 adulthood. It will seem perfectly natural to the child 
 to say to him '^ a '^ says, ^' b '' says, ^^ m ^^ says, etc., 
 and your statements will be strictly true. 
 
 " But as some of the letters do not always say the 
 same thing it will confuse the child's mind to have 
 to teach him this fact.'' It is a fact that some letters 
 do not always say the same thing. The child must 
 learn this when he learns to read, by whatever system 
 he learns word recognition. It does not confuse him, 
 or mystify him, or prevent the development of his 
 reasoning power to find out that some letters can say 
 more than one thing. He does not always say the 
 same thing himself. Some of his friends can speak 
 in two or more different languages. The letters that 
 speak more than one language may be spoken 
 of as better educated than the others and their 
 peculiarity is at once accounted for to the child, 
 if indeed their special power requires to be accounted 
 for. The child's own way of accounting for things 
 is usually entirely satisfactory to himself, and is gen- 
 erally the best way for him. We should account for 
 things to him only when he asks for explanations of 
 his mysteries. His mysteries are, generally, not 
 those that suggest themselves to adult minds, and 
 when he does ask for explanations, our explanations 
 should be those that will satisfy the child mind, not 
 necessarily those that would satisfy the adult mind. 
 
 ^^ The children lose the opportunity for language 
 development in connection with the reading lessons 
 if they are taught by the phonic method.'^ Oh, no I 
 
TEACHING TO READ 65 
 
 The children are led to talk a great deal even while 
 they are learning the powers and sounds of the letters 
 and how to use them; and the phonic method much 
 more quickly than any other method requires the 
 writing of the pupiFs own language in original work. 
 No other method makes the independent construc- 
 tion of words and sentences such an essential part 
 of the process of word recognition as the phonic 
 method does, when properly used. 
 
 The reasons for using the phonic method are both 
 educational and practical. They may be briefly 
 stated as follows : 
 
 1. The child must possess phonic recognition 
 power before he becomes independent in recognizing 
 new words. Independent recognition power should 
 be the aim of the teacher. We recognize new words 
 through life by the phonic method only. Therefore 
 the process that leads to independent automatic rec- 
 ognition power most quickly, and most definitely, is 
 the best, provided that it at the same time affords 
 the best opportunities for the development of the 
 pupil's intellectual and moral powers. 
 
 2. The phonic method makes the pupil self-active 
 from the first day. The teacher, of course, gives him 
 the names and powers of the letters as he needs them, 
 and as soon as he is acquainted with two of them he 
 immediately begins to use them in making words. 
 He is guided at first by his teacher in the perform- 
 ance of the simple steps necessary in the solution of 
 his problems. It takes but a few days for him to 
 become acquainted with the sounds and powers of the 
 letters, and he uses each one as he learns it in con- 
 nection with those already learned. From the first 
 he is engaged in the solution of a progressive 
 sequence of problems as definitely related as the 
 
66 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 problems in arithmetic^ or algebra, or any other 
 science. He has two kinds of problems only to solve : 
 ear problems and eye problems. In the ear problem 
 the word is sonnded for him to write; in the eye 
 problem the word is written or printed for him to 
 sound. The process of solution is the same for all 
 ear problems; the process of solution in all eye 
 problems is also the same. The child has to learD 
 only two processes: the process of solving ear 
 problems, and the process of solving eye problems. 
 He performs both processes the first day. He per- 
 forms them slowly, at first, and with conscious effort. 
 His processes will be the same in the end, but he will 
 then be able to perform them very rapidly and very 
 definitely without conscious effort, and without 
 giving his primary attention to them. The presen- 
 tation of his new tools — the additional letter sounds 
 and powers — is made gradually and as he is ready 
 for them, and takes so little time that it scarcely 
 needs to be taken into consideration. The great 
 work to be achieved is the solution of ear problems 
 and eye problems so frequently and in such varied 
 forms that the child becomes capable, as soon as pos- 
 sible, of solving them rapidly and accurately, while 
 giving his primary attention not to the word itself, 
 nor to the sentence itself, but to the meaning of the 
 word or the sentence. 
 
 During the whole of this progressive development 
 the child is self-active and independent in his opera- 
 tive work. The teacher supplies him with the tools 
 and tests his power to solve increasingly dnHcult 
 problems. These increase in difficulty not because 
 the process changes, but because the number of pos- 
 sible elements in the problem increases, as new 
 letter sounds and powers are taught. The important 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 67 
 
 thing to remember is that the child is from the first 
 day developing independent intellectual power which 
 under proper guidance qualifies him for more rapid 
 and more definite progress in his other departments 
 of study, and for greater success in life. 
 
 The independent achievement of success in the 
 solution of problems has a very important influence 
 on the character of a child, by making him conscious 
 of individual power, and laying the foundation for a 
 vital faith in himself. 
 
 3. The child^s work in learning word recognition 
 by the phonic method is not the repetition of memory 
 processes, but the repetition of operative processes 
 of a constructive character. This is one of the most 
 essential distinctions between the old and the new 
 education in teaching all subjects. The child is not 
 expected to memorize word forms, he is expected to 
 recognize words by combining the sounds and powers 
 of the letters of which they are composed. Memo- 
 rizing words, or recognizing them because they are 
 familiar or have been already taught is one of the 
 things to be most carefully guarded against by the 
 teacher. If possible the child should not see the 
 same word twice when he is learning word recogni- 
 tion. He may of course use the same words in writ- 
 ing his own thought as often as he chooses without 
 danger. Eapid recognition of words should not 
 depend on the frequency with which the words are 
 seen, but on increasing power to solve problems in 
 word recognition. When a child repeats an opera- 
 tive process he has developed more power; when he 
 recognizes a word which he has seen before and 
 whose sound he has learned, he merely develops 
 memory. By repetition of process he is acquiring 
 ability to recognize and use his entire language; by 
 
68 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 repetition of a word he is merely making more cer- 
 tain the recognition and use of one word, and pos- 
 sibly aiding in the recognition of a few others of 
 which it forms a part. 
 
 4. The phonic method preserves and develops the 
 child's interest. Children soon lose interest in things 
 other people talk abont. They lose interest in things 
 other people do to instruct or even to amuse them. 
 They lose interest in things other people show them. 
 They lose interest, after a time, even in doing things 
 themselves, when their work is planned by others — 
 even by the wisest and the most attractive teacher 
 in the world. But their interest increases in work of 
 any kind appropriate to their stage of development 
 and in which they are themselves allowed a fair share 
 of the planning. The phonic method to a much 
 greater degree than any other method of teaching 
 word recognition provides the conditions of vital and 
 sustained interest, because the child in learning by 
 this method is more independent, more operative, 
 and more self-active than in learning by any other 
 method. 
 
 5. Letters are marks, and marks interest children 
 only so far as they represent life, or can be used in 
 some representative process. Children are interested 
 in what things say, not in what they are named. 
 Young children name cows, pigs, cats, dogs, etc., by 
 what these animals say. They are not interested in 
 them on account of their names, but on account of 
 what they say, and they speak of them at first by 
 imitating what they say. In the phonic method each 
 letter is represented as saying something, and the 
 children are at first required to personate the letters 
 and to speak what the letter says. This adapts the 
 
TEACHING TO HEAD 69 
 
 method to the child^s nature, and increases his in- 
 terest in the work of learning to read. 
 
 6. Knowledge is used as soon as it is obtained by 
 the phonic method. The child spends no time in 
 learning the alphabet before he begins to use it. He 
 combines two letters as soon as he knows what they 
 say. When he is introduced to another letter and 
 knows what it says he can make and recognize more 
 words. Each new letter increases his material for 
 use, and he uses it at once in connection with what 
 he has been using. The old methods of teaching not 
 only reading but other subjects did a good deal of 
 storing of the memory with tables and facts to be 
 used, when the child was older. Power is always lost 
 when the memory is loaded with knowledge beyond 
 the child's power to use it. 
 
 7. The child fixes the sounds and powers of the 
 letters in his memory by using them and not by drill. 
 This is in harmony with one of the fundamental 
 laws of the new education. Memorizing by drill or 
 mere repetition of words or facts is the least effective 
 way of committing to memory and the weakest 
 method of developing general memory power. Some 
 teachers of the phonic method drill regularly on lists 
 of letters whose sounds and powers have been learned. 
 This is a most uninteresting and most ineffective 
 exercise. The children cannot be interested in it, 
 and it is certain to lead them into wrong methods of 
 giving the sounds and powers of the letters, especially 
 of the consonants. Such practice does little to train 
 the children to perform the operations necessary 
 either in forming or in recognizing words. It is only 
 by using the letter sounds and powers that they be- 
 come fixed in the child's mind as available instru- 
 ments in reading and writing. Too many things are 
 
70 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 still stored in the memories of children by various 
 processes of word or fact repetitions. Most of the 
 things so stored in the memory remain in the 
 memory and never get into the real executive intel- 
 lectual life and power of the child as vital elements. 
 
 8. The phonic method requires the use of what 
 has already been acquired in order to make a proper 
 use of the new letter that is being taught. This is 
 the only perfect way to review the work that has been 
 taught in any subject. To review merely for the 
 purpose of deepening the impression, or for the sake 
 of the facts or the language is not good teaching. 
 The highest kind of reviewing is done, when in 
 taking a step in advance we require the use in some 
 constructive work of what has already been learned. 
 This should be done in teaching by the phonic 
 method, and can be done only with the phonic or 
 phonetic method. 
 
 9. The phonic method and the phonetic method, 
 which in its operative processes and fundamental 
 principles is exactly like the phonic method, are the 
 only methods which make it possible to give the child 
 constructive problems; and the solving of a properly 
 related sequence of constructive problems is the 
 surest, the most natural, the most logical, the most 
 effective, and the most truly pedagogical method of 
 teaching any subject which is adapted for such teach- 
 ing. Word recognition, by the phonic method, is ad- 
 mirably adapted for constructive problem work by 
 the child, and this is one of the strong reasons in 
 favor of its adoption. 
 
 If the word " Sam ^' be shown to a child, on the 
 blackboard or on a card, he is required by the phonic 
 method to solve a problem which is presented through 
 his eye. This problem requires ability to recall in 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 71 
 
 regular order the sounds of '^ s/^ '^ a/^* and " m/' and 
 unite them into one sound produced by a union of 
 the three sounds produced so rapidly as to make 
 them seem to be but one sound. The recognition of 
 this word by any system except the phonic is purely 
 an act of memory and not a constructive process. In 
 ear problems, too, when the word is pronounced for 
 the child and he has to make the visible form of the 
 word out of the elements of sound and power that he 
 has learned, he is solving a problem of a constructive 
 character. 
 
 If a child, taught by any whole word system, or 
 even by the alphabetic or naming system, be asked to 
 write the word " Sam,^' he does it purely by memory 
 and not as the result of an independent constructive 
 process. When the child learning by the phonic 
 method has learned the sounds of ^' a,^^' " m,'^ and 
 ^^ s," the teacher may very properly ask him to write 
 the word Sam. This is an ear problem in word recog- 
 nition, which is the first step in learning to read. 
 The child cannot write it from memory because he 
 has never yet consciously seen the word he is ex- 
 pected to write. If he has accidentally seen the word 
 he has no idea of its name. He has a real problem 
 to solve. First, he must analyze the word into its 
 three elements by sounding it slowly, and as he 
 analyzes he must remember the letter symbol that 
 corresponds to each sound and write these letter 
 symbols in their proper order to form the word. 
 
 In both eye and ear problems, the child is doing 
 productive and constructive work, and such problems 
 cannot be given by any other method of teaching 
 children to read. Both kinds of problems are of 
 great value, but especially the ear problems. 
 
 10. The phonic method co-ordinates reading, 
 
72 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 writing, spelling and composition, more naturaUy, 
 and more logically, than any other method. The ear 
 problems train children to construct the spelling of 
 all regular words and also of those words that have 
 only regular irregularities in their spelling. Spell- 
 ing reform is gradually removing the worst irregu- 
 larities. Writing may be used in connection with the 
 teaching of reading by any method, but the phonic 
 method calls upon the child to write his own thoughts 
 much sooner than is possible by any other method. 
 
 11. The phonic method aids in securing distinct 
 articulation in speaking. Each letter is expected to 
 do its part in making the word. The child finds by 
 his entire experience in learning to read that every 
 letter, not silent, must be sounded, or the word will 
 be imperfect. 
 
 12. The phonic method prepares the child for 
 learning to understand and to write shorthand when 
 he is older. This is becoming a more important 
 educational feature, and it will become more and 
 more important in future. 
 
 There are a few words such as " eight ^^ that can- 
 not be taught by the phonic method. Their number 
 is so small that they are not worthy of consideration. 
 They may be taught after the child has learned to 
 read, as a special lesson in spelling, or the child will 
 read '^ eight '^ correctly the first time he sees it if it 
 occurs in the sentence, " I can count one, two, three, 
 four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten/^ or other 
 sentences of a similar character. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 TEACHING HOW TO RECOGNIZE VISIBLE LANGUAGE 
 
 When the pupils have been led to realize that the 
 language they use orally may be represented in vis- 
 ible form as explained in Chapter 11, the teacher 
 has only two things to accomplish in training them 
 to recognize language in its visible form : — 
 
 1. She must teach the process of combining sounds 
 to form words. 
 
 2. She must teach the sounds and powers of the 
 letters, and the sounds of vowels united as diph- 
 thongs, and such combinations of consonants as th, 
 and ng. 
 
 All the lessons and exercises of the whole process 
 of learning to recognize visible language, (what is 
 usually spoken of as ^*^ learning to read/^) should be 
 given with the view of accomplishing one or both of 
 these purposes: — to reveal new letter symbols and 
 associate them with what they say, and to develop 
 the power of automatic combination of sounds. It 
 is of the utmost importance that teachers should 
 understand this fact definitely, and remember it 
 always, in the preparation of the work for their 
 pupils both at the blackboard and at their seats, but 
 especially at the blackboard. If the teacher under- 
 stands this clearly and never forgets it while pre- 
 paring her lessons, it will make her work definite, 
 and purposeful, and effective. 
 
 73 
 
74 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 The supreme aim in the work of learning to recog- 
 nize visible language is to lead the child in the right 
 processes of making the association of the proper 
 sounds with their corresponding letter symbols cer- 
 tain, and to make sound combination automatic. 
 Both processes are simple, so simple, that a bright 
 child eight or nine years of age can readily learn to 
 read in a week, and an average child of that age will 
 do so in a month, if properly taught. The process of 
 combining sounds into words may be taught in a 
 single lesson, and it should be the first lesson given. 
 Learning the sounds of the letters will be an inci- 
 dental part of the work and takes very little time. 
 Nearly the whole of the time that has to be spent in 
 learning to recognize visible language has to be de- 
 voted to practices for the purpose of securing auto- 
 matic and rapid power to associate correct sounds 
 with the letters, and unite these sounds into words. 
 The new things that the child has to learn are very 
 few, and the new power is easily understood. The 
 real work of learning to read consists in practice to 
 make word recognition automatic, and the teacher's 
 ability is shown by giving great variety to the prac- 
 tices, by adapting them to the child's nature in the 
 form of games and problems, and by taking them in 
 the proper logical order. 
 
 The First Step — Comlination of Sounds 
 
 The combination of sounds, although it is the 
 greatest step in learning to read, is really a very easy 
 one for the children. It may be made a very inter- 
 esting game for them. The teacher should begin 
 somewhat as follows; '^ Point to the boy or girl 
 whose name I say." She should then sound the 
 words :^ S-a-m, N-e-d, K-a-te, T-o-m, N-e-11, etc. 
 
TEACHING TO READ 75 
 
 The letters should not be named, the sounds alone 
 should be given. The words should be sounded 
 slowly; the pauses made between the sounds of the 
 letters being at first very short. If no one catches 
 the name, it should be sounded again, and if neces- 
 sary the pauses between the letter sounds should be 
 made shorter, until the word is said very slowly with 
 little, if any, pauses between the letters. " Sam ^^ 
 is a good word to begin with, because the sound of 
 each letter may be continued for a time. This can 
 be done with any vowel, but not with all the conso- 
 nants. 
 
 When the light breaks in upon the children, and 
 they find that they can tell the name with the sounds 
 separated, the most difficult step in learning to read 
 has been taken. Gradually the pauses between the 
 letters should be lengthened and in a few minutes 
 the children have made two important discoveries. 
 They have found out that what seemed to be one 
 sound in their language is really made up of dif- 
 ferent sounds united in proper order; and they have 
 also learned that they can combine two or more 
 sounds into one word. A third step may then be 
 taken by allowing the children, in turn, to pronounce 
 the names slowly and separate them into their ele- 
 mental sounds. The teacher should suggest the 
 names at first and choose easy words of not more 
 than three letters. The same names that were used 
 by the teacher in the first part of the exercise will 
 be perfectly appropriate for the pupils, and each 
 pupil may practice in turn on each word. The chil- 
 dren should then in turn sound names chosen by 
 themselves with pauses between the sounds. Words 
 of four sounds may be used, when words of three 
 sounds have been practised until the pupils can read- 
 
76 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 ily combine the sounds to form the word or analyze 
 the words into its component sounds. In a few min- 
 utes a new class of a dozen children will be intensely 
 interested in this game^, if it is conducted in a proper 
 manner, and will be enjoying it thoroughly, while 
 they are at the same time laying the foundations for 
 the most essential powers in learning to read. 
 
 The game may be varied by saying : " Do what I 
 tell you — s-i-t, r-u-n, h-u-m, s-i-n-g, s-t-a-n-d, sh-ou-t, 
 etc./^ or '' Hold up what I tell you — b-oo-k^ s-l-a-te, 
 p-e-n, etc. ; ^^ or " Point where I tell you — u-p, 
 d-ow-n, ou-t, etc.^' In the same way the teacher 
 and pupils may sound the names of things in the 
 room to see who can first find the thing named, 
 and finally the teacher may sound with increasingly 
 longer pauses any words commonly used by children 
 and closely related to their experiences, and the 
 pupils may also test their own power to give the 
 sounds of any words they choose separately while 
 their fellow pupils try to decide what the words are. 
 
 One lesson of this character will be sufficient for 
 bright pupils, but it is better to give a few short re- 
 views with similar games so that all may become 
 fairly proficient in them. The pupils should be able 
 to recognize words quickly, when their elements are 
 sounded separately at intervals, before any letter 
 forms are associated in their minds with these 
 sounds. 
 
 The Second Step — Associating Letter Forms with 
 Their Sounds 
 
 When the process of combining sounds has been 
 made clear to the children there is only one more 
 step in the recognition of visible language, which is 
 to give them the letter symbols for the sounds they 
 
TEACHING TO READ 77 
 
 tave already been making and combining. When a 
 child can combine the distinct sounds S-a-m into 
 the word Sam^ and separate the word Sam into its 
 three elements in the order of their occurrence in the 
 word quickly and definitely, he is ready to receive in 
 one lesson the letter forms that represent these three 
 elements in visible language. 
 
 After first explaining to the children that she is 
 going to teach them to make the letters that repre- 
 sent the sounds they have been making she should 
 ask them all together to make the different sounds 
 in '' Sam/^ and then to make the first sound and 
 prolong it. She should give an illustration of what 
 she wishes them to do. In fact most of her revela- 
 tions in taking new steps should be made by illustra- 
 tion and not by verbal explanation. When they have 
 prolonged the first sound, the letter " s '^ should be 
 written on the blackboard several times slowly, and 
 the pupils should watch carefully while the writing 
 is being done. The teacher should tell them that she 
 is making the picture of the little boy that says the 
 sound they have been making. Wh^n they think they 
 can make it they should be allowed to try to do so, 
 first on the blackboard and then on their paper or 
 slates. They should not be expected to make their 
 letters very accurately at first. The teacher should be 
 satisfied when they know how the letter is made. 
 The power to make the letters accurately will re- 
 quire practice. The letters made by the teacher 
 should be made correctly, and she should watch care- 
 fully to see that each child begins to make each letter 
 at the proper place; but she should not expect per- 
 fection of form before she proceeds, and she should 
 most carefully avoid making individual criticisms of 
 the writing done by the pupils. She should make 
 
78 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 the letter again on the blackboard^ if there is any 
 real error to be set rights or she may ask one of the 
 children to make it on the blackboard. The other 
 children will watch with more interest while one of 
 their classmates is making it. It is practice that is 
 necessary to enable the muscles of the arm and 
 fingers to produce in visible form the letter forms in 
 the child's mind, not more explanations. When a 
 boy who is learning to skate falls he does not need a 
 lecture on how to maintain his centre of gravity 
 above the base of support, nor will it do him any 
 good to tell him he must not lean forward, nor back- 
 ward, nor to either side. He knows how he should 
 go, and he needs practice in order to be able to do 
 what he wishes to do. Many teachers destroy the in- 
 terest of the children both in writing and reading by 
 persistently criticising the form of the letters they 
 make when they are learning to read. The teacher 
 should note general errors if there be any in the writ- 
 ing for a future lesson in writing, but she should 
 absolutely avoid reference to them during the read- 
 ing lesson. She should be satisfied fully at first if 
 the child writes so clearly that she can tell the dif- 
 ference between s and m, and if she can be sure what 
 the child meant to write. The fact that his teacher 
 reads his writing and appears pleased with it, will be 
 the best inducement to lead a child to write more, 
 and by much writing he will learn to write, if his 
 teacher gives him the proper conception of the letter 
 forms. 
 
 When ^^ s ^' has been made and the children have 
 learned that this little boy says the first sound of 
 ^^ Sam/' the teacher should proceed with the second 
 and third sounds as she did with the first, and in a 
 few minutes, — surprisingly few, if they have had the 
 
TEACHING TO READ 79 
 
 necessary practice orally in combining sounds to 
 form words, and in separating words into their 
 elementary sounds — they will be able to make the 
 letters that say the three sounds in Sam. They knew 
 the sounds before, now they know the two boys and 
 the girl that make them. They have had a great 
 revelation, but a greater one awaits them. " Write 
 Sam,^' the teacher says, after they have been told that 
 to wTite a word they have merely to separate the word 
 into its sounds, speaking it very slowly, and write the 
 boy or girl that says each sound as they make it. As 
 soon as they are told to write " Sam '^ each pupil 
 begins to say the first sound and holds it till he 
 recognizes it. When they know what the first sound 
 is they make the boy that says that sound. They 
 sound the next part of the word in the same way and 
 write the girl that says that sound, and so on with 
 the last sound and its representative. They have 
 gained a new power. They can make one word of 
 their oral language visible. After this achievement, 
 the teacher should say, '' Write ma/^ Some of them 
 will hesitate, most average children will begin to 
 sound the word slowly and write the letters that say 
 the sounds they make. Even if none of the pupils 
 started to do so the teacher may set them all to work 
 by saying '' Sound the word ' Ma ^ slowly, and make 
 the letters that say what you say.^^ After " ma '"^ 
 the teacher should give the words " am ^' and 
 " mam ^' which they may be led to write as they have 
 written " Sam ^^ and " ma/^ Thus they learn the 
 last step in the great revelation, which is that they 
 do not need a new set of letters for every word, but 
 that the same letters may be used to write many 
 words. 
 
 " S/' " a/^ and " m/' may be taught and used in 
 
80 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 one lesson, after the proper preliminary training in 
 vocal combination and vocal analysis. At the begin- 
 ning of the next lesson, the teacher should give the 
 pupils, as eye problems, the words they made in the 
 first lesson as ear problems, by writing, " ma,'^ 
 " Sam,^^ '' mam,^^ and " am ^^ on the blackboard that 
 the pupils may tell what the words are. In doing so 
 they have to do nothing new. They have been 
 trained and practised already in vocal combination. 
 They have now merely to say each for himself what 
 the letters say in turn and combine the sounds thus 
 made in the order in which they are made, and they 
 have the word they are trying to recognize. The 
 teacher may at first have to guide the little ones in 
 taking this step, but once it is taken, the pupil is able 
 to recognize visible language made out of the letter 
 elements with which he is acquainted. He does it 
 slowly, and by conscious effort, but he can do it in- 
 dependently. He needs practice, but he has the 
 golden key to literature, and practice will enable him 
 to open all her doors. 
 
 When the pupils are able to use ^^ s,'^ ^^ a," and 
 '' m ^'' in both ear problems and eye problems, in 
 writing the words that can be made with them when 
 they are sounded, and in reading them when they are 
 written, a new letter form should be taught. As a 
 new tool should never be given to a child till he is 
 conscious of the need of it, so a new letter form 
 should not be given to a child till he has been made 
 conscious of the need of it. '' Write Sam ! ^^ " Write 
 ma ! '' " Write am ! '' " Write mam ! '' These four 
 problems have been given and solved, as a prepara- 
 tion for the next step. " Write sat," may be given 
 as the next problem. Each child will start as usual 
 to sound the first part and make the letter that says 
 
TEACHING TO READ 81 
 
 that sound. In this way they get " sa — /^ but when 
 they make the last sound in " sat '^ they can go no 
 further. They make the sound correctly, but they 
 have no visible symbol for it. They turn to the 
 teacher, some laughingly, some hopelessly. Their 
 faces reveal their dilemma. " Do you not know the 
 boy that says that sound ? ^^ Would you like to meet 
 the boy that says it ? ^^ Of course they would. 
 ^^ Here he is, then. Watch me make his picture '^ ; 
 and " t '^' is added to the little family who are going 
 to help the children to read. He at once fills his 
 place at the end of '' sat.'^ The teacher does not ask 
 the class to sound '' i^^ separately. She gives them 
 another word to write at once, another ear problem 
 requiring the use of " t.^^ " Write mat ! '' And after 
 ^' mat '^ is written, other ear problems follow. ^^ At,^' 
 ^' tat,^^ '' tam,'^ '^ tata,'^ may all be written now. 
 Each word that is written reviews the use of other 
 letters, and the complex process of sounding the 
 parts separately as they occur, and writing the letters 
 that say these sounds is becoming more simple. The 
 analysis of the ear problem becomes easier, the asso- 
 ciation of letter symbols with sounds becomes more 
 definite, and the forms of the letters become more 
 familiar and more accurate. 
 
 ^^ Write sap,^^ leads to the introduction of another 
 little friend who soon proves to be a very useful 
 friend indeed. The child has five little friends, four 
 boys and one girl, now. With these five friends he 
 can make, am, at, pa, ma, Sam, sat, sap, mat, map, 
 mam, pat, pap, tap, tat, tam, mamma, papa, tata, 
 mast, past, taps, pats, tats, tams, mats, maps, stamp, 
 stamps, — twenty-eight words in all. 
 
 No new letters should be taught until the children 
 have acquired a ready facility in solving both ear 
 
82 TEACHING TO BEAD 
 
 problems and eye problems with the five letters, s, 
 Si, m, t, and p. 
 
 When they can use these five letters rapidly and 
 definitely they have learned all they can ever know 
 of the processes of recognizing and writing visible 
 language. The problems will be extended and made 
 more difficult as they proceed by the introduction of 
 more boys and girls, and their combinations, but the 
 processes of solving the problems will remain the 
 same. The pupils now have two new powers and 
 they long to use them. Xew boys and girls may be 
 introduced rapidly now. Bright pupils of eight or 
 nine years of age will learn all the letter powers in 
 a few days, and use them in making and recognizing 
 words. When the race is wise enough to refrain from 
 teaching reading to children till they are about nine 
 years of age, there will be no more primers published. 
 There will be much more interesting: and attract- 
 tive literature published for children, and as soon as 
 they have acquired the powers of phonic analysis 
 and phonic combination, and have become acquainted 
 with the boys and girls that say these sounds of their 
 language, and can use them, they will begin to read 
 good stories. They will read at a moderate rate at 
 first, and they will do so by conscious effort; but 
 they will learn to read by reading after they have 
 mastered the fundamental and very simple processes 
 of recognizing and writing visible language. In a 
 surprisingly short time they will be able to read with- 
 out giving their primary attention to the recognition 
 of words. 
 
 The children should never be asked to tell the 
 name of a letter at any time, while they are learning 
 to read. The names of things should never be taught 
 by drill processes in any subject. No such mistake 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 83 
 
 is ever made outside of a school. Teachers who re- 
 member how the names of things are learned before 
 children go to school should never make the blunder 
 of trying to teach names by direct process or of ask- 
 ing children to repeat names as names. The child in 
 the home has learned the name of every article he 
 has used or seen used no matter how long or how 
 hard the name may be, without ever having had a 
 lesson on names of things, or being asked to name 
 them. He learned the names incidentally by hearing 
 them used in connection with the things. No mother 
 ever says to her child, " This is a spoon, dear ; now 
 tell mamma its name.^' " This is a chair.'^ " This 
 is a cup,^' and so on through the long range of 
 articles in the home. No intelligent man or woman 
 ever did such teaching outside of a school. It is 
 just as ridiculous in school as it would be in the 
 home, w^iether we ask for the names of rocks, or 
 trees, or flowers, or parts of plants, or of letters. 
 The child heard the names of things used inciden- 
 tally before he went to school. His parents said, 
 '' Pass me a knife,^^ or '' a plate,^^ or " a spoon,'^ or 
 "a cup of tea.^^ All the things used in the home 
 were named as they were used, when names were 
 necessary. They were never named for the sake of 
 teaching their names, yet the child knew their names 
 even before he could speak them. He learned the 
 names ^^ telephone,'^ ^^refrigerator,'' and ^^gasolier," 
 as easily as the names ^^ dog," ^Mamp," and ^^boot 
 Names should be learned in school in the same way 
 they are learned at home. 
 
 The teacher should use the names of letters just 
 as the names of things are used in the home, or in 
 everyday life anywhere. She should use the name 
 of a letter when she needs to use it to refer to it 
 
 J9 
 
84 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 in any way. She should say^ '' S always says/'' or 
 '' What does ' s ^ say ? ^^ or " Write V/' but she should 
 never point to a letter and say " What is the name 
 of this letter?'^ or ask for the name of a letter in 
 any other way. The pupils will learn the names of 
 the letters much more quickly if they are not asked 
 to learn them, and are not asked to give them, but 
 are just allowed to learn them as they have been ac- 
 customed to learn other names, by using them and 
 hearing them used. 
 
 Steps in Making Word Recognition Automatic 
 
 The aim of the teacher should be to enable the 
 pupils to recognize words automatically, that is with- 
 out conscious effort, so that they may be able to give 
 their primary attention to the thought when they 
 read. They cannot do this at once. Whether they 
 are solving ear problems or eye problems, they should 
 be allowed at first to sound the letters aloud in the 
 order in which they occur. They require to do this 
 to get clear perceptions of the sounds of the letters, 
 as a basis for definite conceptions, and in order that 
 they may learn to combine the sounds of the words 
 properly in eye problems, and find out what sounds 
 they have to represent visibly in ear problems. As 
 in teaching all other subjects in which it is possible 
 to begin by giving the pupils the early steps by per- 
 ceptions, the perceptive stage should be passed as 
 soon as possible. This is a universal law, and it 
 therefore applies in reading as in other subjects. 
 The child must begin by sounding aloud what the 
 letters say, but he should continue to sound them 
 aloud only until the letter is definitely associated 
 with what it says. 
 
 There are four natural stages in the process of de- 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 85 
 
 velopment from the sounding or perceptive stage to 
 the silent or automatically conceptive stage in either 
 ear or eye problems. These stages are in both 
 cases : 
 
 1. Sounding aloud what the letters say. 
 
 2. Whispering the sounds. 
 
 3. Consciously thinking the sounds. 
 
 4. Automatic association and recognition. 
 
 The third stage should be reached as quickly as 
 possible. Some children reach it in a few days. The 
 third stage passes into the fourth gradually as the 
 result of practice. 
 
 Problems 
 
 A problem that reaches the child's mind through 
 its ear may be called an ear problem, and one that 
 is grasped through the eye may be called an eye 
 problem. Word recognition has in the past been 
 learned almost entirely through the eye, but ear prob- 
 lems are much more effective in aiding the child to 
 associate the letters with what they say than eye 
 problems. The child has more to do in solving an 
 ear problem than an eye problem. He has to separate 
 the word to be written into its elements by sounding 
 it ; he has to decide what letters '' say the sounds ^^ 
 as he makes them; and he has to write the letters 
 in their proper order. This makes the association 
 of the letter with its sounds very definite. There is 
 no other method of fixing facts, or principles, or 
 associations in the memory that is so effective as using 
 the hand to work out or represent them. When the 
 mind of a child has to guide the hand, the intellectual 
 effort must be definite, and the result on the memory 
 is more positive and more lasting than if no 
 productive or constructive effort is made. Ear prob- 
 
86 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 lems are of great value, too, because children are 
 made happy by the ability to write words themselves. 
 The teacher may use the child's joyous pride in the 
 acquisition of this power to sustain and develop his 
 interest in reading, spelling, and writing so that these 
 studies never become wearisome. 
 
 Ear problems should precede eye problems, not 
 only in preparing the children for phonic combina- 
 tion and phonic analysis, but in the work of defining 
 in the child^s mind the association between each new 
 letter and what it says. When each new letter is in- 
 troduced it should be used first in solving ear prob- 
 lems. The need of the new letter can best be revealed 
 by giving an ear problem that cannot be solved with- 
 out it, that is a word that cannot be written with the 
 letters already known. When the pupils find a sound 
 for which they have no letter representative they are 
 ready for the new boy or girl letter. In the early 
 stages of learning to recognize visible language most 
 of the teaching done in class at the blackboard should 
 be done by ear problems. 
 
 Eye problems are simply problems in recognizing 
 words or sentences that are new to the children, and 
 translating them into oral language. In ear problems 
 the pupils make visible language to correspond with 
 the oral language used by the teacher. In eye prob- 
 lems the pupils use oral language to correspond with 
 the visible language made or shown by the teacher. 
 Eye problems should be given to the children both 
 when they are out in class, and when they are at their 
 seats, as soon as they are far enough advanced to be 
 able to try to read silently from cards or books, con- 
 taining suitable reading matter for them. 
 
 A great variety of problems may be given to the 
 pupils for work at their seats even in the very early 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 87 
 
 stages of their progress in word making and word 
 recognition. The following are illustrations of many 
 problems that may be given for seat work: 
 
 Make as many words as you can with these let- 
 ters — a, 0, m, p, t, s, and be able to use each word 
 in speaking to the class, if called upon to do so. 
 
 Make as many words as you can beginning with 
 m, or p, or s, or any other letter. 
 
 Make as many words as you can beginning or end- 
 ing with st, sh, or any other combination. 
 
 Fill in the blanks to make as many words as pos- 
 sible — m — p, s — p, p — t, r — sh, or te — , ne — , fa — , 
 or — nd, — sh, — rt. , 
 
 There is practically no limit to the variations that 
 may be made of each problem for work, while the 
 pupils are at their seats. 
 
 When pupils are fairly well advanced a good exer- 
 cise for seat work is to start them with a word, say 
 '' corn/^ and ask them to make as many words as 
 possible by changing one letter at a time in consecu- 
 tive order, for instance, corn, born, barn, bars, cars, 
 card, hard, hand, band, bend, lend, mend, send, sent, 
 tent, tens, hens, etc. When they are far enough ad- 
 vanced this problem may be given still more definitely 
 by saying " Change ' corn ^ to ' bend ^ with as few 
 changes as possible.^^ 
 
 In the early stages of the work of learning to 
 read the problems may be given in the form of in- 
 teresting games which will give the children oppor- 
 tunities for amusement while they are learning to 
 make and recognize words. Each pupil may be made 
 to personate a letter by having it written on a slate 
 which he holds in front of his breast. If slates are 
 not used the teacher may have a set of cards with the 
 letters painted on them, to hang around the necks 
 
88 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 of the children, or to be fastened in front of them. 
 The following are among the many ways in which 
 ingenious teachers may use this method of assigning 
 problems in reading: — 
 
 1. Pupils stand in a row, teacher names those who 
 are to step out, they face the class as they are called 
 out, and the pupils name the w^ord made by the let- 
 ters on their slates. 
 
 2. Exactly the same as (1), only that pupils in 
 turn do the w^ork of the teacher. 
 
 3. Same as (1) or (2) with the understanding 
 that all those called out stand with their backs to 
 the class until the word is completed, and turn 
 around for a few seconds in the order of the letters 
 of the word. The pupils see the letters in order and 
 only one at a time. 
 
 4. Exactly as in (3), only instead of turning one 
 at a time the pupils forming the word turn at once 
 and turn again in a few seconds, the teacher indi- 
 cating the time, and shortening it as the pupils ad- 
 vance. 
 
 5. Same as (4), but the class turns instead of the 
 pupils forming the word. They have their backs 
 turned to the word until it is ready. 
 
 6. Same as (5), but the teacher writes the word 
 on the board instead of forming it with pupils. 
 
 7. Pupils change the word by sending one more 
 letter pupil to the front. 
 
 8. Pupils change the word by sending one pupil 
 
 9. Pupils change the word by rearranging the pu- 
 pils already in the word. 
 
 10. Pupils change the word by sending one pupil 
 to the class and substituting another in his place. 
 (More than one may be changed). 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 89 
 
 11. Teacher names a word and calls on a pupil to 
 bring out the right pupils to make the word. 
 
 12. Teacher names a word and pupils come them- 
 selves in the proper order to make the word. 
 
 13. Two or more pupils may be given the same let- 
 ter. The teacher names a word — say " mat.''' As 
 soon as the teacher says '' one/^ every child with " m " 
 on his slate steps out from the line and turns around. 
 At ''two'' those with ''a'' and at ''three'' those 
 with " t " step out and turn round. 
 
 14. Same as (13)^ except that the "m" children 
 should select the children that represent the next let- 
 ter, and they in turn should choose the children who 
 are to follow them. 
 
 The most tactful teacher will have greatest variety 
 in problems for her class. 
 
 These games may be played with a whole class and 
 several pupils may represent the same letter. When 
 the teacher or the pupil who is leading names a 
 word the pupils stand up in turn as the teacher 
 says — " one/' " two," " three," etc. Pupils who fail 
 to stand promptly when theirs is the next letter, or 
 who stand when they should not do so, may be put 
 out of the game. Sides may be chosen for matches, 
 and the pupils may raise their hands or step a pace 
 forward when they are required to represent the next 
 letter. 
 
 Suggestions Regarding the Best Way to Introduce 
 
 the Letters to the Children 
 
 1. As has been already explained the pupils should 
 never be asked to give the names of the letters. The 
 names should be used by both teacher and children, 
 but there should be no drill on the names of the let- 
 ters'. See page 83. 
 
90 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 2. The teacher should use the expression ^' M 
 says— '^ ''S says—'' or "What does 'm' say?'' 
 " What does ' s ^ say ? ^'' and so on with the other let- 
 ters. 
 
 3. Each teacher should investigate for herself to 
 decide what the letters really say, by sounding short 
 words very slowly and noting carefully what part of 
 the oral word is represented by each letter or com- 
 bination of letters. The words chosen for this prac- 
 tice should have no silent letters. 
 
 4. It will be of great service to the teacher to make 
 a classified list of the consonant sounds. The defini- 
 tion commonly given of a consonant is a very mis- 
 leading and very absurd definition. " To say that 
 a consonant is a letter that cannot be sounded with- 
 out the aid of a vowel " is clearly incorrect. The 
 letters p, t, and k make no sound and do not demand 
 even an expulsion of breath except at the end of 
 a word. But even if the statement made in the defi- 
 nition were correct it is manifestly a weak way to 
 define anything by telling what it does not do. The 
 proper way to define anything is to state its class 
 and explain what it really does — what its function 
 is — so that it may be distinguished from others of 
 its class. The use of the consonants is to indicate 
 organic formations in using oral language. Oral 
 language is produced by changing the position of the 
 vocal organs so as to modify the stream of breath 
 as it passes from the lungs either as breath only, 
 or as breath made into sound. The vowels repre- 
 sent the various sounds; the consonants indicate the 
 ways in which the organs are placed to stop the 
 stream of sound or breath either partially or entirely, 
 or to direct it through the nose. A perfect alpha- 
 bet would indicate the organic formation by the form 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 91 
 
 of the letters^ and indicate also whether the stream 
 from the lungs is breath only or voice, and whether 
 the stream has to be stopped fully or partially, and, 
 if only partially, whether the escape of breath or 
 voice is through the mouth or the nose. Such an 
 alphabet was invented by Professor Alexander Mel- 
 ville Bell and has been used with great success in 
 training deaf mutes to use oral language. 
 
 The simplest scheme for making a classification 
 of the consonants that will be of most service for 
 teaching purposes is to divide them first into sound 
 and breath consonants. Any teacher can do this; 
 and it will be a most interesting lesson for the pu- 
 pils of the higher grades to co-operate with the 
 teacher in deciding to which class each consonant 
 belongs. The decision may be arrived at unerringly 
 by choosing short words and sounding them slowly 
 and deciding in regard to each consonant in turn. 
 
 When all the consonants have been classified into 
 sound modifiers or breath modifiers, they should be 
 further subdivided into those which stop the stream 
 of sound or of breath partially, and those which stop 
 the stream of sound or of breath completely. As 
 those which stop the stream only partially may be 
 continued as long as a single exhalation continues 
 they may be named " continuous ^' to distinguish 
 them from those that we cannot continue to make 
 because the passage of air from our lungs becomes 
 completely stopped by the organic construction which 
 they demand. The letters m, n, etc., may be sounded 
 as long as we can continue to breathe out; such let- 
 ters as b, d, etc., can be sounded only a short time 
 as there is no way of escape for the sound during 
 the organic formation which they represent. When 
 the letters have been classified as recommended the 
 
93 
 
 TEACHIXG TO BEAD 
 
 teacher should record them for her guidance in a 
 table as follows: 
 
 Sound. 
 
 Breath. 
 
 Continuous. 
 
 Stopped. 
 
 Continuous. 
 
 Stopped. 
 
 m 
 
 b 
 
 s 
 
 t 
 
 It will be exceedingly interesting to construct a 
 table of pairs of consonants in which the organic con- 
 struction of each pair is exactly the same, the dif- 
 ference between the letters in each pair being that 
 in one case only breath is used and in the other 
 case sound. In f and v, s and z, and similar pairs 
 the organic construction is the same. The teacher 
 may prove this to herself by first making the power 
 of " f '^ and then without in any way changing the 
 organic construction^ making a sound with her vocal 
 chords. If she does so she will find that she is mak- 
 ing the sound of " v." The digraph '^ th ^^ will give 
 a fine illustration of the change made by retaining 
 the same organic formation and changing from 
 breath to sound if the teacher will first start to pro- 
 nounce " think/^ and after dwelling on the " th ^^ in 
 this word, will without changing the organic forma- 
 tion say " though.^' The only change made in the 
 '' th '^ is the formation of a sound with her vocal 
 chords while she retains the first organic formation. 
 
 The complete tables are omitted in both cases be- 
 cause the real knowledge of the subject will come to 
 the teacher by constructing the tables instead of by 
 committing to memory tables constructed by others. 
 
TEACHING TO READ 93 
 
 This law should be followed by teachers in teaching 
 other subjects in which tables have to be used, when 
 they may be formed by the experimentation or in- 
 vestigation of the pupils. The writer has tested 
 many classes of students in training classes by ask- 
 ing them to construct tables as directed, and in every 
 case with excellent results. One of the most grati- 
 fying results of such tests is the fact that in every 
 test the students had difficulty in deciding in regard 
 to "h/'' and in every case some of them had suffi- 
 cient faith in the result of their investigations to de- 
 cide definitely that ^^ h is not a consonant.^^ Having 
 made the distinction between '' sound '^ and ^^ breath ^^ 
 consonants clear, by experiments and the construc- 
 tion of tables, it is a very simple matter to lead a 
 class of students to discover for themselves that ^' h '^ 
 is a breath vowel as Professor Alexander Melville 
 Bell decided long ago. 
 
 5. In beginning to teach the recognition of visible 
 language it is better to use continuous consonants 
 because the children can continue to make the sounds 
 or powders of the letters long enough to get clear per- 
 ceptions in regard to them. The importance of this 
 is manifest. Clear perceptions form the basis of all 
 real progress. Indefinite perceptions give indefinite 
 conceptions, and trying to deal with indefinite con- 
 ceptions in any subject must discourage and confuse 
 the child, and mav weaken his intellectual power for 
 life. 
 
 6. One of the commonest mistakes made in teach- 
 ing by the phonic method is to make a sound or al- 
 low the breath to escape before the organic forma- 
 tion for a letter is complete. Several books pub- 
 lished in England by distinguished educators con- 
 demn the phonic method because they say " it is but 
 
94 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 a clumsy alphabetic method in which the letters are 
 called um^ pu, tu, etc., instead of em, pee, tee, etc/' 
 In three works on teaching, this objection is given 
 and in each case the same letters are used as il- 
 lustrations. This leads to the conclusion that one 
 man wrote the objection and the others copied it. 
 Three thinkers may separately discover the same 
 truth, but it is highly improbable that three men 
 ever separately reached the same conclusion, when 
 it was an error, and used exactly the same illustra- 
 tions as a basis for their wrong conclusions. Un- 
 fortunately for the phonic method many teachers at 
 first tried to sound the letters and drill on them sep- 
 arately. This must lead to incorrect speaking and 
 improper articulation. The consonants make no 
 sound whatever either before the organic formations 
 they represent are made, or after these formations 
 are changed. The breath consonants make no sound 
 even while the organic formations last. It is an 
 error to say um or mu for ^^ m ^\ it is a gross error 
 to say ut or tu for "t^^ because ^H'^ makes no 
 sound. ^^ Sound ^' consonants do modify sounds, and 
 the sound of ^^ m '' for example should escape 
 through the nose while the organic formation it 
 represents is continued, but neither before nor after 
 the organic formation. In the stopped sound con- 
 sonants, such as ^^ b ^' and ^' d ^\ the sound cannot 
 escape but is formed in the larynx. The teacher 
 must from the first carefully train the children so 
 that they will make no sound and allow no breath to 
 escape when sounding or making a letter, either be- 
 fore the organic formation is made, or after it has 
 been changed. Each letter should act only while its 
 organic construction continues, and it should have 
 no effect whatever at any other time, except when it 
 
TEACHING TO READ 95 
 
 is the final letter, in which case there is a slight ex- 
 pulsion of breath in some cases. To make any sound 
 before the organic construction for a letter begins, 
 or after it ceases, makes it very difficult to teach the 
 process of phonic combination so as to unite letter 
 sounds to form words. The children are not likely 
 to form any bad habits of giving extra sounds or 
 too much breath in connection with the consonants, 
 unless the teacher drills on the sounds as individual 
 sounds. 
 
 The children should be taught to make the conso- 
 nants say just what they say in combination with 
 other letters to make the words of which they form 
 a part. The failure to do this has been one of the 
 chief causes of difficulty and lack of success in using 
 the phonic method. Teachers must be always on the 
 alert to prevent the habit of using either sound or 
 breath before the organic formation of the letter 
 is made or after it ceases. Some teachers have dif- 
 ficulty in cultivating their own habit of definite ear 
 attention so thoroughly as to notice and correct errors 
 in this department of their work. 
 
 In speaking, the organic contact necessary to form 
 the consonants is instantaneous. Oral speech is a 
 very remarkable illustration of the perfection of the 
 human organism, if we consider the number of 
 changes made in the positions of the vocal organs in 
 an hour. The number of changes necessary to utter 
 a single sentence, and the ease and accuracy with 
 which they are made are especially worthy of note. 
 One of the clearly defined purposes of the teacher 
 should be to train the children to make the organic 
 consonant formations continue for the shortest pos- 
 sible time. This will be of great assistance in acquir- 
 ing the power of phonic combination. The sound or 
 
96 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 breath power of a consonant should be made long 
 enough for the children to get a clear perception of 
 it, when it is first introduced to them; but in using 
 it from the first the aim should be to make it for 
 the shortest possible time in which the formation 
 can be definitely made. There should, of course, be 
 no hurry in speaking, and no part of a word that 
 says anything should be omitted or partially sounded 
 or made. Every part should be uttered, and every 
 formation should be made definitely, especially the 
 last consonant sound in the word, but to prolong 
 the consonantal effects destroys the perfection of oral 
 speech. The failure to form the organic construc- 
 tions represented by consonants definitely and ac- 
 curately causes defects in enunciation; to continue 
 the organic constructions too long causes improper 
 pronunciation. 
 
 To dwell too long on the organic construction of 
 consonants may cause the habit of stammering. 
 Nearly all stammering is caused by continuing the 
 formation of the stopped consonants too long. Stam- 
 mering caused by the continuous consonants is 
 usually much more easily cured than stammering 
 caused by the stopped consonants, because the sound 
 or breath escapes during the organic lock of stam- 
 mering in the case of the continuous consonants, 
 while in the case of stopped consonants the stream 
 of sound or breath accumulates and helps to con- 
 tinue the organic lock. The first thing to do in 
 curing stammering is to train the stammerer to make 
 his organic formation automatically instantaneous, 
 and to stop the habit of trying to break by extra 
 pressure the organic locks that cause stammering. 
 The stammering lock is caused either by imperfect 
 breathing power, a weak nervous system, or lack of 
 
TEACHING TO READ 97 
 
 deflniteness in the brain action necessary in think- 
 ing. Very few children, and indeed very few adults 
 can either inhale or exhale properly when breathing. 
 All children may be trained, and should be trained, 
 to breathe deeply and to inhale and exhale smoothly 
 without spasmodic action of the diaphragm. This 
 may be done easily and successfully, and a healthy 
 child who has been trained to say " ah ^' for forty 
 seconds with a single breath effort may be cured of 
 stammering in a very short time. All he requires is 
 specific practice to make his organic formation auto- 
 matically rapid in making a few of the consonants. 
 The child whose thinking is not done definitely stam- 
 mers because his brain does not send messages with 
 sufficient clearness to the vocal organs. He must 
 be trained to think definitely. The child whose 
 nervous system is not in good order stammers be- 
 cause the communication between the organs of 
 speech and the brain and neurologic centres is not 
 properly carried on. The imperfection is some- 
 times the result of an accident in early childhood, , 
 and is often caused by a poor condition of general 
 health with poor nerve nutrition. Children who 
 stammer from this cause need exercise in the open 
 air and an improved diet. They may require medi- 
 cal treatment. They should certainly be examined 
 by a wise physician. But whatever the remote, or 
 organic cause of stammering may be, the immediate 
 cause is a lock in the organic construction corre- 
 sponding to some of the consonants, the worst of 
 them being usually the stopped consonants. The 
 teacher should, therefore, teach the children to make 
 the organic formation corresponding to the conso- 
 nants quickly as well as definitely. 
 
 7. For reasons already explained, the teacher 
 
98 TEACHmO TO READ 
 
 should, so far as possible, associate a real personality 
 with each letter. She should speak of a new conso- 
 nant as " a new little boy/' and of a new vowel as 
 " a new little girl.'' The letters as they are learned 
 may be placed in a house or in a garden which may 
 be represented by a rectangle drawn in an upper cor- 
 ner of the blackboard, so that they may live in the 
 house or play in the garden. When a new letter is 
 to be introduced, a friend of his, one of the letters 
 already known, may be brought out to meet him, and 
 the class may salute the new letter by saying what 
 the old letter says, and the teacher may respond by 
 saying what the new letter says, after which they 
 are both brought into the garden or house, and the 
 new letter is introduced to the others, the teacher per- 
 sonating the old letters as they are introduced, and 
 the pupils personating the new letter. The children 
 will learn the powers of the letters more definitely 
 and more rapidly by means of some such game as 
 this, than by any other process, especially by any 
 process of drill. 
 
 8. As soon as a letter has been introduced to the 
 old letters it should be used. The teacher should 
 first give ear problems and then eye problems in- 
 volving the use of the new letter, and then the pupils 
 themselves should in turn be allowed to think of 
 short words that require the new letter to speak in 
 order to form them, and the rest of the class should 
 write these words. With any means such as has been 
 described of arousing and retaining a vital interest 
 on the part of the pupils the work of learning what 
 a letter says is very easy and takes only a very short 
 time. A more realistic association may be given in 
 the case of some of the letters by associating their 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 99 
 
 sounds with what certain other things say, when the 
 children themselves can suggest the similarity. 
 
 In teaching the forms of the letters the same gen- 
 eral principle should be applied as far as possible. 
 The letters should be spoken of as individuals, and 
 their parts associated with some common things. 
 For instance " m " may be a boy with three legs, or 
 it may be made with three canes ; " n ^^ a boy with 
 two legs or made with two canes; the crossing of 
 " t '^ may be its necktie; and so on. 
 
 9. When the family of letters becomes too large 
 for one house they may be placed in different houses. 
 Letters that exactly correspond in organic formation 
 as " t ^' and " d '' may be placed in one house ; the 
 letters that are formed with the lips or lips and 
 teeth may be placed in another house, those made 
 by the tongue and teeth in another, those made at 
 the back of the mouth in another, and those that 
 send the stream of sound or breath through the nose 
 in another. 
 
 Some teachers keep each letter in a separate house 
 so that the children may play games in forming 
 w^ords. The teacher and the children in turn give 
 words to be made, and the pupils in turn take the 
 pointer and rap on the doors of the letters in the 
 proper order to make the words. The teacher, or 
 a selected pupil, writes the letters on the blackboard 
 in succession as they are called upon to form the 
 word. The game may be varied by allowing each 
 child to write the letter at whose house he rapped. 
 
 Some teachers cut out cardboard brownies to rep- 
 resent the letters, and make the letters on the bodies 
 of the brownies. The brownies with whom the chil- 
 dren are acquainted stand in a row above the black- 
 board, or in some other place, where they may be 
 
100 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 easily seen. The introduction of a new brownie may 
 be made a pleasing and interesting ceremony. The 
 vowels should, of course, be girl brownies. 
 
 10. Whether the letters are brownies, or ordinary 
 boys and girls, or just letters living in little houses 
 in a row at the top of the blackboard, the vowels 
 should be made in colored chalk to make the distinc- 
 tion more definite. 
 
 These suggestions are made as illustrations of the 
 plans that may be adopted with great advantage. 
 
 Methods of Taking Answers in Class 
 
 The teacher should carefully avoid taking answers 
 in such a way as to allow one pupil to lead or guide 
 another, or to make it possible for the slower pupils 
 to follow the lead of those that are brighter. In 
 harmony with the fundamental law of self-activity 
 each pupil should think and answer independently. 
 It will not do to let the names of words be spoken 
 aloud as soon as they are discovered, or the slower 
 pupils will get little development and they will be 
 trained to rely on others and to give as their own, 
 answers worked out by others. It is astonishing how 
 instantaneously pupils in a class will catch the an- 
 swer given by a leader in simultaneous answering. 
 
 When giving ear problems, slates are better than 
 paper for use by the children, but pads may be 
 used. The teacher simply says write " smart ^^ or 
 ^^ tramp,^^ or some word that contains only known 
 letters, and each child proceeds to write. When done 
 each child holds up his slate or pad, and the teacher 
 says " right,^^ or " wrong,'^ or marks with chalk or 
 pencil. The word should then be sounded slowly 
 with a pause after each sound to enable those who 
 were not right to suggest the proper letters to repre- 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 101 
 
 sent the sounds as they are made to form the word. 
 The marks are not given to classify the pupils, but 
 to the child they mean success and the teacher^s 
 recognition of it. These are two important elements 
 in keeping alive the " prospering ambition ^^ of chil- 
 dren. 
 
 In solving eye problems, the pupils should raise 
 their hands when they think they have solved the 
 problems given, and as the hands are raised the 
 teacher should step in front of each pupil, place an 
 open hand on each side of the child^s mouth to pre- 
 vent others hearing, and lean forward to allow the 
 child to whisper the word or sentence that has been 
 written on the board. A smile or the shaking of the 
 head will indicate the result to the child. 
 
 If wrong the child at once tries again to find 
 where he has gone wrong in either ear or eye prob- 
 lems. These exercises guided by a good teacher will 
 develop as much concentration of effort and enthu- 
 siasm as any exercises that can be given in school, not 
 excepting even the plays of the school-grounds. 
 
 It is of the highest importance in teaching all sub- 
 jects that the slower or backward children should re- 
 ceive more direct attention than those who are 
 quicker or more advanced. It is of great importance, 
 too, that the bright pupils shall not be held back 
 while the others are receiving special attention. No 
 child should be trained to work at a low rate of 
 speed, when he is capable of working at a high rate. 
 It is therefore a good plan, when about two-thirds 
 of the time of the reading lesson has passed, to give 
 either ear or eye problems rapidly and allow the 
 first pupils who give correct answers to go to their 
 seats, and proceed with other work which has been 
 assigned for them. If the class be large, two or 
 
102 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 three pupils may be sent to their seats by the solving 
 of each problem. In this way the teacher will soon 
 have the pupils left who need most guidance and 
 most practice^ and she will be able to discover the 
 special difficulties that have prevented the more back- 
 ward pupils from making more rapid progress. By 
 grading the problems to the standard of ability of 
 the slower pupils, by giving them a great deal of 
 practice, and by sympathetic encouragement, those 
 who may have difficulty in understanding the proc- 
 esses of word recognition may be aided in taking 
 the early steps and thus become independent read- 
 ers. 
 
 When the pupils have fairly mastered the proc- 
 esses of word recognition, it is a good plan to make 
 the tests given at the close of the lesson contribute 
 as much as possible to rapidity of recognition. 
 
 The pupils may be asked to stand with their 
 backs to the class till the word or sentence is written 
 on the board and to turn at a signal from the 
 teacher. 
 
 The pupils may be asked to go to sleep — to shut 
 their eyes — while the teacher writes the word or 
 sentence, and wake up at a signal. 
 
 A number of words or sentences may be written 
 on the board and covered with a curtain so that 
 as the curtain is raised one word or one sentence 
 may be exposed at a time. 
 
 An exceedingly good plan is to write the letters 
 one at a time in the order in which they occur in the 
 word, while the pupils are watching, and after allow- 
 ing each letter to remain on the board for a short 
 time to erase it before writing the next letter. This 
 develops a high degree of alertness of attention and 
 quickness of mental action. 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 103 
 
 The teacher may develop the same alertness and 
 quickness by taking a pointer and pointing to the 
 letters in their houses, or to the brownies in the 
 order in which they come in the words. This would 
 have to be done slowly at first, and only short words 
 should be used till the pupils have had considerable 
 practice. 
 
 The pupils will be delighted to have the oppor- 
 tunity of taking the pointer and rapping on the 
 doors of the letter houses to form words which they 
 wish to give as rapid eye problems to the rest of 
 the class. 
 
 It is an excellent plan when taking the class to 
 let the first two or three who answer correctly come 
 out of the class to assist the teacher in examining 
 the written work of the other pupils in ear prob- 
 lems, and in hearing the whispered answers of the 
 other members of the class when eye problems are 
 given. This is a capital exercise for those who are 
 called out; it saves time; and it is a stimulus for 
 all to work hard in order to secure the honor of 
 assisting the teacher. 
 
 Teaching the Vowels 
 
 The short sounds of the vowels should be the only 
 sounds taught while the pupils are taking the early 
 steps in reading. All the processes of recognizing 
 visible language may be taught and should be taught 
 with but one sound or power for each letter. It is 
 best to begin with only one vowel and to teach no 
 other until several consonants have been taught. The 
 best order to teach the vowels is a, o, e, i, u. This 
 order is suggested because the short sounds of " a '^ 
 and ^^ o '^ may be prolonged more easily and more 
 definitely than the short sounds of the other letters. 
 
104 TEACHING TO BEAD 
 
 In the case of " a ^^ the sound given should not 
 strictly speaking be the short sound but the sound of 
 ^' a '' in " ah/' The only sounds of the vowels that 
 it will be necessary to teach till the children can 
 read freely are the short sounds and the long sounds. 
 The children will recognize all the words of the 
 language^ if they are taught only the short and the 
 long sounds of the vowels. It is entirely erroneous 
 to assume that children should be learning how to 
 pronounce words when they are learning how to 
 recognize visible language. When the pupils are 
 older they should receive careful training in all the 
 sounds of the vowels and the diacritical marking of 
 the dictionary accepted as authority in the school 
 which they attend^, and absolutely correct use of 
 vowels should be insisted upon. Even from the first 
 day the pupils should have practice in correct pro- 
 nunciation of words commonly mispronounced. No 
 day of school life should ever pass without some 
 practice to improve the speech of the pupils by se- 
 curing greater accuracy of enunciation, and more 
 perfect clearness and pureness of vowel tone. The 
 teacher should not make a point of correcting each 
 child's errors as they are made. This course humil- 
 iates and discourages sensitive children. The mis- 
 takes should be noted, and lists of words including 
 the vowels that are commonly used incorrectly should 
 be practised by all the pupils during the time set 
 apart for this purpose. The teacher's own pronun- 
 ciation should be as perfect as possible, and the pu- 
 pils will learn to use vowels correctly by hearing 
 them used correctly. 
 
 But the process of learning to recognize visible 
 language, by whatever method the pupils are taught, 
 is not, and cannot, logically be made a process for 
 
TEACHING TO BEAD 105 
 
 teaching pupils to pronounce correctly. Pupils may, 
 of course, reveal their imperfections of speech dur- 
 ing a reading lesson^ as they may during a lesson 
 in arithmetic or any other subject, but it is just 
 as unwise to correct these imperfections during a 
 lesson in the recognition of visible language, as to do 
 so when the pupils are learning to add. The mis- 
 takes made in the use of language should be cor- 
 rected during the time set apart for language, and 
 the errors in pronunciation should be corrected dur- 
 ing the period set apart for pronunciation. 
 
 " Every lesson should be a language lesson." Yes ! 
 Every lesson should afford opportunities for the pu- 
 pils to use language orally or in writing or in both 
 ways, but to make every lesson a time for correcting 
 mistakes in the use of language interferes with the 
 progress of the pupils, not only in the subjects 
 being taught but in pronunciation and in the cor- 
 rect use of language. If when a child has read a 
 paragraph or stanza, he is told that he has given an 
 incorrect sound for '' a ^' in " fast,*' and " father," 
 and " aunt," and that he has used the anterior " c " 
 in '^ calm," instead of the posterior " c," and sounded 
 only one " r " in '' barrel," which forced him to use 
 the wrong sound of " a " in both '^ calm " and 
 ^^ barrel," and if he is asked to read his paragraph 
 or stanza again and make the corrections after the 
 correct sounds have been given to him, he is not 
 taught wisely either in reading or in pronunciation. 
 When he '' reads it again " he is not thinking of the 
 strength or beauty of the thought he has to express 
 and how to express it so as to make the clearest and 
 deepest impression. He is trying to remember the 
 shades of the sounds of '' a " and the correct way 
 to pronounce ^^calm" and ^'barrel." His power of 
 
106 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 thought expression is weakened, and his pronuncia- 
 tion, if improved at all, is improved in the least 
 effective way by such teaching. 
 
 When the child is learning to recognize visible 
 language it is unnecessary and unwise to make him 
 conscious of the fact that the vowels have so many 
 sounds and shades of sounds. The English boy, the 
 German boy, and the American boy give different 
 sounds to the vowels and in many cases different 
 powers to some of the consonants. The process of 
 learning to recognize visible language should not 
 be a process of training these three boys to give ex- 
 actly the same sounds to vowels, and the same 
 powers to the consonants. Learning to read is a 
 process of learning to recognize in visible form the 
 language already used orally. 
 
 In a new class of ten pupils beginning to learn 
 to read it is quite probable that no two of them give 
 exactly the same sound to " a ^' in " f ast.'^ It would 
 not help them in the slightest degree to recognize the 
 visible word " fast ^^ if they could all pronounce the 
 word correctly. It would be a total waste of time 
 for the teacher to try to make them all pronounce 
 ^^ fast '^ in the same way, so far as the recognition 
 of the visible word ^^ fast ^^ is concerned. The sound 
 of " ah ^^ that has been given to them will suggest 
 to each child the sound of " a ^' that he has been 
 accustomed to use in his oral language in pronounc- 
 ing ^^fast.^'' 
 
 In the process of learning to recognize visible 
 language two vowel sounds, the short sound and the 
 long sound, are all that are necessary to enable the 
 children to recognize all the words in their lan- 
 guage, and this is what the first stage of learning 
 to read really means. jSTearly all the primers that 
 
TEACHING TO READ 107 
 
 have been prepared have given a page to each vowel 
 sound, a page to each diphthong, and a page to each 
 peculiar combination of letters such as th, ng, tion^ 
 sion, etc. It may be wise to devote a lesson to each 
 peculiarity, but it is quite unnecessary to do so in 
 the case of the vowels and the diphthongs. 
 
 When the pupils have used the short vowel sounds 
 till they are able to recognize freely, and write quickly, 
 words in which short or kindred sounds are the only 
 vowel sounds used, they are ready for a lesson on 
 the long sounds. A single, short lesson is sufficient 
 to teach the long sounds of all the vowels. All that 
 is to be learned is contained in the single statement 
 which the teacher should make : " These little girls 
 sometimes say their own names.^^ A few illustra- 
 tions should be given, and then the pupils should be 
 told that when the girls have a " hat ^^ on, or a 
 '' shade '^ over them they '' say their own names.^' 
 The dash over the letter may be to the children a 
 '' hat ^^" or a ^^ shade.'^ It takes no longer to teach 
 that all the vowels ^^ say their own names ^^ some- 
 times than to teach that any one of them does so. 
 Indeed it is easier to teach that all the girls say 
 their own names when a '^ hat " or " shade ^^ is put 
 over them than to teach that one of them does so. 
 A general principle is more readily accepted than 
 a special rule. 
 
 The dash to indicate the long sound is easily made 
 by the teacher in eye problems. Even the dash re- 
 quires to be used for only a short time in practice. 
 The thought association enables the pupils to decide 
 whether the vowels say their own names or not. If 
 the teacher writes the sentence : " Sam^s hat is on 
 the table,'^ the children will need no mark over ^^ a '*' 
 in " table ^^ to enable them to pronounce it correctly 
 
108 TEACHING TO READ 
 
 after they have learned that the girls do not always 
 say the same thing. Indeed the most logical way to 
 lead the children to see that the vowels do not always 
 say the same thing is to give them short sentences 
 to read in which the vowels say more than one sound. 
 
 Some teachers prefer to write the vowels with 
 colored crayons when they say their own names. This 
 makes a good variety in eye problems, and eye prob- 
 lems are the only problems in which it is absolutely 
 necessary to use any method of distinguishing the 
 long sound from the other sounds. When the chil- 
 dren are writing the words it is not necessary to 
 indicate which sound the vowels have. The teacher 
 has indicated that by pronouncing the words. It 
 is only in eye problems that the marking of even 
 the long sound needs to be done, and even this should 
 not be continued long. 
 
 When the sounds of ^^ o ^'' in such words as " move ^^ 
 or '' love ^^ are met with it is only necessary to tell 
 the pupils that '' o ^^ sometimes says '' oo/' and at 
 other times speaks like '^ u.^^ It is even better to 
 let the children find out these facts for themselves 
 by writing simple sentences such as '^ Tom loves his 
 mamma.'^ The pupils will speedily find that the 
 long sound of ^^ o ^^ does not make the right word, 
 and they know what the word should be, because 
 the " 1 ^^ and '' v ^^ give the key to it. When the 
 pupils have clearly realized the fact that the letters 
 do not always say the same thing, and have had 
 considerable experience in using vowels with more 
 than one sound, a general statement that " a ^^ some- 
 times speaks for " e,'^ ^^ i ^^ some times speaks for 
 ^^ e,'^ '^ e " sometimes speaks for '^ a,^' or " o,^' and 
 " o '' sometimes speaks for " u,^^ will be sufficient to 
 account for the few words such as " said,'' " ma- 
 
TEACHINa TO READ 109 
 
 chine/' " eight/' '' sew/' and " love." The few un- 
 usual irregularities of the language need not be con- 
 sidered as difficulties. The children should be good 
 readers before they meet with them at all^ and when 
 they can read they will have to be pretty stupid to 
 pronounce " sew " with '' ew " as in '' new/^ or " ma- 
 chine " with the sound of long " i " in such a sen- 
 tence as "Jane sews her dresses with a sewing 
 machine/' or if they fail to pronounce " eight/' and 
 " again " correctly, when they are asked to read: 
 
 ^^ One, two, three, four, five, 
 I caught a hare alive ; 
 Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 
 I let him go again/"' 
 
 The fact is, as shown by experience, that the pu- 
 pils will read such sentences as these without being 
 conscious that " e," or " i/' or " a/' are saying any- 
 thing unusual, if they are able to read freely before 
 such irregularities are given them to read. There 
 are so few of these irregularities that the pupils may 
 be able to read nearly all of the words in our lan- 
 guage before they are introduced to words in which 
 the vowels speak for other vowels, or say anything 
 very peculiar. 
 
 Tlie Diphthongs 
 
 The diphthongs do not require a separate lesson 
 for each diphthong. Nearly all the necessary teach- 
 ing about diphthongs may be done in one or at most 
 two lessons. One lesson may be devoted to the com- 
 ing together of two girls w^hen only one of them 
 speaks. In improper diphthongs it will be found 
 that the first girl is usually the one that speaks. 
 The teacher may take a list of words such as sail, 
 pail, fail, rain, pain, gain, maid, paid, or hear, near, 
 
110 TEACHING TO BEAD 
 
 meat, seat, neat, bean, lean, read, lead, oar, soar, coat, 
 goat, coal, goal, moan, loan, hoe, etc., and by a series of 
 experiments lead the pupils to make two discoveries: 
 first, that in each case the first girl says her own 
 name, and second, that the second girl says nothing. 
 They may thus be led to make a general law, which 
 will have exceptions, that when two girls come to- 
 gether, if the second is silent the first usually says 
 her own name. They should in due time be sho\^n 
 that this is not always true by such examples as 
 head, meant, said, their, etc., but it will help them 
 to overcome more than half their difficulties with 
 diphthongs to learn that when two girls come to- 
 gether in the same syllable the second girl usually 
 says nothing and the first says her own name. They 
 may be shown in the same lesson that if the two 
 girls are in the same syllable or the same small word 
 the same rule is nearly always followed, by taking a 
 list of words such as: hat — hate, kit — kite, pet — 
 Pete, not — note, cut — cute, etc. In every such case 
 the second girl will say nothing, and the first will 
 say her own name. The pupils may be led to dis- 
 cover this in a few eases in which the teacher gives 
 hate, kite, Pete, note, cute, etc., as combined eye and 
 ear problems. For a time in using improper diph- 
 thongs or short words ending with " e ^^ silent it is 
 wise to draw the crayon through the silent letters, 
 when eye problems are given to the pupils. Silent 
 consonants may be marked in the same way. It is 
 not really necessary for the pupils to draw a line 
 through the silent vowels when solving ear prob- 
 lems. A good kind of problems to fix this lesson in 
 the minds of the pupils is to ask them to make words 
 in two ways as pail and pale, sail and sale, pain 
 and pane, lain and lane. 
 
a 
 
 TEACHING TO READ 111 
 
 The second lesson about diphthongs should show 
 that when two girls come together they sometimes 
 sing a duet. When they do this they make a real 
 diphthong or a proper diphthongs each making a 
 sound and uniting these sounds into one sound. By 
 taking out, pout, our, sour, flour, count, oil, soil, 
 toil, etc., the teacher will be able to show the chil- 
 dren in one short lesson that the girls in ^^ ou ^' and 
 ^^ oi,^^ when they come together sing a duet. By 
 sounding ^' o '' and ^^ u '' in quick succession the 
 sound of ^^ ou '^ will be produced, and by sounding 
 ''' '^ and ^^ i ^^ in quick succession the sound of ^^ oi ^"^ 
 will be produced. When ^^ w '^ and ^^ y '' come after 
 ^^ o '^ they sing duets with " o '"^ just as ^^ u '^ and " i ^^ 
 do. 
 
 N'early all the proper diphthongs are formed by 
 uniting the sound of *^^ o ^' with that of another 
 vowel, either *^ 1 ^' or " u ^\ or ^^ y ^' and ^^ w ^^ taking 
 the place of " i '' and " u ^\ so that children will 
 very easily learn to distinguish the duets from the 
 solos when two girls come together. The diphthongs 
 ^^ ou ^^ and ^^ ow ^' occasionally sing solos and not 
 duets, as in slow, grow, snow, ought, etc. 
 
 The diphthong " eu ^^ or ^^ ew ^' in such words as 
 ^^ feud,^^ or ^^ new," may be taught as a duet by the 
 union of long ^^e " and " oo," but as long " u " is a 
 diphthong itself made by the union of long ^^ e '^ and 
 ^^ 00 " the diphthong ^^ eu " or " ew " may be regarded 
 as a solo in which the second girl speaks instead of 
 the first. 
 
 The diphthong ^^ ie '' is peculiar. Both letters do 
 not speak at the same time, but sometimes " 1 '^ 
 speaks and sometimes " e ". In words of one syl- 
 lable ending with ^^ e "', such as pie, tie, etc., the 
 ^^ i " follows the general rule and does the speaking ; 
 
112 TEAcnma to read 
 
 in most words^ however, such as brief, grief, thief, 
 believe, etc., the " e '^ speaks and not the " i '^ In 
 ^' ny ^^ the second girl does the speaking. In '^ ey ^' 
 the first girl speaks but it says long " a '\ 
 
 Two vowels may stand together without forming 
 either a proper or an improper diphthong. When 
 they come in separate syllables they cannot be united 
 into one sound or influence each other so as to pro- 
 duce one sound. The pupils will make this dis- 
 covery for themselves in the course of their reading. 
 It is unwise to confuse the children with details of 
 this character. 
 
 The two great facts which require to be taught to 
 the children in connection with diphthongs are: 
 first, that when two girls come together it is usually 
 the firstonly that speaks ; and second, in most cases, 
 the first on^ says Tier own njime. The proper diph- 
 thongs are so'^ few and theif combined sound so 
 clearly what the two letters say in rapid succession 
 that they give very little trouble. 
 
 Although all the general principles connected with 
 the diphthongs could be explained in a single les- 
 son, it is better to teach the improper diphthongs 
 first and practice them for a time till the children 
 can use them readily both in ear problems and in 
 eye problems, before teaching the proper diphthongs. 
 
 It may be of service to the teacher to remember 
 that long ^' i ^^ as well as long " u ^Ms a diphthong. 
 Long '' i ^' is composed of " ah '' and ^' ee ^' said very 
 quickly, and long '' u '^ is made by '' ee ^' — '' oo ^^ 
 Some would spell long " u ^' by using " y ^'' — " oo ' 
 instead of '^ ee ^^ — " oo.^^ There is very little dif- 
 ence in the organic formation of long " e ^^ and the 
 consonant ^^y^\ 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 113 
 
 Capital Letters 
 
 There need be little difficulty in teaching the cap- 
 ital letters. They may be spoken of as grown up, 
 or in any other familiar way. When a child has an 
 idea clearly it does not confuse him to give him two 
 forms to represent the idea. A young child will 
 learn to speak two languages, if father speaks to it 
 in one language and mother in another. A child 
 who has learned music by the Tonic Sol Fa nota- 
 tion will learn the staff notation in a single lesson if 
 it knows music. Over and over again, large classes, 
 not one pupil of which has ever had a lesson in the 
 staff notation, have been taught a single lesson of 
 half an hour's duration in public, and have im- 
 mediately sung correctly two part music at sight 
 that was written in the staff notation specially to 
 test them and brought direct from the printing press 
 to the hall. So it will not confuse the children at 
 all to give them both forms of the letters, the cap- 
 itals and the small letters. Neither is it at all 
 confusing to give the children both the script form 
 and the printed form. For a short time after the 
 pupils begin to study visible language, that is until 
 they have learned the process of recognition, they 
 need not use capitals. 
 
 ''A'' and ''The'' 
 
 These words give most teachers a good deal of 
 trouble in the primary classes. The reading of 
 younger children is usually spoiled by dwelling too 
 long on " a '^ and ^^ the/' and thus making them 
 prominent. Many teachers give their pupils the 
 short sounds of the vowels in these words, hoping to 
 improve the reading. This teaching does not ac- 
 
114 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 complish the desired result, and is inaccurate. The 
 vowels have not the short sounds in these words, and 
 it produces very incorrect speaking to try to give 
 the short sounds. The trouble results from reading 
 '^ a ^^ and '' the ^^ as separate words. If they are 
 spoken separately they should be pronounced cor- 
 rectly by giving '' a ^^ and '' e ^^ their long sounds. 
 The vowels are obscure, and the words should be 
 read subordinately. The child should be trained to 
 read '^ a ^^ and " the ^' as if they were syllables in 
 the words that follow them. They should not speak 
 them until they know the words that follow them, 
 and should read them as unaccented syllables of 
 these words. 
 
 The over emphasis and prolongation of these words 
 is one of the bad results of reading aloud too early. 
 This forces the child to give too much emphasis to 
 the smaller and less important words. The chil- 
 dren use '' a ^^ and '' the '^ correctly in their oral 
 language before they go to school. They have to be 
 trained to give a drawling emphasis to them by wrong 
 methods of teaching. 
 
 In training children to use ^' sl '^ and ^^ the '^ prop- 
 erly when reading, it is a good plan to write on the 
 blackboard the sentence, ^^ It is a brush ^^ and ^^ It 
 is the brush,'^ omitting the word '^ brush,'^ and hold- 
 ing a real brush in the position of the word ^^ brush.'' 
 The pupils should then read the sentences in answer 
 to the teacher's question, ^^ What is this ? '' When 
 they have read the sentences correctly with the real 
 brush instead of the word, other things may be sub- 
 stituted for the brush, and the correct reading learned 
 in a similar way. The pupils should look at the 
 sentences, when they are answering the teacher's 
 questions. When a number of articles have been 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 115 
 
 used, and the pupils are able to read the sentences 
 as they have been in the habit of speaking them, 
 the brush should be again used and then the word 
 brush should be written in its place and the read- 
 ing done by a few of the pupils individually. If any 
 one prolongs or over emphasizes the '' a '^ or " the,'^ 
 ask him to read it again while the brush is held over 
 the word " brush/' The names of the other words 
 should be written in in turn and the practice con- 
 tinued until the sentences are read correctly by 
 every pupil. 
 
 It is a good plan to have such a sentence as the 
 following on the blackboard for occasional practice : — 
 '' A bird sat on a branch of a tree in a garden near 
 a house on a fine day, and sang a sweet song for its 
 mate in a nest.'' Practice in reading such a sen- 
 tence will help to prevent the formation of incorrect 
 habits of reading words separately and therefore 
 over emphasizing the short words, and will remedy 
 the defects of those who have formed incorrect 
 habits through wrong methods of teaching. The 
 children may be taught to read by phrases by using 
 such a sentence, and asking questions that may be 
 answered simultaneously by the whole class : " What 
 sat?" '^A bird." '^ Where did it sit?" "On a 
 branch." "On a branch of what?" "Of a tree." 
 " Where was the tree ? " " In a garden." And so 
 on. The pupils read only the words in the sentence, 
 and they are trained to read in phrases and inci- 
 dentally to see that the words in a short phrase should 
 be read as nearly as possible like one word. The 
 words in the phrase "in a tree," are as closely re- 
 lated as the syllables in the word " incomplete," and 
 they should be as closely related in oral speech or 
 in reading. 
 
116 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 The method of emphasis in the phrases should 
 correspond with the method of accenting the sylla- 
 bles in a word. We naturally pronounce our words 
 with proper accent — not by giving additional force 
 to the accented syllables but by obscuring or giv- 
 ing less force to the unaccented syllables. The 
 prominence of the accented syllables is given by good 
 speakers by shading down the unaccented syllables, 
 and the necessary prominence of the word represent- 
 ing the dominant idea in a phrase, should be secured 
 in the same way. Too often children are trained to 
 secure emphasis by making a special effort on the 
 emphatic word and raising it above the normal tone 
 of good speaking. The proper method of securing 
 emphasis — the natural method — is to give less force 
 and time to the unemphatic words, instead of more 
 force to the emphatic words. Emphasis is a matter 
 of relative force, and the best way to secure it regu- 
 lerly, in ordinary conversation, or in oratory, is to 
 train children to read as cultured men and women 
 speak, by relatively obscuring the unimportant words. 
 They should have a great deal of practice in read- 
 ing sentences composed of short phrases, and they 
 should be trained not to speak the subordinate words 
 of a phrase until they know the leading word to 
 which the subordinate words are directly related. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 EXPRESSION 
 
 The true basis of expression is self-expression. 
 More than this the logical reason for teaching ex- 
 pression or developing expressive power is that it 
 may be used in self-expression. Expressive power 
 in reading should be developed by training the chil- 
 dren to be regularly more expressive in all their 
 oral language. 
 
 The fundamental element in oral expression in 
 speaking or reading is the power of personation. 
 This power should be developed until it becomes 
 automatic, and the reader unconsciously assumes the 
 character he is to represent, or the mental or emo- 
 tional condition revealed in the selection he has 
 read. Children love personation. They enjoy games 
 in which they have to personate different characters. 
 They personate animals, at first, better than they 
 do the varied types of human character. The story 
 of " Father Bear, Mother Bear, and Baby Bear,'' in 
 which each of these leading characters uses exactly 
 the same language, is an excellent story for practice. 
 The whole class may be divided into three groups, 
 one group to represent the father, one the mother, 
 and one the baby. The teacher may relate with as 
 much dramatic effect as possible the story leading 
 up to the surprise of the bears on their return, and 
 then each group should represent, as well as it can, 
 
 117 
 
118 TEACHIXG TO EEAD 
 
 the tones of father, mother, and baby, as they ex- 
 press their feelings. Then the individuals in each 
 group may take their part in turn. The groups 
 should take a different part each day. Other stories 
 in which animals are represented as holding con- 
 versations should be used regularly in primary 
 classes, to give the children practice in personation. 
 They soon commit short animal dialogues to mem- 
 ory, and they never tire of trying to personate the 
 animals effectively. 
 
 ^Mien they have practised the personation of ani- 
 mals for some time, children enjoy, very heartily, 
 the privilege of imitating street criers. " Fresh fish, 
 all alive ;^^ ^^ Bananas ripe ten cents a dozen ;^^ 
 " Any rags to-day ; '^ etc. : or the commands given to 
 soldiers, such as " Eyes right, cress I ^"' '^ Eyes front 
 — Quick march ! ^^ etc. ; or farm calls such as " Co 
 boss I Co boss I Co I Co I Co 1 '' or such calls as a 
 fire alarm, '^ Fire I Eire I Fire I '^ Probably no other 
 lesson can arouse as much spirited enthusiasm as a 
 lesson of this kind in personation and imitation. 
 The children themselves should suggest the various 
 calls and alarms, and volunteers should be called 
 for in each case to be tested in their ability to per- 
 sonate and imitate. The pupils should be allowed 
 to applaud every one who does specially well. It will 
 not be long before such an exercise relieves the chil- 
 dren of their weakening self-consciousness so fully 
 that the shyest and most restricted children will 
 stand to take part. When they have once conquered 
 their timidity, and have lost their restraining con- 
 sciousness of self, they are on the highway to free 
 expression. Such exercises often make remarkable 
 character transformations in a few days. They are 
 of great service, too, in developing the imagina- 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 119 
 
 tions of the children in addition to their value in the 
 cultivation of freedom in expression. 
 
 Frequently the teacher should write on the black- 
 board such sentences as : '' Oh, mother ! I am so 
 glad to see you ! ^^ and tell a story of a child who 
 was away a long time from home^ and who, when 
 she came back and met her mother, rushed into her 
 arms and said — . The teacher should stop at " said/^ 
 and call upon the pupils individually to finish the 
 story by reading the words on the blackboard. By 
 the use of similar short stories all the emotions may 
 be called forth, and their expression developed in a 
 natural way as self-expression instead of formally. 
 The emotion expressed should be real to each child, 
 and not assumed. If the story be short and told 
 dramatically there should be no doubt about the 
 reality of the emotion, and reality in such cases is 
 vital. Dramatic expressions such as : " Oh ! mother, 
 come back to me ; ^^ " Don^t dare to touch my sister ! '^ 
 ^' He has stolen my top ; ^^ I never was so happy in 
 my life; ^^ '^ You know I love you, mother; '^ " I am 
 sorry I did it, father ;^^ ^^ Here Prince, jump, old 
 fellow;'' and scores of others that will suggest them- 
 selves to every teacher may be written on the black- 
 board to be read by the pupils, when the climax of 
 the story is reached by the teacher. 
 
 Many of the nursery rhymes and nursery tales 
 make excellent matter for expressive recitation by 
 little ones. 
 
 Such short poems as Eiley's " The Goblins will 
 git you if you don't watch out,'' and '' Seeing things 
 at night," afford fine opportunities for the develop- 
 ment of variety of expressive power. 
 
 Short stories, either funny or dramatic, should be 
 told to the children, and then told by individuals 
 
120 TEACHIXG TO EEAD 
 
 of the class. The same stories may be told over and 
 over again without losing their interest, each child 
 tn'ing to improve the telling. All will be willing 
 to take their turn, if the teacher becomes a leader 
 in applauding instead of criticising. Xo criticism 
 should ever be made, under any circumstances, of 
 the method of telling the story, or of imitating or 
 personating. 
 
 Criticism of personal effort always weakens inter- 
 est, and if interest is lost the vital element in tme 
 progress is lost. 
 
 The children should be trained to choose the best 
 stories, and to tell stories they have heard at home. 
 In certain cases it may be wise for the teacher to 
 hear the stories before they are told to the class. 
 
 Very useful tablets for primary classes may be 
 made by pasting colored pictures of bears, roosters, 
 cats, dogs, soldiers, firemen, and other animals and 
 men on large cards. A most interesting game may 
 be played by calling one child to the front and al- 
 lowing him to take the pointer and name certain pu- 
 pils who are to stand up and imitate what the ani- 
 mals or men say as he points to them on the chart. 
 He should point to one of the pictures, say the 
 rooster, and call upon several boys and girls to crow 
 like a rooster. There is a great deal of fun and 
 quite as much profit in the development of expres- 
 sive power in such an exercise. Pictures from Christ- 
 mas picture books may be used in making the 
 charts. 
 
 It is an excellent plan to write a series of ques- 
 tions on the blackboard and keep them covered with 
 a curtain until the time for expressive practice. 
 ^' What is your favorite game ? '' '' On what street 
 do you live ? '' " How old are you ? '^ " What flow- 
 
TEACHING TO EEAD 121 
 
 ers do you like best ? ^^ '' What tree do you like 
 best ? ^^ " How many sisters have you ? ^^ '^ How 
 many brothers have you?^' These and many other 
 questions may be written and remembered. When 
 the curtain is drawn the teacher simply says : " Num- 
 ber 7, John/' " Number 3, Mary/' and so on. The 
 pupils do not read aloud a word of the questions. 
 The pupil named stands after he has silently read 
 the question whose number was given^ and answers 
 the question in a complete sentence. This is an im- 
 portant preliminary step introductory to reading 
 aloud. As the pupil is not required to name the 
 words he looks at^ he is not compelled to cultivate the 
 habit of saying words without thinking of their mean- 
 ing, or very little about it, and thus to form the 
 habit of reading without expression. The teacher's 
 plans should not only prevent the cultivation of 
 habits of expressionless reading, but they should give 
 the most thorough training possible in rapid silent 
 reading. The plan of answering aloud the questions 
 that are written, combines a training in silent read- 
 ing with good oral self-expression. The two essen- 
 tial elements in a good oral reader are the power 
 of rapid silent reading and the power of self-expres- 
 sion, and any plan that secures both of these elements 
 in a single exercise should be used as largely as pos- 
 sible. 
 
 Instead of a series of questions the teacher may 
 sometimes write a series of instructions such as 
 '' Eecite your favorite poem ; '' " Tell the best short 
 story you have heard ; '' " Tell us the most remark- 
 able experience you have had this week ; ^'' or ^' Sing 
 a verse of your favorite song.'' 
 
 The pupils may be asked to write questions or 
 give directions for oral work, and at a signal these 
 
122 TEACHING TO BEAD 
 
 may be exchanged and answered or obeyed. This 
 may arouse intense interest. 
 
 It is a good exercise to choose the most expressive 
 exclamatory sentences or phrases in the reading les- 
 sons or in stories that are related by the teacher 
 or by pupils, and ask the class to speak these sen- 
 tences so as to give as many meanings as possible 
 by changing the expression. Even a single word 
 may be made to give several meanings. The word 
 '^ oh ! ^^ for example, may be used to express the 
 meaning of whole sentences of varied meanings by 
 giving it different shades of expression. 
 
 The true method of teaching expressive reading 
 is based on three laws : 
 
 1. Children are naturally expressive in speech and 
 gesture. 
 
 2. They may be made more expressive both of emo- 
 tion and thought by freeing them of self-conscious- 
 ness and developing their imaginations. Both these 
 results may be attained most effectively by dramatic 
 personation. 
 
 3. When forceful expression has become habitual 
 pupils express properly when reading what they are 
 capable of extracting from visible language. 
 
 It is of vital importance that a good reader should 
 have two powers: the habit of forceful expression 
 in conversation, and the power of rapid, accurate, 
 and comprehensive thought extraction from visible 
 language. He expresses most who sees most to ex- 
 press. Great power to read silently is the most es- 
 sential element in good oral reading. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 VARIETY IN READING MATTER FOR PRIMARY CLASSES 
 
 It is wise to have as great variety of good primers 
 as possible. The primers to be excluded are those 
 in which the illustrations are objective instead of 
 subjective, and are intended to suggest words or 
 thought to the children. The pictures should not 
 suggest words or the thought in the lessons. They 
 should arouse and sustain interest in reading, but the 
 words should be recognized by the independent power 
 of word recognition that has been given to the pu- 
 pils, and the thought should be gained from the 
 reading matter and not from the pictures. The pic- 
 tures in a primer may be used profitably, if the 
 teacher asks her pupils to write stories about them 
 before they have read the lessons they are intended 
 to illustrate. 
 
 But the best reading matter for primary classes 
 should be home made. Thousands of stories told in 
 a few lines may easily be collected, and mounted 
 on small cards. These cards are invaluable for silent 
 or oral reading. The best use that can be made of 
 them is to let the children read them silently and 
 then stand and relate the stories in their own lan- 
 guage. Day by day the time allowed for reading 
 the stories should be gradually and slowly reduced. 
 
 Each school should have an unlimited supply of 
 good white cards about six inches long and four 
 inches wide. The pupils in the primary classes 
 should write stories of their own as soon as they can 
 
 123 
 
124 TEACHING TO EEAD 
 
 write. The best of these should be chosen by the 
 teacher, or composite stories made by combining' the 
 best elements in two or more of them. These should 
 be given to the highest classes in the school and 
 written by the pupils in these classes on the white 
 cards, leaving room for illustrations at the top of 
 the cards. The illustrations should be made by the 
 senior pupils. It is a good plan to allow several 
 pupils to design pictures to illustrate the same story 
 and to choose the best design and allow its maker 
 to draw it on the card. In this way the primary 
 teacher will gradually accumulate a collection of the 
 most interesting stories for children: those written 
 by the children themselves. The pupils in the higher 
 classes will have the best kind of practice in de- 
 signing and good practice in writing. For very young 
 pupils the teacher may cut the cards into strips, and 
 write short sentences on them. The little ones 
 should be allowed to step out of the class and tell 
 the teacher what the cards say, taking their places 
 in line and coming to the teacher in turn. 
 
 Stories written by pupils in the second or third 
 classes often make very interesting reading matter 
 for the first classes. 
 
 Good editions of fairy tales, folk stories, myths 
 told in simple language, and nursery rh5anes, should 
 lie on the teacher^s table, or stand on the shelves of 
 the little class library to be read by the most ad- 
 vanced pupils, as soon as they are promoted to the 
 class of honor in reading. It will be a great in- 
 centive to a pupil to know, that when he reaches a 
 certain standard of excellence he will be allowed to 
 take a book from the library to read it at home. 
 
 In cities and towns, reading matter may be ex- 
 changed by the schools. 
 
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