In pursuance of this plan, the traditional presentation of Grammar in a bristling array of classifications, nomenclatures, and paradigms, has been wholly discarded. The pupil is brought in contact with the living language itself: he is made to deal with speech, to turn it over in a variety of ways, to handle sentences; so that he is not kept back from the exercise-so profitable and interesting-of using language till he has mastered the anatomy of the grammarian. Whatever of technical Grammar is here given is evolved from work previously done by the scholar. The author is prepared to find that this plan may not suit the blind adherents of the old grammatical formalism; but he is well assured that it will meet the views of live and progressive teachers; for such teachers, in their class-room instruction, are, with remarkable unanimity, beginning to use the kind of exercises that form the body of this manual. To these he would say, This is a book out of the class-room; it is a grammarbook made by induction (and perhaps the first ever thus made)—the method pursued having been to collect from large numbers of school papers the difficulties that children actually encounter in speaking and writing English, and then to meet these difficulties by practice and precept. A word as to the Exercises. These are the book. They are numerous and graduated, and are given from the first with a view to composition-the immediate object of the Grammar taught in the common school. The author especially solicits the attention of the teacher to these Exercises, and requests at least an experimental following of the directions and suggestions given. Such a co-operation he feels that he is entitled to ask, in view of the novelty in the plan of the book. He is confident that pupils who have faithfully done the work here laid down will find that they have acquired a reasonable mastery of English. If there be less of lip-service than in following the old fashion, there will assuredly be more of living knowledge and available power. WILLIAM SWINTON. TEACHER'S NOTE. In this work three methods of correcting the written exercises are suggested: 1. The exchanging of papers; 2. The writing of letters of criticism; 3. The placing of one or more exercises upon the blackboard as a basis of oral class-criticism. It has not been thought necessary to indicate in every case the particular plan to be pursued. The teacher should vary the method from time to time. |