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Methods of teaching Reading.

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give the significance of 4, and illustrate it by lend, lo, ill, and full, and then you come to a word like should, in which it is not pronounced at all. Writers of Phonic reading books get over this difficulty by printing in italics the letters which are not sounded, and by printing over those vowels or combinations of letters which have an abnormal sound an accent or mark of some kind to indicate their exceptional characters. But the objection to this is that ordinary books are not printed thus, and that therefore the child will have something to unlearn when he goes from his special phonic school-book to any other.

A graver objection to this method, and the real cause of its failure is the extreme difficulty of isolating elementary sounds and pronouncing them apart.

The method would not be unsuited to older people who were learning the written language for the first time, but it pre-supposes that little children are more distressed by orthographic anomalies than they really are. They can in fact, pronounce words, and divide them into syllables; but to them the analysis of syllables into their components is a task much harder than the mere learning of arbitrary characters.

Against the purely Alphabetic method it is easy to urge that the names of the letters do not express their powers; that singly and apart they have no meaning for children, and are held in the mind by no associations; that analysis is always easier than synthesis, and that it would interest a child much more to learn about a word first and examine its parts afterwards, than to begin with the letters which, after all, do not really represent its parts and afterwards to build up the whole.

On the other hand, the 'Look and say method,' which seeks to give a child a picture of a word as a whole, and

teaches him to read rather by the general aspect of words than by careful observation of their parts, is open to the objection that many words have a general resemblance in their form, e.g. form and from, there and three, board and broad, which might be misleading, if they were not subjected to close inspection. And this method, if depended on entirely, is apt to encourage loose, careless, visual impressions, out of which mistakes constantly arise.

Again, the philosophers who are so sensible of the incongruity of our alphabet and of the arbitrary and misleading effect of the names of the letters, seem to forget that long before children come under regular instruction, they have actually learned the alphabet in the nursery or in the Kindergarten; they have merely in a game handled little wooden letters as toys, talked about them and arranged them in different ways; and they have seen no more difficulty in calling a particular character H. than in calling a horse a horse.

You have therefore to deal with the fact, that in nine cases out of ten the alphabet, with its indefensible nomenclature, is already known, having been learned in fact in the most effectual way, without the child's consciousness that he was learning anything. And after all the art of recognizing printed words ought always to be acquired thus, little by little, in short and playful lessons, while children are very young, and before any appeal is made to their reflection at all. I believe that it is a grave mistake to postpone the first exercises in reading after the fourth year, and that the longer it is postponed the more difficult it becomes. But if this has not been done, and a child of six or seven has to start de novo, it is certainly not well to begin by presenting the alphabet. The best way then is to place before him a printed sheet with very easy sentences on it,

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and to read aloud a whole sentence, pointing to each
word as it is pronounced. Next the children should be
invited to read it with the teacher aloud; then to read
it together without any help; then one and another
should be called on to point and identify each single
word. So far the Look and Say method is right. But
this lesson should be followed up by asking them in
turn to count the number of letters in each word, and by
writing each of them down, and giving their names. A
card containing the alphabet should hang near, and as
each letter occurs in the words of the little sentence,
it should be pointed out and named.
In this way,
though the alphabet would not be taught at first as
a whole, or as a separate lesson, each letter of it would
be learned as it was wanted, and as it occurred in some
word previously read.

The requirements of a good reading-book have Readingalready been referred to. It may be well to recall

attention to them here:

(1) It should be well printed and in sufficiently large type to make it very easy for the child to put his finger to each word as he pronounces it.

(2) It should be made attractive by pictures, and by the pleasantness and interest of the subject. This is of the first importance.

(3) The lessons should not be graduated by so mechanical a rule as the mere length of the words and number of syllables. Many words of three letters are harder than those of five; and words like winter and summer are much easier though they have two syllables in them than words like eye, who, and laugh, though they have one. The real gradation does not depend on the length and number of the syllables, but on the number of anomalies or difficulties in the words. The early lessons.

F. L.

14

books.

Teaching

should have no anomalous words at all. But each new lesson should contain two or three combinations harder than those of the previous lesson, and several examples of each.

(4) If possible let a good many of the lessons be narrative and in the form of dialogue, giving some play for changes of voice. Monotony is encouraged by always reading sentences consisting of assertions only.

(5) Again every lesson should contain at least two or three words which are a little beyond the child's own vocabulary, and which therefore when learned will be distinct additions to it. This is very important. One of the first objects of a reading lesson is to enrich the scholar's store of words. A lesson which is so ostentatiously childish that it fails to add anything to this store, or to furnish material for questions, represents a lost opportunity.

(6) Yet it is of very little consequence that the reading lessons should be obviously didactic or instructive, or indeed that they should convey any information whatever. Later on, of course, we regard reading as a means to an end, and that end is instruction or mental culture; but in the early stages, reading is itself an end. And whatever conduces to make it more interesting facilitates the acquisition of the art.

And now suppose a book is found which fulfils these conditions, how is it to be used?

First it is well to read the passage aloud very careReading. fully with the proper intonation, requiring the scholars to fix their eyes on the book, and to follow the teacher, pointing out word by word as he utters it.

Next, a simultaneous exercise is often found very useful. The teacher reads the lesson again, and asks the whole class to read it with him slowly, but still with all the proper pauses and inflexions.

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The third step is to call upon the class to read the lesson simultaneously without him.

Then he challenges the scholars one after another to read the sentences separately, selecting them by name promiscuously, and causing the worst readers to be appealed to much oftener than the rest.

Afterwards he causes the books to be closed, and proceeds to give a few simple questions on special words, and to require separate little sentences to be turned into others which are equivalent, and of which the words are supplied by the scholars.

As to spelling, it is often the practice to print at the Spelling. top of a reading lesson the few hardest words, and cause them to be specially spelt. I see no particular use in this. An isolated word has very little meaning or use to children. But they understand sentences. It is far better to read the sentence in which a word occurs, and then ask to have it spelled. And it is a good thing often to cause whole sentences to be spelled, the class taking one word after another.

"The sun sheds light upon the earth."

You have all the words spelled rapidly through, but you halt at the word "Light." You call attention to it. You write it on the black board. You say "I notice this word was difficult. Let us spell it again. I will shew you three or four other words formed like it, Bright, Might, Fight. Let us put these into sentences, and spell them."

Thus you encounter the difficulties of spelling, as you encounter all the other difficulties of life, as they come before you, one by one; and try to conquer them in detail. Do not accumulate the difficulties in a menacing and artificial column, and expect them to be dealt with all

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