Speaking and writing English; a course of study for the eight grades of the elementary school, with a preliminary discussion of the problem of elementary English

Front matter

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A Course of Study for the Eight Grades of the Elementary School with

Introduction

THE PROBLEM OF SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL.

Language is by all odds the most important subject in the curriculum. It is, also, for many reasons the subject that is most difficult to teach. There has been an almost entire lack of standards for the teacher to go by. The language habits in the home and on the street are generally not good. There is so little "linguistic conscience" among grown up people that it is difficult to arouse any in little children. These difficulties have been enormously increased in recent years by the influx of large numbers of non-English-speaking peoples, with the result that in some schools of our city the teaching of English is no longer the teaching of the mother tongue, but the teaching of a foreign language.

The purpose of this course of study is to help the teacher to meet the elementary language problem more effectively and more hopefully. A few things it has aimed definitely to do : (i) To replace vague, uncertain, and sometimes too ambitious aims with a purpose clearly defined and reasonably possible of achievement.

(2) To prescribe limits within which the elementary work in language is to be confined.

(3) To emphasize the teaching of oral language, both for its own sake and for its value as a foundation and preparation for written language, and to formulate a systematic and progressive plan of teaching this most important and much neglected side of English composition. (4) To construct tentative standards of achievement for each of the eight elementary grades, in both oral and written language, which it seems reasonable to expect the majority of pupils to reach.

The lack of a clear and definite limitation of the work to be covered in language teaching in the elementary school has been responsible for much of the waste which has attended the teaching of the subject. Courses of study have called for more than could possibly be accomplished. The requirements have been too many and too vague. Many things have been taught that should have been postponed to the high school, since they do not appeal to the needs or the capacity of the stage of development of the ordinary elementary school pupil. Pupils who leave the elementary school before completing the course will be better off for having been taught a smaller number of things thoroughly and for having had abundant practice in these few fundamental things.

The kind and amount of language training in the elementary school should be largely determined, it seems fair to say, by the answers to the following questions :

1. What are the common language needs of people in every day life?

2. What specific language habits can the school cultivate which will most usefully meet the demands that will be made upon the boy and girl at the end of their elementary school course?

3. What capacity for oral and written expression is possessed, or may with reasonable effort be acquired, by ordinary children in the different grades?

In the light of such a study of children's language needs and capacities, the following would seem to be a reasonable and workable aim for the elementary school :

INTRODUCTION r

/. To turn out pupils able to stand before the class and talk for a few minutes upon a subject within the range of their knowledge or experience, speaking plainly,. in clean-cut sentences, and without common grammatical mistakes.

2. To turn out pupils able to write with fair facility an original paragraph upon a subject within the rangeof their experience or their interests.

Such a paragraph should show :

1. An absolute mastery of "the sentence idea" .

2. Freedom from glaring grammatical mistakes. j. Correct spelling of all ordinary words.

./. Unfailing use of the commonest marks of punctuation.

5. Some evidence of attention to matters of sentence structure and to the choice of words.

6. Some degree of power to organize and arrange ideas around a central thought.

SPOKEN ENGLISH.

It is much more important that the elementary school should give pupils ability to talk well than it is that it should give them ability to write well. This is simply because people talk more than they write. Few people write much, but all people talk a good deal. People who write for a business may write a book or two in a year. Most people talk enough in a single week to> fill a book. Few graduates of the grammar school are ever called upon in after days to submit to a test of their knowledge of arithmetic or history or geography. But their spoken English is being passed upon every day of their lives, and it is largely upon the basis of this test that they are adjudged to be educated or uneducated men and women. Moreover, their success in business and in their intercourse with other people depends more than is commonly realized upon their power to speak well. Yet of all the subjects in the curriculum oral language seems to be least effectively taught. Indistinct utterance, poor sentence structure, grammatical mistakes, a poverty of words, and a lack of anything like fluency are coo common in the speech of grammar school graduates.

There are several reasons why our pupils do not learn to talk well :

(i) There is not enough of oral language work, as a separate and distinct training, in the elementary school.

(2) Oral work is not utilized as much as it ought to be as an aid in, and a preparation for, written work. The child who is to be taught to write well must first be taught to talk well.

(3) The other subjects of the course are not utilized as •effectively as they might be to develop power in oral composition. All these provide occasion for a free and natural use of language on the part of the pupils, and fruitful observation of their speech on the part of the teacher.

(4) The common method of the recitation furnishes little motive for the pupil to talk well. Very rarely has he the sense that he is addressing an audience with the purpose of actually telling or saying something worth while. Most of the things he recites, and some of the things he reads aloud, have very little interest for him. When he recites, he recites to the teacher, and much of what he says is lost to the pupils who sit behind him. When he reads, he reads to the teacher with ihe audience behind his back ; or, if he stands in front of the room, he reads to an audience whose every eye is following the words he is reading. Since he is conscious of no real need to speak clearly and distinctly, that his fellow-pupils may hear, "he does not do so.

(5) The school has perpetually to fight the bad influence •of the language environment in which many pupils spend their •out-of-school hours.

(6) The school makes the mistake of thinking it can correct bad habits of speech by the application of the rules of grammar. The ability to talk correctly comes from practice and not from the study of rules. The pupil shears these incorrect forms over and over again on the street. Obedient to

INTRODUCTION y

the principle of motor reaction, such forms invariably "write themselves out" in his daily speech. It is of little avail that the pupil knows what is right. He must hear it; say it; say it again and again and again; say it until the motor reaction is so strong that the right form stamps its impression on the spinal cord and wipes out the wrong one. Only practice can make perfect.

These matters receive attention, over and over again, in the pages that follow. It is not thought necessary at this time to do more than state them.

An effective course in oral composition should include the following essential things :

(i) Much opportunity for free self expression.

(2) Constant attention to matters of voice, enunciation, pronunciation, and inflection.

(3) The training of children, by constant practice, to compose oral paragraphs upon simple themes, and the development, through these, of some elementary skill in selecting, arranging and expressing their ideas.

(4) Unremitting efforts in all grades to eliminate the common errors of speech.

(1) The child's free self-expression is developed best by drawing upon his own personal experience. That is what the youngest pupil knows best and can talk about best. Imagination follows experience directly. It is a personal field, easily and pleasurably worked. Reproduction has to do largely with what lies outside of the personal experiences of children, to things that they do not really know. Memory is the principal factor in reproduction. Experience and imagination have little to do with it. It is, therefore, the least profitable field for children's free expression, and should be sparingly used.

(2) The "schoolroom voice" has long been a term of reproach. Teachers may not be able to improve the quality of g INTRODUCTION

their pupils' voices, but they can do a great deal toward getting pupils to speak in an easy and natural tone of voice, which will still be audible not only to the teacher, but also to the pupils in all parts of the .room. In addition, constant attention should 1 be given, day in and day out, to matters of clear articulation, correct pronunication, and right inflection. By making the conditions of the recitation such that the pupils get the feeling that they are actually talking to one another with the intention of imparting information, or opinions, and not merely "reciting" to the teacher to prove they have learned their lessons, the speech of children would greatly improve in these respects. But no matter how favorable to good talking the schoolroom conditions are made, pupils ought to have throughout the entire course systematic training through special exercises.

In an appendix will be found lists of some of the most common defects in the enunciation of children and some exercises designed to remove them. The exercises printed there are meant only to be suggestive. Teachers will doubtless be able to supplement them by many others of their own. There is, however, enough material in the printed drills, if they are diligently used, to turn in the right direction the careless tendency so manifest in the speech habits of children.

(3) Oral composition, as the term is used in this course of study, means a great deal more than ordinary talking or conversation, which as often as not is fragmentary and disconnected. By oral composition is meant a body of conned ed speech, large enough in scope to demand attention to its structure and form. All the qualities that are to be developed in the written composition, may be, and ought to be, developed first in the oral exercise : choice and variety of words, quality and variety of sentences, and arrangement of sentences in a paragraph. This development will, of course, be slow and gradual. But there will be no improvement at all, unless children are habituated from the first to be critical of their spoken English, in so far, at least, as the more flagrant mistakes in syntax are concerned, and the more fundamental matters of sentence structure and use of connectives.

This course of study provides for much practice in composing oral paragraphs and gives many suggestions for teachingchildren how to acquire the art of developing interesting oral themes on subjects within the range of their interests and experience. Numerous examples of oral compositions, drawn from the actual work of pupils, are given under every grade.

(4) fine habit of correct speech cannot be gained from a study of grammar J Good habits or bad habits of speech are pretty well fixed before the child studies grammar and before he could possibly derive any benefit from a study of it. Good English is mastered by practice, not by rule. It is of little use for the children to know principles or rules. They may spend a week learning the rules for the agreement of the verb with its subject, but rules will not prevent them from saying "he don't". But if they are made to repeat "he doesn't", "he doesn't", "he doesn't", alone or in concert, in as many sentences as can be made by talking as fast as they can *or five or ten minutes, the correct form will finally begin to sound right. It is not knowledge, but habit that counts.

In this course of study an attempt has been made to allot to each grade a number of common errors for correction. Naturally such a distribution is more or less arbitrary. That certain errors of speech are listed under one grade and not under another does not imply a failure to realize that all of the errors are committed by pupils in all the grades, or that the correction of them in one grade will make it unnecessary to fight against the same errors in succeeding grades. The chief object of allotting the correction of certain errors to certain grades and that of certain other errors to other grades is to focus the attention of both teachers and pupils upon a relatively few points, for which they will be held accountable.

The "language game" has been found to be one of the' most effective methods for teaching right forms of speech, particularly in the primary grades. By means of these the child is brought frequently to use the correct forms in a natural manner and under conditions which appeal strongly to him. In an appendix a number of these games will be . found,

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prefaced by an interesting analysis of the common errors of children's speech, based upon a systematic study conducted by the teachers of a city school system during the whole of a school year.

WRITTEN ENGLISH.

IN GENERAL.

When the pupil comes to put on paper what he has to say, the situation becomes complicated by the entrance of factors which were not present when he was expressing himself orally. He must think about his penmanship. He must watch his spelling. He must look out for his capitals, his punctuation, his indentations, and all that. These things become automatic, or nearly so, after years of training and practice ; so that educated men and women are required to give little or no thought to their penmanship, spelling, punctuation, and the other technicalities of written expression. But the child is at first obliged to think of all these things all of the time. By degrees, however, with reasonably good instruction and sufficient practice of the right kind, the observance of the simpler requirements of written technique becomes habitual to him, so that by the time the pupil has completed the elementary school course, he ought to be fairly free from the necessity of giving conscious attention to the mechanics of written language.

Added to the mechanical difficulties of written expression, there is present, also, at the moment of writing, a self-consciousness which tends to check the spontaneity wlr'ch characterizes his oral efforts. In the case of children this is no doubt partly due to the demands made upon them by the technique of written expression (penmanship, spelling, capitals, punctuation, and so on) all of which, because they have not yet become matters of established habit, are a constant drain upon their attention, and act like brakes upon the relatively free and easy delivery of their ideas which characterizes their spoken language. Thought has a stronger and closer association

INTRODUCTION XI

with speech than with writing, and even adults, whose penmanship and spelling and punctuation have become matters of second nature, requiring no conscious attention during the process of composition, find their expression slowing down the moment they put pen to paper. Written expression is of its very nature slower, more deliberate, more careful, and, therefore, more productive of self-consciousness than oral expression. But with children it is probably true that the chief difficulty which written language at first presents over oral language is the attention which has to be given to the technicalities of writing, the penmanship, the spelling, the punctuation, the use of capitals, and matters pertaining to the arrangement of the composition on the paper.

vStrictly speaking, penmanship and spelling are not matters of language technique at all, since they are not developed primarily through written language. The school program provides separate drill for both. The failure to use capitals correctly and the simpler marks of punctuation (the period and the comma) is accounted for not so much by the supposition that these things are difficult in themselves as it is explained by the lack of careful training in oral language. The child who is trained from the first to speak in clear cut sentences will after a while acquire such a strong sentence sense tnat he will seldom, if ever, write as a sentence a group of words that is not a sentence. Pupils write in the classroom as they have been accustomed to talk in the classroom. Failure to use capitals and periods in written composition is largely due to bad oral habits. If children do not possess the sentence sense, their written work is sure to contain many omissions of capitals and periods, and consequently many misuses of the comma. The teaching of written language, so far as correctness goes, offers but few difficulties over and above those which are met with in the teaching of oral language.

There is, of course, more than mechanical correctness to be sought in written composition. There must, in addition, be some attention paid, in the upper grades to sentence structure and to some of the other rudiments of style. For this purpose, the careful and deliberate written exercise, giving opportunity l2 INTRODUCTION

for thought, for studied revision, and finished workmanship, is a more effective vehicle of instruction than the oral exercise, which must of necessity be less thoughtful and structurally less excellent. Still, the teacher should never forget that the basis of all good written work is laid in good oral work, and that if oral work is neglected, her efforts to produce good written language will be in vain.

Written composition, then, so far as the mechanics of writing are concerned, does not offer so many difficulties as the teacher has been inclined to attribute to it. But the few things that are required in the way of written technicalities must be mastered as early as possible in the course, so that these difficulties will not stand too long in the way of the freedom and spontaneity of the child's expression. So long as his attention is distracted from the thought of what he wants to say by thinking of his penmanship, his spelling, his punctuation, and similar matters of written technique, his composition is likely to be formal and meagre and uninteresting. On the other hand, it would be folly to attempt to cultivate freedom of expression by allowing children to write regardless of the rules of punctuation, spelling, arrangement, and the like. These matters of written technique (and we are dealing with only the simplest items of them in this course of study) should not, during the process of writing, hold the center of consciousness. They should occupy only the "margin" of consciousness, as we say. But before they can be safely relegated to the margin, they must first have occupied the centre of consciousness for some time. Children do not possess intuitively habits of correct written expression. These must be built up from the day that written language is begun in the second grade. The important thing, and the difficult thing, is to give sufficient drill on the mechanics of written composition, without killing the child's spontaneity and his freedom of expression. Drill on the mechanics of written composition there must be, from the very start. At the same time, the teacher must be extremely cautious not to let her insistence upon correct form kill the child's desire for self-expression. Form must be taught, and in the process content must not be sacrificed. This is a task

*3 that calls for all the wisdom and all the ingenuity of the teacher. It is the real test of the good teacher of composition.

ONE PARAGRAPH COMPOSITIONS.

At the outset of this discussion the statement was made that the lack of a clear and definite limitation of the language work in the grades below the high school has been responsible for a great deal of the ineffectiveness of our teaching, and the following general standard was there set up as a reasonable measure of attainment in written composition for the ordinary graduate of a Lawrence grammar school :

£ "The ability to write with fair facility an original paragraph upon a subject within the range of his ex perience or his interests, using sentences grammatically complete and correctly punctuated, with correct spelling, and free from grievous grammatical mistakes!'

This standard has the merit of being tolerably definite and reasonably possible of attainment. Later on in the course of study, under assignment of work by grades, there will be found paragraphs written by children, which have been adopted as tentative standards for the different grades.

The chief reason for limiting the written exercise to a single paragraph is to assure sufficient practice in writing which 3, longer composition makes impossible, and to focus the attention of both pupil and teacher upon the smallest possible language field. In addition to the opportunity it affords for practice, the single paragraph is admirably suited to the purposes of teaching elementary composition. It is a complete unit, a whole composition in miniature. It gives free range to development of sentence structure. It may illustrate all the forms of discourse : narration, description, exposition, argument, as the four chief kinds of writing are technically known. It is subject to all the laws of discourse. By its use the child gains a practical knowledge of every important feature of literary workmanship. The child need not be conscious of these things. But the teacher should think of them all the time.

The children in the lower grades will not, of course, be expected to produce a paragraph. In the first grade, children will make a sentence or two with alphabet cards, first from sentences written on the board by the teacher, and later will construct one or two original sentences, based mostly on their reading lessons. By the time the pupil has reached the third grade he will be taught to cast his sentences into a form of a paragraph. This paragraph will at first be short and simple. It will grow in length and in organization of thought during each succeeding year of the elementary school course.

THE MASTERY OF "THE SENTENCE IDEA."

The fundamental thing, the element upon which all other details of composition depend and upon which the whole superstructure of composition is built, is the mastery of the sentence. Nothing, therefore, is more important in the earlier grades than the development of what is variously called "the sentence idea", "the sentence sense", "the sentence feeling",, "the sentence instinct" — the trained habit of mind by which the completed thought is recognized as complete, and left to stand by itself. The lack of this fundamental "sentence sense" is the most glaring fault of elementary school compositions. It is a. natural enough fault in very young pupils, but its persistence in the higher grades, as is too often the case, seems almost indefensible.

This fault appears in two forms. The first is present in the composition that rambles on and on, with statement after statement strung along on a series of "and's" , "hut's" , and "so's" , often without so much as a comma to separate the different statements. Very young children talk in this fashion, prattling on in a breathless stream of words, seldom dropping their voices until they have reached the end of what they have to say. Children in school talk in much the same way. Here are some stenographic reports of actual talk of third grade pupils recently heard in our own schools :

"My mother told me to go to the store and get her a loaf of bread and then I went to the store and the bread fell down and got all muddy."

"The ship was very, very long and it carried coal and sometimes it carried pig iron and one day my papa got off the boat to buy me a fish line and one day I had that fish line and I was trying to fish on the river but the fish pulled so that I couldn't fish any more and my mother said to stop because it was too hard."

The source of this fault suggests its remedy. Children must be taught through much careful oral work to break themselves of this bad habit. Most of our troubles in written composition come from our neglect of oral composition. The child who has been taught to speak in clean-cut sentences will give the teacher little annoyance by writing the kind of sentence that is here described. This has been said before, and is repeated here only to remind the teacher that if this fault persists in the written compositions of her pupils, it is because she has failed to head off the trouble by sufficient oral practice on this particular point. While the habit is being broken upr the children's sentences will become short and jerky. But this will do no harm. The later grades wTill attend to that. In any case, the "choppy" sentence is preferable to the "run on"" sentence.

The other form in which this lack of "sentence feeling" shows itself is worse in some respects than the first, because it is a more violent breach of the laws of the sentence. Here is an illustration of it :

"My dog is a spaniel his name is Nep, that stands for Neptune. Neptune was the sea god, we call the dog Nep because he is so fond of the water, he likes to be in it all the time, once he got caught in the weeds and was nearly drowned."'

The fault here consists not in stringing together a number of statements by "ands", but in running complete statements t 6 INTRODUCTION

together without periods and capitals. Sometimes no mark separates the sentences. If any mark is employed, it is only the comma. Hence it is that text-book writers, in referring to this fault, call it "the comma sentence." So common is tne blunder in the writing of young children that it has come to be known as The Child's Error. To make the offence more heinous in the sight of his pupils one teacher is known to have named it "The Baby's Mistake". In high school text-books (because of our neglect the fault often persists beyond the elementary school) it is variously referred to as "the badge of ignorance", "the badge of shiftlessness", "the hopeless error". These epithets indicate how important it. is that this fault should be gotten rid of early, if it is to be gotten rid of at all. Calling names, however, seldom does any good. What we need to remember is that the habit of running sentences together, either by the "and" method or the "no stop" method is an exceedingly unfortunate one, and very hard to overcome, if it once gets a good start.

If a close study is made of children's compositions with reference to The Child's Error, it will be found to occur most often when there is a close relation between one sentence and the next. This close relation is present whenever the succeeding sentence begins with a pronoun, the antecedent of which is the subject of the preceding sentence. Thus, in the illustration above, "My dog is a spaniel, his name is Nep," the child is conscious of a very close relation between the two statements. He has a dog, and the dog's name is Nep. For this reason, children are particularly in danger of committing the Child's Error when a sentence begins with he, she, it, they, this, these, etc., because sentences beginning with these words, while being grammatically independent, are somewhat dependent for their meaning upon the preceding sentence. In the same way, a clause or a phrase coming at the end of a sentence is likely to be thought of as an independent statement. It is easy for the child to forget it is a part of the sentence. Thus : "Washington once saved a child. Jumping into a swift stream to save it." Or : "And so the boy got the sled after all. Which Avas just what he wanted." Trained writers do not place clauses and phrases in such places. But beginners are crude in the art of sentence structure, and for this reason are prone to use the rear-end phrase or clause, set off as an independent statement marked by both capital and period.

It has been thought worth while to present the problem of the sentence in considerable detail, and to call attention to some of the reasons which render pupils peculiarly liable to the errors we have been describing. The mastery of the sentence is absolutely basal in elementary written work. It is folly to talk about teaching "style" and the other refinements of writing until children are sentence-sure. There are a good many things we would do, if we could. A few we must do. "There is no use in trying" to build a superstructure, when the foundation is lacking. And the foundation of all writing — of all expression of thought — is the sentence.

CORRECT SPELLING OF COMMON WORDS.

There are two things in the general run of school compositions that, above all others, make countless teachers mourn. The first is the bad sentence — the "stringy" sentence, the "comma sentence", or worse, the sentence that is not a sentence at all. This was dealt with in the preceding chapter. The other is the misspelling of common words. If these two conspicuous defects were absent from the compositions, how much brighter the world would seem to the teacher who sits down resignedly to correct a set of papers. Even a paper absolutely wooden in respect to interest and style, if it were free from these two glaring faults, would seem positively hopeful.