Teaching to read

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 psychological 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 expression 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 teaching 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 recognition 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

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-interpreted 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 important 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 blackboard. This exercise will arouse a deep personal interest 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 permanent interest in reading and the^ beginning of a desire to read stories for themselves?) Under the guidance 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 recognition 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 observation and reasoning and relating ability. But, whatever method of enabling the child to recognize words is adopted, the power to do so without conscious 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 Ianguage without expressing it. Silent reading should precede reading aloud ; first, because it is a less complex 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 purpose of reading; fourth, because reading aloud, if practised before the power of rapid, comprehensive, and accurate thought extraction from visible language 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. Individual 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 comparable 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 educators do not really teach oral reading with the purpose of producing a race of good oral readers. Those who think about this matter at all know that comparatively 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 influence 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 reading 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 extract thought rapidly, accurately, and comprehensively 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 population of North America is now about ninety millions. Are there more than ninety men and women 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 development both of good reading and of good oral reading. 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 education, 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. \

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 reporting 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 language 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, accurately, 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 children'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 sufficient 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 excellent material for this exercise. As the children grow older, brief statements about science, or history, 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 comprehensive 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: —

*' 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 author'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 standard 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 consists 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 matter 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 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 attempt at learning to read aloud^ inevitably interfered 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 conscious 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 harmony, 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 fellowmen, and God, my language and all my powers of expression will improve responsively as my mind develops. But you are interfering with Nature's wonderful 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 discoveries 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 sometimes 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, which is the only possible way that I could do it. I am naturally unnatural when I go through a mechanical process in a mechanical way. I am not trying 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 cannot 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 perform 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 effort. So I fail because you ask me to do an impossible thing. And the most serious result of your terrible blundering in my education is that my attempts 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 thoughtlessness 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 compulsion 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 available materials while each individual pupil is reading. 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 desirable 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 acknowledged fact that all children are naturally selfexpressive. They are naturally self -expressive in the 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 question. 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 investigate. 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-expression has not been a definite aim with wise and persistent methods for its development by regular and enjoyable exercise, and the oral expression most practised has been oral expression merely in revealing the thoughts of others, and in revealing these thoughts in the language of others. The neglect of proper methods for developing the child's wonderful powers of oral self-expression is a serious charge against teachers, but to confine the child's oral expression 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.

These lessons should be learned as the result of a careful investigation into the causes of loss of naturalness 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 criticised by personal criticism of the child either for inaccuracy 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 censure him for them. His views should be treated with respect. They need not be accepted as correct. 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-consciousness. 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 rejecting 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 freedom and force in oral self-expression will be preserved.