“Yes, the darlings! and it’s surprising how many words a child knows even before he can speak them; ‘pussy,’ ‘dolly,’ ‘carriage,’ soon convey interesting ideas to him.”
“That’s just it. Interest the child in the thing, and he soon learns the sound-sign for it—that is, its name. Now, I maintain that, when he is a little older, he should learn the form-sign—that is, the printed word—on the same principle. It is far easier for a child to read plum-pudding than to read ‘to, to,’ because ‘plum-pudding’ conveys a far more interesting idea.”
“That may be, when he gets into words of three or four syllables; but what would you do while he’s in words of one syllable—indeed, of two or three letters?”
“I should never put him into words of one syllable at all. The bigger the word, the more striking the look of it, and, therefore, the easier it is to read, provided always that the idea it conveys is interesting to a child. It is sad to see an intelligent child toiling over a reading-lesson infinitely below his capacity—ath, eth, ith, oth, uth—or, at the very best, ‘The cat sat on the mat.’ How should we like to begin to read German, for example, by toiling over all conceivable combinations of letters, arranged on no principle but similarity of sound; or, worse still, that our readings should be graduated according to the number of letters each word contains? We should be lost in a hopeless fog before a page of words of three letters, all drearily like one another, with no distinctive features for the eye to seize upon; but the child? ‘Oh, well—children are different; no doubt it is good for the child to grind in this mill!’ But this is only one of many ways in which children are needlessly and cruelly oppressed!”
“You are taking high moral ground! All the same, I don’t think I am convinced. It is far easier for a child to spell cat, cat, than to spell plum-pudding, plum-pudding.”
“But spelling and reading are two things. You must learn to spell in order to write words, not to read them. A child is droning over a reading-lesson, spells cough; you say ‘cough,’ and she repeats. By dint of repetition, she learns at last to associate the look of the word with the sound, and says ‘cough’ without spelling it; and you think she has arrived at ‘cough’ through cough. Not a bit of it; cof spells cough!”
“Yes; but ‘cough’ has a silent u, and a gh with the sound of f. There, I grant, is a great difficulty. If only there were no silent letters, and if all letters had always the same sound, we should, indeed, have reading made easy. The phonetic people have something to say for themselves.”
“You would agree with the writer of an article in a number of a leading review: ‘Plough ought to be written and printed plow; through, thru; enough, enuf; ought, aut or ort’; and so on. All this goes on the mistaken idea that in reading we look at the letters which compose a word, think of their sounds, combine these, and form the word. We do nothing of the kind; we accept a word, written or printed, simply as the symbol of a word we are accustomed to say. If the word is new to us we may try to make something of the letters, but we know so well that this is a shot in the dark, that we are careful not to say the new word until we have heard some one else say it.”
“Yes, but children are different.”
“Children are the same, ‘only more so.’ We could, if we liked, break up a word into its sounds, or put certain sounds together to make a word. But these are efforts of mind beyond the range of children. First, as last, they learn to know a word by the look of it, and the more striking it looks the easier it is to recognise; provided always that the printed word is one which they already know very well by sound and by sense.”