How to Teach Reading in the Public Schools

by S. H. Clark

At the outset care should be exercised in the choice of extracts. Any extract will not do. Simple passages, with simple ideas, are needed. Avoid complex, involved, inverted rhetoric. Later on, when proper habits have been formed, the difficulties may be increased; but we shall meet only with discouragement if we introduce them too soon. The following is just difficult enough to bring out the efforts of an ordinary child of ten or eleven:

Once upon a time there lived a very rich man, and a king besides, whose name was Midas; and he had a little daughter, whom nobody but myself ever heard of, and whose name I either never knew, or have entirely forgotten. So, because I love odd names for little girls, I choose to call her Marygold.—The Golden Touch. Hawthorne.

The teacher should use a great many isolated extracts. These may not be so interesting as entire selections, but if chosen carefully and read with a definite object, it is surprising how they hold the attention of the class. It may also be possible to find short stories to supplement the extracts. Many good extracts may be found in the reader or even in some of the other books the children are using.

The reason for urging this plan is that few reading books present the difficulties of reading, in a rational, graded manner. Any selection may contain the simplest problem and the most difficult in one paragraph. The pupil must be trained to get his ideas from the printed page in groups, and such training can surely be gained better by using carefully selected passages than by the present aimless wandering among a labyrinth of words. It is admitted that a good teacher of reading may be able to get along without calling the attention of the class to grouping as a definite step; but he must certainly have that step in mind as part of the development of a reader.

In this lesson we begin exercises in what might be called “mental technique.” It must be borne in mind that these lessons are planned with the object of presenting one element at a time, and the pupil must not be expected to read well where he has had no previous drill. In this lesson, therefore, the pupil should be held responsible for what he has learned in the first and second lessons only. It must further be remembered that all corrections should be made by putting such questions as, “Is that the whole picture?” or, “Have you not given us more than one picture?” Never tell a pupil to make a pause here or a pause there, or to read faster or more slowly. Such corrections are useless. We must learn to rely upon the thinking to govern the rate of speed, or the length and frequency of the pauses.

It might be well to bear in mind that in colloquial speech pauses are less frequent. In other words, the groups are longer.

As a result of such training as the pupil gets in this lesson we shall note that he will learn to look ahead, and so rid himself of the too general tendency to utter words as soon as he sees them, regardless of the sense. The process of recognizing words and pronouncing them simultaneously is attended with no small amount of danger. It begets a fatal facility in reading that is a positive detriment to the pupil. There are thousands who read glibly and yet are utterly ignorant of the meaning of what they read. To prevent the formation of such a habit or to break it up where it already exists, there is no better plan than that herein advocated for the study of grouping. It need hardly be said that the method of telling a pupil “to pause before a relative pronoun, inverted adjectives, prepositional phrases,” and the like, is virtually useless. The thought, and not the grammatical construction, determines the pause.

Another suggestive lesson for the teaching of grouping is offered:

You remember that in our last lesson we learned that we must first get the thought before we could read. Now we are to study how to get the thought.

Did you ever notice how you think? If you hear the word “Car,” what do you think of? Some, of a horse car, some, of an electric car, and some, of a steam car. So you see the word “Car” by itself does not give us a very clear picture. The words, “I saw,” do not mean very much either. For unless we know what you saw we get nothing to think about. The two words “in a” do not mean much, and by this time you know why.