Reading: How to Teach It

by Sarah Louise Arnold

It is essential that even the little children should be taught how to study to the limit of their ability. The study of the reading lesson may be made a most profitable exercise. Too much of the occupation termed study by both pupil and teacher is an indifferent conning of the book, a careless and hurried repetition of the text, or a thoughtless copying; all of which weakens the power of attention, and tends to make the lesson dull and uninteresting. Such loss should be prevented by careful direction of the young student. The study should be at first conducted under the personal guidance of the teacher, for, until the children grow into the power of learning to work by themselves, they need to be taught how to study as well as how to read. The time spent in the preparation of the lesson should be thoughtfully employed, the exercise resulting in helpful habits as well as in increased power.

Before we can teach our pupils how to study their reading lessons, we must have a realizing sense of their difficulties in reading. This means that we must know our children as well as we would have them know their lesson. A successful teacher of little children once told the writer that she allowed her pupils a period for free conversation every day. While they availed themselves of this privilege, she listened, in order to discover in what they were interested and about what subjects they talked freely to one another. Having learned this, she began her language lessons where the children’s interest was centred, led them gradually to new interests, and helped them to overcome their limitations.

Some such study of individual children, or at least of the varying classes of children, is indispensable to the teacher who would endeavor to train her pupils to overcome the obstacles in their way. It is vain for her to assume that all classes are alike, and that a mastery of the words at the head of the lesson will properly equip them all for the feat of rendering the thought which the lesson contains. Such easy assumption ends in failure. The children differ in attainment and in experience. We cannot take for granted either knowledge or ignorance on their part. We must study their experience in order to know their limitations and their needs.

A class of children of foreign parentage was engaged in reading a fairy tale which described the adventures of a wee robin on his way to sing a Yule song to the king. Evidently the children were not accustomed to imaginative tales, and, moreover, they had the dimmest possible notions of the wee robin, the gray, greedy hawk, the Yule song, and the king. Their reading was dull, monotonous, and indifferent, accomplished by dint of constant suggestion and explanation on the part of the teacher, and wearisome though patient repetition on the part of the children.

The exercise, though termed reading, was in reality simply a preparation for reading. It would have been greatly improved by a conscious recognition of its import by both teacher and pupils. They were studying the lesson together and aloud. Had it been thoughtfully studied in this way before reading was attempted, both exercises would have been more helpful to the pupils.

This same class was afterwards questioned in regard to home reading. Not one pupil was accustomed to read or to hear reading at home. In few homes were there any books, while story-telling was a practice of which they had never dreamed. Obviously these children had in their home experience a meagre preparation for reading, and the teacher’s duty was consequently a double one. In such an instance the reading lesson would be entirely robbed of its value if the proper study of the lesson were omitted.

For preliminary study, therefore, it is well for the teacher to use the period assigned to reading in talking with the class about the lesson, her object being not to tell what she knows, but to discover what the children know or do not know. To this end she will bend a listening ear to all mistakes, not to waive them away, nor to smile at the awkward interpretation, but to see from what limitation they arise. Knowing their source, she can help to correct them by removing the cause. Such attention to the errors or the questions of the children discloses two classes of difficulties: those which the children can overcome by thought or by observation, and others in which the teacher must of necessity furnish the necessary explanation. For example, a class in a primary school read, and with fair expression, the story of “a kid upon the roof of a house that railed at a wolf passing by.” The teacher, knowing her class, assumed their ignorance of the meaning of “railed”—was not surprised at the suggestion that “the kid fired a rail at the wolf”—and by her explanation made clear the meaning of the word. She was surprised, however, in the course of the study conversation, to discover that to the majority of the class “kid” stood for little boy. Nothing in the wording of the fable or in the children’s experience served to correct the impression. Again the duty devolved upon the teacher.

Obviously, in such cases the children must depend upon the teacher. To withhold aid at the right time is to make the study fruitless and the children indifferent or discouraged. On the other hand, by means of just such united exercises in study the children will learn to measure their own understanding and to point out their own limitations.

Fancy the class, described above, as having been taught to study, and therefore having wrestled alone with the fable. Upon coming to the recitation, some are conscious of their ignorance and say at once, “I do not know what ‘railed’ means.” They have studied to some purpose, have made themselves ready for their teacher’s explanation—and for helping themselves by means of the dictionary. The other difficulty presented by the slang use of “kid” would of course fail to present itself to their consciousness.

One result, then, of the preliminary study, with or without the teacher, should be to help the children to discover the “don’t know” line; the second should be to enable them to help themselves, if possible. Through careful and conscious study, they may be helped to realize the “sense” of what they read, and to judge for themselves when they fail to get the meaning of the sentence.