The Teaching of Reading in Primary Grades by H. E. Reeder

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 1, 1907

The Teaching of Reading in Primary Grades

By H. E. Reeder

THIS to some may seem a time-worn subject; but it is one with which every teacher as well as every pupil must deal.

Surely there is afforded by the teaching of reading, one of the best opportunities for the training of that God-given instrument, the human voice, which is possessed of the most delicate and wonderful properties, susceptible of the highest degree of improvement and perfection.

As one has well said, “A teacher whose ear is not trained to detect the harsh and discordant tones that children sometimes employ, and after detecting them does not know how to remedy them, is unfit for teaching reading.” The child should be taught to read in good, clear, well-rounded tones.

Reading has been very properly called “the key to all knowledge;” for this reason it should be correctly taught in all grades, but more particularly in the primary. If neglected here, the probabilities are that the pupil will never become a good reader.

There are two great objects to be attained by the teaching of reading. First: the pupil is to be trained to acquire, for himself, the thought of the author from the printed page.

Second: audible reading should be done in such a manner that the hearer may understand the full meaning of what the author has written. We have a Bible-recognition of the importance of this last-named object in Neh. 8:8: “So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.”

But, for our purpose, the great question is, How shall these great objects be accomplished?

Many methods have been prescribed and used with more or less success, but in the hands of the ordinary teacher no one method is usually successful. For instance, the exclusive use of the word method has in nearly all cases developed a class of very poor spellers and stumbling readers because the child is taught to recognize the word by its form only, very much the same as the Chinese are taught characters.

The A B C method, the oldest of all (and probably that is the greatest objection to it), surely has produced some very good readers and spellers, and we know that very little progress was made in the arts of reading and writing before the alphabet was invented.

All other methods have their strong and weak points, and whether children learn to read at first by the word, sentence, or phonic method, they will soon learn the names of the letters. At least this has been my experience, and it is a fruitless waste of time to adopt subterfuges in order to avoid the teaching of the names of the letters. Only a few persons ever had any trouble in learning the names of the letters, and most of them learned their letters so easily that they have forgotten when they did learn them.

The successful teacher is not a person of method, but one of methods; able to take the good out of all, and combine it into a working system of his own.

There is no valid reason, so far as I can discover, why the child from the first should not spell all the words in his lessons by letter and by sound. He must learn the names of the letters as well as the sounds, and it will require only a few days for the child of ordinary intelligence to learn both.

Of course in the teaching of reading, we should be careful that all reading lessons placed before the child should have at least an educational value and express good sense in their arrangement. I have seen some new primary readers, like “Ward’s Rational Method,” which I am sorry to say has been used in some of our schools, in which the author has sacrificed sense for the purpose of introducing only a few new words in each lesson. Thus the lessons given are a senseless jingle of words, as follows: “Look at me. Look at me well. Do I look well? Well, look at Jack. Jack looks well.” H. E. REEDER.