acquired a store of knowledge, and has learned language well enough to understand others when they talk, and to convey his own thoughts to them thru oral speech.

This language power has been acquired by unconscious imitation of the speech of those around him, and is perfect or imperfect according to the way he has heard language spoken. In acquiring this power there has been constant interaction between thought and expression. Every effort made to clothe his thoughts in fitting words, so that others may understand them, reacts on his thinking, making it clearer; and clearer thinking means increased power to get new thought.

Reading and writing open up new avenues for getting and expressing thought. As both are dependent on thought and closely related, they should be taught at the same time. Experience has proved that the highest degree of interest and self-activity is enlisted when they are taught as interconnected processes.

The child enjoys writing the words which he has read. To do this correctly he is obliged to observe closely their form and the order of the letters which compose them. The almost universal practice of having the first reading-lessons written on the board affords the opportunity for doing this. As the children, interested and observant, watch the sentences grow, they not only become familiar with the visual image of the words, but see how they are made by watching the teacher's movements as she writes. This is apparent by the comparative ease with which they afterward reproduce them on the board. When the visual and auditory memory of the words is reinforced by the motor memory which comes from using them in writing, they become permanently photographed on the mind. As the child in learning to talk modeled his first sentences upon those he heard, he also in learning to write naturally imitates the sentences he sees written on the board. Hence the importance of having from the very beginning good models for him to copy.

While reading and writing are started at the same time, the child's growth in expression is far slower than his power to appreciate and appropriate what he reads.

As soon as the habit of associating the printed with the spoken word and its idea has been formed, his progress in learning to read becomes rapid. This is especially true where books are used in which his interests and needs have been considered and cared for. Here interest in the story furnishes the motive for mastering the symbols of thought, and he works with great zest.

In reading, his mind is in a receptive attitude. He not only gains new ideas, but the proper forms of expression for them. His vocabulary, too, grows rapidly as he masters the new words which he meets in his reading. In this way his mind becomes enriched, his vocabulary enlarged, and his language power increased. When he talks or writes his mind is more active than when he listens or reads; for here he must determine his own thought, while in listening or reading his thoughts are determined by another.

As it is the child's self-activity that educates, he should be given frequent opportunity to express his thoughts both thru speech and writing. Thruout the first year lessons which provide for free spontaneous oral expression should predominate. These lessons pave the way for written expression where to the difficulties of composition are added those of writing, spelling, and punctuation.

As the aim in writing is to secure free and effective expression, the child should be asked to write about only such things as are of vital interest to him and which he enjoys talking about, such as: himself, his family, his pet, games, sports, toys, school, etc.

The written expression should be made to follow the oral expression so naturally that he will consider writing as only another way of talking. He will enjoy writing his thoughts as he has before enjoyed telling them.

ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF READING and writing

ROBERT MACDOUGALL, PROFESSOR OF DESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK CITY

In this paper I have been asked to speak of the mental processes involved in reading and writing, and the consequent nature of the problems which their teaching presents. With the first of these topics the teacher has primarily nothing to do. He seeks results. To make of the child a good reader and writer is his aim, and the question whether he is conscious or unconscious of the special methods by which this end is attained is a matter of little consequence.

With the psychologist it is different. His interest lies just in those processes of mind, in teacher and pupil alike, of which the activities of instruction and learning are the expression; and the practical result is as secondary a matter for him as are the underlying processes for the teacher.

Yet, in spite of this apparent incompatibility of aim, you must daily feel that these two activities are intimately related and their studies complementary to each other. For its perfect development practice rests upon understanding, and in no work is this truer than in the direction which the teacher undertakes in connection with the unfolding of the soul of a child. Intuition must be supplemented by analytic knowledge, for theoretical science is the ultimate basis of the successful control of material in every field of human activity. It is to these principles of mental development that all practical method finally owes its validity, for the only right way of teaching any subject is that which consciously or unconsciously adapts itself to the child's mode of assimilation and growth. The discussion of the mental processes involved in reading and writing thus forms the rational propedeutic to the teaching of these branches.

Reading and writing are two highly specialized variants of human speech, and all intelligent analysis of their phenomena must start from an understanding of the type in which they have their common root. Speech is a mode of adaptive reaction in which the primitive response has been replaced by a description of the act or its consequences, and which becomes possible only thru the development of representative thought and the establishment of social habits. Thought is a function of consciousness interpolated between stimulus and reaction which, from the biological point of view, constitutes a device whereby economy of action is attained thru the elimination of unfit alternatives at the level of imagination instead of at that of movement. The reconstructions of thought thus form a vicarious treatment of the problems of life which has had its rise as part of the immediate process of adaptation for which it serves as a general preparation thru the habitual representation of imaginary problems and their theoretical solutions. Thru the freeing of consciousness from its direct practical relations an independent value comes to attach to all its manifestations, and thought and speech are cultivated as impersonal and æsthetic media.

This highly refined type of reaction involves a system of ideas representable by social symbols and a process of expression consisting of a complex set of movements changing character in dependence upon the variations in the ideational content. As human speech essentially reflects intelligence, its development presupposes the whole process of experience in which the self takes shape, with its gradual definition of responses, and the rise of a system of perceptions, memories, and judgments; and as it involves complex process of utterance, it must wait for its completion upon the development of co-ordinated nerve centers and incessant habituation. The understanding of speech is gained thru a process of trial and error, the system of concepts being clarified and corrected thru repeated exemplifications, and its use is mastered only thru persistent practice of its elements. To the study of reading the child thus comes with a relatively full equipment of ideas and a fluency in their use which is of immediate service in the new field of work.

Reading differs from speech thru the addition of a complex set of movements of sensory adaptation and a succession of apperceptive reconstructions necessary to the understanding of what is read. Sensory adaptation, which in the adult takes place with precision and facility, has largely to be established in connection with the reading habit. Tho the control of eye-movements is in general well developed when the child begins to read, they have hitherto been made in a freely extended visual field under the influence of reflex attraction or motives of immediate practical or æsthetic importance. Now they must be applied to the disentanglement of a system of conventional and uninteresting symbols distributed in wholly artificial space relations and necessitating a constant strain. The adult has little notion of the errors of adaptation under which the young reader suffers, and of the consequent importance of carefully considering the size of type to be used, the color and surface of the paper, the length of line, and the continuity of print from side to side of the page in the beginner's reading-matter. So long as these difficulties persist, the disturbance which they involve will destroy the integrity of the ideational and expressive functions and make it impossible for the child either to understand clearly or to read expressively. Sensory control, however, is not the chief difficulty which confronts the beginner. Since the whole system of symbols is novel and embarrassing, that anticipation of verbal construction and swift supplementation of text by context which enables the fluent reader to leap forward from phrase to phrase is here impossible. Each word must be studied, even its letters verified; with the result that in this analytic process the sense of all larger relations is lost, and the sentence becomes scarcely more than a series of isolated substantives and connectives. Until this process of apperceptive construction becomes a matter of routine, no reading, in the proper sense of the term, can be said to exist.

The problems involved in reading are thus twofold-the understanding of what is written and its interpretative expression. The mastering of the system of conventional symbols in which written language consists is commonly

complicated by the fact that the ideas for which they stand are only in part known, so that the young reader is confronted with a world of novel realities as well as with an unfamiliar set of signs. While the following of the type and the translation of its symbols into mental images continue to involve friction, therefore, it becomes important to select reading-matter whose elements are already familiar to the child, so that as nearly as possible his whole attention may be given to fixing in mind the relation between the symbol and that for which it stands. To provide the child with a stock of visual verbal equivalents for familiar objects and relations should be the first aim in teaching him to read.

The means by which this task must be approached consists specifically in the child's possession of oral speech which enables him to translate the printed symbols directly into significant terms. It is this which differentiates learning to read from the acquisition of speech itself, for in the earlier process the child sets out with no such interpretative basis, but must discover the meaning of each sound and combination of sounds from the practical situation in which they are uttered and the actions with which they are associated. Tho the problem of learning to read is thus greatly simplified, there still remains the essential difficulty that in becoming conventional and abstract all logical relation between the sign and the thing signified vanishes, and the child must simply ask and be told the meaning of each term. The only possible modification of this rule is embodied in the phonetic method, the application of which makes feasible the translation of any written combination into its auditory equivalent and the discovery of its meaning, provided it represents a known object. In a logically constructed language such a method is of the utmost value, but its application is restricted in proportion to the phonetic irregularity of a speech.

The general employment of phonetic methods tends to the establishment of a habit of uttering each word as it is met―a custom which appears naturally in the early stages of reading, and which in most persons is but partially suppressed in later years. This motor accompaniment is a purely secondary process which theoretically constitutes an incubus upon rapidity and clearness alike, for an apprehension of what is read thru visual perception alone is all that reading logically involves. Lip-movement is a residual function which has been carried over into silent reading from the earlier office of speech as a medium of social communication, and statistical investigation has shown that the most rapid and retentive readers are those in whom this habit has been most fully suppressed. Nevertheless, the employment of these supplementary motor processes is an indispensable accompaniment of the earliest stages of reading. The child comes into possession of his vocabulary thru the use of the terms which compose it, and in learning to read the word is mastered only thru the repeated utterance of its sound in connection with the perception of its visual form. In proportion, however, as attention can be withdrawn from the cultivation of utterance, and emphasis laid upon the

significant content, the child should be systematically trained to suppress this motor accompaniment and to translate the visual symbols directly into mental

terms.

The second general problem in reading is that of interpretation, which includes two elements-the production of the voice and dramatic expression. The proper production of the voice begins with the correct breathing, the cultivation of which is related to conditions of health, exercise, clothing, and posture. Speech itself involves a wholly secondary use of the respiratory apparatus, and that the conditions of reading further complicate this function is shown in the fatigue entailed by a period of reading which would hardly tire the speaking voice at all. The second element in voice-production is phonation, the use of the vocal cords in producing sound. The quality of the voice as thin, full, high, flexible, and the like, is commonly regarded as constitutional and unalterable. No greater incubus than this delusion could exist. As a matter of fact, most of us have voices poor in tone, range, and pliancy; but just as truly might the majority of us have had good voices. The larynx is a most sensitive instrument, responding alike to good and evil influences; and while certain bounds to its functions are indeed set, its character, pitch, and variability within these limits are largely matters of models and use. Constant adaptation molds the voice to the quality as well as form of the sounds in which it is exercised, until at last its dominant pitch-level and modulations, just as surely as its habits of articulation and accent, become fixed and unalterable. Congenital voice quality does exist, but its chief determinant is to be found in the prevailing speech of the neighborhood; and we must attribute that high, harsh character which has been called the American voice to habitual abuse and not to lack of endowment. The third element of voice-production is articulation—the molding of the tones produced by the larynx into the forms of speech, in which the whole buccal cavity participates. The determinants of word-formation are in part organic, in so far as developmental or degenerative changes in the mouth-parts and neuromuscular apparatus condition variations in articulation; but, apart from universal or pathological characters, they are wholly functional, since the form of the individual's utterance arises from adaptation to the models presented for imitation during the formative period of speech-development. The child unreflectively, but with extraordinary fidelity, reproduces the vocal peculiarities of those about him, and the only final way to insure correct speaking is to hear good speech used continuously; for in the face of a home environment in which incorrect pronunciation and faulty grammar prevail, the school can do little to mold the child's habit of speech.

The training of the voice, however, touches but the elements of method; for reading is the employment of all these means, respiratory, vocal, and articulatory, to give expression to one's interpretation of written thought. The patient study of expression and discipline of the voice which this involves are exemplified in the lifelong training of the actor which centers in the manage