M ECHANICAL P ROCESSES

Reading begins in the "Children's House" as soon as the children reread the word they have already composed with the movable alphabet. This early effort is not indeed the true reading of the word, since interpretation is lacking. The children, it has been seen, know the word because they have actually put it together. They have not gained an understanding of it from the simple recognition of the graphic symbols. What they have done is, nevertheless, an important contribution to real reading. As one considers all of the details of this period of development, it is apparent that its mechanism is closely allied with that of the spoken language.

When the child's attention has been intensively applied to the recognition of the written word, it can easily be fixed on the analysis of the sounds which make up the word. At a certain age the child's interest was aroused by "touching" the letter. He can now be interested in hearing the sounds of the word when pronounced by others and in pronouncing it himself. We have shown that the work on the written language in the exercises with the alphabet was necessary for developing and perfecting the spoken language. It is by so doing that we make it possible to correct defects in speech and to pass naturally over the period when such defects are formed.

We now aim at finding an exercise in the actual mechanism of pronunciation which can be started at the moment of its natural development in such a way that its growth to perfection will follow as a matter of course. It is a question of bringing the children rapidly to pronounce without hesitation. In so pronouncing well, in performing extensive exercises in hearing words and in the interpretation of them from graphic signs, the child brings together in a unit of effect the basic processes of reading and writing.

A good pronunciation of the word read is of great importance. We may say that in the elementary schools of our day this is the principal purpose of reading. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to obtain a good pronunciation when defects have been allowed to develop and become habitual in the child's previous work. In fact, the elimination of these defects, which have been the result of a fundamental error in education, comes to absorb all of the energies of the reading class in ordinary primary schools. So far along as the fifth grade we see teachers struggling to make the children read, that they may acquire a good "pronunciation," and in our reading books there are graduated exercises constructed on the basis of "Difficulties in Pronunciation." It is apparent that all of this stress on the physiological mechanics of pronunciation is foreign to true reading. It is, rather, an impediment to the development of true reading. Such reading exercises constitute, as it were, a foreign body, which operates like a disease to prevent the development of the high intellectual activity which interprets the mysterious language of written symbols and arouses the child's enthusiasm with the fascinating revelations they can give. The eagerness of the child to learn is curbed and cheated when he is compelled to stop his mind from working because his tongue refuses to act properly and must be laboriously trained to work right. This training, if begun at the proper time, when the child's whole

psychic and nervous organism yearns for the perfection of the mechanism of speech, would have been a fascinating task; and once started along the right path, the pupil would have continued to follow it with alacrity and confidence. When the time comes for the intelligence to try its wings, its wings should be ready. What would happen to a painter, if at the moment of inspiration, he had to sit down and manufacture his brushes!

A

Our first publication on the methods used in the "Children's House" made clear two distinct operations involved in reading: the interpretation of the meaning and the pronunciation aloud of the "word." The stress we laid on that analysis as a guide to the development of reading was the result of actual experience. Those who followed this work during its initial stages saw how the children, when they read for the first time, interpreting the meaning of the words before them, did so without speaking,—reading, that is, mentally. Interpretation, in fact, is a question of mental concentration. Reading is an affair of the intelligence. The pronunciation aloud is quite a different thing, not only distinguished from the first process, but secondary to it. Talking aloud is a question of speech, involving first hearing and then the mechanical reproduction of sounds in articulate language. Its function is to bring into immediate communication two or more people, who thus exchange the thoughts which they have already perfected in the secret places of their minds.

Interpreted reading: "Smile and clap your hands." The child reads silently an order written on a slip of paper; then proves that she understands by acting the direction given. (A Montessori School in Italy.)

But reading stands in a direct relation with writing. Here there are no sounds to be heard or pronounced. The individual, all by himself, can put himself into communication not only with human beings actually alive on the earth, but also with those who lived centuries and centuries ago down to the dawn of history. Such communication is made possible not by sound but by the written symbol. The mind takes in these symbols in silence. Books are mute, as far as sound is concerned.

It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two "languages." It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves. In reading aloud the child speaks not to express his own thoughts, but thoughts revealed by the written symbol. The "word" in this case no longer has that natural stimulus from within which creation gives it. In fact, it is something forced and monotonous, something like the language of the deaf-mute. Words which are the product of the interpretation of individual alphabetical symbols come with effort, and the meaning which comes from the interpretation of the entire sentence, as the eye reads word by word, and translates into sound, is apprehended and reduced to expression with great difficulty. To give a fairly intelligible expression to the meaning, the eyes have been obliged rapidly to traverse the sentence as a whole, while the tongue has been laboriously and monotonously pronouncing one word after another. Just imagine adding to such a complex problem for the child of the primary schools the

additional task of correcting his pronunciation! It is no wonder that reading is one of the rocks on which the rudderless ship of elementary education inevitably runs aground.

Interpreted reading: "Take off your hat and make a low bow." (A Montessori School in Italy.)

Composition of words

writing

mechanical

grammatical (controlled by translation into action)

narration and description reading

mechanical interpretative expressed (aloud)

grammatical (translations into action)[5]

declamatory (elocution)

The experiments we have succeeded in conducting on the subject of reading are perhaps among the most complete we have made. We found the key to the problem when we discovered that the child passed from the mental reading of the words written on the cards directly to interpretation in action. This interpretation, ready and facile, as all the acts of children are, reveals to us what the child has understood and accordingly what he is capable of understanding. We have thus been able to obtain an experimental graduation of passages for reading, which on being gathered together, show the nature of the difficulties which successively present themselves to the child. The children have made for themselves specimen clauses and sentences which an expert grammarian could not have devised better for facilitating the study of language. As we went on with this work, we became more and more convinced that the study of grammar may be made a help in[175]

[176] the up-building of the child's language and that it makes its influence felt in reading and in the

written composition. The table (p. 175) may be useful in showing the successive steps actually traversed by the child in the phenomena of reading.

The fundamental point to realize is that interpretation alone constitutes true reading. Reading aloud, on the other hand, is a combination of reading and articulate expression, in other words, a

combination involving the two great mechanisms of the spoken language and the written language. Reading aloud permits an audience to take part in the reading communicated to it by means of articulate speech. Even here, the mental effort required to listen to the voice of a man passionately interested in the narration of things which he himself has experienced is not the same as that demanded in listening to a reading of the same things by a person who has not experienced them, and who, to narrate them, must perform the rapid and intense effort of interpretation. In this reading, so to speak, by "transmission," the most serious difficulties are encountered. We all know by experience how difficult it is to endure a reading, and how rare an endowment the "gift of reading" is. However, the person who is thus gifted can get a hearing almost as well as the person who speaks. The teaching of reading, then, in this sense, is not merely the teaching of the interpretation of the meaning,—all that would be necessary, if the sole function of reading were to gain new ideas for the reader. Reading, thus conceived, represents really the addition of an art of expression to simple reading, and since this expressive art is purely dramatic, the teaching of reading involves the development of dramatic art. Only through dramatic art can the transmission of reading to a group of people be made possible.

It is clear that the oftener the exercise of identifying oneself with what is read is repeated and perfected, the greater the possibility of expression becomes. It follows that in the perfection of this art we should be less concerned with timbre, with tone of voice and gestures, all extrinsic aspects of this art, than with intense vivid interpretation which brings the child to an identification of himself with what he reads. And this interpretation will realize its objects if it is practised as a habit and as a form of reading.

The proof of correct interpretation was the child's ability to reproduce in action what was described in the words he read. Similarly, the proof of the interpretation in reading aloud is the repetition of the things heard by means of the spoken language. That is, the children, in order to prove to us that they have understood something read aloud, should be able to repeat in narrative form what they have heard.

The practical results of our efforts in this direction were very interesting to watch. Some children can say nothing. Others offer to tell the whole story. Their story is not clear or perhaps it is defective in some respect. Immediately other children are ready to correct the ones telling the story: "No, no, that's not what happened, that's not what happened," or, "Wait, you have forgotten something," and so on. In fact, to understand and to be able to narrate what has been understood is not the same thing. In telling a story there is a successive unfolding of very complex mental activities which are based on and added to the primal activity of "having understood." It is a question again of the three different stages noted by us in the first lessons given to children:

First stage, the causing of the perception: (That is red, that is blue); Second stage, the perfection of recognition: (What is red or blue?); Third stage, the provocation of expression: (What about this or that?).

Thus, the child who succeeds in expressing, even in an imperfect way, what he has understood of the passage he has read, is in a more advanced state of development than other children who are unable to tell the story. However, these children who are not able to relate what they have heard said may very well be in the preceding stage in which they are capable of "recognition." These latter are

the relentless critics, the constant "hecklers" of those who are trying to relate—"No, no,—that's not so," "You have forgotten this, or that." Let one of us teachers try to tell the story in the most perfect and complete manner, and these tiny impetuous hecklers listen to us in ecstasy, showing their approval in every form of approbation of which they are capable. By studying such manifestations in the children, we can get sufficient psychological data for determining what reading is adapted to children of different ages, the best ways of reading aloud, and the line of development followed by each child in that hidden mental world of his which is cut off from our gaze. But to derive these benefits from reading, it is perfectly clear that the children must be left absolutely free in the expression of what goes on in their minds.

According to the method used in ordinary schools a child is called upon to read aloud, and the teacher herself continually interrupts, either to correct the pronunciation, or to assist by explanations and suggestions in the interpretation of the meaning. This is all useless for experimental purposes. We have no certain means of determining whether the pupil has understood either what he has read or the explanations of the teacher. Furthermore the corrections of pronunciation have centered the child's attention on this detail which is entirely without relation to the meaning of the text he is interpreting. Another situation not infrequently arises. A child is selected at random to tell in his own words what he has been read. Often the selection is not made at random, but some pupil is called on because he has shown himself the most inattentive, the least interested in what is being done—the recitation thus becoming correctional in character! While the child is telling his story, there is a constant suppression of interruptions: "Hush, I did not call on you," "Wait till you are called on," "It is not polite to interrupt some one who is talking," etc. It is clear that the teacher will never learn anything about her pupils in this way.

This explains why, from the psychological point of view, our present-day schools have not been able to contribute anything new to a reformed scientific pedagogy of reading.