GROUPING
If the work of the first step has been carefully done, the
transition to the second step will present few difficulties. As
a matter of fact, the pupil has been grouping unconsciously, but
in a way more or less uncertain. The purpose of the next step is
to fix firmly the habit of grouping. As a general rule, the pupil
pronounces as many words in one group as his eye can take in and
his voice utter; consequently, his reading is choppy and often
meaningless.
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.
Let us put all these words together and add a word or two: “I saw
a man in a steam car.” Now we have a clear picture. What do we
learn from this? We learn that a single word does not give us a
clear picture, and that it takes three, and four, and sometimes
many words, to give us a picture. We can think “I saw a man” or
“in a steam car,” but we get a complete thought only when we put
these two groups of words together. We notice also that while it
takes just a moment to see a picture, it often takes many words
to describe it.
What we have done is called grouping; that is, reading several
words together just as we read the syllables of a word. Let
us try some examples. “Charles gave a sled to his brother.”
Here there are two groups: One ending at “sled,” the other, at
“brother.” “I went to King Street with my sister to buy a new
hat.” Here we have three groups. Can you pick them out?
The last thing we are to learn in this lesson is that every group
of words has a picture in it, and that we must not read aloud any
word until we have got the thought or the picture in the group.
Pick out the groups in the following sentence, and then read
aloud, but be sure you pay attention to the picture in each
group: “When-our-school-closes for-the-summer-vacation,
some-of-us-go-to-the-country, others-go-to-the-lakes,
some-go-to-the-mountains, and-many stay-in-the-city.”
For to-morrow’s lesson[9] I want you to bring in the groups in
the following examples, putting hyphens between the words of each
group, just as we did in the sentence about the summer vacation.