How to Teach Reading, and What to Read in School

by G. Stanley Hall

Excerpt from How to Teach Reading, and What to Read in School
How to teach children to read, and what they should read, are two of the oldest and most complicated, as well as most important problems of pedagogy.
To begin with the first of these problems, there are two methods of teaching the art of reading: viz., the synthetic, which proceeds from letters or sounds to words, sentences, etc.; and the analytic, which begins with pictures, words, or sentences, and descends to visual or vocal elements. So long and so far as letters were named from real or fancied resemblances between the form of the letters and objects, the process of naming them no doubt facilitated learning, much as to call our large A a harrow, B an ox-yoke, etc., would now do. This latter, or even if a novice in Hebrew were to remember that mem is water, aleph an ox, nun a fish, etc., would be especially helpful in writing, which in modem methods often comes as a very early stage of language-teaching, and where a distinct name is helpful for each sign. Just when or by whom the school device of telling off the independent names of letters as a key to the spoken word (or spelling) was hit upon, is unknown. Of course, d-o-g really "spells" deogee, and not dog, any more than delta, omicron, gamma, does. Arbitrary in itself, spelling has naturally associated itself with harsh methods of teaching.

50 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 2015

About the author

Granville Stanley Hall was an American psychologist and educator. He was the first president of the American Psychological Association.