Teaching Children to Read

Citation preview

Teaching Children

To Read

By

Leonard Bloomfield

TEACHING CHILDREN TO READ

by Leonard Bloomfield

Reprinted from Let's Read:

A

Linguistic

Approach by Leonard

Bloomfield and Clarence L. Barnhart. Copyright ©1961 by Clarence L. Barnhart. Wayne State University Press.

Parts of Dr. Bloomfield's essay appeared as an article entitled "Linguistics and Reading," in The Kb mentary English Review, XIX, No. 4 (April 1942), 125-130, and XIX, No. 5 (May 1942), 183-186. PRINTED

IN

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

What

Reading?

is

-Literacy

the most important factor in keeping up our civiliza-

is

and teaching children

tion,

our schools.

We

perform

to read

this task

the

is

most important task of

clumsily and with a great waste

of labor and time. Even at the end of eight years

many

of our

pupils cannot be said to read; yet eight months ought to suffice.

This

is

not due to a lack of pedagogic methods.

excellent teaching technique as the teacher does not It

is

bound

know what

poor results so long

to give

to teach.

generally assumed that a teacher,

is

The most

who knows how

to

read, understands also the linguistic processes that are involved in

the act of reading.

No

one assumes that a cook

who

prepares a cup

of coffee understands the chemical processes which he has called

Everybody knows that there

into use.

that chemical processes

lyzed

is

a science of chemistry

—

have been systematically observed and ana-

—and everyone who

deals with chemistry, in the

way

of teach-

ing or otherwise, makes use of the knowledge that has been gained

by generations of

scientific study. In quite the

not everyone knows

it,

human

speech has been systematically ob-

served and analyzed. Generations of subject,

to light.

and many useful and

No

1

unaided

work have been spent upon

facts

one, not even the cleverest person, could hope, by his to duplicate these results.

efforts,

until the teacher in the early grades

and

this

interesting facts have been brought

tinue to waste time and energy and to reap

and

same way, though

Our

schools will con-

meager

success unless

knows the main

linguistic

principles that play a part in the act of reading.

This essay

rangement

is

— these

—

planned to present facts

and

in a practically useful ar-

principles.

Speech and Writing

To

understand reading, one must understand the relation of

written (or printed) words to speech. 1.

This history is very interestingly presented in H. Pedersen's Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century, translated by J. Spargo (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1931). 3

Compared and

to speech, the use of writing

To

modern.

relatively

years ago in Egypt

and

never since then been

something

is

Mesopotamia, and the

in

lost.

artificial

was used thousands of

be sure, writing

Our own alphabet

art of writing has

probably a descen-

is

dant of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, until recently,

was confined

the art of writing

few persons.

these nations to a very

hundred years

to a very

that literacy has

few nations, and within only within the last two

It is

become widespread

in a

Most languages have never been represented

tries.

may be

writing;

it

know how

to

in

that less than half of the people alive today

few coun-

read and write.

Written notations

in the

English language began to be

made

only some centuries after the beginning of the Christian Era. For

were confined

several centuries these notations

phrases; they

were made

and only a few pagan It

is

in the

to

words or

brief

clumsy alphabet known as Runes,

priests or magicians

only around the year 800 or so that

were able

we

to read them.

get. connected texts

written in English in the ordinary Latin alphabet. Even then the art of

reading and writing was confined to the priesthood. Slowly

this art

spread to wider and wider classes, but anything like general

popular literacy has arrived only within the is

last

hundred

years. It

well to recall also that in the Middle Ages the few persons

knew how

to read

their reading

the present-day literate person

it

seems almost incredible

that people could get along without reading

even today many savage

and writing, and

that

and many

civi-

tribes are in this position,

What happens

lized nations contain a great proportion of illiterates. to a

language

tionaries,

and writing

than in their native language.

in Latin rather

To

and write did most of

if

the people

who

speak

it

have no books

— no

grammars, spelling books, and so on? The answer

question was one of the

first

and most surprising

study: unwritten languages function as languages that

great mass of

who

history, the

in the fact,

non-use of writing

and the use of writing

is

to this

results of linguistic

and develop

have been reduced to writing. In

human

state of affairs,

dic-

is

same way taking the

the normal

a special case and, until

very recent times, a most unusual case.

language, where there

and where there ing

is

merely

is

no popular

is

popular

The

literacy,

literacy, as

among

practically nothing,

of writ-

us, the effect

introduce a few small irregularities into the process

to

of linguistic development. This, of course,

popular view, but

and

undertaken

on

effect of writing is

the opposite of the

the result of every investigation that has been

it is is

is

today

accepted

firmly

by

every

of

student

lanjnia^e.

Writing

much

A

merely a device for recording speech.

is

person

same and looks the same, whether he has ever had

the

picture taken or not.

Only

a vain beauty

who

sits

many

for

is

his

photo-

graphs and carefully studies them may end by slightly changing her pose and expression.

It is

much

the

same with languages and

their written recording.

For our present purpose is

we need

how

speech

noises.

These

only understand

recorded by means of written or printed signs.

Language

consists of

sounds

— musical sounds and

sounds are produced by movements of the speaker's vocal organs (larynx,

waves

tongue,

in the air,

drums. In

w hat we r

this call

and so on). These movements produce sound

and these sound waves

way we language.

Suppose we want

to signal to

someone who cannot be reached

—

far away, or to

by the sound of our voice generations.

strike the hearer's ear-

one another, and the signals are

signal to

to

someone

Nowadays we could

use the radio or

make

graph record. These are modern inventions, and writing

somewhat

less

modern invention of much

the

a

phono-

is

only a

same kind.

There have been many systems of writing, but

seem

coming

all

of them

to consist of three devices or of various mixtures of these

three devices: picture writing,

word

writing,

and alphabetic

writing.

Picture Writing First, there is picture writing, in

ture that represents the story you

which you simply draw a

would

tell

your reader

if

pic-

you

could reach him by the sound of your voice.

Some

Here

can Indians were great picture writers."

tribes of

Ameri-

an American

is

In-

dian's picture message:

N% %

*=^

«?? At the center are two crossed is

gun and

a

lines; at

one side of these there above

a beaver with thirty little strokes

it;

at the

other side are sketches of a fisher, an otter, and a buffalo.

This means: "I will trade vou a fisher-skin, an otter-skin, and

gun and

a buffalo-hide for a

A

message

like this

are in accord as to the

means

strokes a

fisher,

a

other,

and so on

beaver pelts."

provided the writer and reader

meaning of the

pictures.

They must agree

and that the

act of trading,

is

on.

These things are determined by con-

always drawn

in

one way. the

for ever)* animal, so that even a poor draughts-

The important

feature of picture writing

at all.

A

reader

who knows

is

that

if

understand the language which the writer speaks.

knows

that the picture of

he can get

3.

the

this part

word

it

is

not based

the conventions by which

the pictures are drawn, can read the message even

2.

otter in an-

can show which animal he means.

upon language

how

set of

number, and that the animals are a beaver, an

and so

vention: the beaver

man

effective,

mean an

that the crossed lines

otter,

is

thirty

an animal with a big

tail

If

he does not the reader

means

a beaver,

of the message, even though he does not

for beaver

would sound

in

know

the writer's language.

The best examples are to be found in G. Mallery's study, published in the 4th and 10th Annual Rf ports of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution (Washington. D.C.. 1886 and 1893). Ibid.. 4th Annual Rf port (1886), p. 220.

In fact, he can read the picture correctly, even

what language

the speech sounds (the

he does not know

Without going too

the writer speaks.

psychology of the thing,

if

we may

far into the

say that the reader does not get

words or sentences) which the writer might

use in conversation, but he gets the practical content (the "idea")

which

in conversation

he would have got from hearing those speech

sounds.

Word

Writing

The second main type of writing is word writing. In word writing each word is represented by a conventional sign, and these signs are arranged in the

writing

same order

as the

the most perfect system of this kind.

is

tional character for every

word

hand corner of

for the second word,

the paper,

below

it

first

in speech.

There

To

in the language.

you put the character which represents the right

words

is

a second

into the upper

you write the character

and so on; when you have reached the bottom

column down

so on. Each character represents

vocabulary

7

a conven-

write a message

word

of the page you start again at the top, to the left of the

and form

Chinese

to the

first

word,

bottom of the paper, and

some one Chinese word. As the

of a literate person runs

to

about twenty thousand

words, this means that in order to read even moderately well, one

must know thousands of difficult task,

he

is

if

characters. Learning to read Chinese

is

a

the Chinese reader does not keep in practice,

likely to lose his fluency. It is

at

and

any

probable that word writing grew out of picture writing;

rate,

in

the system

known

to us,

some of

the characters

resemble conventionalized pictures. However, the difference be-

tween these two kinds of writing

is

far

more important

for our

purpose than any historical connection. The characters of word writing are attached to words, and not to "ideas." In picture writ-

ing you could not distinguish such near symbols steed; but in

word writing each one of

as, say, horse,

these words

would be

represented by a different character. In picture writing very

words cannot be represented

at all

—words

like and,

nag,

or,

many

but,

if,

aust i

.

in

and abstract words like kindness, knowledge, please. word writing each such word has a conventional

its

own.

was,

is,

— but

symbol of

We

ourselves use

numerals,

1,

word writing

and

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,

(in arithmetic, representing the

in a very limited

in signs like $,

word

There

seven.

spelling or sound involved here; the symbol to the

=, x

,

is

is

word

for

5,

and

fire,

no question of

arbitrarily assigned

word. The characteristic feature of word writing, from the

point of view of people

who

the characters, like our 5

and

are used to alphabetic writing, 7,

word

dicates a

Viewing

as a whole.

point of the teacher and pupil,

be learned by

figuring

itself.

word seven

it

You or

that

we may

say that there

words

whole

as a

in-

from the stand-

practically,

it

ing: the written sign for each of the

sents the

is

do not indicate the separate sounds

which make up the word, but that each character

to

—

+,

our

in

word "times"). The symbol

instance, by an arbitrary convention, represents the

the symbol 7 represents the

way

is

no

spell-

(jour, seven, etc.) has

know that the character 7 repreyou don't know it; there is no way of either

out on the basis of sound or

letters,

and there

is

no way

of figuring out the value of an unfamiliar character.

Word

writing has one great advantage: since a character says

nothing about the sound of the word, the same character can be used for writing different languages. For instance, our numeral digits

we have used by many

(which, as

writing)

are

words have

seen,

form a small system of word although the corresponding

nations,

entirely different sounds.

The following

the words which are represented by the characters

German, French, and

Character

1

table

Finnish.

1

2

4

5

English

one

two

three

four

five

German

eins

zwei

drei

vier

funf

French

un

deux

trois

quatre

cinq

Finnish

yksi

kaksi

kolme

neljii

viisi

3

shows

to 9 in English,

—

Character

6

7

8

9

English

six

seven

eight

nine

German

sechs

sieben

acht

neun

French

six

sept

huit

neui

Finnish

kuusi

seitsemiin

kahdeksan

yhdeksan

The advantage

of this

that

is

we

can

read each other's

all

numbers. Different regions of China speak different dialects which in part are

mutually unintelligible, for the extreme differences are

perhaps as great as between English, Dutch, and German. But thanks to a system of conventions like that of our numeral a piece of less all

Chinese writing

is

readable in

all parts

digits,

of China, regard-

of the different-sounding words, just as the digit 4

is

readable

over Europe, although the words of the various languages sound

very differently.

Alphabetic Writing

The

third

main type of writing

is

alphabetic writing. In alpha-

betic writing each character represents a unit speech sound. literate Chinese,

The

with his system of word writing, has to memorize

thousands of characters

— one

for every

word

in

his

language

whereas, with an alphabetic system, the literate person needs to

know

only a few dozen characters

—one

sound

for each unit speech

of his language. In order to understand the nature of alphabetic writing

we need

speech sound,

The

to

or, as

know

only what

the linguist calls

is it,

meant by the term unit by the term phoneme.

existence of unit speech sounds, or phonemes,

is

one of

the discoveries of the language study of the last hundred years.

short speech

—

say, a sentence

broken succession of our

own

—

in

any language consists of an un-

of sounds.

When we

hear speech in

language, the sounds are so familiar and the meaning

so obvious that

we

all sorts

we do

not notice the mere noise effect, but

hear an entirely strange language,

we wonder

if

any system in such a gibberish of queer noises, and tion

whether

it

A

is

when

there can be

we may

ques-

could ever be reduced to alphabetic writing. Sys-

tematic studv has shown. however, that in every language the mean^s

attached to certain characteristic features of sound.

is

These features are very stable and

from around

fifteen to

around

number ranges anywhere

their

differing for different lan-

fifty*,

guages. These features are the unit speech sounds or phonemes.

±

word :he

phonemes. There-

consists of a fixed combination of

we have

fore, if

sum

a written character for each

a lan-

range anywhere from

total of characters will

we

teen to fifty and with these characters

down any word of that langu^ The existence of phonemes and phoneme are by no means obvious:

phoneme of

fif-

shall be able to write

the identity- of each individual

took several generations of

it

study before linguists became fully aware of this important feature

of

human

speech.

It

had made

dents of language

em

remarkable that long before

is

of alphabetic writing

represented a phoneme.

It

this

—a

scientific stu-

had arisen a

rhere

di>.

system in which each character

seems that alphabetic writing has de-

veloped out of word writing, and that

this

remarkable development

—somewhere

has taken place only once in the history of mankind

between 2000 and 1000 B.C. at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, with

the

Egyptians,

Phoenicians)

.

the

(such as

the role.

forms of alphabetical writing, then, are offshoots of a

D

single original system.

we

so far as

history,

would

Semitic-speaking peoples

and the Greeks successively playing the principal

earn* us

The

details of this origin

can get at them, an

too far afield.

that alphabetic writing

em. but that

It

iually

at

later

eat interest but

important for us to

is

was not invented

it

and of the

one

know

stroke, as a finished

and. one could almost

by a series of accidents, out of

m

of

word

-

writing. Neither

then nor at any time since was there anv bodv of experts

who

under-

stood the system of phonemes and regulated the habits of writing.

Accordingly of the system. to

find

many ups and downs

ancient Greeks seem at

in the perfection

some times and

places

have reached an almost perfect application of the alphabetic

principle

10

we

The

and then

to

have lapsed from

it:

in

medieval and modern

Greek writing the alphabetic principle

A

very poorly carried out.

is

Romans.

similar story could be told of the ancient

some have almost

nations,

perfect alphabetic systems (such as the

Bohemian, and Finnish systems of writing), but others

Spanish,

have

Among modern

relatively imperfect systems

German), and

(such as the Italian, Dutch, or

others have extremely imperfect and arbitrary

still

systems (such as the modern Greek, and French, and the English).

English Writing

We

Alphabetic.

is

can illustrate the nature of alphabetic writing by means

of English examples, for, in spite of

system of writing

This

is

and

in origin

is

proved by the simple

many

its

in

main features alphabetic.

its

fact that

imperfections, our

we

can write every English

word by means of only twenty-six characters, whereas a system of word writing would demand many thousands. As an illustration

we may

take the written representation of the

i

It

consists of three characters,

phoneme.

a single

to represent the

If

word

is,

we compare

jit

the sound of the p,

and read

The

n

is

needle.

used conventionally

the written symbol for other words, such as pig

and read

nip, or if

we

if

we

if

and

reverse the order of

place the letter p at both ends

pip.

alphabetic nature of our writing appears most plainly of

however, when

does not

i,

word

sound of our language. This appears plainly

or bin and din, or pan and pun; or

the letters

all,

to use these three characters

should find the suggestion absurd,

each of the three characters

to represent a unit

pit,

and each of these three represents

we

because these characters do not

That

n

anyone told us needle,

word p