comprehend any of your assertions perceives nevertheless and at once the relationship which they bear to one another and your intention in making them. If I am right, then, in thinking that the failure of the student to apprehend his reading is caused by his failure to appreciate connectives, it should not be difficult to see that the voice is the best medium by which to teach the significance of the relationship of exprest ideas, precisely in the same way that it is the best index of ideas ungrasped. It should not be difficult to see that the best way to deal with the unapprehending student is not to make him write but to make him read aloud, to give him practice in consciously translating the connectives of written speech into the inflections of spoken speech.] Reading aloud in an elocution class, then, discloses the habitual failure to have acquired the meaning on the first and silent reading. It is an exact test of apprehension, and the only one that does not involve the danger of ascribing to the understanding what may after all arise only from the memory. It is the only exercise which will correct the universal habit of assuming that because one recognizes words one understands meanings. ORAL READING AN EXACT TEST OF APPREHENSION When you tell a student that the reason he cannot make you understand what he reads is not your perversity but his ignorance, he is indignant. He says that it is only because he cannot twist his voice to it, and that this is what he is there to learn. You reply that he is there to learn to be effective and that you cannot tell whether he is or not until you understand what he is trying to say; that you have no difficulty in understanding him when he is, as at present, talking out of his own mind; if, then, you have such difficulty when he is using the words of another, it is merely because the thoughts those words stand for have not as yet entered his own mind. Still he insists, with a defiant determination not to look the worst in the face, that there are two ways of talking, his own and the author's; and it is merely because he is unused to the language. Nor is he conNor vinced until he is asked to put the author's thought into his own words that hitherto he has really failed to grasp it; nor even then will he own that the very moment he did so, he was enabled to read this strange language aloud with perfect intelligibility. All this squirming is simply due to the fact that the student is unwilling to admit the drift of his present failure and its enormity—that he is not in the habit of getting the thought of what he reads, that his eye merely runs over lines of words and recognizes them separately, but that his mind fails to take them in as a group. Well may he be unwilling to admit so radical a disability!-less skipping and irresponsible spirits than his are apparently unwilling to admit it of him. He is only assuming what most colleges at present assume, namely, that he knows how to read. It must be owned that if I had not been there to nag him into it, he would have been entirely satisfied with his first reading. Indeed, he does not at all doubt his ability now. The case was not representative; the sentence was queer; the fault was in the unaccustomed language, not in himself. He still goes on believing that he is reading books and has earned the right to judge them, when in reality he has read only some of the more striking words and assertions, and these for the most part only in isolation. But he is not the only one who claims that oral reading is an inexact test of apprehension. Mouths more plausible, though perhaps actuated by a similiar uneasiness, have said so. The trouble, explain they, is merely a matter of translating an apprehended thought into vocal expression of another person's words. But since the thought came from these words in the first place, this does not seem reasonable. Or they say that the mind in reading a sentence by the eye alone suspends its decision as to the relationship of phrase with phrase until the sentence is completed, while the voice, having of necessity fixt what should remain fluid until the period, naturally makes some faulty inflections. But this specious contention is valid, of course, only with reading aloud at sight. Others say it is a matter of what might be called vocal self-consciousness through inexperience. For one reason or another they seek to explain how it is that goods which have just that instant been purchased by the mind are generally lost in delivery. The truth is simple and unescapable-whatever the mind understands it can, granted the words, make understandable. There is one objection which appears for a moment more satisfactory. Some of the failure to express the thought may, it is true, proceed from the failure to bear in mind that speech is not subjective but objective in its intention. Since thought precedes speech, it, as it were, grows stale in the very instant of its acquisition; and, in the subsequent expression, the instinctive devices of the voice-Finflection. and emphasis-fail to manifest themselves correctly, merely because the ideas are not, at the precise instant of speaking, grouping themselves together for the first time. The mind of the reader, they say, having perceived the thought once and not being concerned as it should be with the objectivity of the oral act, is no longer exerting itself on the thought as new material and hence allows the voice to present it mechanically and thus, of course, wrongly. It is true that any language allowed to take care of itself generally acquires in utterance an inflection which betrays the fact by its greater or less unintelligibility. But while this distinction exists in public speakers and is real enough, it makes little difference in readers. Generally, false inflection and false emphasis indicate, not a mind which has temporarily absented itself, but one which was never present at all-uttering words which it recognizes but the significance of whose connection has not been grasped. A proof of this constantly occurs in an elocution class. If you tell a student there is only one part of his good reading which you fail to comprehend, he will either admit or demonstrate by paraphrase that this is the part he failed to comprehend himself. There is nothing capricious in the relation of the voice to the sane and presiding mind. What the mind understands the voice, granted the words, can communicate. The voice may in a dozen ways deprive the thing of interest and effect, but it cannot, except by deliberate intention, deprive it of intelligibility, provided the thing is at the moment of reading aloud being apprehended. NEITHER ORAL NOR WRITTEN COMPOSITION SUFFICIENT TO CORRECT THE FAULT Since, then, an inaccurate reading aloud means an inaccurate silent one, it is apparent that Oral English, when it takes the form of discussion on assigned reading, is not sufficient to correct the fault. It can do nothing more than demonstrate the fact. Valuable as returning the thought is, one must first have got it in order to return it. Even if the major thought has been acquired, returning it is of course no equivalent for the exact rendering of the entire passage aloud. For, naturally, much must drop out on the smaller scale. And if I am right in saying that the failure to detect relationships is at the root of misapprehension, it is obvious that the diminished return cannot disclose the bulk of the possible weakness in what has of necessity been omitted. As every student knows and counts upon, an examination can hit only the high spots, and it takes little astuteness to discover the low ones. Nor is work in written composition sufficient. An accurate writer does not imply an accurate reader. Naturally, any one will take more trouble with his own work than with other people's. But aside from this human fact, many a student who can write well, even to the exhibition of good structure as well as good diction, is able to apprehend the printed page only esthetically. He has merely that sublimated kind of emotional perception, the artistic. That this can be entirely divorced from the intellectual, both in perception and in expression, is crystallized in the familiar remark "beautiful, but what does it mean?" Sometimes, it is true, students who write best may read best, but there is no necessary connection between the two. EVEN GOOD WRITERS OFTEN POSSESS ONLY ESTHETIC One of the best writers I ever had, whose writing was full of the nicest discriminations, was unable to read a page so that it could be understood. This was not because of a self-defeating vocal monotony or of a lack of objectivity in reading, but because he failed to apprehend the connection of the ideas as they came along, and demonstrated it in his false inflections. The excellence of his writing must be set down to a peculiar interest in expressing himself; but when it came to expressing another, he showed as skipping and irresponsible a spirit as many who lacked his excellence in writing. Diction, phrasing, rhythm were the things that contented him in reading, since he perceived them emotionally; the exact intellectual content escaped him. Students who write well (unless, indeed, their excellence is obtained only by much use of knife and file-two tools not to be |