Teachers and Teaching

The aim of the teacher is to get his pupils as quickly as possible over the period in which each printed symbol is looked at for its shape, and arrive at the stage when the pupil looks at words and phrases, for their meaning, almost without noticing the shapes of the separate letters.

When a good reader is at work, he does not look at letters or even at words one by one. However quickly, he takes in the meaning of two, three, or four words at a time, in a single moment. Watch carefully the eyes of a person who is reading, and it will be seen that they do not travel smoothly along the lines of print, but they move by jumps separated by very short stops. The eyes of a very good reader move quickly, taking long jumps and making very short halts; the eyes of a poor reader move more slowly, taking only short jumps and stopping longer at each halt. Sometimes, when he meets a difficulty, he even goes backwards to see again what has already been looked at once.

The teacher's task is therefore clear: it is to train his pupils to take in several words at a glance (one eye-jump) and to remove the necessity for going backwards to read something a second time. This shows at once that letter-by-letter, or syllable-by-syllable, or word-by-word reading, with the finger pointing to the word, carefully fixing each one in turn, is wrong. It is wrong because such a method ties the pupil's eyes down to a very short jump, and the aim is to train for the long jump. Moreover, a very short jump is too short to provide any meaning or sense; and it will be found that having struggled with three or four words separately, the pupil has to look at them again, all together and in one group, in order to get the meaning of the whole phrase.