Length

The question of the relative length of the pieces in a reading-book depends partly on the stage of progress of the learners. At first they can advance only slowly, and hence even a moderate amount of variety can only be secured by keeping the texts short. If the book is intended for young children, there is all the more reason for making them short.

On the other hand, it is possible to make too great concessions to variety: an unbroken succession of very short texts is more wearisome than restriction to a single long one. A great part of Vietor and Dörr's Englisches Lesebuch is, through the excessive use of nursery rhymes and riddles, little more than a collection of detached sentences in archaic English. Thus, the first two pieces they give are—

I.

‘He that would thrive
Must rise at five;

He that has thriven
May lie till seven.

2.

Early to bed and early to rise

Makes a man healthy, and wealthy, and wise.'
Then come some short poems, including, of course—

'Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.'

Then Section II. begins with a prose piece, 'The fatal quarrel of saucer, mug, and spoon;' then comes

2.

'Molly, my sister, and I fell out,

And what do you think it was about?

She loved1 coffee, and I loved tea,

And that was the reason we could not agree.'

Then a poem, 'Too clever;' then another piece of prose, ‘The wonderful pudding;' then

1 Archaic for like.

6.

'Everything has an end and a pudding has two.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Which is the left side of a round plum-pudding?

First come, first served.
Hunger is the best sauce.
Enough is as good as a feast.

Half a loaf is better than no bread.
They that have no other meat 1
Bread and butter are glad to eat.

After dinner sit a while,
After supper walk a mile.'

Then a prose piece, 'Food.' Then no less than nine pages headed Nursery Rhymes, Riddles,' etc., among which we find 'This is the house that Jack built,' 'If all the seas were one sea, what a great 2 sea that would be! . . . Solomon Grundy, Born on a Monday,' together with verses such as—

'Swan 3 swam over the sea;

Swim, swan, swim.

Swan swam back again;

Well swum, swan.'

And riddles such as

'Which is the strongest day in the week?

SAVE THE LAY AHL THE ASIA

What is that which you and every living person have seen, but can never see again?

What is that which no man ever yet did see,1
Which never was, but always is to be?'

All this is surely carrying the principle of variety too far. One does not see how the pupils are to carry away any definite associations from such jerky transitions, in spite of the care taken by the compilers to preserve unity by giving each section a special subject, such as 'getting up and going to bed,' 'meals,' etc. But the section 'nursery rhymes and riddles' is made up of absolutely detached pieces, many of which, as we see, are extravagantly short.

It is evidently impossible to come to a definite agreement on the subject of length, for what seems short to a slow, retentive mind may seem intolerably long to a quicker or more superficial one. It is evident, therefore, from this point of view, that the compiler of a reading-book ought to vary the length of his pieces on both sides of the average length. This average length ought, from a purely linguistic point of view, not to be less than a page or two, and anything shorter ought to be given only exceptionally, riddles and proverbs being entirely excluded unless quoted in a clear context.

Clear Context

It is of the greatest importance that each word-especially each new word-should, as far as possible, have such a context as to leave room for the minimum of hesitation as to its meaning. Thus the context of the word east in such a statement as the house faces east may suggest to the learner that east denotes one of the four quarters, but it will not tell him which it is, while such a statement as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west enables him to identify the quarter in an unmistakeable manner indeed, if he only knows the meaning of sun and rise, he will be able to infer the meaning of the other three full words with almost complete certainty. In such a statement as the first day of the week is called Sunday, the second Monday, the third Tuesday the associations between the numbers and the days are so definite that any one who has learnt the complete statement by heart in the language he is learning will have no difficulty in recalling any one of the words by repeating the series till he comes to it. In this case we have two independent associations of order-first, second..., Sunday, Monday. -each of which strengthens the other.

We see that where, as in the last example, there is a known fixed order, the mere enumeration of the words in this order

would be enough to fix the meaning of each word in the memory-the mere repetition of Sunday, Monday, Tuesday... by itself is enough to teach us the meaning of each word. But if there is no definite order of associations, mere enumeration gives only the information that a certain number of words have some meaning in common, without affording the learner any further means of discriminating them. Thus I once saw an elementary French reading-book in which the different things in a house were simply enumerated, thus 'in the kitchen are plates, dishes, saucepans, kettles. . ., so there was nothing to correct the English learner's natural assumption that plat means 'plate' instead of 'dish.' So also with such a statement as 'all kinds of flowers grow in the fields: daisies, buttercups, primroses, cowslips

It need scarcely be added that the context, to be clear, must be familiar. Thus a European beginner should not be allowed to read in a description of scenes in the southern hemisphere that the sun was hot because it was the middle of December.

Limited Vocabulary

As we have frequently had occasion to say, the learner's vocabulary should not be large. Even up to the end of the third stage he will not require more than three thousand words. But these he will command with perfect ease and certainty, and will find them enough to make himself understood in speaking of any topic of ordinary life without going into technical details.

Those who learn a language through its literature often have almost as wide a vocabulary as the natives, but have no real command of the elementary combinations, the phrases and idioms, so that, as already observed, they are often unable to describe the simplest mechanical operations, such as 'tie in a knot,'' turn up the gas.' Nor, when they come to study English, for instance, do they know that the antithesis of finding in the spoken language is not seeking but looking for. So also, instead of getting wet, they become wet. Those who learn a language on a colloquial basis generally have no difficulty in expressing what they want by idiomatic paraphrases. Thus I remember a foreign child who, not knowing, or having forgotten, the name for a 'pen-wiper,' described it without hesitation as the thing you make dirty pens clean with. Such a learner, so far

from substituting seek for look for, would probably not even know what the former meant.

The Most Necessary Elements given First

The more limited the vocabulary, the greater the care that must be exercised in its selection. It is evident that the first and strongest associations of the learner, ought to be with those elements of the language which are the common foundation of the colloquial, the literary, the familiar, and the scientific and technical strata of the language. As already remarked, he ought not to be confronted with words which would still be unintelligible to him when translated into his own language. His reading-book ought not to give him a description of a candle-manufactory. Even a description of a game of cricket is out of place, for few foreigners are likely to join in it, and such a description would involve technicalities that even Englishmen might be ignorant of, or, at any rate, unable to define accurately.

The distinction between necessary and unnecessary idioms and phrases is especially important. All proverbial idioms, and most of those containing similes, are mere ornamentsoften only vulgar ornaments-of speech, and therefore superfluous for the foreigner who can only just manage to express himself in a straightforward way: he requires only to understand, not to be able to use them himself. Equally superfluous are the idioms and expressions constituting slang or argot; except when what is called slang really serves to supply a want -to give expression to some idea which could not otherwise be expressed-in which cases it ceases to be slang, and becomes simply colloquial. Another reason why foreigners should not attempt to imitate such expressions is that they are constantly changing, and nothing is more out of place than antiquated slang.

But besides these, there are thousands of idioms which, although quite unobjectionable in themselves, are superfluous to a beginner because they express ideas which could be expressed just as well by a normal and unidiomatic combination of words. Thus in English, I must be off now can be expressed just as well by I must be going now or I must go now, which, though less forcible, is less familiar, and therefore safer