New National Fourth Reader
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Teachers and students studying the history of English textbooks and early reading pedagogy
- Learners who want to train English reading through old-style textbooks
- Teachers who need public-domain English teaching texts as course material
- Readers interested in nineteenth-century English basic education materials
Not a good fit for
- Beginners who want modern graded readers or entertaining stories
- Readers who need contemporary notes, exercise answers, and audio support
- Ordinary readers seeking a literary reading experience
Reading tips
- Skim the table of contents and the difficulty of the selections first, then choose pieces suited to your level
- Read one piece a day and note archaic expressions to build material for language history
- Read alongside materials on the history of English teaching to understand the design intent of the selections and exercises
- Use the lessons as reading-aloud material to train pronunciation and language feel
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
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- 8
- 9
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- 11
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FAQ
Is this book suitable for English beginners to self-study?
Does the book contain exercises and answers?
How does this book differ from modern English textbooks?
Comments
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About the author
J. Marshall Hawkes is an author about whom very limited public information is available; only the name as signed and a single work can be confirmed. The library holds one work by this author, New National Fourth Reader, which, judging by its title, is an English reader intended for students in the higher grades and belongs to the "New National" series of textbooks. Such readers typically contain selections, language exercises and reading practice for classroom recitation and comprehension instruction. Because no reliable records of nationality, dates of birth and death, education or professional career exist, his biography cannot be further outlined. On the available evidence, Hawkes's writing and editorial work centers on elementary educational readers, and his style would serve teaching purposes, emphasizing readability and graded language difficulty in the selections. Readers of this kind were widely used in English-speaking countries around the turn of the twentieth century and played a role in developing students' reading ability and awareness of language norms. Overall, Hawkes is a sparsely documented author known in bibliographic records for textbook compilation, whose influence lies mainly in the instructional use of the reader he edited.
