Reading: How to Teach It

Arnold, Sarah Louise, 1859-1943Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

2.5

Word count: 213K words
Chapters: 22

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Reading: How to Teach It by Sarah Louise ArnoldAuthor: Arnold, Sarah Louise, 1859-1943,Language: English, Class: LB: Education: Theory and practice of education, Release Date: Dec 12, 2018

Editor's review

This book is a primary source on early reading pedagogy. Its author, Sarah Louise Arnold, worked for many years in teacher education and reading promotion, and the book's focus is not quick-fix techniques but how to build, step by step from children's language experience, the relationship among word recognition, oral reading, and comprehension. For today's readers its value lies more in historical reference: one can see how educators a century ago understood reading difficulties, classroom pacing, and textbook selection. The style is expository, the structure clear, but the examples bear the marks of their time, and some views need to be reconsidered in light of modern reading research. It is suitable for a reference list on the history of education, language-arts pedagogy, or parent-child reading, as comparative reading rather than an operations manual. If you are looking for immediate strategies for today's classroom, read it alongside contemporary research; if you care about how ideas about reading instruction evolved, this short work offers many details worth discussing.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Students of educational history studying the history of reading instruction and the evolution of language-arts education
Trainee and in-service teachers who need supplementary primary texts on early pedagogy
Parent readers with a historical interest in ideas about parent-child reading
Libraries and digital-humanities researchers collecting public-domain educational texts

Not a good fit for

Frontline teachers looking for modern lesson plans they can apply directly
Readers hoping for leveled-reading assessment tools and data support
General readers who prefer light essays or original children's literature

Reading tips

Read the table of contents and preface first, mark the chapters relevant to your own teaching context, then read them closely.
After each chapter, compare its views with contemporary reading research and note what is transferable and what is outdated.
If used for a reading group, organize a themed discussion around "the relationship between oral and silent reading."

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

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.

FAQ

Is this book suitable for directly guiding classroom teaching today?

It should not be applied directly. It is a discussion of pedagogy from over a century ago, and classroom organization, textbooks, and children's experience have all changed. A better use is to treat it as historical reference for understanding how ideas about reading instruction evolved, then combine it with contemporary research to select transferable principles rather than copying specific steps.

How difficult is the English, and what background is needed?

The original is English expository prose with long sentences but no very obscure vocabulary; university-level English reading ability is enough to read it through. There is little specialized educational terminology, and period examples can be skipped without losing the main thread.

Is it long, and is it suitable for reading in fragments?

It is a short educational treatise with relatively independent chapters, suitable for reading in fragments chapter by chapter. It is easier to digest its argument if you pause after each chapter and note the key points rather than reading it all at once.

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About the author

Arnold, Sarah Louise, 1859-1943 Author

Sarah Louise Arnold (1859–1943) was an American educator whose life is documented only in limited public sources. According to the records available here, she left one work, Reading: How to Teach It, whose title indicates a book on methods of reading instruction intended for teachers and educational practitioners, dealing with how to develop and guide children's reading skills. The book belongs to the practical literature of education; its plain, hands-on style reflects the attention that American educators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave to reading instruction. Although her full career and academic background cannot be verified, the work remains a useful reference for studying the reading-teaching ideas and practices of her time.