Reading Instruction in the mid 19th century
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The McGuffey Readers are a series of elementary-school texts first published in 1836, and widely used in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I'm not quite old enough to have to have experienced McGuffey in school, but I've been interested for a long time in the problems of early reading instruction, and so I did skim some dog-eared copies of McGuffey many years ago.
My involvement with the "Using Generative Artificial Intelligence for Reading R&D Center" (U-GAIN) has now involved me directly in relevant research, in collaboration with others at Penn, at Digital Promise, at mdrc, and at Amira Learning. Wikipedia tells us that "The Science of Reading (SOR) is the discipline that studies the objective investigation and accumulation of reliable evidence about how humans learn to read and how reading should be taught". And the methods that have emerged from that process are similar in many ways to McGuffey's intuitively-derived methods — minus one interesting feature, namely McGuffey's emphasis on training students to produce a rhetorically effective performance of the passages that are given to them to read.
Here's a quote from Section I, Preliminary Remarks, of the 1853 edition of McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic Fourth Reader :
The great object to be accomplished in reading as a rhetorical exercise is, to convey to the hearer, fully and clearly, the ideas and feelings of the writer. In order to do this, it is necessary that the reader should himself thoroughly understand those sentiments and feelings. This is an essential point. It is true, he may pronounce the words as traced upon the page, and, if they are audibly and distinctly uttered, they will be heard, and in some degree understood, and, in this way, a general and feeble idea of the author's meaning may be obtained.
Ideas received in this manner, however, bear the same resemblance to the reality, that the dead body does to the living spirit . There is no soul in them. The author is stripped of all the grace and beauty of life, of all the expression and feeling which constitute the soul of his subject, and it may admit of a doubt, whether this fashion of reading is superior to the ancient symbolic or hieroglyphic style of communicating ideas.
At all events, it is very certain, that such readers, with every conceivable grace of manner, with the most perfect melody of voice, and with all other advantages combined, can never attain the true standard of excellence in this accomplishment. The golden rule here is, that the reader must be in earnest. The sentiments and feelings of the author whose language he is reading, must be infused into his own breast, and then, and not till then, is he qualified to express them.
Unfairness to hieroglyphics aside, this strikes me as a somewhat florid version of an obviously valid idea, namely that a reader's prosody gives evidence of their understanding, or lack of it. In U-GAIN discussions, Ran Liu of Amira Learning has suggested that a computational analysis of prosodic features could be an effective way to evaluate how well grade-school students understand what they're reading.
In the service of teaching effective expression of a text's intent, the various McGuffey readers add exercises on topics like emphasis, melody, pausing, and so on, to their exercises on phonic decoding and sentential word combination. Thus the section "Suggestions to Teachers" in the Fourth Reader starts this way:
To read with an appropriate tone, to pronounce every syllable properly and distinctly, and to observe the pauses, are the three most difficult points to be gained in making good readers. These points will require constant attention throughout the whole course of instruction upon this subject. Such other directions for reading, and such general rules as are considered of practical utility, will be found in the Introductory Article, and preceding the several lessons.
As an example of McGuffey's prosodic exercises, the section on Emphasis in the Third Reader starts like this:
If the pupil has received proper oral instruction, he has been taught to understand what he has read, and has already acquired the habit of emphasizing words. He is now prepared for a more formal introduction to the SUBJECT of emphasis, and for more particular attention to its first PRINCIPLES. This lesson, and the examples given, should be repeatedly practiced.
In reading and in talking, we always speak some words with more force than others. We do this, because the meaning of what we say depends most upon these words.
If I wish to know whether it is George or his brother who is sick, I speak the words George and brother with more force than the other words. I say, Is it George or his brother who is sick?
This greater force with which we speak the words is called EMPHASIS.
The words upon which emphasis is put, are sometimes printed in slanting letters, called Italics, and sometimes in CAPITALS.
The words printed in Italics in the following questions and answers, should be read with more force than the other words, that is, with emphasis.
Did you ride to town yesterday? No, my brother did.
Did you ride to town yesterday? No, I walked.
I don't know to what extent this level of attention to elocutionary rhetoric will help students learn to read with understanding. At a minimum, it suggests a route towards Ran's idea of a way to evaluate their understanding — but it might also develop into lessons aimed at helping them learn to express themselves more effectively.
Update — See also "Spontaneous (dis) fluency" and "Spontaneities".
Mai Kuha said,
August 16, 2025 @ 6:27 pm
I used to be regularly tasked with reading aloud to a group a passage that was conceptually challenging. My experience was that devoting a considerable part of my attention to producing an appropriate spoken rendition (including prosody) kept me from being able to absorb the ideas in the passage deeply. It felt as though reading aloud successfully required me to attend to sentence structure and some elements of discourse structure, but it wasn't necessary or even possible for me to fully attend to the meaning of what I was reading. But maybe the relationship between understanding and prosody is more straightforward for simpler texts, or for learners.
Mai Kuha said,
August 16, 2025 @ 6:31 pm
I've noticed that on the rare occasions when newscasters make a mistake in prosody, they treat it as any other flub: they pause and repair. This strikes me as interesting, because you'd think they could almost claim that they did produce correctly each word that was displayed in the teleprompter; evidently they hold prosody to be pretty important.
cameron said,
August 17, 2025 @ 12:08 am
I know that in the ancient world "reading" generally meant "reading aloud", but I'm surprised to see this 19th century text where "reading" has that sense
when did "reading" stop meaning "reading aloud"?
Laura Morland said,
August 17, 2025 @ 2:36 am
@Mai Kuha,
You raise an interesting point. As it happens, I've been training people in public speaking for nearly 30 years, and my experience is that you must thoroughly grasp the meaning of the piece BEFORE working on the prosody. (And doing so would resolve your problem.)
Only after you thoroughly (or at least, to the best of your ability) understand the text, will you begin to practice your delivery.
In short: you need both comprehension *and* the skill, honed with experience, to produce the desired result, as outlined in the McGuffey Readers: "To read with an appropriate tone, to pronounce every syllable properly and distinctly, and to observe the pauses."
Many beginning public speakers overlook that last point. When I teach people to read in public, in addition to diction, I put a lot of emphasis on helping them to realize when to make appropriate pauses, and of what length. (I myself usually make a tiny pause *before* a key word, and a much longer pause after most paragraphs.)
Rachael Churchill said,
August 17, 2025 @ 2:51 am
Does contrastive emphasis (as in "George or his brother") exist in all languages? If not, which ones don't have it?
I've sometimes noticed non-native English speakers – even those whose pronunciation and accent are pretty good – failing to use it. For example, they might say "This one is fifty GRAMS, but the other one is twenty GRAMS", where a native speaker would emphasise the "fifty" and "twenty" rather than the "grams". I'm guessing it's because their native language doesn't use contrastive emphasis and maybe they've never been taught the concept, but I don't know this for sure.
Mark Liberman said,
August 17, 2025 @ 5:25 am
@Rachel Churchill "Does contrastive emphasis (as in "George or his brother") exist in all languages? If not, which ones don't have it?"
See Yong-cheol Lee, Bei Wang, Sisi Chen, Martine Adda-Decker, Angélique Amelot, Satoshi Nambu, and Mark Liberman, "A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus", IEEE ICASSP, 2015. The abstract:
We examined the production and perception of (contrastive) prosodic focus, using a paradigm based on digit strings, in which the same material and discourse contexts can be used in different languages. We found a striking difference between languages like English and Mandarin Chinese, where prosodic focus is clearly marked in production and accurately recognized in perception, and languages like Korean, where prosodic focus is neither clearly marked in production nor accurately recognized in perception. We also present comparable production data for Suzhou Wu, Japanese, and French.
See also "Victor Hugo, hélas", 4/13/2024, "LÀ encore…", 4/14/2024, and "Intonational focus", 4/21/2011.
ardj said,
August 17, 2025 @ 5:50 am
wot Laura Morland sed.
Rachael Churchill's point is well taken: I would think of both French and Danish as, in their different ways, avoiding stress on a particular word or part of a word. This is, I understand – perhaps wrongly, contradicted to an extent by the usages of actors in those countries.
In slender support of Mai Kuha's experience, years ago I consistently won the school prize for reading aloud (as well as several medals for goodness). One year there was a passage of Dickens where an old man made a surprizing noise. Had it been, say, "Hrrmph", it would have been no problem, but it was impossible to say what might be meant. Of course I used my imagination and won, but even the judge was unable to find a clear assessment of the sound and purpose intended.
Or maybe that counts as contradiction.
Bob Ladd said,
August 17, 2025 @ 6:37 am
@Rachael Churchill: Actually, the problem here is the reverse: English really likes to OMIT emphasis on repeated words – which has the effect of shifting the main stress of the phrase to the contrastive word – while many other languages tend to keep the relative emphasis across the phrase unchanged regardless of whether there's a repeated word. Within Europe, the West Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German) are enthusiastic "de-accenters", while the Romance languages are mostly non-de-accenters, yielding sentences exactly like your 20 grams example. Marc Swerts and his colleagues have done experiments on this, where speakers have to describe a series of coloured shapes (red circle, blue triangle, etc.) that show up on a screen one at a time. Whenever the shape is repeated from one screen to the next, English and Dutch speakers will pronounce the second one with the emphasis adjusted, whereas Italian and Romanian speakers continue with the same emphasis pattern.
(This is complicated by the fact that there's also a difference between the adjective/noun word order in these languages, but the basic point is unchanged, and you could repeat the experiment with number+noun phrases – which have the same word order in Germanic and Romance – and see the effect more clearly.)
Jerry Packard said,
August 17, 2025 @ 8:08 am
Wrt the methodology of reading instruction, my colleagues at the Center for the Study of Reading at the U of Illinois took the whole language (= whole word) vs. phonetic form (= phonics) contrast and using it as sort of a heuristic baseline, went on to produce a series of methods designed to engage the learners with content, and then presenting them reading materials constructed to exploit the students’ knowledge base that had appeared in the designed content. We then took this methodology to China where we achieved a modicum of success with elementary school learners. We never dealt with prosody at all.
Rodger C said,
August 17, 2025 @ 9:29 am
In Spanish, focus contrast is generally achieved by changes in word order; syntax is more flexible than in English. Imperfect speakers of English, with its more rigid syntax, are apt to produce sentences like the above with the GRAMS.
Mark Liberman said,
August 17, 2025 @ 9:34 am
@Roger C "In Spanish, focus contrast is generally achieved by changes in word order"
I'm guessing that (as in French) the word-order changes are combined with tonal and durational changes, and that in some cases (as in corrective focus on number or letter strings), the prosodic changes are the only cues.
Mai Kuha said,
August 17, 2025 @ 12:42 pm
It is interesting to hear about Laura Morland's 30 years of experience. Let me offer an example of the kind of text I was referring to in my earlier comment. The fact of what happened in my experience was that I was able to read aloud a paragraph such as the following really well, prosody and all, the first time I encountered it, but I'd have to reflect silently for at least 1-2 minutes before I fully grasped its entire meaning.
"By using a phenomenological approach to awareness practice and to exploring the dynamic nature of the stream of consciousness, we can deconstruct each moment of life into the pixels of experience identified as the mind, mental states, and materiality. Such an approach reveals how these elements are synthesized in any moment and how they arise dependently conditioned. A further elaboration of the nature of their conditional relationships exposes the intricate weaving of the tapestry of all life. Without awareness, the lawfully unfolding process is embedded in delusion and suffering." (Source: Spirit Rock website)
For me, a related issue is that reading aloud is very slow. When reading a passage for deep understanding, I need to go through most of it much more quickly while pausing for far longer on certain words and occasionally maybe looking ahead and looking back to check some detail needed for textual coherence.
Hey, are there eyetracker studies that shed light on what people attend to, and for how long, when reading aloud?
Julian said,
August 17, 2025 @ 3:47 pm
"a reader's prosody gives evidence of their understanding, or lack of it."
In first year university Latin classes the teacher would occasionally finger one of the class to read out, let's say, a few lines of Virgil's Aeneid.
As they hesitantly picked it out word by word it was instantly clear that they they had no idea that it was actually verse.
Of course they knew intellectually that was verse, as it was printed with line breaks, but it was clear that they couldn't hear it in their minds
KevinM said,
August 17, 2025 @ 6:54 pm
For a similar illustration, listen to the AI-generated narrations for youtube videos. There's nothing wrong with the vocabulary or syntax, but they are sometimes almost unintelligible as read aloud. In my early youth (pre- Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963)), kids would read aloud in public school class from the KJV Bible, with similar results.
John Finkbiner said,
August 18, 2025 @ 8:50 am
@Rachael Churchill and Bob Lad: Geoff Lindsey has a short video on de-accenting in English. I found his examples very clear and helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5jD5SyH3EM
David Marjanović said,
August 18, 2025 @ 10:52 am
Well, that is not surprising. The meter only works if you know the syllable lengths, so you first need to teach people coming from Standard Average European the concept of vowel length, the concept of syllable-final consonants counting just like vowel length, and the phenomenon that unstressed syllables maintain all of this in Latin. Few teachers even try. Most do say it's verse and read a few lines aloud, but that doesn't begin to explain how the meter works.
I'm guessing that (as in French) the word-order changes are combined with tonal and durational changes, and that in some cases (as in corrective focus on number or letter strings), the prosodic changes are the only cues.
And sometimes, in French, not even that: in de neuf heures à treize heures, heures is stressed both times, and the numerals are not.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 19, 2025 @ 4:48 am
@David Marjanović de neuf heures à treize heures, heures — I found this one very interesting when viewed from the POV of my first language, i.e. Polish. Polish does both, i.e. word order and focus modification, but in general the latter is of secondary importance. However, here, there's an additional twist: the Polish would be od godziny dziewiątej do trzynastej, almost rigidly requiring the avoidance of lexical repetition.
Julian Macdonald said,
August 21, 2025 @ 5:57 am
@david m
"Few teachers even try."
If I were a Latin teacher I would insist on correct pronunciation, not least to promote the idea that this is/was a real language spoken by real people, not just a sort of literary jigsaw puzzle.
Instant fail to any text book that does not show vowel length.
Aforementioned teacher: "not 'populus'! [people] 'Populus'!" [With a macron over the 'o' – poplar tree]