402 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIII. No. 329 



SCIENCE 



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NEW YORK, May 24, lE 



No. 329. 



CONTENTS : 



The Daft Electric Road in Cin- 

 cinnati 



Insecticides and their Applica- 

 tion ; 



White's Street- Railway Rail and 



Royal Society of Caka 



, News. 



■■ 396 

 ... 396 



Overhead Wires for Electric Rail- 

 ways 397 



Some Experiments on Light and 

 Electricity ... 397 



The Electro-Chemical Equivalent 

 of Silver qoS 



The Voltaic Current obtained with 

 Bismuth in a Magnetic Field 398 



Notes and News ; 



Reading as a Means of Teaching 

 Langu.^ge to the Deaf 



A. Graham Bell i 

 Explorations of Capt. Bjnger.... ^ 



GuSTAVE Eiffel , .1 



Mental Science. 

 Psychic Cures 4 



Book-Reviews. 

 The Primitive Family in its Origin 



and Development t 



Hygienic Physiology 



A Hand-Book of Cryptogamic Bot- 

 any 



Outlines of Lessons in Botany . 



Among the Pu 



READING AS A MEANS OF TEACHING LANGUAGE 

 TO THE DEAF.' 



' I would have a deaf child read books in order 

 learning the language in order 



learn the language, 

 read books." 



It delights me to observe in America a gradual change from 

 the scholastic method of teaching language to that which has been 

 so properly called by Mr. Scott Hutton the " natural method." 

 But there is one point in the natural method to which I would 

 direct your attention. 



When we study the methods by which languages are naturally 

 acquired by hearing children, we observe that comprehension of 

 the language always precedes a child's attempt to express ideas 

 in that language, — he understands the language before he uses 

 it ; whereas, in our attempts to apply the natural method to the 

 deaf, we try to make the child use the language before he under- 

 stands it. ' 



I was very much struck by the remark of Mr. Job Williams, that 

 it is practice, practice, practice, that gives a perfect command of 

 language ; that it is the frequeticy of repetition of words that im- 

 presses them upon the memory. Now, what sort of repetition do 

 we give to the hearing child ? Will any member of this conference 

 make the experiment ? It is an interesting one. Take a book in- 



^ An address delivered before the si.xth national conference of superintendents and 

 principals of institutions for the deaf (Gallaudet meeting), held at the Mississippi In- 

 stitution, Jackson, Miss., April 14-17, 1888, by Alexander Graham Bell. 



tended for children's use, and read it aloud. Test the speed of 

 your reading, and you will find that two hundred words a minute- 

 is not a rapid rate. 



A stenographer would say that one hundred and fifty words a. 

 minute is above the average rate of public speaking ; but this is- 

 for language in which long words are of frequent occurrence, and 

 where a deliberateness of utterance is employed that is uncommon 

 in talking to children. Not only do short words predominate in 

 our conversation with children, but mothers and nurses gabble at 

 such express speed that a stenographer would probably give up in 

 despair the attempt to transcribe the conversation. I am con- 

 vinced from experiment that the average rate of nursery gossip ex- 

 ceeds two hundred words a minute. However, to be well within 

 the mark, let us assume one hundred and fifty words as the aver- 

 age rate, and calculate upon this supposition the number of words- 

 presented to the ears of a hearing child in the course of a day. Let 

 us suppose that if these words were concentrated into one continu- 

 ous talk, without any pause, it would amount to a speech of four 

 hours in length, and surely this is not an excessive assumption. 

 One hundred and fifty words a minute amounts to nine thousand 

 words an hour, or thirty-six thousand words in four hours. This 

 means that we shower at the ears of the hearing child no less than 

 thirty-six thousand words a day ; and, as the whole vocabulary we 

 use in talking to children hardly exceeds three hundred words, this 

 means a very great daily repetition. 



We not only talk to a child at the rate' of thirty-six thousand 

 words a day, but we do this for three hundred and sixty-five days 

 in the year (we do not stop on Sundays) ; and we do this for two 

 years at least before we expect the child to turn round and talk to- 

 ns. If, then, we attempt to apply to the deaf the natural method 

 of learning language, what sort of repetition of words to the eye 

 should we give the deaf child before we exact from him any great 

 efforts at English composition .'' In the natural method of learning 

 language, comprehension always precedes expression. But in our 

 schools for the deaf this process is generally reversed. For ex- 

 ample : in our sign-institutions a story is told in signs, and pupils 

 who know little or nothing of the English language are required lo- 

 go through the drudgery of writing out the story in words. Would 

 not the converse process be more natural and profitable ? Even in- 

 schools where the sign-language is not employed, action-writing is 

 largely resorted to. For example : a teacher will take a book from- 

 a pupil, open it, pretend to read it, then close it and lay it upon the 

 table. She then asks her class to express in English words what 

 she has done. 



While this plan furnishes an admirable exercise in composition 

 for older pupils, it is surely out of place with pupils who cannot 

 understandingly read an ordinary book. It reverses the process 

 of nature, which demands that comprehension shall precede ex- 

 pression ; that a child must understand a language before he uses 

 it. 



Now, we know perfectly weirthat if we can repeat words to the 

 eyes of deaf children with any thing like the frequency and clear- 

 ness with which we present them to the ears of the hearing, the- 

 deaf will come to master the language by the same natural pro 

 cess that produces comprehension in the hearing child. The great- 

 difficulty is how to do this. The speed of writing, even at a scrib- 

 ble, hardly exceeds thirty words a minute. The speed of the man- 

 ual alphabet can be made to approximate one hundred words a. 

 minute, but very few teachers exceed an average speed of eighty, 

 words per minute. It is obvious, then, that the teacher cannot,, 

 by his own exertions, even approximate to the speed of speech. 



Is there no hope, then, for the deaf child ? Must the acquisition 

 of English always be to him a long and laborious task .'' Must he. 

 acquire imperfectly, after years of labor, a language which is mas- 

 tered by the hearing infant before he is four years of age, and, 

 which foreigners, commencing at the age when the deaf child enters- 

 school, acquire in a few months .' I do not think so. I think that, 

 there is hope for the deaf child by the adoption of a plan that can. 

 be ingrafted on any system of instruction. 



Though the speed at which we write is limited to about thirty 

 words a minute, the speed at which we read is very different, es- 

 pecially when the words are presented in print so that the letters 

 are clear and unambiguous. I gave an interesting novel the other 



