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problem. Hence, in the United States, great ingenuity has 

 been expended in the discovery of practical and speedy meth- 

 ods. Germany has furnished many plans which have been 

 ingeniously modified and applied. 



The ancient alphabetic method is now scarcely used at all in 

 good schools. It is the longest and most monotonous method 

 — and it is the method best known in France. This method 

 was not represented at the Exposition. Even in the country 

 schools in the United States, there are not on the average 

 twenty in a hundred that use the old spelling plan, and in 

 many States it is not employed at all. Manifestly public 

 opinion has pronounced for the new methods. 



In the phonic method, imported from Germany, the teacher 

 drills the child first in the pronunciation of the sounds of the 

 language, then in distinguishing the signs by which these are 

 represented. He thus proceeds from the sound to the symbol, 

 from the letter uttered to the letter figured, in place of passing 

 from the name of the letter to its phonic value, which is often 

 very difiicult. However, this method, applied strictly and in 

 its whole scope, assumes that, as is the case of German, a given 

 letter always corresponds with a given sound, and this is not 

 the case w^ith the English language. Hence many objections 

 have been raised to the purely phonic method, which indeed 

 had to be modified into the word method or the phonetic 

 method. 



The phonic method, even when aided by all the American 

 improvements of the word method, will always meet with grave 

 objections. Excellent for German and Spanish, in which a 

 letter hns rarely more than a single power, it encounters in 

 French, and still more so in English, anomalies resulting from 

 the constant use of the same sign for different sounds, or of two 

 different signs for the same sound, not to speak of useless 

 double consonants, silent letters, etc. This consideration has 

 led to the invention, by Dr. Edwin Leigh, of a method based 

 on the same principle, but which in its application has recourse 

 to typographical innovations. In many schools the teachers 

 make use of the Leigh method in connection with the word 

 method, and this is called the eclectic method, for in America 

 every new device assumes a pretentious name. 



