birth. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that teachers seek to eradicate this defect by persistent and long-drawn-out lessons to train their pupils to hear and to pronounce English sounds as Americans pronounce them. Both from the daily programs of lessons submitted and from the emphasis in the flood of recent literature on teaching English to foreign born, one must gather the impression that the correction of foreignisms in pronunciation is of supreme importance. Especially is this true of schools and teachers who are inexperienced in the teaching of English to immigrants and who are perhaps obsessed by the importance of nice distinctions in sounds as a result of elaborate college courses in phonetics. Such teachers fail to realize the difference between teaching children whose main business is to prepare for life and teaching adults whose main business is to make a living.

Very frequently foreign-born children, after many years of hearing English spoken correctly, during which their habits of sound production are being formed by constant drill and correction, still reveal their foreign birth by their accent, enunciation, or tone. Thus children of Russian parentage, educated in the public schools and in American colleges, frequently fail to pass tests for teaching positions in New York because of their inability to pronounce correctly such words as "English," "finger," "younger," "singing," "anchor." Time and ingenuity devoted to the eradication of foreignisms in the pronunciation of children is eminently worth while and the effort

should be increased rather than diminished. For with children the school has a reasonable expectation of continuous effort over a number of years in providing that repetition with attention at ever-lengthening intervals which makes for habit; while the pupils are in that plastic stage in which it is possible to slough off old habits of pronunciation and to acquire new ones.

Very different is the case of teaching English to adults of foreign birth. Their attendance at school is usually voluntary, uncertain, and dependent entirely on their judgment of the worth of the instruction. They regard drill in correct pronunciation as a proper refinement of teachers who are jealous for the purity of English sounds, a thing of little practical though of great ornamental value. Their point of view in this respect may be summed up in the statement of one of them, "In my factory they don't care if you say 'Go avay' or 'Go away,' provided you don't cuss. Were it possible to keep the adult pupil in school for a long enough time to affect his habits of articulation, his enunciation and tone, and were he to consider such a result worth while, it is still questionable whether the desired end could be accomplished with pupils who are past adolescence and whose speech habits are fixed.

Common experience tells us that even exceptionally well educated persons who learned to speak English after adolescence are only in rare instances without foreign accent. Besides possessing a knowledge of the science of phonetics,

foreign-born professors of modern languages have a stronger incentive than other immigrants to speak English without an accent; but after adolescence the time for building those delicate habits of adjusting mouth parts for the production of pure sounds in a new language is past for professor as it is for laborer.

Although purity of English accent is an impossible goal for adult immigrants to attain, it is desirable that some attention be paid to corrective phonetics for two purposes. The first is to point out distinctions in the meanings of words; this is a practical consideration even for those who are least impressed with the importance of phonic exercises. Pupils can be held to a measure of effort in learning correct pronunciations by being shown that mispronunciation results in misunderstanding, as in the following sentences:

I slip (sleep) on the floor.
The tin (thin) soldier.
The color of pitch (peach).
The bad room (bedroom).
You gas (guess) too much.
Calm (come) down.

The second purpose is to present an ideal of good English pronunciation, which is worth while even though correctness remain but an unattainable ideal. If illustrations of this kind can be taken from class conversation the point can be made more strikingly. In the most progressive schools, however, teachers spend comparatively

little time in correcting errors in pronunciation and only a few minutes in focalizing on correctness.

PROVIDE INTERESTING READING

During the earliest stages of English instruction pupils find the themes developed on the blackboard, in leaflets, or in textbooks sufficiently interesting as topics both in oral drill and in reading. Soon, however, they outgrow such mechanical exercises and desire to read—i.e., to get an author's thoughts. Twenty years ago the pedagogy of reading failed to stress the importance of a content on a level with the pupil's thinking. It is not so long ago that even the intelligence of children was discounted by reading material as puerile as:

I see the boy.

Do you see the boy?
He is a good boy.

In the earliest development of work with nonEnglish-speaking adults, teachers were impressed by a seeming analogy between the adult immigrant with his small English reading vocabulary and the English-speaking child with his small reading vocabulary. It is not surprising, therefore, that many teachers report using children's primers as reading matter for adults, especially as suitable texts, presenting subject matter of interest to adults by means of a simple vocabulary and sentence structure, have but recently appeared. Guided perhaps more by a sense of humor than by a principle of method, teachers have gradually excluded primers with their

ridiculous, “I am a little buttercup," from the reading material of husky Poles and Swedes. Unfortunately, however, many texts especially written for adults still contain reading matter appealing only to the intelligence of children.

In selecting the subject matter of English lessons, whether the object be to teach speaking or writing, the same principle holds true-that the more nearly the content of instruction coincides with the realities of the pupil's ordinary experience, the better adapted it is to his needs; obversely, the more remote such content is from the direct and present interests of the pupil, the more academic and futile it becomes.

The principle is partially applied in organizing the curriculum for children because their present interests are ephemeral and their future activities problematical; it must be applied rigidly in selecting content for the teaching of adults because the latter have undoubted life interests and pressing present needs. Such subjects as the following, taken from textbooks for adults, are so remote from the immediate interests of adults learning to read English that they have no place in a proper program: the fable of the lion and the mouse; the English colonies; a ride in the park; success; "The Village Blacksmith." Adult immigrants learning to read English are more likely to require ability to read a bill of fare, one of the many signs they see, an application blank, a time-table, a street-car advertisement, or newspaper headings.

It need hardly be pointed out that the content