MARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY GIFT OF GINN AND COMPANY COPYRIGHTED BY JEAN SHERWOOD RANKIN 1906 To My Beloved Alma Mater Ripon College, Wisconsin where With Small Classes but Great Teachers 1 First Began to Love and Revere The English Language and Its Literature "Everyday English" Is Affectionately Dedicated PREFACE 66 Everyday Erglish" has been written, not to exploit a theory, but to meet the loudly voiced demand of American educators for a different sort of language training. This demand has arisen because of evident need. It is well understood that language work is the weakest link in the long chain of public school methods. Should one still doubt this, let him consider two significant facts in the recent history of secondary schools: (1) Some of our best high schools now require a short but strenuous review of the very elements of English,-oral reading, spelling, and penmanship; (2) Certain of our great universities have lately ruled that all would-be students must pass satisfactory entrance examination in reading, spelling, penmanship, and simple English composition. No course of study nor examination is suggested in number, geography, history, natural science, or nature study; for language alone gives rise to serious complaint. The cause of failure to satisfy is not long to seek. Let it be remembered that America and her schools are continuously swallowing, constrictor-wise, huge masses of population from a score of foreign nations. This peculiar and difficult condition cannot be paralleled in any other country under the sun. For the sake of self-preservation, nation and school must digest all this raw material. In this fact lies our chief problem. How have we met the problem thus far? Have we provided freely for children of foreign-born parents, who hear little or no English in the home, instruction in which special emphasis is laid upon vocabulary gain? These children, in learning to read, need to acquire in the case of most words, not merely written signs for terms already possessed in oral use, but also the original ideas lying back of those oral signs, together with the oral signs themselves. The English-speaking child, for example, knows the object sofa, and the word sofa; he has, therefore, an idea corresponding to the object sofa, and he knows the name of that idea; he |