READING BY NEW METHOD.

Northern Advocate, 22 January 1920, Page 4

READING BY NEW METHOD.

A country schoolmaster, Mr G. P. Jones, of Bundurra, demonstrated at the Teachers' Conference ait Sydney recently a new method of teaching reading. Mr Jones said that the difficulties in teaching reading in primary and infants' classes were due '.o the phonetic deficiencies of the mother tongue. He had got over the difficulty by formulating a new alphabet, which consisted of signs. He endeavoured 'to correlate all the sounds. It consisted of 36 characters, and was used in conjunction with the ordinary a'lpheb'"t. The two went hand in hand. The system told the child—the 'teacher did not have to do it. The alphabet consisted of 19 vowels, 16 consonants, and one sign for a silent letter. The basis of the system was that the child learned from sign play with the hands. Hand-drill was the essential feature.. A teacher ar.d a child could converse by ha:

signs, and with the use of cocalising, Ithe sound became indelibly fixed in the child's mind. The system aimed essentially at gaining efficiency in reading by arousing the interest of the tiny child. The child read from ordinary script and type from the putset and in the language of his pwn vocabulary. The sound signs the only new characters to be These, firs'; learnt by hand-play, presented no difficulty and np burden, and led to no confusion, since each was quite simple and characteristic in form and acquirement. Hand-play was really (the unique feature of ths

system