into use. The capacity of the human mind in assimilating new words varies. The average language student can with comparative ease learn ten new words daily. If we count twenty-five days to the month this would give him a vocabulary of 1,500 words at the end of six months. Estimates of the amount of vocabulary of a workingman credits him with 300 to 500 words; of a thirteen-year old pupil, sixth grade, with 4,192 and of a college graduate with 20,000 to 100,000 words. But during the first six months one should aim to master what is in the course rather than to extend the vocabulary.

The aim of every teacher should be to keep the student's mind active. We can usually depend on it that when the pupil loses interest the teacher is either tired, lazy or ill. The teacher's purpose will be defeated if he permits his students to go to sleep in the class. It is downright hard work to teach a conversation class by the direct method and secure the maximum results. The teacher must hold the undivided attention of every student in the class during the entire hour.

A feature of the classroom work in the Nanchang Young Men's Christian Association School has been the experiment of developing the student's initiative by having him do practically all the work himself. After the teacher has covered the lesson carefully by demonstrations and object instruction, he calls two or more students to the platform and has them carry on conversations about the text. Students take turns in handling the objects and asking questions about them. They are instructed beforehand to bring various objects to class for topics of conversation. This plan has worked exceptionally well and has proven a novel way in keeping up interest. One little fellow smilingly brought in a beautiful green grasshopper alive, while a more war-like student produced a clumsy old army rifle.

The student should have a definite period for practise and he should develop speed. He should closely observe the facial and vocal movements of his teacher. He should never work when his interest has flagged and when he is physically tired. The student should seize every opportunity to chat

with shopkeepers, peddlers and neighbors, to talk with high and low, young and old. Attending church and lectures for the benefit one derives from listening to good tones and constructions is an excellent practise. One must cultivate the ability to hear everything that goes on around him.

The amount of daily study which one can devote to a language and keep his health depends upon the person. In general terms, study as long as you are interested. The secret of good work is attention. Determine your personal capacity and see if you can keep up interest by trying to beat your own record. Fluency, accuracy in construction and in pronunciation are goals toward which the student must always strive.

LEARNING TO READ

Reading must follow, never precede, the ability to speak. Begin to read only what you know how to say. If you reverse this program you are sure to fail. If an English student attempts to read French he at once encounters the difficulty of the pronunciation. This he must learn from the human lips. A book is a good teacher for some purposes, but it will never serve the purpose of a human being. A teacher should always be used as a book. No book, no printed page, no written sheet ever did nor ever can teach language sounds. Imagine trying to learn to speak Chinese by studying Chinese characters. It is an impossible task. We have invented systems of Romanization to get us over this difficulty, yet no system ever written has proved satisfactory. Why? Because it is impossible to convey sounds and tones thru the eye. A Chinese boy learns characters only by repeating their sounds over and over with a teacher. He learns to speak before he learns to read. The only way to learn to read correctly is first to learn to speak.

At the outset the Chinese student learns that the English language has an alphabet of twenty-six letters. With these letters he is able to construct all the words we have, tho the letters often do not indicate the sound of the word. It is here that a system of phonetic spelling is of great value. Silent letters are always a stumbling block to a beginner.

After a student has learned to say a number of sentences correctly, these sentences are written in character and in Roman on slips of paper or on the blackboard. The teacher then goes over the sentences at which the student is looking. Now he gets the words and the sentence thru both the ear and the eye. He now has a double grip on the language.

THE TEACHER

A teacher to be competent should have a personality—a winning personality. He should have enthusiasm and "drive" and a good supply of initiative. He must block out his work and do more than barely keep ahead of the class. He should be an actor and intensely interested in what he is doing. He should not be afraid to open his mouth to show how sounds are made, nor afraid to take off his coat to illustrate an action. He should be patient, never forgetting that his student is like a child with his mother and it will take hundreds of repetitions, spread over months, before he can say things properly. The teacher should not speak in the native language of his students. It is unnecessary that he be acquainted with their tongue. At one time in my teaching experience I inadvertently let my pupils know that I was acquainted with their language. This was the ruin of my class because the students thereafter insisted that I translate sentences for them. They never learned to think in English; they failed because they used English words and foreign constructions. A teacher should not tell his pupils all their mistakes at once.

The pupil should welcome all criticisms. He should not be afraid to use what he knows before all foreigners with whom he comes in contact. If the pupil will bear in mind the following rules, he will succeed:

1. The ear, not the eye. 2. Sentences, not words. 3. People, not books. 4. The lips, not the memory. 5. Talk first, read and write later. 6. Live the language, do not translate. 7. Not why, but how. 8. It's play, not work.

NANCHANG, CHINA

FRANK B. LENZ

III

FURTHER DATA ON THE MAGNITUDE AND RATE OF CHANGES IN ADOLESCENCE

Professor Thorndike's conclusions on the magnitude and rate of alleged changes at adolescence based on the answers of sixty-six men to queries as to when they experienced the greatest and least intensity of certain mental attitudes and interests were so interesting that it seemed to us desirable for the sake of comparison to try the same set of questions on some other slightly different groups. The question arose as to whether larger and somewhat younger groups of both sexes might not lead to different results. We, therefore, gave the same questions (See EDUCATIONAL REVIEW, Vol. 54, p. 140) to 386 college students mostly juniors and seniors, 303 women and 831 men, except that to the list previously used we added four additional questions as follows:

When were you most adventurous?..
When were you most self-confident?..

.Least?.
.Least?.

When was your emotional life most intense?.

Least?...

When did you experience the first definite romantic interest in the opposite sex?.. Did it afterwards increase

or diminish?...

The median age of both men and women was slightly over twenty-one. Altho Thorndike does not state what the ages of his group of men were, it was presumed that the groups here reported were slightly younger than the men reported by him.

1 The group was composed of students taking courses in psychology and education at the University of Iowa, Cornell College and Grinnell College. The returns from the two latter places being obtained thru the kindness of Professor Betts and Professor Hartson. Mr. McDowell, fellow in Education, S. U. I., assisted in tabulating the data.

By referring to the above cited article it will be seen that the author estimates the definiteness and magnitude of the alleged changes by taking the difference between the votes for the greatest and for the least for each age from ten years on. While his tables show fairly definite maxima for a number of these supposed traits there seem to be somewhat less definite minimum periods.

This tendency was even more marked in our cases, so much so that it seemed to us that it might be unfair to estimate the intensity of the traits simply in terms of the difference between the greatest and least intensities. While the greatest intensities in most cases showed definite maxima, the judgments of "least" were frequently distributed with such uniformity as to suggest little more than chance as the determining factor. It is obviously harder to locate specifically the period of least intensity of a trait than the period of its greatest intensity. These students were quite emphatic in stating that they found it more difficult. There were, for example, in the totals of 11,904 possible judgments 784 failures to give any time at all, or 6.3 per cent. Of these only 4 per cent were found among the judgments as to greatest intensities, while 8 per cent of the returns on least intensity were blank. The reliability of the answers may also be roughly estimated by the frequency with which the students marked their answers A, certainty, B, fairly certain, C, much doubt and D, merely random guess. Sixty-two per cent of all judgments were ranked as A, sure or B, fairly sure. In the case of Thorndike's presumably older group of men, there were only 43 per cent of A and B judgments.

Our conclusion is, therefore, both on the basis of the relative number of blanks and on the basis of the degree of certainty the students attached to their judgments that they are somewhat more reliable than those obtained from Thorndike's sixty-six men.

We present below the distribution of judgments according to ages for the various traits reported by Thorndike. The judgments are reduced to percentages in order that results for the men and women may be readily compared.