Directory_and_Chronicle_1842 — Page 569

1842.

Report of the Morrison Education Society.

551

foreign language, for it gives them a great deal of practice upon the sounds of words, which if not early acquired, will ordinarily never be mastered. While this was done, the boys were taught to use simple sentences in English, and to understand and ask easy ques- tions. The simple interrogation, What is that? has generally been learned first, and has proved the key to a good deal of information, especially while picking up a vocabulary of the names of things. Having finished the above mentioned Primer, and reviewed it tho- roughly, they were then ready to read a little, and the next book given them, was a work alluded to in the last report, called the Lexi- logus, or a collection of about 1200 phrases in English, translated into their equivalents in Chinese. This they have committed to me- mory, and reviewed many times; and it has been of great service to them, in learning to use idiomatic English in conversation, and to understand it in books. Throughout the greater part of the year, they have had a daily recitation from this book, together with lessons in writing and reading. This class has fortunately been under the influence of an older class, which, I am happy to say, has been such as to increase their attachment to the school and to the family. Of their progress in learning English, I shall have occasion to say more hereafter.

The older class, one of whom will have been at school three years next November, and the rest, some a few months less, and one but a year and nine months, have of course taken a wider range in their studies. They have been exercised from time to time in writing their own thoughts on various subjects. They have usually had this for an evening task, and their compositions were examined and corrected before the whole class the next day. If the writer failed to suggest at once the proper amendment to be made, the rest were then called upon in turn to do it for him, so that each one's produc- tion has been criticized by all, and no time lost. But their pro- gress in writing will best appear, from the speciinens that accompany this paper.

It may be observed, however, that these specimens, are what they profess to be, original and uncorrected by any but the writer of them.

In reading, they have been required to render into Chinese colloquial as they read. No exercise has tended more to show the boys the contracted range of their own thoughts, if they had been left to move in the circle prescribed by Chinese usage. They often meet with ideas, sentiments, and facts that had never occurred to them before, and never would have occurred to them, had they not