Teacher.—What did you learn in the previous Lesson?

Pupil.—I learned that a spoken word is composed of certain sounds, and that letters are signs of sounds, and that spoken and written words are the signs of ideas.

This question should be passed from one pupil to another till all of these answers are elicited.

All the written words in all the English books ever made, are formed of twenty-six letters, representing about forty sounds. These letters and these sounds make up what is called artificial language.

Of these twenty-six letters, a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes w and y, are called vowels, and the remainder are called consonants.

In order that you may understand what kind of sounds the vowels stand for, and what kinds the consonants represent, I will tell you something about the human voice.

The air breathed out from your lungs beats against two flat muscles, stretched like strings across the top of the windpipe, and causes them to vibrate. This vibrating makes sound. Take a thread, put one end between your teeth, hold the other in your fingers, draw it tight and strike it, and you will understand how voice is made.

If the voice thus produced comes out through the mouth held well open, a class of sounds is formed which we call vowel  sounds.

But, if the voice is held back by your palate, tongue, teeth, or lips, one  kind of consonant  sounds is made. If the breath  is driven out without voice, and is held back by these same parts of the mouth, the other  kind of consonant  sounds is formed. Ex. of both: b, d, g; p, t, k.

The teacher and pupils should practice on these sounds till the three kinds can easily be distinguished.

You are now prepared to understand what I mean when I say that the vowels are the letters which stand for the open sounds of the voice, and that the consonants are the letters which stand for the sounds made by the obstructed voice and the obstructed breath.

The teacher can here profitably spend a few minutes in showing how ideas may be communicated by Natural Language, the language of sighs, groans, gestures of the hands, attitudes of the body, expressions of the face, tones of the voice, etc. He can show that, in conversation, we sometimes couple this Natural Language of tone and gesture with our language of words, in order to make a stronger impression. Let the pupil be told that, if the passage contain feeling, he should do the same in Reading and Declaiming.

Let the following definitions be learned, and given at the next recitation.

.—Verbal language, or language proper, consists of the spoken and written words used to communicate ideas and thoughts.

.—English Grammar  is the science which teaches the forms, uses, and relations of the words of the English Language.