The aim of the teacher is to get his pupils as quickly as possible over the period in whic

h each printed symbol is looked at for its shape, and arrive at the stage when the pupil looks at words and phrases, for their meaning, almost without noticing the shapes of these separate letters.

When a good reader is at work, he does not look at letters, nor even at words, one by one, however quickly; he takes in the meaning of two, three, or four words at a time, in a single moment. Watch carefully the eyes of a person who is reading, and it will be seen that they do not travel smoothly along the lines of print, but they move by jumps separated by very short stops. The eyes of a very good reader move quickly, taking long jumps and making very short halts (停顿); the eyes of a poor reader move more slowly, taking only short jumps and stopping longer at each halt. Some- times, when he meets a difficulty, he even goes backwards to see again what has already been looked at once.

The teacher’s task is therefore clear: it is to train his pupils to take in several words at a glance (one "eye jump" ) and remove the necessity for going backwards to read something a second time.

This shows at once that letter-by-letter, or syllable-by-syllable (音节), or word-by-word reading, with the finger pointing to the word, carefully fixing each one in turn, is wrong, It is wrong because such a method ties the pupil’s eye down to a very short jump. Moreover, a very short jump is too short to provide any meaning or sense; and it will be found that having struggled with three or four words separately, the pupil has to look at them again, all together and in one group, in order to get the meaning of the whole phrase.

Which of the following is closest in meaning to the first paragraph？

A．Pupils should be trained to reach quickly the stage of reading without having to concentrate on the separate symbols.

B．Pupils should look at each printed symbol for its meaning as well as for its shape.

C．Teachers should help their pupils avoid looking at the shape of the printed symbols.

D．Teachers should tell their pupils the different stages of their study.