The MICE experiment is being commissioned at RAL to demonstrate the feasibility of the muon ionization cooling technique for future applications such as the Neutrino Factory and the Muon Collider. The cooling will be evaluated by measuring the emittance before and after the cooling channel with two 4 T spectrometers; to distinguish muons from the background, a multi-detector particle identification system is foreseen: three Time of Flight stations, two Cherenkov counters and a calorimetric system consisting of a pre-shower layer and a fully active scintillator detector (EMR) are used to discriminate muons from pions and electrons. EMR consists of 48 planes of triangular scintillating bars coupled to WLS fibers readout by single PMTs on one side and MAPMTs on the other; each plane sensible area is 1 m2. This article deals with a small scale prototype of the EMR detector which has been used to test the MAPMT frontend electronics based on the MAROC ASIC; the tests with cosmic rays using both an analog mode and a digital readout mode are presented. A very preliminary study on the cross talk problem is also shown.