Chapter 3 - What Is Reading

Broad Reading | Development | Reading Process | Q + A

Four-year-old David, holding the newspaper upside down, looked at it intently as he had seen his father do. "I'm reading," he said.

His twin sister picked up her mother's grocery list and rattled off a number of items that bore no resemblance to those on the list. Both children were merely imitating their parents, whom they had seen reading in these ways, for different purposes.

Billy was looking at a picture book and telling an authentic story about each picture. He was learning to observe details, to see relations, to get meanings, and to communicate them to others. So far he had no need for printed words. "Words are for people who can't read the pictures," his brother explained.

Jeannie liked to hear the same story over and over. Soon she could remember it exactly as Mother read it. When she picked up the book herself and repeated the story page by page, she appeared to be reading, but she was really only remembering the words she had heard.

Ted always looked at each page as his father read the words. Before long he could point to certain words and say them. He had learned to associate the printed word with its sound and with its meaning.

By the end of the second grade, Paul had been so intensively, and exclusively, drilled in phonics—associating letter sounds with their printed forms in words—that he could pronounce words like "atomic energy" and "political controversy." He could pronounce all the words in his brother's high school history text—but he did not understand a word of what he was reading.

If a child can pronounce all the words in a passage correctly, can he read? Not if he does not understand a word of it! What is more futile than merely pronouncing words without getting any meaning from them? What could be a greater waste of time! Reading is not word calling.

Yet this is the way some children read. They can give a perfect pronunciation to every word in a paragraph, but when you ask, "What is the paragraph about?" they do not know—or care.

Alfred, at ten years of age, would quickly leaf through a book, put it aside, and say, "I've read it." He did not know anything more about the book than some adults know about the Sunday papers after several hours of going through them.

Karen, in junior high school, dutifully but passively read every word in the reading assignment. When she was through, she remembered very little of what she had read.

Pamela, in the same grade, approached the reading assignment quite differently. Before beginning to read, she stopped to think what the section was about, what she already knew about it, why she was reading it, what questions it would answer. Then she read with an active mind, skimming parts that did not seem important, pausing to reread and think about sentences that answered her questions. After reading in this way, she reviewed what she had learned and then took a little more time to see how she could use the ideas in the class discussion the next day. Pamela was bringing meaning to the reading material, getting meaning from it, and putting her new synthesis of meanings into a useful form.

Paul, a college senior, represents a mature reader—the kind of reader we hope all our children will become. He constantly derives meaning from what he reads by relating it to his own background of experience. He judges an author by the way he selects and presents facts; Paul sorts out the facts from opinions and inferences. By examining the feelings and values the author has expressed or implied, he avoids being misled by the author's intentional or unconscious misuse of words. By comparing the author's point of view, inferences, and conclusions with those that he himself has arrived at, and with those of other writers in the field, he puts himself in a position to draw valid conclusions from the material. His habit of thinking critically while reading enables him to apply the knowledge he gains from reading to the solution of personal and social problems. In addition, he uses this knowledge as a means of developing deeper insights into the meaning of his experience, and thus enhances his personal development and social sensitivity.

We could continue with many other snapshots of the reading process. Make-believe reading may indicate the beginning of a desire to learn to read. Reading pictures is a prelude to reading print. Anticipating the next words in a story is a habit that is common to efficient readers. Associating the sound of words with their printed form is the first step in formal reading instruction. If a child learns to pronounce unfamiliar words in order to unlock their meanings, he has taken a big step toward becoming an independent reader. But if he merely pronounces words without concern for their meanings, he is not reading in the true sense of the word—he is not using the printed word as a tool for thinking and living. As Edgar Dale, an authority on reading, has so well said, reading is getting meaning from the printed page by putting meaning into it.

There is danger that reading may become a mere adjunct to television. A recent cartoon pictured one mother saying to another, "I think children should learn to read. Gives them something to do if the TV goes out." Is TV crowding out reading time in your home? Does the family look at television when they used to read together? Do television and motion pictures satisfy your children's curiosity and leave them with no desire to explore the world of books? The only way to combat these tendencies is to make sure that children's early years are full of satisfying and rewarding experiences with books. Then they may say, as one teen-age youngster did, "Although there are lots of things I like to do, give me a good book any tune."

The Broad View Of Reading

The Physical Basis Of Reading | Meaningful Seeing | Reading As An Associative Process | Independence Through Word-Recognition Skills | Comprehension Unlimited | Use Of Reading | Feeling Responses To Reading | Personality And Character Development Through Reading

In the broad view, reading is regarded as a manifold process that involves associating words with meanings and letter sounds with the printed symbols, thinking, feeling, acting, and becoming. Creative and thoughtful reading begins when the reader has learned how to find out what the author actually said.

The Physical Basis of Reading

If you took your child to an eye specialist, he would be concerned to discover visual defects that might make it impossible for the child to see letters and words clearly. A clear visual impression of the word is basic to reading.

If the child is farsighted, he will find it difficult to read a book if he holds it at the usual distance from the eyes. Farsightedness is more uncomfortable for the reader than a small degree of near-sightedness. The usual school eye examination, based on the old Snellen chart, often gives parents a false sense of security; this test does not detect farsightedness, nor does it detect some other eye defects that have a bearing on reading.

Another eye difficulty that may blur the child's impression of the printed word is a muscular imbalance that causes the eyes to move inward or outward, or to deviate from a parallel horizontal plane. This can sometimes be corrected by special orthoptic exercises under the supervision of a competent eye specialist.

You may find that your child has a degree of astigmatism that can be corrected by glasses.
Eye difficulties may cause so much discomfort that reading will acquire unpleasant associations for the child.

Many schools give all their pupils a visual screening test. The purpose of this test is merely to determine which children should be referred for an expert eye examination. Sometimes parents are annoyed because the optometrist or ophthalmologist finds nothing wrong with the child's eyes. The parent feels that he has paid for an unnecessary eye examination. In some cases, the visual screening test does over-refer—that is, it detects difficulties that really do not need to be corrected. In other cases, the eye doctor may give the child a superficial examination that does not detect conditions that may make reading difficult or uncomfortable for him.

If, after a careful examination, a competent eye doctor prescribes glasses, the parent should, of course, have these glasses made and see that the child wears them.

There are many reasons why some children try to avoid wearing their reading glasses. Boys may think that glasses make them look "sissy." Girls may think that glasses make them look homely. Either boys or girls may consider glasses a nuisance and forget to bring or wear them to school. If you can find out why a child or adolescent is refusing to wear the glasses that have been prescribed for him, you may be able to enter into his world of reasoning and help him change his attitude. You should also interest him in keeping the glasses clean and properly adjusted.

Hearing, too, needs to be checked. Sometimes teachers are so concerned with the psychological effects and aspects of teaching the child to read that they ignore his physical condition. One rural teacher who had tried in every way to interest one of her pupils in schoolwork, said: "No matter what I did, she sat there just like a log. On the playground, too, she didn't take part in the games with other children. Finally I went to visit her home. In the course of the conversation the mother remarked, 'I reckon Mary's doing right well, considering she can't hear.' Mary had had a severe case of scarlet fever that had resulted in loss of hearing." The mother had not reported this important information to the school, and the teacher had not thought to check on the child's hearing as a possible cause of her school difficulty. One proved characteristic of good readers is that they hear and understand conversations and stories.

Poor nutrition may also interfere with a child's learning. After World War I, George Stoddard studied educational problems in European countries and came back with a new definition of a school: "A school is a group of children who have had breakfast" Little learning takes place if the child is seriously undernourished or ill. Consideration of the child's health and physical functioning is a prerequisite to reading instruction.

Meaningful Seeing

Visual perception is as important as visual efficiency in a child's reading development. By visual perception we mean the ability to recognize figures and forms in pictures, and words or parts of words in storybooks. Good readers are usually able to recognize a form or a word from a few clues, as in the childish game of "Hangman" where several letters of a word are given, for example: —e — d

g. The child fills in the missing letters to make the word read ing. Some children can reconstruct the word quickly, while others have to guess letter after letter.

Reading as an Associative Process.

Many teachers begin reading instruction by building up a basic sight vocabulary of fifty or one hundred words. They may present a word simultaneously with the object, picture, or action for which it stands. This process may be represented as follows:

One step removed from this simplest form of association is the linking of the printed word with the spoken word, which has already been invested with meaning:

For example, if the child has had many experiences with cats, the spoken word is rich in meaning for him. Consequently, when the adult points to the printed word and says "cat," the printed symbol takes on meaning.

The usual method of building sight vocabulary is through little stories that the children dictate to the teacher. These may be about the class turtle or rabbit, a little white kitten who strayed into the classroom, or the big machines at work near the school. The children read the story as a whole, and the teacher uses various devices and exercises to test their understanding of the separate words. If the children have adequate mental ability and a good basis of spoken language, and if the reading material resembles their conversation, they quickly form associations between the unknown printed symbol and the familiar spoken word and its meaning.

Independence Through Word-Recognition Skills

In learning Chinese one would have to go through this associative process with every single word; this is foolishly laborious in learning a language whose words are built of a limited number of letters. Therefore we begin to use the phonetic approach as soon as the children have acquired a small vocabulary of meaningful words. This process may be described as follows:

Associating the             the sound                            the pronun-
lettersinthe with             of these gives                      ciation of
printed word                 letters                                 the word
 
If the spoken word is familiar to the child, he can get the meaning of the printed word—if he wants to, and is not interested in merely pronouncing it.

To direct the child's attention to the meaning of the word in the sentence, the teacher often asks, to begin with, "What do you think the word might mean?" Then she may ask, "Which letter does the word begin with? Do you know other words that begin this way?" As the child tries to sound out the letters he knows, he may solve the word without having to sound out all the letters. Later he will recognize familiar syllables, prefixes, suffixes, and roots. But he should always be concerned about whether his solution is correct and whether the word makes sense in the sentence.

Comprehension Unlimited

Seeing the words clearly, knowing instantly by sight those that recur frequently, and being able to puzzle out the meaning of unfamiliar words—these are all basic to reading sentences, paragraphs, and pages for meaning. When you ask a child who has just read a story, "What was the story about?" you may get any of a number of replies. These represent different levels of comprehension. He may merely repeat a few of the author's words, just as a parrot might. He may tell the story accurately in his own words; this shows he has been reading the lines well.

He may read between the lines and reconstruct the characters in his imagination from the clues the author gives; he may tell why he thinks they behaved as they did. Or he may read beyond the lines and make his own generalizations, conclusions, and inferences. These higher levels of comprehension are approached in a simple way as soon as the child begins to read independently. The teacher or parent asks questions such as these: Would you like to have Jimmy for a friend? Why or why not? Why did he give the stranger the wrong directions? Would other people have done the same thing under the same conditions? What might have happened if he had made friends instead of enemies of the natives?

Use of Reading

There is a time, perhaps, when the wonder of being able to get meaning from printed words is completely absorbing to the child. It is at this stage that he is likely to say, "Mommy, let me read to you." But as soon as reading becomes a tool rather than a toy, the child reads for a purpose. What he reads is remembered more readily when it is put to use. He reads to find out what the class is going to do that day, to follow directions, to get information, to make a play out of the story he has read, to read a letter or a notice on the bulletin board, or just to enjoy an amusing story or poem. The manifold utilization of reading constitutes another aspect of this broad view.

Feeling Responses to Reading

Would you say that a child was reading in the broadest sense of the word if he showed no pleasure, no excitement, no satisfaction, no emotional response of any kind to the material he was reading? Surely not! Children need the therapy of laughter and the therapy of tears 1 that books may give. They weep over the death of poor Charlotte the spider and laugh through their tears at silly Wilbur the pig. Reading without feeling is a mechanical process; it does not involve the child's personality as a whole. The way a book makes us feel is one of the best indications of its value.

As soon as the child has acquired a basic sight vocabulary and has mastered enough word-recognition skills to read independently, reading becomes a process of thinking, feeling, responding. As such, it lends itself very early to the purposes of character formation. In fact, that was the main aim of the McGuffey readers and similar books of a century ago. One story titled "Helping Father" concluded: "Daniel did a great many things which his father had always paid a man for doing. And he had plenty of time for play besides, and then he enjoyed his play better because there is always a satisfaction in doing good, which lends a charm to everything we undertake."2 Such content was calculated to make the reader either congratulate himself because he was like Daniel, or feel guilty because he had not helped his father and been happy in doing so. Thus conscience is developed, especially in children whose parents love and accept them, seldom use physical punishment, and reason with them if they do something wrong.

Personality and Character Development Through Reading

Theoretically, self-development is facilitated as the child identifies himself with worthy characters. The literature that has lasted over the years has been notable for its moral influence. An individual shows his character by his way of living, which is the product of deep-seated values and ideals. These values arise from his experience, both past and present. Reading is part of this experience. Its impact may be constructive or destructive, positive or negative, slight or intense. From the earliest years, we should be alert to the possible contribution that reading may make to a child's character.

High school students have reported many instances in which some book or article has influenced their point of view, attitude, or behavior. One ninth-grade girl said, "Until I read The Old Maid, I never realized how a child could hurt her mother." After reading Dear and Glorious Physician, a ninth-grade girl wrote, "I had the feeling I should go out and do something great. Of course, this feeling did not last long, but it did get me thinking about what I could do for humanity." Many other adolescents have written about books that helped them to understand themselves, get along better with their family, maintain their good intentions, deepen their religious life, or acquire a sense of direction or destiny in their lives.3

Almost two-thirds of more than a thousand college students who were questioned about how reading had affected their personal development felt that books had contributed to the development of their philosophy of life. A third thought that reading had helped them to discover their ideal selves, change some of their attitudes, and develop by emulation some of the personal qualities of admirable characters.

Reading, we believe, contributes to personal development, and personal development, in turn, enriches reading.

Child Development And Reading

Multiple Immaturity | Methods Of Dealing With Immaturity | Principles Underlying Child Development

The child's gains in total development contribute to his reading development. Similarly, his growth in reading contributes to his further all-round development. Reading is an important tool of learning, a source of happiness, a way of gaining understanding of oneself, the world, and other people; and a means of social and emotional adjustment. The reciprocal relation between child development and reading may be shown schematically as follows:
 
Child Development
 
language physical growth mental growth social development
Reading Development
 
skills needed for further learning
happiness, enjoyment
understanding of oneself and others
mental health

Multiple Immaturity

If your child seems to be retarded in physical growth, social development, word knowledge, or mental alertness, he is likely to show a similar retardation in learning to read. It may be that he just needs a little more time to grow. You might do well to follow the example of the mother bird in the children's poem. Instead of pushing the fledgling out of the nest to fly or fall, she said,

Birdie, wait a little longer,
Till your little wings are stronger.

Two boys both of whom started out as slow growers later made pronounced gains in reading, one with and the other without remedial instruction.

Some children have missed, for one reason or another, the kinds of "normal" experiences that seem to be indispensable to healthy, all-round development—persons to talk with, freedom from want and freedom from fear, an adequate diet, opportunities to play with other children, work they engage in wholeheartedly, and chances to rest when they are tired. If this is true of your child, then you can contribute to both his general development and his reading maturity by supplying these experiences.

Methods of Dealing with Immaturity

There are three methods of dealing with a backward or slow-learning child. The first method Willard C. Olson 4 has called forcing. If a child does not begin to learn to read in first grade as children are expected to do, the parent may insist that the teacher use all sorts of exercises, games, drills, and other devices calculated to make the child a good reader. In many cases, master teachers can do this. But is it worth the effort? At a later age the child will be able to make the same progress at a cost of far less effort both on his part and on the part of the teacher. In the long run, nothing is gained by premature attempts to teach beginning reading. In some cases no amount of practice will be effective; it may even make the child resistant to reading.

A better method is pacing. Each child is helped to progress at his own rate and on his own initiative. If he is ready to read, as many bright children are when they enter first grade, the teacher provides the instruction and the interesting reading material that he needs and lets him go ahead as fast and as far as he wishes. If the child is not ready for formal reading instruction, the teacher provides more prereading experiences of the kind that children find in good homes during the preschool years. Each child is given encouragement and individual help when he gives evidence of being ready to read.

The third method, delaying reading instruction for all children, does not recognize individual differences. It is a suitable method for the slow-learning child. The mentally retarded child who enters school when he is six may not be ready to read until he is eight or nine years old. But this does not justify a general delay in all children's introduction to reading.

Obviously, the best method is to recognize individual differences, provide the most effective instruction, offer encouragement and opportunity to learn, and be guided by the results. Once a child has shown interest and responsiveness, he is likely to profit by specific guidance and instruction in reading.

Principles Underlying Child Development

Certain principles underlie both child development and reading. The first is that affection is a basic need of children. A parent may express affection in various ways. In early infancy, the mother shows her love for the child by holding him warmly in her arms, fondling him, and meeting his needs. Later, praise and approval are seen by the child as signs of affection. As the child grows older he may realize that the parent is showing love when he sets firm limits that reinforce his self-control and help him to realize his most acceptable self. That is why children and adolescents often describe their favorite teacher as one who is "strict," and approve parents who, as they say, "make them mind" or are "not too strict and not too easy." But love is not enough. To affection must be added understanding— an understanding of how children learn and grow—and an expectation that the child will do his best.

A second principle is that every individual has resources within himself—growth potentials and an inner urge to grow in his own best way. Although certain developmental sequences are common to all children, each child has his own unique pattern and rate of development. All we need to do is to provide conditions that are favorable to that development, very much as a gardener tends his growing plants. Sometimes physical defects, emotional disturbances, or poor schooling may deflect the child's normal course of development in reading. When these blocks are removed, the child is freed to grow according to his natural growth pattern.

If we accept this principle of growth, we shall expect our children to take more responsibility for their development. When they are confronted with a difficulty, we shall not rush in to solve their problem for them. Instead, we shall offer a suggestion, raise a pertinent question, and unobtrusively help them to succeed through their own efforts. In 1775 a father wrote to his daughter, "I do not want to make you do anything; I want to know what Nature has made you, and to perfect you on her plan." Don Marquis emphasized the same principle when he said, in his humorous way, that someday parents would no longer bring up their children, but provide the right conditions and let them bring themselves up. Our task is to provide a favorable environment and to guide our children in all the related aspects of their growth.5

Closely allied to this principle of growth is the principle of readiness. There is, to paraphrase Shakespeare, a tide in the process of learning, which, taken at the flood, leads to optimum achievement. In the life of every child there are "teachable moments," moments and periods when he is most eager and able to learn. By taking advantage of a child's readiness to learn, we help him to avoid the experience of failure, both in beginning reading and also in later stages of his schooling.

A fourth principle is that a child's development and progress in learning are affected by his concept of himself. Inferiority feelings and lack of self-esteem have an unfavorable influence on the child's behavior and accomplishment. Some reading problems stem from fear of competing with a more competent brother or sister. Occasionally a child fails in school in order to "get even with" a parent who seems to care only for his achievement and not for him as a person. We need to cultivate a keener awareness of the child's feelings about himself and his situation.

Two additional principles of learning are very important in the teaching of reading. One is the principle of meaningfulness—children should seek meaning in the words and sentences they are reading, not memorize them blindly. The second is the principle of use—children should enjoy or put to use the ideas they gain from reading. Excursions, pictures, discussions of similar experiences— all help to invest the printed material with meaning. If they need to obtain information or learn a reading skill in order to carry on a vital and interesting activity, they will make use at once of whatever they have learned.

These principles are interrelated. Meeting the child's basic need for affection and response from his earliest years has a favorable effect on his total development. The way a child develops also depends on his inner resources and the impetus supplied by his unique development pattern. His readiness for new experiences depends on the nature of his previous experiences and on his present stage of physical and psychological development. If conditions have been favorable, the child will have developed a positive, confident view of himself; he will have no emotional need to sabotage his own best development. If the learning task is meaningful and immediately useful to the child, it may help him to pull himself together and cope with any emotional problems that have arisen.

If we can translate these principles into productive relationships with our children and use them as a basis for making the right responses to their day-by-day behavior, we shall help each child to realize his best potentialities.

The Reading Process

Individual Differences In The Reading Process | Possible Influence Of Personality | Role Of Incentives In The Reading Process

In describing the reading process, the best place to start is with the child. The child meets a reading situation to which he makes a certain response, which leaves some memory in his nervous system to influence the way in which he views the next situation where similar reading is involved.

Individual Differences in the Reading Process

Let us observe the process in the case of Jimmy. Jimmy is outgoing, curious, confident, and eager to read as he has seen members of his family do. He also wants to experience for himself the adventures in all those books Mommy does not have time to read to him. His eyesight and hearing are good, as is his general health. He is mentally alert and has profited by a home environment that has afforded him many opportunities to talk about his interesting experiences, learn the meaning of many spoken words, ask questions and receive answers, and associate letters with their sounds in spoken words. When he hears a story read to him, he listens carefully and can tell what the story is about. Although he has not been to kindergarten or nursery school, he has learned to play with other children of his own age. Since he is curious about the signs and labels that he sees, he has asked their meaning and has learned what these printed words say. Jimmy is ready to read.

What about the reading situation? This, too, is favorable. He likes the teacher, and she likes children and enjoys watching them grow. The other children, too, are friendly and have come to school in the expectation of learning how to read. The teacher starts with their interests. As they tell her about things that are important to them, she prints their stories on the board or on a chart; she uses their simple vocabulary and sentence patterns. Jimmy quickly learns to read these stories, and, after a little varied drill, he recognizes the separate words. All these conditions are conducive to learning to read—a friendly, encouraging atmosphere; reading material that is both suitable and appealing; skillful teaching that gives the child success and satisfaction in each step of the process; rewards for putting forth effort.

Jimmy's response to this reading situation has already been described. He feels confident about his ability to learn, likes reading and school, and can say with pride, "Daddy, I'm learning to read."

Although he sometimes forgets some of the words, he remembers many of them from day to day. Soon he will be associating the letter sounds with the printed letters in the meaningful words that he has already learned. These associations will gradually become more numerous and increasingly useful in unlocking the meaning of the new words he meets.

Having met these first reading experiences successfully, Jimmy will look forward to the next day's lesson. He will perceive the reading situation as one in which he can succeed with reasonable effort, one in which he can win the approval of people who are important to him, and, even more important, one that gives him that wonderful feeling of competence, of learning and growing.

For Billy, who is naturally slow in learning and has missed the preschool experiences that contributed to Johnny's readiness to read, the reading process was quite different. The situation presented to Billy was too difficult for him. He felt that the teacher did not like him; at least she was impatient with his inability to learn and remember the words. He felt discouraged and stupid. Instead of welcoming the reading period as Jimmy did, he dreaded it.

It will be noted that Jimmy and Billy brought different intellectual capacities and language abilities to the reading situation. All the specific abilities of this sort bear complex relationships to one another. Instruction that develops one of them may have a favorable influence on others.

Possible Influence of Personality

Self-confidence, self-reliance, emotional stability, and outgoing-ness seem also to be characteristic of the good readers in the primary and elementary grades. If these personality traits are missing to begin with, they may develop as the child meets success in his first attempts to learn to read.

In a study of good and poor readers of high school age, Holmes 6 found that the ratings that mothers gave fast-reading daughters on certain personality traits were remarkably similar to the ratings the daughters gave themselves. However, the ratings that mothers gave to slow readers were not only different from the girls' self-ratings; they were more disparaging. Mothers regarded their slow-reading daughters as more nervous, moody, quiet, unresponsive, hard-boiled, submissive, critical, or impulsive than the daughters regarded themselves.

Although we have no clear-cut scientific evidence of the importance of personality factors in reading, work with individual reading cases has repeatedly shown a circular response that begins either with an emotional difficulty or with failure to learn to read. This circular response may be represented as follows:

Role of Incentives in the Reading Process

Certain underlying desires, needs, values, and convictions may be more important than personality factors. These, too, may be built in part by means of reading, and may, in turn, promote further reading development. Intelligence, language ability, visual and auditory perception—these and other specific abilities are all important. However, none of them, singly or in combination, entirely accounts for an individual's reading performance. The search continues for some "psycho-catalytic mobilizers" that marshal all the available skills on a particular reading task.7 Reading should be its own reward. Learning per se is satisfying to a child. Especially in the early years, the child finds joy in any activity that brings pleasant, tangible results. Punching the keys on a typewriter and seeing letters appear on the clean white sheet of paper, scribbling on a piece of paper or a blackboard, copying the letter forms that one sees, supplying the rhyming word in a jingle—all these and many other activities have intrinsic interest for the young child.

The child also wants a certain amount of praise, affection, and recognition. If these rewards are given when he makes some genuine progress in reading, they tend to reinforce the behavior that evoked them. If they are withheld up to a certain point, their absence may motivate the child to try harder. If they are given too frequently and indiscriminately, they carry less value, and therefore less power to influence the child's reading.

If the child is emotionally sturdy, punishment or criticism may lead him to put forth more effort. But if he is sensitive and insecure, these negative responses may cause him to withdraw from the situation and refuse to put forth any effort at all.

Popular children who read well may stimulate a poor reader to do better. For example, one popular boy laughed aloud at the amusing parts of the story he was reading and showed an intense absorption in the exciting parts; his behavior interested the reluctant readers in the class. A girl who was admired by the other members of the class for her unusually expressive and dramatic reading stimulated many of them to abandon their monotonous word-by-word reading. Similarly, children are impressed by seeing their parents reading for enjoyment and information. One boy said: "I remember lying in my bed and gazing at my mother across the room, eating cherry chocolates and reading. I recall thinking, 'Boy, when I get older, I'm going to read every chance I get.'"

These and many other subtle aspects of the total reading situation determine whether one greets the next reading opportunity with enthusiasm and interest, as Jimmy did, or with dread and fear of failure, as in Billy's case.

Questions And Answers

1. What are the characteristics of a mature reader?

He enjoys reading and finds time for it, no matter how crowded his schedule is.

He has a purpose in reading—for relaxation, inspiration, or information. His purpose may be personal or social, practical or theoretical; to stir his imagination or spur him to action.

He adjusts his rate and method of reading to the nature of the material and to his purpose. For some purposes he will skim quickly; for other purposes he will associate ideas he has already acquired with the key words he catches as he runs his eye down the page. For still other purposes, he will read to get the main idea of every paragraph and relate it to the other ideas, noting the supporting details if he needs them.

He reads widely. Though he may read intensely in one field, he does not neglect other kinds of reading.

He applies the ideas he gains from reading to his own development and to social problems.

2. What do intelligence tests teU about a child's ability to learn to read?

What an intelligence test tells you about a child's ability to learn to read depends on the nature of the test, the conditions under which it was given, and the characteristics of the child. It also depends on the way in which the school interprets the test results to parents.

Most group intelligence tests, which are given to a class as a whole, require a good deal of reading. Naturally, the poor reader will not do well on these tests. They tell more about his present reading achievement than about his reading potential. Some tests tell more than others because they show whether a child is relatively skillful (1) in comprehending words and using them fluently, (2) in remembering specific facts and past experiences, (3) in doing arithmetic, or (4) in reasoning about certain things. If he ranks high in the verbal parts of the test, we should expect him to do well in reading. If he ranks low in verbal ability but high in other mental abilities, we feel that he will be able, with practice, to improve his word comprehension and fluency.

The individual intelligence test, when it is given by a specially trained person, tells much more about the child's potential reading ability.

The child's personality affects the test results. If a child is curious, independent, self-confident, and interested in solving intellectual problems, he is likely to do his best on an intelligence test. However, if he has the opposite qualities, he may not demonstrate his true mental ability. Beween the ages of six and twelve, if he gains self-reliance and experience in meeting the challenges of a good school, his intelligence score is likely to increase.

Intelligence test scores and IQs should be interpreted to parents, not given to them without explanation. The IQ alone means little. It does not tell the parent what kinds of mental ability his child has—whether he ranks very high in some abilities and low in others, or whether he stands on about the same level in each ability. A single intelligence test score may be very misleading; a child's IQ can change considerably between the early preschool years and the high school years. In fact, in one study one-fourth of the children, who were tested at regular intervals from age two and a half to age twelve, increased their scores by eighteen to fifty-seven IQ points.8

3. Do modern children read? What evidence do we have on this question?

Your own observation will give you an answer in the local situation. How much does your own child read? What place does reading have among his competing interests? What are the reading habits of his friends?

Going further afield, take a look at the sales of children's books. They have increased tremendously in recent years, and now exceed the sales of most of the best-sellers. For example, from 1942 to 1954 nearly 320 million Little Golden Books were sold. Many parents have a hard time getting their children out of the supermarket without buying a book.

Juvenile book clubs have flourished. More than ten million children and young people are members. Outstanding books are selected by judges of children's books. Juvenile book clubs include the following:

Arrow Book Club, Scholastic Magazines, 33 West Forty-second Street, New York 36, N.Y.

Catholic Children's Book Club, 260 Summit Ave., St. Paul, Minnesota.

Catholic Youth Book Club, Garden City, N.Y.

Junior Literary Guild, Garden City, N.Y.

Parents' Magazine Book Club for Beginning Readers, Bergenfield, New Jersey.

Parents' Magazine Book Club for Children, Bergenfield, New Jersey.

Teen-Age Book Club, 33 West Forty-second Street, New York 36, N.Y.

Weekly Reader Children's Book Club, Education Center, Columbus 16, Ohio.

Young People's Book Club, Spence Press, Inc., 153 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 1, 111. (story biographies and stories of historical events).

Young Readers of America, 345 Hudson St., New York 14, N.Y. (non-fiction).

Circulation lists of public libraries show that large numbers of children's books are being checked out. These include the children's classics as well as many modern books of fine quality.

4. What makes a book easy or difficult to read?

Children say a book is easy if it is interesting. And it is interesting if it appeals to the child's imagination or reflects his firsthand experience, and thus meets a need in his life here and now.

A book is difficult if it is packed with new ideas that are stated but not illustrated, if it is poorly organized or contains long, involved sentences and many unfamiliar words.

5. How can a person who has formed lazy habits of reading learn to read faster?

If the person has acquired basic vocabulary and word-recognition skills, he may jog himself out of unnecessarily slow reading habits by using mechanical devices such as a reading-rate controller or by setting time limits for himself. Some students have increased their speed without loss in comprehension by forcing themselves to read, from five to thirty minutes a day, a little faster than is comfortable. They note a daily increase in the number of pages read in the time allotted.

Other students have set an arbitrary but reasonable time limit for reading a given amount of material. For example, one alert person picked up a magazine in a doctor's office where she had to wait ten minutes. She found an article that interested her and decided to see what she could get out of it in ten minutes. She read the introductory paragraph carefully, to become acquainted with the author's point of view. Then she skimmed, reading the first one or two sentences of each paragraph. She read more details in the paragraphs that contained information of special significance to her. She had just enough time to read the summary paragraph before the ten minutes were up. A friend who was with her asked, "What did you get out of that article?" and was surprised at the amount of accurate information she had gained in such a short time.

6. What is the relation between speed of reading and comprehension?

In general, the rapid reader comprehends what he reads. He reads rapidly because he grasps large units of thought.

But there are exceptions. The student who reads everything rapidly will not comprehend the more difficult reading material. One cannot skim unfamiliar or difficult science or mathematics texts. The relation between rate of reading and comprehension is determined by the difficulty of the material and the reader's familiarity with it.

You have heard of people who can read a page at a glance. They could not do so with material with which they were unfamiliar.

When the subject matter is familiar to them, what they probably do is to catch a few key words as they sweep their eyes down the page. Their minds do the rest. From their background of knowledge, they reconstruct the meaning from the few words or phrases that their eyes have caught.
7. How fast should a person read a page?

The figure 350 words per minute is sometimes given as the average rate of reading for adults.
Actually, no average figures can be given. The rate of reading varies with the difficulty of the material, the reader's familiarity with it, and his purpose in reading it. Frivolous fiction should be read at the speed of light, and serious books at a pedestrian pace. I. A. Richards has written a book describing "how to read a page."

The important thing for children and young people to learn is that they need several rates and that they should choose the rate that is appropriate to the material and to their purpose in reading it. It may take only a split second to spot the information one needs —a date, an answer to a specific question—much as one spots a four-leaf clover. It takes a little longer to get the main ideas from topic sentences, headings, captions, and pictures or diagrams. It takes still longer to support these main ideas with significant details. And the reader must be prepared to spend additional time if he wants to see relations among the ideas, and draw sound inferences and conclusions. Sometimes he may read slowly just to enjoy the author's style or follow carefully the development of a train of thought. For the latter purposes, speed is a dubious advantage.

8. What is strethosymbolia?

The word itself simply means "twisted symbols." A child with strethosymbolia does not see letters and words as most people see them. He sees them reversed or upside down, or both. He may mistake b for a d, and read ton as not. The child may write a whole word backward so that it can be read only in the mirror.

This difficulty stems from a kind of mental immaturity—neither side of the brain has become clearly dominant; the individual is ambidextrous, as he was in infancy. A right-handed person's center for language skills is usually on the left side of the brain. Children with strethosymbolia may use either side of the brain for perceiving and interpreting words and letters. The result is that their perceptions are confused. Children with a mild degree of strethosymbolia often overcome or outgrow it in the course of good reading instruction.

A child who makes occasional reversals in reading and writing letters does not necessarily have this problem of brain dominance; he may merely have failed to acquire the habit of reading and writing from left to right. If the tendency is severe and persists beyond the third grade, special reading instruction is indicated.

9. Why are boys more commonly referred to reading clinics than girls?

A number of explanations have been suggested, among them the following:
There may be a hereditary factor of specific language disability in males. Certainly girls exceed boys in die total number of words spoken and the number of different words known at a given chronological age. Someone has remarked that girls talk more than boys but boys know more about what they are saying!

Certain cultural conditions may favor girls' superiority in reading —they engage in games that are less active than boys' games and require more talking; they are likely to have closer daily contact with their mothers; teachers often prefer "nice little girls" to "rough, noisy boys."

Girls mature earlier than boys and are therefore more ready than boys to begin reading in the first grade.

Boy babies are usually bigger than girls; they are therefore more likely to have a difficult birth, with the possibility that oxygen deprivation may injure some of the brain cells associated with reading.

It should be borne in mind that though sex differences in speech and reading development appear early, they become less apparent as children grow older. Moreover, differences in reading ability are greater within each sex than between boys and girls.

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