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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Page 30
Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Page 31
Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
×
Page 32
Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
×
Page 33
Suggested Citation:"Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends." National Research Council. 1970. Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18684.
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Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

JEANNE S. CHALL Learning and Not Learning to Read: Current Issues and Trends LEARNING AND TEACHING TO READ I would like you to pretend that you are taking a reading test. Figure 1 shows part of a test that is given to high school and college students to see how well and how rapidly they can read silently. They read a story very carefully so that they can answer questions about it. At the end of a minute, they are told to stop reading, circle the word they are then reading, and wait for further instructions. They must then answer ques- tions about the story without referring to it. My reason for asking you to pretend to take a reading test is to make you feel like a beginner—to have you experience again what it means to learn to read. Figure 2 shows the test as it really looks. The shorthand version of the test illustrates, in an oversimplified manner, that there are two basic requisites in reading: knowledge of the notational system and knowledge of the language. Unless you had learned Pitman shorthand, you could not read the shorthand version of the test (Figure 1), because you did not know the system of notation, although, as you can see from the regular version (Figure 2), you could comprehend the language. But even if you had taken the regular version of the test, you might not have gotten an optimal score, because you did not concentrate, found the 14

Learning and Not Learning to Read - v i , ;„ r ^v/^ ) -* c XI ^ .y. y vi <? ^ FIGURE 1 A portion of the Iowa Silent Reading Test, transcribed into Pitman shorthand. No. Ed M.. AM TEST 1. RATE-COMPREHENSION — PART A DntECnONS. This is a test to Me how well and how rapidly you can read silently. Read'the story below very carefully to that you can answer questions about it. At the end of mr minute you will hear the word " Stop." Put a circle around the word you are then reading and wait for further instructions. GLASS 1 Glass is made by melting sand with lime, potash, soda, or oxide of lead at a great heat. ' Silica, which is the basis of sand, enters into all varieties of glass. ' It has more to do with determining the quality than any of the other ingredients. • The purity of the ingredients and the pro- sive that it made the glass too costly for general use. " Bohemian and a few other varieties of European glass are still made from silica obtained in this way. " The expense of Bohemian glass in this country restricts it to the homes of wealthy people. FIGURE 2 The part of the test shown in Figure 1, in common notation. (From Iowa Silent Reading Test-New Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1939-1942. Reprinted with permission.) 15

JEANNE S. CHALL content dull, and so on. The essential point is that the child who is be- ginning to learn to read his native language is in much the same position as a person who does not know shorthand but is asked to read it. He has a pretty good command of his language. It is not advanced, but he has an extensive vocabulary, as the various estimates of the number of words known by the average 6-year-old child testify. (A reasonable estimate is about 4,000 words for the average English-speaking 6-year-old in the first grade.9) Linguists also tell us that by the age of 6 he has good con- trol over the major grammatical structures of English. In a sense, the first task facing the child when he learns to read is mas- tering the notational system (the written code) of the language he al- ready speaks and understands. How can he best learn this written code? Here is where we find much of the confusion and debate about the teach- ing of reading. All authors of reading programs acknowledge that the ultimate goal of reading instruction is not mastery of the notational system—i.e., saying, sounding out, or decoding printed words—but get- ting the meaning of the message. But, in their approach to the beginner, some tend to stress the decoding, rather than the meaning, component of reading as the best route to the ultimate goal. The problem in the teaching of reading in the United States, England, and probably other countries with similar writing systems is how to program these two com- ponents of reading for the beginner so that he will ultimately be able to comprehend the printed form of his language as efficiently as or more efficiently than the spoken form. Decoding versus Meaning Emphasis I analyzed more than 20 beginning-reading programs, including the two reading series used most widely in the United States during 1962-1965 (the duration of the study supported by the Carnegie Corporation4 ) and innovative programs in print or in an experimental stage at the time (1967).4 From a rather extensive analysis of these programs, I found that they could be placed on a decoding-to-meaning emphasis contin- uum. At one end were programs that stressed the decoding component at the start; at the other end were programs that stressed the meaning component at the start. The most widely used reading series during 1962-1965 (indeed, since about the 1930's) was at the meaning end of the continuum. In such reading programs, the child is viewed as a miniature adult, who, from 16

Learning and Not Learning to Read the start, is asked to react to the printed forms of words, phrases, sen- tences, and stories. Most of the child's practice time (if the teacher fol- lows the manuals that accompany the readers) is devoted to answering questions on the pictures and the content of what is read. The words used in the beginning books are highly controlled and limited to the commonest in the English language. Only a few new words are added in each lesson. In the early 1960's, the total number of different words taught in the five books (three pre-primers, a primer, and a first reader) of the typical basal series for the first grade was about 250-350. The words are selected on a meaning-frequency principle, i.e., words judged to be within the child's understanding and frequent in the language gen- erally. After the child learns to recognize, "as wholes," about 50 of these words, he is taught to analyze words; that is, he is taught which letters or letter combinations stand for which sounds (decoding). But that is secondary to learning to recognize words as wholes and to "reading for meaning." Most of the innovative programs of the early 1960's, as well as those predominantly in use before the 1930's in the United States, were at the decoding end of the emphasis continuum. Such programs give more attention, at the beginning, to the systematic teaching of the relation- ship between the spoken and written forms of words. They usually, al- though not always, teach the child the alphabet before he is taught to recognize words, or while he is being taught to recognize words. Gener- ally, code-emphasis programs view learning to read as a two-stage process: mastery of the alphabetic code and then reading for meaning. Code- emphasis programs vary, and in my classification I included systematic phonics programs, the so-called linguistic approaches of Bloom field and Fries that limit the early reading vocabulary to regularly spelled words, and schemes that use an initial modified alphabet—for instance, the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA)—with a more regular sound-to-symbol correspondence. Although code-emphasis programs put early stress on learning the alphabetic principle, they also have beginners "read for meaning." But in general, compared with meaning-emphasis approaches, the child spends relatively less time at the beginning on "reading for meaning" and more on mastering the alphabetic principle. The crucial questions here are: Does the beginning emphasis make a difference? Do pupils do better when initiated into reading by a code- emphasis or by a meaning-emphasis approach? Does one or another of these two approaches produce fewer failures? To answer these questions, 17

JEANNE S. CHALL I reviewed the research conducted from about 1910 to the time of the completion of the first research report to the Carnegie Corporation in 1965.4 Included in my analysis were classroom experiments comparing the effects of these two basic approaches, laboratory experiments on learning to read, correlational studies on factors related to success in be- ginning reading, and selected "classic" clinical studies of children who failed or had unusual difficulty in learning to read. The evidence was not absolutely clear-cut. But it did indicate a trend: the programs that could be classified as having a code emphasis, rather than a meaning emphasis, produced better reading and spelling achieve- ment. The advantages of code-emphasis programs lasted at least through the grades for which there was sufficient evidence—the end of the third grade or the beginning of the fourth. Few researchers followed their children through the fifth and sixth grades, and none followed them through high school. However, on the basis of the evidence through the fourth grade, I hypothesized that the advantages associated with code- emphasis programs would remain longer, if the reading programs in the later grades were sufficiently difficult to challenge the early superior attainment of the children who had been in those programs. Although the clinical studies analyzed did not have the data to confirm or deny that code-emphasis programs produce fewer children with reading diffi- culties, I was able to conclude that their problems are probably less serious and more amenable to remedy. In other words, although code- emphasis programs are not guaranteed to teach all children to read easily, they tend to lead to fewer serious reading problems. There was some evidence, too, that the advantages of code-emphasis initial programs were greater among children of lower mental ability, children of low socioeconomic status, and children who are predisposed to having difficulty in learning to read. The trends evident from the classroom experiments and clinical stud- ies were supported by the laboratory experiments and the correlational studies. Indeed, knowledge of the names (and sounds) of the letters in kindergarten or early in the first grade came out as one of the strongest predictors of success in first-grade reading in studies done as early as the 1930's up through 1965,5 and also in the most recent U.S. Office of Education (USOE) cooperative first-grade studies completed in 1966.7 Probably more classroom experiments comparing the effects of dif- ferent methods of initiating the beginner into reading have been con- ducted since 1965 than were conducted up to 1965. What are the re- 18

Learning and Not Learning to Read suits? Do they support or refute the interpretations that I drew from the research up to 1965? Fortunately, Robert Dykstra, one of the coordinators of the USOE cooperative studies, has summarized the results and made the compari- son for us. He drew together specific data from the cooperative research program pertinent to the issue of effectiveness of code-emphasis as op- posed to meaning-emphasis programs in initial reading instruction. Fol- lowing the classification scheme for beginning reading approaches that I devised for the Carnegie study,4 he categorized conventional basal read- ing programs as meaning-emphasis, and linguistic and phonics-first basal reading programs as code-emphasis. After analyzing the studies that were relevant to this issue, he con- cluded8 : Data from the Cooperative Research Program in First-Grade Reading Instruction tend to support Chall's conclusion that code-emphasis programs produce better over-all primary grade reading and spelling achievement than meaning-emphasis pro- grams. This superiority is especially marked with respect to pronouncing words orally in isolation, spelling words from dictation, and identifying words in isolation on a silent reading test. It is apparent that concentrated teaching of the alphabetic code is associated with improved initial ability to encode and decode words. Other Factors Method alone does not account for all differences. Success within all methods is related to characteristics of the pupil, the school, and the teacher. Indeed, larger differences were often found among schools and teachers using similar methods than among those using different methods. Dykstra,7 in an earlier summary of the USOE studies based on compari- sons of beginning reading programs that varied in characteristics other than meaning or code emphasis, concluded that the total instructional setting and the teacher were probably more important for reading achievement than the specific method used. This conclusion has some support from one of the cooperative first- grade studies directed by Shirley Feldmann and me.5 We attempted to find out what it is about the teacher that makes a difference in pupil achievement. Detailed weekly observations of teachers who were osten- sibly using the same basal reader (meaning-emphasis) program showed considerable variation in implementing it. Generally, we found little cor- respondence between what the teachers said they did and what they 19

JEANNE S. CHALL were actually observed to do. When initial readiness characteristics of pupils were controlled, the following factors were related positively to reading achievement at the end of the first grade: overall teacher compe- tence, a thinking approach to learning, providing children with materials of suitable difficulty (neither too easy nor too hard), and a greater em- phasis on teaching the relation between sounds and letters (code em- phasis). What can we conclude from the research through 1965 and from the more recent USOE studies? Certainly, that method itself is not a simple matter, or a sufficient condition for achievement. Even without the evi- dence available from these experiments, it does not take unusual astute- ness to observe that teachers vary in competence and skill in implement- ing any method; that children vary in background, abilities, interests, and receptiveness to different learning tasks; and that schools vary in expectations and facilities. Thus, any reading program, even if carried out exactly as the author prescribes, tends to vary in its effectiveness. It may very well be that a less effective method in the hands of a good teacher may lead to better reading achievement than a more effective one in the hands of a poor teacher. But that does not deny the impor- tance of method. CRITERIA FOR MEASURING ACHIEVEMENT IN READING Achievement in reading is usually measured by standardized reading tests. These are group tests with multiple-choice items and time limits. The results are expressed in terms of the age and grade of a normative population and are usually given as grade-level scores or percentiles. By definition, then, about half the pupils who take a test will score above and half below the grade norm (often referred to as the "national norm"). These tests have floors and ceilings, and are designed for narrow grade ranges. The important point about floors and ceilings is that in taking successively more advanced reading tests as he proceeds through the grades, a pupil may, through fortuitous successful filling in of a few blanks, show increments in achievement while, in fact, he is still illiter- ate. The ceilings may also underestimate the real achievement of the advanced readers in each grade.3 Most standardized reading tests measure a conglomerate of skills and abilities that are often hard to separate. The names of the tests may re- 20

Learning and Not Learning to Read main the same at different grade levels (e.g., vocabulary, reading com- prehension, rate), but they measure different skills and abilities at dif- ferent stages of development. In the primary grades, for example, a test of reading comprehension is probably a stronger measure of word recog- nition and decoding skills than of comprehension, because the words and sentence structure in the selections are usually well within the pupil's verbal comprehension. Beginning at about the fourth grade and continu- ing into high school, a reading-comprehension test measures more of what would be considered "understanding the message." But even here, a low reading-comprehension score may result from a pupil's inability to recognize the words, rather than from his inability to understand the ideas. Thus, the same grade-level score or percentile rank on the same test may mean different things for different individuals and for the same individual at different stages of development. Although the newer standardized tests tend to have separate subtests for different aspects of reading, they do not solve the problem entirely. It is still difficult, even with different subtests, to disentangle word- recognition and decoding skills from reading comprehension, and read- ing comprehension from reading rate. It is also difficult to disentangle word recognition from word meaning on tests usually designated as vocabulary or word-meaning tests. It is therefore necessary, especially for pupils who are not performing as expected, to give additional indi- vidual tests. But even for survey purposes, standardized reading tests have a basic limitation that must be kept in mind: because the scores are relative measures, they do not, except by inference, tell us how much of each of the different component reading and language skills has been mastered. Even if we manage to improve the reading ability of all pupils in the United States, the percentage of "poor" readers will remain the same if standardized tests as we know them today are used, inasmuch as poor readers are usually defined as those who score one or more years below age or grade norms. Indeed, I have a strong impression that the tests for the primary grades published in the 1960's are more difficult than those published in the 1940's and 1950's; i.e., they require a greater mastery of the component reading skills for the same grade-level scores. Thus, a 2.0 for a third-grader in 1960 may represent a higher level of skill than a 2.0 for a third-grader in 1940, but both pupils would be classified as poor readers. What we need are criterion measures, or mastery tests, so that 21

JEANNE S. CHALL schools, classes, and individuals can be evaluated not only in relation to each other, as they are now, but on the basis of their mastery of known component skills of reading. DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT OF POOR READERS Current Status Methods of diagnosis and treatment of poor readers vary a good deal, depending on the facilities and resources available and the viewpoints and skills of those who diagnose and treat. There is also considerable variation in the criteria used to identify poor readers. Generally, in large-scale surveys, pupils who score one or more years below the na- tional norm for their age or grade on a standardized reading test are classified as "retarded" or "poor" readers. This classification therefore includes both children who have limited intelligence and those who are deficient in other areas that may be causally related to reading achieve- ment—children with sensory defects; those who are neurologically dam- aged, discrepant, or immature; those in the lower socioeconomic levels of the population; those whose emotional problems prevent them from learning; those who have had inadequate instruction; and those with combinations of these characteristics. The "retarded-reader" classification fails to include those who are ex- ceptionally able intellectually, but who manage to score only "on grade level." Such a classification also overlooks another important distinction: a 1- or 2-year retardation from age or grade norms in the primary grades is different from and probably more serious than such a retardation in high school, where a one- or two-grade retardation may often be a func- tion of a low rate of reading. There is a growing tendency in schools and clinics to move away from that rather global definition of "poor" or "retarded" readers and to use, instead, the concept of the "disabled reader." The disabled reader is a child who reads one or more years below the norm for his age or grade level and below his mental age. Although this classification eliminates those who have difficulty because of intellectual deficiencies, it, too, poses problems. If group intelligence tests (which usually, except for the first or second grade, require that the questions be read) are used, many "disabled" readers will be overlooked. Indeed, when only school- 22

Learning and Not Learning to Read administered group intelligence and achievement tests are available for estimating the extent of reading disability, it is difficult to tell whether a low reading score can be attributed to a low IQ , or a low IQ to a poor reading score. As with the more global "retarded-reader" classification, exceptionally able pupils who achieve at grade level or above but who are nevertheless still achieving significantly below their potential are not usually classified as "disabled" readers.11 Trends I would like to sketch very briefly some of the broad trends in diagnosis and treatment of poor readers. As indicated earlier, a good deal depends on who makes the diagnosis and who is responsible for the treatment. In most school systems, the major burden of identification, diagnosis, and treatment still rests with the classroom teacher. Ideally, teachers should use both standardized and informal reading tests to estimate level of functioning, strengths, and weaknesses in component reading and language skills, in order to give each child in the class the appropriate instruction. That is the ideal, but it is extremely difficult to realize. Most classroom teachers are not sufficiently trained in the use of individual tests and in their interpreta- tion, nor do they have the training, the time, or the proper materials to vary instruction on the basis of these interpretations.1 More and more schools or school systems (but probably not enough to keep up with the increase in the population of school-age children) have been appointing reading specialists to help the classroom teachers (or the children with reading difficulty). Such a reading specialist usu- ally gives individual tests to determine a child's strengths and weaknesses in reading. The child's record card may be consulted for relevant data on IQ , health, previous achievement in reading and related language skills, etc. The reading specialist may then confer with the classroom teacher, who will carry out a more individualized instructional program with the child, or the child may receive "corrective" or "remedial" instruction in reading from the reading specialist several hours a week alone or in a small group. The child may also be referred for a physical examination to rule out the possibility of sensory or other defects, or may be exam- ined by a psychologist or consulting psychiatrist if an emotional or be- havioral problem is suspected. Generally, although the diagnosis and treatment by a reading specialist 23

JEANNE S. CHALL in a school are more analytic and intensive than those by the classroom teacher, they are usually specific to reading. If the child makes progress in the "corrective" or "remedial" reading sessions, little further diagnosis is undertaken. If progress is not made, the child may be referred for a more intensive clinical diagnosis. A clinical diagnosis, in contrast with one carried out in a school setting, attempts to get at the underlying "cause(s)" of the problem, as well as at the best possible course of treatment. Ideally, a comprehensive clinical diagnosis involves a social worker, a clinical psychologist, a psychiatrist, a neurologist, a pediatrician, an ophthalmologist, an optometrist, and possibly others, as well as an educational (reading) specialist. Most clinics, however, do not have all these specialists, and the child or the parent may be "referred out" to such specialists. On the basis of the findings of the various specialists, a course of treatment is recommended. It may in- clude parent or child counseling, psychotherapy, perceptual-motor train- ing, remedial instruction in reading, and so on. Unfortunately, such a multidisciplinary approach to diagnosis and treatment, although accepted as ideal, is still quite rare. And even with a full complement of specialists from different disciplines, it is not easy to make a differential diagnosis. My own experience indicates that a psycho- logically or psychiatrically oriented clinic tends to find that most chil- dren referred to them because of reading disability have emotional prob- lems and usually recommends some form of psychotherapy or counseling in addition to or in place of remedial instruction in reading. In contrast, a neurologically or medically oriented clinic tends to find neurologic or physiologic defects, malfunctions, or immaturities. Some neurologically oriented clinics recommend intensive retraining in reading, writing, and spelling, usually with heavy code-emphasis, for pupils who still have not mastered the fundamental literacy skills. More recently, some medically oriented clinics have been experimenting with direct teaching to the par- ticular deficit in visual and auditory perception that the pupil appears to have.10 The differences in diagnostic findings among clinics with different orientations may, of course, be explained by a kind of self-referral by parents and school personnel who identify the child as a reading prob- lem to begin with. It is the parent and the teacher who make the first hypothesis about the possible cause, and then probably refer the child to a clinic that "fits" the hypothesis. I would suggest the possibility that the frequency of some diagnostic findings reported by some clinics re- 24

Learning and Not Learning to Read fleets the particular viewpoint and interests of the clinic personnel. Read- ing disability is quite an elephant, and all of us still suffer from varying degrees of blindness when it comes to describing the what, how, and why of it. Indeed, during the 1940's and early 1950's, when the psychologic and psychiatric orientation was dominant, most published reports from psychoeducational clinics found that one of the major causes of reading disability was emotional problems. Since the late 1950's, with the neuro- logic orientation in the ascendant, more children with reading disability seem to be labeled as neurologically immature, perceptually handicapped, and so on. Another current trend is prevention of reading failure through early identification and treatment, even before the child is exposed to formal reading instruction in the first grade. Largely through the work of Ka- trina de Hirsch and her associates,6 some schools are beginning to test children in kindergarten and are setting up transition classes for "high- risk" children, where their specific lacks in visual-motor coordination, visual and auditory perception, language, and attentional processes are treated in a less pressured atmosphere. Also related is the trend in schools to give corrective and remedial instruction in reading to children begin- ning as early as the end of the first grade. Until very recently, such chil- dren would be considered "not ready." They would usually wait for remedial instruction until they reached the fourth grade or higher, by which time their problems were often intensified. RESULTS Lack of Documentation The next logical question is: How effective are the various approaches to diagnosis and treatment? Unfortunately, there are too few controlled studies or even good clinical reports to state with any degree of confi- dence that the diagnoses were valid, that they helped in specifying the forms of treatment recommended, that the particular treatment was re- lated theoretically or even clinically to the recommended treatment, or even that the treatment recommended was responsible for the observed improvement in reading. With so many possible causes for the reading disability, it will be quite some time before such data will be available. At any rate, it seems to me that, as with psychotherapy, many different 25

JEANNE S. CHALL forms of treatment can be and possibly are effective, although it is not always clear what it was about the treatment that made for the effec- tiveness, or whether the treatment's effectiveness could be said to con- firm the validity of the diagnosis. Because all remedial treatments (like all psychotherapies) have in common a concern and care for the child, an acceptance of his difficulty, and a promise of hope to him and his parents, some improvement can be expected from all of them. But if we are going to learn more about the phenomenon of reading disability, we will have to do the kind of clinical and controlled research that will ulti- mately lead to knowing what leads to what. The few follow-up studies of pupils who received remedial help (not always specified) in university-affiliated reading clinics seem to indicate that children who receive remedial reading up to the point where they can read well enough to function in school do tend to maintain the gains they make. There is also some evidence that the earlier the identifica- tion and remedial treatment, the greater the chance for a successful out- come.2 Early Identification What about the effectiveness of programs of early identification and treatment before the first grade? Here, we must await the evidence. The practice of setting up transition classes for "high-risk" children is still too new to know whether the expense of time and effort is worthwhile in terms of progress made in learning how to read or in the overall ad- justment of the child. I would hazard a guess that, even though some of these intervention programs are successful in making the child more "ready" for regular reading instruction in the first grade, his success in the regular first grade and later will depend also on the kind and quality of instruction he receives there. REFERENCES 1. Austin, M. C., and C. Morrison. The First R: The Harvard Report on Reading in Elementary Schools. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1963. 269 pp. 2. Chall, J. Clinical studies useful to the reading specialist, pp. 83-89. In Proceed- ings of the 11 th Annual Convention of the International Reading Association, Volume II, Part 2, 1966. 26

Learning and Not Learning to Read 3. Chall, J. Interpretation of the results of standardized reading tests, pp. 133-138. In H. M. Robinson, Ed. Evaluation of Reading. Chicago: University Press, 1958. 208 pp. 4. Chall, J. S. Learning to Read: The Great Debate; An Inquiry into the Science, Art, and Ideology of Old and New Methods of Teaching Children to Read, 1910-1965. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. 372 pp. 5. Chall, J., and S. Feldmann. First grade reading: an analysis of the interactions of professed methods, teacher implementation and child background. Reading Teacher 19:569-575, 1966. 6. de Hirsch, K., J. J. Jansky, and W. S. Langford. Predicting Reading Failure: A Preliminary Study of Reading, Writing, and Spelling Disability in Preschool Children. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. 144 pp. 7. Dykstra, R. Final Report of the Continuation of the Coordinating Center for First-Grade Reading Instruction Programs. United States Office of Education Project 6-1651. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1967. 8. Dykstra, R. The effectiveness of code- and meaning-emphasis beginning reading programs. Reading Teacher 22:17-23, 1968. 9. Lorge, I., and J. Chall. Estimating the size of vocabularies of children and adults: an analysis of methodological issues. J. Exp. Educ. 32(winter): 147-157, 1963. 10. Money, J., Ed. The Disabled Reader: Education of the Dyslexic Child. Balti- more: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966. 421 pp. 11. Roswell, F., and J. Chall. An Analysis of the Reading Problems in Two Fifth- Grade Classes in Districts 12, 13, and 14, New York City. New York: The City College, 1953. 53 pp. DISCUSSION DR. LINDSLEY : Dr. Chall, you have spoken about the broad aspects of the prob- lem of reading, the criteria for reading, and how we have measured the state of the child's problem, and you have spoken about perceptual factors in reading. You did not make a special point of the matter of learning to attend. For ex- ample, children are asked to read the Iowa Silent Reading Test silently and then turn it over and answer the questions. I am sure that we have all had the experi- ence, when we have taken a test, of not expecting the content of the test. There is the difficulty of focusing attention on the test and perceiving the relations that are interwoven in the written language. To what extent has this been proved to be a problem, or to what extent have investigators focused on the matter of learning to attend? We speak of learning to attend and learning to perceive, which seem to me to be very fundamental problems. 27

JEANNE S. CHALL DR. CHALL: Attention is definitely an important part of learning to read or of learning anything. In fact, I wonder whether some methods are more successful than others because they help to focus a child's attention better. A method that requires a child to trace a word, or write it, and say it at the same time focuses his attention more than just asking him to say the word he sees. In fact, in the earlier classroom experiments that I analyzed for the Carnegie study and also in the more recent USOE studies, reading programs that incorporated writing with early reading instruction showed benefits over those that did not. Another bit of evidence of the importance of attention comes from a small study that I did in 1965 with colleagues at City College of New York (J. Chall, F. Roswell, L. Alshan, and M. Bloomfield, unpublished) in which first-grade teachers were asked to rate, on a five-point scale, their pupils' ability to pay attention. There was a significant relationship between the teachers' ratings of the pupils' ability to pay attention and achievement in reading. Also, one of the factors that de Hirsch found to be a significant predictor of reading failure among preschool children was hyperac- tivity or difficulty in attending. DR. DOTY: I recently read a paper (Amer. J. Orthopsychiat. 38:599-614, 1968) by a Japanese group claiming that there was no dyslexia among a large popula- tion of Japanese children, whereas the rates for all European languages are rather similar. If this is a valid bit of work, I think it poses an extremely important point as to the nature of the problem. We might be able to determine the heart of the difficulty from such comparative studies. DR. KAGAN: I know that study. I am not suggesting that the following fact ex- plains it, but 49% of the teachers in those schools were men. DR. WADE MARSHALL: That brings up the finding that the ratio of boys to girls in children having developmental dyslexia is 5 or 6 to 1. I wonder whether that is simply because boys are more active and are disciplined more often. DR. CHALL: The Japanese article interests me very much. The first thing that came to my mind when I read it was that it was based on few cases and on teacher judgment. If it is true that there is no dyslexia among Japanese children, or a smaller percentage than in western countries, then many explanations are pos- sible. One explanation that was already mentioned by Dr. Kagan may have some- thing to do with it: the male teacher. Another has to do with the Japanese notational system, which is syllabic, al- though it uses ideographs as well. English and other European languages are basically phonemic; that is, the separate consonant and vowel sounds are rep- resented by separate letters or letter combinations. In the literature on reading, we find in both clinical reports and correlational studies that the sounding and blending of phonemes (for instance, |c|a|t|) are particularly difficult for the se- verely disabled reader. Orton made a particular point about blending difficulty among his clinical cases. In Japanese, the written characters stand for syllables; that is, there are separate visual notations for na, ne, ni, no, and nu that do not 28

Learning and Not Learning to Read resemble each other. Therefore, the Japanese child does not need to make the fine distinctions in vowel and consonant sounds that the English-speaking child must make, nor does he have to blend vowels and consonants as does the Ameri- can or English child. A third possible explanation is that education in Japan is highly valued and highly competitive. A great deal of time is spent on learning, especially on learn- ing to read. Still another explanation involves the way reading is taught. I think the Japa- nese and Chinese teach writing early, simultaneously with reading, and even guide the children's hands in writing. And early writing does seem to be related to early acquisition of reading skills. DR. BERING: What about the fact that the Japanese and the Chinese read verti- cally, as opposed to moving from left to right? DR. CHALL: That might have a bearing on the problem. I understand that those languages can be written horizontally as well. DR. STAIGER: I might add two other possible reasons for the Japanese-language difference. One is the social pressure brought to bear on the child—his whole family loses face if he does not succeed in school. Another is that the Japanese have two systems of writing: one is phonic, and children are introduced to the phonic system and then graduated to the Chinese ideographs. The two-stage sys- tem is possibly something like our ITA and other simplified alphabets. Perhaps there is a relationship there. One comment on the vertical writing: A Japanese friend of mine said that his biggest problem in reading was moving his eyes up and down and he found that, to be comfortable if he read for any length of time, he had to move his whole head, not just the eye muscles. DR. INGRAM: According to MacDonald Critchley, only one type of Japanese script is likely to be associated with dyslexia, and that is the one that uses phonic spelling. The writing of the syllable for "rain," which may be a cloud with a few drops of rain coming down out of it, is much less likely to involve dyslexia. I am very surprised to hear that pressure on Japanese children is more likely to reduce dyslexia than to increase it. It is possible that children with difficulty in reading and writing have difficulty in maintaining their attention for any length of time, and certainly that has been the experience in the Word Blind Institute in Copenhagen, where it was found that the more severely affected the child is, the shorter the period of remedial instruction may be. They may start with five or six periods of 5 or 10 min at a time during the day. I agree that overactive children—for example, the hyper- kinetic children described by Prechtl and Stemmer (Develop. Med. Child Neurol. 4:119-127,1962)—may have difficulty in sustaining attention, but is it not also possible that, if you ask a child to do something that he finds particularly diffi- cult, it will be very difficult for him to maintain his attention span? 29

JEANNE S. CHALL DR. YOUNG: I would like to know at what age Japanese children start to read. Some years ago, I talked to some educators who were a part of a group that studied the Russian school system. They mentioned several times in our discus- sions that Russian schoolchildren do not wear glasses in the same proportions as American schoolchildren. American schoolchildren do not wear glasses in the same proportions as Japanese schoolchildren. One of the differences between the American and Russian school systems was that we start our children reading ,around the age of 6, and they start a year later. I am curious about when the Japanese start to read. DR. SHANKWEiLER: Dr. Doty raised the question of a cross comparison of lan- guage and reading difficulties. I did not know that the western languages had similar rates of reading disabilities. If that is true, we ought to know about it be- cause western languages differ enormously in the degree in which they have pre- dictable phonic structure; it seems to me that differences or similarities in the rates of reading difficulties in western languages ought to be of concern to us. I don't know what the facts are. DR. STAiGER: I know the figures from the survey claiming that there is no dys- lexia in Japan, but the reason that so little is reported is that, in comparison with our country, where the dyslexia ratio of boys to girls is 5:1, there is a 1:1 ratio, so that it looks like less dyslexia. But there is an excess of boys to girls here, com- pared with Japan. DR. MEIER: I have some data dealing with studies in schools in which pupils started out in kindergarten with male teachers who had absolutely no sophistication in reading instruction, and their reading readiness was greater than that of all other groups. The very conservative school systems still prove that, with the male teacher who has had no formal reading instruction, schoolboys are proceeding with written material much more rapidly than other groups of boys and doing nearly as well as the girls. In fact, their mean performance is such that there is no significant difference between boys and girls. DR. LANGE: Our school has had a male teacher with the same boys from the first grade through the third grade. I think they have found that the attitude of the boys toward learning is so much better than that of the girls that their whole curriculum is different, and they feel very successful. DR. HIRSH: May I use "reading disorders" and "dyslexia",as synonymous, or can I say that a child has a reading disorder because he has dyslexia? I used to call a child who did not speak "aphasic," but I was taught by the neurologist to call it a "language disorder" that may or may not be the result of aphasia. DR. CHALL: I tend not to use the term "dyslexia." I use the term "reading dis- ability," because it does not assume a definite cause for the disability. By "read- ing disability," I mean a significant discrepancy between what the child is ex- pected to read, as determined by an individually administered intelligence test, and what the child can read. There are so many definitions of "dyslexia," many 30

Learning and Not Learning to Read of which assume a particular etiology, that I tend not to use it. I tend to think of dyslexia in terms of a reading disability stemming primarily from problems that probably have a neurologic basis but do not necessarily show up on the usual type of neurologic examination. The broader terms, such as "reading disorder" and "reading disabilities," include reading problems stemming from cultural, edu- cational, psychologic, neurologic, or sensory deficits or problems. DR. SILVER: I would like to make a comment on Dr. Chall's herculean comprehen- sive survey, touching each area of the problem the way she has and defining what she means very clearly. The question of definition of terms has beset us at every meeting of this nature that I have attended. The Interdisciplinary Committee* worked out a compromise definition. We divided problems of language—let us take reading specifically—into groups. In the first group are children who are re- tarded in reading, which means that they function lower than their age group. This group may include children with low IQ'S and children with peripheral sen- sory defects. In the second group are children with reading disabilities or reading difficulties, which narrows the field a little bit; these are children who are re- tarded in reading with respect not only to their age, but also to their intelligence and to their educational opportunities (which brings in the cultural factors). This group would include motivational problems, minimal organic defects, and "specific reading disability," which we use as synonymous with "specific dyslexia." This group includes developmental, or so-called congenital, dyslexia and designates children who are retarded in reading with respect to their age, intelligence, and educational opportunities, who have no evidence of central nervous system struc- tural defects, and whose peripheral sensory apparatus is intact. This would in- clude Critchley's group with developmental dyslexia. I think it is important to speak the same language. I am also reluctant to use "dyslexia" unless I modify it with the term "spe- cific," because it has too many meanings. In general, it would be synonymous with "reading disability," and "specific dyslexia" synonymous with "specific reading disability." The Japanese study troubled me. As I recall it, there were two groups: those who were taught by means of a phonic method, and those who were taught by means of an ideographic or essentially visual symbolic method. The children who were taught phonetically did better than the children who were taught ideo- graphically. This would be consistent with what we have found (Silver, Hagin, and Hersh, Amer. J. Orthopsychiat. 37:744-752,1967), but I questioned the study and I am glad Dr. Ingram has reinforced that question. The study really is a little bit different. Interdisciplinary Committee on Reading Problems, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, D.C. 20036. 31

JEANNE S. CHALL DR. MEIER: I would like to suggest that the beginning chapter of The Disabled Reader (J. Money, Ed., Johns Hopkins Press, 1966) is helpful. DR. SILVER: I might mention that the initial meeting of the Interdisciplinary Com- mittee was bogged down on just this point of terminology. We tabled the ques- tion by handing it to a subcommittee; after a year, we have come out with our definitions. DR. CHALL: The same thing has happened in the latest committee on dyslexia, the National Advisory Committee,* of which I am a member. We have one task force assigned to definitions, and I think they have, at last count, 14 definitions of dyslexia. It will be helpful if they suggest some guidelines. *Secretary's (HEW) National Advisory Committee on Dyslexia and Related Reading Disabili- ties, Building 31, Room 8A34, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. 20014. 32

ROLE OF THE VISUAL SYSTEM: OPTICAL AND OCULOMOTOR, RETINAL, AND CENTRAL NEURAL FACTORS

Next: ROLE OF THE VISUAL SYSTEM: OPTICAL AND OCULOMOTOR, RETINAL, AND CENTRAL NEURAL FACTORS »
Early Experience and Visual Information Processing in Perceptual and Reading Disorders: Proceedings of a Conference Held October 27-30, 1968, at Lake Mohonk, New York, in Association With the Committee on Brain Sciences, Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council. Edited Get This Book
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