set 1979 : no. 2

To read well and widely is a central objective of formal education. People who cannot read are seen to be at a crippling disadvantage, personally, educationally, and vocationally. Public concern is often expressed about standards of reading attainment.

When things go wrong with a child's social behaviour, teachers, psychologists and social workers frequently ask for the parents' help. When children are disruptive in class, when children are repeatedly late for school, when children seem upset or withdrawn, parents are asked to suggest possible causes, to try out new ways of managing the problem, and to report on any changes in their child's behaviour. When things go wrong with a child's school work, however, professionals… Read more

Most teachers assess reading comprehension by asking questions. These questions may be very broad, such as 'What was the story about?' or else very detailed, listed on a worksheet perhaps. Yet why do we ask the kinds of questions we do? How much story understanding do they really get at? Why is it that 'some children are able to answer our questions even though we know they are not good readers? In the last five years, we have come a lot closer to understanding the nature of… Read more

Legibility research has been going on for two hundred years and it has discovered some useful pointers for anyone who is writing down words, or selecting words, to be put in front of anyone learning.
When a book designer is at work his trade, called typography, is an art: but it should be the least obtrusive of the arts. Its first job is to avoid all barriers that might come between the reader and the ideas for which the words are only symbols. If the print and the layout can avoid… Read more

Most children begin school expecting to learn to read. If this expectation is not met, if they have problems with reading, they may develop a dislike for reading, or just a hopeless feeling about it. The reading problem and the poor attitude to it aggravate each other, and this can lead to the child developing a poor opinion of himself and poor attitudes to school work generally.
We cannot ignore the defeatist and negative attitudes of the ... student when we deal with his reading… Read more

Subscribe, or better still have the school subscribe, to one of the half dozen or more journals devoted to reading. But be aware: some journals specialise in one area of reading or specialise in research studies rather than articles dealing with the teaching or improvement of reading. The following notes will give some idea of what you can expect to find in different reading journals.

A fable

Voluntary individual tuition for adults with acute problems in reading, writing and spelling is not new. It has always gone on quietly for a few people in a scattered and isolated way. What has changed in the 1970 s is that New Zealanders are starting to realise the scale of the need for tuition and are beginning to respond with purpose.

Discovery-learning and the information explosion both require that children have study skills. What exactly are these skills and how can they be taught?

In Ypsilanti, Michigan a project has been underway since 1962. It now shows that significantly more of those who had pre-schooling have jobs, stay out of prison, and so on.