This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Excerpt from Some Phases of Reading in the Elementary School, 1919: Reprinted From the Series Published in the Educational Journal Because the Educational Journal is largely a principals' magazine, this article is addressed primarily to the elementary principal who desires to attack the problem of reading in his school. As far as possible, the writer wishes to put this into the form of a friendly talk rather than in the form of a finished essay, so that while we may lose something in the way of style, we may, perhaps, gain thereby in directness and simplicity. First of all, I should impress on the teachers of your building that reading is the most important subject with which we have to deal in the elementary school. Unfortunately, there is a tendency in this city, as well as elsewhere, to measure a child's progress, if not actually to decide upon his fitness for promotion, by his ability in arithmetic. Now, while arithmetic is a highly important subject, and merits our best attention, it is altogether conceivable that men and women may get along successfully in life with only a modicum of arithmetical skill. Indeed, the average person in adult life has little use for anything but the simple fundamental processes of addition, subtraction and multiplication, while reading functions to an enormous degree in the affairs of every day life, not only in conducting the affairs of the working day, but in the right employment of one's leisure. Hence, the position of so many teachers that reading as a subject, is of relatively little importance beyond the first and second grades is hardly a tenable one. In the next place, I should point out to the teachers that reading is an extremely complex subject, and one which is exceedingly hard to teach. Nothing is easier than to distribute readers to a class and to call upon the individual members to read in turn with an occasional criticism by the teacher. Such a lesson could hardly be called a reading lesson, but it is considered so in unfortunately too many cases. Again, there is a lack of clear understanding that reading must be considered both from the standpoint of silent reading and oral reading. Many teachers regard reading as synonymous with oral reading, neglecting entirely the wide field of silent reading. In the elementary school, it is indeed necessary to devote considerable time to oral recitations in reading, but the time given to oral reading should decrease from lower grades to higher grades, and the time given to silent reading increased from grade to grade until in the higher grades of the elementary school silent reading should receive most attention. In adult life, one's oral reading demands relatively an insignificant portion of our time, while silent reading for information or for pleasure is an indispensable part of daily life. Then, too, reading is complex in that the attempt to analyze a reading situation is not an easy task. To discover why a child fails in reading and to prescribe an adequate remedy calls forth the best skill which the teacher possesses; a task which is complicated by the truth that there is no panacea for poor reading, but every case, in a very real sense, must be judged upon its own merits. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Science of Reading: A Handbook brings together state-of-the-art reviews of reading research from leading names in the field, to create a highly authoritative, multidisciplinary overview of contemporary knowledge about reading and related skills. Provides comprehensive coverage of the subject, including theoretical approaches, reading processes, stage models of reading, cross-linguistic studies of reading, reading difficulties, the biology of reading, and reading instruction Divided into seven sections:Word Recognition Processes in Reading; Learning to Read and Spell; Reading Comprehension; Reading in Different Languages; Disorders of Reading and Spelling; Biological Bases of Reading; Teaching Reading Edited by well-respected senior figures in the field

Recognizing the characteristics of children with learning disabilities and deciding how to help them is a problem faced by schools all over the world. Although some disorders are fairly easily recognizable (e.g., mental retardation) or very specific to single components of performance and quite rare (e.g., developmental dyscalculia), schools must consider much larger populations of children with learning difficulties who cannot always be readily classified. These children present high-level learning difficulties that affect their performance on a variety of school tasks, but the underlying problem is often their difficulty in understanding written text. In many instances, despite good intellectual abilities and a superficial ability to cope with written texts and to use language appropriately, some children do not seem to grasp the most important elements, or cannot find the pieces of information they are looking for. Sometimes these difficulties are not immediately detected by the teacher in the early school years. They may be hidden because the most obvious early indicators of reading progress in the teacher's eyes do not involve comprehension of written texts or because the first texts a child encounters are quite simple and reflect only the difficulty level of the oral messages (sentences, short stories, etc.) with which the child is already familiar. However, as years go by and texts get more complex, comprehension difficulties will become increasingly apparent and increasingly detrimental to effective school learning. In turn, studying, assimilating new information, and many other situations requiring text comprehension -- from problem solving to reasoning with linguistic contents -- could be affected. Problems with decoding, dyslexia, and language disorders have attracted more interest from researchers than have specific comprehension problems and have occupied more room in specialized journals. Normal reading comprehension has also been a favorite with researchers. However, scarce interest has been paid to subjects who have comprehension difficulties. This book is an attempt to remedy this situation. In so doing, this volume answers the following questions: * Does a reading comprehension problem exist in schools? * How important and widespread is the problem? * Is the problem specific? * How can a reading comprehension difficulty be defined and identified? * Does the "syndrome" have a single pattern or can different subtypes be identified? * What are the main characteristics associated with a reading comprehension difficulty? * When can other well-identified problems add to our understanding of reading comprehension difficulties? * Which educational strategies are effective in preventing and treating reading comprehension difficulties? * What supplementary information can we get from an international perspective?