It is of interest to note that a scale like Stanford-Binet, against which has been repeatedly brought the a priori objection that it depends on verbal acquirement, is capable of differentiating a non-reader from the feeble-minded. It is also interesting that the Pintner “Scale of Performance Tests,” which does not include ability to read at all, gives almost exactly the same result as the Stanford-Binet, in this case.
Fig. 9.—Showing an account written by X of his week’s reading.
X is a boy of superior character. He never missed an appointment with his instructor, and was never tardy except once, unavoidably. He gave up pleasures, such as trying out for baseball, in order to learn reading. When asked why he did so, he replied that “You most probably can’t get a living playing baseball, but you can get a better living if you can read.” These qualities of perseverance and fidelity to duty were undoubtedly very important factors in such success as was achieved.
Why did X not learn to read as children of his general character and endowment usually do, in the ordinary course of schooling? After four years of studying and teaching him, the present writer cannot give a definite answer to this question. He was finally taught to read by a method in which the letter is the unit of perception, and in which words are read in the first place by spelling them aloud. This is not the method used in the schools where X attended, nor in any modern school.
Still, the possibility of teaching him by some method other than that which succeeded, has not been excluded. It is even possible that he might have learned to read by the very method used in the schools, under individual instruction, where each habit can be scrutinized as it is being formed. In a class of forty or fifty children, each demanding attention, a teacher cannot succeed with an individual pupil, by any method, as well as with that pupil alone, by that same method.
It was observed throughout the teaching of X that he constantly made appeal to his ear. He could always grasp a difficult word more easily by hearing it spelled aloud, than he could by seeing it. In order to obtain some quantitative statement of the extent to which auditory perception showed an advantage over visual perception in his case, the following experiment was tried.
In the spring of 1922, on four successive weekly appointments, 27 paragraphs, comprising 4131 words, were read by X, both (1) through the ear, the teacher spelling the words, and X pronouncing them without seeing them, and (2) through the eye, X seeing and saying the words, in the usual way. The order of these procedures was reversed for alternating paragraphs, so that no advantage to either method of perception would accrue from practice.
Errors are of two kinds—misreadings and omissions. Omissions in sight reading were not counted, since, according to the method whereby the teacher spelled successive words to X, no omissions were possible. Misreadings only were counted. In reading these paragraphs, X made 162 errors through the eye, and but 57 errors through the ear, in perceiving the same words.
This great reduction in error through auditory channels might, however, be due to the fact that by that method only one word was presented at a time, whereas in the ordinary visual reading the whole page of words was presented, acting as a distraction. In order to check this possible error in interpretation, one hundred isolated words were presented to the eye and to the ear, reversing the procedure alternately for every ten words. The ratio of error was nearly the same as in the first experiment. X can now, in fact, pronounce almost any puzzling word in ordinary reading matter, such as is found in newspapers, by spelling it aloud.