ABSTRACT

Reading seems to be a sort of high-speed breaking-down and reassembling process in which the reader has to accomplish three things apparently simultaneously: firstly, an appreciation of the information or ideas contained in the written material; secondly, the interpretation of the sentence patterns; and thirdly, the recognition of the individual words. The skilled reader fully recognises two, three or even more words in one glance. Thus he may read a line of average print with only three eye movements. The child learned one lot of shapes and wrote them with a pencil. He was then made to throw it away and learn a lot of new shapes which he was made to write with a pen which most modern adults would find difficult to manage. The child has to put letters together, assemble them into words, leave spaces between the words, keep them in straight lines, and separate whole collections of words with a very limited number of punctuation marks.