Learning to Read Without a Teacher: A Case Study.

Abstract

Most children are taught to read after they are in school, but a certain number have some reading skill already when they enter first grade. Dolores Durkin (1966) reports that about one per cent of approximately 5000 children who entered the Oakland, California public school system in 1958 were able to read as many as 18 out of 37 words in her simple test. Since reading is a language skill, it is reasonable to suppose that children who read earlier than usual do so because of especially high language ability or especially appropriate exposure to language. When children fail to learn reading, it seems reasonable to look for lower verbal ability or lack of appropriate exposure to language. Thus, the reading problems of slum children are commonly attributed to a lack of knowledge of language, and it is suggested that if they were given special training that would make their articulation, vocabulary, or grammatical patterns more like those of middle class children; they would be able to compete also in reading. In view of the explanations that suggest themselves both for early reading and for reading problems in disadvantaged children, it is worthwhile to examine a case of one child of average general and verbal ability according to tests, whose language deviates from standard English both in articulation and in grammar, but who has nevertheless mastered very early and without much help the difficult art of reading. Background I had the opportunity to spend three hours a week for four months with a five-

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.