First R

An estimated 85% of what modern man learns is taken in by eye, most of it by reading. Despite radio's rise, the function of reading is growing. Since the turn of the Century U. S. publications for the adult have grown 170%, and more and more reading is necessary to make a living. Today a private secretary has to do some 500% more reading than in 1900. Because inefficient reading is responsible for 60% of all failures in school, $612 of every $1,000 spent for primary schooling is spent to teach reading. Yet one-half the adult population of the U. S. reads with difficulty. Eye defects are partly to blame. So are poverty of vocabulary and fuzzy thinking. Major reason for reading inefficiency, however, is bad reading habits.

Last week before a convention in Buffalo of the National Council of Teachers of English, Dr. Stella S. Center, director of New York University's reading clinic, reported: 1) what constitutes bad reading habits, 2) how they may be corrected. Dr. Center, 60, who is co-chairman of the English department in New York City's Theodore Roosevelt High School, started three years ago to cure bad habits of the 60% of students who came to the school below par in reading. So successful were these remedial classes that they were extended to other high schools and last year the N. Y. U. clinic was opened for handicapped adults as well as youngsters.

To Dr. Center's classes came an international banker because he had difficulty reading financial pages and stock tables, an actor who could not read his lines, an engineer who could read nothing but his technical jargon; a young reading-cripple with a high I. Q., who walked in. sat down and calmly announced: "I am a problem child. I must not be excited." After a few weeks of training the banker could get through his financial pages, the engineer could read 550 words a minute of general literature, a secretary who had never read a book of her own accord had read four, including Gone With the Wind.

Reading eyes do not move continuously from left to right. They hop. The number of words they grasp in one hop is called the span of recognition. This span for the average efficient college reader is 1.2 words; a very few persons can grasp as many as five or six words at once. At the end of the hop there is a pause, while the words register on the brain; 94% of reading time is spent in these "fixations." Sometimes the eye goes back over words it has already scanned. These are regressions. To read rapidly it is necessary to reduce regressions to a minimum, shorten fixations, lengthen the recognition span.

First step in Dr. Center's clinic is to measure hops, fixations and regressions with an ophthalmograph. which takes motion pictures of a reader's eye movements. The resulting picture looks like sets of stairs, recording the eye's stops and jerks. If the reader is efficient, the stairs are regular.

To create a regular rhythm of reading is the task of another machine, the metronoscope, which exposes one, two or three words at a time to the reader through a narrow window. It trains the reader to extend his span to two words, cuts the fixation time. Because the words move out of sight as fast as they are read, it eliminates regressions. The speed of the machine is gradually increased to raise the reader's speed.

Dr. Center's methods are not entirely mechanical, however. She helps readers choose books that interest them, pick out key words and phrases as clues to understanding..

Some discoveries through the ophthalmograph:

P: An untrained adult reads 200 words a minute, pauses 120 times, goes back 23 times per 100 words.

P: An average college student, who can read 325 words a minute, pauses only 80 times, goes back 10 times per 100 words.

P: In an office where tests were made the lowest paid stenographer read 273 words, the best paid stenographer 461, the office head 600 per minute.

P: Fastest reader ever tested, an 8-year-old high-school boy who evidently had an unusually large macula (a yellow spot in the retina, most sensitive point of vision), in one test read 2,202 words a minute with excellent comprehension.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.