How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading Read Online Free PDF Page B

approaches that differ from all of these. It is perhaps too early to tell whether any of these is the long-sought panacea for all reading ills.
    Stages of Learning to Read
    One useful finding of recent research is the analysis of stages in learning to read. It is now widely accepted that there are at least four more or less clearly distinguishable stages in the child's progress toward what is called mature reading ability. The first stage is known by the term "reading readiness." This begins, it has been pointed out, at birth, and continues normally until the age of about six or seven.
    Reading readiness includes several different kinds of preparation for learning to read. Physical readiness involves good vision and hearing. Intellectual readiness involves a minimum level of visual perception such that the child can take in and remember an entire word and the letters that combine to form it. Language readiness involves the ability to speak clearly and to use several sentences in correct order. Personal readiness involves the ability to work with other children, to sustain attention, to follow directions, and the like.
    General reading readiness is assessed by tests and is also estimated by teachers who are often skillful at discerning just when a pupil is ready to learn to read. The important thing to remember is that jumping the gun is usually self-defeating.
    The child who is not yet ready to read is frustrated if attempts are made to teach him, and he may carry over his dislike for the experience into his later school career and even into adult life. Delaying the beginning of reading instruction beyond the reading readiness stage is not nearly so serious, despite the feelings of parents who may fear that their child is "backward" or is not "keeping up" with his peers.
    In the second stage, children learn to read very simple materials. They usually begin, at least in the United States, by learning a few sight words, and typically manage to master perhaps three hundred to four hundred words by the end of the first year. Basic skills are introduced at this time, such as the use of context or meaning clues and the beginning sounds of words. By the end of this period pupils are expected to be reading simple books independently and with enthusiasm.
    It is incidentally worth observing that something quite mysterious, almost magical, occurs during this stage. At one moment in the course of his development the child, when faced with a series of symbols on a page, finds them quite meaningless. Not much later -perhaps only two or three weeks later- he has discovered meaning in them; he knows that they say
    "The cat sat on the hat." How this happens no one really knows, despite the efforts of philosophers and psychologists over two and a half millennia to study the phenomenon. Where does meaning come from? How is it that a French child would find the same meaning in the symbols "Le chat s'asseyait sur le chapeau"? Indeed, this discovery of meaning in symbols may be the most astounding intellectual feat that any human being ever performs-and most humans perform it before they are seven years old!
    The third stage is characterized by rapid progress in vocabulary building and by increasing skill in "unlocking" the meaning of unfamiliar words through context clues. In addition, children at this stage learn to read for different purposes and in different areas of content, such as science, social studies, language arts, and the like. They learn that reading, besides being something one does at school, is also something one can do on one's own, for fun, to satisfy curiosity, or even to "expand one's horizons."
    Finally, the fourth stage is characterized by the refinement and enhancement of the skills previously acquired. Above all, the student begins to be able to assimilate his reading experiences-that is, to carry over concepts from one piece of writing to another, and to compare the views of different writers on the same subject. This, the