Education: First R

Brisk, efficient Guy Thomas Buswell has been photographing readers’ eye movements at the University of Chicago since 1920 and has had as much to do as any man with developing new wrinkles in teaching children how to read. Three years ago Guy Thomas Buswell decided that children were not the only ones who needed instruction. He rounded up 1,000 adults of varying degrees of literacy and for two years tested them intensively. He wanted to find out what happens to people’s reading habits and ability after they leave school. Last week his report, How Adults Read, which the Carnegie Foundation helped finance, showed these major findings:

¶ Mr. B, a salesman, graduate of an elementary school, stumbles along at the rate of 156 words a minute, never reads books or magazines. Miss A, a college graduate and school administrator, can lap up 600 words a minute, reads nine magazines regularly, keeps two library cards busy.

¶ Nearly all adults read newspapers, 91% regularly; 41% regularly read magazines; 34% read many books. But 23% never read books at all, 4% never read magazines. The longer people have been out of school, the less they read.

¶ For the most efficient readers, the favorite type of magazine is news comment; of the least efficient, pulps. Leading five magazines read by the 100 ablest readers in Professor Buswell’s study were, in order of preference: Reader’s Digest, TIME, Saturday Evening Post, American Magazine, Good Housekeeping. Most frequently read by the 100 poorest readers: True Story Magazine, Detective Story Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Liberty, Saturday Evening Post.

Trying to find out why inefficient readers read poorly, Professor Buswell discovered that many of them “vocalized,” i. e., moved their lips or otherwise indicated that they were laboriously pronouncing one word at a time instead of taking in several. He tested his subjects with a passage of tongue-twisters. Because tongue-twisters make silent readers as well as lip-movers vocalize, they slowed down the efficient readers more than the inefficient ones. From this test Dr. Buswell concluded that the schools’ old oral method of teaching reading was partly responsible for people’s bad reading habits.

Dr. Buswell found that bad readers get worse 1) the more they read 2) the more firmly fixed their bad habits become. In his group, only 11% of the adults who had stopped school at the sixth grade could read as well as present-day sixth-graders. The professor thereupon set out to invent improved methods of teaching adults to read. Chief advance over the system of Dr. Stella Center at New York University’s reading clinic (TIME, Dec. 6), was the use of a motion picture film that flashes successive phrases on a screen, to guide the eyes along a line of type. In 15 one-hour lessons Dr. Buswell increased the reading ability of his adults 15%, was highly pleased.