The Unsuccessful Reader
- Author:
GUNZBURG, B.A., Ph.D.
Monyhull Hall, Birmingham
“… I was the worst reader in our class at that time. I had a book called All about the Circus and it was a baby’s book. Well, ” I started to read it. It was no good and it was about animals and a girl and a boy. It was proper daft and I would not read it. I felt like throwing it across the room. I just sat down and looked at it. After a few minutes our teacher came round and said: ‘ Do you like the book ? ‘ Yes, I said. I didn’t half like it. I did not bother reading books and now I regret it and I am 15 now and I wish I was only 12 so I could go on again with my reading. I have got only one year here. I have heard many boys wish they were at school again.”
This extract from a short autobiographical note by one of the boys in my class is typical of the opinions of many unsuccessful readers in later years. Not having learnt to read when still comparatively young, they realize when 15 or 16, the importance of reading. However, being forced to go through the initial stages where scarcely any other reading matter is available but that written for much younger children, they detest reading though attracted at the same time to a skill which seems so necessary to all other people. This regret and disappointment may assist considerably in strengthening asocial tendencies, and many research workers have pointed out the close interrelationship between non-reading and behaviour troubles.
The unsuccessful reader may be defined as a reader whose technical ability to read, or whose understanding for what he reads, does not conform to his mental capacity. Even children with subnormal intelligence ought in most cases to be able to learn to read, though their maximal achievements will of necessity be on a lower level than those of their contemporaries with normal intelligence. However, we find unsuccessful readers at all intelligence levels, though with a greater emphasis on the lower sections.
The problem of the unsuccessful reader has been approached from many different sides. The physical bases have been investigated and organic (congenital word blindness) or neurological weaknesses, defects of vision and of audition, left ocular and manual dominance, have been named as possible causative factors. From the psychological angle, many investigators occupied themselves with research into the nature of perception, of the mental functions, of intelligence, of maturation, etc., and their bearing on shortcomings in the acquisition of reading techniques. The educationists attempted to trace the cause of shortcomings to inadequate techniques of teaching and to disregard of individual differences. Comparatively new is research into the relationship between a child’s emotional and social adjustment and his attitude to the reading situation. The following article will attempt to point out the theoretical assumptions, and some of the practical experiences gained in approaching the problem of reading disability from this particular side.
To teach reading to senior boys of 14 to 16 is very often a roundabout process needing much preliminary spadework before the initial steps in the proper learning process can be undertaken. Though most of the boys have by that time realized the importance of reading, there exists still in many cases a vast amount of unconscious resistance. Many of them cpme from slum homes, from broken-up families, or are orphans or illegitimate. They have been delinquents, truants, absconders, have been in frequent trouble with the police, have been beyond home control and are in need of care and protection. Being pushed about from pillar to post, from one institution to another, they have developed feelings of resentment and hostility against the society of adults, to which they had been unable to adapt. Intellectual subnormality is of little importance in this connection if demands are correspondingly lowered. Far more important is the subnormality in emotional and characterological respects, which is directly responsible for these children’s inability to adjust themselves to the requirements of society, among them the task of reading. They become neurotic and delinquent, and reading represents a prime target for their resentment because it symbolizes society in its worst coercive features. There exists an interesting study of American retarded readers whose psychological make-up has been investigated.(l) It arrived at the conclusion that retarded readers are emotionally less well adjusted and less stable than normal readers, that they are insecure and fearful in relation to emotionally challenging situations, and that they are socially less adaptable to the group. How far the fact of non- or poor reading is causative for such an attitude, or merely strengthening an already inherent temperamental pattern, cannot yet be decided. But it may be surmised that here in the lacking personal adjustment is to be found at least a good deal of the contributory factors responsible for many children’s reading disability, which is often merely traced to weak or inferior organic tools and inefficient teaching techniques. The effects of inferior organic endowment, and inferior methods of teaching, can after all be overcome and have been overcome as long as there exists motive power and drive. A great amount of work has been devoted to the study of the import and significance of particular reading disability features. Reversals, addition and omission of sounds, substitutions, repetitions, additions and omission of words, have been named among others in the etiology of reading disability. These, however, are reading errors which are committed by every. child learning to read. After an analysis of the reading errors, the fact emerges that they, by themselves, are by no means characteristic of a particular reading disability, like certain symptoms are characteristic of particular diseases, but are merely characteristic of a certain stage in the process of learning to read through which a normal child passes without much difficulty, whilst the reading disability cases remain for one or the other reason fixed at that stage.
Despite the existence of some sensory or psycho-physical handicap, this in itself does not provide the explanation for a fixation on such an unsatisfactory stage in a child’s development which is sure to be exposed to nagging, threats and punishment by the family and near environment. This unreasoning, chilling reception of the child’s apparent inability to learn to read, will contribute substantially to his unwilling and resentful disinclination to overcome his initial failure. The child is most probably insecure and anxious, possessing a weak and immature personality, lacking drive, and everything combines to reinforce the unsuccessful reader’s negative attitude. The child, having realized that the time has come when he is expected to do his level best and to conform to the standards and expectations of the adult world, may, though consciously trying his best, put up, unconsciously, a barrier of resistance, thereby preventing that decisive plunge into adult reality which he is too immature yet to face and the first sight of which has frightened him.(2) If, moreover, the child happens to be subnormal in intelligence this will most probably only have been detected after repeated attempts at teaching have been unsuccessful, which should not cause surprise as it is just his lowered mental age which is responsible for his unreadiness to benefit by instruction at an early age. However, we can be sure that the shock of being forced to do something which the child was constitutionally unable to perform, will have conditioned the child to continue his negative attitude whenever the question of reading crops up, even long after his mental equipment is ready for use. In both cases, in that of the child with normal intelligence as well as in that of the sub-normal child, reading and unpleasant adult world will have become closely associated in the mind of the unsuccessful reader and will have produced a kind of conditioned reflex leading to continued non- or poor reading, though later on the child may consciously be very willing and eager to take up the difficult task of reading. From all this, the problem of the unsuccessful reader emerges as being the problem of the maladjusted child. Reading disability in one or the other form is very often merely an expression of lack of adjustment to the reality of society, if the intelligence is adequate to master the complex processes of reading. The mere presence of adequate intelligence, as indicated by the results of intelligence tests, cannot however guarantee success in overcoming obstacles, as long as that intelligence has not been made to participate in the task and has not been integrated with the personality as a whole.
Broadly speaking, the boys of my class are badly adjusted to society. They are unstable, immature, anxious, lack drive and ambition and are weak. They are full of conflicts and a lack of security. Their acts of truancy, delinquency and absconding appear to be mostly acts of despair: a breakdown of the feeble self-control which has been weakened by constant feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. There, then, a beginning has first of all to be made in stabilizing the unstable, in adjusting the unadjusted. As long as that negative attitude persists and no emotional rapport can be established, the non- or poor reader will remain the unsuccessful reader he is, because reading means to him the straightjacket of a society which he rejects and perhaps attacks. Once, however, we are able to make the unstable and the insecure realize that there exists something like security and safety, that we are able to offer him shelter for his emotional distress, once we are able to let these emotionally disturbed children find some ground under their feet, we will have created the favourable atmosphere for endeavouring to teach detestable school subjects like reading.
The resentful, insecure, critical and timid attitude of many of these boys interferes considerably with the task of teaching to read, even though psychotherapeutic treatment may succeed to some extent in modifying the consequences of temperamental obstacles. Reading itself must become part of the psychotherapeutic treatment by inducing feelings of security and confidence in a task which can be mastered, and which makes the children shed these feelings of inadequacy which had led in the past to a flat rejection of reading. The method and approach must therefore be re-adapted to the needs of senior boys who are often nearly 16 years of age and have many of the interests of boys of that age, though only the technical skill of boys of 7 or 8 years of age. The material they work with, the books they are given, must be easy and must induce confidence but must at the same time not be ” babyish ” or “daft”, as reading material written for so much younger children must inevitably appear to older boys. The process of teaching to read must appear ” grown-up not comparable to the “baby-stuff” of the youngsters which carries unpleasant associations with it.(3) The process of improved reading must be speeded up; dazzling figures of achievements and improving reading skills act as a spur to throw into the race all the little energy available. Once some of the emotional obstacles have been removed by establishing a feeling of security, the undreamt of and intoxicating first success in reading creates the feeling of self-confidence which has been so deeply undermined in the past. Teaching to read, that is to ” bark at print ” as it has been put so pointedly, is, however, not the final aim. Whilst it is perhaps comparatively easy to teach the skill of fluent reading, because it is a mechanical skill which is trainable once the necessary social and emotional adjustments have been made, the aim of reading is of course the understanding of what is being read. This is not as obvious as it may at first appear. Many readers of sub-normal intelligence obtain, for example, a skill of mechanical reading exceeding by far their intellectual capacity to grasp what they have read. We may disregard these cases as long as their comprehension of reading matter is level with their mental capacity. The real problem cases are those whose comprehension of reading matter is below their established mental capacity, although these readers are in the possession of an adequate technical reading skill. These readers, too, though fluent and efficient in their mechanical reading, have to be regarded as unsuccessful readers. Most available tests of comprehension of reading are unsatisfactory when applied to particular cases like the present. However, their results, and the day to day observations in the classroom, can soon substantiate suspicions concerning the comprehension of those otherwise efficient readers. There are various factors which may be responsible for shortcomings and which may be listed as follows:
Lack of adequate experience.
Lack of adequate vocabulary.
Lack of emotional adaptability.
As far as the first two factors are concerned, their influence on the misunderstanding of reading matter is quite obvious. Particularly children growing up within the four walls of an institution, a residential special school, or an orphanage, etc., show quite a considerable lack of adequate experience which makes them unable to draw from a personal reservoir of experiences and associations to make their reading meaningful to them. The exceedingly small vocabulary resulting from the limited contact with the environment, leads of course to an inability to understand anything written in a slightly more mature language than the first primaries.
But I should regard of even greater importance the third factor, because here again can be found the roots of a deeply founded inability and unwillingness to overcome these obstacles. Here in the unsuccessful reader’s personality we shall find a store of resentment, hostility and immature critical opposition, which are responsible for a pronounced tendency on the part of the reader to misconstrue the meaning of sentences, to overlook relevant particulars, to read his own story into the story actually read, in short to go his own way in reading instead of following the author. It is fairly easy to imagine how the understanding of reading matter can be seriously hampered by the interference of unsolved emotional problems. Understanding of reading matter is, after all, as Cyril Burt has pointed out, not merely an intellectual process as generally assumed. The printed symbols are meant to evoke certain mental pictures, to associate with certain experiences to be visualized and imagined. If it happens that reading evokes a different set of mental pictures than has been intended by the author, a private set so to speak, and that other associations than those generally accepted are the result, then we must assume that the final outcome will be a rendering of the story not as the writer has put it down, but as the reader has shaped it according to his own needs and wishes. In certain psychological procedures, such as the word association experiments, the same idea is utilized for uncovering the unconscious life of patients. We can well imagine that neurotic and anxious readers will often substitute their own thoughts for the author’s thoughts, put words of their own invention in place of the actual printed words, mutilate and alter, a process which in fact is parallel to those lapses of speech and memory, the slips of the pen, and the trippings of the tongue, which in adults have been shown by psychoanalysis to be so richly symptomatic of the profounder secrets of the individual’s mental attitude. “(4)
These children, so constantly struggling with their rebellious inner forces and devoting nearly all the little energy of which they are capable to the control of their mutinous inner life, are specially subject to an unconscious misrepresentation of their reading matter. Again and again their beloved ego, which they are carefully shielding, pushes into the foreground and takes the limelight, making them frequently unable to see someone else’s point of view or even to pay sufficient attention to any other person to enable them to follow his words. In the class-room this can be clearly seen in the constant usage of the excuse : ” I thought you said …” when it is pointed out to the child that he did not even trouble to take in the wording of a question. It can also be seen in composition and story telling where it is exceptional if a child is able to employ throughout his narrative the third person without changing over into the first person.
This dominance of the ego, so conspicuous in its personal life, must show itself in the way such a child absorbs his reading matter. The lack of emotional adaptability with its over emphasis of the ego, must thus contribute towards an increased misrendering of reading matter. The shaping and bending of reading matter according to the reader’s own emotional life is greatly assisted by the inaccuracy of word pronunciation, by the small vocabulary which enforces more or less skilfull guessing, and by the narrow sphere of experience which has to be supplemented by the reader’s own, and not always very healthy, phantasy. ,
The conclusion from the above is, that many of the difficulties of the unsuccessful reader must be sought in his own unsatisfactory personal make-up. Emotional maladjustment will in many cases express itself in poor academic progress, making use of existing weaknesses in the sensory apparatus. Special coaching and new teaching methods may not be successful as they do not treat primarily the root of the disability, but merely the symptoms. However, change in methods or special coaching are often due to and coincide with new teachers, new environment and a new encouraging approach ensuing in a perceptible change of the emotional atmosphere round the child. He may gain new hope and confidence in his own abilities, may feel more secure and thus the establishment of emotional rapport is facilitated. Co-operation and drive may not be long in forthcoming, and remedial work in reading will find little difficulty in eliminating the faulty reading habits which are now of a merely technical and habitual nature, deprived of their previous emotional roots.
References
(1) Gann, Edith. Reading Difficulty and Personality Organization. New York. 1945. (2) Vorhaus, Pauline G. ” Non-Reading as an Expression of Resistance.” Rorschach Research Exchange Vol. X, No. 2. June, 1946. (3) Gunzburg, H. C. “Experiments in the Methodology of Improving Reading in a Group of Educationally Subnormal Boys.” Journal of Mental Science. October, 1948. Gunzburg, H. C. ” The Private Silent Reading of Educationally Subnormal Boys.” New Era. February, 1948. (4) Burt, Cyril. Mental and Scholastic Tests, p. 278. Staples Press. 1927.
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