Joseph
- Author:
Winifred Stewart,
Senior, School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. Joseph is a sturdy eight-year-old Irish boy, with a mop of bright red hair, deep blue eyes and a pink and white complexion. He is the picture of health and is a normal looking fun-loving boy. He was first brought to the clinic by a social worker from the White Williams Foundation because of his inability to read. Upon the basis of an examination by Dr Young, he was diagnosed as normal mentally, with good trainability but deficient in reading. Indeed, he did not show first grade competency in this subject, although he is in the third grade of the Ascension School. He was recommended for diagnostic teaching with special attention to reading.
My first introduction to Joseph was made by his mother, who prefixed this formality by saying, “My, Joseph is so dumb. Here he is eight years old, been going to school two years, and can’t read as good as his little sister Maria. He does nothing but play marbles. I can’t even send him to the store because he never brings home what I tell him to.” The general tenor of this dissertation was repeated every time I saw her in the future.
I devoted my first lesson to letting Joseph read the story of The Little Red Hen, pp. 1-9, Winston Primer. He read with great difficulty, spelling the words out loud before attempting to pronounce them. I had to help him with some of the harder words as “wheat,” “some,” “goose,” “plant” and “help.” He failed on “not” and “she” in three successive sentences. I noticed also that he depended on the little picture illustrating the story to supply him with the names of the animals as he read duck for goose, etc. He was, however, able to repeat the story from memory after he had read it and was able to tell me the difference between a duck and a goose a half hour after I had explained them to him. I then tested his ability to write. He made well formed letters, but had to spell words out before writing them. He was unable to write the same words that he was unable to read, namely, “plant,” “help,” and “some.” After he had written a list of these words with my assistance I asked him to point to different words. He was unable to do this, making many mistakes. I also found him to be unsuccessful in reading the words from the word cards.
I found in subsequent lessons that he was of normal third grade competency in arithmetic. In fact, he was even good at that subject. He performed all the elementary operations very easily and quickly, and when I taught him a new form he was quick to learn.
I decided that since Joseph had been going to a parochial school, it might be well to try a new method of reading with him, to see whether he could learn better. I tried the phonic method, giving him the two consonant sounds p and t and the five short vowel sounds and combined them into five three-letter words. He had little trouble with the consonant sounds here?or in subsequent lessons?but the difference between e and i was an unending source of difficulty for him. In connection with this drill I tested his hearing with the tuning forks and found that although his hearing appeared to be normal, his discrimination between sounds was poor and although he was able to tell which was the higher or lower tone in the case of pronounced tonal differences, he was wholly unable to reproduce the sounds and unable to sing the musical scale or to raise his voice a tone higher when I told him to. He is apparently psychically deaf.
For several weeks I drilled him on the phonic sounds of consonants, short vowels, and in reading and writing three-letter words. He learned to discriminate the consonant sounds very quickly, but learned very slowly with the vowel sounds, showing, however, a little improvement as time went on. At the end of three weeks he was able to read almost any three-letter word, if he spelled it out phonetically at first, and only occasionally did he make mistakes, and these in discriminating between short e and short i.
In order to cure him of this and to teach him more sounds, I made him say long e, followed by short e, long a followed by short a, and long u followed by short u, in order to build up auditory associations between these sounds. He did this fairly well, and learned to associate the pairs of sounds, but it took very much longer for him to learn this than it would have taken an ordinary child. I kept up the drill of three-letter words until the supply of possibilities was almost exhausted. In all cases he was able to read and write these words from dictation, but always by spelling them out phonetically at first. It seems that he gets the word only by running together the three sounds, and not through a memory image of the whole word.
I also discovered that Joseph forgot a word with which he had some difficulty, as fast as he learned it. I next tried giving him dictation. Accordingly, I read the word cards for the Little Red Hen. The results are:
Wanted?he couldn’t read it, but could write it after seeing it a few seconds.
grind read led wrote grind shall wrote she then shall make read mend wrote make chicks read clock wrote chicks said read said wrote shad It is interesting to note that he cannot write the words he can’t read. However, he can write a word correctly after he has read it, incorrectly, even though the stimulus word has been removed. However, he can’t write a word composed of more letters than his memory span. I tried him on this and every time he failed.
On the whole, Joseph’s case seems to be one of congenital semialexia or word-without-letter blindness. He is able to read figures fluently, and moreover, to work with them intelligently; in addition he knows his letters, but he is unable to read words except in a very few cases. On the other hand, he is able to write, but unable to read what he has written.
Hinshelwood states a case of acquired word-without-letter blindness in which the individual suffered the complete loss of ability to read words, but yet could write fluently from dictation, but could not read what he had written. In discussing cases of word-withoutletter blindness Hinshelwood states: “1. They could read fluently the individual letters printed and written, but could not interpret words composed of those letters. 2. They could read figures individually and when combined in the most complex manner. 3. They could write spontaneously and from dictation, but could not interpret the words they themselves had written.” This condition is due to the fact that the area for words in the visual memory center has been destroyed.
Joseph’s case shows the same symptoms exccpt that he cannot write at dictation words that he cannot read. In his case I should say that there is a lack of the potentiality for development in the visual memorial center for words. That is, the cells in this area are not capable of being developed and modified as in the normal child. In Joseph’s case, I do not say that there is complete deficiency of development so as to result in total word blindness, but only a very decided retardation and slowness in modification which results in ? the fact that to get even the simplest word image, he has to be taught about ten times as long as an ordinary child. During his lessons with me, he learned a few words this way. These were “some,” “plant,” “help,” “shall,” “Goose.” He had also picked up a reading vocabulary of about fifteen of the most simple and essential words during his two years of school training. In reading the three-letter words which I taught him, Joseph got them purely by sound. Each letter stood for a specific sound, by running these sounds together he figured out what the word was, purely by combinations of sounds. The reason why he varies from all cases of acquired word blindness in that he cannot write fluently at dictation the words he cannot read is because he has not had sufficient drill in writing to have it developed as a purely kinaesthetic response. By the time the ordinary individual has reached maturity, writing has become such a habit in the field of kinaesthesis that one can write without the aid of vision. Joseph, handicapped by his inability to read, has never reached this stage. On the other hand, the fact that he can write words from the word cards which he cannot read does not point to the fact that he has verbal imagery in the visual field; indeed, this ability of his is pure memory span in the reproduction of the discrete letters which form the word, and combined they mean nothing to him.
On the whole, I should say that Joseph could learn to read only at the expense of the greatest labor and time, and at that it will be almost impossible for him to read such words as are not phonetically spelled. He is a normal boy, but not unusually bright, and is not endowed with good retentiveness or good discrimination for sounds, two things which would be his only salvation, in this particular deficiency. He will be greatly handicapped in life by this defect, but from what I gathered from the following conversation with him during one of our lessons, I have noticed that he has enough of the commercial instinct to get him through life successfully despite his inability to read. His hands were perpetually grimy. Finally I said in desperation, after having washed them for him, “Joseph, why are your hands so dirty? Do you play marbles on the way to the Clinic? “
“No’m,” said Joseph. “We fellers get coal out of the cars and off the tracks and sell it for fifteen cents a bucket.”
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