Spelling Progress Bulletin

HONG KONG -In times of internal crises, visitors to China were regularly awakened by loudspeakers booming political instructions to early rising workers. Today, in a more tranquil period, foreign visitors are more likely to be aroused by radios blaring in English: "This is a pen." "This is a dog." The People's Republic of China is in the grip of a new mass movement: an English boom is sweeping over the country. From 6-year-olds to grandmothers, the nation has taken to the study of this language with zest. Hotel employees waylay foreigners to practice a cheery "good morning" or a "bye-bye." All students from the 8th grade upward are taking courses in English. It is a far cry from the days when departments of English language were described as "cancers in China's universities." Foreign Policy Shifts The men who govern China today have been preparing the nation for the major shifts in foreign policy just exemplified by agreement between Washington and Peking to exchange laison missions. Even if there were not a host of other indications, the English boom alone would demonstrate Peking's determination to establish a relationship with the United States. In addition, English is, as the Chinese authorities say, a most useful tool for "building up the country" and expanding contacts with the outside world. Unlike the forced Russian language boom of the 1950's, the English campaign is largely spontaneous. As soon as the Government allowed it, students and their elders threw themselves into the study of the language. The editor of one Chinese publication wrote: "For the Chinese people, English represents democracy and freedom, while compulsory Russian stood for dictatorship and repression." All children now begin studying English about the age of 13. Through their university careers, they spend a minimum of four or five hours a week on English. Peking is importing large quantities of English-language technical periodicals and books. They cover subjects from chemistry and engineering to agronomy and pharmacy The single most extraordinary aspect of the English boom also tells a lot about the China of 1973. It is virtually nonpolitical in emphasis. When Russian was being pushed, largely against the will of the uninterested populace, extraordinary measures were necessary. Every text stressed the "political significance" of studying Russian to "unite with the fraternal socialist countries." But the Chinese have not been forced to study English. Instead, they have behaved as if they were merely awaiting permission. Peking has just published a Practical Daily English Vocabulary. The preface advises "Students who master this vocabulary will rapidly gain a good command of English and -either by using English or by teaching English -will be able to make great contributions to education and culture in our Socialist motherland." Invariably and unavoidably new ideas are introduced by mass study of English. Though not endorsed, concepts of individual freedom which were only recently anathema are, at the very least, given much more exposure. All is obviously not synchronized in China's English language boom, but the leaders are championing it with the same vigor they have shown in other enterprises. -o0o- [Spelling Progress Bulletin Fall 1973 pp2-5,18] Reading Failures, Dropouts, Delinquency & Crime, by Newell W. Tune Introduction Even tho the education of out children has been improved over the years, the quality of education in American schools is still inadequate. Too many pupils are not getting sufficient education. Bert Greene The school dropout problem has been said to be, "The nation's number one headache." Certainly it is the concern of every educator. Even our legislators seem worried about it. Senator Edward Kennedy [36b] writes: "325 years ago, the Colony of Massachusetts mandated the establishment of the first public schools in this country and ordered these schools 'to teach such children as shall report ... to write and read.' "Yet today, our educational system has so badly failed us that more than 18 million American adults cannot read a newspaper. "The cost of this failure is not solely personal. It is tallied on the nation's welfare rolls, prison logs, and unemployment files. Studies reveal that more than half of the welfare recipients in Chicago cannot read. In New Jersey, more than half of the prison inmates cannot read. In our largest cities, more than half of the young people under 21 who are unemployed cannot read. "Every taxpayer pays for our failure to teach children to read and write well enough to function as adults in our society. Yet the treadmill continues to send illiterates out of the schoolhouse door. One quarter of the children attending school today have serious reading disabilities, according to the late Dr. James E. Allen, former U. S. Commissioner of Education." But let us go to the source for this information. Dr. James E. Allen [1] writes, "When I came to Washington a year ago I knew that out schools and their 45 million pupils were in trouble. Statistics on school dropouts, teacher strikes, rejected school-bond issues and assaults on teachers spelled out the severity of the crisis. As I pored over reports from across the country, however, I began to realize that one of the most critical problems seldom made headlines: 25% of our pupils suffer from significant reading deficiencies; of these, 3 in 5 have problems so severe that they cannot be corrected in today's ordinary classroom. "The shocking presence of 11 million crippled readers contaminates virtually every aspect of education. Quite obviously, it is at the heart of our nation's inability to educate the deeply deprived child of the ghetto, the backwoods or the isolated reservation. But it also strikes hard at children of our privileged middle class. Regardless of social or economic status, unless a child acquires essential reading skills by the end of the third grade, or is given intensive remedial reading instruction later, he is doomed to fall further and further behind his age group. The chances are that such a child will eventually either drop out to join the ranks of the under-21 unemployed (half of whom reportedly read at less than a fifth-grade level) or find some way to get into trouble (3/4 of all youngsters referred to juvenile court in New York City, for example, are two years or more below grade level in reading)." Byron Chapman [8] also calls attention to the need for reading skill, "The progressive refinement of our culture has brought reading skills into sharp focus. Once it was easy to earn a living by physical exertion alone. Today practically all jobs require the ability to read. Those adults who for one reason or another have not learned to read face almost unbelievable obstacles in making a living in our literate technological society." William Armstrong [2] also continues along the same vein, "The most important thing happening in American education today is what is being done at school and in the home for the elementary school child. Upon this foundation the whole future of our education rests. It is becoming quite evident that the elementary school years can no longer be wasted. Today the child who finishes the eighth grade without intellectual stature and a good basic foundation in the primary subjects finds himself in serious trouble. If we, the school and the home, have required only 1/5 of capacity learning from out children in lower elementary school, we have demanded even less from the years which comprise the 5th, 6th and 7th grades. The qualities of the mind which develop during these years give lasting and enduring influences to 'the beginnings' which are sponsored, or should be sponsored, during the earlier years. "The inability of American boys and girls to read, even when they have finished high school, had been made shockingly plain; first, by the great percentage of reading illiteracy uncovered by the examination of American youth during World War II; and secondly, by the fact that many colleges have had to introduce reading courses to save their freshmen classes. Tests have shown that although a person has been reading two or three hours a day for 12 years before he enters college, he simply does not know how to read well. The great majority of students entering college read too slowly, and still do not learn or understand as much as they should of what they read." It is precisely because they read so slow that they frequently fail to get much of the meaning. They forget what was at the beginning of the sentence. We must get at the crux of the problem. New and better methods of teaching the same old status quo are not going to remove the basic cause of the trouble. Books, magazine and newspaper articles have been written by the hundreds -nay, thousands-about reading failures. One such book of 500 pages lists 538 references for its 29 authors, only one of which evinces any idea of the cause of reading failure. Most of these books seem to confine themselves largely to gathering endless statistics and making numerous tables of irrelevant data, most of which, instead of helping us to solve the problem, only create more confusion by its very ponderosity. How can one hunt thru the haystack to find the needle if one doesn't know what to look for? Very few worthwhile conclusions can be drawn from reading most of the books now in our libraries on reading failures and dropouts. (The two go hand in hand, yet you'd never guess it from most such books). And most of these conclusions are not clearly indicated because the authors themselves usually seem confused or do not have the power to analyze and logically deduce reasons for the causes. Donald E. Smith "More than 15 thousand articles on the teaching of reading have appeared in professional journals in the last 40 years; failure in reading is the largest single cause of school failure during the gradeschool years. With so much attention devoted to the teaching and learning of reading, it seems anomalous that the problem of the nonreader remains with us. "It has been suggested by one investigator that clinicians are like a small group standing beside a river full of drowning people. The victims are being swept sea-ward by the current of time. The clinicians can pull out a few, but the rest are lost. Few of the group are willing to go upstream to find out how the victims got into the river in the first place. "With respect to reading disability, many do go up the river to find the cause, but most get lost in the marshes of correlation." Correlation -the bugaboo that is so invisible to most acceptors of the status quo of the irrational nature of our English spelling -the major cause of inability to learn how to read. While it is true that there have been some improvements in teaching reading as evidenced by Eli Ginzberg and Douglas Bray [17], they wonder why our system of free education has not accomplished more: "In 1890 there were approximately 19 million gainfully occupied male workers. Approximately 14% of them, or one out of every seven, were unable to read and write in any language. These 2½ million illiterates were not distributed proportionally among the different regions and groups in the nation. As might be expected, the totals in the North and the South were strikingly different. Although the male labor forces of the North and the South were about equal in numbers, the South had 1.7 million illiterate workers as compared to only 370,000 in the Northeast. This made the illiteracy rate for gainfully employed males about one out of three in the South as compared to only one out of fifteen in the Northeast. "It seems strange that the serious shortcomings inherent in the population revealed by these examinations had gone unnoticed in previous years, or if noticed, had failed to lead to remedial action. This question has particular pertinence with respect to the large number of young men in the country who were rejected for military service because they were adjudged to be mentally deficient. The United States has long been recognized as one of the richest countries in the world as well as one of the most democratic. One reflection of this economic well-being and democratic orientation has been the emphasis that has been placed for many generations on education, particularly free education, for every boy and girl in the country. Yet at the outbreak of World War II more than 4 million men on the labor force had less than five years of schooling; about 1½ million were totally illiterate. "During World War II more than 5 million men liable for military service were rejected as unsuitable because of physical, emotional, mental, or moral disability. Since about 18 million men were examined, this implies that almost one out of every three young men was considered so handicapped that he could not serve his country in uniform during a major war. In the year following the outbreak of hostilities in Korea about a half million of the 1½ million men examined were rejected. Once again, the number and proportion of handicapped men were very large. "Hidden within these startling figures is the still more startling fact that during World War II, 716,000 men were rejected on the grounds that they were mentally deficient: At the peak of mobilization the Army had 89 divisions. Those rejected for mental disabilities were the equivalent in manpower of more than 40 divisions. In the year following the outbreak of fighting in Korea, more than 300,000 were rejected on this same ground of 'mental deficiency.' Some were truly mentally deficient; many were only educationally deprived." The facts about illiteracy should be upsetting to us. Harry Lindgren [47] writes from a British magazine, "An article on illiteracy in Britain in the October, 1972 Nova paints an appalling picture. According to it, one expert claims that of the 8½ million children in school today, half will never read well enough to enjoy a book, one in five will never be able to read more than comics, and one in ten will leave school virtually illiterate . . . After leaving school many people will lose what little skill in reading and writing they do have. . After five years, up to 50% in some areas will be virtually illiterate." This is also echoed by Hunter Diack [12], who quotes: "A member of Parliament, Mr. J. Pitman stated, 'Some 400 thousand to 500 thousand 5-year-olds begin their schooling every year, and some 120 thousand to 150 thousand are destined to come out of the school system unable to read properly. He referred to the Ministry of Education pamphlet (1947) entitled, Reading Abilities." The very expressive team of Sibyl Terman & Chas. C. Walcutt [84] pose this challenging question: "Why is it that children find our English a difficult language to read? "Every fall millions of five-and six-year-olds go to school with sharp pencils and bright eyeseager to learn to read. Three months later they are bored, frustrated, and either listless or disorderly, for they still have not started reading. Instead, they are being subjected to unnecessary exercises in hearing, noticing, and 'experiencing' which are presumed to ready them for reading but which in fact only tire, confuse, and disappoint. Three years later the majority of them still cannot read." And Fred Schonell How the educators tried to accomplish this goal in the past is explained by Charles C. Walcutt "After a half century of this undertaking (p. e.), we who run businesses, carry on professions, work for the government, or engage in teaching itself are forced to admit that illiteracy is still with us. The Army and the draft uncovered an alarming percentage of genuine, Simon-pure illiterates, and the worlds of employment and of learning come upon a discouraging number of schooled illiterates -men and women, often greatly gifted, who have passed through the public school system and into college and yet who cannot read accurately or write intelligibly. Speaking for myself, I can say that among the highly selected graduate students in the university where I teach I find about one in ten who needs coaching in the elements of literacy -spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and diction. And these students cannot write because they cannot read. The origin of their plight is confirmed by the occasional would-be scholar who does not know the order of the letters of the alphabet and is unable to copy the title page of a book without error. "The sheer inertia of a machine involving professional reputations, course offerings in colleges and universities -indeed whole curricula in schools of education -and great financial investments in textbooks is tremendous. Add to these the psychological resistance of people who have been defending a system whose theory and justification they do not themselves understand, and you have perhaps identified the most important causes of our national plight: that considerably more than half (probably 75%) of our young people do not read as well as they could, and that at least 35% of them are very seriously retarded." Just what proportion of our school children are retarded readers has been the subject of several researchers besides Walcutt. Florence Roswell & Gladys Natchez [72] say, "The number of children who cannot cope with school has been increasing. Authorities have variously estimated that children with inadequate reading skills measure as high as 33%, 28%, or as low as 11% of the school population. Whatever the percentage, most educators agree that the number of children who read less effectively than they should -and could -is far too high." And Katherine de Hirsch [31] concurs with, "One of today's major social problems is the enormous number of children who, as a result of severe reading, writing, and spelling disabilities, are unable to realize their intellectual and educational potentials. The incidence of reading difficulties has been reported to be as high as 30% of the school population; more conservative estimates put the figure between 5% and 15%. According to the National Council of Teachers of English this would mean that at least 4 million elementary school children in the United States are disabled readers. 'The magnitude of the reading problem and the shattering impact of reading disability on personal and vocational adjustment should accord proposals for its correction a major position in mental hygiene programs,' states Leon Eisenberg, professor of child psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, in highlighting the urgency of the problem." Some of our more logically minded teachers have drawn conclusions from these appalling statistics: for example, Arther Trace Pearl Herlihy That we are aware of the dropout problem can be seen by the quantity of written material. Bert 1. Greene One such exhortion is worthy of note, T. J. Bond [3b] "The dropout problem is a crucial one for our country at a time when a more adequate supply of better educated and trained manpower is required. We can ill afford to lose the potential capacity possessed by the many students who withdraw from school before graduation. The failure of the dropout represents a failure of the American people. The primary function of the high school is no longer that of a college preparatory institution. More provision must be made to take care of those students whose completion of high school terminates their formal education." Quite true -but why not devote more effort to finding the cause of dropouts and eliminating it? (That is, assuming that there is one main cause). That there is some relation between dropouts and delinquency and crime has not been ignored but yet not fully explored either. Bert I. Greene "It is somewhat ironic that those who are least ready to accept adult responsibility are the first to have this responsibility thrust upon them. The dropout, who leaves school at 16 or 17, is not prepared to meet the challenges of the world of work. He has demonstrated his inability to adjust to his school, his work, his teachers, and his peers. By the very act of dropping out of school he reveals his inability to cope with challenging situations." And Judge Lester Loble [48] points out that there are more young criminals than ever before: He quotes J. Edgar Hoover, "It wasn't 1/10 of the crime in this country that was being committed by people under 20 -half of this country's crimes were being committed by people under 19. (And 90% or more of these J. D.'s are dropouts.)" In August Kerber & Barbara Bommarito's book [37], there is a chapter by James B. Conant, which starts, "I submit that the existence in the slums of our large cities of thousands of youth ages 16-21 who are both out-of-school and out-of-work is an explosive situation. It is Social Dynamite. "I do not have to remind this audience of the fact that the fate of freedom in the world hangs very much in the balance. Our success against the spread of Communism in no small measure depends upon the successful operation of our own free society. To my mind, there is no question that a healthy body politic necessitates a sound economy and high employment. The history of Communism shows that it feeds upon discontented, frustrated, unemployed people. The present unemployment rate nationwide is roughly 7% for all age brackets, but t

Spelling Progress Bulletin Dedicated to finding the causes of difficulties in learning reading and spelling

Announcements United Kingdom Information Technology Year, 1982 As this issue goes to press, the United Kingdom is well into its promotion and publicity for Information Technology Year 1982 when the British Government is spending £1.2 million to publicise modern developments in electronic communication, microprocessors, and video equipment. All these were non-existent in their present forms only a few decades ago. Two hundred years ago, the only major piece of Information Technology was the printed word. The basis for storing information was invented several thousand years ago -the writing system