Teachers find many books and articles written on teaching reading to slow learning children. No other educational skill has received so much emphasis or has been the subject of such a great variety of investigations. There is, however, a volume of books dealing with the reading of children but a scarcity of books dealing directly with the reading of children who are slow learners. Yet, in every classroom, there is a little group of slow learners , that is, children who do not have the capacity to keep up with their classmates and whose problems must be met in some way by their teachers.
Slow reading may then have one or more of three main causes. It may be due to inefficient eye movements, excessive vocalizations, or word-for-word reading. These three causes are, of course, interrelated. A child who reads every word as a unit must have many fixations and has time to vocalize if he wishes. Excess vocalization leads to many fixations, and the pupil tends to read syllable by syllable which is even worse than the word-for-word. The child with too many fixations usually vocalizes, and the largest unit he sees at once is a word. In general, the three habits go together, and it is often impossible to tell for any given child which habit comes first, or if all three developed together.
The typical slow reader at Wilmer Hutchins High School is not the victim of a single bad habit but the possessor of an unfortunate system of habits, each of which reinforces the other. The whole performance is inefficient because it is clumsy and time-consuming. Even if a child becomes familiar with the techniques, he never gets the degree of comprehension for which his efforts should be rewarded because his technique breaks up reading matter into tiny and meaningless units. Regardless of the method used in teaching slow learners, there are certain matters in which special care must be taken by teachers of slow learning children
