Reading Problems

Reading and learning are the two things that determine the success of a child during his school career. First he learns to read. Then he reads to learn. Reading is therefore of paramount importance in the educational process.

Unfortunately reading problems, and therefore poor learning skills, is a reality for an alarming number of children.

To understand what causes reading problems, one must first understand that learning is a stratified process. One step needs to be mastered well enough before subsequent steps can be learnt. This means that there is a sequence involved in learning. It is like climbing a ladder; if you miss one of the rungs of the ladder, you will fall off. If you miss out on one of the important steps in the learning process, you will not be able to master subsequent steps.

An example should make this clear. Suppose there was a child who has not yet learnt to count. It would be quite impossible to teach such a child to add, subtract, multiply, or divide. This would only become possible after the child has learnt to count. This suggests that counting is a lower-lying skill than calculating, and that mastery of a lower-lying or foundational skill is a prerequisite for mastering any higher-lying skill.

In the same way there are also skills that form the basis or foundation of reading. If a child has not adequately mastered the foundational skills of reading, he would be a poor reader, and there would be no way in which he could be turned into a better reader other than by first practising and developing these foundational skills of reading.

Basic skills like (1.) concentration, (2.) visual discrimination of foreground-background, form, size, position in space and (3.) visual, sequential and iconic memory are all functions that form the foundation of reading. Until a child has mastered these basic skills first, reading will remain a closed — or, at most, a half-open — book to him.