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When Bestselling Author Rudolf Flesch (The Art of Plain Talk) offered to give a friend's twelve-year-old son some "remedial reading," Flesch discovered that the boy was not slow or maladjusted; he had merely been "exposed to an ordinary American school." Author Flesch decided to investigate how reading is taught in the U.S. Last week he published his findings in a 222-page book, Why Johnny Can't Read-and What You Can Do About It (Harper; $3), that will shock many a U.S. parent and educator...
Only in the U.S., reported Flesch, is there any remedial-reading problem. In Britain, kindergarten children read Three Little Pigs; in Germany, second-grade pupils can read aloud (without necessarily understanding all the words) almost anything in print. By contrast, average U.S. third-graders have a reading mastery of only 1,800 words. Why is the U.S. so far behind? Says Flesch: "We have decided to forget that we write with letters, and [instead] learn to read English as if it were Chinese...
Under the word method, if a child comes up against a new word, all he can do is guess-not at its pronunciation, but at its "looks." As a result, says Flesch, word-method pupils make outlandish errors, reading "said" for "jumped," "caps" instead of "houses." One youngster who had successfully recognized "children" on a word-recognition card was unable to read it on the printed page. How did he get it from the card? His simple answer: "By the smudge over in the corner...
...Small-Size Adult." According to Flesch, the basic flaw in the system lies in that it "looks at a child as if it were a small-size adult." Lip reading and learning the rudimentary ABCs are taboo; the word "children" is "children" only because Teacher says so, not from any deciphering of its component letter-sounds. Result: a third-grader is "unable to decipher 90% of his own speaking and listening vocabulary when he sees it in print...
...TiME is perfect. It hits exactly where Dr. Flesch says it should. Here is the score: average sentence length, 19 words; average syllables per 100 words, 149.7. This means that TIME can be read by students in the eighth and ninth grades . . . and understood easily by 83% of the adults in the linked States...