B, H, W

Whatever other progress they have or have not made, modern educators are proud of the fact that they have vastly improved the methods of teaching children to read. They estimate that today pupils can learn to read with more sense, more fun and in half the time that youngsters spent on the job 40 years ago. For this great improvement, research in child psychology is responsible. Teachers now are more alert to the questions: when are children ready to learn, what kind of reading should they get in, and in what doses?

To help determine whether reading matter is suitable for children of a given age, experts count the number of familiar and new words. For example, a third-grade pupil should not encounter more than one unfamiliar word in 40. Los Angeles' progressive public-school system had long made such counts, written the words it found in its books on separate slips of paper, filed them away. Rummaging through these neat alphabetical stacks, Dr. Alfred Speir Lewerenz (pronounced: loor-entz), Los Angeles' assistant research supervisor, began to wonder whether he could find a simple rule for distinguishing between easy and hard words. Last week he announced his findings.

Dr. Lewerenz soon learned that most words beginning with the letters B, H or W (mostly Anglo-Saxon) were easy for children to understand; words beginning with E, I, P or Q (mostly from Latin and Greek) more difficult. Dr. Lewerenz also discovered that children liked books abounding in colorful adjectives. Next step was to devise a simple test, based on these findings, for rating books. Dr. Lewerenz' test included a list of 500 simple words, many of which begin with B, H and W; another list of 2,695 colorful adjectives (e.g., brimful, chubby, shipshape, licentious). To grade a book, he checked a sampling of its vocabulary against these lists.

Dr. Lewerenz graded magazines as well as books (1,000 a year), found that Saturday Evening Post and Liberty fiction was suitable for fourth-grade readers, TIME for ninth-graders. His system is now used in Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, other cities.

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