How to Teach Children to Read

Abstract

I had occasion, in the late 1930s, to address directly the question of how to teach beginners to read. By then I was a relatively mature psychologist and a pupil of Vygotsky, and had already been teaching for several years in the primary grades. My practical work convinced me of the difficulties of teaching beginners to read and of the deep contradictions between method and the scientific data accumulated in linguistics and psychology—ideas that could be tested only many years later.