Manual for Tutors and Teachers of Reading

This book is meant for tutors, classroom teachers, homeschooling parents, and anyone else who wishes to help someone acquire one of the most precious gifts attainable – the ability to read, and to read well. Learning to read should never be frustrating. This book presents a sequence of challenges, a hierarchy of tasks, arranged so that each prepares the learner for the next one. If at any stage the learner encounters too much frustration, the instructor drops back on the hiearchy. From the point where the learner can be successful, they work forward. The instructor celebrates every success along the way. The process can be a joyous, happy experience for both teacher and student. This book is the product of countless revisions of prior manuals, refined over the course of some twenty-five years of experience and research. The methods described here are applicable across the widest range of abilities, from gifted students to dyslexic ones. Joseph M. Strayhorn, Jr., M.D. is a child and adolescent psychiatrist who has had a special interest in the learning process.
He is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Drexel University School of Medicine and the University of Pittsburgh. He has been on the editorial boards of School Psychology Quarterly and the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He has conducted several research projects on reading instruction, including a method of telephone tutoring in reading. He is a homeschooling father who has taught two daughters to read using these methods.