Improving students’ reading comprehension. Content Introduction Chapter 1: Theoretical foundations of the formation of reading skills in primary school Main body

1.1.2. Difficulties in learning to read.
On the way to mastering reading, the child encounters many obstacles. A significant part of these obstacles is in the child himself, the other part of them is in the teacher.
The most frequent and basic obstacle lying in the child himself is the degree of his mental development. According to Burt, mechanical reading is a more difficult subject for mentally retarded children than the initial mastery of the technique of arithmetic operations.
It has often been argued in psychopathology that the hallmark of an adult moron is the inability to learn to read, despite the best teaching methods.
A child learns to read relatively easily if his mental age is not less than 7 years. It is difficult to teach a child from 1-6 years old to read and write. It has been repeatedly suggested that a child from 1 to less than 6 years of age does not learn to read and write until his mental development advances (recall that in school, in the first months of being in it, the rate of mental development of such children usually accelerates).
Other obstacles are hearing and vision defects. In elementary literacy training, the child repeatedly has to listen to the teacher trying to pronounce etc. etc. When hearing is poor, it can be difficult for a child to hear. With visual defects, the child either does not see well what is shown on the board, or it is difficult for him to read this font. It should not be thought that of the visual defects, myopia plays the greatest role in this case. It is farsightedness - a more frequent occurrence at this age than myopia - that makes looking at such close and small objects as letters a painful process [ Blonsky, 1999:198 ].
1.1.3. Visual processes in reading.
The visual and pronunciation processes in reading, which are automated under the influence of learning, are of a very complex nature. The complexity of this process receives its objective characteristic in the movement of the reader's eyes.
The movement of the eyes of even an experienced reader cannot be imagined in the form of uniform translational movements. When reading, the eyes move not only forward, but sometimes backward. The movement itself is carried out in the form of fast jumps from one fixation point to another [ Egorov, 1953:4 ].
When reading, the eyes move: the gaze moves along the line and moves from one line to another. It turns out that during eye movements it does not receive distinct perceptions, they are obtained only during pauses. The duration of each such pause, as well as the interpause movements, is very short: thus, the duration of the interpause movement is measured in a few hundredths of a second, and the duration of the pauses in tenths of a second. Reading speed depends mainly on the following:
1) How many stops does the eye make when reading;
2) How long does each of them last;
3) How many words the eye perceives when it stops;
4) How quickly he recognizes these words [ Blonsky, 1999:198 ].
The number of eye fixation points, as a rule, does not correspond to the number of not only letters, but also words of the text. These points do not always fall on some strictly defined part of the word, although most often the moment of fixation coincides with its middle.
The nature of eye movement during reading suggests that reading is not a simple addition, gluing the words of the text being read to each other. In the process of visual perception, the reader grasps whole, sometimes more, sometimes less large segments of the text [ Egorov, 1953:6 ].
The eye of the novice reader makes many stops, and each of them lasts a long time, but during it few words are perceived, and even those are slowly recognized. The first-grader, as a result of training and practice, quickly reduces both the number of stops and their duration. This decrease continues at a slower and slower pace, especially in the shortening of the pauses. The number of pauses continues to decrease in the future. This means that in the upper grades, the reading speed increases mainly due to the fact that the student perceives a large number of words at once during the stop of the eyes [Blonsky, 1999: 198].