MACHINE FOR TEACHING READING

A machine for teaching students to read is equipped with a visual display, a manual keyboard for entering alphabet letter responses, correctness and incorrectness indicators of display responses, and conditioning means for initiating particular grammar characteristic sequences to be practiced. The machine also includes a repertoire of words and letter combinations corresponding to word roots encoded in an electronic form and stored in digital memory. A word set is assembled in response to an instruction from the conditioning means concerning the grammar characteristic sequence to be practiced. Words or word roots are selected at random from the assembled word set for display or partial display. The student, through the keyboard, is thereby able to identify particular vowels and consonants, long and short vowel sounds, soft and hard consonant sounds, determine the number of syllables in a word, identify misspelled words, supply missing letters, and identify words as to their grammatical parts of speech. The correctness and incorrectness indicators inform the student as to the accuracy of the manually entered response.