The History of Proportional Reading

And Background of John F. Adams

The Proportional Reading program is so comprehensive and such a forward leap in technology and educational theory from what currently exists in most schools, adult learning centers, workplace literacy programs and home tutoring, that many people want to know how it came about.

All the underlying educational theory behind Proportional Reading was researched and developed by John F. Adams, who was born in 1945. However, his work is built upon an extensive familiarity with structured phonetics, as well as his theory of innovation. Mr. Adams had dyslexia as a child and received help from Janet Rule, one of the founders of the Orton Gillingham structured phonetics movement. His tutor was actually the wife of the Dean of Students at MIT.

Mr. Adams received this help in structured phonetics in the tenth grade at Buckingham, Browne and Nichols, his prep school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mr. Adams was New England champion as a schoolboy wrestler and all New England prep school alternate as fullback in football. He was also stroke of the first boat in crew. Perseverance and growth were second nature to him. He was admitted into Harvard College, Class of '68.

While at Harvard, Mr. Adams found that structured phonetics fell far short of providing all the answers for reading well and quickly. He conducted a large number of reading experiments on himself over his college career, not always with ideal results. Nevertheless, he survived. He graduated in 1968 with a B.A. in American History and a desire to improve reading.

Mr. Adams decided he would become a professional inventor and solve a number of educational related issues, applying his theory of creativity to education. He comes from a long line of caring professionals. His grandfather was professor of missions at Union Theological Seminary, where he worked with Rheinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. His mother studied with Freud's disciple, Otto Rank, and was assistant professor of social work at Simmons College. His father, Ralph Adams, M.D. was associate chief of surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the first chief of surgery at the Lahey Clinic, and developed the modern filter mask that is used in operating rooms all over the world. Also, and as a matter of historical fact, the entire clean room concept for the US space program was taken directly from his father's operating room practices. Traditions of religion, psychology, medicine and innovation all combined in John, and he decided that educational and rehabilitative invention was the proper synthesis for him to pursue, in combination with using and communicating his own theory of creativity and therapy. His work has built upon concepts from all the above disciplines and is ongoing.

Shortly after graduation from Harvard, Mr. Adams started to build a mechanical device to eliminate all eye movement in reading, using prisms and mirrors. He soon realized that certain elements of technology still needed to be created before he could finish his design. Nevertheless, for the next ten years he continued his personal research into solving reading difficulties.

Mr. Adams developed many devices to help people read and assist them in their daily living. He holds twelve United States patents. His theory of creativity has been widely discussed on national television. Walt Disney, Ted Turner and Evening Magazine have all done movie pieces on his philosophy and work. At one time or another every major talk show in America has illustrated one or more of his inventions. Articles on his theory of creativity have appeared in many different newspapers and in newspaper editions around the world. His approach to helping others is called Pragmatic Realization Therapy.

In the mid 80's Mr. Adams wrote a structured phonetics course to help his then young daughter and other people learn to read. Joe Forest helped him with technical implementation of this course, embodying it in an actual computer operating system, which Joe wrote. John's twin brother, Frank H. Adams, acted as a sounding board and was in charge of finances and fund raising, providing John for many years with the basic financial independence necessary for creative integrity. The course John wrote was very successful. However, the world was then fighting between Apple and PC, and there was not any room for a third operating system. Furthermore, structured phonetics can only go partway towards solving most reading problems, and many people simply find the approach too boring to do. Finally, this approach had a fixed text and did not help a person read any text they wanted to load in.

By 1990 Mr. Adams saw that he could finish his dream of building a tool to process any text in a way that would enable troubled readers to read at grade level, fast and well, and also help average and good readers become excellent readers. For the last nineteen years he has focused his creative energy on solving reading issues with this new technology. Proportional Reading is the name for this new approach and the software Mr. Adams wrote to empower students to do these things.

Mr. Adams has worked with over 19,000 students and adults and helped almost every one of them. When he found a problem he could not solve, he created a new tool to solve it. Sometimes this took a few years, but it always happened. After thousands of such improvements his software program was able to help a number of individuals.

Mr. Adams has spoken nationally and regionally at a number of conferences and has worked with a number of schools in the U.S.A. He was flown to Washington, DC to receive the national award for helping Dyslexics. He has also been invited frequently to other countries as a reading consultant, most notably Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Czechoslovakia.

The State of Massachusetts financed Mr. Adams as a demonstration site for all the schools in the State. He worked with nine schools on Cape Cod and many thousands of students and over 200 teachers, often working in individual classrooms for six months at a time. Quite frankly, this was an extremely rare opportunity in American Education, if not totally unique. Thousands of these elementary school students helped him debug his software program. Every night he would improve his program and counter any ways the young students had found to disrupt it. After a while it was debugged. His students were in third place as the most improved class in the state on the state MCAS test.

Mr. Adams's goal has been to build technology and a training approach that produces demonstrable improvement in reading any text immediately, within minutes, much as any Yankee invention of old. All students and teachers must be able to verify positive results on the spot, instantly. This approach provides a valid alternative to lengthy, expensive and often limited statistical studies and enables available resources to be spent much more fairly and wisely.

Now that his program works, Mr. Adams is committed to solving the administrative and marketing issues to bring his program to all Americans. As always, research continues. When the Macintosh version of WordPerfect was taken off the market, Mr. Adams guided development of a stand-alone version of his software.

Recently, Mr. Adams has developed techniques for scanning books without a scanner and for tutoring one-on-one remotely, by talking on the phone while remotely controlling the student's computer anywhere in the country. He also developed the ability to read sentences a punctuation interval at a time.

More recently, Mr. Adams developed the additional technique to present any e-text by a phrase or punctuation interval at a time, and go through either of these cognitive intervals a word at a time, or a phrase at a time, and then have the phrase or punctuation interval repeated fluently in its entirety. This technique goes a long way to eliminate reading anxiety and getting overwhelmed by having to process too much text at one time, as often happens when challenged readers have to process a sentence at a time.

In addition, Mr. Adams developed a special In-Line Book Holder that holds book pages open, right above your keyboard, so you can type notes on your laptop or flat screen while reading. Also, you never have to turn your head as you edit papers, read and type. Most importantly, this approach enables proper reading posture for far greater comfort and increased concentration.

Most recently, Mr. Adams developed a free on-line reading course for anybody in the world to use to improve his or her reading. Those who need help with decoding, and automaticity and basic fluency can go to the Internet and see the different steps for help, and assess where they are. In addition, those needing help with basic comprehension and avoiding falling asleep while reading can get immediate help. Thirdly, average readers who still read no faster than they speak can watch special movies and learn the basic principles of how to hear an inner voice, and how to overcome lip reading, sounding out words, whispering and sub-vocalization. They can also learn how to see short words with peripheral vision, and at short exposure. They experience reading without making regressions, and they learn what it feels like to read by punctuation intervals, connecting key words that “pop out”. Then, the visitor can learn how to take these principles and learn how to apply them to reading text paginated just like in a book. A special high-seed voice and text approach is used to show how. Additional videos show how students use this same tool to read any middle school, high school or college textbook or novel with speed, accuracy and great enjoyment. Viewers can even read parts of Moby Dick at high speed with great pleasure. All this can now be experienced on the web for free. Personal consultation is also available and can be contracted as needed. Software is available.

Currently Mr. Adams is also working with The University of Massachusetts (Boston) and a major textbook publisher to improve student reading of textbooks, using his software.

Essentially, the story of Proportional Reading is the story of an individual with an intimate knowledge of reading difficulty combining this knowledge with perseverance and expertise as an independent professional inventor and applying this to American education, which was more than ready and in need of pragmatic innovation that works. Many family members, close friends, teachers, students, schools and governments have provided help and encouragement along the way.

(c) Proportional Reading, 2009