We began investigating the reading skills of children with Down syndrome in Portsmouth in 1980 after receiving a letter from a father, Leslie Duffen, describing how he had discovered that his daughter Sarah could begin to learn to read at the age of three years. Sarah was born with Down syndrome. At three, she was just beginning to imitate and to use single words in her speech. Leslie taught Sarah to read on flashcards the words that he wanted her to be able to use in her speech and he observed that she began to use the words she had learned from the printed form at a faster rate than those she only experienced in the spoken form.

When Leslie wrote to us in 1979, Sarah was twelve years old and being educated in a local comprehensive school. She had received all but one year of her education in mainstream schools and was considered to be exceptionally able for a child with Down syndrome. Leslie felt sure that her exceptional progress had been the result of teaching her to read early and that other children might be helped in the same way.

We found Leslie’s letter surprising and intriguing. His experience with Sarah suggested that pre-school children with Down syndrome could learn to read and that reading might be a “way-in” to language for these children. In 1979 children with Down syndrome were not thought capable of learning to read at all by most professionals and there was very little research into the reasons for their spoken language difficulties. We certainly thought that Leslie’s observations warranted further investigation.

With a grant from the Down Syndrome Association we were able to appoint a teacher (Liz Wood) and set up a research study to begin to investigate these hypotheses. We followed the progress of fifteen pre-school children for three years while they received a regular home-teaching programme from us based on Portage.

Joanna, the first child that we tried teaching to read in 1980, learned thirty words in a month at two years and six months of age. It was immediately clear that Leslie’s observations with Sarah might well apply to other children with Down syndrome and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation agreed to fund our work for a further year. The results of that first project have been published in full elsewhere (Buckley, 1985a) as has an evaluation of the “parents as teachers” aspect (Buckley, 1985b). We also published a video-tape illustrating this work in 1983, which is still available from us at The Sarah Duffen Centre.

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