In the book, Chall wrote that schools need to teach both meaning and phonics. Despite the changing views about phonics, Chall never changed the conclusion she reached in Learning to Read, said Lecturer on Education John D. Strucker '66.

He said a study last year by the National Academy of Sciences arrived at the same conclusion Chall had written of over 30 years earlier.

Her later book, Stages of Reading Development (1983), described how the task of reading itself changes and gets harder as children grow up.

According to her theory, when children first learn to read, they are reading simply to learn, focusing on "decoding" one word at a time.

In the second and third grades, most students acquire "fluency," meaning they decode the words more quickly.

By the fourth grade, Chall argued, students normally read to learn vocabulary and content.

These stages also apply to illiterate adults, said Strucker.