Book: Language at the Speed of Sight

Mark Seidenberg isbn 9781541617155

Chapter 6: Becoming a Reader

pg 102

Proposed Requirements for Licensure as a Certified Skilled Reader

Prerequisite: All candidates must have achieved age-appropriate proficiency in a spoken language.

Reading-relevant expertise:

• Knowledge of orthographic structure and relations between written and spoken language, including how written words are pronounced and how spoken words are written.
• Ability to recognize a large vocabular of printed words quickly and accurately, including academic vocabulary mainly found in text, such as ANALYSIS, ACQUISITION, and WHEREAS
• Extended knowledge of the means of vocabulary words, including multiple meanings, and the ability to interpret them correct in context.
• KNowledge of the kinds of phrases and sentence structres in which words commonly occur, including literal and figurartive expressions
• Ability to comprehend sentence structures of varying complexity as they are read, as well as the larger structures created from sequences of sentences (paragraphs, sections, articles, chapters, books), making necessary links within and across levels
• Ability to recognize lapses in comprehension and perform simple repairs
• Possession of background knowledge relevant to understanding a broad range of topics (Exact content may vary but should minimally include shared cultural knowledge concerning, for example, media, government, and social institutions; it may include deep expertise in specific areas such as music, guns, cars, sports, or Star Wars.)
• Ability to vary depth of reading comprehension and textual engagement in accordance with goals.

Pg 187

Chapter 9: Brain Bases of Reading

Behind its mundane façade, reading is an extraordinarily complex act.

pg 190

For many years the main source of evidence about the brain bases of reading and other higher functions came from studies of how they were affected by brain damage due to an injurious even (such as a stroke or a closed-head injury from, say, falling off a bike without wearing a helmet) or disease (such as Alzheimer’s). The pioneering research was conducted by nineteenth-century neurologists including Paul Broca and Carl Wernick, whose most famous work concerned spoken-language impairments.

pg 191

The term “acquired dyslexia” refers to reading impairments that develop after a literate person experiences brain damage, rather than impairments in learning to read. Neuropathology causes several patterns of acquired dyslexia that reflect damage to different parts of the reading triangle. In all of these case, the patient has experienced brain damage that affects reading and other behaviour. The primary focus is observable; the patient’s comprehension and production of spoken and written language, short- and long-term memory, and other capacities are also assessed.

The serval types of acquired dyslexia reflect the fact that in many cases brain injury does not affect all components of the reading system equally. The researcher asks, How is the reading system organized such that neuropathology results in very impaired performance in reading one type of work but leaves another relatively intact? Each type of acquired dyslexia is defined by a characteristic pattern of errors. Performance varies within each type for several reasons: differences in the severity, locus, and cause of the brain injury; differences in reading skill that existed prior to the injury; time since injury; and type and extent of rehabilitation. The case reports in the literature emphasize patients for whom the damage was relatively selective because they are more informative than patients who are globally impaired.

Pg 192

Surface Dyslexia

The main symptoms are as follows:

• The patient can read many words and nonwords aloud fluently and accurately.
• Errors mainly occur with exception words, which are often “regularized.” For example, BROAD is pronounced “brode,” or PINT is pronounced to rhyme with MINT. The defining symptom is that damage affects irregularly pronounced words more than regulars, although the exact pattern varies for reasons I’ve noted. Some patients only mispronounce lower-frequency exception words; for others, the impairment extends to common ones such as SAID and GIVE.
• Comprehension of both spoken and written language, even single words, is poor. The patient might read the word BOOK aloud correctly but be unable to match the spoken or written word to a picture of the object. The patient’s ability to speak and write coherent sentences is also severely impaired.
• Locus of the brain damage is in areas of the left temporal lobe known to encode semantic information or link to the regions where such information is represented.

Pg 195

Phonological Dyslexia

The main symptoms:

• Many exception words and regular words can be pronunced correctly and at about equaly accurancy levels
• Nonword pronunciation is much more impaired. Patient can still correctly pronounce many words they know but are very poor at sounding our new ones. This discrepancy is the defining feature of the condition.
• The extent to which comprehension of spoken language is compromised varies; even when impaired, comprehension is much better than speech production, which is dysfluent. Patient usually understand the words they correctly read aloud.
• Lesion are found in parts of temporoparietal circuit for generating phonological codes.

pg 199

Alexia

This condition, also known as “word-blindness”, was first described by Jules Dejerine, another pioneering nineteenth-century neurologist. The impairment involves the code that is unique to reading, orthography. Dejerine described two patients who were unable to recognize visually presented words from their spellings, but for different reasons.

Chapter 11: The Two Cultures of Science and Education

Pg 262

The Pseudoscience of Reading

Reading scientists think that their job is done when the data have been gathered, analyzed, reported, replicated, extended, meta-analyzed, summarized in reports like the NRP’s, and communicated to a broader audience in accessibly terms. At easy step, however, the research shadowed by educational experts who reinterpret the word for their audience, teachers and other personnel, mitigating whatever impact it might have had. These lobbyists target the parties that determine what happens in classrooms: teachers, administrators, politicians, and publishers.

Reading educators rely on authorities who names are not as well known as Dewy of Montessori but who play a similar role. They formulated strong confident perspective on how reading works that become the whole-language approach and continues to evade reading education. The claims were plausible and easily explained to preservice teachers without requiring specialized knowledge. The claims were not updated as evidence accumulated. They were compatible with the exucational seitgeits I’ve described and contributed to its ascendance.

Pg 263

Phonics

Opposition to phonics has been a central theme in both Smith and Goodman’s work (see table for a sample of relevant quotes). The main arguments are as follows:

1. Phonics is irrelevant because people read for meaning, wheras phonics emphasizes connects between print and ound.
2. Phonics is unworkable becasue of the properities of written English: too many irregularities.
3. Even the patterns that are consistent are too complicated to teach.
4. Children who learn to read using phonics become poor readers.
5. The drill-and-kill methods used to teach phonics and soul-draining exercises that stifle children’s interest in reading (and tedious to teach)

If you’ve followed the book this far, you know that Smith and Goodman were wrong:

1. People unquestionably read for meaning; the question is how. Whether they rely on phonology is a question of fact, which was answered using appropriate empirical method. The answer is, they do. The reason is, they to, given the deep integration of orthography and phonology in writing systems, in haviour and in the brain.
2. The properties of written English do not preclude phonologically based reading. Early theories emphasized that children learn pronunciation rules for most works and memorize pronunciations of the exceptions. Our later models show that the problem is even simpler once it is seen as an example of statistics learning.
3. The statistical learning theory shows how the correspondences between spelling and sound can be learned, via a combination of implicit learning and timely instruction.
4. This is the part they got backward. It is the good readers who make more rapid progress in mastering the mappings between spelling and sound. Children who are able to use this information can recognize words fluently and automatically, allowing them to focus on comprehension. Children who struggle with these mappings must continue laboring at the word level rather than developing comprehension skills and learning from texts.
5. It is time to divest the phrase “drill and kill (or “drill and skills” as it is also known) of its magical power to make phonics instruction disappear. The empirical question is, What do good readers know and do? The pedagogical question is, What are the effective, engaging methods for helping children achieve that skill? Teachers (1 am one) do not have the option of skipping a topic because we find it hard to teach. Moreover, phonics can be taught without inducing severe print aversion, and the amount of time and effort involved isn’t excessive unless a child has a developmental impairment re quiring focused intervention.

Pg 265

Does anyone still believe that phonics is the route to poor reading? Of course.

Several generations of teachers learned that this is so. The science is still discounted and can be excluded from the curriculum. Or, more likely, the pro and con sides can be presented as options for the prospective teacher to pick from. Truly studying the conflict-reviewing the opposing claims in depth, guided by instructors with relevant expertise- would be a great learning expetience. Presenting the alternatives as equally valid but different realities from which to choose is like providing equal time for the pro- and anti-vaccination sides on cable news.

Isn’t balanced literacy the obvious solution? It might be, if it were more than a slogan. By the close of the twentieth century, the amount and variety of research on phonology and reading, combined with dissatisfaction over achievement levels and some excellent coverage of the reading was in be mass media, made it impossible to maintain the “phonics = reading death” position. Balanced literacy allowed the educational establishment to dis the controversy by acknowledging phonics without specifying how practices should change.

Incorporating phonics in a serious way requires addressing some tough questions: how to teach it, how much is enough, how much is too much. how to integrate it with reading and literacy activities, how much to individualize instruction, and so on. Balanced literacy provided little guidance for teachers who thought that phonics was a cause of poor reading and did not know how to teach it. Documents such as the report of the National Reading Panel weren’t much help. The panel did a fine job identifying major components of early reading: phonemic awareness phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. The components can always be carved slightly differently, but they covered the major skills and potential obstacles. However, the panel was not charged with making specific curricular recommendations. Translating the panels findings into effective practices required additional expertise, effort, and evaluation, which were in short supply. That led to blunders.

For educators opposed to phonics, only a nod in that direction was required for curricula and practices to be marketable as a “Balanced? program consistent with the recommendations of the NRP. For educators seeking curricular guidance, the NIP report could be read as describing a set of independent building blocks. Of course the components aren’t independent; they bootstrap each other. Phonics is necessary but not a skill to be acquired before the child can be exposed to something else. Vocabulary affects comprehension but also the discovery of the components of words, which gains support from phonics instruction, which contributes to fluency, and so on and so on. It’s a system of interacting components. Worse, under this mistranslation of the panel report, mastering the component skills can take precedence over reading, the actual goal. A teacher needs considerable expertise to integrate necessary instruction in the components with reading itself, but how to acquire it?