I have just ordered an interesting sounding book, Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It by Mark Seidenberg who describes himself as “a psychologist/psycholinguist/cognitive neuroscientist who has been studying reading since the disco era”. This seems typical of the style of the book, colloquial and easy to read, but backed by a wealth of knowledge.
At the moment I am reading the sample on Amazon, but am looking forward to reading the rest when my hard copy arrives. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, here a few things that seem interesting, significant, relevant and/or encouraging…
“… we have better methods than Freud … We’ll have you lie down and talk to us, but in the barrel of a magnetic resonance imaging machine, not on a couch.” Some of the things they have learned from this include
• The basic mechanisms of skilled reading, how it is acquired and the main causes of impairment.
• What characteristics of 3 and 4-year-olds predict reading ability.
• How children become readers in the first years of schooling and obstacles they may face.
• What distinguishes good from poor readers, young from older, typical from atypical.
• The main neural pathways used in reading …
“This vast research base has led to the development of methods that can reliably help many children who struggle to read. Researchers disagree about many details – it’s science not the Ten Commandments – but there is remarkable consensus about the basic theory of how reading works and the causes of reading success and failures.”
Chapter 2 is headed “Visible Language” and starts with “We read with our eyes, but the starting point for reading is speech.” Spoken language existed for millennia without written language, but now they are fundamentally intertwined.
It looks like this book will be an interesting read with lots of stories, including the history of both written and spoken language, but one that also goes to the heart of problems and controversies that have plagued the teaching of reading for decades.
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