“How the Reading Brain Resolves the Reading Wars” – a very helpful white paper, by Maryanne Wolf, about what happens in the brain as children learn to read.
I recently came across this article that I had written some time ago and forgotten about, on resolving the Reading Wars – how phonics and whole language work together.
The key ideas
- Phonics teaching with a lot of drill and practice is needed first.
AND
- The skills emphasised by whole language are also necessary, but needed later in the process.
The white paper gives five principles that form a developmental hierarchy. I have tried to extract key quotes below, but it was hard to know what to leave out.
- “Human beings were never meant to read. Reading is a cultural invention. The ‘reading brain’ represents the semi- miraculous capacity of the brain to form new circuits …
- “Young readers have to create a whole new reading circuit out of … still developing component processes. There will be differences in the development of this circuit depending on the particular writing system and the child’s language environment.
- “The brain is masterful at ‘neuronal recycling’, a wonderfully apt term by cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene. To build up the all the parts for the reading circuit, some neurons are reprogrammed to accomplish new tasks—like recognizing the fine features of letters or the larger units of re-occurring letter patterns. Making neurons originally programmed to recognize objects able to recognize letters requires a great amount of exposure time. … This is an essential aspect of phonics-driven approaches, and should never be conceptualized as mere ‘drill’.
- “Connectivity is all, but it has to be learned. … The more the young reader knows about words, and about how words function within sentences and stories, the faster this knowledge becomes activated, and the faster the circuit. All of this knowledge about words across varied literary contexts matters (an emphasis in whole language approaches) and increases the speed of connections.
- “Reading is ultimately about going beyond the text and going beyond ourselves. Thus, the goal of reading, as Marcel Proust wrote, is to ‘go beyond the wisdom of the author’ to the reader’s own best thoughts. To get every young reader there, we need to work explicitly on the development of all the component parts (some not described here), their increasingly rapid connections among each other, and the readers’ understanding of the importance of their own critical and creative thought processes when encountering text. …”
Original article https://www.ldaustralia.org/client/documents/Wolf_How_the_Reading_Brain_Resolves_the_Reading_Wars_2013.pdf
Photo adapted from https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-black-and-silver-steel-barbell-photography-949126/
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