The Kids Can't Read - What Science Has to Say

Recently, there has been quite a bit of consternation in California (see California Does Little to Ensure All Kids Read by Third Grade ), over the low percentage of students that read at grade level. In my opinion, a considerable contributor to the problem we've created is a wishful, almost magical, model of how we read and the methods we have used to teach reading based on that model.

The model I'm referring to is the idea that great readers can scan a page of text and turn words, or sentences, or even whole paragraphs directly into meaning without going through the clunky, time consuming, and seemingly unnecessary step of audio/vocal reconstruction. After all, why waste time hearing what you're reading? What could possibly be gained by that. We seem to intuitively believe, or imagine, that the meaning could get into our minds directly from the printed words. This probably has some connection to our experience with computers which can transfer whole books in few seconds - but I don't think any machine to date has accomplished what we would recognize as reconstructing meaning from all that text. The result of this erroneous model in our heads about how we read is that we try to teach reading without some essential first steps.

What does science have to say about our model? Well, it turns out that a researcher named Stanislas DeHaene has written a book “Reading in The Brain” which describes what “we” know about the process of reading. As he describes it, that thing you did way back when you were learning to read, where you created phonemes from letter combinations on the page and then put them together to actually hear the word in your head, that really does take time. When you get good at it, it will take a minimum of 300ms to turn a word into meaning – or a little quicker as you turn whole phrases into meaning while you read. Sorry, but that is just the physics of brain action. Direct translation of printed text into meaning in your mind is a myth. You will always “hear” what you read, or you won’t be reading.

(See this article from SDSU about how the deaf read).

Accepting the myth as reality, without critical questioning, has led to programs for teaching reading which focus on picking up information from the pictures, or the context, or just jumping to conclusions from the first letter for example. Such programs have wasted the best years of too many student’s learning opportunities.

Based on both the science of how reading is done, like Stanislas DeHaene’s book describes, and the data from all the experiments conducted on teaching people how to read, we do have a pretty good idea of the best methods to teach young people this critical skill. Like it or not, and some people really do not – maybe because they see it as boring, the best method is to begin with helping a student recognize the sounds we put together into words (phonemic awareness) and then basic phonics, teaching the sounds represented by letters and letter combinations. It does take some time, but, in the long run, it saves much more time as a student will develop this skill quickly and then be able to start reading real content – a much needed activity to prepare one for higher education and/or a career. See The Knowledge Gap for this argument. Come to think of it, this skill is essential just to participate in the culture of modern civilization. Let’s stop wasting our young student’s time on our magical thinking about reading. Let’s use what we know works!

NICHD: What is the best way to teach children to read?

T. Troy Stark
troy@starkeffects.com
www.starkeffects.com