THE MIND LEARNING
TO READ
Roelien Herholdt & Prof. Elbie Henning
CONTENTS
A baseline
A neuroscience perspective
Contextualisation
Preparation for later learning to read
Speech circuits
Visual circuits Learning to read
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This presentation draws widely on the works of:
Prof Stanislas Dehaene – Reading in the brain
Dr Jenny Thomson – University of London
Dr Duncan Milne –Teaching the brain to read
Prof Leonard White and Prof Dale Purvis – Duke University
SOME QUESTIONS
True or false
The foundations for reading are laid when children start with grade R or
in some cases the last years of nursery school
Areas facilitating reading is only found in the left hemisphere of the
brain
Whole language approaches or balanced language approaches are the
WHY NEUROSCIENCE?
Understanding a system, in this case the brain, can assist in
understanding how to this system works
Empowering teachers and people working with children with an
understanding of the neuroscience of reading can lead to better
ways of assisting children
An understanding of the underlying science can assist in the
CONTEXTUALISATION
Literacy, including reading, must be understood within the South African
context
South Africa is a multilingual country
o Bi-/multilingualism is the norm rather than the exception
o Languages differ in terms of their regularity – how well sounds/
phonemes map onto letters
TYPES OF LANGUAGES
Logographic languages
Transparent languages
o Letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) connections are regular
o Phonological awareness – predictor of reading achievement
o Phoneme most important component
Less transparent languages
o Lots of irregularities or exceptions
LEARNING TO READ
Children start on the path to becoming readers in the first year of life
o Visual development – invariant visual recognition
o Linguistic development – speech comprehension
P R E PA R AT I O N F O R R E A D I N G
Prenatally and first six months after birth
Rhythm of native language in utero
Linguistic contrasts e.g. /ba/ /ga/
Left superior temporal region – analysis of speech sounds
Temporal lobe – extracting phonemes, words and sentences
Left inferior prefrontal region - Broca’s area – previously
thought to only involve speech production and grammatical skills, activated in babies listening to speech
Predisposition for acquiring a language
Prosody – myth of left hemisphere dominance
P R E PA R AT I O N F O R R E A D I N G
First three years –tuning to native language
six months – vowels of native language
one year – consonants of native language
o Japanese babies /r/ /l/ and in South Africa?
o Discards speech combinations not in native language
o Speech segments occurring most often become first
words
two to three years
o vocabulary increases by 10 – 20 words per day
READY TO READ
Age five to six
Vocabulary of several 1000 words in native language
Basic grammatical rules of language
Visual system developed invariant recognition
o Maximal plasticity or a sensitive period
Sophisticated speech circuits, which will assist in making sense of the
VISUAL CIRCUITS
Simultaneously to the speech circuits the visual circuits develop
Infants learns to
o parse visual scenes into objects and to track them, even when
they are concealed for a period of time
o recognise faces – by 9 months they specialise in recognition of
VISUAL CIRCUITS
One year olds
o can discriminate between objects using contours, texture, and
whether they are convex or concave
o when viewing an object from several view points they can infer
its three dimensional shape, using the type of edge junctions (T, Y or L)
Two year olds can break an object down into its parts or elements
STAGES IN READING
Logographic or pictorial stage
Recognises words as objects
Uses color, shape, letter orientation and curvature
Exploits superficial cues
Very artificial form of reading
The right occipito-temporal region distinguishes consonant strings
from words – bilateral processing
PHONOLOGICAL STAGE
Grapheme-phoneme links as well as link between spoken and written language
Phonemic awareness – spoken words consist of phonemes
Explicit teaching – alphabetic principle: phonemes map onto graphemes
Word length and grapheme complexity increase reading time
Illiterates can discriminate sounds, detect rhyme, etc. but struggle with
substitution
• Mastery of alphabetic principle changes brain wiring
• Visual system breaks words into graphemes
P H O N E M E S O R G R A P H E M E S
F I R S T ?
Spiral causality
o Grapheme awareness focus attention on phonemes o Phonemic awareness enhances grapheme awareness
Phonological stage is characterised by
o regularisation mistakes of irregular words such as “said” will be
read as “sa-it”, “key” will be read as “kay”
o Diffculty reading words with complex consonant structures, e.g.
ORTHOGRAPHIC STAGE
Reading time no longer determined by word length or grapheme complexity
Higher frequency words read faster than rare words
Reading becomes more fluent
Parallelism as opposed to serial processing
• Up to 8 letters at a time
• Still processes every letter though
THE LETTERBOX
Also called the visual word form area
Located in the left lateral occipito-temporal sulcus (valley), next to
the fusiform gyrus (hill)
This area is activated, irrespective of the language which is read,
the reading direction (left to right or right to left) or the type of
T WO R E A D I N G PAT H WAY S
Phonological decoding route
Depends on phoneme-grapheme correspondence
Generative – “self-teaching effect”
Steps:
o Segmentation
o Transcoding – link grapheme to phoneme o Fusion or concatenation
Assess through pseudo-words, e.g. labbit
o Lexicalisation, e.g. labbit is read as rabbit
T WO R E A D I N G PAT H WAY S
Direct access or lexical route
After lots of repetition
o Develops only after years of practice
o Creates illusion of whole word reading though fast and efficient automatisation
of processes
Depends on establishment of a direct connection between visual and auditory systems
Leads to less mistakes and is faster
Used most often by fluent readers
o Left hemispheric dominance for processing in reading occurs o Prosody still processed in right hemisphere
Assess using irregular words, e.g. said
o Mistake = regularisation e.g. sa-it
SOME UNDISPUTED FACTS
Reading changes the brain
o Cortical areas for face, object and colour recognition become attuned to
graphemes and written word
Reading improves reading
o Left inferior prefrontal cortex
Poor readers’ reading achievement gets progressively worse without
intervention
Reading must be taught explicitly
o Children do not acquire reading spontaneously
o Learning takes time to master – in more opaque languages learning to read takes
MIRROR READING/WRITING
o Called boustrophedon
DYSLEXIA
Neurologically based – phonological pathway
Often hereditary
Leads to problems with reading, writing and spelling
Associated with difficulties in
o Concentration
o Short term memory o Organisation
HELPFUL STRATEGIES
Explicit teaching of phonemic awareness
Explicit teaching of alphabetical principle
Phonics programme must be structured and sequential, e.g. teach regular
frequently used phonemes first
Simultaneous teaching of graphemes and phonemes
Multisensory – feel pronunciation, use concrete letters, hear & say
Metacognitive, e.g. LCWC for irregular words
BRUCE MCCANDLISS
Phonics vs whole language experiment
WL did better on first 30 words learned, but on learning the second 30
words they started forgetting the first words
Phonics group took longer to master the grapheme-phoneme combinations,
but:
o Improved steadily
o Did better on encountering new words
TEACHING
Should we aim to increase verbal vocabulary?
Should we teach letter sounds, letter names or both?
Should our teaching of letter formation be linked to our teaching of
phonemes, spelling and reading?
Should we teach graphemes or phonemes first?
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