THE MIND LEARNING TO READ

Roelien Herholdt & Prof. Elbie Henning

2015

CONTENTS

v  A baseline

v  A neuroscience perspective

v  Contextualisation

v  Preparation for later learning to read v  Speech circuits v Visual circuits

v  Learning to read

v  Implications for education

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This presentation draws widely on the works of:

v  Prof Stanislas Dehaene – Reading in the brain

v Dr Jenny Thomson – University of London

v Dr Duncan Milne –Teaching the brain to read

v  Prof Leonard White and Prof Dale Purvis – Duke University

v All other sources can be found under references

SOME QUESTIONS

True or false

v  The foundations for reading are laid when children start with grade R or

in some cases the last years of nursery school

v  Areas facilitating reading is only found in the left hemisphere of the

brain

v Whole language approaches or balanced language approaches are the

optimal way to teach reading

WHY NEUROSCIENCE?

v  Understanding a system, in this case the brain, can assist in

understanding how to this system works

v  Empowering teachers and people working with children with an

understanding of the neuroscience of reading can lead to better

ways of assisting children

v  An understanding of the underlying science can assist in the

development and testing of teaching methodologies and materials

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 o  Which languages you put together is important

TYPES OF LANGUAGES

v  Logographic languages

v  Transparent languages

o  Letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) connections are regular o  Phonological awareness – predictor of reading achievement o  Phoneme most important component

v  Less transparent languages

o  Lots of irregularities or exceptions o  Onset and rime patterns become more important

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

PREPARATION FOR READING

Prenatally and first six months after birth

v Rhythm of native language in utero v Linguistic contrasts e.g. /ba/ /ga/ v Left superior temporal region – analysis of speech sounds v Temporal lobe – extracting phonemes, words and sentences v Left inferior prefrontal region - Broca’s area – previously

thought to only involve speech production and grammatical skills, activated in babies listening to speech

v Predisposition for acquiring a language v Prosody – myth of left hemisphere dominance

PREPARATION FOR READING

First three years –tuning to native language

v six months – vowels of native language v 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 v two to three years

o  vocabulary increases by 10 – 20 words per day o  Basic grammatical rules of language

READY TO READ

v  Age five to six

v Vocabulary of several 1000 words in native language

v Basic grammatical rules of language

v Visual system developed invariant recognition

o  Maximal plasticity or a sensitive period

v  Sophisticated speech circuits, which will assist in making sense of the

written word

VISUAL CIRCUITS

v  Simultaneously to the speech circuits the visual circuits develop

v  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 human faces

VISUAL CIRCUITS

v 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)

v  Two year olds can break an object down into its parts or elements

v  Five to six year olds have developed invariant visual recognition

STAGES IN READING

Logographic or pictorial stage

v  Recognises words as objects

v Uses color, shape, letter orientation and curvature

v Exploits superficial cues

v Very artificial form of reading

v  The right occipito-temporal region distinguishes consonant strings

from words – bilateral processing

v  Stage brief in transparent languages

PHONOLOGICAL STAGE

v Grapheme-phoneme links as well as link between spoken and written language

v  Phonemic awareness – spoken words consist of phonemes

v Explicit teaching – alphabetic principle: phonemes map onto graphemes

v Word length and grapheme complexity increase reading time

v  Illiterates can discriminate sounds, detect rhyme, etc. but struggle with

substitution •  Mastery of alphabetic principle changes brain wiring •  Visual system breaks words into graphemes •  Parts of speech systems adapt to explicit representation of phonemes

PHONEMES OR GRAPHEMES FIRST?

v  Spiral causality o  Grapheme awareness focus attention on phonemes o  Phonemic awareness enhances grapheme awareness

v  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.

CCCVCC such as in “strict”

ORTHOGRAPHIC STAGE

v  Reading time no longer determined by word length or grapheme complexity

v Higher frequency words read faster than rare words

v Reading becomes more fluent

v  Parallelism as opposed to serial processing

•  Up to 8 letters at a time •  Still processes every letter though

v  Efficiency increases

THE LETTERBOX

v Also called the visual word form area

v  Located in the left lateral occipito-temporal sulcus (valley), next to

the fusiform gyrus (hill)

v  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

language

TWO READING PATHWAYS

Phonological decoding route

v  Depends on phoneme-grapheme correspondence

v  Generative – “self-teaching effect”

v  Steps:

o  Segmentation o  Transcoding – link grapheme to phoneme o  Fusion or concatenation

v  Assess through pseudo-words, e.g. labbit

o  Lexicalisation, e.g. labbit is read as rabbit o  Additions, omissions, inversions and substitution

TWO READING PATHWAYS Direct access or lexical route

v  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

v  Depends on establishment of a direct connection between visual and auditory systems

v  Leads to less mistakes and is faster

v  Used most often by fluent readers o  Left hemispheric dominance for processing in reading occurs o  Prosody still processed in right hemisphere

v  Assess using irregular words, e.g. said o  Mistake = regularisation e.g. sa-it

HOW THIS LOOKS IN THE BRAIN?

SOME UNDISPUTED FACTS v  Reading changes the brain

o  Cortical areas for face, object and colour recognition become attuned to graphemes and written word

v  Reading improves reading o  Left inferior prefrontal cortex

v  Poor readers’ reading achievement gets progressively worse without

intervention

v  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

longer

MIRROR READING/WRITING

o  Called boustrophedon

o  Natural process where visual invariance is applied to graphemes and words

DYSLEXIA

v Neurologically based – phonological pathway

v Often hereditary

v Leads to problems with reading, writing and spelling

v Associated with difficulties in o  Concentration o  Short term memory o  Organisation

HELPFUL STRATEGIES

v Explicit teaching of phonemic awareness

v Explicit teaching of alphabetical principle

v  Phonics programme must be structured and sequential, e.g. teach regular

frequently used phonemes first

v  Simultaneous teaching of graphemes and phonemes

v Multisensory – feel pronunciation, use concrete letters, hear & say

v Metacognitive, e.g. LCWC for irregular words

v Reduce memory and attention load

BRUCE MCCANDLISS

BRUCE MCCANDLISS

v  Phonics vs whole language experiment

v WL did better on first 30 words learned, but on learning the second 30

words they started forgetting the first words

v  Phonics group took longer to master the grapheme-phoneme combinations,

but:

o  Improved steadily o  Did better on encountering new words o  Remembered previously learned words better, even with no revision

TEACHING

v  Should we aim to increase verbal vocabulary?

v  Should we teach letter sounds, letter names or both?

v  Should our teaching of letter formation be linked to our teaching of

phonemes, spelling and reading?

v  Should we teach graphemes or phonemes first?

v Whole language, phonics approach or balanced language approach?

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