Chapter 4: The Beginnings of Reading Development, or Not

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and that was the beginning of the fairies.

-J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

 As I finished Part I of the Maryanne Wolf’s text Proust and the Squid, I felt a sigh of relief.  Though Part I was interesting and pertinent in its own right, I quickly realized that Part II would be more relevant to me as a teacher, and as a life-long learner.  Part II is entitled ‘How the Brain Learns to Read Over Time’.  I had chosen this book to gain an insight into how my students’ brain develops the necessary skills to become literate members of society.  This portion of the text starts with Chapter 4: The Beginning of Reading Development, or Not.

               As stated in an earlier blog post, I mentioned that I would be viewing this text through the lens of history.  Both the history of reading development and each student are personal reading history.  As I have mentioned before, a child’s first exposure to literacy, through the spoken word sets in motion a series of events that will determine how they will be as a reader.  As Wolf explains, even the first words a child hears after they are born create connections in the brain that will aid in language development, which then develops into reading development.  As a child grows older, the ability to pay attention increases and so does the infant’s knowledge of familiar visual images, and his or her curiosity about novel ones.  Over time, the child develops the neural connections that allow for them to become a, “linguistic genius”, a term coined by the Russian scholar Kornei Chukovsky.  To become a genius, the child must successfully master phonological development, the ability to hear, discriminate, segment, and manipulate the phonemes in words, semantic development, an understanding of the meanings of words, syntactic development, acquiring and using grammatical relationships, morphological development, the understanding and use of the smallest unit of meaning, and finally pragmatic development, a child’s ability to know and use social-cultural rules of language.

               Through these stages of development, the students are not only growing in reading ability, but they are beginning to develop a set of emotions.  As Wolf states quite boldly, “Young children learn to experience new feelings through exposure to reading, which, in turn prepares them to understand more complex emotion.”  Wolf elaborates that children learn one of the most valuable skills that the human race has developed: the ability to take on someone else’s perspective.  To interject my own personal belief here, I true believe that in almost all aspects of our culture, we have lost the ability to empathize with our fellow human being.  If reading will enable this feeling to return to our everyday lives, I will read to my budding students, I will read until I am blue in the face.  But I digress…

               In the most recent assignment that I submitted for this course, I started the piece by stating that ‘nothing happens in a vacuum’.   Every aspect of our lives is influenced by external forces, even if we decry this notion claiming nothing bothers us.  I am one of the later.  Maryanne Wolf echoes what Gee, Lea & Street, and Keane and Zimmerman have stated numerous times in numerous ways, reading acquisition and development is a social practice.  To ensure proper connections among the visual, auditory, processing and critical thinking portions of the brain, students must be exposed to text as early and as often as possible.  As students are struggling, corrective reinforcement must be employed to ensure the above mentioned connections are solidified in the correct way.  Wolf explains that, “the principal regions of the brain that underlie out ability to integrate visual, verbal, and auditory information rapidly are not fully myelinated in most humans until the age of five."  So why is there such an emphasis on reinforcing connections if they may not even exist until the student is ready to enter kindergarten?  Wolf concludes the chapter and backs up this thought with the war on “Word Poverty”.

               Maryanne Wolf cites a study by Todd Risley and Betty Hart that states, “by five years of age, some children from impoverished-language environments have heard 32 million fewer words spoken to them than the average middle class child”.  Coming from the City of Pittsburgh, I know all too well how developmentally crippling this stat can be.  Many of my inner-city students came from homes where there is a lack of literature in the home.  Even many of their parents cannot read themselves.  These students lacked the exposure to language and print and were well beyond students of their own age in the surrounding suburbs. 

Three years removed from my hometown, I find similar struggles in my current school.  In our most recently published data, 33% of the entire population of our town is considered English Language Learner, though English is the language most dominantly spoken language in all of the homes.  To battle this ‘word poverty’ I hit all the yard sales and flea markets that I can and buy every children’s book I can get my hands on.  By sending them home with my students, I am at least trying to establish a community of reading where my students can be the ones that break the cycle, and create a culture of literacy.

Catherine Show of Harvard stated, “…one of the major contributors to late reading was simply the amount of time for ‘talk around dinner’”.  I think we’ll shut off the TV tonight during our evening meal.

Until next time…