Chapter 5: The "Natural History" of Reading Development: Connecting the Parts of the Young Reading Brain

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,

make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history

or music, that we should begin

with the simple exercises first

and slowly go on trying

the hard ones, practicing till strength

and accuracy became one with the daring

to leap into transcendence…

-Adrienne Rich, “Transcendental Etude”

                As I’ve gone through reading, underlining and reflecting on Maryanne Wolf’s study of the reading brain, Proust and the Squid, I have focused on the history of reading, both the history of the development of the reading brain and how each student’s individual history of exposure to text sets them up for reading success, or not.  Looking back at my own life, I cannot recall my own history.  I don’t remember the “aha!” moment when I was able to read with pride a passage placed before me.  What I do recall is being read to, spending summers in the local library reading in the big chairs (it also helped that our house wasn’t air conditioned, but the library was), and reading aloud in school with such pride that nothing could take my smile away.  Little did I know that I was going through a series of steps to make me the literate, fluent person that I have become today.

                Maryanne Wolf explains in this chapter, and the following, that there are five types of readers, Emerging Pre-Reader, Novice Reader, Decoding Reader, Fluent, Comprehending Reader and Expert Reader.  In this chapter, and subsequently this blog post, the first three readers were discussed and I will do so here.

                The emerging pre-reader was discussed at length, though not identified as ‘emerging pre-reader’ in the previous chapter and blog entry.  These readers are receiving their first exposures to sounds, words, concepts, images, stories, print, literacy materials, and just plain talk.  This stage lasts through the first five years of life.

                During the novice reader stage, each student is learning to decode print and to understand and develop meaning.  It is during this critical stage that the students learn and realized that every word on the page means something and that letters connect to the sounds of their language.  As we know, the smallest unit of sound in a word is called a phoneme.  During these years of development, the novice reader begins to identify these phonemes, identify onset and rime, and identify syllables.  A startling fact that I underlined, highlighted and dog-eared the page it was on hit me hard as a first grade teacher: “Not being able to decode well in grade 1 predicted 88 percent of the poor readers in grade 4.”  Talk about pressure.  The next morning during small group instruction, you can bet we went over every single phoneme in that day’s word list.

                Wolf elaborates upon one of the many reasons why English is so difficult for children, and non-native speakers, to learn, orthographic development.  Orthographic development consists of learning the entirety of visual conventions for depicting a particular language, with its repertoire of common letter patterns and of seeming irregular usages.  Most important, it involves the transformation of these visual patterns of letters and frequent letter combinations into representations that can become automatic.  For the perfect example of this development, please refer to this piece by Mark Twain.

                Thus far, the emphasis of the decoding reader has been the act of decoding itself.  However, Wolf warns of the pitfalls of ignoring comprehension.  She states that one of the biggest errors in reading instruction is the assumption that after a student finally decodes a word, they automatically know the meaning.  As we know this is pure malarkey.  A student may decode the word bug, but not know what meaning to apply to the word.  Is it a small insect, or is it something used to spy on another person.  As I have state before in relation to Gee, Lea & Street and Keane & Zimmerman, explicit instruction is necessary to ensure the desired results are met.  Novice readers need to learn much more than the surface meaning of a word.  They also need to be knowledgeable and flexible regarding a word’s multiple uses and functions in different contexts.

                The brain of a novice reader has quite a job to do.  When the reader looks at the word, it first must connect the visual and visual association areas to the portion of the brain, which appears on both hemispheres, or sides, that initiate the orthographic and semantic process.  The third area it connects to is in the frontal lobe and activates speech, memory and phonological and semantic processes.  The automaticity of skilled readers clearly cannot be obtained in this stage because the brain has so much to work through and process to read a single word.  I take this to mean that when a young child takes upwards of 30 seconds to decode and say a word, it does not necessarily mean that they are unable to read the word, they’re brains just need a little more time.

                The difference between a decoding reader and a novice reader can be ‘heard’ when a child reads.  The automaticity that has become the ultimate goal is beginning to take shape as the students are able to read more fluently both by decoding and recalling sight words.  As Wolf states, “readers need to add at least 3,000 words [during this stage] to what they can decode.  It is essential during this stage that readers acquire a good set of letter-pattern and vowel-pair “sight chunks” that make up words beyond the primer level.  To elaborate, Maryanne Wolf uses quite a macabre example, “The faster that a child can see that ‘beheaded’ is be + head + ed, the more likely it is that more fluent word identification [will occur].

                Fluent word recognition is significantly improved by both vocabulary and grammatical knowledge throughout the steps of this stage.  If I may clarify something here, as I have stated before in this blog and during Elluminate sessions, being a fluent reader does not always mean that comprehension will follow automatically.  As Wolf states, though comprehension becomes bound to the processes discussed above, students must be shown how to participate in “comprehension monitoring”.  As Maureen Lovett defines it, “…their ability to think about how well they are understanding what they read in a text.”

                As I concluded this chapter it appeared to me that the novice stage is where all of the workings of reading are learned, and the decoding stage is where everything is starting to be put together.  In the next chapter, Wolf elaborates on the ultimate prize as a literacy teacher, the Expert Reader.

Until next time...