Chapter 6: The Unending Story of Reading's Devleopment

I can take my own sweet time.

-Luke, age nine

               Fourth grade was hard.  I struggled more in that year of school than any other year than I can recall.  I am not sure if it was because I had four different teachers that year (I attended a small Catholic school in the city of Pittsburgh where your homeroom teacher taught it all), but something happened that year.  School was no longer fun.  I stopped caring about my work.  I made up stories about not having homework to my parents.  Twenty years later I am haunted by the memories of that particular school year.  As I went through my undergraduate studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, I learned that I was not alone.  There is a phenomenon in the English speaking world called the fourth grade slump.  In fact, Maryanne Wolf offers the following statistic in her study of the reading brain, Proust and the Squid, “30 to 40 percent of children in the fourth grade do not become fully fluent readers with adequate comprehension.”  Wolf states that one of the reasons behind this phenomenon is that textbooks, teachers, parents and schools have different expectations for students from fourth grade on.  Thankfully, I had a wonderful support system at home and one of the greatest teachers I have ever known in fifth grade, Mr. Bowen, so not reaching the next two stages of reading development were not an option for me.

               In the last blog entry, I had mentioned Wolf’s five stages of reading development and elaborated upon two.  In this entry I will cover the final two.  The fourth stage in Wolf’s development is the Fluent, Comprehending reader, or as I have come to refer to it as, the Maturation Stage.  As students enter this stage, the decoding and automaticity has been practice and achieved with great success.  The student can now read to find deeper meaning within a text.  They can go beyond what the author has written and find meaning that is relevant for them.  As the reading becomes more difficult, good reader’s awareness and knowledge of figurative language and irony helps them find those new meanings described above.

               Whether a student reaches this stage is heavily influenced by two factors according to educational psychologist, Michael Pressley, explicit instruction by teacher’s in major content areas, and the student’s own desire to read.  The later I have talked about numerous times before in this blog and the struggles to help foster a student’s desire to read.  The former is something that has been discussed in assignment submissions, Elluminate sessions, collaborative groups and also, here in this blog.  Explicit instruction is the running theme that has been elaborated upon in works by Gee, Lea & Street, and Keane and Zimmerman.

               The brain of the Fluent, Comprehending brain looks vastly different from that of the novice reader.  As David Rose, a translator of theoretical neuroscience into applied educational technology, states, “The three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling.”  TheLimbic region helps us to prioritize and give value to what we are reading.  Our attention and comprehension processes become either stirred, or turned off at some level.  This is where a student’s motivation to read heavily influences these processes.  As Wolf states, “as children become more fluent, the young brain typically replaces bi-hemispheric activation with a more efficient system in the left hemisphere.”  The brain is streamlining itself to move into the next stage, The Expert Reader.

               Maryanne Wolf beings this section with a quote by Sir Edmund Huey who essentially states, “fully fluent, expert reading embodies all the cultural, biological, and intellectual transformations in the evolution of reading and all the cognitive, linguistic, and affective transformations in the reader’s own ‘natural history’”.

               At this stage, the automaticity that has been sought after has been achieved.  In fact, as Wolf states, one half second is all it takes the expert reader to read almost any word.  She elaborates in great detail what the brain does in those ‘500 milliseconds of Fame’.  What takes the brain half a second to do, Wolf elaborates for ten pages.  This was the hardest portion of the book for me thus far, so I will give you, the reader of this blog, the outline of what is happening and the illustration provided in the book.

·        0-100 Milliseconds: Turning Expert Attention to Letters

·        Between 50-150 Milliseconds: Recognizing a Letter and Changing a Brain

·        100-200 Milliseconds: Connecting Letters to Sounds and Orthography to Phonology

·        200-500 Milliseconds: Getting to All That We Know About a Word

·        Sometime after 200 Milliseconds: Syntactic and Morphological processes.

(Sorry about the formatting of the image, I couldn't get it to fit in the white portion of this page.)

What is startling and crushingly sad at the same time, is that most students don’t ever get to this stage, nor do they get to enjoy everything text has to offer them.  Many students arrive at the Decoding Stage and remain there.  As educators, we cannot make the brain, nor the child, do anything it cannot, or will not do.  We can only provide strategic, explicit instruction in how to ease the student into making the connections necessary themselves and ignite the desire to read through engaging, enlightening activities.

               Wolf concludes the chapter by once again discussing what I discussed in my discussion on the title of this book.  Who we are is heavily influenced by what we have read.  How many of us would still be scared of the dark if we hadn’t read Goosebumps?

               This chapter concluded Part II of the text, How the Brain Learns to Read Over Time.  The Final Three chapters of the book address issues that all literacy teachers face, When the Brain Can’t Learn to Read.

Until next time…