How the Brain Learns to Read Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by David A. Sousa

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  All rights reserved. When forms and sample documents are included, their use is authorized only by educators, local school sites, and/or noncommercial or nonprofit entities that have purchased the book. Except for that usage, no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Printed in the United States of America.

  A catalog record of this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 9781483333946

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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  Contents

  About the Author

  Introduction

  The Bad News and the Good News

  About This Book

  Assessing Your Current Knowledge of Reading

  1. Learning Spoken Language

  Structure of Language

  Levels of Language Comprehension

  2. Learning to Read

  Three Phases of Learning to Read

  Reading Is Not a Natural Ability

  Early Stages of Reading

  Reading Comprehension

  How Memory Affects Learning to Read

  What Does New Research Reveal About Reading?

  Two Routes to Reading

  The Importance of Practice

  3. Teaching Reading for Encoding and Decoding

  Brief History of Teaching Reading

  Early Literacy Skills

  Brain Research and Learning a Skill

  Modern Methods of Teaching Reading

  Research Findings on Reading Instruction—Decoding

  4. Teaching Reading for Comprehension

  Research Findings on Reading Instruction—Comprehension

  5. Recognizing Reading Problems

  The Reading Gap

  Inadequate Reading Instruction

  Social and Cultural Causes of Reading Problems

  Physical Causes of Reading Problems

  Detecting Reading Problems

  6. Overcoming Reading Problems

  Some Considerations for Teaching Students With Reading Problems

  Basic Ingredients of Early Intervention Programs

  Programs for Older Students

  Rewiring the Brains of Struggling Readers

  Reading Problems and Taking Tests

  Advice to Students With Reading Problems

  Advice for Parents of Children With Reading Problems

  7. Reading in the Content Areas

  Strategies for Helping Students Read Content Material

  Sequencing the Reading Strategies

  Graphic Organizers and Comprehension of Content-Area Reading

  Reading Patterns in the Content Areas

  8. Putting It All Together

  The Basics of a Successful Reading Program

  Conclusion

  Resources

  Glossary

  References

  Index

  About the Author

  David A. Sousa, EdD, is an international consultant in educational neuroscience and author of more than a dozen books that translate brain research into strategies for improving learning. He has presented to more than 200,000 educators across the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. He has taught high school chemistry and served in administrative positions, including superintendent of schools. He was an adjunct professor of education at Seton Hall University and a visiting lecturer at Rutgers University. Dr. Sousa has edited science books and published dozens of articles in leading journals. His books have been published in French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Korean, and several other languages. He is past president of the National Staff Development Council (now Learning Forward) and has received honorary degrees and awards for his commitment to research, professional development, and science education. He has appeared on the NBC Today show and National Public Radio to discuss his work with schools using brain research.

  Introduction

  Most of us don’t recall much about learning to talk. It just seemed to come naturally. We probably don’t remember much about how we learned to read either. As adults, reading seems so effortless and automatic that we often assume it should be an easy skill for almost any child to acquire. But that is not the case. Learning to speak is an innate ability supported by specialized areas of the brain, and is automatic for almost all children raised in normal circumstances. But for many children, learning to read is a long, complicated task requiring years of conscious effort.

  Have you ever thought about what your brain goes through when you read? First, your eyes have to scan those squiggly lines and curves called the alphabet and group them into the words as indicated on the page. Then, certain areas of the brain work to associate the written symbols with the sounds of language already stored in your head. As this association occurs, other neural networks decode the writing into a mental message that you understand. Incredibly, your brain can process and comprehend an entire sentence in a few seconds. It almost seems like magic. But it isn’t magic. Reading is the result of an elaborate process that involves decoding abstract symbols into sounds, then into words that generate meaning. Can you remember the first time you encountered printed text and saw those letters? Just turn this page upside down and you get an idea of how alien those squiggles must have looked at first and what a struggle it was to make sense of them.

  THE BAD NEWS AND THE GOOD NEWS

  The Bad News

  Educators have been well aware of the difficulties involved in learning to read and have long debated the best ways to teach beginning reading. No one method or program has triumphed, as evidenced by the lack of substantial progress in improving reading achievement scores. Unfortunately, despite all the time and resources devoted to reading programs, there have been no noticeable gains in reading achievement since the publication of the first edition of this book. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that nearly two-thirds of low-income fourth graders cannot read at the proficient level. Grade 8 students have made no gains in reading achievement in the past decade, and the reading scores of Grade 12 students have actually declined slightly in that same time period (NAEP, 2012). The number of students identified with reading problems, including dyslexia, is growing rapidly. No one is sure if this
is because more students are developing difficulties in reading or whether school districts are getting better at diagnosing previously unidentified students. One thing seems certain: Students who are poor readers in their early years remain poor readers in their later years.

  A decades-long battle over the best way to help children learn to read has only polarized the educational community though less so since the report of the National Reading Panel in 2000. Nonetheless, critics still argue that reading instruction has been out of touch with research in that too many programs minimize the teaching of phoneme-grapheme relationships. The selection of reading programs has often been fueled by debates of philosophical stances and advocacies that have little to do with what research is uncovering about how children learn to read.

  The Good News

  Scientific methods are now available to study how the brain acquires reading skills. In the last two decades, brain researchers have developed new technologies for looking inside the living brain. These technologies fall into two major categories: those that look at brain structure and those that look at brain function. When aimed at the brain, computerized axial tomography (CAT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are very useful diagnostic tools that produce computer images of the brain’s internal structure. For example, they can detect tumors, malformations, and the damage caused by cerebral hemorrhages.

  Different technologies, however, are required to look at how the brain works. An alphabet soup describes the five most common procedures that can be used to isolate and identify the areas of the brain where distinct levels of activity are occurring. The most frequently used technologies are the following:

  • Electroencephalography (EEG)

  • Magnetoencephalography (MEG)

  • Positron emission tomography (PET)

  • Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

  • Functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy (fMRS)

  Table I.1 summarizes how these technologies work and what they measure.

  Using these technologies, researchers have been able to explore how different brains function when carrying out certain tasks, including reading. Here are just a few of the fascinating things that have been uncovered:

  • Novice readers use different cerebral pathways while reading than skilled readers do.

  • People with reading difficulties use different brain regions to decode written text than do typical readers.

  • The brains of people with reading problems are working harder during reading than those of skilled readers.

  • Even though dyslexia is a brain disorder, it is treatable.

  • With proper instructional intervention, the brains of young struggling and dyslexic readers can actually be rewired to use cerebral areas that more closely resemble those used by typical readers.

  Table I.1 Techniques for Mapping Brain Functions

  As a result of these discoveries, it is now possible to identify with a high degree of accuracy those children who are at greatest risk of reading problems, even before the problems develop, to diagnose the problems accurately, and to manage the problems with effective and proven treatment programs (Dehaene, 2009). It is not exaggerating to say that reading is very likely the one area of school curriculum to date where neuroscience and cognitive psychology have made their greatest impact. The brain imaging studies have opened a relatively new field in neuroscience called developmental cognitive neurology (Habib, 2003). Here one observes how the developing brain reacts to various kinds of environmental constraints. Future studies will enable scientists and educators to work together to better understand both the typical brain and the causes and possible treatments for learning deficiencies, including dyslexia. The application of new discoveries in neuroscience to educational practice has spawned a very new field of inquiry called educational neuroscience.

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  I have been asked on many occasions to give specific examples of how the fruits of scientific research can have an impact on educational practice. That question is a lot easier to answer now than it was 15 years ago because recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience have given us a deeper understanding of the brain. We now have more knowledge of our working (short-term) and long-term memory systems, the impact of emotions on learning, and how we acquire language and motor skills. But the greatest contribution to date, in my opinion, is the growing body of research on how the brain learns to read.

  Because reading is essential for success in our society, teaching all children to read is every school district’s highest curriculum priority. Although many children learn to read well, too large a number encounter difficulties. Numerous reasons are cited for this unfortunate situation, such as poor home environment, physical and psychological deficits, and inadequate reading instruction. Regardless of the reasons, teachers of reading are still faced with the awesome responsibility of getting each child to learn the difficult task of reading. The more these teachers know about how the brain learns to read, the more likely they are to choose instructional strategies that will result in successful learning. The purpose of this book is to present what scientists currently believe about how young humans acquire spoken language and then use that capability when learning to read.

  Chapter Contents

  Chapter 1. Learning Spoken Language. Children’s competence in spoken language greatly influences how quickly and successfully they learn to read. This chapter examines how the young brain detects language sounds from the background noise and begins to recognize the words, pitch, and tempo of a native language. It looks at the specialized regions of the brain that work together and manipulate sounds to build words, phrases, and sentences, and at how the brain cleverly groups words and phrases to increase the speed of spoken language comprehension.

  Chapter 2. Learning to Read. This chapter explores the various stages that the brain must go through while learning to read, including the process of building sounds into words, words into phrases, and phrases into sentences. The alphabetic principle is introduced here as well as the roles that working (short-term) and long-term memories play in reading. Also discussed here are the most recent fascinating discoveries that brain imaging scans have revealed about the cerebral mechanisms responsible for decoding written text and the different neural pathways used by beginning, intermediate, and skilled readers.

  Chapter 3. Teaching Reading for Encoding and Decoding. This chapter briefly reviews the history of the debate over whether phonics or whole language is the better method for beginning reading instruction. It cites the scientific studies that have gained a deeper understanding of how the brain learns to read. From these studies come valuable implications that educators can consider when deciding on the components of a reading program involving encoding and decoding, and on selecting instructional strategies in beginning reading that are likely to be more successful with more students.

  Chapter 4. Teaching Reading for Comprehension. The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension. Yet there are students who read fluently but have little understanding of what they are reading. This chapter uses the research in reading comprehension to suggest strategies on how to teach vocabulary and linguistic knowledge, and to offer activities that help build students’ comprehension skills. Reading strategies for older students and English language learners are also included.

  Chapter 5. Recognizing Reading Problems. Because early detection of reading problems is essential for early intervention, this chapter focuses on the potential causes of reading difficulties, including what brain imaging scans have revealed about the nature of struggling readers and dyslexia. Also discussed here are the clues that teachers should look for at various grade levels to determine whether a student is having persistent difficulties with reading.

  Chapter 6. Overcoming Reading Problems. Numerous suggestions are offered in this chapter for teachers and parents to help students overcome their reading problems. The components of early intervention programs are discussed in some detail, as are successful st
rategies for older students. Featured here is a discovery of great interest that came from imaging studies: Certain reading interventions can actually rewire the brains of struggling readers so that they more closely resemble the neural mechanisms used for reading in the brains of skilled readers.

  Chapter 7. Reading in the Content Areas. This chapter discusses the major differences between developmental reading (learning to read) and content-area reading (reading to learn). It presents some tested strategies that secondary school content-area teachers can use with students who are poor readers to help them understand vocabulary and gain a more accurate and deeper understanding of the content material they are reading. It highlights the value of graphic organizers and suggests some reading patterns that are unique to different subject areas.

  Chapter 8. Putting It All Together. Finally, this chapter examines the essential pieces that are needed to develop, select, implement, and support an effective reading program, based on our current scientific understandings of how the brain learns to read. It suggests what beginning readers need to learn, what teachers need to know about teaching reading, and what kind of professional development needs to be implemented to support the reading program. Some suggestions for closing the reading achievement gap are proposed.

  Most of the chapters contain suggestions for translating the research on reading into instructional practice.

  Resources and Common Core State Standards

  The Resources section contains useful information on reading, most of it available on the Internet. At the end of this section are the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading, along with references to the chapters in this book that address each anchor standard.

  The information in this book was current at the time of publication. However, as scientists continue to explore the inner workings of the brain, they will likely discover more about the cerebral mechanisms involved in learning to read. These discoveries should help parents and educators understand more about reading, reading problems, and effective reading instruction.