Tuesday December 2, 2008 7:30 am Lethbridge

Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the Squid.

Part II: How the Brain Learns to Read Over Time

Chapter 4. The Beginnings of Reading Development, or Not

• "Decade after decade of research shows that the amount of time a child spends listening to parents and other loved ones read is a good predictor of the level of reading attained years later." [p. 82]

  This is certainly true in the case of our family.

• "The association between hearing written language and feeling loved [while being held and read to] provides the best foundation for this long process [of emergent or early literacy]." [p. 83]
  
  
• "The next step in the process involves a growing understanding of pictures. ... Underlying this development is a visual system that is fully functional by six months, an attention system that has a long road ahead to maturity, and a conceptual system that grows by leaps and bounds each day. As the ability to pay attention increases with each passing month, so too does the infant's knowledge of familiar visual images, and his or her curiosity about novel ones." [p. 83]
  
  
• "As children's perceptual and attention abilities grow, they engage with the most important precursor for reading, early language development, and with it the pivotal insight that things like ponies and dogs have names. ... But the realization that everything has its own name typically comes at around eighteen months." [p. 83 - 84]
  
  
• "This intertwining of oral language, cognition, and written language makes early childhood one of the richest times for language growth." [p. 84]
  
  
• "... the various elements of oral language...
  
  • phonological development - evolving ability to hear, discriminate, segment and manipulate the phonemes in words
  • semantic development - increasing vocabulary and the meanings of words
  • syntactic development - acquiring and using the grammatical relationship within language
  • morphological development - acquisition and use of the smallest units of meaning (e.g. adding an s for plurals)
  • pragmatic development - ability to perceive and use the social-cultural rules of language in its natural context." [p.84 - 85]
    
    
• "All of these factors are either nurtured or neglected by the child's environment." [p. 85]
  
  
• "At work here is a reciprocal relationship between emotional development and reading. Young children learn to experience new feelings thorough exposure to reading, which, in turn, prepares them to understand more complex emotions." [p. 85]

  Reading, indeed all aspects of psychological and physical growth are highly interrelated. Nothing involving living organisms is simple, and with larger organisms it can be incredibly complex. Of course. Saying that a parent should read to their young children may seem simple, but the underlying reasons why this is good advice is an interlocking and recursive web of factors.

• "The work of my research group over many years indicates that the ability to name objects when a child is very young, and then to name letters, as the child matures, provides a fundamental predictor of how efficiently the rest of the reading circuit will develop over time." [p. 93]
  
  
• "... What we learn from this research is that many efforts to teach a child to read before four or five years of age are biologically precipitate and potentially counterproductive for many children." [p. 96]
  
  
• "Many wonderful things can happen before age five that are developmentally appropriate and facilitate both later reading and enjoyment of preschool without explicit reading instruction. [Two examples are beginning to write, and listening to poetry]
  
  
• "... there are startling differences in the number of books available to children ... the sheer unavailability of books will have a crushing effect on the word knowledge and world knowledge that should be learned in these early years." [p. 103]
• "another ... of the major contributors to later reading was simply the amount of time for 'talk around dinner' " [p. 103]

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

• "And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did ... [Anna Quindlen] ". [p. 109]

Tags: psychology, reading