Wednesday December 3, 2008 5:20 am Lethbridge

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

Part II: How the Brain Learns to Read Over Time

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]
  
  
• To repeat from the previous chapter: phonological, orthographic, semantic, pragmatic, syntactic and morphological development are all inter-related components of language competence. [p. 113]
  
  
• "... five types of readers: (1) emerging pre-reader, (2) novice reader, (3) decoding reader, (4) fluent comprehending reader, and (5) expert reader." [p. 114 - 115]

(1) Emerging pre-reader

• "... the emerging pre-reader sits on 'beloved laps', and learns from the full range of multiple sounds , words, concepts, images, stories, exposure to print, literacy materials, and just plain talk during the first five years of life." [p. 115]
• "Few more heartwarming or exhilerating moments exist than watching children learn that they can actually read, that they can decode the words on a page, and that the words tell a story." [p. 116]

(2) Novice reader

• "The major discovery for a novice reader is ... that the letters connect to the sounds of the language. This is the essence of the alphabetic principle and the foundation for the rest of her reading development." [p. 117]
  
  
• "Learning all the grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules in decoding comes next ... , and this involves one part discovery and many parts hard work." [p, 117]
  
  
• "Novice readers can hear and segment the larger units. Gradually, they learn to hear and manipulate the smaller phonemes in syllables and words, and this ability is one of the best predictors of a child's success in learning to read." [p. 117]
  
  
• "Phonological or sound blending involves the child's larger ability to synthesize - literally, to blend - individual sounds to form larger units such as syllables and words. ... Just like phoneme awareness skills, blending develops steadily over time through practice, and through more and more reading." [p. 118]
  
  
  • Have children "act out" a word by assigning a sound to each child and then have them say them in sequence [p. 118]
    
    
  • Practice with words that have an initial consonant followed by vowel + consonant (e.g. c + at) [p.118]
    
    
  • "Reading out loud" helps expose what types of problems the particular child is experiencing. [p. 119]
    
    
• "Young novice readers tend to move through three short, fairly predictable steps.
  • First, they make errors that are semantically and syntactically appropriate, but that bear no phonological or orthographic resemblance to the real word ('daddy' for 'father').
  • Once they learn some rules of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, their errors show orthographic similarities to the missed word, but little semantic appropriateness ('horse' for 'house').
  • At the end of their time as novice readers, children make errors that show both orthographic and semantic appropriateness ('bat' for 'ball')" [p. 119]
    
    
• "Very important, ... children who succeed most in reading never get arrested in any of these early steps, but move quickly through them." [p. 119]
  
  
• "... orthographic development for novice readers requires multiple exposures to print - practice, by any other name." [p. 121]
  
  
• "... every word read activates many possible meanings" [p. 122]
  
  
• "... semantic development plays much more of a role than many advocates of phonics recognize, but far less of a role than advocates of whole language assume." [p. 122]
  
  
• "Three related principles in semantic development transcend all pedagogical differences.
  
  • Knowing the meaning enhances the reading
  • Reading propels word knowledge
  • Multiple meanings enhance comprehension" [p. 123 - 124]

  Fascinating. I have been focusing on making notes for about an hour, and not once has it occurred to me to make a meta-cognitive or reflective comment. This would seem to indicate that I am so focused on learning new material that I am failing to relate it to any previous knowledge. Further, I am not fluent in the use of terms such as orthographic, phonological or morphological. I usually have to stop for a moment and ask myself, what does that mean again? I am not at the level of automaticity. The solution: practice, repetition and more re-reading of this material. I was not expecting this chapter, or the next, to be a quick read. And I am not disappointed. I just looked up the prefix ortho in google and found it means "straight" or "correct". Thus orthographic means correct graphic or understanding of the letters of the alphabet. My lack of a Latin come back to bite me. Is it generally true that reading specialists tend to have an enriched, and sophisticated, vocabulary for their field? This is fine, and it makes sense, but paradoxically it may also reduce their own effectiveness in communicating with others.

(3) Decoding Reader

• "If you listen to children in the decoding reader phase, you will 'hear' the difference. ... the sound of a smoother, more confident reader on the verge of becoming fluent. [p. 126 - 127]
  
  
• "In this phase of semi-fluency, readers need to add at least 3,000 words to what they can decode, making the thirty-seven common letter patterns learned earlier are no longer enough." [p. 128 -129]

  Where did 37 come from? What are these patterns?

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Tags: psychology, reading