[Reading-hall-of-fame] Has brain science changed how you teach about reading?

[Cambourne Brian]

Colleagues,
  I'm currently working my way through Stanislas Dehaene (2009) "  
Reading in the Brain", published by Viking Press. I ordered it before  
I left for NCTE and it was waiting for me when I got back to Oz. I  
bought it for a couple of reasons. One was because the author ( whom  
I'd never heard of before) was marketed as "the leading authority on  
the neuroscience of language" . A second was because the book itself  
is supposed to be about  "the complicated partnership of eye and mind  
that transforms printed symbols into sound, music and meaning and  
gives rise to thought",   which is a topic I'm doing some armchair  
research on.

I've included some notes and responses I made to his claims in the  
margin as I read the early chapters of his book in Caps so you can  
discern how  my mind was working as I read.

  Although I haven't finished it yet I have to admit so far I'm  
disappointed by some of the assumptions he asks the reader to  
(unquestioningly) accept. He implies that   the ability to  recognise  
and pronounce words accurately is the same as comprehending the  
meaning of these words in context.  He refers to the decoding-first  
vs the meaning-first debate rather nonchalantly thus: ( p 26)
"Whether our mind goes straight from the written word to its  meaning  
without accessing pronunciation or whether it unconsciously  
transforms letters into sound and then sound into meaning has been  
the topic of considerable discussion."

In  the next paragraph he states:
"Nowadays a consensus has emerged: (NOTE : IT'S A "CONSENSUS" NOT "  
RESEARCH") In adults both reading routes exist and both are  
simultaneously active. We all enjoy access to word meaning which  
spares us from pronouncing the words mentally before we can  
understand them. Nevertheless proficient readers continue to use the  
sounds of words, even if they are unaware of it.(NOTE: THIS CLAIM  
MYSTIFIED ME AND I HAD TO READ IT SEVERAL TIMES TO MAKE SURE I WAS  
READING WHAT WAS ACTUALLY THERE-- MY INITIAL RESPONSE WAS" HOW DOES  
HE KNOW IF IT'S UNCONSCIOUS-- THIS SMACKS A BIT OF LAVOISIER'S  
PHLOGISTON THEORY.)  Not that we articulate words covertly---we do  
not have to move our lips, or even prepare an intention to do so.  
(EVEN THOUGH WE DON'T DO THIS IT STILL HAPPENS???) At a deeper level  
however, information about the pronunciation of words is  
automatically retrieved. Both the lexical and phonological pathways  
operate in parallel and reinforce each other. There is abundant proof  
that we automatically access the speech sounds while we read".  
(emphasis added) (NOTE: I CAN HARDLY WAIT TO  LEARN ABOUT THIS "  
ABUNDANT PROOF")

  This " abundant proof" is  based on the reaction time of  
pronouncing ( NOT COMPREHENDING) lists of words like " rabbit",  
"bountery", "cudolt",  "money",  , " "dimon", "karpit", " nee", AND  
DECIDING WHETHER OR NOT THE LETTERS SPELL OUT AN ENGLISH WORD.  
("dimon" is supposed to be pronounced as " demon", "karpit" as "  
carpet", "nee" as "knee": and so on )

He also  bases this claim on this kind of evidence:
" Mental conversion into sound plays an essential role when we read a  
word for the first time--, the string "Kalashnikov". Initially we can  
possibly access its meaning directly, since we have never seen the  
word spelled out. All we can do is convert it into sound, find that  
the sound pattern is intelligible, and thus through this indirect  
route, come to understand the new word".

  These examples seem to be very tenuous data for the claim that "we   
automatically access speech sounds while we read".

  If he's going to convince me that his claims about decoding to  
sound being an essential prerequisite for comprehension to occur  
before I finish the book, I'm afraid that he'll have to come up with  
some much more  convincing data than these examples to prove to my  
satisfaction that "we automatically access the speech sounds while we  
read".

A few pages later he seems to contradict himself-- on p29 he begins a  
section headed "The Limits of Sound". In this section he seems to   
cast significant doubt on  his  claims above about the "abundant  
proof that we automatically access the speech sounds while we read".

He begins  "The Limits of Sound" section thus:
" Covert access to pronunciation of written words is an automatic  
step in reading, but this conversion may not be indispensable.(NOTE:  
DOES THIS MEAN IT IS "DISPENSABLE"-- THAT IS IT'S NOT AN ESSENTIAL  
PRE-REQUISITE?) Speech-to-sound conversion is often slow and  
inefficient. Our brain thus often tries to retrieve a word's meaning  
using a parallel and more direct pathway that leads straight  from  
the letter string to the associated entry in the mind's  
lexicon." ( my emphasis)

He then describes how reading homophonic words (" maid" and "made")  
can only be done by bypassing sound and going straight to meaning,  
concluding thus, "The very fact that we readily discern multiple  
meanings of such homphonic words shows that we ARE NOT OBLIGED TO  
PRONOUNCE THEM-- another route is available that allows our brain to  
solve ambiguity and go straight to meaning" ( emphasis added).

He then devotes almost a complete paragraph to "the problem for   
purely sound based theories: THE ROUTE FROM SPELLING TO SOUND IS NOT  
A HIGH SPEED HIGHWAY DEVOID OF OBSTACLES"

He illustrates this with the same sets of examples Frank Smith gave  
us years ago, i.e. of irregularly spelled words like " blood" being  
spelt like "food" and "good" but being pronounced like ' mud'. He  
seems to deliver his own " coup de grace" to his earlier claims of  
"mental conversion to sound playing an essential role" when he then  
writes "" SOME WORDS ARE SO EXCEPTIONAL IT IS HARD TO SEE  HOW THEIR  
PRONUNCIATION RE;ATES TO THEIR COMPONENT LETTERS ( "SIGN-SIGNATURE",  
"COLONEL", "YATCH", " THOUGH" ETC.   IN SUCH CASES THE WORD'S  
PRONUNCIATION CANNOT BE COMPUTED WITHOUT PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OF THE  
WORD"  (Emphasis added)

  Wouldn't this apply to all words? Doesn't this cast serious doubt  
on the"Kalashnikov" example cited above as proof of the "Mental  
conversion into sound plays an essential role when we read a word for  
the first time"?

IN MY MIND  DEHANE MIGHT KNOW A GREAT DEAL ABOUT NEUROSCIENCE, BUT   
IN MY MIND (SO FAR) HE DISPLAYS A VERY CONFUSED  UNDERSTANDING OF  
EFFECTIVE, READING,  and/or EFFECTIVE READING PEDAGOGY.

ON THE OTHER HAND WHEN I FINISH THE BOOK IT COULD BE THAT IN LATER  
CHAPTERS HE PRESENTS SUCH POWERFUL EVIDENCE THAT I WILL CHANGE MY MIND.
  I'LL LET YOU ALL KNOW.

  Cheers from down here on a very hoT Sunday afternoon.

Brian Cambourne

Assoc. Prof. ( Dr) Brian Cambourne
Principal Fellow
  Faculty of Education
University of Wollongong
Northfields Rd Wollongong
AUSTRALIA
Phone: Overseas callers
Home 61-244-416182
email<brian_cambourne at uow.edu.au
  Mobile/Cell phone: 0408684368



On 06/12/2009, at 10:32 AM, tsticht at znet.com wrote:

> Colleagues: In 2003, Sally Shawitz published Overcoming Dyslexia: A  
> New
> and Complet Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any  
> Level. Four
> years later, in 2007, Maryanne Wolf published Proust and the Squid:  
> The
> Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Now, two years later, in 2009,
> Stanislas Dehaene has published Reading in the Brain: The Science and
> Evolution of a Human Invention.
>
> In all these books much is discussed about what areas of the brain are
> involved in various reading tasks as indicated by imaging  
> techniques. This
> gives us a lot of information about how the brain functions during
> different reading tasks. All these books seem to point away from whole
> language and toward a phonemcs/phoncs approach to reading instruction,
> Shaywitz and Dehaene most directly.
>
> Dahaene says at the end of his book, "We now know that the whole  
> language
> approach is inefficient: all children regardless of their  
> socioeconomic
> background benefit from explicit and early taching of the  
> corresondence
> between letters and speech sounds.This is a well-established fact,
> corroborated by a great many classroom experiments."
>
> How adout this? Is this a "well established fact" in your opinion?
>
> I'm wondering if any of you have drawn upon this new brain science
> information to change the way you teach about reading instruction  
> to future
> or present teachers?
>
> Tom Sticht
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Reading-hall-of-fame mailing list
> Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
> http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/reading-hall-of-fame

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