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

[richardallington at aol.com]

 Here is the problem from my point of view (one informed by Strauss and Hruby on the topic): We know almost nothing about how the brain works. The "scans" that charlatans like Shaywitz use are so much scans but snapshots. Anyone who has ever had an MRI has some idea of how this brain evidence is collected. Get slid into a tube and have someone flash words on the mirror you can see. Just when you take the brain snapshot will tell you how your brain responded to a word flashed at you in a tube. I don't know about any other members but reading words flashed at me in a tube is not reading anyway and then to construct/invent explanations of how the brain reads from these snapshots is in itself enough evidence of naivete or stupidity but that doesn't stop people from buying the books these fools write.

 

Dick Allington
University of Tennessee
A209 Claxton
 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: tsticht at znet.com
To: reading-hall-of-fame at nottingham.ac.uk
Sent: Sat, Dec 5, 2009 6:32 pm
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Has brain science changed how you teach about reading?


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



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