[Reading-hall-of-fame] The Brain is NOT Hard-Wired for Speech

[tsticht at znet.com]

August 11, 2010


The Brain is NOT Hard-Wired for Speech


Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education


As a nation we spend a lot of time and money trying to get children to grow
up and become literate adults, but we spend a lot less time and money
helping children develop their oral language skills. Generally, the latter
are thought to be the automatic results of the brain’s being “hard-wired”
for speech, while reading and writing are unnatural and must be directly
taught. But this is a mistake on two accounts.

First, the brain is not “hard-wired” for speech. If it were, we would all
speak the same language and everyone would express and comprehend this
spoken language without being taught the language. But as it turns out,
what the brain is designed for, i.e., “hard-wired” for, is to let babies
LEARN a spoken language. And indeed, parents, especially mothers, are the
baby’s first teachers and they teach both by simply exposing babies to
spoken language and also by direct instruction using “baby talk” early on
and then by using progressively more extensive and complex language later
on.

Secondly, and unfortunately, and contrary to what might be thought, children
do not learn the oracy skills of auding (listening to and comprehending
speech) or speaking skills much better or much faster than they do literacy
skills. Work in the field of auditory processing difficulties (APD) reveals
a wide range of factors affecting the ability of children and adults in the
processing of spoken language and there are estimates that as many as  five
percent of children may have some sort of difficulty with their development
of oral language production and/or comprehension (see
http://www.ncapd.org/What_is_APD_html).

Another misunderstanding among reading experts is that literacy is an
unnatural activity. For instance, Chapter 1 of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and
the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, starts with the
sentence: “ We were never born to read.” But this is as mistaken as the
thought that “we were born to speak.” The correct view is that we were born
both with the ability to learn to speak and to learn to read. To argue that
the brain is rewired when learning to read is no different from the
argument that the brain is rewired by all acts of learning. If it weren’t,
there would be no learning.

It is also true that most children and adults who are taught to read and
write do, in fact, learn to read and write, at least to some extent. Often,
those who are called “dyslexic” have a great deal of trouble learning to
read. But for a large number of these there are problems with oracy, that
is, they may have an auditory processing disorder that reduces their
ability to hear phonemes and hence they have difficulty learning to decode
or encode the written word.

While we have made extensive efforts to understand how well children and
adults learn literacy, we have very little evidence of the extent to which
oracy skills are developed before, during, and after formal schooling.
Evidence from the study of the oral vocabulary of adults in the
International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) indicated that adults at the low
end of the literacy scale also possessed lower levels of oral vocabulary.
They also performed poorly on a test of spelling, a skill which is highly
related to problems with auditory processing disorders.


It seems likely that our tendency to think that oracy develops naturally and
automatically while literacy is unnatural and only results from direct,
intensive, and extensive instruction has lead us to overlook the
multi-faceted problems that both children and adults experience with the
development of their oracy skills.  Perhaps with a better understanding of
how oracy skills are taught, learned, and developed we will go a long way
toward alleviating many problems in the teaching, learning, and development
of literacy.


tsticht at aznet.net