How the Brain Learns to Read

by David A. Sousa

  In this chapter, we look at three aspects related to the teaching of reading. First, we examine what research is saying about the factors that enhance early literacy skills during a child’s prereading period. We address what kinds of interventions can improve early literacy. Second, recognizing that reorganizing the brain to read means acquiring certain skills, we explore the research findings on what teachers can do to make skill acquisition successful. Finally, we discuss those strategies that help beginning readers become fluent readers through decoding and encoding.

  EARLY LITERACY SKILLS

  After reading the first two chapters, it is clear that the more exposure to and practice with spoken language and print materials prereaders have, the more likely they are to be successful at learning to read (see Figure 3.2). These early literacy skills begin to develop and organize the cerebral networks needed to manage phonemes and morphemes, and to tackle the challenge of the alphabetic principle. This reasoning seems logical, but what research evidence exists to support it? The task of answering that question was undertaken by the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) convened by the U.S. Department of Education, which issued its report in 2008.

  The panel was charged with examining four questions: (1) What skills and abilities can predict later success in reading, spelling, and writing? (2) Which instructional approaches and interventions are linked to later success in these areas? (3) What family environments and other settings are linked to better results in later literacy? and (4) What characteristics of children are related to improved skills and abilities in later literacy? (Shanahan & Lonigan, 2010). After reviewing hundreds of research studies involving thousands of preschool and kindergarten children, the panel found the following:

  Figure 3.2 This diagram shows the factors that research studies have found can predict success in later literacy skills. Note that factors such as socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity are not included here because they were not reliable predictors.

  Predictors of Success

  Six variables emerged that strongly predicted later success in literacy. These variables showed a strong correlation to later skills (i.e., in first and second grade) in decoding, comprehension, and spelling:

  • Knowledge of the alphabet: Knowing the names and sounds of letters.

  • Phonological awareness: The ability to detect, manipulate, or analyze the sounds and auditory aspects of spoken language independent of meaning.

  • Phonological memory: The ability to remember spoken information for a short period of time.

  • Rapid automatized naming of letters and digits: The ability to rapidly name sequences of random letters or digits.

  • Rapid automatized naming of objects and colors: The ability to rapidly name a sequence of repeating random sets of pictures of objects or colors.

  • Writing and writing name: The ability to write letters in isolation or to write one’s name.

  Several other variables appeared, such as print knowledge and visual processing, but their predictive power was weak.

  Successful Instructional Approaches

  Five categories of instructional approaches and interventions revealed positive results in helping these students with later literacy skills:

  • Code-focused interventions: Interventions designed to teach skills related to cracking the alphabetic code. These involve getting children to detect and manipulate the sounds that comprise words, usually though rhyming activities.

  • Shared reading interventions: Interventions that involved reading books to children. The degree of student participation in the shared reading varied, although the more interactive interventions yielded better results in later literacy.

  • Parent and home programs: Interventions by parents, some of whom were taught instructional techniques to use at home with their children. The biggest impact of these interventions was on vocabulary development.

  • Preschool/kindergarten programs: Studies evaluating any aspect of a preschool or kindergarten program, including educational programs, curricula, and policies. These studies showed that the greatest impact was on readiness.

  • Language enhancement interventions: These studies looked at instructional strategies designed to improve young children’s language development. Most were successful at improving oral language skills, including frequency of word use, and the average length of their statements.

  These results demonstrate that there are strategies and interventions that parents as well as preschool and kindergarten teachers can use to improve the literacy development of young children.

  Family Settings and the Child’s Characteristics

  Surprisingly, the research review could not find specific family or child characteristics, such as socioeconomic status, age, race, or ethnicity, that altered the effectiveness of the instructional approaches and interventions. The results here are important signals to teachers to resist the common notion that these family and child characteristics can impede or enhance a child’s ability to acquire literacy skills. Although their opportunities for exposure to literacy may have been fewer, their capacity to fill that gap is not diminished.

  BRAIN RESEARCH AND LEARNING A SKILL

  Reading is a learned skill, and the curriculum programs selected to teach reading must reflect what science continues to learn about how we acquire skills. Research in cognitive neuroscience indicates that learning any skill, including reading, requires some basic elements if such learning is to be successful. These elements include the following:

  • Motivation and attention. Motivation is the key to successfully learning a skill because it keeps students interested in paying attention and in practicing the skill. Getting students’ attention these days is not easy because so many other things in the environment are competing for it. Even beginning readers have already become accustomed to interacting with electronic tablets and similar devices at home. Young children have difficulty focusing on one thing for an extended period of time because their brain’s attention systems are still very immature. Yet those children in preschool who are persistently inattentive during literacy instruction perform more poorly in phonemic awareness and letter naming in kindergarten one year later (Walcott, Scheemaker, & Bielski, 2010).

  Naturally, interest levels and preferences vary among children. Remember, too, that learning to read requires not only focus but also considerable mental effort to sustain it. Teachers of reading can include a variety of motivational strategies, especially those that use technology. However, we need to take care that the technology becomes a means to achieving a reading goal and not an end unto itself. Children do not recognize this difference, but teachers do.

  • Intensity. Learning a new skill requires focus and concentration. Intense focus on a new skill allows the learner’s brain to build more neural support for that skill in a short period of time. If you are planning on running a marathon, occasional jogging will not have sufficient intensity to prepare and train your body. To become a skilled reader, the learner must first focus intently on the basic skills needed to learn the correct letter-to-sound relationships.

  • Practice. For the brain to build and strengthen the neural pathways required to learn a new skill, the learner must be repeatedly exposed to, and process, the material being learned. But the practice cannot be haphazard. Remember, practice makes permanent, so it is important that the activities associated with practice be carefully planned to ensure that the learning being stored is correct. Practice does not have to be boring, either. One of the major criticisms of the total phonics approach was the repetitive and monotonous drills of the phoneme worksheets. Several publishers now have phonological practice lessons on interesting and appealing computer programs. As for reading, practice brings about true accomplishment. Studies show that the more a person reads, the better that person will be at reading at any age and at any level of proficiency.

  • Cross-training. Learning any skill is easier if it can be supported by other skills the student already
knows or is learning at the same time. Cross-training involves bringing together a wide range of skills that reinforce overall comprehension of the material. Doing so allows seemingly unrelated neural networks to establish connections, expanding the learner’s ability to decode unfamiliar words and comprehend more material. Accomplished reading requires that the learner be simultaneously proficient in many different skills, such as spoken language fluency and comprehension.

  • Adaptivity. When teaching a new skill, the teacher needs to assess the student’s current skill level and adapt the new instruction accordingly. If the instructional skill level is too low, the learner may get bored and lose interest. If the skill level is too high, the learner may get frustrated and lose motivation. The secret is to differentiate instruction by finding that in-between level where the learning challenge is sufficient to motivate but not seemingly unattainable. Reading instruction should include constant monitoring of the learner’s progress so that the teacher can adapt the instructional strategies as needed.

  • Awareness of skill level. As readers gain competence in the alphabetic principle, they begin to realize that they can read and pronounce many words that they have never seen or heard before. Of course, they will make mistakes when encountering a word like choir, whose onset pronunciation is very different from more common words like chair, chicken, and cheese. Nonetheless, their success in decoding unfamiliar words empowers them while giving them the confidence to continue to practice and raise their skill level.

  None of the elements mentioned above will come as a surprise to any person who has taught. Nonetheless, they are worth reviewing. With so many reading programs available, these elements become important measures that teachers can use to assess the effectiveness of materials designed to support the teaching of reading.

  MODERN METHODS OF TEACHING READING

  Over the past decade, trying to determine the components of a successful reading program has not been easy. First came the reports of the National Research Council (Snow et al., 1998) and the National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000). Both reports concluded that, based on scientific evidence, reading programs that included a strong phonics component were more likely to be successful with more beginning readers than programs lacking this component. The reports were met with some criticism but gained support from the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2001, which required districts to use scientifically based reading programs. To this day, some educators and politicians are not clear about what “scientifically based” means.

  Meanwhile, the research using fMRI and other scanning technology continues to offer new insights into how the brains of beginning, skilled, and struggling readers differ. Furthermore, intensive interventions with struggling readers (described in Chapter 6) changed their fMRI images to resemble those of typical readers.

  Educators need to make important recommendations regarding the type of reading program that is most likely to help young children learn to read successfully. Accordingly, let’s consider what the major research studies have revealed about how the brain learns to read. Also included is research related to how writing improves reading. The evidence presented here comes from the following sources:

  • The National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000). Issued in 2000, the NRP report was the result of two years of effort that included reviewing thousands of research studies on reading, interviewing parents and teachers, and recommending the most effective and scientifically proven methods for teaching reading. The NRP report took into account the report of the National Research Council and focused on the specific topics of alphabetics (phonemic awareness and phonics), fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension, teacher preparation, and the use of computer technology in reading instruction. Many of the recommendations of the NRP were translated into teaching strategies in a publication developed by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement and funded by the National Institute for Literacy (NIFL, 2001).

  • The National Early Literacy Panel Report (NELP, 2008). As we discussed earlier, this panel looked at hundreds of research reports involving preschool and kindergarten children to determine what skills and abilities can predict later success in reading, spelling, and writing. It also determined which instructional approaches and interventions are linked to later success in these areas.

  • Writing to Read: Evidence of How Writing Can Improve Reading (Graham & Hebert, 2010). This report looked at research showing that writing about material enhanced students’ reading comprehension, that teaching writing strengthens students’ reading skills, and that increasing writing improves how well students read.

  • Laboratory Studies. Experimental studies conducted in laboratories are also providing new information about the reading process. Using brain imaging and mapping technologies, scientists are learning more about the brain regions associated with the different stages of learning to read. More than 70,000 articles written between 2003 and 2013 can be found in scientific journals worldwide dealing with reading and the brain. Many of them include looking at the brains of people with reading problems. Findings from some of these studies offer valuable insights for teachers of reading to consider.

  • Best Practices Research. Best practices research on reading conducted in schools involved case studies that assessed whether certain instructional practices were more effective than others. These studies examined the practices of exemplary teachers to sort out what they were doing differently than others that resulted in greater student achievement. Several of these reports have been published recently, and they offer valuable insights into the effectiveness of various strategies for teaching reading. Although some of the studies involved a small sample of students, their results cannot be dismissed.

  • Evidence-Based Practices. Other research studies have looked at the effectiveness of practices in longitudinal and multilevel designs rather than just at exemplary teachers. Results from these types of studies are particularly valuable because they generally involve a large sample of students whose achievement is monitored for a year or more.

  In this and the following chapters, we will discuss the findings of research studies and reports as they apply to the teaching of reading to children who do not display reading difficulties. Diagnosing children with reading problems, and how to address those problems, will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Figure 3.3 reminds us that reading involves the two major processes of decoding and comprehension. Successful decoding includes phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency. Comprehension requires a developed vocabulary, interaction with the text, and a teacher whose training provides strategies for advancing the learner’s ability to understand what is read.

  RESEARCH FINDINGS ON READING INSTRUCTION—DECODING

  Phonemic Awareness Instruction

  Phonemic awareness, you will recall, is the ability to manipulate individual sounds in spoken language. Children have phonemic awareness when they can (1) recognize words beginning with the same sound, (2) isolate and say the first and last sounds in a word, (3) combine and blend sounds in a word, and (4) break a word into its separate sounds. Phonemic awareness and letter knowledge are the two best predictors of how well children will learn to read during their first two years of instruction. Even for middle and high school students, phonemic awareness is a good predictor of their ability to read accurately and quickly (Shaywitz, 2003). Phonemic awareness can be taught and learned.

  Figure 3.3 Successful reading is the result of the interaction between the decoding and comprehension processes. Decoding includes phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency. Comprehension requires adequate vocabulary and linguistic knowledge, and interaction with text to capture meaning.

  The findings in the research (NIFL, 2001; Shankweiler & Fowler, 2004) show that phonemic awareness instruction

  • helps children learn to read. Phonemic awareness is the first step in mastering the alphabetic principle, the ability to map letters onto the spoken sounds of language. As children’s mapping skills get better, they can
read faster and with greater comprehension;

  • helps children learn to spell. Children who have phonemic awareness understand that letters and sounds are related in a particular way, and that these relationships are important in spelling;

  • is most effective when children are taught to manipulate phonemes while handling cutouts of the letters of the alphabet that represent those phonemes. This allows children to see how phonemic awareness relates to their reading and writing. Learning how to blend letters with phonemes helps them to read words, and learning to segment letters with sounds helps them to spell words;

  • is most effective when it focuses on only one or two types of phoneme manipulation, rather than several types. Teaching too many types at once confuses children and may not allow enough time to teach each type well. Another possibility is that it may inadvertently result in teaching more difficult types before the children have learned the simpler ones; and

  • is effective under a variety of teaching conditions with a variety of learners across a range of grade and age levels. Furthermore, the improvements in reading lasted well beyond the end of the phonemic awareness training, indicating mastery in most children.

  Recent brain imaging studies have also shown the following:

  • Effective practice can build new neural circuits. After children are introduced to new letter-sound relationships, additional practice is necessary to ensure that the learning is committed to long-term memory.

  • Learning to read depends critically on mapping the letters and the spellings of words onto the sounds of speech and speech units they represent in order to develop the visual word form area.