This is "The Tale of Two Childhoods"
For Child A, it was the best of times:
Every night, he sat on his parent's lap and learned that . . .
Goodnight Moon teaches the names of familiar items, thanks to a mother rabbit.
Mother Goose teaches the poetry of sound awareness through alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and repetition.
Winnie the Pooh has sound relationships between words, like, "funny", "bunny", and "honey".
Curious George presents figurative language when George flies into the sky with balloons and finds that the, " . . . houses looked like toy houses and the people like dolls."
Frog and Toad teaches that empathy means friends help each other out.
George and Martha show that a good friend understands feelings.
"Once upon a time" is a clue to a genre with dragons, castles, and royalty.
These equations apply:
The more he is spoken to < understanding of oral language
The more he is read to < understanding of all language around & the more developed his vocabulary
By the time he is 18 months, his visual, attention, and conceptual systems have developed to where he knows that things have names.
Between 2-5 years old, he is learning an average of 2-4 new words every day.
By the time he is 3 1/2, he has experienced the reciprocal relationship between emotional development and reading. Marcel Proust has said that taking on someone else's perspective lies at the heart of communication through written language, which is now developing for Child A.
He draws a picture of himself playing soccer and labels it "YN".
When he is 5, he will have a 10,000-word repertoire. Best of all, he has associated the act of reading with a sense of being loved. According to Wolf (2007), he has spent 5 years " . . . developing highly complex cognitive, linguistic, perceptual, social, and affective abilities which flourish best in rich environmental interactions". Gee would agree that he is learning to perceive words analytically in the most effortless way. Child A is now ready for the reading discipline.
Now it's time for the second story:
It was the worst of times for Child B
He lives in poverty . . . word poverty. There are no books in his home. He has missed being talked to, read to, and listened to; all the important aspects of early language development. According to a study by Risley and Hart, when he enters Kindergarten he has heard 32 million less words than Child A. He will be in the lower quartile for vocabulary development and will remain behind. By 6th grade, he and Child A will be separated by 3 grade-levels in reading.
An impassioned plea:
Instead of a war zone for Child B, we can make his preschool years rich with language development by something as simple as educating parents about "dinner talk" and providing free developmentally-appropriate books for him before he enters Kindergarten. My 13-yr-old nephew is rounding up as many books as he can for children on the Navajo reservation just outside of Chinle, Arizona and parts of northwestern New Mexico. His dream is to provide every home with books. If you want to help him, please let me know. Leveling the playing field isn't really that hard.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
What conditions promote literacy?
Have you ever thought about how many words you speak in a minute? Speech scientist Grace Yeni-Komshian found it to be 125-180 continuous words per minute. Unlike reading, there are no cues to show we're beginning or ending a word when we're speaking. It makes sense when you think about the first time you heard a foreign language, an incomprehensible stream of sound that happened too quickly for you to even begin to make sense of it!
Maryanne Wolf (2007), maintains that the flow of language promotes literacy. Chapter Three of her book, Proust and the Squid, speaks of the efficiency of an alphabet. She suggests that the alphabet, with its limited number of signs (20-30), orderly presentation, and comprehensive sound representation, allows letter-recognition to happen at almost automatic speeds, giving the brain more time to think.
Ancient Greek civilization is a powerful example of how the alphabet promotes literacy. The most prolific period in Greek history, a time when there were huge gains in mankind's powers of thought, accompanied the establishment of the Greek alphabet in 750 BC. Because the alphabet did away with memorization and other constraints posed by the previous oral tradition, it became more possible for more people.
Which brings me to the Sneetches. Remember Dr. Suess's book where some Sneetches have stars on their bellies and some don't? Even in the literacy debate, we find Sneetches claiming superiority. Socrates himself believed the oral culture was superior to the written one.
Socrates' Objections:
1. Inflexibility of the Written Word
He saw the generative relationship between words and thoughts to be at the heart of education and maintained that this could only happen within a dialogue. Calling written language a "dead discourse", he related it to looking at a painting, a mute object that can't respond. Centuries later, we can agree with Vygotsky that the very process of writing requires an inner dialogue as the writer carefully chooses words that best capture his or her ideas.
2. Memory's Destruction
Socrates was right about the written word minimizing our need for memorization. Wolf (2007), asks her undergraduate students each year how many poems they can recite from memory. Ten years ago, it was between five and ten poems; but now it's one to three. Let's think about those multiplication tables . . . . Listen to this quote by Nicholas Ostler, "[In] modern Guatemala . . . Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to remember them."
3. The Loss of Control over Language
Socrates worried about a superficial understanding of the written word. Like Pandora's box, he felt that the process of unsupervised reading would lead to a loss of control over knowledge. Dave Marvit's speech on YouTube, promotes distributed knowledge as a positive outcome of our civilization's expanded knowledge system.
As you were reading this blog, how many of you thought of how Socrates would feel about the dawning of the digital age of literacy? Do we have our own Sneetches who still feel that "book learning" is superior to a computer screen? Will "continuous partial attention" to an endless flood of information encourage a superficial understanding or will it promote literacy? I believe only time will tell.
Maryanne Wolf (2007), maintains that the flow of language promotes literacy. Chapter Three of her book, Proust and the Squid, speaks of the efficiency of an alphabet. She suggests that the alphabet, with its limited number of signs (20-30), orderly presentation, and comprehensive sound representation, allows letter-recognition to happen at almost automatic speeds, giving the brain more time to think.
Ancient Greek civilization is a powerful example of how the alphabet promotes literacy. The most prolific period in Greek history, a time when there were huge gains in mankind's powers of thought, accompanied the establishment of the Greek alphabet in 750 BC. Because the alphabet did away with memorization and other constraints posed by the previous oral tradition, it became more possible for more people.
Which brings me to the Sneetches. Remember Dr. Suess's book where some Sneetches have stars on their bellies and some don't? Even in the literacy debate, we find Sneetches claiming superiority. Socrates himself believed the oral culture was superior to the written one.
Socrates' Objections:
1. Inflexibility of the Written Word
He saw the generative relationship between words and thoughts to be at the heart of education and maintained that this could only happen within a dialogue. Calling written language a "dead discourse", he related it to looking at a painting, a mute object that can't respond. Centuries later, we can agree with Vygotsky that the very process of writing requires an inner dialogue as the writer carefully chooses words that best capture his or her ideas.
2. Memory's Destruction
Socrates was right about the written word minimizing our need for memorization. Wolf (2007), asks her undergraduate students each year how many poems they can recite from memory. Ten years ago, it was between five and ten poems; but now it's one to three. Let's think about those multiplication tables . . . . Listen to this quote by Nicholas Ostler, "[In] modern Guatemala . . . Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to remember them."
3. The Loss of Control over Language
Socrates worried about a superficial understanding of the written word. Like Pandora's box, he felt that the process of unsupervised reading would lead to a loss of control over knowledge. Dave Marvit's speech on YouTube, promotes distributed knowledge as a positive outcome of our civilization's expanded knowledge system.
As you were reading this blog, how many of you thought of how Socrates would feel about the dawning of the digital age of literacy? Do we have our own Sneetches who still feel that "book learning" is superior to a computer screen? Will "continuous partial attention" to an endless flood of information encourage a superficial understanding or will it promote literacy? I believe only time will tell.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
How do people become literate?
The Egyptian king Psamtik I (664-610 BC) asked this same question. He believed the answer could be found in raising babies in isolation to see how they began to communicate. He commanded two infants to be placed in a shepherd's hut with only a shepherd bringing milk and food to them daily. Because one baby eventually yelled, "bekos", the Phrygian word for "bread", people began to believe that Phrygian was the original language of all humankind, but we have no evidence to support this theory.
It's not as difficult to trace the first written language as it is the first spoken one. We have samples of clay "tokens" dating as far back as 8,000 - 4,000 BC, some in clay envelopes with markings that signified what was inside. This first symbolic representation was probably used to quantify cattle, sheep, etc. As Wolf states (2007), ". . . the world of letters may have begun as an envelope for the world of numbers" (p. 27).
The second breakthrough came when a system of symbols was created that could preserve a person's thoughts over time and space. This Cuneiform writing used pictographs in a rebus-type way that showed a symbol representing its sound. (Do you remember reading rebus stories with pictures of eyes and cans to represent "I can"?) As new civilizations emerged, much was added until the writing system became so complicated that by the time the Akkadian writing system evolved, it took 6 - 7 years to master. (Sound familiar?) The power of reading was restricted to a small, exclusive group of people in the temple and the court.
A final breakthrough came when the hieroglyphic system of the Egyptians evolved into an efficient two-cursive form of writing and they discovered the idea of phonemes by creating a partial alphabet for consonants based on an internal, sound-based structure of words.
History proves that most writing systems hung on to languages of previous cultures. The English language is no exception. It includes Greek, Latin, French, Old English, and many other roots. According to Wolf (2007), it's " . . . a historical mishmash of homage and pragmatism . . at a cost known to every first- and second-grader" (p. 42).
To read a word, a person must identify the letters in the visual association areas of the brain, then use the frontal, temporal, and parietal areas to provide information about the smallest sounds in words (phonemes), and lastly process its meaning, function, and connections to other words in the temporal and parietal lobes. Of course the processing of the reading brain is just one piece of a literate person, although an important one.
So how do people become literate? It's simple . . . right?
It's not as difficult to trace the first written language as it is the first spoken one. We have samples of clay "tokens" dating as far back as 8,000 - 4,000 BC, some in clay envelopes with markings that signified what was inside. This first symbolic representation was probably used to quantify cattle, sheep, etc. As Wolf states (2007), ". . . the world of letters may have begun as an envelope for the world of numbers" (p. 27).
The second breakthrough came when a system of symbols was created that could preserve a person's thoughts over time and space. This Cuneiform writing used pictographs in a rebus-type way that showed a symbol representing its sound. (Do you remember reading rebus stories with pictures of eyes and cans to represent "I can"?) As new civilizations emerged, much was added until the writing system became so complicated that by the time the Akkadian writing system evolved, it took 6 - 7 years to master. (Sound familiar?) The power of reading was restricted to a small, exclusive group of people in the temple and the court.
A final breakthrough came when the hieroglyphic system of the Egyptians evolved into an efficient two-cursive form of writing and they discovered the idea of phonemes by creating a partial alphabet for consonants based on an internal, sound-based structure of words.
History proves that most writing systems hung on to languages of previous cultures. The English language is no exception. It includes Greek, Latin, French, Old English, and many other roots. According to Wolf (2007), it's " . . . a historical mishmash of homage and pragmatism . . at a cost known to every first- and second-grader" (p. 42).
To read a word, a person must identify the letters in the visual association areas of the brain, then use the frontal, temporal, and parietal areas to provide information about the smallest sounds in words (phonemes), and lastly process its meaning, function, and connections to other words in the temporal and parietal lobes. Of course the processing of the reading brain is just one piece of a literate person, although an important one.
So how do people become literate? It's simple . . . right?
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Proust and the Squid
Introduction
I was introduced to blogging about a year and a half ago when my brother started a family blog. I love adding photos and writing about what I'm up to as well as seeing what my brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews are doing. I think of it as an interactive family story.
Last Fall, I began my own blog as part of a class on reading and writing digital texts. I had a funny experience early one morning when I posted an entry and realized I was in my family's blog. Fortunately I fixed it right away. There's definitely something about writing to an audience. I imagine my family would have wondered who I was trying to impress with my textbook entry!
Besides my family blog, two of my nieces have blogs that I really enjoy. One niece is a photographer who digitally scrapbooks and her posts are visually amazing. The other one is a very talented interior designer who posts a new, original idea, along with how-to instructions daily.
As I was searching different blogs, I found First Lady, Michelle Obama's, and was impressed that she would use this forum for public access. Of course the tone or voice she uses is much more formal than the personal ones I enjoy. I also followed a few news blogs in the interest of reading what others had to say about news-worthy events.
Two of my friends at school have set up class blogs. One teaches second graders and the other fifth. The fifth grade teacher has had to set clear expectations, which happens to be my main concern about blogging with students. She found that some were using it just to catch up on what their friends were doing after school hours, instead of staying focused on the book discussion and science experiments. Because of this, she's had to be more involved as a monitor than she had originally planned. All in all, it's been a good experience for both teachers. This is the year I plan to start one with my class.
So now . . . Welcome to my book blog on Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. I chose this book for two reasons. First of all, I really like the author's name. Secondly, I'm interested in what French novelist Marcel Proust and an ordinary squid have to do with "The Story and Science of the Reading Brain", subtitle of the book.
A year ago I took a class on the nature of the reading brain. I was introduced to ideas I had never considered before about how the brain functions. As a cognitive neuroscientist and reading scholar, the author of this book is well-versed in presenting both the nature and nurture aspects of reading.
The book jacket begins with, "The act of reading is a miracle. Every new reader's brain possesses the extraordinary capacity to rearrange itself beyond its original abilities in order to understand written symbols. But how does the brain learn to read?" That's a good enough hook for me. I hope it is for you, too.
The graduate class I'm enrolled in this summer is examining the definition of literacy in a world where the written word is literally at our fingertips. Wolf's introduction shows that this book will attempt to redefine the reading brain in regards to the wealth of digital knowledge available today.
Happy Reading!
I was introduced to blogging about a year and a half ago when my brother started a family blog. I love adding photos and writing about what I'm up to as well as seeing what my brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews are doing. I think of it as an interactive family story.
Last Fall, I began my own blog as part of a class on reading and writing digital texts. I had a funny experience early one morning when I posted an entry and realized I was in my family's blog. Fortunately I fixed it right away. There's definitely something about writing to an audience. I imagine my family would have wondered who I was trying to impress with my textbook entry!
Besides my family blog, two of my nieces have blogs that I really enjoy. One niece is a photographer who digitally scrapbooks and her posts are visually amazing. The other one is a very talented interior designer who posts a new, original idea, along with how-to instructions daily.
As I was searching different blogs, I found First Lady, Michelle Obama's, and was impressed that she would use this forum for public access. Of course the tone or voice she uses is much more formal than the personal ones I enjoy. I also followed a few news blogs in the interest of reading what others had to say about news-worthy events.
Two of my friends at school have set up class blogs. One teaches second graders and the other fifth. The fifth grade teacher has had to set clear expectations, which happens to be my main concern about blogging with students. She found that some were using it just to catch up on what their friends were doing after school hours, instead of staying focused on the book discussion and science experiments. Because of this, she's had to be more involved as a monitor than she had originally planned. All in all, it's been a good experience for both teachers. This is the year I plan to start one with my class.
So now . . . Welcome to my book blog on Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. I chose this book for two reasons. First of all, I really like the author's name. Secondly, I'm interested in what French novelist Marcel Proust and an ordinary squid have to do with "The Story and Science of the Reading Brain", subtitle of the book.
A year ago I took a class on the nature of the reading brain. I was introduced to ideas I had never considered before about how the brain functions. As a cognitive neuroscientist and reading scholar, the author of this book is well-versed in presenting both the nature and nurture aspects of reading.
The book jacket begins with, "The act of reading is a miracle. Every new reader's brain possesses the extraordinary capacity to rearrange itself beyond its original abilities in order to understand written symbols. But how does the brain learn to read?" That's a good enough hook for me. I hope it is for you, too.
The graduate class I'm enrolled in this summer is examining the definition of literacy in a world where the written word is literally at our fingertips. Wolf's introduction shows that this book will attempt to redefine the reading brain in regards to the wealth of digital knowledge available today.
Happy Reading!
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