Skimming over the problem
LANGUAGE AT THE SPEED OF SIGHT FIGHTS TO REOPEN OUR CLOSED BOOK ON LITERACY
Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It By Mark Seidenberg Basic Books 400 pp; $ 37.50
Afew weeks ago, while we were all l ooki ng the other way, the triennial survey comparing the world’s educational systems came out. For the United States, the news wasn’t good. Math scores dropped, while reading numbers weren’t much different from last time. Neither finding puts the Americans on course to lap Singapore anytime soon.
Predictably, of the limited media coverage the survey received in the United States, most articles focused on math and science. Who cares if Johnny can’t read well, so long as he can multiply?
Too often, according to Mark Seidenberg’s important, alarming new book, Language at the Speed of Sight, Johnny can’t read because schools of education didn’t give Johnny’s teachers the proper tools to show him how. Economic inequality is a big problem, too, of course, but kindergartners may be grandparents before that can be redressed. Seidenberg, a veteran cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, makes a strong case for how brain science can help the teaching profession in the meantime.
His by-now-obligatory waltzing subtitle is How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It. By weight, this isn’t quite right. That first third, How We Read, takes up fully two- thirds of the book, leaving only the last hundred pages or so for Seidenberg’s shrewd diagnoses and prescriptions. Reading Language at the Speed of Sight could almost function as a reading experiment itself. Give a volunteer a smart, witty, only occasionally poky primer on the science of reading. Then, on Page 200, replace it with focused, impassioned argument. This test subject, at least, saw his speed and reading comprehension tick up considerably.
Building on decades of steadily improving linguistic and psychological data, Seidenberg’s research relies on “computational modelling” — methodology that a lay readership could probably stand to hear him define more clearly. But his discoveries, and those of his colleagues, lead him to logically watertight conclusions. We learn that, among other things, dyslexia is all too real and should be caught as early as possible; English spelling is a sadistic but nonlethal impediment to slow learners; the reading of books to children is insufficient but indispensable; and some modern pedagogical theories are “zombies that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons such as empirical disconfirmation.”
As they say on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others. Seidenberg’s simmering anger at how teachers themselves are taught erupts over those last hundred pages, and it’s bracing to behold. He starts out sounding like a patient classroom professional trying to keep his voice down and ends by sending more than a few educators to a destination some of them aspire to anyway: the principal’s office.
Take away all of Seidenberg’s helpful tables, charts and other scientific furniture, and his conclusion boils down to this: Human beings learn written language most efficiently in the same way that humanity first learned it, by following the pathway from phonetic speech toward reading. Which is to say phonics.
Count on Language at the Speed of Sight to kick up some blogospheric dust on this point. The “reading wars” have long since pitted the phonics- favouring, “sound it out” camp against educational policymakers’ whole- language “think it through” cohort. Pundits on both sides fight the same battles over and over, just like Civil War re- enactors, only they quote their enemies out of context instead of pretending to shoot them.
To this non- combatant, Seidenberg seems to have science on his side. Still, as he bends over backward to remind us, who can blame some educa- tors for a certain defensiveness these days? If you were a publicschool teacher, besieged by privatizers, union- busters, zealots and profiteers, you might be touchy, too.
Far from privatization, Seidenberg’s specific proposals include transforming insular colleges of education into public, taxpayer- funded institutions; training Teach for America recruits in underfunded schools to become not rookie teachers but supplemental reading tutors; and restoring reading instruction to its rightful place at the heart of traditional literacy. Most of all, as he, teachers and other reading-instruction stakeholders have already joined forces to do in the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, he pleads with those who teach written communication and those who research it to start, at last, communicating with one another.
Language at the Speed of Sight starts out invigoratingly — if somewhat over-generously in the Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 department — and soon enough finds an even higher gear. Seidenberg has that rare knack of sounding reasonable and righteous at the same time. You wish for a longer treatment from him someday of such related challenges as teenage reading, reading on screens and the cognitive neuroscience of something he’s genuinely good at, which is to say, writing.
Seidenberg’s book won’t end the debate between scientists and the educational establishment over how children should learn to read, but it should jump-start an overdue conversation. As with literary theory, the hard problem with the teaching of reading may continue to be how to eradicate old, unsatisfying, jargon- bound approaches once a new generation has already begun teaching them to the next.
Whether it takes phonics, whole- language learning, allsinging, all- dancing teachers, or the gradual introduction of criminal penalties for illiteracy, something has to change. A national reading push would be the moon shot that makes all others possible. How many more studies will it take? We know that readers vote more and volunteer more, and that reading literature deepens empathy. And — as finally, categorically demonstrated in a landmark Yale study last year — that readers live longer.
Control for any variable, for income, for neighbourhood, for anything you please, and proficient reading still makes all the difference in life. A country where only a third of kids can read well, however, is easily controlled.
A NATIONAL READING PUSH WOULD BE THE MOON SHOT.