photo by Celestial Photography @ flickr

I have finally finished Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf. I have always loved to read (as far back as I can remember) and have a healthy respect for the reading brain, but this book reminded me just exactly how complex reading is.

That anyone can learn to read—it’s practically a miracle, there are so many developmental processes that have to come together. There’s phonological development (understanding the small units of sound that make up words). There’s orthographic development (learning that writing represents oral language, and then learning the features of letters, common letter patterns, and how to spell all these various words). There’s semantic and pragmatic development—learning about the meanings of words and often the multiple meanings of words. There’s syntactic development—learning all the grammatical forms as well as the rules of sentence structure and how events relate to each other in a text. And then there’s morphological development, which is learning the conventions around word formation: prefixes, suffixes and root words.

photo by McBeth @ flickr

Doesn’t it make you impressed with yourself that you learned to read at all? But it’s a long road to reading, starting with the “emerging pre-reader.” Think of Dad holding you on his lap while he reads you a story (or reads the newspaper, for that matter). According to Wolf:

The association between hearing written language and feeling loved provides the best foundation for this long process [of learning to read], and no cognitive scientist or educational researcher could have designed a better one. . . .The more children are spoken to, the more they will understand oral language. The more children are read to, the more they understand all the language around them, and the more developed their vocabulary becomes.

And that’s hugely important because children have to learn about 88,700 written words during their school years. At least 9,000 of these words need to be learned by the end of grade 3!

Wolf ends the book with two fascinating chapters on dyslexia. I learned a lot about how complex dyslexia is, as well as its gifts and challenges. Dyslexics often have remarkable spatial talents and many are able to read equally well upside down or in a mirror. The author’s son is dyslexic and she includes in the book a drawing he did of the Leaning Tower of Pisa—upside down! Many architects are dyslexic, and among the famed with dyslexia are Charles Schwab, the sculptor Rodin, Andy Warhol, Picasso, Danny Glover, Keira Knightley, Whoopi Goldberg, Johnny Depp, John Irving, Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein. An impressive bunch. As Wolf says:

It is in the highest interests of our society to protect the potential contributions of our children with dyslexia. . . .There is a necessity that we help them endure what is difficult and foster their resilience, so that they are prepared to invent the next lightbulb when they are ready.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under Children and Families, Learning To Read. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.