Banter Speech & Language

Sydney speech pathologists helping adults and children speak for themselves.

Literacy

Beginning readers’ brains are not the same as skilled readers’ brains, so stop teaching beginners to read like they are adult experts

· ·

Unlike speech and oral language (talking and listening), reading is biologically unnatural. Most (not all) people learn to understand and to speak their first language without much fuss. But everyone – in every generation, from every culture, in any language – needs to learn to read. As a species, we’ve only been doing it for a bit over 5000 years.

For some people, learning to read happens easily. For others – including people with dyslexia and reading comprehension problems – learning to read can be a lifelong struggle.

Learning to read changes the brain

Brain plasticity – also called ‘neuroplasticity’ – is the ability of the brain to modify its connections or to rewire itself. Without brain plasticity, the brain would not be able to develop from infancy to adulthood, or recover from brain damage (Banks, 2016).

At birth, we are not wired to read – there is no specialised “reading centre” in the brain. Instead, researchers think that most of us are able to ‘recycle’ evolutionary older brain circuits with similar underlying functions – e.g. general visual processing – to recognise written word forms. This is called the ‘neuronal recycling hypothesis’ (e.g. Dehaene & Cohen, 2007).

Many reading scientists think that learning to read consists of creating mappings (associations) between:

  • visual representations (letters and written words); 
  • phonological representations (speech sounds); and
  • semantic representations (word meanings).

These three-sided mappings are the focus of the ‘triangle model of reading’ (e.g. Seidenberg, 2005). This model suggests that learning to read requires us to:

  • look at written words, sentences and texts; and
  • convert them into oral (spoken) language, so that we can understand them (e.g. Dehaene & Cohen, 2007).

This model is consistent with the evidence-based ‘Simple View of Reading’, which you can read more about here and here and here. 

Learning to read: the print-speech convergence

To learn to read, we have to learn to integrate (combine into a useful whole):

  • auditory information (speech and oral language comprehension); with 
  • visual language information (recognising words). 

Learning to read results in a brain network that brings together speech, language and print recognition: an overlap in activation during reading tasks. Some researchers call this the ‘print-speech convergence’: a brain signature of successful literacy acquisition (Rueckl et al., 2015). 

The development of print-speech convergence can be seen in emerging readers, but not in pre-readers of the same ages. This suggests that learning to read induces (influences or causes) speech-print convergence (Chyl et al., 2018).

The dual-stream model of reading

The brain’s organisation for reading is different for beginners and for skilled readers. The brain changes as beginners learn to read (e.g. Dehaene et al., 2015; and Pugh et al., 2001). To understand what this means in a bit more detail, we need to understand some very basic brain anatomy and a theory called the ‘dual-stream model of reading’ (Marks et al., 2019; and Pugh et al., 2001):

Source: Selket, 2007.

This diagram shows a (very simplified) outline of the human brain visual system. There are two main streams to know about that are relevant for reading: 

  • the dorsal stream or system, which is marked in green; and
  • the ventral stream or system, which is marked in purple. 

For developing readers, the dorsal (green) system predominates at first. This stream is associated with analytic processing for learning to integrate the:

  • orthographic (letters/spelling); 
  • phonological (speech sound); and 
  • lexical-semantic (word comprehension/meaning) 

features of printed words. This stream is most involved in the slow, effortful learning that’s needed to build the foundations for reading. We have summarised some of the key research about how best to teach early reading skills here.

As beginners become more skilled, the ventral (purple) system plays an increasingly important role in the processing of reading, facilitating fast, fluent word recognition that does not require effortful decoding. To explore this almost magical process in more detail, you need to learn more about specific dual pathway models of reading, e.g. the DRC model (Coltheart et al., 2001), the Triangle Model (Harm & Seidenberg, 2004) and the CDP+ model (Perry et al., 2010), which are beyond the scope of this article. It’s also useful to learn about the Self-Teaching Hypothesis (e.g. Share, 1995), which we touch on here.

Growing evidence

Evidence for these ideas continues to mount. For example, recent research by He and colleagues on child beginners (aged 9-12 years) and skilled adult readers of Chinese (aged 20-21 years), using a Chinese word-sound matching tasks in speech and print, showed that:

  • skilled adult readers demonstrated greater speech-print convergence than children who were beginning to read;
  • consistent with the dual-stream model of reading, coactivation in the dorsal stream predominated for children, whereas coactivation in the ventral stream predominated in adults; and
  • greater visual-model specialisation was observed with development. 

In other words, the researchers found clear evidence of developmental changes in readers’ print-speech networks during word-sound matching processes. (The study is cited as our primary source below, with a link to the full paper.) These findings are consistent broadly with studies using alphabetic languages (e.g. Chyl et al., 2018; Marks et al., 2019; and Preston et al., 2016).* 

Bottom line

When we are teaching children and adults how to read, we must remember that:

  • reading is biologically unnatural: no one is wired to do it from birth;
  • the brain needs to rewire itself to become good at reading; and 
  • rewiring the brain to read takes lots of time and effort, and comes more easily to some, than to others.

We can help beginners learn to read by:

Beginners are not experts. Beginning artists can’t paint like Leonardo da Vinci or Jackson Pollock. Beginner composers can’t write music like Johann Sebastian Bach, John Williams, or Prince. Beginning readers can’t read like Maria Popova, James Clear, Mortimer Adler, Octavia E Butler, Warren Buffett,  Mahatma Gandhi  – or even just you or me.

Related articles:

Principal source: 

Yin He, Xin Liu, Jiali Hu, Emily S. Nichols, Chunming Lu & Li Liu (2021). Difference Between Children and Adults in the Print-speech Coactivated Network, Scientific Studies of Reading, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2021.1965607 https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2021.1965607

An introduction to neuroplasticity: What is brain plasticity and why is it so important?

*In studies of alphabetic languages, there were some differences from the findings in He et al., 2021, including significant co-activation of the dorsal posterior temporal regions of the brain in beginning child readers. The researchers speculate that this may be due to the differences between alphabetic and non-alphabetic writing systems.

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

Stories help students to understand and remember new information. Here’s why.

· ·

When I think about gravity, the first thing that pops into my head is an image of an apple falling off the tree and onto Isaac Newton’s head. For water displacement, it’s Archimedes leaping out of a bathtub and running home naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!”. When I hear Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, I imagine the almost completely deaf composer continuing to wave his arms furiously, well after the orchestra had finished playing. 

Many historians question whether these events occurred. It’s likely that they didn’t – at least not in the way I read about them at school. But stories like these helped me to learn about physics, maths, and music. And I still remember them decades on. 

If I go back to some of my earliest memories, I realise that I learned many life lessons being told (and later, reading) stories and fables about the importance of things like perseverance and patience, kindness, telling the truth, the importance of giving to others, flexibility and inventiveness under pressure, and avoiding greed.  These were stories I was keen to pass on to my own children as soon as they were old enough.

Even when I think about complex topics, like the causes of World War I, it’s again the stories that come first. An image of the doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife sitting in that black car on the streets of Sarajevo is much easier to summon than more abstract thoughts about the complex interplay of European colonialism, nationalism, and the disruptions caused by industrial, scientific and political revolutions. This is both the advantage and drawback of stories: they are easier to remember, but can oversimplify events and ideas, and lead to bias when a good story trumps the truth.

Reading is one of the best ways we have to learn new information. True, we learn from non-fiction. But stories – also known as narratives – are more easily understood and recalled.  

Why?

Stories and essays differ in purpose and structure

Written narratives include short stories and novels. They are usually written to entertain readers, and follow a familiar structure, which is known as “story grammar”. Story grammar includes:

  • setting: the story’s time and place; 
  • plot: the things that happen in the story, which centre around the goals of the main character (also known as the “protagonist”) and which drive character actions and emotional responses. Most commonly, events progress through a chronological order of goal-centred events;
  • characters with conflicting goals: the goals of the different characters conflict, creating a tension that builds to a climax; and
  • resolution: in which the goals of the protagonist are either achieved or remain out of reach.

Many visual aids exist to help students to understand story grammar. Here’s the one we use: 

Essays, textbooks, non-fiction articles, and manuals are all examples of expository texts. “Expository” means “intended to describe or explain something”. Expository texts are written to inform readers, communicating information and ideas about a specific topic. They often contain descriptions, definitions, ideas, and explanations that are structured and supported by arguments. Their structure often looks like a pyramid, with the theme or topic introduced first (at the pyramid tip) and and the theme subsequently elaborated at length.

So why are stories easier to understand and to remember than essays?

We don’t know for sure. But there are a several good theories:

  • In their structure, stories resemble our everyday lives. In parallel with the structure of stories, most of us experience life in the “real word” as:
    • a series of events that happen for a reason in chronological order (see more about sequencing as an aid to comprehension here);
    • organised around personal goals; and
    • presenting us with a series of obstacles to achieving our goals, which we struggle with and either overcome or fail to achieve, resulting in emotional experiences.  
  • The content of stories maps closely to our everyday experiences. Even if set in space, or fantasy worlds, stories often focus on social relationships and the conflicts that inevitably result from conflicting goals. Most stories involve themes of familiar topics for most humans, including friendship, conflict, love, and separation, and we all have some experience with these topics. Most stories use the vocabulary of traits, conflict and emotions, which mirror how we communicate our own experiences.
  • Most of us are more familiar with the structure and at least some of the content of stories. As such, we have better prior knowledge of what to expect from a story. We can generate more knowledge-based inferences about stories, which aids our comprehension of them. For example, if we read a story about a boy who is rejected by his classmates and has to eat his lunch alone, most of us will infer from our own experiences of rejection that the boy feels hurt and lonely, without the author needing to spell it out for us. You can read more about inferencing here and here.
  • Many of the things we read in expository texts are new concepts: things that, by definition, we don’t know much about. We can’t rely as much on our general knowledge, and our understanding will depend on our knowledge of the specific topic or domain.
  • Stories are a prominent part of human history across cultures. Before reading and writing, oral storytelling was the primary mode of communication. It still is in many cultures. We use stories to retain and transmit information from generation to generation. Some scientists think that stories and storytelling gave our early ancestors an evolutionary advantage, including the ability to share survival-dependent information across generations, e.g. about poisonous plants, dangerous places, and predators. (You can read more about this type of “primary knowledge” here.)
  • We are exposed to stories from the very beginning – from early childhood, and sometimes from before we have the ability to speak. Stories are the most common type of text encountered during early schooling, with some students being introduced to expository texts as late as at the ages of 8-9 years. (As an aside, that’s one reason I recommend introducing and using more nonfiction books to preschoolers and younger students here.)
  • Stories may be easier to remember because they provoke emotions. As we read stories, we experience and mentally represent the emotional states of the characters. Emotional events are more deeply imprinted on the mind, and can create “flash-bulb” memories. 

New research confirms that stories are easier to understand and recall than essays

In 2021, Raymond A. Mar and colleagues published a meta-analysis of studies looking at memory and comprehension in stories versus expository texts. Most of the information in this article comes from this paper (see citation below).

Based on 75 studies and data from more than 33,000 participants, the researchers confirmed that stories were more easily understood and recalled than essays. In other words, they found that people have an easier time understanding and recalling information presented in a story compared to that presented in an essay.

Bottom line

When teaching students, we should think about the benefits of introducing new information in stories to exploit the narrative advantage. But:

  • we should recognise that narratives will not always be appropriate or efficient – particularly when the purpose of the text is to inform people who already have significant domain or subject matter knowledge on the topic. But storytelling techniques can still liven up a dry topic and make it easier for readers to understand. Using techniques common in mixed genres, like narrative journalism, for example, may give us the best of both worlds.
  • we must be wary of narrative fallacy, the tendency to make connections between things and to impose our imaginations on arrangements of data, and where we see patterns where none exist. This is especially important in science, where correlation does not always mean causation, and where we are all vulnerable to being misled by stories.

Main source: Mar, R.A., Li, J., Nguyen, A.T.P., & Ta, C.P. (2021). Memory and comprehension of narrative versus expository texts: A meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28: 732-749.

Related articles:

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

What are the priorities for early reading instruction: should we work on executive functions or focus on word decoding and oral language skills?

· ·

The Simple View of Reading, originally proposed in 1986 by Gough and Tunmer, suggests that reading comprehension in early school years is best predicted by two factors:

  • the child’s fluent word decoding; and 
  • the child’s oral language skills. 

For example, studies have shown that fluent decoding and language skills, together with the effects of their interactions, explain more than 96% of the variance in students’ early reading comprehension development (e.g. Hjetland et al., 2018). You can read more about the Simple View of Reading here and here.

Some researchers think that a third factor has an important, additional, part to play in reading development: executive functions.

What does “executive functions” mean?

Executive functions are hard to define and even harder to measure. They are a set of top-down cognitive abilities that control thoughts and behaviours that include:

  • verbal working memory, e.g. the ability to recall chunks of word-related information, like lists of numbers or words in sequence;
  • visuospatial memory, e.g. the ability to mimic a sequence of movements, as in the famous “Simon” game of the 1980s; 
  • inhibition, e.g. the the ability to rapidly name opposite shapes (e.g. “say square when you see a circle”) or the opposite direction (e.g. “say down when the arrow is pointing up”); 
  • shifting or cognitive flexibility, e.g. tasks like saying the correct shape or arrow direction only if the object is coloured white, and the opposite shape or arrow direction if the item is black; 
  • planning, e.g. using strategies before, during, and after tasks to achieve a desired objective; and
  • selective and sustained attention, e.g. the ability to identify targets among distractors.

There are plausible reasons why each of these functions may play a role in improving reading comprehension.   

But do they?

Recent research, conducted with Romanian-speaking second graders, suggests that:

  • executive functions, as with decoding and language skills, have a strong association with reading comprehension; but
  • executive functions do not have a significant direct effect on the development of reading comprehension in early years beyond fluent decoding and oral language skills (at least in languages like Romanian, which have relatively transparent orthography); and
  • fluent decoding and oral language skills explained 92% of the variance in the students’ reading comprehension, providing further support for the Simple View of Reading.

In other words, executive functions did not predict reading comprehension skills beyond the effects of fluent decoding and language skills.

These results were consistent with those from an earlier US study conducted with children aged 9-14 years in the US (Spencer et al., 2019). Together, the results suggest that the Simple View of Reading does not need to be updated to include executive functions as a third factor.

Clinical bottom line: What does this research mean for early reading instruction?

If we want to improve students’ reading comprehension skills, we should prioritise teaching students word decoding skills – especially in the early stages of reading development – and oral language skills, rather than spending our scarce time and money working on discrete executive functions like working memory and cognitive flexibility. 

You can read a lot more about the science of reading, and what it means for early reading instruction here.

Principal Source:

Dolean, D.D., Lervåg, A., Visu-Petra, L., and Melby-Lervåg, M. (2021). Language skills, and not executive functions, predict the development of reading comprehension of early readers: evidence from an orthographically transparent language. Reading and Writing, 34, 1491–1512. Available here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11145-020-10107-4

Related articles:

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

The Scatter-Slayer Adventures: The Scarecrow and Bear Fair in the Land of Nowhere

· ·

You can feel it in the air. You are closing in on the final battle. But. Not. Quite. Yet. 

To get to Miss Sunday, you must first outwit her henchmen – the Bear and the Scarecrow – in their scary (but silly) lair. And you’re right to be wary about that broken-down old mare who watches you from the back paddock, For, in the Land of Nowhere, things are not always as they seem… 

Set in an abandoned fairground, this is the 11th and penultimate instalment of the Scatter-Slayer’s Extended Code Decodable Adventures, focusing on reading <air> and <are> words like “hair” and “care”. Beware! Take care!

DOWNLOAD NOW
DOWNLOAD NOW

For the first 10 Scatter-Slayer Adventures, check out:

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

The Spoiled Boy: the next exciting instalment of our Scatter-Slayer decodable reader series

· ·

Introducing The Spoiled Boy:

“The boy wears a crown, so you know he must be royal. But he looks silly sitting so importantly in his chair – like a toy doll.”

Learning to decode words using knowledge of the extended code doesn’t have to be dull.

In this, the tenth and latest of our select-your-sequel Scatter-Slayer series of adventure stories, we focus on words containing <oi> and <oy>.

We’ve added:

  • screen friendliness, so that our stories can be played on phones, iPads, other devices, laptops, and smart boards (as well as in print if you prefer);
  • simple sound effects and black-and-white animations (in Google Slides) to increase engagement without distracting readers from the text (or letting them guess from the pictures);
  • second person perspective, so readers are reading about themselves (“you”);
  • length (52 pages), so you can work on reading fluency (rate, accuracy, and expression) at the same time as word decoding;
  • text in a large, sans serif font with lots of white space and not too many words per page;
  • suspense, drama, intrigue, and silliness increases interest;
  • some Tier 2 vocabulary to help stimulate oral language development; and
  • choice, so readers (and parents, educators) are in control of which tale comes next.

We designed this inexpensive resource for students who are learning or revising the extended code, including older students with reading difficulties, and students who are interested in fantasy and adventure tales.

download now

Here’s a preview:

We hope you like it!

download now
David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

Check out our therapy and provider resources Go to our shop