Language at the speed of sight

Mark Seidenberg is a reading researcher who wrote Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It. This book came to my awareness through a mention in another text that I have written about: Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties (see here, here, here and here). He is focused on the idea that many teachers do not know, and consequently implement, the science of reading.  This book addresses the concern in a somewhat abstract way. His major theory is that to teach reading, it is essential to teach alphabetics- the phonetic and orthographic code of our language.

Of core importance to learning to read is speech. Students who enter reading with a developmental delay in speech, poor access to standard English (home language is a dialect of English or a completely different language such as Mandarin), or limited vocabulary will struggle with reading. The focus for these children is intensive Standard English exposure to develop vocabulary and an understanding of standard pronunciation to assist with spelling and recognizing written terms by their orthographic code. In my house my mother pronounced the structure that our car was in as a gar'ge. I could not spell or even determine the number of syllables in the word until high school. Bostonians would "pahk a cah." American Black English has "tin" mints, not "thin" ones. These all compete with matching verbal statements to written ones.

Poor readers are a) burdened with the greatest difficulty in decoding and b) struggle with reading context words and c) are poor guessers (p. 130). A recent spurt of research publication as well as older ones explain how poor readers are more likely to use context clues and yet they are worse at it (for some examples see here, here, here, here, and here). Context clues are useful a small amount of the time in determining words. In the sentence, "The baby has a ____." You might know you need a noun (syntactic clue) but is it a nap, bottle, smile or something else? Without the phonetic clues, you are lost. While context is important and the older students must use context to develop both background knowledge and vocabulary, for students just learning to read, it is the lesser of the skills students need to develop.  The author points out that "phonological information is an essential element of skilled reading in every language and writing system: impairments in the use of this information are typical of poor readers and dyslexics" (p 126).

He offers an interesting chart on characteristics of dyslexics. All dyslexics will not show exactly the same pattern, but these are characteristic to look for. I modified it slightly.

phonology	·         Limited impairment on phonemic tasks: deletion, matching, blending ·         May have other limitations (especially if young) in letter naming and sounds
Reading Aloud	·         Slow, dysfluent and error-prone- especially with irregularly pronounced words ·         Poor at sounding out nonsense words
Processing speed	·         Slow at naming familiar things (rapid automatized naming- RAN) ·         Fluency issues
Orthography	·         Limited knowledge of structure- ex determine legal from illegal letter strings (ex. jn, px versus jam or pixy) ·         Weak spelling- misspelling, misidentifications (rain or rane), dysfluency  (slow, nonautomatic spelling)
Working memory	·         Deficits in non-word repetition and memory span tasks
Language	·         Limited vocabulary and quality ·         Familiarity with a narrower range of sentence structures and expressions ·         Prosody weaknesses

                                                                                                                               (p 152)
The primary identifier in dyslexia is poor phonemic skills.

Dyslexia is not the sole reading challenge. As the author points out,  "every act of reading is also an act of visual perception, learning, memory, language, and the rest. The goal may be comprehending the text, but the bonus is the tuning and refining of these shared systems, which then tend to correlate" (p 164). Students who struggle to read or who are late readers, do not have the practice and refinement in these other areas and so you see a rippling of impact across many areas in school. He expresses concern over the expansion of the concept of literacy to include digital and other ideas because it dilutes focus on reading print and its consequent benefits. "The emphasis on multiple literacies is that it devalues the importance of reading and teaching reading at a time when they need more attention, not less" (p. 297).

He would like to see a revolution in teacher education. Instead of the art of teaching reading, he would like to see instruction in the science of it. Unfortunately he has seen a reluctance to accept the science as a mainstay of teaching preparation programs. Teaching preservice teachers the science behind child development and linguistics would be a good step in the direction of helping teachers understand the underlying elements of learning.

While many states have enacted legislation about teachers needing to learn and use evidence based practices is the teaching of reading (see EdWeek), there exists a gap between evidence-based and research demonstrated high effectively instruction. Further, the deeply ingrained focus on, at best, embedded phonics instruction is a tough mountain to change.