Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

by Maryanne Wolf

PHONEME AWARENESS AND THE WISE MOTHER GOOSE

En gland

England

KINDERGARTEN: WHERE PRECURSORS COME TOGETHER

The Second Story

THE WAR ON “WORD POVERTY”

Unbeknownst to them or their families, children who grow up in environments with few or no literacy experiences are already playing catch-up when they enter kindergarten and the primary grades. It is not simply a matter of the number of words unheard and unlearned. When words are not heard, concepts are not learned. When syntactic forms are never encountered, there is less knowledge about the relationship of events in a story. When story forms are never known, there is less ability to infer and to predict. When cultural traditions and the feelings of others are never experienced, there is less understanding of what other people feel.

Yet another study concerns books in the home—any kind of books. In a survey of three communities in Los Angeles, there were startling differences in how many books were available to children. In the most underprivileged community, no children’s books were found in the homes; in the low-income to middle-income community there were, on average, three books; and in the affluent community there were around 200 books. My carefully interwoven tale of toads, words, and syntax goes out the window when such statistics appear. The sheer unavailability of books will have a crushing effect on the word knowledge and world knowledge that should be learned in these early years.

children who come to kindergarten in the bottom twenty-fifth percentile of vocabulary generally remain behind the other children in both vocabulary and reading comprehension. By grade 6 approximately three full grades separate them from their average peers in both vocabulary and reading comprehension; they are even more dramatically behind children whose vocabulary in kindergarten was at or above the seventy-fifth percentile.

In other words, the interrelatedness of vocabulary development and later reading comprehension makes the slow growth of vocabulary in these early years far more ominous than it appears when viewed as one unfortunate phenomenon. Nothing about language development has isolated effects on children.

Many factors that children “bring to the table” in kindergarten can’t be changed. Language development is not one of them. The average household offers ample opportunities to give a child everyth...

EFFECTS OF EAR INFECTIONS ON EARLY LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

THE POSSIBLE EFFECTS OF BILINGUAL ENVIRONMENTS ON LEARNING TO READ

Englishlanguage

English language

Learning to Read in Eldorado, Florence, Philadelphia, and Antigua

Studying the development of early reading, therefore, allows us to peek into the underpinnings of our species’ accomplishment, beginning with the interrelated processes that prepared the child in the first five years and that expand in different, predictable ways over the rest of the development of reading.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Phonological development—how

Orthographic development—how

Semantic and pragmatic development—how

Syntactic development—how

Morphological development,

The reading scholar Jeanne Chall of Harvard taught that reading acquisition moves through a fairly orderly set of steps from pre-reader to expert reader, which we can study, “as if learning natural history or music.”

How Reading Develops

To structure this account, I introduce in the present chapter and Chapter 6 five types of readers: (1) emerging pre-reader, (2) novice reader, (3) decoding reader, (4) fluent comprehending reader, and (5) expert reader. Each type represents dynamic changes in reading development that we move through unknowingly.

Emerging Pre-Reader

The major insight in this period is that reading never just happens to anyone. Emerging reading arises out of years of perceptions, increasing conceptual and social development, and cumulative exposures to oral and written language.

Novice Reader

WHEN “CAT” HAS THREE SOUNDS, NONE OF WHICH IS “MEOW”: PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

“WHO SAID YACHTS ARE TOUGH?”: WHY ORTHOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT PREPARES KIDS TO READ THIS TITLE

DISCOVERING THAT A “BUG” CAN SPY! SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NOVICE READERS

Three related principles in semantic development transcend all pedagogical differences.

Knowing the Meaning Enhances the Reading.

Reading Propels Word Knowledge.

Multiple Meanings Enhance Comprehension.

THE BRAIN OF THE NOVICE READER

Decoding Reader

FROM “BE” TO “BEHEADED”: CONSOLIDATING PHONOLOGICAL AND ORTHOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT FOR DECODING READERS

WHAT’S IN A WORD? THE SEMANTIC, SYNTACTIC, AND MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A DECODING READER, OR NOT

THE “DANGEROUS MOMENT”: APPROACHING FLUENT COMPREHENSION

Fluency is not a matter of speed; it is a matter of being able to utilize all the special knowledge a child has about a word—its letters, letter patterns, meanings, grammatical functions, roots, and endings—fast enough to have time to think and comprehend. Everything about a word contributes to how fast it can be read.

WHAT ABOUT FEELING?

THE UNENDING STORY OF READING’S DEVELOPMENT

I feel certain that if I could read my way back, analytically, through the books of my childhood, the clues to everything could be found. The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child. —ELIZABETH BOWEN

Fluent, Comprehending Reader

So much of a child’s life is lived for others. . . . All the reading I did as a child, behind closed doors, sitting on the bed while the darkness fell around me, was an act of reclamation. This and only this I did for myself. This was the way to make my life my own. —LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ

Comprehension processes grow impressively in such places as these, where children learn to connect prior knowledge, predict dire or good consequences, draw inferences from every danger-filled corner, monitor gaps in their understanding, and interpret how each new clue, revelation, or added piece of knowledge changes what they know. To practice these skills, they learn to unpeel the layers of meaning in a word, a phrase, or a thought. That is, in this long phase of reading development, they leave the surface layers of text to explore the wondrous terrain that lies beneath it.

The reading expert Richard Vacca describes this shift as a development from “fluent decoders” to “strategic readers”—“readers who know how to activate prior knowledge before, during, and after reading, to decide what’s important in a text, to synthesize information, to draw inferences during and after reading, to ask questions, and to self-monitor and repair faulty comprehension.”

Children’s desire to read reflects their immersion in the “reading life.” Comprehension emerges out of all the cognitive, linguistic, emotional, social, and instructional factors in the child’s prior development, and Proust’s “divine pleasure” in immersing oneself in reading pushes it forward.

Celie and Nettie,

TheColor Purple

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom,

Rabbit, Run by John Updike.

Jayber...

A character by Wendell Berry.