Adrian Buck’s Reviews > The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads > Status Update

"If children are more often left to entertain themselves, we would expect they will not only learn to do so, they will learn that sometimes one is bored for a while before there's a payoff." - I stopped playing video games because I found them boring.

"This pattern of data led to the functional equivalence hypothesis" - by far the most interesting idea in this book gets...almost two pages. Obvious to me than for some kinds of learning..anything technical, reference, digital multimedia is far superior to mere reading.

"Other research has shown that students rarely critically evaluate information they find on the web, if they do try to evaluate the credibility of a website, they are likely to focus on the look of the site than source characteristics" - isn't the same true for academics assessing academic journals, cf Sokal affair, etc.

"...comprehension is better if you navigate a book by flipping virtual pages, compared to scrolling..." - I wonder if the opposite was true for our ancestors raised on scrolls.

"Parents and teachers can try to exploit situations where reading is useful to thr child" - my son prefers to use YouTube, which raises the question of whether, with ubiquitous digital video, we are entering a post-literate world.

"[Writers] judge what their readers already know and what must must be made explicit in the text..." - As well as not being up to speed with the interdependence of lexis and grammar, he doesn't seem to be aware of conversational implicature either. This wouldn't be a problem if he wasn't making his limited knowledge of language to inform his model of reading.

"...readers need to know 98% of the [type or token?] words for comfortable comprehension" - what is the relationship between comfort and learning? Does comfort reinforce learning or inhibit it?

"When readers can read by spelling as well as by sound, decoding requires less attention, which leaves more attention for...comprehension" - I think he means when readers recognise whole words rather than individual letters...and working memory rather than attention.

"Indeed, some data show that's it's the development of prosody, and not reading rate per se, that leads to boosts in reading comprehension associated with fluency, but this conclusion is controversial" - not for me it isn't. I see this everyday in class, when a student realises how a sentence is to be read aloud, and simultaneously what it means. A discussion of speech development is sorely missing in this book.

"In fact, this kind of writing was commonly used by teens in the 1990s when texting" - He's wrong here txting(!) exploited the sound of letters and digits not their shape, i.e. C U B4 5. Don't B L8! Once again spoken language is prior.