https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8484-0629
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Abstract
Significant challenges exist globally regarding literacy teaching and learning. To address these challenges, key features of how the brain works should be taken into account. First, perception is an active process based in detection of errors in hierarchical predictions of sensory data and action outcomes. Reading is a particular case of this non-linear predictive process. Second, emotions play a key role in underlying cognitive functioning, including oral and written language. Negative emotions undermine motivation to learn. Third, there is not the fundamental difference between listening/speaking and reading/writing often alleged on the basis of evolutionary arguments. Both are socio-cultural practices that are driven through the communication imperative of the social brain. Fourth, both listening and reading are contextually occurring pyscho-social practices of understanding, shaped by current knowledge and cultural contexts and practices. Fifth, the natural operation of the brain is not rule-based, as is supposed in the standard view of linguistics: it is prediction, based on statistical pattern recognition. This all calls into question narrow interpretations of the widely quoted “Simple View of Reading”, which argues that explicit decoding is the necessary route to comprehension. One of the two neural routes to reading does not involve such explicit decoding processes, and can be activated from the earliest years. An integrated view of brain function reflecting the non-linear contextual nature of the reading process implies that an ongoing focus on personal meaning and understanding from the very beginning provides positive conditions for learning all aspects of reading and writing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank Eva Bonda, Thomas Parr, and Tina Bruce for helpful comments, Mark Solms for providing , Mandy Darling for (re)drawing the figures, and Roland Eastman for extremely helpful discussions that shaped , as well as regarding details of the text. We thank two referees for comments that have materially improved the paper.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 These terms became widely used in South Africa since the President of South Africa called for all children to “read for meaning” by aged 10 in his 2019 State of the Nation Address, after being alerted to the severity of the challenges following these results.
2 We use the terms skills based to refer to “part to whole” views of early literacy teaching which, may differ in detail, but all start from the “bottom up” with phonics and other technical skills, also referred to as “phonics based”, or Structured Literacy.
3 We use the term meaning based to refer to views of early literacy teaching which may differ in detail, but prioritise context, socio-cultural practices and meaning making. They are sometimes called “top down”, emergent literacy, whole language or “social practices”.
4 Although we do not deal directly with multilingualism, multiliteracies, and learning in this paper, we flag this as involving significant pedagogical issues which are impacted on directly by the views of neuroscience which underpin programmes for language and literacy teaching for all children.
5 We avoid the term “whole language” as this is a loaded term, with various interpretations and misinterpretations of its meaning.
6 To date, most of this early literacy research has been done in high Socio-Economic Status (SES) countries of the Global North. Despite significant recent scientific attention on the importance of the “first 1000 days”, the early years of childhood are still poorly provided for, and are very low in actual status and value in terms of support for quality care and educational provision, except for the children of the elite. Slowly it is being instituted in the Global South; research attention follows in its trail.
7 We use the term ”normal” here to include diverse SES, cultural and linguistic practices and contexts.
8 It is pertinent to consider how this might affect both the confidence of young beginning readers who live in poorly served communities and expectations of them as readers. Many are taught by teachers who have been trained to perceive them as already lacking in school readiness skills; a deficit model of reading is added to this.
9 The role of the VWFA as unique to reading has been called into question recently, inter alia by Vogel et al. (Citation2012, Citation2014), Moore et al. (Citation2014), Martin et al. (Citation2019), and Vidal et al. (Citation2021). The VWFA is not present on functional MRI scans before learning to read, but appears and enlarges as reading skill is gained. Also noted, is that from the outset the VWFA is strongly connected to the dorsal tempero-parietal areas which are activated during speaking and listening, and are present as early as 2 months of age. The fMRI scans show that, after the initial visual reception, reading results in nearly instantaneous and simultaneous involvement of widespread ventral, dorsal and frontal areas involved in the sound, shape and meaning of words in skilled readers. We thank Roland Eastman for these comments.
10 A study which does this is Fedorenko et al. (Citation2016), showing how different brain areas are indeed involved.
11 Klaas and Trudell (Citation2011), Piper et al. (Citation2016), and including South Africa, see for example Spaull amd Pretorius (Citation2016:9).
12 We refer to multiple cueing systems below in Section 5.2.
13 These 5 pillars were identified by the National Reading Panel (Citation2000) as phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension.
14 Much of the literature refers to “predictive coding”. However, we do not limit ourselves to schemes designed to predict continuous variables, like the acoustic properties of a voice. Instead, we mean all forms of predictive processing, including those that deal in categorical variables like phonemes, words, and sentences, so will refer in the following to “predictive processing”. We thank Thomas Parr for this comment.
15 Miscues are “window on the reading process” (Goodman and Burke, Citation1973). They uncover both the lower and higher level processes readers undertake as they read (decoding phonological and graphic information, as well as predicting. sampling, confirming, and correcting).
16 For up-to-date views on gestalt psychology in perception, see Wagemans et al. (Citation2012), Wagemans et al. (Citation2012a), Isaac and Ward (Citation2019).
19 This is not to imply that informal learning does not involve working out what the mother or other wants, but that informal learning has a strong self-motivated voluntary aspect.
21 And their extensions to electronic versions. LAN(w) should be interpreted in this way, where “printed” includes hand written and electronic versions of the same text.
22 This is beautifully described by Carl Sagan here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVu4duLOFGY.
23 Friederici (Citation2017), in particular, 121–141, presents such studies in the case of oral language.
24 We mean here stories in their broadest sense, incorporating the narrative form.
25 A wonderful diatribe against such books is given in the section on Education in Let us Now Praise Famous Men James Agee (Agee, Citation1988).
26 We use the term “worthwhile” to reiterate the benefits of teachers and teacher educators engaging in an ongoing investigation of books, with discussion about what “worthwhile” means in diverse cultural contexts. It points to the extraordinarily important role adults have in curating the texts children encounter, and also to their observing and consequently learning from and about the children who explore the books.
27 In stark contrast to Dehaene (Citation2010).