Teach the Brain Forums
READING the best researcher - Printable Version

+- Teach the Brain Forums (https://www.teach-the-brain.org/forums)
+-- Forum: Teach-the-Brain (https://www.teach-the-brain.org/forums/Forum-Teach-the-Brain)
+--- Forum: How the Brain Learns (https://www.teach-the-brain.org/forums/Forum-How-the-Brain-Learns)
+---- Forum: John Nicholson (https://www.teach-the-brain.org/forums/Forum-John-Nicholson)
+---- Thread: READING the best researcher (/Thread-READING-the-best-researcher)

READING the best researcher - John Nicholson - 05-05-2010

[SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]From READING IN THE BRAIN by Stanislas Dehaene.
Copyright © 2009 by Stanislas Dehaene.

From Neuroscience to Education[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[SIZE="5"]What we have seen so far is that the acquisition of reading entails massive functional changes in children’s brains. They must first discover phonemes, then map letters onto sounds, and then establish a second lexical reading route. Learning to read implies a literal search for a proper “neuronal niche” for written words in the patchwork of cortical areas for face, object, or colour perception.
From a practical standpoint, it is essential to examine whether we can take advantage of these scientific advances to improve teaching. Does our growing understanding of reading lead to clear indications concerning optimal teaching methods? Do some educational techniques ease the transition toward the adult state better than others?
A great deal of caution is needed here. My own impression is that neuroscience is still far from being prescriptive. A wide gap separates the theoretical knowledge accumulated in the laboratory from practice in the classroom. Applications raise problems that are often better addressed by teachers than by the theory-based expectations of scientists. Nevertheless, brain imaging and psychological data cannot be detached from the great pedagogical debates. Relativism notwithstanding, it simply is not true that there are hundreds of ways to learn to read. Every child is unique ... but when it comes to reading, all have roughly the same brain that imposes the same constraints and the same learning sequence. Thus we cannot avoid a careful examination of the conclusions—not prescriptions—that cognitive neuroscience can bring to the field of education.258
To define what reading is not is a good starting point. As over trained readers, we no longer have much perspective on how difficult reading really is. We tend to believe that one glance at a word will allow its immediate and global identification in a single step. Nothing could be further from the truth. The brain does not go straight from the images of words to their meaning. An entire series of mental and cerebral operations must occur before a word can be decoded. Our brain takes each string apart, then recomposes it into a hierarchy of letters, bigrams, syllables, and morphemes. Effortless reading simply serves to show that these decomposition and recomposition stages have become entirely automatic and unconscious.
With this definition in mind, the goal of reading instruction becomes very clear. It must aim to lay down an efficient neuronal hierarchy, so that a child can recognize letters and graphemes and easily turn them into speech sounds.
All other essential aspects of the literate mind—the mastery of spelling, the richness of vocabulary, the nuances of meaning, and the pleasures of literature—depend on this crucial step. There is no point in describing the delights of reading to children if they are not provided with the means to get there.
Without phonological decoding of written words their chances are significantly reduced. Considerable research, both with children and with illiterates, converges on the fact that grapheme-phoneme conversion radically transforms the child’s brain and the way in which it processes speech sounds. This process whereby written words are converted into strings of phonemes must be taught explicitly. It does not develop spontaneously, and must be acquired.
Reading via the direct route, which leads straight from letter strings to their meaning, only works after many years of practice using the phonological decoding route. ...
A Few Suggestions for Educators
In the final analysis, what can psychology and neuroscience recommend to teachers and parents who wish to optimize reading instruction? The growing science of reading has no ready-made formulas, but it does offer a few suggestions.
The punch line is quite simple: we know that conversion of letters into sounds is the key stage in reading acquisition. All teaching efforts should be initially focused on a single goal, the grasp of the alphabetic principle whereby each letter or grapheme represents a phoneme.
In kindergarten, very simple games can prepare children for reading acquisition. At the phonological level, preschoolers benefit from playing with words and their component sounds (syllables, rhymes, and finally phonemes). At the visual level, they can learn to recognize and trace letter shapes. The Montessori method, which requires tracing sandpaper letters with a fingertip, is often of considerable help at this early age. It helps children figure out each letter’s orientation, and makes it clear that “b,” “p,” “d,” and “q” are different letters.
After this preparatory stage, children must be taught, without fear of repetition, how each letter or group of letters corresponds to a phoneme. The child’s brain does not automatically extract these correspondences by dint of seeing a great many words. It must be explicitly told that each speech sound can be represented in different “clothes” (letters or groups of letters) and that each letter can be pronounced in one of several ways. Because English spelling is complex, introduction of graphemes must occur in logical order. Their presentation must start with the simplest and most frequent ones that are almost always pronounced in the same way, such as “t,” “k,” and “a.” Less frequent graphemes (“b,” “m,” “f”), irregular ones (“i,” “o”), or complex ones (“un,” “ch,” “ough”) can be introduced gradually.
Children’s attention must be drawn to the presence of these individual elements within familiar words. This can be done by assigning each grapheme a distinctive color, or by moving them around to create new words. It should also be explained that letters unfold in a fixed order, from left to right, with no gaps. The ability to attend to the various subcomponents of words is so essential that this must be taught explicitly by, for instance, covering words with a sliding window that reveals only a few letters at a time.
Of course, learning the mechanics of reading is not an end in itself—in the long run, it only makes sense if it leads to meaning. Children must know that reading is not simply mumbling a few syllables—it requires understanding what is written. Each reading period should end with reading words or sentences that can be easily understood and that the child can repeat, summarize, or paraphrase.
A great many teachers will consider my recommendations redundant and obvious—but it does no harm to specify them. I once tried out reading software that was supposedly “award-winning,” where the very first word introduced to the beginning reader was the French word oignon, pronounced onion almost as in English—probably the most irregular spelling in the French language!
Errors as ridiculous as this one clearly show that even the most basic principles of teaching have not yet been absorbed by everyone. Stressing what parents and teachers should not do is equally important. To trace the global contours of words is useless. Likewise, to draw children’s attention to ascending and descending letter patterns is not particularly helpful.
Exercises like these may even be detrimental to reading, inasmuch as they mislead children into paying attention to the global contour of words. This makes them conclude that they can guess at words without examining their component letters one by one. The contours of the words “eight” and “sight” are almost identical. Children need to understand that only the analysis of letters one by one will allow them to discover a word’s identity.
Because of the essential need to avoid distracting the child’s attention from the letter level, I am wary of the many richly decorated reading manuals that contain more illustrations than text. Word posters displayed in classrooms all through the school year, with the same words appearing at the same place, can also create problems. Some children, often the most gifted, merely memorize the fixed position of each word and the general layout of the page and no longer attend to the actual letters in the individual words. This strategy can give teachers and parents—and worst of all, the child himself—the illusion that he knows how to read. Illustrations also divert attention from text. Children now live in a world of constant overstimulation and distraction, so that some no longer learn to sustain attention for long periods of time. A return to sober texts, written on a blackboard during class (so that gesture is also memorized) might be beneficial. It might also be worthwhile to remind the child that although reading is hard work, it has its own inherent reward in the decoding and understanding of text.[/SIZE]

READING the best researcher - John Nicholson - 05-05-2010

[SIZE="5"]Going too fast can also be a handicap. At each step, the words and sentences introduced in class must only include graphemes and phonemes that have already been explicitly taught. Reading lessons provide little room for improvisation. A teacher cannot simply decide, at the last minute, to work on a few unprepared words or sentences. A haphazard choice of this kind will be confusing, because it is very likely to require advanced knowledge that the child has yet to learn.
As expert reading adults, we systematically underestimate how difficult it is to read. The words given to beginning readers must be analyzed letter by letter in order to ensure that they do not contain spelling problems that are beyond the child’s current knowledge—for instance, unusual pronunciations, silent letters, double consonants, or peculiar endings such as the suffix “-tion.” All of these peculiarities, if they are introduced too early in the curriculum, can make children think that reading is arbitrary and not worth studying. As a scientist and a professor myself, I expect the teachers and educators to whom I entrust my children to invest as much obsessive care in the design of lessons as my colleagues and I do when we prepare a psychological experiment.
Finally, guardians of children with reading problems should not give in to despondency. Reading difficulty varies across countries and cultures, and English has probably the most difficult of all alphabetic writing systems. Its spelling system is by far the most opaque—each individual letter can be pronounced in umpteen different ways, and exceptions abound. Comparisons carried out internationally prove that such irregularities have a major impact on learning.270 Italian children, after a few months of schooling, can read practically any word, because Italian spelling is almost perfectly regular. No dictation or spelling exercises for these fortunate children: once they know how to pronounce each grapheme, they can read and write any speech sound. Conversely, French, Danish, and especially British and American children need years of schooling before they converge onto an efficient reading procedure. Even at the age of nine, a French child does not read as well as a seven-year-old German. British children only attain the reading proficiency of their French counterparts after close to two full years of additional teaching.
Barring major spelling reform, there is not much we can do to simplify the acquisition of reading in English. All we can do is encourage our children to practice reading daily ... and to remind ourselves that our situation could be worse. In China, reading lessons extend well into the teens, in order to acquire the several thousand characters needed to read a newspaper. Chinese children’s plight is all the more surprising in that it could be avoided, since most of them nowadays start by learning the simple alphabetical Pinyin notation, which is acquired in a matter of months.271
Teachers can also derive some consolation from bearing in mind that the time spent on learning to read has an extraordinarily profound and useful impact on the child’s brain. Try to picture the ceaseless activity of new connections building up after each reading lesson. Every young reader’s letterbox area is called on to integrate a hierarchy of neurons coding for letters, bigrams, graphemes, and morphemes. This effort creates tremendous neuronal effervescence throughout the reading circuitry. Hundreds of millions of neuronal wires must find their proper targets within other regions coding for speech sounds and meaning. Whether we like it or not, this neuronal hierarchy is far more complex for English or for French than for transparent languages like Italian. The amount of neuronal recycling required for English is so impressive that we must relentlessly teach children to cope with each of its countless spelling pitfalls—even long after the end of elementary school.
My firm conviction is that every teacher should have some notion of how reading operates in the child’s brain. Those of us who have spent many hours debugging computer programs or repairing broken washing machines (as I have done) know that the main difficulty in accomplishing these tasks consists in figuring out what the machine actually does to accomplish a task. To have any hope of success, one must try to picture the state in which it is stuck, in order to understand how it interprets the incoming signals and to identify which interventions will bring it back to the desired state.
Children’s brains can also be considered formidable machines whose function is to learn. Each day spent at school modifies a mind-boggling number of synapses. Neuronal preferences switch, strategies emerge, novel routines are laid down, and new networks begin to communicate with each other. If teachers, like the repairman, can gain an understanding of all these internal transformations, I am convinced that they will be better equipped to discover new and more efficient education strategies. Although pedagogy will never be an exact science, some ways of feeding the brain with written words are more effective than others.[/SIZE] [SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]

Every teacher bears the burden of experimenting carefully and rigorously to identify the appropriate stimulation strategies that will provide students’ brains with an optimal daily enrichment.[/COLOR][/SIZE]

READING the best researcher - John Nicholson - 25-05-2010

[SIZE="7"]This is the only line or phrase that I have ever disagreed with from any thing that I have ever read by Stanislas Dehaene.[/SIZE]


:pcprob:


[SIZE="7"]
""" "The growing science of reading has no ready-made formulas,"""
[/SIZE]

:adder:



[SIZE="5"]Just has he has worked ceaselessly to understand brain function, through highly detailed research for many years so have I worked ceaselessly for one quarter of my Adult life reading the words of Stanislas Dehaene and many others in order that I could give explanation to something that I realised in ten minutes fifteen years ago.


Children using an Abacus Laid down a mental map of mathematics simply from taking regular exercise in those procedures, transferring this realisation to reading processes and combing them into system one 4 every 1 ** has been the pleasure of my life. Let the work of Stanislas Dehaene. be utilised in millions of all and “every child`s life” utilising system one 4 every 1[/SIZE]


READING the best researcher - John Nicholson - 27-05-2010

[SIZE="7"]
Stanislas Dehaene
[/SIZE]


[SIZE="7"]
Says that every child learns to read exactly in the same manner.

Of course it does we share millions of years of evolutionary history
[/SIZE]


***************************************Confusedunny: **************:yes:


[SIZE="7"]Teachers and Parents are you Listening[/SIZE]


READING the best researcher - John Nicholson - 27-05-2010

[SIZE="7"]
Stanislas Dehaene

Says that every child learns to read exactly in the same manner. We process what we see at the speed of light then we convert that to silent sound


Just read his own article aloud and you will see what he means by this, we are evolutionarily prepared to turn sound into meaning.

When we are older we read to quickly quite naturally so read any complicated work aloud

Of course all brain function is alike we share millions of years of evolutionary history

Teachers and Parents are you Listening
[/SIZE]

READING the best researcher - John Nicholson - 28-06-2010

[SIZE="5"][COLOR="DarkRed"][SIZE="6"]Early Word Recognition Is Key To Lifelong Reading Skills Says New Study
ScienceDaily (May 12, 2009) — Children’s early reading experience is critical to the development of their lifelong reading skills a new study from the University of Leicester has discovered.[/SIZE][/COLOR]It found that the age at which we learn words is key to understanding how people read later in life.
The study addresses a 20-year riddle: When researchers investigate reading behaviour in children they find different patterns. Some researchers have found children’s reading mimics that of adults, but others have seen a different pattern of reading behaviour. Psychologists have struggled for twenty years to offer a convincing explanation for why different studies looking at the same topic have found such different results.
Now research by Dr Tessa Webb in the School of Psychology at the University of Leicester sheds new light on the subject by taking into account the age at which words are learnt.
She said: “Children read differently from adults, but as they grow older, they develop the same reading patterns. When adults read words they learned when they were younger, they recognise them faster and more accurately than those they learned later in life.”
In her research children from three different school years read aloud common and rarely used words, with half of the words following spelling to sound rules and the other half not obeying them. Unlike previous studies, Dr Webb made sure her research considered word learning age as well.
She found that children in their first few years at school read the words differently from adults. However, by age 10, they were mimicking the reading pattern of adults. This suggests that the different pattern of results found in children compared to adults may be due to the fact that word learning age was not considered.
This led her to conclude that word learning age is a key aspect of reading that should not be left out of research, lest the results are unsound.
The results of this research could have implications in tackling reading-related disabilities, such as dyslexia, said Dr Webb.
[COLOR="darkred"][SIZE="6"]Environment Plays Key Role in Developing Reading Skills, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2010) — While genetics play a key role in children's initial reading skills, a new study of twins is the first to demonstrate that environment plays an important role in reading growth over time.[/SIZE][/COLOR]The results give further evidence that children can make gains in reading during their early school years, above and beyond the important genetic factors that influence differences in reading, said Stephen Petrill, lead author of the study and professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University.
"We certainly have to take more seriously genetic influences on learning, but children who come into school with poor reading skills can make strides with proper instruction," Petrill said.
"The findings support the need for sustained efforts to promote reading development in children that take both genetic and environmental influences into account."
While other studies have shown that both genetics and environment influence reading skills, this is the first to show their relative roles in how quickly or slowly children's reading skills improve over time.
The study appears online in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
The study participants were 314 Ohio twins participating in the Western Reserve Reading Project. This study included 135 identical twins and 179 same-sex fraternal twins.
The twins began the study when they were in kindergarten or first grade and were assessed in their homes when they enrolled, and annually for the next two years.
At each home visit, the twins were given a 90-minute battery of reading-based measures. Among other things, the tests measured word and letter identification, the ability to sound out words, and the speed at which children could name a series of letters.
The researchers compared how twins scored on the tests and then used a statistical analysis to determine how much growth in their performance could be explained by genetics and how much by environmental factors.
Environmental factors include everything the children experience -- how they are cared for by their parents, how much they are read to, the neighborhood they live in, nutrition and their instruction in schools, among other factors.
The findings showed that when children start out reading, both genetics and environment play a role in readings skills, depending on the skills assessed. For word and letter identification, genetics explained about one-third of the test results, while environment explained two-thirds. For vocabulary and sound awareness, it was equally split between genetics and environment. For the speed tests, it was three-quarters genetic.
But when the researchers measured growth in reading skills, environment became much more important, Petrill said.
For reading skills that are taught, such as words and letters, the environment is almost completely responsible for growth. For awareness of sounds in reading, about 80 percent of growth was explained by the environment. Speed measures were the only ones where genetics still played a large role.
"Regardless of where children start as far as reading skills, and the impact that genetics and environment had on their initial skills, we found that their environment had an impact in how fast or how slowly those reading skills developed," Petrill said.
Petrill emphasized that a child's environment is much more than just the instruction he or she receives in school. However, instruction is likely a key part of how reading skills grow over time.
Petrill said much more research needs to be done examining the roles of genetics and the environment in shaping how children learn to read.
"We believe that both factors play a role in reading, which is very similar to what researchers find in health issues such as heart disease and obesity," Petrill said. "But we know a lot more about the relative impacts of genetics and environment on the biological systems that influence heart disease than we do in reading."
For example, people can change their environment to help lower their risk of heart disease, no matter their genetic susceptibility to the disease, he said.
Petrill said he hopes we can do the same to help children improve their reading.
"Understanding the causes of why kids differ in reading skills, and the roles of genetics and environment, could help us understand how to teach them better," he said.[/SIZE]

READING the best researcher - John Nicholson - 28-06-2010

[SIZE="5"][COLOR="DarkRed"][SIZE="6"]Touch Helps Make The Connection Between Sight And Hearing
ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2009) — The sense of touch allows us to make a better connection between sight and hearing and therefore helps adults to learn to read. This is what has just been shown by the team of Édouard Gentaz, CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition in Grenoble (CNRS/Université Pierre Mendès France de Grenoble/Université de Savoie).[/SIZE][/COLOR]These results, published March 16th in the journal PloS One, should improve learning methods, both for children learning to read and adults learning foreign languages.
To read words that are new to us, we have to learn to associate a visual stimulus (a letter, or grapheme) with its corresponding auditory stimulus (the sound, or phoneme). When visual stimuli can be explored both visually and by touch, adults learn arbitrary associations between auditory and visual stimuli more efficiently. The researchers reached this conclusion from an experiment on thirty French-speaking adults. They first compared two learning methods with which the adults had to learn 15 new visual stimuli, inspired by Japanese characters, and their 15 corresponding sounds (new auditory stimuli with no associated meaning). The two learning methods differed in the senses used to explore the visual stimuli. The first, "classic", method used only vision. The second, "multisensory", method used touch as well as vision for the perception of the visual stimuli. After the learning phase, the researchers measured the performances of each adult using different tests (1). They found that all the participants had acquired an above-chance ability to recognize the visual and auditory stimuli using the two methods.
The researchers then went on to test the participants by two other methods (2), this time to measure the capacity to learn associations between visual and auditory stimuli. The results showed that the subjects were capable of learning the associations with both learning methods, [SIZE="6"]but that their performances were much better using the "multisensory" learning method. [/SIZE]When the subjects were given the same tests a week after the learning phase, the results were the same.
These results support those already found by the same team, in work done with young children. The explication lies in the specific properties of the haptic sense (3) in the hands, which plays a "cementing" role between sight and hearing, favoring the connection between the senses. What goes on in the brain remains to be explored, as does the neuronal mechanism: the researchers plan to develop a protocol that will let them use fMRI (4) to identify the areas of the cortex that are activated during the "multisensory" learning process.(1) The first two tests respectively measured the learning capacity for visual and auditory stimuli using recognition tests. In a visual test, a visual stimulus had to be recognized among 5 new visual stimuli. In an auditory test, the target had to be recognized among 5 new sounds.
(2) In the "visual-auditory" test, the subject was presented with a visual stimulus and had to recognize its corresponding sound among 5 other sounds. In the "auditory-visual" test, the opposite was done.
(3) Or tactile-kinesthetic. "Haptic" corresponds to the sense of touch, used to feel the letters.
(4) Functional magnetic resonance imaging: the application of magnetic resonance imagery to study the function of the brain.[/SIZE]

READING the best researcher - John Nicholson - 13-08-2010

[SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]
WHAT IS SYSTEM ONE

SYSTEM ONE

4 EVERY 1

IT SAYS EXACTLY WHAT IT MEANS

1ST POINT


Any human child in normal health able to see the number “1” and say one who can also see and say “a” can be taught to count and read perfectly.



SYSTEM ONE 4 EVERY 1 is a simple path for every parent/guardian and teacher to take, in order to insure that perfect arithmetic -- -- mathematic awareness and reading ability becomes inbuilt into the mind of every child.

Simply by taking systematic steps, which in themselves become obvious, as to why they need to be firmly in place, before further learning can be perfected, guarantee that every healthy child can count and read perfectly.

Every one of us is in possession of the most powerful brain on our planet, every human brain builds awareness quite naturally, in whatever and wherever circumstances we are born into.

Speech and the ability to understand our natural language are inbuilt abilities quite naturally acquired in almost all family and extended family situations.

Counting and establishing measurement of all things, required the development of systematic recordable processes, which quite naturally led to the necessity of written language to provide further explanations. These developments were slowly evolved and required years of trial and error to perfect. Only by reading will any of us be able to gather all our human history.

In order to understand how these human systematic processes came about and also give explanation as to how we can best acquire them has virtually taken all my own lifetime and the lifetime of many others who have attempted to give explanation to various parts of these processes. It has taken me fifteen years of my life to enable you to read enough about your individual ability and how you can teach your own children in one day, and this is only the same length of time it took me to understand the power of visualisation in the human learning process, less than the ten minutes you will need to read this primary explanation.



MY SUMMARY OF BRAIN RESEARCH AS I SEE IT AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS OF PERSONAL RESEARCH INTO BRAIN FUNCTION.

The failure of any healthy child on earth that fails to learn to read well and not to develop first class mathematic ability is purely a failure of teaching procedure not a failure of individual teachers or of parents but a failure to recognise these facts and remedy them by the state.
[/COLOR][/SIZE]

READING the best researcher - John Nicholson - 13-08-2010

[SIZE="7"]Showing is Knowing adults learn most often in the form of instantaneous realisations.

ALL HUMAN SENSES WORKING IN HARMONY

Adults transfer spoken or written concepts into visual memory stored in the safe vault of the subconscious, until the subconscious instantaneously needs to find instantaneous explanation, in new words written or spoken.

Teaching our children perfectly is very different¸ it means creating visual memory as true images in action, reinforcing until perfection becomes a permanent memory within the subconscious, safely stored as images in action.

Using our intelligence to build our children’s intelligence is where Knowing is Showing --------------------------------------------------------
[/SIZE]