How does reading work? [link]
Dec. 8th, 2022 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ur_gothmomI've been reading for as long as I can remember. Literally; I learned to read by the time I was about three, so I don't actually remember the process of learning, but my parents tell me I essentially taught myself. I don't remember much about how reading was taught in my elementary school, either, since I was already zipping through Nancy Drews while everyone else was learning the basics, except for my grade three teacher's USSR time (that's "uninterrupted, sustained silent reading") one morning a week. But I do have vague memories of being told to sound it out when I used to come to words that were long and unfamiliar.
Which is why the Sold a Story podcast series has been SO mind-blowing. Little did I know, over the past several decades, a theory of how people read that is completely wrong was adopted by tons of schools all over the English-speaking world. It was disproved by Harvard neuroscientists in the 1990s, but it's still being used in some schools to this day. Please go listen to it; it's one of the most shocking things I've heard this year.
It seems so obvious, so self-evident, that in order to read you have to... actually... read. You have to look at the letters and sound out the words. How could it be that thousands of teachers were convinced the opposite is true? The podcast doesn't go into the implications, but that's what I find really chilling: this has been out there in the wild for decades, meaning that a significant proportion of kids, teens, and adults have grown up functionally illiterate. What does this mean for our society? How do we collectively undo the harm from this? Is that even possible?
Which is why the Sold a Story podcast series has been SO mind-blowing. Little did I know, over the past several decades, a theory of how people read that is completely wrong was adopted by tons of schools all over the English-speaking world. It was disproved by Harvard neuroscientists in the 1990s, but it's still being used in some schools to this day. Please go listen to it; it's one of the most shocking things I've heard this year.
It seems so obvious, so self-evident, that in order to read you have to... actually... read. You have to look at the letters and sound out the words. How could it be that thousands of teachers were convinced the opposite is true? The podcast doesn't go into the implications, but that's what I find really chilling: this has been out there in the wild for decades, meaning that a significant proportion of kids, teens, and adults have grown up functionally illiterate. What does this mean for our society? How do we collectively undo the harm from this? Is that even possible?
