Ruth Beaton’s high school AP Psychology class is one of the most popular and highly enrolled elective classes that our students take. Clearly, Ms. Beaton herself is a big reason for so many upperclassmen wanting to take her class, but the content for high school students is also very interesting. I have had the pleasure of sitting in and watching her teach and hearing the discourse, thoughtful questions and the deep reflection the students share. As they begin to make sense of the human mind, human relationships and how the brain interacts with our other body systems, so many of the students become motivated to continue their study of psychology in college.
Recently, Ms. Beaton asked me if I could come and speak to her classes specifically about how humans learn to read and speak. I have never been one to turn down an opportunity to discuss the science behind language and literacy so I jumped at the chance. While I have spent considerable time preparing presentations and professional development for educators on the science of reading, this was a different task.
The Brain and Learning to Read
Discussing the difference between how language develops and how reading develops required us to understand more about the different parts of the brain. We discussed the Simple View of reading (Gough & Tunmer,1986) and how there are two major components that contribute to learning to read (Decoding/Word Reading - Language Comprehension) then made connections to the different parts of the brain. It is interesting when we discuss this with students who are still teenagers, but have been studying human psychology for the year. The class has already has grown accustomed to reflecting on their own experiences. In professional settings, often these discussions are had with adults who are focusing on how best to teach reading, but these students can distinctly make connections to their own experiences just within the past few years.
Understanding that language is connected to reading, but developmental and using different parts of the brain seemed to peak the interest of many, including senior Sophia Marcus.
“The discussion on developmental learning versus learning that is acquired because it's been taught helped me realize how important it is that when learning a language that a child is exposed to it early on in their life. This explains why it can be challenging to learn a second language later on in one’s schooling such as high school because elementary school or even younger is really the prime time where one should learn since it is the critical period for brain neural pathways forming.” - Sophie Marcus
While understanding specific research related to reading was not the objective of the lesson, the class did dive into some of the research by Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, a French neuroscientist. The students learned that learning to read consists of 2 main sequences. First, recognizing the letters and how they combine into written words, then second, connecting them to the brain systems for coding of speech sounds and for meaning. As Dehaene explains, reading requires creating an interface between your brain’s vision system and your brain’s language system, and your spoken language system. The brain has areas that are shared between spoken language and written language and these areas are in your brain before you learn to read. This is a key distinction when we are examining how the brain learns to read and also suggest that reading is not a “developmental process” that requires people to be of a certain age. It is actually something that must be taught and learned.
Dehaene further explains, “The brain is changed by reading. Everyone's brain anatomy is changed by learning to read.” Dr. Dehaene, through imaging studies, has made a complete map of the brain areas that have been changed by reading. This shows us that teaching humans to read should not be viewed as a developmental activity that should be reserved for a certain age or maturity. While language develops rather naturally and through exposure, the brain must be taught to read. For some, learning to read does seem rather effortless but the brain is still going through the same process as for someone who requires significantly more structure to learning the process.
Kira Dolan, a senior in on of the classes, made several connections to their prior units that covered development and nature versus nurture.
“When talking about how some aspects of language are innate while others have to be taught and learned systematically, it made me think of our talks about nature v. nurture and the debate about what aspects of ourselves can be manipulated and which are predisposed. Additionally, the staircase graphic model of learning language and reading comprehension made me think of our developmental unit and how people can't reach one milestone without first reaching another.” - Kira Dolan
No Science of Reading discussion is complete without some time spent understanding Scarborough’s rope. This allowed us to really distinguish the two different components for humans to learn to read.
What Makes up The English Language?
Most students were way off and did not guess that it was 44 phonemes and around 250 graphemes. It sounds so simple when we state it that way, but it can certainly be complicated to master. We had some fun with this concept as most had never considered what actually makes up language. Some students, from their global language studies and use of cognates, were very familiar with the roots of the English language and meaning connections to various word parts. However, the sound symbol relationship was new to think about. We played some phoneme level substitution games, staring out easy and then getting their tongues (and brains) in a twist.
Senior Matt Pipan never realized how many things and different processes were happening when he was reading.
“The phoneme manipulation was more challenging than I thought it would be. I found myself using the sounds more but when easier words came up, images came to mind more quickly.” - Matt Pipan
When doing the phonemic manipulation and deletion activities, Tanner Kumada, also a senior, found himself thinking more about how he actually learned to read a spell.
“I would picture the actual spelling of the word and then I would sound it out from there and replace it with what Dr. Conway asked us to change. But there are a lot of steps that are happening quickly. When I thought about how I learned to read, I realized how much I relied upon images and not actually learning to read the words. I am glad I have moved beyond that now.” - Tanner Kamuda
Discussing though how different phonemes can have many different grapheme representations had them thinking too. This is what makes spelling so challenging. A quick activity with Elkonin squares was helpful to show the students how letter combinations make sounds and that those combinations will vary based on a number of factors or patterns. There are always irregularities to what the pattern is but as Louisa Moats and Carol Tolman write “Predictability exists on a continuum; some words are perfectly regular, some are a little bit odd, and others are very odd. Truly unpredictable spellings, typically leftovers from Old English, are common among the words most often used for writing.”
Moats and Tolman continue, “Approximately 50 percent of all English words can be spelled accurately by sound–symbol correspondence patterns alone, and another 36 percent can be spelled accurately except for one speech sound (usually a vowel).”
Teaching the Brain to Read
While we didn’t spend too much time discussing how we should teach reading, as that becomes more of a professional development session, we did discuss how reading really does require instruction for the vast majority of students. I also showed them the first of two videos that were made a few years ago called The Purple Challenge. A scientist who was home during COVID with her kindergarten child was intrigued by the manner in which her daughter was being taught to read. So she used a “leveled” text to see if her daughter was really learning to read, or if she was simply using the pictures and repeated pattern of the text to essentially guess at the word. While we only watched portions of the first video, the second video shows what happens when we focus on the decoding instruction so kids can really learn to read using the sound symbol correspondence.
These Purple Challenge videos - 2 of them - demonstrate the flaws in leveled reading approaches to young and emerging readers. These are the bad habits that poor readers use - guessing is not reading.
How do we really comprehend text?
Of course, no one really wants to sit and listen to a teacher talk at them and show videos for 50 minutes, so we had to make this a little more engaging. Getting students to think a bit more about how they comprehend text, rather than just thinking about how they decode words, gave some great opportunities for them to reflect.
In partners, I had them think of all the different meanings of the word “pitch”. For me, the first meaning I always go to relates to baseball. But that is not going to be true for everyone in the room. While they did some good work and some partners came up with over 10 meanings, they were shocked to learn that there were over 20 meanings for the word. We then discussed why someone might think of one meaning, while other people never knew it was a meaning for the word, which led us to discussing background knowledge and the role it plays in how we comprehend a text we read.
Background knowledge
People’s background knowledge has a clear influence on what they can take away from a text. The students really had some outstanding insights as they thought about this.
I introduced them to the work of Hugh Catts who is able to describe that comprehension itself is not an isolated skill but rather an outcome based on the interaction of three things. The Text, The Reader, and The Purpose. When texts are challenging for any reason at all, it does help to lean into strategies to help us make better sense of the text. However, not all strategies are appropriate for each circumstance. We discussed what strategies the students have found helpful but then distinguished the meta-cognition needed as one reads to decide what approach they should take to help them make better sense. We use strategies when something is sufficiently challenging. When something is easy, no strategy is really needed.
“The activity that focused on reading comprehension made us truly think before we spoke about what the correct answer was, realizing how tricky language can be and how many things, especially my own background knowledge, can contribute to what I understand and what strategies I might need to use if a text was complicated.” - Sophie Marcus, Senior at PRMHS
They learned about “The Baseball Study” and I shared a rather simple text about a cricket match, that without any knowledge of cricket, they were left with limited strategies to make sense of what it meant. Nevertheless, they made a valiant, and one might say “creative” attempt to describe what was happening in the article on a cricket match. They did all recognize that reading a text is far more complicated than they had ever considered and in fact it requires even more brain functions than language and word recognition. They need to pay proper attention, they need to be willing to think and connect meaning to prior experiences and texts, and they need to be willing to go back and re-read portions when they know they may not have understood. Dr. Nell Duke refers to these as Active Self-Regulation in her Active View of Reading.
Personal Connections
We tried to avoid making this learning too personal for students. It certainly is possible that some students had difficulty learning to read and some may still find it laborious or become embarrassed about spelling or slow reading. The good news is, that even if that was true for some of the students, it has not held them back from taking challenging courses, like AP Psychology, in High School.
"By exploring how the brain processes language and supports cognitive development, students gained valuable insight into the physiological and psychological foundations of language and reading comprehension. It thrilled me to witness student’s applying their knowledge of AP Psychology content as they made intricate connections between literacy, language and the brain. “ - PRHS AP Psychology Teacher, Ruth Beaton
However, kids certainly made some through-line connections to their own experiences and learning. While I doubt I motivated anyone to become a reading specialist or to pursue a Ph.D. in language and literacy, I know many were intrigued by the reflection on their own learning and also how others have learned. Maybe there is a future reading teacher or elementary teacher among them, and the science of reading has helped them to understand a little more about what they will need to know and understand to help the next generation of students become proficient, skilled readers.
Dr. Brent Conway
Assistant Superintendent
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