In a LinkedIn comment, David Chalk said: "Our brains have been wired hundreds of thousands of years to speak and interpret by hearing words, but there is no natural ability to read-attaching sounds to symbols-words."
This is making statements without thinking. He repeats what he has read from others such as Stanislas Dehaene and Pamela Snow. Dehaene does not answer questions asked, and Pamela Snow thinks she becomes invisible when she sticks her head in the sand. She blocked me when she could not answer the questions, I asked her. It is irresponsible to say something on social media and to not respond when relevant questions are asked.
The noted neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene (2018) argues that there is no place or mechanism in the brain to accommodate the learning-to-read process, seemingly adding credence to the reading-is-unnatural assumption. Dehaene and other researchers point out that oral language has been around for 50,000 years, whereas written systems developed much later—as recently as 5,000 years ago.
However, the argument is frankly not entirely persuasive. Simply because a behavior emerges later in human development does not necessarily make it more “unnatural” nor more difficult or daunting to learn.
Yet in today’s culture, numerous articles, podcasts, and blogs regularly lament how difficult and daunting it is for children to learn to read because it is an unnatural process. One might be led to believe that this notion is settled science. It is not.
If reading is unnatural then David Chalk owes us an explanation of how he said that he learned to read in 11 days. He should ask himself what made him able to read when he had been unable to read for 62 years.
Yes, let me quote what our so-called 'education guru' Pamela Snow said, ‘Reading (and its corollary, writing) is a human contrivance that has existed for only approximately 6,000 years (Snow, 2016). This recency of reading as a human skill is important, because 6,000 years is a mere blink in evolutionary terms, and the human brain has not developed specialized neural pathways to support a skill that is widely agreed to be essential to successful living in first-world developed economies and to the social and economic trajectories of developing nations.’
What a stupid statement to make! What an insult to the human mind!
Educators on Twitter keep saying that learning to read is NOT a natural process because of so-called researchers who say idiotic things such as – ‘Reading is a human contrivance that has existed for only approximately 6,000 years (Snow, 2016)’. This woman should be banned from all social media.
The statement above ridicules the intelligence of humans. I called it an idiotic statement and a Twitter friend said, “I don't think it is productive to categorise opposing opinions as 'idiotic', especially when those positions are generally accepted.”
Generally accepted by whom and for what reason?
When kids are ready to read it can be as natural as walking and talking. A kid comes into the world already equipped with both the strong desire and ability to copy what they see us doing.
For a kid, print is just another facet of the world that is not different from all the complex sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures in the natural environment.
It is because of women like Pamela Snow who tell me that I place too much importance on letter sounds and block me that we have such low illiteracy rates in Australia.
Here is an extract from an article in the Harvard Medical School:
In addition, there are several important white-matter pathways involved in reading, says Gaab. White matter is a collection of nerve fibers in the brain—so called for the white color of myelin, the fatty substance that insulates the fibers—that help the brain learn and function.
Gaab likens these tracts to a highway system that connects the back of the brain’s reading network to the front. To read and comprehend, this highway system must be wide enough for multiple pieces of information to travel simultaneously. The highway must also be smooth, so that information can flow at a high rate of speed. And, she says, “You don’t want the information to stop. You don’t want a lot of stoplights.”
The human brain is predisposed to visualizing words, even before individuals acquire literacy, according to a team of researchers at Ohio State University.
The following is from scientific reports about reading. LINK
Their paper, published in Scientific Reports, focuses on a region of the brain known as the visual word form area (VWFA), which is used in identifying words and letters.
“Even at birth, the VWFA is more connected functionally to the language network of the brain than it is to other areas.”
The researchers found that the VWFA differs from its adjacent regions in that it is functionally connected to parts of the brain that are used in language processing, even in newborns, who have had limited exposure to both spoken and written language. The VWFA is still considered an experience-dependent region, meaning that as individuals learn to read it becomes more specialized over time. However, the findings of the study suggest that the VWFA is sort of prewired for word and letter recognition, because the VWFA has an innate connection to the brain’s linguistic faculties, even before a child has acquired language.
Beliefs about learning—once established—tend to be deep-seated, difficult to change, and have a considerable impact on one’s motivation, behavior, and achievement (Bandura, 1997; Pajares, 1992). Thus, people must have adaptive rather than maladaptive views of learning.
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