What's So Hard About Learning to Read?

We need to understand that reading is not natural. Writing was invented only about 5000 years ago, and the phenomenon of mass literacy is so recent that it occurred in the last tick of the clock of human history. Given a normal brain and somebody else to converse with, humans will develop a language. It is natural. Reading and writing are not. They are recent cultural inventions that have to be taught.

Reading is not easy for a lot of children. It seems easy to those of us who do it well, just as riding a bike seems effortless after you know how to do it.

One reason that reading isn't easy is that it is based on a code called the alphabetic principle. That code maps minimal units of written language, in the case of English these are letters of the alphabet, onto minimal units of spoken language, called phonemes. You know what alphabet letters are. What word would we have if we took the /b/ sound away from bat? That /b/ sound is a phoneme.

To take you back to those days before you knew how to read and give some sense of the difficulty of the alphabetic principle, consider the following example of print:

This is a pre-roman Celtic writing called Ogham. Very strange looking, isn't it.

Now listen to this:

How does this writing map onto those sounds? How are these marks to be divided up into units? And, how is that stream of sound to be divided up into units? What are the phonemes, if you will? Once the writing and the sounds are parsed into individual pieces, the graphemes and phonemes, how do they link up? Which unit of writing corresponds to which unit of sound?

Very mysterious, isn't it? What you need to realize is that the connections between the English alphabet and the sounds of spoken English are just as mysterious for a young child.

Not only is the code not transparent, but in English we throw children the curve of what is called "deep orthography." Our language has a commitment to spelling the roots of words the same, even when the pronunciation changes. Thus, say this word:

CHILD

Now say this word:

CHILDREN

Why isn't it CHILD-REN instead of CHILL-DREN?

To make it harder for children to break the code, I guess.

Now add to the arbitrary code, and irregular spellings, a considerable demand on phonological memory. I recently looked at a videotape of a little second grade girl, Jennifer, laboriously trying to read an 8-page picture book. It took her over 31 minutes, with her mother's help. By the time Jennifer got to the end of a sentence in which she'd flubbed and stumbled over most of the words, to the point at which she could potentially comprehend what she'd read, a minute or two may have passed, and she wasn't able to remember what she sounded out at the beginning of the sentence. Some children have a lot more trouble remembering sounds than others, and these children are particularly prone to reading problems. We actually have brain imaging results on children that demonstrate the location of these difficulties.

Notice that the pre-reading area is found just above the storage area for germ finding, and next to the wiggling center.

More seriously, we do have clear neurological evidence from real imaging studies that some poor readers have problems in the left temporal lobe of the brain.

To the mix of an arbitrary code, irregular spellings, and demands on phonological memory, let's add a fourth element of difficulty - instructional confusion. This is a polite euphemism for the teacher not knowing what she's doing. Far too few teachers in elementary schools in this country, much less preschools, have received any training in how children learn to read and how to teach them. So, struggling children may not only not get the help they need, but in many cases they may be misdirected by their teacher. For example, we know that children need to break the alphabetic code in order to be able to read, yet many teachers still ask children who are struggling with a word to guess what it might be from context. They believe that good readers often guess at words. Yet, we know that good readers read nearly every word on the page. It is struggling readers who guess.

To sum up, learning to read is hard for at least 4 reasons: arbitrary code, irregular code, demands on phonological memory, and instructional confusion. For these reasons, many children don't learn to read well, with dire consequences. Is there anything we can do to help?

The answer, of course, is yes. The roots of reading difficulties lie in the preschool period, and that is where prevention must begin.

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