The issue of when to teach children to read is a hotly debated one. Increasing numbers of parents are teaching reading early, and increasing numbers of children are learning to read as preschoolers. Yet, there is no shortage of parents, educators and developmentalists opposed to this phenomenon. Some believe that early reading , while others think children are to learn to read until they start school. A commonly heard criticism is that it is wrong to “push” children to read before the age of five or six. Some would even like to see the general reading age pushed back to seven.
It is our belief that teaching children to read at a young enough age frees them from the potential burden of learning to read in school. We believe that it is learning to read too late that actually causes the process to become burdensome. For more on how these views fit in to the debate surrounding early learning as a whole, go to the section.
Babies are linguistic geniuses
, founder of the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential (IAHP), said it first: babies are linguistic geniuses. Doman points out that while learning to speak one’s native language perfectly may be an everyday miracle, it is a miracle nonetheless:
To every baby born in Philadelphia tonight, English is a foreign language – no more and no less foreign than Kurdish or Hindi. And then a miracle happens: he learns his language. How does he learn it? We kid ourselves that we teach him. My foot! We teach him ‘Mommy,’ ‘Daddy’ and ‘no.’” And the other hundred thousand words and a good vocabulary he learns by himself.
Doman notes that children learn their language through context; not by having the meanings of words explicitly taught to them (which is the way foreign languages – and reading – are usually taught in school). In his book Native Reading: How To Teach Your Child To Read, Easily And Naturally, Before The Age Of Three, computational biologist Timothy Kailing zeros in on the value of implicit teaching (which children respond well to) over explicit teaching (of the kind children are subjected to in school):
Inconsistent and explicit text pointing [when reading to a child] disturbs the attention of a child, it interrupts the cadence of the language, and it ends up making reading more confusing for a child – and a lot less fun… You need to make text pointing a consistent, accurate but unobtrusive habit.
Kailing has coined the phrase “native reading” to refer to the natural ability of children under three to acquire an instinctive, intuitive or native feel for their language – one, he says, that can easily be extended to reading. He believes that any child can learn to read by the age of three provided her home environment provides sufficient correlations between the written and spoken forms of language.
This is similar to Doman’s view that most babies do not learn to read for the simple fact that they cannot see text as it is normally presented to them. Doman advises that by treating the written form of language as we treat the spoken form (i.e. simplifying it for babies), a small child can learn to read as effortlessly and instinctively as he learns to speak:
In order to understand language through your ear, there are three requirements: it has to be loud, clear and repeated. And instinctually, all mothers speak to their babies in a loud, clear, repeated voice… The reason babies haven’t learned their language through the eye to the brain as they have through their ear to the brain is because in order to read a language, it must be large, clear and repeated – and this we have failed to do with babies… Make the words large, clear and repeated – and children learn very easily.
Isn’t learning to read supposed to be difficult?
The idea of babies learning to read as effortlessly as they learn to speak sounds too good to be true to many people. In any case, some in the field of early childhood development believe reading requires too much brain power for a small child, as Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust And The Squid: The Story And Science Of The Reading Brain, explains:
Reading depends on the brain’s ability to connect and integrate various sources of information – specifically, visual with auditory, linguistic and conceptual areas. This integration depends on the maturation of each of the individual regions, their association areas, and the speed with which these regions can be connected and integrated. That speed, in turn, depends a great deal on the myelination of the neuron’s axons… The more myelin sheathes the axon, the faster the neuron can conduct its charge.
Although each of the sensory and motor regions is myelinated and functions independently before a person is five years of age, the principal regions of the brain that underlie our ability to integrate visual, verbal and auditory information rapidly are not fully myelinated in most humans until five years of age and after.
The fact is that, for as long as children have been learning to read, there have been children who have learned to read “early.” Skeptics and critics of early reading have taken these instances to be exceptions – cases of special genius above and beyond the usual genius of childhood. Support for this view seems to come from the fact that early readers are more likely to mature into accomplished adults. But, asks Kailing, what if we have been viewing this relationship – between early reading success and above-average achievement in later life – the wrong way round?
While you don’t need to be an unusual genius to read before three, I believe that being a native reader might make you more likely to become a genius. Because native readers gain language fluency earlier, more deeply, and in its written form – and because literacy is a fundamental tool for further intellectual growth – it’s a fairly straightforward consequence that native reading will generally help a child use the skill of reading to learn many important and interesting things. And, like language itself, native readers will tend to learn these things, which reading makes accessible, earlier and more deeply, too.
From speaking to reading… a giant leap?
Wolf has pointed out that reading depends on the brain’s ability to integrate its visual, auditory, linguistic and conceptual centers. Yet, merely learning to speak one’s native language depends on all of this too! True, it does not involve visually processing text, but it does involve visually interpreting the world around us (which is arguably more challenging) – and integrating this with auditory, linguistic and conceptual thought processes. The more you consider it, the more of a miracle it is that babies understand as much spoken language as they do, with many demonstrating clear understanding of a range of words and gestures before their first birthday.
Kailing promises that to make the leap from speaking to reading requires nothing more than “some simple techniques that consistently correlate the spoken language your child is naturally absorbing with the written language that is almost entirely analogous in structure.” Just as (according to Doman) parents kid themselves that they are the ones teaching their child to speak, when really the child is learning all by herself, Kailing believes that early reading acquisition is largely a child-led process:
Native reading frees your child to acquire reading on his or her own initiative, in a natural and unforced manner. It absolutely does not mean somehow pushing your child to read. In fact, you are not really teaching them to read at all. Instead, what you are doing is organizing their environment so that reading comes naturally, just like walking and talking.
Reading’s place in history
That the average child will begin walking and talking during his first two years of life is an accepted fact, because it is so commonplace. But what if it wasn’t? Mightn’t you consider it unreasonable to expect a child to develop such an impressive repertoire of motor and verbal skills at such a tender age?
If most children you knew learned to read at the same time as they learned to speak, there would be no need to consider whether their brains were sufficiently myelinated to handle the task. (We’re still not sure babies’ brains are officially myelinated enough to handle speaking at the age they do!) In considering the feasibility of babies learning to read, we would do well to view the phenomenon of reading in its historical context, as Kailing reminds us:
Remember, for countless human generations before just the last hundred years or so, spoken language was the only language a person typically learned. Remember, too, that just a few hundred years before that, nearly everywhere across the world, reading was something that only a tiny percentage of educated monks and scribes ever learned at all.
I believe it is this social history of reading, especially the relatively recent expansion of literacy beyond the most upper and learned classes of society, that accounts for why we still see reading as a “hard” subject, and why we introduce reading too late, when it is harder and less natural to learn.
Glenn Doman was certainly ahead of his time when, in the 1960s, he began teaching parents how to teach their babies to read. As more early reading advocates appear, the idea of children being able to read before they start school is gradually going mainstream. Instead of being viewed as the one in a million, the early reader might soon properly be viewed as the regular kind of genius that every baby is from the moment he is born.
The promise of early reading
“Not only is it possible to teach babies to read; it’s a great deal easier to teach babies to read than it is to teach six-year-olds,” notes Doman. This is because babies are naturally more gifted at language acquisition than six-year-olds. , creator of the Your Baby Can Read (YBCR) series of books and DVDs, explains:
There’s a natural window of opportunity for learning language, and that window begins at birth and goes through [to] around age four years. And that’s when it’s easier for a baby to learn second languages, sign language, spoken language, or the written form of language. Usually people think of that as some difficult skill, but it doesn’t have to be – it can be very natural if you learn as a baby.
Some critics of early reading claim that there are no long- or medium-term benefits to learning to read as a baby – all of the advantages level out in early grade school, they say. The YBCR website has a section that summarizes scientific research into the importance of early reading instruction:
The neural circuitry for reading is developed early in life
A study by Yale professors found that adults who could who could not read well in 2nd or 4th grade and in high school have “neural circuitry for reading [that] was present but improperly connected.” This study, by Yale pediatricians, points out to parents and teachers that activating children’s neural circuitry for reading early on is key.
The earlier the child learns to read, the better the child reads and the more likely the child wants to read
Children who were taught to read at age three or four read better than children who were taught at age five or six. Those taught at age seven or eight were farther behind. This was true even when comparing children of the same IQ and same socio-economic status. After eight years, the children taught earlier were ahead of children who were taught later. The children who were taught to read earlier were more likely to “devour books.”
Titzer’s daughters Aleka and Keelin stand testament to the long-term benefits of learning to read in babyhood. Aleka is now in college, having begun her sophomore year at the age of 16. Says her father:
Watching Aleka and Keelin grow up and excel in school has made me very content. They have both maintained 4.0 GPA averages and each has skipped at least one grade. And they are typical American teenagers – except that they can read at a level most people cannot unless they are taught as a baby.
Perhaps it will be only a few more years before it becomes commonplace for two- and three-year-olds to know how to read. When that happens, the idea that children should not be taught to read until they are five, six or even seven will seem outmoded, and a little strange – just as the idea of reserving literacy for privileged monks and scribes does to us today. |
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