Reading Development

What is reading?

• Recent cultural invention

  • Invented ~5,000 years ago independently in the Middle East, East + Southeast Asia + Mesoamerica 

  • Early scholars discovered that a system of symbols could be used to convey information (Harley, 2014) through a process of decoding the symbols into words + meaning 

• Requires mapping arbitrary visual symbols onto spoken language + meaning

• Fundamental to individual success, social participation + economic wellbeing 

  • Low literacy has significant personal and societal costs and remains widespread, even in developed countries 

What are different types of writing systems?

• Alphabetic scripts 

  • E.g. Latin 

  • Each symbol/letter represents a sound (vowel or consonant) 

• Abjad 

  • E.g. Arabic 

  • Symbols for consonants, reader often infers vowels 

• Syllabaries 

  • E.g. Japanese katakana 

  • Each symbol represents a syllable 

• Logographic scripts 

  • E.g. Chinese 

    • Each symbol represents a word 

What does text comprehension rely on?

Interlocking skills 

• Alphabetic decoding 

• Fluent word recognition + comprehension 

How do we learn to read?

Intensive practice + different (learning) processes for different alphabets 

What does learning how to read involve?

• Alphabetic principle = letters of the alphabet stand for sounds of language 

  • BUT struggle to infer this without formal instruction → phonics should be more effective than whole-word reading 

    • Byrne et al (1992) → taught 4yos to read aloud fat + bat and then asked if fun is pronounced fun or bun (didn't succeed) 

• Mappings from letters to sounds 

Is knowledge of letter names a factor explaining early reading?

No → at 5yo predicts reading at 7yo (Vellutino + Scanlon, 1987) BUT intervening to teach children letter names at 5yo doesn’t enhance reading at 7yo (Piasta + Wagner, 2010)

What factor explains early reading?

Phonemic awareness = what sounds make up a word

• Awareness at 5yo predicts reading at even 11yo (Nation, 2008)

• Teaching it at 5yo improves reading at 7yo (Lonigan, 2015)

What are the 2 approaches to teaching reading?

• Whole word reading

• Phonics

What is whole word reading?

• Guessing words in context 

• Joint reading with adults 

• Focus on motivating a love of literacy + value of reading 

• Educational theory based on discovery, following Piaget + Vygotsky 

• Give children tools to infer how sounds relate to the alphabet 

What are phonics?

• Teach how sounds relate to alphabet 

• Mappings from letters to phonemes + from combinations of letters to sounds/syllables 

• Educational trials indicate significant advantage → Ehri (2001) 

• Implementation of obligatory systematic phonics assessment in England improved reading scores (+ in 2013 Mississippi) 

What is dyslexia?

• Cognition 

  • Limited STM for words 

  • Difficulty visually identifying objects 

  • Limited phonological awareness 

• Compton (2014) → 5-10% 

• Oliver (2004) → 85% in MZ twins but 48% in DZ twins 

• High-achieving people with dyslexia still struggle with reading (even post-schooling)

• Bradshaw (2021) → Oxford UGs with dyslexia score worse than matched peers at non-word reading

What are the reading wars?

• Phonics = emphasise explicit instruction in letter–sound correspondences

VS

• Whole language = emphasise immersion in meaningful text + discovery learning

Concern how children should be taught to read

According to Castles (2018), why do reading wars persist?

• Research findings have been poorly communicated, oversimplified, or selectively interpreted in educational discourse

• Insufficient explanation of why phonics works

  • Rooted in a lack of understanding of how alphabetic writing systems encode language

  • False dichotomy in which phonics is portrayed as incompatible with meaning, comprehension + rich literacy experiences

• Need a balanced, developmentally informed approach grounded in cognitive science 

What is lexicon?

Mental dictionary, full store of words + their meaning 

• Accessing the lexicon requires translating graphemes

  • E.g. ‘steak’ has four graphemes (s-t-ea-k) → this mapping is the spelling-to-sound correspondence where each grapheme has a typical sound that also enables the reader to decode completely new words (Harley, 2014) 

What are graphemes?

Units of written language that correspond to phonemes (to recreate the words) 

What does reading require?

A system that can cope with regular and irregular words 

What are dual-route models?

Propose that there are essentially two pathways to the lexicon

• Direct lexical route

• Indirect sublexical route

What is a direct lexical route?

One where the grapheme maps directly onto the phoneme, based on the information stored in the lexicon 

• Pronunciation of words (e.g. yacht, aisle) are simply learned + stored in the lexicon → there is no need here to try and work out a mapping between grapheme + phoneme 

What is an indirect sublexical route?

One that does not involve the lexicon at all BUT maps the grapheme directly onto the pronunciation 

• Explains why learners often mispronounce irregular words → haven’t learned the exceptions to the general rule + are relying on the direct lexical route only 

What can dual-route models be used for?

Understanding different forms of dyslexia (disorder involving difficulty with reading + writing)

• Surface dyslexia = unable to read irregular words 

  • Often make the error of applying the rules for regular words when reading irregular words

  • E.g.pronouncing have in the same way as save

  • Have no problem with regular words and non-words

• Phonological dyslexia = unable to read pronounceable non-words

  • Indicates that they can use only the direct lexical pathway + are impaired on the indirect sublexical route (Shallice + Warrington, 1975 

What are the weaknesses of dual-route models?

• Too simplistic to account for other features of reading that suggest more complicated mechanisms are in play (Harley, 2014) 

  • Good evidence that a word’s semantics are accessed in parallel with the attempt to read it

    • E.g. reading ‘doctor’ makes it easier + quicker to read subsequent related words (nurse or ambulance)

    • AKA semantic priming = meaning of a word influences the processing of other words that are conceptually related (McNamara, 2005) 

• Other forms of reading disorders suggest that simple grapheme-to-phoneme mapping is only part of the process

  • E.g. deep dyslexia = can’t retrieve the meaning of words

    • May see the word daughter and say sister → shows that conceptual knowledge is also required for reading

• How we think determines how we read language

  • And some would argue that language determines how we think