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WORK TITLE: Language at the Speed of Sight
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://seidenbergreading.net/
CITY: Madison
STATE: WI
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://psych.wisc.edu/faculty-seidenberg.htm * https://seidenbergreading.net/contact/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Columbia University, Ph.D., 1980.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Psycholinguist, cognitive scientist, and cognitive neuroscientist. McGill University, former professor; University of Southern California, former professor; University of Wisconsin–Madison, professor, 2001—.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Cognitive Science, Brain & Language, and Language Learning and Development.
SIDELIGHTS
Mark Seidenberg is a psycholinguist and cognitive neuroscientist who teaches and researches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Seidenberg’s research focuses on spoken language and reading, on how these skills are acquired and how the brain works during acquisition. Seidenberg additionally explores how scientific findings can be used to improve education and overall literacy rates. Seidneberg shares what he’s learned in his 2017 book Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done about It. The volume explores how humans learn to read and how they process language (both in speech and in writing/reading). From there, the book covers different languages as well as literacy challenges like dyslexia. Language at the Speed of Sight additionally explores how cognitive research can be used to address literacy challenges in education. As the author notes, early achievement in literacy speaks to overall achievement in life, literacy skills are inextricably linked to socioeconomic status. Given the immense impact that high or low literacy skill can have over the course of a lifetime, Seidenberg stresses the importance of understanding the biological functions at work in reading skill acquisition. Ultimately, the author finds that the culture of education often works against these biological functions. Teachers teach according to imperfect pedagogical approaches rather than through proven scientific methods.
“If the science is so good,” Seidenberg told Hayley Glatter in the Atlantic Online, “how come there are so many poor readers? And should we be able to make use of what’s been learned about reading and reading disability to improve literacy levels, which are not as high as they should be for a country with our resources? So the connection between what we know about how reading works and the fact that there are lots of kids who either don’t read well, or can read but avoid it, was the thing that really motivated me to look more closely and then write the book.”
Praising Seidenberg’s insights in the Washington Post, Annie Murphy Paul remarked: “The author is not singling out teachers for criticism. But our misconceptions about reading and our lack of understanding of the science have consequences in the classroom and in society.” Paul went on to note: “If we appreciate the science of reading and its fascinating history and sociology, Seidenberg contends, we will arrive at the insight that ‘understanding this complex skill means understanding something essential about being human.'” David Kipen, writing in the New York Times, advised: “Mr. Seidenberg’s book won’t end the debate between scientists and the educational establishment over how children should learn to read, but it should jump-start an overdue conversation. As with literary theory, the hard problem with the teaching of reading may continue to be how to eradicate old, unsatisfying, jargon-bound approaches once a new generation has already begun teaching them to the next.”
As Robert Pondiscio put it in his online Education Next assessment: “Wrath and outrage are the only sane and appropriate responses to the gulf between science and practice that, as Seidenberg notes, places millions of children at risk of reading failure, discriminates against poorer children, and discourages children who might have become successful readers.” Pondiscio went on to conclude that, “in Language at the Speed of Sight, Mark Seidenberg, our Cassandra of reading, makes a deft attempt to shake our schools of education out of their indifference to the science of reading. I hope he succeeds, because children cannot thrive in school and beyond unless they first earn their ‘licenses’ as proficient readers. What could be more important to our future?” Offering further applause in Kirkus Reviews, a critic stated that the book is “a worthy primer on the science of comprehending language at the visible, symbolic level of print, a place that requires plenty of brain power and years of practice to navigate.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2016, review of Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done about It.
New York Times, December 29, 2016, David Kipen, “Fighting to Reopen a Closed Book.”
Publishers Weekly, November 28, 2016, review of Language at the Speed of Sight.
Washington Post, January 30, 2017, Annie Murphy Paul, “Book World: On Reading, We’ve Got the Wrong Ideas.”
ONLINE
Atlantic Online, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (August 21, 2017), Hayley Glatter, author interview.
Education Next, http://educationnext.org/ (May 10, 2017), Robert Pondiscio, review of Language at the Speed of Sight.
Spirituality & Practice, http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/ (August 12, 2017), review of Language at the Speed of Sight.
University of Wisconsin–Madison Psychology Department Website, https://psych.wisc.edu/ (August 21, 2017), author profile.*
About the author
I’m Mark Seidenberg, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was originally a psycholinguist but you could call me a cognitive scientist or cognitive neuroscientist and I’d be good with it. I grew up in Chicago, and went to a few colleges but only Columbia gave me any degrees, including a Ph.D. I was a professor at McGill University and then at the University of Southern California before returning to the Midwest in 2001. I’ve conducted a lot of research on language and reading. If you’re curious, this is our lab website.updated-japanese-stamp-copy
My reading research addresses the nature of skilled reading, how children learn to read, and the brain bases of reading and dyslexia, using the tools of modern cognitive neuroscience: behavioral experiments, computational models, and neuroimaging. Recently I’ve been investigating the causes of chronically low reading among lower income and minority children—so-called “achievement gaps.”
My language research focuses on determining what we know when we know a language, how we acquire this knowledge, and how it’s used in comprehending language. Also how language compares to other human capacities, and to the communicative systems of other species
This is my first book.
Mark S. Seidenberg
Mark S. Seidenberg Picture
TitleProfessorOffice534 PsychologyPhone(608) 263-2553E-mailseidenberg@wisc.edu
Mark S. Seidenberg is a Vilas Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor
Ph.D. 1980, Columbia
Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Research interest
My research is concerned with basic questions about the nature of language and how it is acquired, used, and represented in the brain. It has two complementary parts. One part concerns reading, a particular use of language. My main interest is in how reading skill is acquired by children, and the causes of dyslexia (reading impairments). I am also commited to exploring how the science of reading can contribute to improved educational performance; as part of that effort I am studying the persistently low reading achievement of minority children, many of whom are from low-income backgrounds. In practice my reading research involves behavioral and neuroimaging studies of children and adults, and the development of computational ("neural network") models of normal and disordered performance. The second part of my research concerns spoken language, particularly how it is acquired and the mechanisms underlying comprehension. I use the same theoretical principles and methods in studying both reading and language. In both cases we want to understand how the skill is acquired and its brain bases, using computational models as the interface between the two.
Representative Publications
Seidenberg, M.S. & Plaut, D.C. (2014). Quasiregularity and its discontents: The legacy of the past tense debate. Cognitive Science. PDF.
Graves, W.W., Binder, J.R., Desai, R.H., Humphries, C., Stengel., B.C., Seidenberg, M.S. (2014). Anatomy is strategy: Skilled reading differences associated with structural connectivity differences in the reading network. Brain & Language, 133, 1-13. PDF.
Seidenberg, M.S. (2013). The science of reading and its educational implications. Language Learning and Development, 53, 638-646. PDF.
Mano, Q.R., Humphries, C., Desai, R., Seidenberg, M.S., Osmon, D.C., Stengel, B. & Binder, J.R. (2013). The role of the left occipitotemporal cortext in reading: Reconciling stimulus, task, and lexicality effects. Cerebral Cortex, 23, 988-1001. PDF.
Seidenberg, M. S. (2011). Reading in Different Writing Systems: One Architecture, Multiple Solutions In P. McCardle., J. Ren., & O. Tzeng. (Eds.), Across languages: Orthography and the Gene-Brain-Behavior Link. Paul Brooke Publishing.
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Seidenberg, M. S. (2012). Computational models of reading: Connectionist and dual-route approaches In M. Spivey., K. McRae., & M. Joanisse. (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics (pp. 186-203). Cambridge University Press.
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Seidenberg: To Improve Literacy, Teachers Must Embrace the Science behind Reading
By MARY FRANCES MITCHNER | November 7, 2016
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November 4, 2016; The Atlantic
Mark Seidenberg’s Language at the Speed of Sight explores potential reasons why the United States, compared to other countries, is underachieving in reading ability. His Atlantic interview, “The Ignored Science That Could Help Close the Achievement Gap,” presents reasons that are both unsettling and academic.
Reading, in its essence, requires word recognition, understanding, and comprehension. The end is to make meaning: automatic, accurate, and with fluency. Seidenberg cites the National Assessment for Education Progress Report Card’s recent finding that only one-third of American fourth- and eighth-graders read at or above the level of proficiency. In this highly technological age, why are U.S. literacy levels so mediocre? His theory is that this poor performance illustrates how educators often ignore science’s understanding of how we read, with insights that can be drawn from psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. He attributes this to a divergence of “cultures” in schools of education, separating those who study how people learn to read and those who teach people to read. (One hopes this also includes “those who study how to teach people to teach people to read” and “those who teach people to teach people to learn how to read.”) In the push for education reform, we’d be remiss to leave the reform of institutional curricula for the study of education itself out of the equation.
Seidenberg believes in using a scientific approach to teach reading in a manner geared toward the students who actually attend public schools: those who are poor, and those who are not first-language English speakers—and he includes in that group African Americans, who, he believes, speak a different version of English. These groups suffer from factors that can make learning to read in English extremely difficult. He calls the neglect of these groups “education redlining,” where the educational system places people in a virtual holding pattern until poverty is alleviated.
Seidenberg rejects the notion that poor students cannot be educated. He extols public education’s virtues, believing that regardless of your background, if you have education, you have greater opportunity. “Science is not the solution to all of these problems; it can’t get rid of poverty by itself. But we don’t want to accelerate that by doing a poor job of teaching kids in the first place.”
Seidenberg’s research is a provocative and important insight into the next level of education research collaboration.—Mary Frances Mitchner
The Ignored Science That Could Help Close the Achievement Gap
There’s a body of research on cognitive reading processes, so why isn’t it being utilized?
Two elementary-school aged boys read chapter books next to cats.
Mark Makela / Reuters
HAYLEY GLATTER NOV 4, 2016 EDUCATION
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Listen and subscribe to The Atlantic’s podcast, Radio Atlantic. This week: Kurt Andersen on How America Lost Its Mind. Click here for more.
As of January 2014, about 76 percent of Americans over the age of 18 said they had read a book in the last year, according to Pew Research data. But surely the other 24 percent of the population read something over the course of those 365 days. They read Google Maps directions to get to the dentist, they read popcorn-cooking instructions so the kernels didn't burn, they read Wikipedia articles as they spiraled down conspiracy-theory rabbit holes. So even though book reading isn't exactly ubiquitous, the process of mentally converting letters on a page or screen into meaning is.
Along with the divides that hamper many aspects of education, the nature of developing the basic intellectual skill of reading is also rife with contradictions. Educators and scientists alike seemingly have the same goal of helping children become high-functioning, engaged readers. And yet, according to Mark Seidenberg, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research focuses on reading and language, the two groups are not exactly in sync right now.
In his forthcoming book, Language at the Speed of Sight, Seidenberg seeks to unpack why a nation as developed as the United States is underachieving in reading ability. According to the most recent National Assessment for Education Progress Report Card, just about one third of American fourth- and eighth-graders were reading at or above a proficient level last year. And Seidenberg says this poor performance is indicative of the underutilization of reading science by educators. He criticizes the education establishment for failing to adequately address the reading gap—pointing out that, though education may not be the equalizer it’s dreamt to be, there are ways for schooling to help chip away at the effects of poverty.
I talked to Seidenberg about his book and his experiences as a reading scientist. A lightly edited version of our conversation is below.
Hayley Glatter: Can you tell me a little bit about your background and what motivated you to write Language at the Speed of Sight?
Mark Seidenberg: I’m a language and reading researcher and I’ve been studying things about how reading works, how children learn to read, and the obstacles that lots of children encounter for many years.
The problem is—and what the book is really about—if the science is so good, how come there are so many poor readers? And should we be able to make use of what’s been learned about reading and reading disability to improve literacy levels, which are not as high as they should be for a country with our resources? So the connection between what we know about how reading works and the fact that there are lots of kids who either don't read well, or can read but avoid it, was the thing that really motivated me to look more closely and then write the book.
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Glatter: As you mentioned, despite all of its resources, you identify the U.S. as a “chronic underachiever” in reading proficiency. How do you think the country got to this point?
Seidenberg: What I try to do in the book is trace it back pretty far and look at how two cultures developed. There’s one that studies reading and language and other things from a science perspective. That involves psychology, linguistics, and now neuroscience. It has its own standards and ideas about how you answer questions and its own unique, distinguishing characteristics.
Then there’s a separate culture, which is educational culture. And it really has developed pretty independently even though we’re concerned with the same questions. There are, what I call them, cross-cultural differences, and it’s very hard to cross the boundaries between these two. And basically, when we think about educating kids, we think about education, and so we go to schools of education, we go to the people who train the teachers, and we go to the educational establishment for answers. And my belief is that that’s really kind of going back to people who have helped create the problems that we have and really have not been able to deal with them. And one of the reasons is because they really have very little contact with this whole other body of work that says much more about how reading really works, how children learn and develop, and so on.
Glatter: Along with that, you talk about the socialized culture and the cultural construct of teaching. Can you expand on the idea of the separation between learning literacy versus learning how to actually read?
Seidenberg: On the education side, you know, it’s a pretty in-grown group. They develop their own sort of beliefs, and in that culture, reading is really something that is hardly discussed. If you go to a school of education where they’re teaching the teachers of the future, there are few, if any, courses about reading. Educators are not interested in reading. They think that’s just sort of the basic nuts and bolts, kind of the lowest-level problem of recognizing letters and recognizing words, and that’s just the mechanics. What they are interested in is literacy, and so effort focuses on developing children’s interest in books and thinking about how they’re structured, how they function, and what they mean in different kinds of cultures.
That leaves all the stuff about how kids actually go from not reading to beginning reading to skilled reading out of the curriculum. So they emphasize “literacy” and we emphasize, I would say, the prerequisite: being able to read quickly and accurately with some basic skills under your belt. In my view, the way that they’re taught can actually make it more difficult. They focus on a high-level notion of literacy and assume that just being able to pick up the mechanics is easy. All of us have the goal of getting kids to be able to read challenging material from which they can learn and ask questions, but we disagree about how to make sure that children get to that point.
Glatter: And then looking at the more macro perspective, in the book, you unpack reading failures as a societal issue and as collateral damage of poverty. So where do you see these cognitive processes of reading brushing up against all of the social, economic, cultural factors affecting poverty?
“I really reject the idea that because kids are poor, they can’t be educated.”
Seidenberg: I'm not sure about that question. It’s clear that poverty has a huge impact on children and on education. And it is certainly one of the factors that contributes not just to children who don’t learn to read, but also to children who don’t benefit from school and who are at risk for dropping out. So poverty is obviously a huge issue, and I wouldn’t want to take any attention away from attempts to address basic poverty issues.
However, poverty is a difficult problem to solve. And in the meantime, we can’t just stop educating kids because they happen to be poor. I think that there’s more that could be done to help education serve the function of helping to overcome some of the effects of poverty. Poverty has a huge impact. Children from low-income areas go to poorer schools and have less access to lots of resources. But, there are plenty of things that we could be doing that we’re not. I really reject the idea that because kids are poor, they can’t be educated. And it’s the poorer kids who need more help and therefore would benefit most from making use of everything we know, which includes a lot of very good science that's basically being left on the table.
Glatter: Digging into that, throughout the book you push back on what you say are the assumptions of educators and reformers who blame poverty as catch-all for society's ills. You point to this line of thinking as a cop-out. Can you expand on that?
Seidenberg: Yes. Namely, there’s a pretty large percentage of children who read poorly and who never gain very high-level reading skills, and this is a problem for them as individuals and it’s a problem for society. So many people and politicians and others believe that the schools could be doing a better job in reading, math, science. And there was a traditional idea that education was what Horace Mann called “the great equalizer,” that regardless of your background, if you had an education, you would have greater opportunity. And it’s never functioned as the great equalizer, but it can be extremely helpful for many kids.
So when No Child Left Behind was passed, there was the federal government intervening in education as it was occurring in every classroom across the country. That legislation was really disastrous, but it was a response to a real problem, which is chronic low literacy, and a failure on the part of the educational establishment to acknowledge or address the problem. Well, the pushback against that legislation took the form of saying, ‘Actually, our educational system does really quite well. Elementary education doesn’t really need fixing at all. It’s doing fine, except for the problem of achievement in low-income areas. And really, all this legislation was totally unnecessary.’
The idea was that educational achievement in reading and other areas is not an educational problem. It is a problem of social policy and social justice. It is a problem of poverty. There was a line of argument that got very popular among many educators and others that said we don’t need to examine closely how well education is working: It’s working fine. What we need to do is address the poverty issues in the U.S. If we did that, then all these other issues about reading achievement and so on would be moot.
I have problem with that. And the problem with that is that it’s basically like educational redlining. It’s sort of saying, ‘You know, poverty, we really can’t do anything educationally in some of these areas because the people are too impoverished to benefit. And until we deal with the poverty issue, we’re really not going to be able to help.’ And that seems wrong to me. And moreover, it’s sort of saying, ‘well the educational system works well as long as you’re a middle or upper-class kid.’ And it’s treating the issues for the kids who aren’t succeeding as less important and not their responsibility. Education plays a huge role in these socioeconomic differences, and the system can’t be said to be working well if it’s only working well for middle and upper-income children.
“Science is not the solution to all of these problems; it can't get rid of poverty by itself.”
Glatter: Is there anything parents can do to help their children become better readers?
Seidenberg: I think parents need to be alert because we usually assume that if we’re sending our child to school, the educators will be able to take over and will have the training to be able to teach kids to read and learn other things. Middle-class parents already know that they have to supplement what goes on in the classroom: They know that it’s expected that they will work with the children at home to fill in things that are not being taught in the classroom. Lots of things are sort of being outsourced, but that model assumes that there’s a parent in the home who can help, who speaks the language, who’s available. And that’s not going to be true in many cases. It’s not going to be true if the parents are low-income and they’re working multiple jobs. It’s not going to be true if there isn’t an adult in the home who is a native speaker of the language. And it’s not going to be true because people from a lower-income background may not be as aware that the way kids are taught kind of assumes that they’re going do some of the heavy lifting.
So parents need to understand that the schools have shifted some of the burden for instruction onto them, and I think they should push back. I think they should say, ‘Hey, schools have the responsibility for teaching children basic kinds of skills, and parents are not professional teachers. Parents are not educators. And moreover, parents may not have the backgrounds, skills, or financial resources to fill in the gaps.’ So hold the schools to the obligation to teach children to read and not assume that the parents or caregivers are going to pick up the slack.
Glatter: Is there anything else you wanted to add?
Seidenberg: It’s clear there are a lot of children who either aren’t becoming good readers or they become good readers and then they don’t want to read. They're disinterested. And I think this is a problem and that it’s going to continue to be a problem ... But the failures are determined by multiple factors. I’ve tried to focus on one part where I think the science really has something to contribute. We know more about how children learn, we know more about how reading works than people have recognized and that there’s a lot there that can be made use of. Science is not the solution to all of these problems; it can’t get rid of poverty by itself. But we don’t want to accelerate that by doing a poor job of teaching kids in the first place.
Book World: On reading, we've got the wrong ideas
Annie Murphy Paul
The Washington Post. (Jan. 30, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Byline: Annie Murphy Paul
Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It
By Mark Seidenberg
Basic. 274 pp. $28.99
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Our intuitions about how reading works are often wrong, and yet they feel so reliable that entire industries are based on them. Think, for example, of the many manuals, courses and apps that promise to allow us to speed-read. From the books of Evelyn Wood, popular in the 1960s (President John Kennedy was said to be a fan and brought instructors to the White House to train his staff in her methods), to the products of Howard Stephen Berg, the "world's fastest reader" whose Mega Speed Reading program is sold on the Internet, such products are based on the same three assumptions. As cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg wittily explains in "Language at the Speed of Sight," those assumptions may seem plausible, but the science of reading has shown to be false. "What is claimed cannot be true given basic facts about eyes and texts," he writes.
Assumption one: The way to read faster is to take in more information at a time. Why take in just a word or two when you could be absorbing bigger chunks of text? Because, Seidenberg says, our eyes can fixate only on one quite small section of a page. About seven to eight letters are read clearly on each fixation; fixation durations average around 200 to 250 milliseconds; words in most texts are about five letters long on average. That works out to about 280 words per minute - far less than Berg's claimed rate of 25,000 words per minute. It's just not possible, Seidenberg says: "The injunction to take in whole lines, paragraphs, or pages cannot be achieved by the human visual system, short of growing additional cells on one's retina."
Assumption two: The way to read faster is to eliminate subvocalization, or the practice of covertly saying words while reading. As we read, most of us have the sense that we are saying words to ourselves or hearing them said, and speed-reading programs appeal to the intuition that this habit slows reading. But in fact, skilled readers automatically activate the "phonological code" that maps written language onto spoken language, and this use of phonological information makes it easier to read, not harder. As Seidenberg puts it: "Speed reading schemes would improve reading by eliminating one of the main sources of reading skill."
Assumption three: The way to read faster is to eliminate regressive eye movements, or the tendency to run our eyes back over what we've just read. Just as "hearing" the sounds of words in our heads as we read helps us pick out their intended meaning (is it PER-mit or per-MIT?), occasional re-reading of a sentence or phrase helps make its nuances clear. It's a habit skilled readers should want to promote, not one we should try to shed. Once again, intuition leads us astray.
Seidenberg, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin, unravels the science of reading with great flair. He is the ideal guide - and it turns out that we need a guide to reading, even though we've been doing it most of our lives. That's because, Seidenberg explains, while "we are aware of the result of having read something - that we understood it, that we found it funny, that it conveyed a fact, idea, or feeling," we are not privy to "the mental and neural operations that produced that outcome." This, he concludes, "is why there is a science of reading: to understand this complex skill at levels that intuition cannot easily penetrate."
Seidenberg argues that wrongheaded intuitions about reading dominate the education system. As with speed-reading, an entirely understandable assumption is in conflict with the scientific evidence - but with much more serious consequences. "Because writing systems represent spoken languages," the author explains, "many educators conclude that learning to read should proceed just like learning one's first language. In fact, no one learns to read the way they learn to talk, thus occasioning the question, What happens when several generations of children are taught to read under this mistaken assumption?"
All of us learn to speak simply by being around people who talk. It seems credible that reading would work the same way: Surround children with books and written materials, and they'll get the hang of it soon enough. But, Seidenberg notes, this ignores a crucial difference. As a species, we evolved over millennia to acquire spoken language without explicit instruction. Reading is a much more recent cultural invention, and it must be deliberately taught. Moreover, there is one way of teaching reading that works best: phonics, or showing children exactly how the words they hear connect to the letters they see on the page. Yet many teachers resist offering phonetic instruction to their young students, preferring to proceed on the basis of their experience, their observations and, yes, their intuition.
As natural as these inclinations may feel, Seidenberg is unsparing about the harm they do: "A look at the science reveals that the methods commonly used to teach children are inconsistent with basic facts about human cognition and development and so make learning to read more difficult than it should be. They inadvertently place many children at risk for reading failure. They discriminate against poorer children. They discourage children who could have become more successful readers."
The author is not singling out teachers for criticism. But our misconceptions about reading and our lack of understanding of the science have consequences in the classroom and in society. "The people who are skilled readers will continue to have advantages over people who are not," Seidenberg observes. The plain fact is there are too many Americans, including a significant proportion of students, who are not skilled readers. If we appreciate the science of reading and its fascinating history and sociology, Seidenberg contends, we will arrive at the insight that "understanding this complex skill means understanding something essential about being human."
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Paul, the author of "Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives," is a science writer at work on a book about the extended mind.
Fighting to Reopen a Closed Book
David Kipen
The New York Times. (Dec. 29, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pC6(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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A few weeks ago, while we were all looking the other way, the triennial survey comparing the world's educational systems came out. For America, the news wasn't good. Math scores dropped, while reading numbers weren't much different from last time. Neither finding puts us on course to lap Singapore anytime soon.
Predictably, of the limited media coverage the survey received in the United States, most articles focused on math and science. Who cares if Johnny can't read well, so long as he can multiply?
Too often, according to Mark Seidenberg's important, alarming new book, ''Language at the Speed of Sight,'' Johnny can't read because schools of education didn't give Johnny's teachers the proper tools to show him how. Economic inequality is a big problem, too, of course, but kindergartners may be grandparents before that can be redressed. Mr. Seidenberg, a veteran cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, makes a strong case for how brain science can help the teaching profession in the meantime.
His by-now-obligatory waltzing subtitle is ''How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It.'' By weight, this isn't quite right. That first third, ''How We Read,'' takes up fully two-thirds of the book, leaving only the last hundred pages or so for Mr. Seidenberg's shrewd diagnoses and prescriptions. Reading ''Language at the Speed of Sight'' could almost function as a reading experiment itself. Give a volunteer a smart, witty, only occasionally poky primer on the science of reading. Then, on Page 200, replace it with focused, impassioned argument. This test subject, at least, saw his speed and reading comprehension tick up considerably.
Building on decades of steadily improving linguistic and psychological data, Mr. Seidenberg's research relies on ''computational modeling'' -- methodology that a lay readership could probably stand to hear him define more clearly. But his discoveries, and those of his colleagues, lead him to logically watertight conclusions. We learn that, among other things, dyslexia is all too real and should be caught as early as possible; English spelling is a sadistic but nonlethal impediment to slow learners; the reading of books to children is insufficient but indispensable; and some modern pedagogical theories are ''zombies that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons such as empirical disconfirmation.''
As they say on ''Sesame Street,'' one of these things is not like the others. Mr. Seidenberg's simmering anger at how teachers themselves are taught erupts over those last hundred pages, and it's bracing to behold. He starts out sounding like a patient classroom professional trying to keep his voice down and ends by sending more than a few educators to a destination some of them aspire to anyway: the principal's office.
Take away all of Mr. Seidenberg's helpful tables, charts and other scientific furniture, and his conclusion boils down to this: Human beings learn written language most efficiently in the same way that humanity first learned it, by following the pathway from phonetic speech toward reading. Which is to say phonics.
Count on ''Language at the Speed of Sight'' to kick up some blogospheric dust on this point. The ''reading wars'' have long since pitted the phonics-favoring, ''sound it out'' camp against educational policy makers' whole-language ''think it through'' cohort. Pundits on both sides fight the same battles over and over, just like Civil War re-enactors, only they quote their enemies out of context instead of pretending to shoot them.
To this noncombatant, Mr. Seidenberg seems to have science on his side. Still, as he bends over backward to remind us, who can blame some educators for a certain defensiveness these days? If you were a public-school teacher, besieged by privatizers, union-busters, zealots and profiteers, you might be touchy, too.
Far from privatization, Mr. Seidenberg's specific proposals include transforming insular colleges of education into public, taxpayer-funded institutions; training Teach for America recruits in underfunded schools to become not rookie teachers but supplemental reading tutors; and restoring reading instruction to its rightful place at the heart of traditional literacy. Most of all, as he, teachers and other reading-instruction stakeholders have already joined forces to do in the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, he pleads with those who teach written communication and those who research it to start, at last, communicating with one another.
''Language at the Speed of Sight'' starts out invigoratingly -- if somewhat overgenerously in the Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 department -- and soon enough finds an even higher gear. Mr. Seidenberg has that rare knack of sounding reasonable and righteous at the same time. You wish for a longer treatment from him someday of such related challenges as teenage reading, reading on screens and the cognitive neuroscience of something he's genuinely good at, which is to say, writing.
Mr. Seidenberg's book won't end the debate between scientists and the educational establishment over how children should learn to read, but it should jump-start an overdue conversation. As with literary theory, the hard problem with the teaching of reading may continue to be how to eradicate old, unsatisfying, jargon-bound approaches once a new generation has already begun teaching them to the next.
Whether it takes phonics, whole-language learning, all-singing, all-dancing teachers, or the gradual introduction of criminal penalties for illiteracy, something has to change. A national reading push would be the moonshot that makes all others possible. How many more studies will it take? We know that readers vote more and volunteer more, and that reading literature deepens empathy. And -- as finally, categorically demonstrated in a landmark Yale study last year -- that readers live longer.
Control for any variable, for income, for ZIP code, for anything you please, and proficient reading still makes all the difference in life. A country where only a third of kids can read well, however, is easily controlled.
Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About ItBy Mark Seidenberg374 pages. Basic Books. $28.99.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY ETHAN M. SEIDENBERG)
Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read,
Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done
About It
Publishers Weekly.
263.48 (Nov. 28, 2016): p63.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It
Mark Seidenberg. Basic, $29.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-465-01932-8
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Cognitive neuroscientist Seidenberg digs deep into the science of reading to reveal the ways human beings learn how
to read and process language. After describing how humans adapted to form writing, speech, and languages,
Seidenberg explores current research into dyslexia and other literacy problems, especially as they pertain to the
challenges facing the American education system. Progress in reading is inexorably tied to achievement gaps and
differences in socioeconomic status, but Seidenberg circles back to the biological connections among spoken
language, dyslexia, and general reading ability. Poverty alone cannot account for the U.S.'s "mediocre showing" in
multinational assessments, he says. His major criticism of national reading progress lies in the "culture of education"
or the way teachers are trained to approach teaching. Seidenberg turns against the trend of natural "discovery"
learning, where he says nothing is really taught, and argues that direct instruction by tested methods is the best way to
ensure students consistently learn to read. Seidenberg's analysis is backed up by numerous studies and tables of data.
His approach is pragmatic, myth-destroying, and rooted in science--and his writing makes for powerful reading. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It." Publishers
Weekly, 28 Nov. 2016, p. 63. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473149959&it=r&asid=5f7be1c9dbaaf04eb6b3a51db2c3170e.
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Seidenberg, Mark: LANGUAGE AT THE
SPEED OF SIGHT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Seidenberg, Mark LANGUAGE AT THE SPEED OF SIGHT Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $29.99 1, 3 ISBN: 978-0-465-
01932-8
Johnny can't read--and too often his teachers can only guess why.Reading is something that we almost always do at a
subconscious level: we do not think about it, and for good reason, since we need to concentrate on the result--the
content of what we have been reading, that is--and not the process. Still, the fact that there is this subconscious work
going on requires a science of reading to describe what Seidenberg (Psychology/Univ. of Wisconsin) calls a complex
skill that operates "at levels that intuition cannot easily penetrate." One way of looking at reading is to examine where
it doesn't quite work out as expected. Much of the author's research, and a sizable portion of this book, concerns
dyslexia, a phenomenon that turns on anatomical properties of the brain in which "signal propagation between and
within regions seems to be...noisier," which in turn affects "the modification of neuronal responses and their
retention." The neuroscience underlying these findings is complex, of course, but Seidenberg does not often fall into
thickets of technicality; for the most part, his discussions are clear and accessible, if of most compelling interest to a
small audience of reading specialists. The author counters on that score that reading should be a matter of larger
interest to teachers especially, given the discouraging levels of literacy across the world; he argues that teacher training
should involve a curriculum embracing reading science, child development, and cognition, among other areas. Broader
familiarity with the science of reading, he suggests, would be of use at the policy level as well, since so much of it is
based on assumptions concerning problems of social engineering--poverty, household makeup, and so forth. A worthy
primer on the science of comprehending language at the visible, symbolic level of print, a place that requires plenty of
brain power and years of practice to navigate.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Seidenberg, Mark: LANGUAGE AT THE SPEED OF SIGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865871&it=r&asid=ef07b1d1c76ee460bf59b28bc1b2e5f3.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865871
Reading and WrongingHow education has ignored the science of reading
By Robert Pondiscio 05/10/2017
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Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It
by Mark Seidenberg
Basic Books, 2017, $28.99; 384 pages.
As reviewed by Robert Pondiscio
Cognitive neuroscientists are the Cassandras of education.
Recall that in Greek mythology, Cassandra was blessed with the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo. But when she refused to sleep with him, Apollo didn’t rescind the gift, he added a curse: poor Cassandra could still see the future, but she was doomed never to be believed. Mark Seidenberg probably envies Cassandra. He writes like someone who wonders exactly whom he has to sleep with to get people to pay attention to him.
Seidenberg is a University of Wisconsin cognitive neuroscientist who has been studying reading “since the disco era.” His indispensable new book, Language at the Speed of Sight, lays out in clear, readable English much of what we have learned over the past several decades about reading; he labors to “cheerfully destroy a few myths” about how we process and make sense of the printed word, but Seidenberg is no happy warrior. He wants his readers to share his fury at the “profound disconnection between the science of reading and educational practice” that he deftly unpacks.
The first two-thirds of the book covers the current state of reading science, starting with a brief history of human language development and the emergence of writing, “the first information technology.” Seidenberg then describes our current understanding of what happens when we read. “Skilled reading is a specialized type of expertise that only some people possess. So is plumbing,” he dryly observes, before offering his “Proposed Requirements for Licensure as a Certified Skilled Reader.” The necessary expertise includes the “ability to recognize a large vocabulary of printed words quickly and accurately, including academic vocabulary” and the “ability to recognize lapses in comprehension and perform simple repairs.” The point of Seidenberg’s droll exercise is “that expert reading is not an inscrutable art,” he writes. “The major qualifications can be listed. Having specified what skilled readers know and do, we can ask how they got there.”
As noted in its subtitle, the book also focuses on why so many of us don’t get there. This is where the book really takes off—and takes no prisoners. In the last third of the book, Seidenberg launches a full frontal assault on what he derisively refers to as the “culture of education,” which contributes significantly to reading underachievement. By culture of education Seidenberg means “the beliefs and attitudes about how children learn, the role of the teacher, and the educational mission that dominate the schools of education, which are the main pathway into the profession.” His critique is unsparing. “Parents who proudly bring their children to school on the first day of kindergarten are making a big mistake,” he writes. “They assume that their child’s teacher has been taught how to teach reading. They haven’t.”
Shortly after I began teaching as a provisionally certified elementary-school teacher, I remember counting myself lucky that I was assigned to teach 5th grade, since I hadn’t been taught the first thing about teaching children to read. I was terrified that I would be found out and fired. It turns out I wasn’t an outlier. “The principal function of schools of education is to socialize prospective teachers into an ideology—a set of beliefs and attitudes” that form the culture of education, Seidenberg writes. “Prospective teachers are exposed to the ideas of a select group of theorists who provide the intellectual foundations for this ideology.” Reading educators “rely on authorities whose names are not as well known as Dewey or Montessori but who play a similar role.” In a series of case studies, he singles out whole-language enthusiasts like the Harvard-trained Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman of Wayne State University for promoting “balanced literacy” and encouraging generations of teachers to believe “that phonics is the route to poor reading.” He also lambastes the Reading Recovery remedial system invented by New Zealand educator Marie Clay.
“If the whole language/balanced literacy approach is as flawed as described, many children will struggle to learn,” Seidenberg insists. For those students, in thousands of U.S. schools, there is Reading Recovery, “an expensive remediation program based on the same principles. Fewer children would need Reading Recovery if they had received appropriate instruction in the first place,” he writes. As for teachers, they are “left to discover effective classroom practices [on their own] because they haven’t been taught them. One of the first discoveries is the irrelevance of most of the theory they have learned. Some of the concepts are impractical, or don’t work, or don’t work as well as something else, like instruction.”
Reading science has moved on, but education has not. Of course, people should not be faulted for making erroneous claims decades ago, Seidenberg insists. “People should be faulted, however, for having made definitive claims based on weak evidence, for sticking with them long after they’ve been contradicted beyond reasonable doubt, and for continuing to market their stories to a trusting but scientifically naïve audience.”
The question that remains for those of us who lament the nation’s long-standing mediocre performance on international reading tests is how to shake education from its indifference, if not outright hostility, to science.
One significant weakness in Language at the Speed of Sight is Seidenberg’s relative inattention to reading comprehension and the role of background knowledge in helping children understand what they read. The oversight is not entirely surprising, since Seidenberg is one of our leading experts on decoding. And while U.S. reading scores compare poorly to those in many other countries, decoding is a relative strength here, thanks to phonics, which, despite Seidenberg’s complaints, has made some headway in American classrooms. Where we really fall down is in teaching children to read with understanding. That topic would provide plenty of ore to mine, should Seidenberg want to write a sequel. Our schools have improved some, but we have a long way to go in appreciating and valorizing the role of content in comprehension. And our teacher-preparation programs remain unaccountably indifferent to background knowledge as a driver of education inequity. It’s fair, I think, to suggest our schools of education spend too much time decrying achievement gaps, and too little addressing them. Our refusal to acknowledge and attack these knowledge gaps would be a fit target for Seidenberg’s wrath.
Indeed, wrath and outrage are the only sane and appropriate responses to the gulf between science and practice that, as Seidenberg notes, places millions of children at risk of reading failure, discriminates against poorer children, and discourages children who might have become successful readers.
Research on cognition, language, and learning is growing exponentially, as is work in neuroscience, behavioral and molecular genetics, and developmental neurobiology. These are “central topics in modern psychology and cognitive science,” Seidenberg writes—and the subjects our teachers-in-training should be studying. Instead, our schools of education continue to focus on 19th- and early 20th-century theorists such as Dewey, Vygotsky, Bruner, Piaget, and Montessori, still treating their work “as the source of axiomatic truth.”
In Language at the Speed of Sight, Mark Seidenberg, our Cassandra of reading, makes a deft attempt to shake our schools of education out of their indifference to the science of reading. I hope he succeeds, because children cannot thrive in school and beyond unless they first earn their “licenses” as proficient readers. What could be more important to our future?
Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Language at the Speed of Sight
How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It
By Mark Seidenberg
A cognitive neuroscientist's hard look at America's reading problems.
Book Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
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Mark Seidenberg is the Vilas Research Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor in the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a cognitive neuroscientist who has studied language, reading, and dyslexia for over three decades.
Garrison Keillor has observed: "Teaching children to read is a fundamental moral obligation of the society." If that is true, then American leaders in education have failed the young since the most recent reports claim that over half of our children still read at a basic level and few become highly proficient. Seidenberg and others are highly critical of the arcane methods of teaching language in schools, which has resulted in chronic underachievement among the poor.
The author affirms the science of reading and adds his own keen insights regarding the interplay between cognitive science, neurobiology, and linguistics. Seidenberg also specializes in dyslexia and has some cogent things to say about this condition which leads to poor reading. He contends that the rates of functional illiteracy can be reduced and that those who follow the pathway from phonetic speech toward reading are on the right track.