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MAGGIE DENT

“ Reading stories to children has always been important ; however, reading in a highly animated w a y w i t h t e x t s that use rhyme, especial ly in the f irst three years, is seen as more important.”

Reading, writing and dyslexia: The latest newsTeachers – and families – can do so much to help.

I recently spent a day with Dr Martha Burns who works in neuroscience exploring the issues literacy, reading

and dyslexia. The first important thing to understand is that English is a non-transparent language. This means that words do not sound like they look.

George Bernard Shaw said we could spell fish – phoeti; “f” sound as in phone, “i’ sound as Phoebe, and “sh” sound as in nation.

The most transparent language is Italian, but unfortunately moving to Italy is not a helpful solution to low literacy rates in Australia and New Zealand.

Dr Burns showed us technical slides about the brain. The left side is where we process the ability to do maths, reading, understanding of symbol systems and sequencing. The first three years of life is where children build the essential neuronal highways that process the “traffic” of stimuli and experiences. Real experiences that involve all the senses are profoundly important like listening, movement, sequencing like nursery rhymes and lullabies, rocking, swinging and face to face interaction. The saturation in language in a calm environment is an important preparation for future capacity to read well. The neuronal “tracts” or highways take time to mature due to exposure to quantity and quality of real-life experiences, and when the tract is mature, it is then “ready” to learn to read. This maturity is known as readiness, and children who speak English as a second language, boys or those exposed to chronic distress often have delayed readiness. Boys have been shown to develop their right brain before their left brain, whereas girls develop both at the same time, and this partially explains why boys are often up to 18 months behind girls.

It was great to see that neuroscience supports how important “parenteze” or baby talk is to developing the “tracts”

or processing neuro highways that later help children read. When parents make “goo goo, gar gar” noises, it is how babies work out how to speak, how sounds are formed. When combined with the repetition and sequencing the brain needs, it is like creating the fertile soil needed to grow the future seeds of language and words. Dr Burns kept affirming how essential nursery rhymes were in the developing phonological awareness – the building blocks for reading. It helps build a sense of syllables in a natural fun way. Indeed, Dr Raschle, an expert on dyslexia, believes that a key indicator of a child’s ability to read later, is “can they rhyme at 4 years of age?” Tongue twisters are also excellent for building phonological awareness as well as building children’s working memory. Reading stories to children has always been important; however, reading in a highly animated way with texts that use rhyme, especially in the first three years, is seen as more important than just reading any old story.

Turn of the TV – and moveBabies and young children cannot take language from a TV. Nothing can replace human interaction in positive human development, and this is why experts recommend that under 2 year olds should not have any TV. They need to get the key auditory and visual neuro pathways built. One wonders what will happen to today’s children who have an Ipad by 18 months of age as a toy. There is a well-known study by Hart and Rissley that shows that the amount of language a child hears, the better they will read, and lower socio-economic families speak less than higher socio-economic families. It was estimated that there is a difference of 30 million words over the first five years.Te

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MAGGIE DENT

Reading is not a natural human activity. It has only been around for 5,000 years, and human brains have evolved for millions of years without reading. So technically, the brain has to recycle its circuitry so that we can read. Humans have been always capable of understanding symbols and their positioning. Visual-spatial organization

is important in processing text. Children under five develop this capacity through movement – and the more movement the better. Body spatial processing develops a child’s sense of body and body space, and this context builds children’s visual-spatial organization. This is an area of significant change in the modern world, where children

are staying inside, spending hours passively watching TV or using screen technology. There has been a 60 percent drop in outside play in Australia in just one generation, and this coincides with an increase in children struggling to read.

Movement needs to have both gross

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motor and fine motor skills. It is why our preschool educators spend time building children’s ability to manage scissors, puzzles, marbles and sand. These are important in helping the brain to be ready for reading. Active play, especially unstructured play, is how our children learn visual-spatial organization as well as language. In modern classrooms we have interactive whiteboards, laptops and less movement. Twenty years or more ago children had to do music (fabulous for the visual and auditory processing parts of the developing brain) folk dancing, rote learning, PMP programs outside and still plenty of play equipment in kindy, prep and Year 1 classes. Are we creating environments that inhibit the natural developmental processes of beginning readers by focusing on curriculum that involves picture recognition, work sheets and flash cards?

The next area of concern is the noisy world our children live in and how that can create problems with auditory processing. Too much noise from TV’s, technology, traffic and noisy toys can overload young children’s nervous system and impair this essential developmental stage. There are four ways to degrade the sensory cortex (aural language and somatosensory cortex development):

1. Structured noise – the absence of music, speech, rhyming nursery rhymes, songs and storytelling will create problems. Also fluid in the ears or ear infections can impair development.

2. Continuous unmodulated noise - research shows that continuous “white noise” like a fan or noisy air conditioner creates a muddy map for processing sound later.

3. Perinatal anoxia – degrades auditory system function and cortical processing speeds.

4. Non-coplanar PCBs – PCB poisoning r a d i c a l l y a l t e r s c o r t i c a l m a p development as it stores in our fat and myelin is a fatty substance in the brain.

Another very interesting part of Dr Burn’s seminar explored the processing of speech. Speech sounds can vary by as little as 10 milliseconds, and this can make the ability to distinguish speech sounds correctly tricky for some children. So it may not be that you can’t hear a sound, it is more you are unable to process that sound. I had no idea it is such a technical field and that 10 milliseconds can make such a difference.

Dyslexia: What is it?For a long time it was thought that dyslexia was a visual impairment mainly because of the rotation of letters. If we just work on building visual processing, dyslexic children will always be “tortured readers.” Dr Burns stressed that dyslexia is not an incapacity to learn.

Dyslexia involves three things:

1. Phonological awareness problems – auditory processing difficulty with sounds

2. Less efficient working memory that hinders sentence and story recall

3. Difficulty with rapid auditory naming

Some of the research shows that dyslexia children often try to process reading via the right brain rather than the left brain, where it is easier to process. These children can also have more difficulty managing distractions than other children.

In helping struggling readers, i t is important to give them books to read that they will be able to read at least 90 competently. If the books are too hard, they will give up. There are high- quality computer programs that can help build auditory processing skills as well as improving working memory. Normal games and programs will not necessarily improve either of these areas – nor will it help managing distractions. Another tip to help with both reluctant readers and those with dyslexia is that small group work is very beneficial as long as it is not punitive. Audio books can also be helpful

as long as the children are following along in the text at the same time.

If children appear to be not listening in class, have problems comprehending, have difficulty holding attention or are disruptive and restless, the best advice is to get them to a speech therapist or a developmental optometrist. So many of these problems can be picked up early and early intervention can make things improve often quite quickly.

Finally remember that some dyslexic children have grown to be extremely successful because they saw and processed the world differently. There is more help available than ever before and that means there is more hope to overcome a genetic disposition. It does not have to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

More tips for helping reluctant readers

1. Find funny books that have short fun quotes or fun facts

2. Find books about things they love

3. Read every day without asking questions after

4. Let them read comics, magazines

5. Validate their feelings and encourage lots

6. Choose technology that encourages reading