Shannan Salvestro

Welcome to the Literacy and Podcast. I'm Shannan Salvestro, Literacy coordinator K to 12. In the podcast today we have travelled to Blackheath Public School and we've invited Kate Blackwell. Hello Kate

Kate Blackwell

Hello

Shannan Salvestro

So I thought a podcast episode would be a way to tap into some of that knowledge that's out there. So Kate's going to talk to us about the science of reading, some science behind reading and it's just it is important to note that in this isn't Kate's own work but a bit of a summary of the things that Kate has learnt. So Kate first of all tell me what is cognitive neuroscience?

Kate Blackwell

Cognitive neuroscience is the study of the brain and the components of the brain and how they interact to learn things and it's relatively new in the way that imaging has improved so much that we can now see into the brain with functional MRI and other imaging so that we can see what the brain is doing when it's exposed to different stimuli, when it hears a word when it reads a word we can see exactly what's going on in that brain. And this is really important to understand how people acquire reading, how they acquire language and it has also told us a lot about what happens when this doesn't happen as we would expect it to happen.

Shannan Salvestro

So advances in technology have done wonderful things. So then how did you decide all this is what something I want to know more about?

Kate Blackwell

Well I have a child who did not develop reading as expected. So she started to have that passion of reading failure that is familiar to many I'm sure where she struggled she worked hard to be just below average and then in Year 3 the wheels well and truly fell off and I didn't quite understand what was going on and as a teacher and as a parent I wanted to understand how to help and so I took myself off to seminars and I listened to speakers and I read books and I came across the researchers Stanislas Dahaene, Professor Maryanne Wolf and a wonderful American academic called Mark Seidenberg and it started to make a bit more sense to me what was going on.

Shannan Salvestro

Okay so you tapped into some research so what did you learn, tell me something you found out.

Kate Blackwell

Well I learnt that reading is not a natural process it's not something that will happen automatically where language. If you hang around with other people and you listen to them speak you'll pick it up whereas reading is not like that there is no genetic pathway. It's kind of like swimming where you have to be taught the different bits in order to be able to swim. And I also learnt that if humans have been around for 50,000 years then we have been reading for - the most evidence we have is about 6,000 years that we can prove that writing has been around in some form - then we haven't been reading and writing for very long and our brains have had to create a way of doing this new thing, this amazing thing we are the only species on earth that does this thing.

Shannan Salvestro

It is an amazing thing.

Kate Blackwell

It's amazing. And it’s amazing when it works and it's amazing when it doesn't work for different reasons. So . Stanislas Daheane has this evolutionary theory of reading where his research suggested that old parts of the brain can form you connections and new pathways to repurpose and enable us to read instead of having to, you know, entirely reinvent the brain.

Shannan Salvestro

So you're saying that brains of found a new way for using old parts of the brain that were being used..

Kate Blackwell

They were being used but now they're being a different way yes so and that is relying on the idea that brains can change and we know that brains can change we need to build those pathways we need to make those connections with those brains so that they can acquire reading and we know that that circuit will be strong and we also know that some brains will not develop that circuit circuit in a typical way.

Shannan Salvestro

So what kind of brains won't develop it

Kate Blackwell

A dyslexic brain

Shannan Salvestro

So why is ia dyslexic brain different why is that well working differently

Kate Blackwell

If you had an image of a word and you had an fMRI you could see that word travelling through the brain and using these different pathways. Most of those pathways they're on the left side of your brain and the research has shown that we can track and predict that pathway and the reading circuit is almost in that way a visible thing. In a dyslexic brain that circuit goes off on to its own little journey and it can go over to the right hemisphere and it can use a different part of the brain which doesn't sound like it would cause that you know much of an issue except when you think that the processing of that one word by typically developing brain might take 100 to 200 milliseconds but that little journey to wherever it's going in the dyslexic brain can take up to 400 milliseconds. Which once again do you think ‘oh that's not too bad’ but if that's one phoneme and then you think about whole page of text so that little dyslexic brain is having to concentrate so much harder for so much longer and work hard get tired and lose meaning as just reading that text takes so much effort.

Shannan Salvestro

So how does that help us to teach all kids to read?

Kate Blackwell

Well the word that's being used a little bit is cerebral diversity meaning that there are different ways that brains can be organised so a dyslexia brain is organised a different way than typically developing brain and I also find you an amazing that in different languages different dyslexic brains use different things again so as a species we've needed these different brains and that's been fabulous for innovation and for entrepreneurship but it's dyslexic brain is not so great for print and so that brain needs to be taught in a specific way that helps all students.

The research has shown specific components that should be part of reading instruction that will target those areas that will make reading instruction the most effective. They're not used to anyone who's been paying attention to any form of reading research for years but in some ways they did come as news to me in how explicit it needs to be taught. I thought I was explicit. A dyslexic brain will need a lot more exposure to the same component then typically developing brain so if you break down the components of what should be part of reading instruction, once again not a shock- phonemes - smallest units are sounds students need to be taught these very exclusively orthographic patterns, writing the words forming the letters correctly writing the words as evidence that the actual process of writing the word develops the letter sound knowledge better than type it into a computer. And semantics is hugely important understanding the meanings of words, having the background knowledge and making the connections with that reading circuit so that the circuit can draw on that knowledge and fire really quickly so the more a child knows about a word, the more connections they can make the quicker that processing is going to be.

Syntax - structuring sentences correctly with the correct grammar and finally morphology - understanding how words and sounds can be manipulated and those units of meaning and playing with those words is hugely important as well.

So if you know that your program needs to have these explicit components you also need to assess them because by assessing them you'll be able to highlight any deficits and target that deficit with your instruction rather than just throwing everything at someone who's having trouble with reading and just hoping something will stick.

Shannan Salvestro

When we're assessing where checking and we're getting that information about what's going on for a student. What happens when something does go wrong and when we do need to address a particular need?

Kate Blackwell

Well I think to understand that multiple exposures to whatever that component was is probably the easiest way to ensure that the student will develop the skills, develop the circuit in that area because different brains will need different numbers of exposures and a dyslexic brain or a brain working memory issues will need more exposures than it typical brain so if your typical brain needs to hear the you know the ‘c’ sound 4 times in a week your dyslexic brain will need it 40 and that has huge implications for your instruction. So if you're able to target which students in your class have trouble with their phonemic awareness you can understand that those students will need a lot more practice, a lot more time than the student who just picked it up.

Shannan Salvestro

And I guess being able to get on top of that early is important as well?

Kate Blackwell

Absolutely. I know from my own daughter I felt something was wrong in Year 1 because I wasn't seeing what I was seeing in my classroom with most of my students. If you keep thinking about that reading circuit idea and think that ‘no waiting and seeing is not going to work I need to get those neural pathways surging and firing and working early’.

Shannan Salvestro

Yeah important. So tell me that the impact that digital texts and now having on our brains.

Kate Blackwell

Digital texts are really interesting because we already know that the brains, the brain can change, the brain has the capacity to change when it's exposed to new things and there's a growing body of evidence that digital devices are changing the way our reading brain develops and reading brain circuitry. So and whilst this might not be a terrible thing, Professor Wolf has some real concerns about what this means for different aspects of reading. She specifically is concerned that different aspects of reading she is specifically is concerned that contemplative or deep reading is being lost because what reading digital text is telling us is that students approach it with continuous partial attention; they're looking for something new they're not giving their whole attention to one thing.

It's the idea of multitasking but it's actually not tasking anything at all, you're just doing lots of different things and you need lots of stimulation, there's a low boredom threshold. So students aren't getting that ‘deep reading’ she calls it critical thinking skills contemplative ideas and analogy, inference, they're all being lost and if you think about the reading circuit those things were vital for the development of a really reading circuit so the things that we don't really want to lose because we don't really know what that means for our for our reading for the reading brain of humans.

Digital reading has also meant that students have access to an almost infinite amount of information and whilst this seems like a fabulous idea and everyone can research to their heart's content, research is showing that what students are actually doing is seeking out sources that already conform to what they already know. So that background knowledge isn't broadening in some ways it's narrowing which Professor Wolf says is, once again, damaging the development of those more sophisticated reading skills and I think we've all seen that when someone straight to Wikipedia and it might be a fact that they know. So they automatically say “what's the capital of Australia? Google it” Don't Google it! Think about it! Use your background knowledge and go “Oh yeah I remember where’s Parliament House? Oh yeah that’s right..”

So i think it's having the background knowledge to have that really strong semantic part of your circuitry firing is really important but I mean of course students are going to prefer to read digitally. The most recent research shows is really interesting study where students were given the same text in a digital format and in a print format and the students all said that they comprehended the text, you know, deeply and preferred reading it digitally whereas when you examine their responses to the text, there was the complete opposite they had much better level of comprehension when they read the print version.

So Professor Wolf actually advocates that perhaps we need to teach digital reading skills and print reading skills so that it comes like a code switching idea bilingualism where students can understand that different modes, different ways of accessing information needs a different skill set

Shannan Salvestro

So Kate I have found this completely fascinating and wow what an amazing thing our brain is if this is new to some people or they just they do want to find out more and discover more things about how our brain works and where could you suggest they could go to?

Kate Blackwell

I think a fabulous place to start would be a book from an American academic called Mark Seidenberg and the book is called ‘Language at the speed of sight’ and he has a website as well … and he talks about the development of early reading and writing and then brings it through to today's educational context and I think it's a fabulous book for teachers to understand why we're doing the things we're doing and also how things are going to change with this new understanding of reading, well it's not new when we put our understanding of reading knowledge into practice.

Shannan Salvestro

Kate thank you so much to talk to me have a microphone sitting in front of you is a bit daunting I know but thank you so much.

Links to those resources and more will be in the podcast notes. Bye for now

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