Reading behavior

“Our universities deliver education in English ..[so] we should teach reading in the language that will be most useful.” Letter to the LATimes re. dual-language immersion ~ [link ]

As reasonable as this may sound ..it is not consistent with the way nature prepares children to read. Nor is it supported by the state-of-the-art in neuroscience and language development. The language children are going to need in college isn’t as important for reading education as their native language. Learning to read in one’s native language is the most effective route to fluency. That’s because learning to read starts out as a process of linking the sound of words on paper to their meaning in memory [link]. This puts children from non-English backgrounds at a disadvantage when trying to read English first. They have no ‘phonic memory’ for it. That’s what accounts for the high percentage of high school students in the U.S. who cannot read or write well. Furthermore, it is widely known that reading fluency in one language is easily transferable to another [link]. It only makes sense to teach children to read in a way that assures early success in one language and boosts their chances of future achievement in other languages.

Academic captivity

I have a theory. I think home schooling is more native to childhood development than the classroom. If you took a random sample of home-schooled children I think you’d find the same incidence of so-called ‘learning problems’ coupled with higher levels of achievement. That’s because dedicated parents, tuned to the strengths and weaknesses of their children, can overcome many problems ordinarily associated with classroom learning ..and do so without drugs. I’m talking about problems with attention span, short-term memory, and communication. Public education in the US is way behind the learning curve and traditional classrooms are designed to tap only a limited range of childhood potential. For instance, the kind of focused attention ordinarily required in a classroom is not all that helpful overcoming obstacles found outside the classroom. There are many instances where a wider focus of attention, which is usually associated with ADD, is way more adaptive [link]. This is also true of other developmental disorders, including autism. I know of a mother who taught her son to communicate even though he was in the most disabling range of the autistic spectrum. He’s now a prolific writer with several published works to his credit [link].