Language at the Speed of Sight

by Mark Seidenberg

In 2011, when an international survey reported that students in Shanghai dramatically outperformed American students in reading, math, and science, President Obama declared it a "Sputnik moment": a wake-up call about the dismal state of American education. Little has changed, however, since then: over half of our children still read at a basic level and few become highly proficient. Many American children and adults are not functionally literate, with serious consequences. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of the educational system and as adults are unable to fully participate in the workforce, adequately manage their own health care, or advance their children's education.

In Language at the Speed of Sight, internationally renowned cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg reveals the underexplored science of reading, which spans cognitive science, neurobiology, and linguistics. As Seidenberg shows, the disconnect between science and education is a major factor in America's chronic underachievement. How we teach reading places many children at risk of failure, discriminates against poorer kids, and discourages even those who could have become more successful readers. Children aren't taught basic print skills because educators cling to the disproved theory that good readers guess the words in texts, a strategy that encourages skimming instead of close reading. Interventions for children with reading disabilities are delayed because parents are mistakenly told their kids will catch up if they work harder. Learning to read is more difficult for children who speak a minority dialect in the home, but that is not reflected in classroom practices. By building on science's insights, we can improve how our children read, and take real steps toward solving the inequality that illiteracy breeds.

Both an expert look at our relationship with the written word and a rousing call to action, Language at the Speed of Sight is essential for parents, educators, policy makers, and all others who want to understand why so many fail to read, and how to change that.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Teaching, Language, Science, Linguistics, Psychology

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 3, 2017

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.

Reviews

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I bought it but wish I'd waited until the library copy came in. The book was kind of all over the place, from science to education policy to curriculum critique to everything in between. Spoiler alert: phonics are important and the way to go for instruction. Unfortunately, I've read other books on the science of reading and I already knew that. He doesn't give many specifics on which curricula do work other than "phonics." Okay, but there are a lot of different ways of teaching phonics, and he doesn't really distinguish between them.

I did like his critique of the education system and the degree to which it is not evidence-based, particularly his analogy of education being at the state that medicine was before the Flexner report -- an analogy that I invented, though of course he can't know that since I'm not famous:).

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kept feeling an irritated sort of suspense--when is he actually going to tell me something specific about the reading process and what works? Never happened. I did get a lot of background I didn't need or already knew. And I wish he hadn't been so dismissive of comprehension issues. There is a subset of kids who are hyper Lexi can, so they've clearly cracked the phonetic code but still don't necessarily know what they're reading. Some info that I found valuable on the disconnect between teacher training and scientific evidence. He was most persuasive to me when he spoke re the cult of personal observation. I've noticed this too.

In short, worthwhile in some ways but ultimately disappointing.

[Midori Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

While there was some good to this book, as a teacher of reading, I found his blanket judgements against “how it is taught in schools” to be misleading. There is no one way reading is taught in public schools. Plenty of his advice for what should be part of reading instruction IS CURRENTLY part of reading instruction. Instead of blanket judgements against schools, and teachers, and our educational system, he should be more clear about exactly which pedagogical strategies are unhelpful and which are most potent. If he were to do THAT, then this book would be more useful to teachers, who are the people most interested in trying to get it right.

[Bonnie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps linguists would find this book more interesting than I did. Unwilling to wade through lots of technical jargon, I learned nothing about what neuroscience tells us about how to teach children to read. Seidenberg thinks that teachers should take courses in linguistics, although I don't really understand why. He thinks that poverty plays a big role in why some children don't learn to read, but it's not the only factor. He doesn't say what can be done to overcome the deficits caused by poverty when children get to school. Honestly, I found it a big disappointment.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a feeling I'd enjoy this book, but I was much more entertained than I expected to be. Seidenberg has a great sense of humor and wit about him. (Non-fiction books about reading can be a little dry. This one was pretty funny at times.) Plus, it was fascinating and informative. I'd put it in the same category as Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid and Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain. It's that excellent.

[Jerrid Kruse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Major takeaways: 1) spelling, sound, and meaning interact when reading. 2) phonics is good. 3) we don't know how best to teach reading. 4) neuroscience tells us that certain parts of the brain associate with certain tasks, but we don't know why or how.

The book is well written and a bit entertaining. However, the author never provides any insight on how the research cited translates into the neat/clean teaching methods they desire. While I agree with the author that teaching is seen as too much art and not enough science, their blame for this is misplaced. Who do they think does the research they discuss (faculty in schools of education). The author assumes that because teachers have not changed, that schools of education have not changed. However, the more accurate reality is that schools of education teach teachers science-based strategies that new teachers quickly let go of in the face of pressure from their colleagues to "not look different".

The author seems to have a limited understanding of education that they picked up from popular press rather than any experience or in depth research.

[Konrad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though this was at times dense, and at times disorganized, it is a worthwhile read for people entering with a Science of Reading background. Particularly Seidenberg’s reflections the last 100 pages of the book on the gaps between EPP’s and research are phenomenal, and make it worth pushing through the density of the first two thirds of the book.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall an informative book about the reading process. I found the beginning section about the history of writing to be interesting. I got bogged down in some of the technical details about the reading process but the author does dispel a lot of myths about how reading works and what distinguishes a skilled reader from a poor reader. The chapter on dyslexia helped me understand a term that is thrown around a lot but rarely defined. The most frustrating aspect of the book for me was the lack of suggestions for practical application. There was an emphasis on what is wrong with reading instruction, but not a lot of constructive advice on what should be done instead. Okay, phonics are important: what is the best way to teach phonics? I have a better understanding of how reading works, but how do I actually use this information as an educator? The ending was a rather cathartic, "preaching to the choir" rant on the state of teacher training in America. While I found the author's argument compelling, and some of his proposed solutions were interesting, I wanted more focus on what I as an individual teacher can do to improve my reading instruction.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked the first part of the book the best - about what reading is and how it works in our brains, especially as contrasted to listening to speech. The big chunk about dyslexia was interesting also. I didn't care as much for the sections about what is wrong with how we teach reading and how it got that way, and possible improvements. Important stuff, and I'm confident he's on the right track - but I guess I'm more interested in the how-it-works stuff as opposed to the social policy stuff.

[Rebecca Hartley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many of the reviews of this book express concern about some of his broad statements and general organization of the book. I don’t think this is necessarily fair given what Seidenberg is trying to accomplish. He is trying to create a bridge between science & research and educational practices, which is rarely done. This book is meant for the person invested in learning more about how we read, and I think it accomplishes that. He doesn’t claim to know what it’s like to manage a class of 20+ or a caseload of 100+, but he does know what the research says about learning to read and provides realistic opportunities for the scientific community and educational community to come together for our students.

[Eric Kalenze · Rating 5 out of 5]

The latest title in an exceptionally great year or so of education reading (i.e., arguably the best-ever ED Hirsch, Michaela's 'Tiger Teachers', new K Chenoweth, Didau/Rose, Crehan's 'Cleverlands', etc., all with Boser, Ericsson, Peal, Hess, & Willingham on deck), and possibly the most important. Really saying something, considering all the high-quality stuff I've read of late.

Though 'Language at the Speed of Sight' focuses mainly on the science of reading, the few dozen pages of chapters 10-12 may be the most potent and letter-perfect critique of American Education -- teacher prep, professional ideals, evidence-resistance, and the like -- I've ever read.

Seriously, Ed Cases: Put this one on your 'Required' shelf.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a particularly fascinating read as someone with a child about to enter the public school system. Seidenberg overviews the history of written language, what we know about how we read, and how reading is being taught in public schools. The middle was more technical and a bit of a slog to get through, but still interesting. I most enjoyed the first third (history, what we know) and the last (what does it mean for how reading is taught in schools). Overall, well-researched and I walked away having learned a lot. It has influenced how I think about how to teach my son to read and what my role as his parent will be in that aspect of his education.

[Isabella González · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book for understanding our current political moment. The reading wars have united the conservative think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Black and Latino/Hispanic civil rights groups including the Oakland NAACP, and most importantly parent advocacy groups such as Decoding Dyslexia but, if you read left-leaning newspapers like me, you would hardly know it's happening at all. I feel like I have read more attempts to debunk the "Mississippi Miracle" in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post whereas The Free Press simply has Robert Pondiscio as a contributor. I mean some of the experts supporting the status quo cited in this book literally don't think dyslexia exists, so we're not occupying the same reality. However, this is one area where political polarization is mercifully abating. Probably because it is so embarrassing.

The central idea of the book (summed up by the title) is that our listening comprehension speed is a little more than half our skilled reading comprehension speed. So while we can accommodate a lack of skilled reading with things like text-to-speech, people with skilled reading can cover and process almost twice the information as a non-skilled reader who relies on audio. While the teaching profession has moved away from "reading" and towards "there are multiple types of literacies" including e-readers and audiobooks, skilled reading should always be the goal, otherwise we are disadvantaging poor, minority and/or disabled students based on an ideological belief, without evidence, that reading is becoming obsolete.

I was scandalized to find out half (more than half?) of Americans are going around reading the English language like it is Mandarin Chinese. I asked one of these people how they learn to read a new word ("diplodocus," for example) and they said they Google it and play the TTS, memorize the word and how it's pronounced. Then I asked how they read the street signs and they don't read them automatically like I do. It is a very inefficient method because unlike Chinese or the stem system in Hebrew, the shape of English words often doesn't provide any information about its meaning. "Element" and "elephant" are not related words. While I don't think the individuals deserve scorn or derision, it is an elaborate society-wide scam we have pulled on ourselves.

I was impressed with the paper Harm and Seidenberg (1999) which modeled how prior phonological knowledge facilitates learning to read using an attractor network. They added "lesions" to simulate dyslexia. This was not even in the 21st century so I can't imagine what they've been able to model since 2012 with many hidden layers or even 2017, when this book was published, the same year "Attention Is All You Need" was also published. Before any haters jump in the comments, they did more experiments than just some neural nets to learn about brain bases of reading. That is simply one paper cited in the book that I was interested in.

My jaw dropped when the author mentioned that the Cloze test was part of the Gestalt theory that influenced the idea "reading is a guessing game" used prominently in American classrooms. In Natural Language Processing, you might be familiar with the Story Cloze test, or other benchmarks for commonsense reasoning and narrative understanding (there are new benchmarks since LLMs made this less challenging). So, in the podcast Sold A Story, one of the shocking moments is when the kids are in Zoom school at a reading lesson, which consists of covering up the word and having them guess. Now, I realized, THAT'S what they were trying to do with all those little kids? The Cloze test?! They don't read like computers!

Overall, I felt like this book was related to some of my interests, NLP, education (my mom was a teacher), and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, one of the books I read recently by coincidence. But I think he could have introduced 3-cueing MUCH earlier in the book, around the time he was explaining the Speed Reading scam of the 1960s. 3-cueing is the method for teaching reading that has been banned by at least 14 U.S. states since 2023.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this book was dense with science and information, it was also loaded with humor. I think every teacher, K-12 administrator (esp. preK-6), and teacher educator professor should be required to read this. The science of reading is carefully explained and supported with relevant example. It is also a scathing indictment of the lack of science-based reading instruction for future teachers at the college level. However, it ends with some practical suggestions for future change. Highly recommend!

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book. It is also difficult, filled with jargon, and seems to expect a lot of previous knowledge by the reader. I looked up a lot of words, but even then, I'm not sure the dictionary meanings help in this very technical context. The first seven chapters or so cover the "How We Read" part of the subtitle, and I loved them. I've always been interested in how reading works. Lately I've thought quite a lot of the difference between reading printed pages and listening to audio books, but I've never really delved into the science of it. These early chapters cover how written language developed, how it's related to spoken language in different cultures, and how people learn reading. Really interesting, since reading is one of the more complex mental activities that we all do. I distinctly remember learning to read myself, so I was interested in how kids are able to learn so many words so quickly.

I was less enamored with the "Why So Many Can't and What Can Be Done About It" part of the book, which came across to me as a multi-chapter rant that can be summarized, "Why can't teachers be as smart as scientists, or if that's not possible, why don't they just do what scientists say?" I'm sure I'm over-simplifying here, but what seems to be the issue is that Seidenberg believes phonics is mostly the heart of reading, and he thinks educators hate phonics, despite, in his opinion, 35 years of conclusive science on their benefits. By not teaching phonics, he feels teachers are setting students up for failure. So, I asked my wife, an educator of sorts, "Hey Mary, when you were working at Maryvale, how did they teach reading?" She answered, "Phonics." So, either Seidenberg has set up a huge straw man, or Mary had no idea, or maybe I didn't understand the controversy correctly. Seidenberg never really states what his method of teaching reading would be, or how he thinks reading is taught at most schools, so you really need a lot of background in this controversy to understand the book. In addition, Seidenberg has a lot of negative things to say about how teachers are taught (or not taught, in his opinion). All interesting stuff, but I didn't really have the background to understand or evaluate Seidenberg's opinion.

[Marya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sidenberg is a reading SCIENTIST, thank you very much, and he'd love to explain how he and his colleagues have, using the SCIENTIFIC METHOD, conducted experiments to find out how children actually learn to read. Not anecdotes. Not theories. Not models. Ok, maybe a few models, but those are computer programmed models to mimic neural networks. And everything is tied together with how language actually works and how children develop. To that end, Sidenberg finds much fault with schools of education that completely ignore his field (i.e. most of them). This isn't just disheartening to Siedenberg as a professional; he also feels genuinely upset at the prospect of children being "taught" in ways that make it more difficult to learn to read. He intends this book to be a way to introduce laypeople into the conversation, and despite dragging with jargon in places, he mostly succeeds. Worth the read.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really hard to get through. Not because the writing was bad, but because there is so much good science here and it was hard to make sure I was understanding all of the implications. I found myself reading and rereading passages to make sure I got all of it. The basic gist is this--brain science says good readers learn by phonics. Which was phased out when I was a kid. And this is why we have reading problems in our country. This all makes sense if you look at studies of stroke patients, if you study the traits of young children that go on to be good readers, and if you look at MRI scans of brains and how it's the connections between areas of the brain that produce reading. The basic problem with reading is that it is a human construct. We invented it. Now we have to figure out how to best teach children how to use this invention. I highly recommend this for anyone teaching reading at any level of education.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chapter 11 is a MUST READ for anyone who teaches reading. There is a persistence in the field of some educational strategies (i.e. 3 cueing systems) even though a mass amount of scientific evidence over the past 30 years disproves these methods.

This is a technical read with lots of big words and lengthy sentences (one sentence I counted clocked in with 49 words). The basic premise is that reading scientists know a lot about the brain and how it works with regards to learning to read, and their understanding is continuing to grow. What is extremely unfortunate, with detrimental effects on student achievement, is that there is a gap that exists between scientific research and the ways in which educators are educated about teaching reading.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times mind-blowing and at other times a complete slog. The author was so funny, witty, fiesty, and then completely boring. Seidenberg provided interesting information about language, but I wanted more insights into the best way to teach struggling readers. According to the science (though not clearly explained by the author), phonics is the most important base. Fortunately, I've been using the best parts of three different phonics curricula with my intervention students.

[Mommalibrarian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up thinking there would be practical information on teaching reading. The author spends a quarter of his pages bemoaning the lack of scientific proof behind the current methods and the rest of the book describing the way the brain works or doesn't when reading based on scientific studies of live people and computer simulations.

[Jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a reading intervention teacher I found this book both interesting and valuable to my work with beginning readers who struggle with learning to read. All educators should read this book.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been working through this book for AGES. Seidenberg does an amazing job of explaining the extensive brain science behind learning to read (note: phonics are important and our eyes limit our speed; multiple systems contribute to comprehension). He does this to counteract the balanced language trends of the late 80s-2000s, trends that he sees as harming entire generations of young readers in the US, trends that downplayed phonics and focused on surrounding students with "cultures" of literacy. I see his point and think he's right, and education as a discipline should correct for this and should have corrected decades ago. But I do think that Seidenberg's extreme focus on the reading *process* forgets the realities of what teachers face in any classroom -- issues of motivation, of devaluation, of behavior, of poverty. He tends to think that teacher complaints about those issues are attempting to sidestep taking the blame for not following reading science for so long, when I think that teacher complaints about those issues are a parallel issue, not deflecting from reading science but addressing other issues that plague education. I actually think that balanced / whole language was a misguided attempt to address for the inequities in the classroom.

Despite this, every teacher should be aware of the science behind the reading process, and the vast majority of this book does a great job of sharing that. Seidenberg dives DEEP into dyslexia, to a point where even I lost interest, so just know that.

A nice parallel text is the podcast "Sold a Story."

(And I was shocked that the index didn't even list NCTE as an entry when Siedenberg addresses NCTE so explicitly in multiple places.)

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is dense af and I really enjoyed it. However, I do not recommend for tired parents looking for an easy overview or for parents of dyslexics unless they're doing a deep dive. I would've been better off picking a different book relating to dyslexia to read first.

That said, he gives a really in-depth overview of tons of interesting things related to reading, language, and linguistics that I found fascinating. How did reading develop, what does science say about what happens when people are reading, how does all this reading vary with the language spoken (shallow vs deep languages), etc. The chapter on education policy made us so mad that we had to keep stopping to rant about how screwed our child had been by the public school's approach to (not) teaching reading.

Took us forever to get through because we read it aloud. We enjoyed—the book reads like your reading scientist dad is giving a very serious overview sprinkled with dad jokes here and there.

Must read for anyone who teaches children to read and for anyone hoping to understand the Reading Wars in American education.

[Matt Spain · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of science, which comes with the territory of truly understanding how people read. It took me a while to get through and understand, but the information is beneficial as a teacher. Highly suggested if you teach reading k-12 or are an educator of teachers in a school of education. The last bit has a lot of information on schools of education and teacher preparation.

[shatine]

I didn't realize when I picked this up how much of it was focused on teaching kids to read English in the US, because (ironically) I didn't read the title carefully. I'm not a teacher, so the parts about education methods and policy weren't my favorites, but even they included some things I wouldn't have intuited, and the book overall covered some ground it wouldn't have occurred to me to wonder about.

[Mephistia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am definitely buying a physical copy of this app I can annotate the research applications for easy reference!

It's a bit dense. There are plenty of times he gets pretty into the weeds with neurobiological details, or the politics of linguistic educational debate. Depending on the readers temperament and how/ when this book is read, these details can be fascinating or extremely irritating. I read the book by choice during the summer, so I enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly.

That said, I was uncomfortably aware that it is not exactly formatted in the most accessible way for education and research application (for example, in teaching programs and professional development). It's the type of book that's irritating to be assigned, because it has a high bar of reading comprehension, and inevitably administrators and professors tend to assign multiple texts like this without consideration for extant mental strain, work demands, other classes/ training and overall work/ life balance. Further, the book is not formatted with end-of-chapter bullets summarizing the key research takeaways, which is both true to the spirit of the book and not terribly helpful in succinctly conveying the fundamental research findings to pre-service or in-service educators.

Chapter 11 is absolutely the most relevant and important chapter for every administrator and educator to read. It recalls to mind the episode of a podcast where the participants were discussing long-term school diversity initiatives. To summarize, the diversity and equity programs and initiatives conceived and implemented by white people were aesthetic and constructivist: they were about visual representation and addressing how individuals felt about their experiences in the world. In contrast, the diversity and equity programs and initiatives conceived and requested by minorites were about real-world, practical tools and applications: fix damaged buildings, provide equal resources and tools, hold teachers and admin accountable for their actions. I would recommend having everyone do a chapter study on at least chapter 11.

So, basically, I loved it and would highly recommend it to any educator invested in understanding and improving literacy. But I would leave it up to them to fit into their reading schedule and work life balance.

[Agra Liege-Dolezko · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most important book I've read this year; a crucially important book on reading - and why teaching it so often is not actually teaching it.

[Shelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good scientific reading book.

[Trevor · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the problems I have with deeply ideological texts like this is that it quickly becomes obvious that the author is not interested in engaging with other people’s ideas other than to find holes in them and to tear them down. And the author here is deeply ideological. He has the one right way to teach children to read and any deviation from that one right way must be stamped out. There is even a chapter here where he dreams of the day when teachers of reading can be replaced by computer programs that can be guaranteed to teach according to the one true mantra – the science of reading. As he says at one point, “Teachers aren’t going the way of travel agents any time soon, but the idea of the teacher as a highly skilled professional could be, for some grades and subjects.”

He also has a special loathing for communities of practice, and this is for almost exactly the same reason that he would like to see teachers replaced by computers. Communities of practice reinforce errors of instruction, the teachers engaged in these communities are basically making wild guesses on the basis of limited and generally inaccurate input data and so therefore learn nothing from each other but errors true scientists have disproven decades ago. It isn’t really possible to retrain every teacher in the world, and they have mostly already been poisoned by those crazy hippies in education faculties – so, we either have to hope computers take over sooner rather than later, or we need to hope programs that have been modelled on Teach for America soon take over reading instruction – once those teachers have been properly instructed in the one-true-science.

Now, some teachers complain that this one-true-science may have been tested under laboratory conditions, but that it has rarely been tested in classrooms, and rarer still by teachers in classrooms. This would hardly be an argument for the author here, since he disdains teachers so much, but also, the purity of the science makes such a consideration irrelevant. If it works in the lab, it will work in the classroom, in every classroom, because all children learn in the same ways and truth is truth is truth.

I started reading this book because there is a person in Tasmania who uses it in a paper he has written called Merchants of Illiteracy. In this he proposes a class action against, well, just about everyone, to force teachers to teach reading according to the scientific principles laid out in this book. What I find so utterly remarkable is the level of self-belief these people have. The litigious one admits to never having been a teacher, and yet has no doubt at all that he understands teaching reading far better than the thousands of teachers in Tasmania, and all of the initial teacher educators across the country. You know, more strength to his elbow, that really is a level of self-confidence I’ve never been able to muster.

The author of the book is much the same. He despises social constructivism and also is invariably ironic whenever he mentions critical literacy. For example, “If software takes care of the pedagogical challenges, teacher education could continue to focus on the social justice and cultural diversity concerns and the child’s social and emotional development, for better or worse.”

He spends a lot of time in one chapter attacking Diane Ravitch. I believe he mischaracterises her argument, essentially he says that she is arguing that poor students will never learn to read until we eradicate poverty, and so she has given up one of the best ways to eradicate poverty (a child’s educational achievement) and thereby condemned poor children to remain poor. I think this is a mischaracterisation of her argument for a number of reasons. The first is that he sees poor children as identical to rich children. All that is necessary to ensure they succeed at school is to provide them with scientifically proven educational strategies, and all will be well with the world. But this simply isn’t the case. For example, Leon Feinstein’s work in 2003 showed that social class had a major impact on the cognitive development of children in the UK. Children from low and high SES groups forming two separate cohorts by 118 months. His discussion of African American English does not go nearly far enough to uncover the challenges faced by minority and low SES students in education. This is not, as he would make out and assumes Ravitch is saying, me saying we should stop trying to educate the poor. Rather, is you are going to start doing something, you need to know the magnitude of the task ahead of you. Wishing it were otherwise is the clear path to failure.

The major problem facing low SES students in the US (and UK and Australia, for that matter) is how grossly inequitable our education systems are. The rich are provided with every opportunity, resourced to levels that are eye-watering. But if you read books like Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education or Johnson’s Stop High-Stakes Testing, you’ll learn how obscenely poor children are treated by the US education system. As I said, this is also true in the UK and Australia – my favourite example recently was that there are 15,000 schools in England that are at risk of collapsing, potentially killing students and teachers (https://www.theguardian.com/education...). Ravitch’s argument is that low SES children start from behind. If they are ever to catch up, they need more resources than their already advantaged peers. But do they get more resources? No chance. They get infinitely fewer resources. To then complain that they never seem to be catching up is a sick joke. We meet disadvantage with more disadvantage and then complain that these situations appear intractable. Worse, we then blame teachers for not providing the science of reading to poor children, because that is all that is necessary for them to catch up.

The author’s disdain for social constructivism is, at times, laughable. For instance, this sentence, “Lev Vygotsky, who lived in the Soviet Union, wrote in Russian, died in 1934, and never saw an American classroom or a television, calculator, computer, video game, or smartphone.” Let’s change that to Jesus Christ was a Palestinian Jew, who was unable to write, spoke Aramaic, died 2000 years ago, and never saw an American classroom or a television, calculator, computer, video game, or smartphone. Does the sentence still make sense? Clearly, the author knows of the US obsession with Russia and Communism – hardly the grounds for a scientific discussion of Vygotsky’s ideas. Vygotsky is also mischaracterised by the author, but necessarily so, since the author believes that the social situation of the child is irrelevant to the education of the child. All children learn in exactly the same way and structuring their learning environment is all that is necessary.

He also have an extended discussion on the benefits of reading to children that I want to mention too. Basically, he sees these benefits as being that it is a nice time that parents (or grandmothers) get to share with children and that it provides children with vocabulary they would not otherwise encounter in spoken language. He does mention grammar here too, but he has completely under-represented the vast advantages that being read to provides. I’m nearly certain he also says that children pretending to ‘read’ a favourite story book aloud isn’t really reading. This is because for the author anything that isn’t decoding text is virtually meaningless as an activity moving towards being able to read.

But we have known forever that being read to as a child isn’t just a cute thing parents do – but that it has real advantages well beyond merely learning to read. A wonderful text on this is Shirley Brice Heath’s What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School. The other text that makes this abundantly clear is Basil Bernstein’s research in the 1960s Class, Codes and Control. In that he was able to show that children with identical IQ scores from different social classes held significantly different linguistic codes, mostly due to parents reading to them and interacting with them in language codes that he described as either elaborated or restricted codes. Kids who had been read to understood, as only a book can teach, that school requires elaborated language codes, you need to be able to speak like a book, you need to make everything clear and assume no knowledge in the person you are speaking to – just as a book must. Whereas, low SES kids, who mostly hadn’t been read to all their lives, spoke in a restricted code, a language code that assumed the people you are speaking to can see what you can see. This restricted code is not rewarded at school, only the elaborated code is. And so low SES kids are disadvantaged by the language they speak and the lack of access they have had to elaborated language codes. Reading to your children isn’t about bonding, it is about providing them with the linguistic skills they will not learn in any other way.

Look, this book isn’t completely hopeless, I’m not as convinced that teachers, particularly primary school teachers, do not teach phonics, even if not always in exactly the manner he would prefer them to, but life’s like that.

What did annoy me was that he spends far too much time talking about brain regions with bio-babble such as: “Frontal areas focused on the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) are implicated in several aspects of normal and disordered reading. This region, which includes the classical Broca’s area, is activated in the performance of many tasks, with higher activation associated with greater task difficulty. One subcomponent, the pars opercularis, is involved in planning and producing speech and may be a part of the dorsal, phonological pathway in reading.” Yeah, you bet yah. I never understand what that point of pages and pages of text like that is for a book for lay readers. My underlying assumption, despite him beginning this section of the book by saying, “The result is not a cartoon version of what is known, just one that is neither overly broad nor numbingly specific” is that he wants to present himself as an expert that is beyond the ability of the reader to refute, since he clearly knows his par opercularis from his inferior frontal gyrus.

I can’t pretend I liked this book – like so many ideological books, he felt to me that it was seeking to present itself as unassailable on the basis of the far greater knowledge of the genius laying down the law to idiots. I’m not sure how many people you are likely to win over with an attitude like that, but clearly he has won over some people just as dogmatic. If that’s a win, well, that’s a win. If you are interested in this topic, I would recommend Castles, Rastle and Nation (2018) Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert, which is available here https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full... It will save you a lot of time.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent information on dyslexia.