How We Learn to Read

For over two hundred years, a debate has raged over the best way to teach reading. In one camp, phonics proponents believe that children must be explicitly taught the rules of our alphabetic writing system. In the other camp, whole language proponents believe that children should be taught to extract meaning from text without being drilled on phonics rules. Which approach is best? Studies into reading pathways in the brain give a clear answer.

Reading Pathways in the Brain

All expert readers have an established reading pathway in the brain, which follows three steps: letter identification, word recognition, and sentence processing (Figure 1).

Letter identification occurs in the visual processing center of the brain, in an area that has been dubbed the letterbox region. The letterbox region is not only able to identify an individual letter, it is able to recognize all variants of that letter. As far as the letterbox region is concerned, an A is an a, regardless of how it is written (Figure 2).

In a skilled reader, the letterbox region is capable of processing several letters at a time, and seems primed to recognize groups of letters that are likely to form word fragments and whole words. It cannot, however, access the meanings of words. To decipher meaning, information about letters must be sent to the language processing center of the brain.

Word Recognition occurs by two different pathways. The phonological pathway maps each letter or letter group to the sound it represents. The semantic pathway uses a mental dictionary to identify words. Both pathways are essential to fluent reading. The semantic route allows the reader to rapidly identify familiar words, and the phonological route allows the reader to sound out words that are not familiar.

Sentence processing occurs in the language processing center, and in the frontal cortex. Once words are identified, many written sentences can be processed the same as spoken sentences. However, written text provides some unique challenges. For example, if a word can be pronounced two different ways, the correct pronunciation will need to be determined based on context.

It is clear that reading pathways in the brain rely on recognition of letters and the sounds they represent. Even the semantic pathway, which recognizes whole words, does so based on information about letters sent from the letterbox region. Thus, for reading pathways to become established, information about letters and the sounds they represent must be learned. According to psychologist Uta Frith, learning occurs in three stages: the pictorial stage, the phonological stage, and the orthographic stage.

The Stages of Learning to Read

Children at the pictorial stage understand that words have meaning, but do not yet know that letters represent sounds. Instead, they recognize a word as they would an object, as a whole entity that is has a particular appearance.

Because a child at the pictorial stage identifies a word by its appearance, they cannot recognize words that are written in an unfamiliar way. For example, a young child may recognize the name Coca Cola as it is written on the side of a can, but will not be able to recognize this name if it is written in capital letters. They are also likely to confuse words with a similar appearance. Children at the pictorial stage are able to recognize up to a few dozen commonly encountered words, such as their own name.

At the phonological stage, children become aware that letters represent sounds. It is during the phonological stage, around age seven, that reading pathways begin to form. Initially, few words are entered into the reader’s mental dictionary, and most words must be processed by the phonological route.

Two skill are required for success at the phonological stage. First, the child must develop an awareness of phonemes, which are the component sounds of spoken language. It can be quite difficult for young children, and even illiterate adults, to identify phonemes as these sounds are always blended together in spoken language. Thus, phonemic awareness is a skill that must be learned. The second skill required for success at the phonological stage is the ability to map letters to the sounds they represent.

At the orthographic stage, readers have developed an extensive mental dictionary and can readily recognize many common words. It takes less working memory to retrieve a word from memory than it does to sound it out, so orthographic readers are able to read faster and with less effort.

Much learning at the orthographic stage occurs simply by reading. However, explicit vocabulary instruction can help, as long as examples of how to use each vocabulary word are provided. Teaching students to recognize an unknown word based on context, and teaching students to recognize prefixes, roots, and suffixes, can also help.

Typically, reading pathways that begin to form in the phonological stage do not reach maturity until early adolescence, and only with a tremendous amount of practice. The purpose of reading education, then, should be to facilitate development of these pathways. Some tips on developing reading pathways in the brain are provided below.

Best Approaches to Early Reading Education

The very first thing that beginner readers usually learn is letter names, notably through the ABC song. Unfortunately, letter names can be quite confusing as they often do not represent the sound that a letter most commonly represents. For example, a child who knows the name of the letter c (pronounced see), will be quite confused when they are taught that c represents the /k/ sound in ‘cat’. Rather than letter names, students should be taught letter sounds. To do so, a teacher might point to the letter c and say that it is a picture of the /k/ sound.

English spelling is quite complex and many letters, such as c, represent more than one sound. Even more confusing, pairs or groups of letters are often used to represent a single sound. Beginner readers do better if they are introduced to simple letter-sound corresponds before being introduced to more complex ones.

For students to map letters to sounds, they must be able to identify phonemes, which are the sounds that letters represent. Exercises that develop phonemic awareness include segmenting words into their component sounds, and blending sounds together to form words. Once students become aware of phonemes and are familiar with a few letter sounds and sight words, they can be provided with decodable readers containing only those sounds.

As a final note I will add that some students seem to “get it”, and are able to pick up reading quickly, even if they do not receive explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and letter-sound mapping. However, many of these students lag behind by fourth grade. Why? Because they’ve learned to recognize whole words without cracking the code of our alphabetic writing system.

Cracking the code is essential, because it is not possible to memorize all the words in the English language. Fortunately, quality reading programs, such as my Step-by-Step Reading Program, simplify the process of teaching students to crack the alphabetic code, and in the process to lay down robust reading pathways in the brain.