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Issue 3: |
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| Article 3: | Reading From Both Sides Of The Brain By Peter Kline |
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Unfortunately, this debate and its resolution too frequently overlook the neurological processes on which reading is based. While the popularly understood distinction between the functions of the left and right brain is oversimplified and ignores the fact that the brain is far more malleable in its development than is usually supposed, the distinction is nevertheless very useful in understanding how people learn to read. |
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In general, the left brain deals with sequential thinking and linguistic processing; the two most important elements in the decoding of print. The right brain, on the other hand, deals with the overview, as well as the more abstract interpretations of experiences and concepts. This is the part of the brain that is most involved in reading comprehension. These two parts of the brain don't communicate very well with each other unless there is some emotion involved, since the corpus collosum that unites them passes through the limbic system where primitive emotions are generated. Unfortunately, most reading instruction, even when it combines elements of whole language and phonics (or, much better, phonemic awareness) segments the decoding of words from the process of interpreting ideas in reading. Eugene Ionesco's absurdist play, The Bald Soprano, was based on his experience of the instructional materials that were used to teach him English. The play deals with the logically impossible Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Mr. and Mrs. Martin, the sort of people who appear in primers of reading and language instruction and live inside a vacuum devoid of human experiences. Much of the problem most people have in concentrating on what they are reading is that it is possible to think you are reading when you are merely decoding the words on the page. Thus you can read a passage aloud and not hear or understand what you have read. The same unfortunate habit carries over into silent reading. The solution to the conflict between decoding and comprehension is to involve them both simultaneously from the very beginning. In other words, beginning reading and language instruction should focus on situations and characters that can have personal meaning for the student. If you are reading sentences like "See Spot run," you are not inspired to interpret them in terms of your own experience. In contrast, a sentence like, "I spilled something on my new suit," is more likely to elicit an emotional response from the reader. Literature teachers spend most of their time involving their students in a discussion of the meanings and implications of what they have read. The same approach should be used from the very first day of reading and language instruction. It is difficult to conduct a discussion about what it means to see spot run, but almost all of us can recall an embarrassing incident when we spilled something on our clothing. Learning occurs far more rapidly when the student is emotionally involved in the process. Using emotionally involving materials in the early study of almost any subject will make it much easier to learn and to remember the basic ideas about that subject. Publishers and readers are rapidly learning the importance of this lesson. Nonfiction books on various subjects used to be dry renderings of their material in a manner that would interest only specialists. More recently, the best and most effective nonfiction books in even very arcane subjects often use the techniques of the good novelist to involve the reader in the subject from the very beginning. Developers of instructional materials for beginning learners need to follow the latest trends in publishing and provide materials that from the very beginning invoke learning experiences that are both meaningful and fun at the same time. That way, the student can become emotionally involved in the learning process. For example, a math book might open what the question, "How do you feel when someone else's share is bigger than yours?" A book on astronomy might begin, "Did you ever wonder while playing Space Invaders what life might be like on the planets where the invaders come from?" A book on economics might begin with, "What would you do if you suddenly discovered that you had no money at all and no way to get any?" A book on comparative religions might begin, "Suppose you died and awoke to discover that you were in an afterlife. How would you react, and what would you want to know first?" All too often when books for beginners are dressed up with supposedly interesting examples of applications of the subject matter, but the applications are of more interest to experts than to the beginning student. It's all very well to describe Galileo dropping something off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but it would grab the reader far more if the subject were introduced with the following quotation from Shakespeare: The very place puts toys of desperation Without more motive, into every brain That looks so many fathoms to the sea And hears it roar beneath. In other words, I'm much more likely to develop an interest in the formula F = ma if it's my own body that I imagine suffering the dreadful descent from the top of the tower to the concrete street below. |
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Article 4: Books to Challenge Your Thinking |
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