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“A book is made up of signs, which speak of other signs, which speak of things,” wrote famed Italian writer and scholar Umberto Eco, describing the labyrinth of symbols that comprise written language. To be sure, many of us take the seemingly simple act of reading for granted. But to a significant number of children in the United States, learning how to read is tantamount to cracking a highly enigmatic code. Close to 40 percent of U.S. fourth-grade children score below grade level in reading assessments, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And it is estimated that 10 to 15 percent of children have been diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disability signaled by serious difficulty reading, writing, and spelling. Why can’t some children learn to read as easily as their peers? The answer, says HGSE assistant professor Tami Katzir is more complicated than anyone previously expected. Katzir’s recent research may help to recast how educators conceptualize the task of reading—and how they teach it. “For decades, researchers have likened learning how to read to climbing a ladder. Each child goes through the same series of steps to achieve the end goal,” Katzir says. A child starts up that ladder by listening to the sounds of spoken language, then mimicking and manipulating them, a skill called phonological awareness. The child then learns the names of the letters and the sounds associated with them. Soon, she can learn new words by sounding them out. After much practice, she will be able to pay more attention to a word’s meaning than to its letters.
Inclusive Approaches to Reading Instruction But the act downplays other approaches to teaching reading, and according to Katzir’s latest discoveries, that may unintentionally exclude some children with dyslexia. Her investigation of 229 average and dyslexic second- and third-grade readers in Boston, Toronto, and Atlanta found that while many of the dyslexic children in the study had difficulty blending sounds, a second subset of them had a normal ability to do so. For these children, reading difficulties were traced to an impediment in naming letters in rapid succession. A third subgroup of children in the study showed both impairments. The three groups differed in their performance on letter, word, and connected text reading. A second study proved that letter-naming and sound-blending are distinct neurological processes that contribute separately to the task of reading. In this study, Katzir charted the neurological activity of 12 adult skilled readers as they completed sound-blending and letter-naming tasks. Indeed, she found that one part of the cerebral cortex long associated with processing written text, called the angular gyrus, became a flurry of neural activity when subjects named letters in rapid succession. During tasks drawing on phonological skills alone, the angular gyrus was dormant. Katzir says that both studies prove there are at least two distinct processes involved in reading and many potential stumbling blocks. “For this reason, reading preventions that address sound-blending skills alone won't help children with other reading problems.” Katzir is currently evaluating other reading programs and, through the Jeanne Chall Reading Lab at HGSE, training literacy specialists to put her new findings to use in their classrooms. “The more we extend our definition of dyslexia, the more we will understand the multiple pathways that lead to reading disabilities,” she says. About the Article
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HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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Tami Katzir on her main research interest (1 minute) 
