The Centrality of Word Knowledge to Reading Skill Explored at Chall Lecture

The brain holds much insight into how children and adults learn to read words and develop reading skills. In particular, word knowledge is important in how the brain reads, according to Charles Perfetti, associate director of the learning research and development center at the University of Pittsburgh.

Perfetti shared his research at the third annual Jeanne Chall Lecture, “Beyond Decoding: The Centrality of Word Knowledge to Reading Skill,” on Thursday, October 25. Chall was a professor at HGSE and a leading expert in her field. Her seminal work on reading research and instruction influenced scholarship on the teaching of reading in schools and universities throughout the country. “As someone who’s a researcher on science and only occasionally on education and reading, I’m an admirer of Chall,” Perfetti said. “It’s a privilege to be here.”

Learning to read is difficult. To date, educators have used a variety of methods like teaching phonics, word meanings, balanced instruction in phonics and word meaning, and whole word study, in teaching children to read. Perfetti’s research focuses on the context of words and how neuroscience can add another dimension to understanding how one learns to read. When children or adults learn to read words, Perfetti studies the brain’s response or, rather, the “reading network.” Most notably the brain’s reading network responds to training, he said, which supports a Chall article from the 1970s in which she wrote that learning to read isn’t a right- or left-brain activity, but rather something entirely dependent upon good instruction.

Perfetti tests many common aspects of learning to read — like reading words in context, learned definitions, phonics, and rare words —  in the brains of both skilled and low-skilled readers. The results demonstrate that skilled and low-skilled readers often have different efficiency levels based on learning methods and reaction times. For example, when a child sees an unfamiliar word, the brain shows a negative shift within 400 milliseconds, Perfetti said. But if that same unfamiliar word is put into some type of context or paraphrased, skilled readers respond better whereas less-skilled readers have a more “sluggish” response when integrating words in text. Perfetti suspects this has to do with the reader’s knowledge of the word.

“Word meaning is the link between decoding and comprehension,” Perfetti said. This is even true of adults, who during one study were trained on the meaning of some rare words like ”gloaming” and ”tiglon.” Perfetti then tested the adults on trained and untrained word meaning recognition while charting the brain response. Perfetti noticed that when both skilled and low-skilled readers saw the familiar or trained words, they would attempt to recall the meaning. However, the skilled readers were more successful, which may indicate that word meaning can affect ability to learn to read words efficiently.

“This [brain] provides timing information on the unfolding of cognitive events in reading and learning,” Perfetti said.

While this timing may have implications for educational practice, Perfetti also cautioned that educators shouldn’t throw out what they already know about teaching word form and meaning either.

“We have a lot of technology that is helpful in practice,” he said, pointing out that a larger problem in the field is the failure to identify a child’s motivation in seeking to read on their own.

Following Perfetti’s lecture, Assistant Professor Nonie Lesaux announced Young-Suk Kim, Ed.D.’07, as the recipient of the Jeanne S. Chall Doctoral Student Research Award. Kim is currently an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Florida State University, who focuses on the role that specific language skills play in reading development, especially for children and adults who negotiate two languages. Her dissertation followed 215 four-year-old Korean-English children for 15 months examining the development of their phonological awareness.

In addition, this year featured the first Jeanne S. Chall Research Grant which was presented to Caitlin Dillon. Currently, Dillon is a post-doctoral fellow at Haskins Laboratories, a research institute in New Haven, Conn., that focuses on speech, language, and reading and biological basis, where she investigates the effects of a three-year study in which first-grade teachers were provided professional development seminars and in-class coaching in literacy instruction. Dillon plans to place her current work and findings on professional development and knowledge of literacy education in historical context.