Making the Most of Neuroscience for Teaching Reading

Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, a respected neuroscientist, holds the Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collége de France in Paris and directs the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpine, France's advanced brain imaging research center. In this post, I’ll share major findings reported in his keynote speech, “How Learning to Read Changes the Brain: Implications for Education,” at Learning Ally’s 2023 Spotlight on Dyslexia Reading Conference and provide specific examples of classroom and tutorial practices supported by neuroscience.

Professor Dehaene’s work brings clarity to what we learn from neuroscience about teaching reading. He speaks eloquently about championing equity and hope for overcoming reading problems not only in America and France but across languages.

Professor Dehaene reports that reading is a visual system for accessing one’s already existing spoken language to create meaning. As an expert reader, you are making meaning from this sentence by automatically and unconsciously, without effort, connecting the English alphabetic code on the page with the meanings and sounds of the English words you already have in your spoken language. All readers across languages read the same way and use almost precisely the same areas in the left hemisphere cortex for reading. No matter what writing system one uses, there is only one reading circuit in the brain, and by and large, all readers use that same circuit.

5 Key Points for What Works and What Needs to Change According to Neuroscience

I gleaned five key points from Professor Dehaene’s brilliant and compelling presentation, along with other insights.

1. Explicit instruction for beginners in phonics for decoding, and spelling for encoding words, works! Discovery learning for word study with minimal guidance, currently a dominant practice in many American schools ensconced by decades of whole language training and whole-language-inspired published resources, along with what’s popularly known in education circles as “balanced reading," “does not work” to quote Dehaene. He avers that “whole language or even balanced literacy confuse the attention of the child” due to now debunked cueing practices, such as guessing by looking at pictures, remembering the word’s shape, or guessing from context. These signature whole language practices prevent the child from paying attention to mapping sounds to letters.
2. Dehaene describes early acquisition when beginners in first grade begin to decipher words slowly and analytically, requiring a lot of short-term memory; they must effortfully analyze words letter-by-letter, he says, convert each grapheme into a phoneme, then “listen” in their mind to the word on the page and connect it to a word in their spoken language in order to enable understanding and comprehension. Beginners “listen” in their mind’s ear and begin to connect what they hear to a spelling pattern or brain word in their mind’s eye in a specialized cortical area in the left hemisphere called the "visual word form area."
3. During this beginning learning-to-read process, the child’s brain compiles statistics about letters and words. Reading acquisition specializes in a cortical area for fast recognition of letter strings (graphemes) and establishes a functional link with areas coding for speech units (phonemes). Dehaene describes the beginning reader’s brain as a “super-computer” that needs to be fed with structured inputs, a well-designed curriculum for explicit teaching of phonics and spelling. Catastrophically (a word Dehaene used in his keynote), structured inputs, a well-designed curriculum, and explicit teaching of phonics and spelling have been abandoned in many American schools due to two decades of discovery learning promoted by now debunked whole language theory resulting in minimal guidance with phonics and spelling in popular versions of “balanced literacy” (Gentry, 2022; Ouellette & Gentry, 2019; Swartz, 2019).
4. Initially, assembling a string of graphemes into a series of phonemes is difficult for children. It must be explicitly taught with active engagement and teacher feedback.
5. It takes time—grapheme by grapheme from left to right; Dehaene says, “Beginners need to be told how it works.” Here's an example.

Imagine you are looking in on a science-of-reading word study lesson in a first-grade classroom. Effortful analysis of a word such as rat, along with active engagement and feedback from the teacher, might require the first grader’s teacher to employ modeling and prompts in word study lessons, using a carefully crafted curriculum with targeted phonics patterns of roughly 10 high-frequency words for up to 10 minutes or more each day.

Teacher: “Today, we will be learning and listening to our new words for this week. Listen to all the sounds, and then you say the word after me. Ready? The first word is rat. Rrraaat. Rat.”

Guided word analysis in engaging multi-sensory activities occurs throughout the week, along with interleaved teaching and testing and regular daily practice to achieve automatization. At week’s end, the teacher, tutor, or homeschooler guides students to self-correct sentences they have written and read and correctly spell the week’s words in the decodable contextual sentences, such as “A rat and a cat can be sad” (adapted from Ouellette & Gentry, 2023). Reading and writing these contextual decodable sentences independently is the hallmark of breaking the code.

Once beginners break the code—expected for most normally developing readers by the end of first grade—through a process of consolidating letters into phonics chunks and syllable patterns, one can count on automatization, Dehaene reports. Beyond second grade, as reading becomes automatic, words take a more direct unconscious route, as can be demonstrated by hundreds of complex imaging studies conducted by Professor Dehaene and a host of his colleagues over the last 20 years. “All letters in a word are processed simultaneously,” allowing fast readable access to the lexicon (the known words in a person’s spoken language), generating meaning and comprehension.

Professor Dehaene champions three main variables that predict success: 1) Teaching of graphemes-phoneme relations (phonics and spelling); 2) increasing the size of the child’s spoken vocabulary; and 3) in his words, motivating the child to “read, read, read!” The more the child reads, the bigger the vocabulary and the more likely to have growth of essential background knowledge for comprehension. He champions the presence and access of books and motivation—the frequency the child chooses to read.

Importantly, Professor Dehaene espouses four pillars of efficient learning that are a hallmark of what is now known from neuroscience and cognitive developmental psychology, and he applies them to the process of learning to read:

1. Attention
2. Active engagement
3. Feedback (from the teacher, tutor, or parent)
4. Consolidation and automatization: transfer from conscious effort (in beginners) to unconscious automatic reading of brain words after readers have broken the code

Professor Dehaene is candid, unapologetic, and clear regarding what needs to change. In his book, Reading In the Brain, he asserts that whole language “does not fit with the architecture of our visual brain” (2009, p. 195) and goes on to say, “Cognitive psychology directly refutes any notion of teaching via a 'global' or 'whole language method'” (2009, p. 219). In the keynote, Dehaene is quite specific:

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• I claim that whole language or even balanced literacy confuses the attention of a child. What you all need is to focus on phonics [and spelling].
• Do not use three-cueing.
• Do not guess from context or from the word’s shape.
• Guessing plays no role; it’s all in the letter string (the spelling).

He describes a fascinating study where the whole language group was using the right hemisphere for reading and says, “That’s a catastrophe!” His assertion that the most popular reading programs in America aren't backed by science is widely reported by cognitive scientists and in the popular media (see, for example, Seidenberg, 2017; Swartz, 2018).

Embrace the current science-of-reading movement despite politics and resistance based on the fact that districts continue to spend millions of dollars on Whole Language-inspired training and curricula. Parents and educators should join the Science-of-Reading movement to promote progress and instill hope for the future of American reading education.