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Eonverye taht can raed tihs rsaie yuor hnad
A message is making the rounds of the Internet, claiming that the fact that 55% of people can read the words in the title proves that the order of letters within a word doesn’t matter as long as the first and last letters are in the right place. The message goes on to claim that the brain doesn’t process individual letters but rather reads each word as a whole. The implication is that whole word methods of teaching children to read are appropriate.
It apparently doesn’t occur to the author to think about the 45% of adults who cannot read mixed-up words. There is nothing strange or mysterious about who falls into the 45% category and who falls into the 55% category. The 55% who can read mixed-up words are the fluent readers, and the 45% who can’t read them are the unskilled readers - the adults who can’t read very well, if at all. No beginning reader is able to read mixed-up words. It would be our guess that everyone who reads our blog would be able to read the mixed-up title, no problem.
Sally Shaywitz, a neuroscientist and professor of pediatrics at Yale University, has carried out brain imaging studies to find out how people learn to read. It turns out that there are two subsystems involved - the parieto-temporal region and the occipito-temporal area. In her book Overcoming Dyslexia, Dr. Shaywitz writes: “The parieto-temporal system works for the novice reader. Slow and analytic, its function seems to be in the early stages of learning to read, that is, in initially analyzing a word, pulling it apart, and linking its letters to their sounds. In contrast to the step-by-step parieto-temporal system, the occipito-temporal region is the express pathway to reading and is the one used by skilled readers….After a child has analyzed and correctly read a word several times, he forms an exact neural model of that specific word; the model (word form), reflecting the word’s spelling, its pronunciation, and its meaning, is now permanently stored in the occipito-temporal system. Subsequently, just seeing the word in print immediately activates the word form and all the relevant information about that word. (p. 79)
In other words, kids have to laboriously sound out each unknown word several times before it can be transferred to a different part of the brain which allows it to be instantly recognized. The proponents of whole word methods are making the mistake so common to experts in any field - forgetting their own learning processes and assuming that novices can just jump right in and copy their advanced performance without going through the beginning stages. However, only a small percentage of students, most of them with a head start provided by enriched homes, can manage this. The majority of students need to be taught systematic phonics in order to become fluent readers.