This is The Reading Instruction Show. I'm your
host, as always, Dr. Andy Johnson. Let's learn
something today. Topic of today's podcast is
what elephants can teach us about reading instruction.
Now here's a word, high school. Right now your
brain is connecting with things in your memory
related to high school. Even though you may not
be conscious of your doing so, it's connecting
to your memories of events, people, episodes,
circumstances, things, and places that you've
experienced. Now if you were to encounter the
words high school band, a more specific set of
memories and associations would begin to surface.
And if you were to encounter high school sports,
a different set of memories and associations
would surface. However, these subset of memories
would be connected to the initial high school
memories in some way. The big idea here is that
the things we encounter aren't just randomly
thrown into long -term memory all higgly -piggly.
No, the things are stored with or connected with
related things. And when I say stored or connected,
I'm referring to the neurons in your brain that
form the three -dimensional dot -to -dot picture
called neural networks. These connections are
used to help recognize words during reading.
These are the micro -predictions to which Ken
Goodman was referring. when he used the term
psycholinguistic guessing game. When we encounter
a word in text, we've usually already made unconscious
connections to the word based on what came before
the title, the context of the sentence, or the
context of the text. Very rarely, if ever, do
we encounter isolated words floating in space.
they are always found in the context of a sentence,
sign, product, or situation. Well, almost always.
If you were to see the word elephant written
on a piece of plywood floating in the middle
of a lake in Grantsburg, Wisconsin, you'd have
to rely solely on letters and letter patterns
stored in long -term memory to recognize the
word. But how often have you encountered the
name of a large land mammal floating on a piece
of plywood in the middle of a lake? To recognize
this word, you most likely use some letter clues
to match the word stored in your long -term memory.
You may have also identified the word by sounding
out each letter. However, you'd have to remember
that pH makes the F sound. You'd have to sound
out each letter's sound and listen to the sounds
as you put the parts together. You'd hear the
word elephant as you sounded out each letter,
and then you'd say, ah, the word is elephant.
Or so they say. However, if you were to encounter
the word elephant at a zoo or in the jungle,
you'd be able to identify the word microseconds
faster, than you would on the floating piece
of plywood. And why is this? Because elephants
belong in zoos and jungle. Same word, different
context. But to really understand how you came
to recognize the word elephant on a floating
piece of plywood, we need to understand what's
going on inside your head. Now the eyes tell
us a little bit about your intracranial activity
during reading. Now, if you were to see the word
ELEPHANT written by itself in the middle of a
paper, notice how your eyes move. Even though
you knew what the word was, when you looked at
ELEPHANT in isolation, your eyes most likely
fixated on ELE, PH, and NTS. and then back to
the beginning of the word and re -read it. Now
let's put a little bit more information around
the word. Let's put some context around the word
elephant. Notice the difference in your eye movement
when you see the same word in the context of
a sentence. At the zoo, the elephant was next
to the tiger. If you were to see this, your eye
movement would be quite different. The information
in your head would be directing your eyes. Your
brain would say, stop wasting our time. We don't
need to stop on every stinking word. We can fill
in the blanks, for goodness sakes. In the sentence,
you probably fixated on the words at, zoo, and
the L in elephant before skipping to next and
tig in tigers. And then zip back and forth a
few words after tiger. Your eyes never actually
stopped on the words the, the, was, to, and the.
In that sentence at the zoo, the elephant was
next to the tiger. Eye movement studies show
that most readers skip 20 to 40 % of the words
on the page. Now let's look at this from a cognitive
perspective. You have a file folder in your head
related to elephants. not a literal file folder,
rather a cognitive structure called a schema.
Schema means thinking. It's a thought structure
or an imaginary file folder in your head. All
your elephant information is stored here. As
you learn more about elephants, the imaginary
file folder becomes larger. The things in your
elephant file folder are also connected with
things in other folders like your jungle, mammal,
and zoo folders. And things that are closely
associated with elephants are stored closer in
your file folder with lots of connections. These
come to mind the quickest when activated by an
encounter with similar words or things. Things
that are vaguely associated with elephants are
stored further away, with very narrow neural
pathways leading to them. These things may surface
in time, but they would take a little bit more
prompting to become activated. And activation
here means that your brain becomes aware of them,
often in the periphery of consciousness. you're
not consciously aware of them. This means that
once you realize that you're reading about elephants,
a whole bunch of elephant things get activated.
The result is that you need far fewer letter
clues to recognize words. Yes, you also have
a file folder for letter pattern things, along
with grammar and word order things. tick information,
but when you're recognizing words versus identifying
words, elephant things are more important than
the letter pattern and grammar things. Now, analogies
and metaphors, activating elephants. Analogies
and metaphors are useful in helping us connect
a new thing with a known thing. We're able to
picture the known thing and then shoehorn the
new thing right inside of it. And suddenly the
new thing makes a bit of sense. And did you notice
how I just used the shoehorn metaphor? Now picture
a harp in a large indoor football stadium like
the stadium where the Minnesota Vikings play.
Think. of long -term memory is a multi -dimensional
harp that fills up the entire Vikings football
stadium. Harp strings here go off in all sorts
of directions. Each harp string is connected
to related harp strings. And when you pluck one
string, the vibration moves outward to the connected
harp strings. Now, connected strings that are
closer to the initial pluck vibrate sooner and
with stronger vibration than strings that are
further away. For example, if you plucked a string
on the 50 -yard line that was connected to a
string in the upper balcony, that vibration may
eventually get there, but not as quickly and
with a much weaker vibration. then a connected
string on the 49 -yard line. And the strings
not connected wouldn't vibrate at all. When reading,
each encountered word is a small pluck on the
strings. This activates other related strings,
meaning that strings connected to the next word
on the page have often been activated before
you get there. This is part of the top -down
flow of information that occurs during reading
that was described in an earlier chapter. Thus,
you've got all these good vibrations going on
before you encounter a word. This is the social
psycholinguistic guessing game described by Ken
Goodman years ago. This does not prevent you
from using letter clues or letter patterns stored
in long -term memory. It just minimizes the need
to do so. Now replace the harp strings with a
neural network and electrochemical signals zipping
back and forth. And there you have it, the social
psycholinguistic guessing game. Word possibilities
are activated before the word is encountered.
Semantic, syntactic, and phonological information
are all used together to recognize words in the
larger context of creating meaning. Now this
idea of things activating related things is known
as spreading activation. This theory posits that
semantic memory, memory of facts and information,
is organized by semantic distance or relatedness
of the things. This in turn facilitates more
efficient and effective processing of new information
and faster responses for things like recognizing
words or responding to saber -toothed tigers.
and McClellan and Rummelhart's parallel processing
model demonstrates that a person can take in
and understand lots of different stimuli at the
same time. For reading, this means you're using
a lot of different information to create meaning
with print, not just the code. Now, picture an
elephant playing a harp in the middle of a football
stadium. Just messing with you. Don't do that.
But you would notice, if you had that sentence
in front of you, the difference in your eye movement
as you read that seemingly meaningless, nonsensical
sentence. Your eyes most likely would have zipped
over it at least two times. and all your strings
related to harps, elephants, football stadiums,
and reading would have been vibrating, but the
song was out of tune. It wasn't making sense.
And your brain knew this, and in a desperate
attempt to tune it up or create meaning, it ran
over that sentence a couple times. So, based
on the elephant harp theory, I present three
recommendations for emergent and struggling readers.
Number one, students need to read about familiar
things. Learning to read is facilitated by reading
about known things. Early readers and struggling
older readers should be provided with books,
characters, events, and language that are similar
to their own. This enables them to focus on recognizing
words. Also, they've got lots of connections
to their vibrating harp strings. This provides
a scaffold as their human brains try to make
sense of the squiggly shapes on the page. Second,
language experience activity should be used with
emerging and struggling readers. Being able to
read their own words that are used to describe
familiar things or experiences facilitates word
recognition. And more space and short -term memory
can be devoted to word recognition, to creating
meaning with print, when they're not also struggling
with meaning. And third, the use of decodable
text should be limited. Sentences like Nan and
Pap sat in a pan just don't make sense. We ask
emerging and struggling readers to make sense
out of nonsense with these decodable texts. And
notice how I said limited, not eliminated. Decodable
texts can be a valuable tool, but the value of
any tool is dependent on how it's used. used
in the context of lots of authentic reading material,
decodable text can sometimes be effective for
some students to reinforce letter patterns and
sounds in some situations. But the really big
point of this podcast is this. It's the semantic
connections that are most important, not the
orthographic, graphemic, or phonemic connections.
When you encounter the word elephant, you don't
connect it with short E words. You don't activate
words containing the A -N -T, ant, letter pattern,
or words with silent P -H blends. You connect
it with elephant things, regardless of the letter
sounds or patterns. Just hearing the word elephant
brought some of the elephant things in your elephant
schema to consciousness. Meaning that if elephant
were followed by the words sock, trunk, squallow,
you'd be able to identify the word trunk microseconds
faster than the other non -related words. This
is called priming. Priming looks at how something
that comes before primes or impacts what follows.
The very word elephant primed the pump so that
I would be able to identify elephant words quicker
and more efficiently. And I'll be looking at
some of these research studies in another podcast.
Now I know what some of you are thinking at this
point. You're thinking, how can we activate elephants
if we don't know what we're reading, if we don't
know we're reading about elephants? It just makes
sense that decoding must precede meaning. You
have to decode before you can activate anything.
Now, what makes good science and what makes good
sense are often two different things. If you
relied on a single word recognition system, the
phonological system, to read, you would indeed
be correct. But you don't, and it isn't. When
you start reading, there's usually a title or
a picture related to what you'll be reading.
People generally have some sense of what they'll
be reading. And even if you don't, the very first
time you encounter the word elephant, you may
indeed need to use more letter clues than semantic
clues, yes, but you already have a sense of syntax,
sentence structure, and the nature of the text
being read. This information is all used to some
degree before you use letter clues. All this
information is used along with lettered clues
to recognize words. And once your elephant schema
kicks in, you're off to elephant land. Again,
this does not mean that you ignore lettered clues.
It means that, and this does not mean that phonics
is unimportant or that direct systematic instruction
should not be used. It does mean, however, that
if we can develop what the brain does naturally,
students will learn to read faster and become
better readers. This is The Reading Instruction
Show. I've been your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.