It's offishal -
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Project Employment Inc |
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Bridie Smith Science and Technology Reporter The Age Newspaper, 17/11/09 |
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RESEARCH has confirmed that English is "the worst" language to learn to read - of those that use the Roman alphabet. School Students take at least two years to grasp reading it, as opposed to three or four months for a "transparent" language such as Italian. "The spelling is impossible," renowned French brain expert Stanislas Dehaene said yesterday. "If you learn Italian, you learn the sounds for each of the letters and then you can read Italian. The letter-to-sound correspondence is transparent. But that is not the case for English - or for Professor Dehaene's native tongue, French, which he admits is the "second-worst" language to learn to read. Professor Dehaene is in Melbourne as a guest of the Mental Health Research Institute and University of Melbourne, |
his visit
coinciding with the Australian release of his latest book Reading in the Brain. An earlier book, A Number Sense, was translated into eight languages. His latest research has shown that the complexity and irregular spelling of English resulted in significant delays in learning to read. "Comparisons in European countries have shown this has a huge impact of several years of delay in reading for children learning English," he said." On top of this, learning to read English required more cortical space in the brain. His research using brain imaging has shown that once eyes land on a printed word, a specific point of the brain lights up - the occipito temporal area at the back of the left hemisphere. |
This area of the brain does not function well among children with reading difficulties such as dyslexia. The area has evolved for reading, which
in evolutionary terms is a relatively recently acquired skill. The theory that the brain learns to read by whole-word recognition was wrong. Professor Dehaene said, and should be taken into account when teaching students to read. "The brain gives an illusion of whole-word recognition because it's processing all the letters at once, but the retina is decomposing the word into little pieces . . . and the brain puts the word together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle," he said. The process happened in a fifth of a second - which is why it semed a one-step process. |
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