The link below is to an article that looks at reading and mental health.
For more visit:
http://bookriot.com/2017/05/16/reading-is-good-for-your-mental-health-heres-why/
Category Archives: Reading
Explainer: how the brain changes when we learn to read
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Nicola Bell, The University of Queensland
Right now, you are reading these words without much thought or conscious effort. In lightning-fast bursts, your eyes are darting from left to right across your screen, somehow making meaning from what would otherwise be a series of black squiggles. 
Reading for you is not just easy – it’s automatic. Looking at a word and not reading it is almost impossible, because the cogs of written language processing are set in motion as soon as skilled readers see print.
And yet, as tempting as it is to think of reading as hard-wired into us, don’t be fooled. Learning to read is not easy. It’s not even natural.
The first examples of written language date back to about 5,000 years ago, which is a small fraction of the 60,000 years or more that humans have spent using spoken language.
This means our species hasn’t had enough time to evolve brain networks that predispose us to learn literacy. It is only through years of practice and instruction that we have forged those connections for ourselves.
How the brain learns to read
Brains are constantly reorganising themselves. Any time we learn a new skill, connections between neurons that allow us to perform that skill become stronger. This flexibility is heightened during childhood, which is why so much learning gets crammed in before adolescence.
As a child becomes literate, there is no “reading centre” that magically materialises in the brain. Instead, a network of connections develops to link existing areas that weren’t previously linked. Reading becomes a way of accessing language by sight, which means it builds on architecture that is already used for recognising visual patterns and understanding spoken language.
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The journey of a word
When a skilled reader encounters a printed word, that information travels from their eyes to their occipital lobe (at the back of the brain), where it is processed like any other visual stimulus.
From there, it travels to the left fusiform gyrus, otherwise known as the brain’s “letterbox”. This is where the black squiggles are recognised as letters in a word. The letterbox is a special stopover on the word’s journey because it only develops as the result of learning to read. It doesn’t exist in very young children or illiterate adults, and it’s activated less in people with dyslexia, who have a biological difference in the way their brains process written text.
Words and letters are stored in the letterbox – not as individually memorised shapes or patterns, but as symbols. This is why a skilled reader can recognise a word quickly, regardless of font, cAsE, or typeface.
Information then travels from the letterbox to the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, to work out word meaning and pronunciation. These same areas are activated when we hear a word, so they are specialised for language, rather than just reading and writing.
Because information can travel so quickly across the skilled reader’s synaptic highways, the entire journey takes less than half a second.
But what happens in the brain of a five-year-old child, whose highways are still under construction?
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The growing brain
For young children, the process of getting from print to meaning is slow and effortful. This is partly because beginning readers have not yet built up a store of familiar words that they can recognise by sight, so they must instead “sound out” each letter or letter sequence.
Every time children practise decoding words, they forge new connections between the visual and spoken language areas of the brain, gradually adding new letters and words to the brain’s all-important letterbox.
Remember, when a practised reader recognises a word by sight, they process the letters in that word, rather than its shape.
Literacy instruction can therefore support children’s learning by highlighting the symbolic nature of letters – in other words, by drawing attention to the relationships between letters and speech sounds.
Here, evidence from brain imaging research and educational research converge to show that early phonics instruction can help construct an efficient reading network in the brain.
What might the future hold for literacy development?
As technology evolves, so too must our definition of what it means to be “literate”. Young brains now need to adapt not only to written language, but also to the fast-paced media through which written language is presented.
Only time will tell how this affects the development of that mysterious beige sponge between our ears.
Nicola Bell, PhD student, The University of Queensland
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
How do we learn to read?
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Misty Adoniou, University of Canberra
The sign on the public car park in the tiny Tasmanian town of Wynyard reads, 
Egress from this carpark is to be via the access lane in the rear.
“Egress?” I wondered.
As my 21-year-old son quipped, perhaps the council had called in the local duke to write its signs. Or at least the local lawyer.
I could say all the words on the sign with very little effort, and with impressive fluency.
That is called decoding.
I had to work a little harder to understand what the sign was saying.
That is called comprehending.
The aim of reading is, of course, comprehension.
In essence, debates around how to best teach reading have been about which comes first, the decoding or the comprehending.
Research concludes these debates are redundant because comprehension and decoding are codependent.
The federal government’s recent proposal, however, for a Year 1 Phonics Screening test – which tests a child’s ability to decode made-up words – appears to support the view that decoding comes before comprehension.
Comprehension, therefore, is deemed irrelevant – at least initially.
So who is right? The researchers or the politicians?
Let’s take a look at what the research tells us about how we learn to read.
Tackling unknown words
It was the first word in the car park sign that threw me. “Egress.”
I used my knowledge of how sounds map on to letters in English to decode it. However, because I couldn’t remember ever hearing the word said out loud, I wasn’t sure if I was decoding it correctly.
It might be EE-gress or ee-GRESS, EGG-ress, or egg-RESS. It is the first, apparently. I Googled it later.
In any case my decoding efforts didn’t help me understand what the word means. In order for decoding skills to be of any use in reading, children need an excellent vocabulary to which they can cross reference as they attempt to decode.
Tip 1: teach phonics through words already in the children’s vocabulary.
Building children’s vocabularies
Before we rush out and start teaching children lists of vocabulary, words in lists are not enough.
If someone had shown me “egress” by itself on a flashcard, I might have guessed it was a bird.
Luckily, “egress” was in a full sentence on a sign in front of a car park, and all of that context helped me comprehend the word.
Without context, words are just letters on a page. This is because all words in English are polysemic – they have multiple meanings depending upon the context.
The wind in my hair. My baby has wind.
And some words keep their spelling but change their pronunciation as well as their meaning.
I’d like to wind you up. I need to wind my clock. Why do I always **wind **up doing the dishes.
Tip 2: build your children’s vocabulary by talking and reading to them so that they encounter words in all their many and varied guises. Seeing a word in many different contexts is more important than just seeing the word flashed at you many times.
Grammar matters
The grammar of the parking sign in Wynyard also helped my comprehension.
I had figured out from the context that “egress” meant either entry or exit.
I hear a lot of language so I understand how words “collocate” in English – that is, how some words always hang out together grammatically. My experience with the language meant I knew that we exit “from” and enter “into”.
The more we hear and read real language, the more we learn about how word order works in English.
Tip 3: teach reading through real books with real language so that children learn the rhythm and patterns of English grammar.
Experience counts
I relied on my experience as a driver to look around and see that a median strip in the road would make “egress” from the front of the car park tricky. Life experience helps us read too.
If I write I live in a studio apartment in San Jose, your interpretation of where I live will depend upon whether you understand a studio apartment to be a basement bedsit, or penthouse bachelor pad. It will depend on whether you understand San Jose to be an affluent tech hub or an working class industrial city.
The words alone cannot carry all the meaning of my message. You bring your life experience to the task of reading my words.
Tip 4: give children lots of real life experiences and talk to them about what they see. Trips out and about, and chats about things beyond their everyday environment are important.
Are we giving poor readers the help they need?
Good readers have a full repertoire of skills, each dependent upon the other.
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They have excellent oral language and a wide vocabulary. They know what words mean and this helps them decode.
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They can decode and this helps them locate the word in their existing vocabulary.
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They know the structure of English through exposure to authentic complex written and spoken language.
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They use rich life experiences to support their comprehension of written texts.
Poor readers need all of these skills too. Yet our interventions for poor readers typically only address one skill – decoding.
Our declining results in international tests of literacy show us that our 15 year olds can decode but they can’t comprehend.
Until we pay full attention to all the other reading skills, the decline will continue.
Misty Adoniou, Associate Professor in Language, Literacy and TESL, University of Canberra
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Speed Reading Apps
The link below is to an article that takes a look at speed reading apps.
For more visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/08/speed-reading-apps-can-you-really-read-novel-in-your-lunch-hour
Reading and Mental Health
The link below is to an article that looks at reading and mental health.
For more visit:
https://www.bustle.com/p/5-proven-ways-reading-can-improve-your-mental-health-43367
How to Read More
The link below is to an article that looks at how to read more – in fact, how to read 200 books a year.
For more visit:
https://qz.com/895101/in-the-time-you-spend-on-social-media-each-year-you-could-read-200-books/
Reading with your children: proper books vs tablets
Nicola Yuill, University of Sussex
Most of us have an opinion about whether we prefer reading on screen or paper: but what difference does it make for children? The truth is that technology is now encountered from babyhood. Anecdotes abound of toddlers swiping their fingers across paper rather than turning the page, while parents and teachers express their fear of screen addiction as tablets introduce new distractions as well as new attractions for young readers.
Ofcom figures tell us that children’s screen use rises sharply towards the end of primary school (from age seven to 11) and in the same period, book-reading drops. Increasing screen use is a reality, but does it contribute to a loss of interest in reading, and does reading from a screen provide the same experience as the feel of reading on paper?
We looked at this in our research on shared reading. This has been a neglected topic even though it is clearly a common context for children when they read at home. It might be their regular homework reading of a book from school, or a parent reading them a favourite bedtime story.
Warming up
We asked 24 mothers and their seven to nine-year-old children to take turns – mother reading or child reading – with popular fiction books on paper, and on a tablet. They read Barry Loser: I am not a Loser by Jim Smith and You’re a Bad Man, Mr Gum by Andy Stanton. We found that the children’s memory for the descriptions and narratives showed no difference between the two media. But that’s not the whole story.
The interactions of parent and child were found to be different in the independent ratings from video observation of the study. When they read from paper rather than a screen, there was a significant increase in the warmth of the parent/child interactions: more laughter, more smiling, more shows of affection.
It may be that this is largely down to the simple physical positioning of the parent and child when using the different media, as well as their cultural meaning. When children were reading from a screen, they tended to hold the tablet in a head-down position, typical of the way they would use the device for solo activities such as one-player games or web-browsing.
This meant that the parents had to “shoulder-surf” in order to share visual attention. In contrast, when parents read to their children on paper, they often held the book out to support shared visual engagement, tucking the child cosily under their arms. Some children just listened without trying to see the book, but instead curled themselves up comfortably on the sofa.
Megan Trace/Flickr, CC BY-NC
Keep taking the tablets?
Our research joins a growing list of studies comparing paper and e-books, but the answer isn’t a simple one. Shared reading is different to reading alone, for a start. And we may be interested in whether screen or paper makes a difference in how children learn to read, to understand, and enjoy reading. In short there are multiple perspectives to consider – developmental, educational, literary and technological – if we are to decide which medium is preferable.
Most studies have compared children at the earliest stages of reading, using paper books, e-books with audio and dictionary support to help less-skilled readers, and so-called “enhanced” e-books with multimedia, activities, hotspots and games.
Text with audio support helps children to decode text, and multimedia can keep a reluctant reader engaged for longer, so a good e-book can indeed be as good as an adult reading a paper book with their child. But we don’t yet have long-term studies to tell us whether constant provision of audio might prevent children developing ways of unpicking the code of written language themselves.
George Rudy/Shutterstock
Re-design for life
There is also increasing evidence that adding multimedia and games can quickly get distracting: one study found that young children spent almost half their time playing games in enhanced e-books, and therefore they read, remembered and understood little of the story itself. But there is plenty of guidance for e-book developers on the what, where and how much of designing multimedia texts.
And that brings us back to perhaps the defining conclusion from our own study. Books versus screens is not a simple either/or – children don’t read books in a cultural vacuum and we can’t approach the topic just from a single academic field. Books are just books, with a single typical use, but screens have many uses, and currently most of these uses are designed round a single user, even if that user is interacting with others remotely.
We believe that designers could think more about how such technology can be designed for sharing, and this is especially true for reading, which starts, and ideally continues, as a shared activity in the context of close long-term family relationships. Book Trust figures report a drop from 86% of parents reading with their five-year-olds to just 38% with 11-year olds. There is a possibility that the clever redesign of e-books and tablets might just slow that trend.
Nicola Yuill, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Sussex
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
2017 Goodreads Reading Challenge
It is that time of year for starting the Goodreads Reading Challenge for 2017. Will you be taking part? I have set my challenge for 70 books in 2017 and I’m off to a good start having read my first book already. I tend to have the odd reading slump throughout a year and last year there was quite a long one of several months, which is really the only threat to my not reaching the target I have set myself – another prolonged slump (otherwise I may have set 100 as the target).
For more visit:
– https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/779-want-to-read-more-this-year-join-the-2017-reading-challenge
– https://www.goodreads.com/challenges/5493-2017-reading-challenge
Read and Live Longer
The link below is to an article that reports on readers living longer.
For more visit:
http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/people-who-read-books-live-longer
At the BookShelf 
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