Mark Seidenberg
Autor de Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It
Obras de Mark Seidenberg
Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It (2017) 112 copias
Mickey Mouse Hot Diggity-Dog Tales [2019 TV series] — Creator — 1 copia
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Conocimiento común
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- male
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Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So… por Mark Seidenberg
I am a little obsessed with the reading wars. This book was recommended by "Sold a Story" podcast host Emily Hanford (https://www.apmreports.org/story/2022/10/20/science-of-reading-list).
Really liked the first part of the book the best - about what reading is and how it works in our brains, especially as contrasted to listening to speech. The big chunk about dyslexia was interesting also. I didn't care as much for the sections about what is wrong with how we teach reading and how it got that way, and possible improvements. Important stuff, and I'm confident he's on the right track - but I guess I'm more interested in the how-it-works stuff as opposed to the social policy stuff.
Now that I'm caught up on the science of reading thanks to Mark Seidenberg's Language at the Speed of Sight, I can say with confidence that the skill of learning how to read is both enormously complex and relatively straightforward. Fortunately, the complex part mostly happens behind the scenes in our brains so there isn't a lot to actively think about there. For example, there's a chart in the book showing the letter "A" but written in twenty different fonts. Each depiction is graphically different from the others, but each character is clearly an "A". Thank your brain for doing this visual heavy lifting for you. Similarly, it's possible to remove certain letters from words across entire paragraphs and still the paragraph is readable. It's all based on how we decode the context of what's being said. Again, your brain does this on the fly. But the letters matter and the context matters. Remove too much and it simply doesn't work.
The straightforward part of learning to read, while not easy, is to repeatedly practice reading using phonics. It'll take years for most people, and it's usually children who acquire this skill, but then they've got it. Unlike learning a language, which can be absorbed from simply existing in a culture, learning to read has to be specifically practiced. In other words, having someone read to you, and only reading to you, won't make you a reader. You need to do the coding work of reading yourself, i.e. applying meaning to the arbitrary pictographs on a page.
Overall, the book is informative but dense. But I wouldn't expect anything less from a science book about reading. I think the most surprising revelation for me is that speed reading is still scientifically unproven. If someone claims to be able to do this, chances are they are merely good skimmers. The fact is the eyes still need to scan the text—and to clarify, the eye movement more resembles darting than scanning—and the eyes can only go so fast. There's certainly a range where the exceptional readers do read faster than everyone else but go too fast and full comprehension will suffer.… (más)
The straightforward part of learning to read, while not easy, is to repeatedly practice reading using phonics. It'll take years for most people, and it's usually children who acquire this skill, but then they've got it. Unlike learning a language, which can be absorbed from simply existing in a culture, learning to read has to be specifically practiced. In other words, having someone read to you, and only reading to you, won't make you a reader. You need to do the coding work of reading yourself, i.e. applying meaning to the arbitrary pictographs on a page.
Overall, the book is informative but dense. But I wouldn't expect anything less from a science book about reading. I think the most surprising revelation for me is that speed reading is still scientifically unproven. If someone claims to be able to do this, chances are they are merely good skimmers. The fact is the eyes still need to scan the text—and to clarify, the eye movement more resembles darting than scanning—and the eyes can only go so fast. There's certainly a range where the exceptional readers do read faster than everyone else but go too fast and full comprehension will suffer.… (más)
Extremely in-depth look at how we actually read, including how a disorder like dyslexia functions to interfere with that process. The chapter on dyslexia really helped clarify the current debate about this condition, and I feel like I understand it much better. Siedenberg does a thorough job of explaining how necessary phonics in to the reading process. The analysis of the breakdown between the relevant research and the application of reading science in recent decades was spot-on and very illuminating.… (más)
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- Obras
- 2
- Miembros
- 113
- Popularidad
- #173,161
- Valoración
- 4.1
- Reseñas
- 4
- ISBNs
- 4