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The early organization of literacy in the brain, where neural maps and highways are first laid down, connects vital components needed for reading and writing. These new circuits, established synapse by synapse over a relatively short time, will provide the navigation (efficiently or not) for reading and writing for a lifetime. In this article, we build evidence to encourage a comprehensive approach that includes an equal emphasis on decoding and encoding. Decoding requires turning written symbols into speech; encoding is the process of turning speech into print.
Encoding is not simply a first step to writing; it is a vital but underappreciated route to reading. It requires a deeper and more consistent practice of identifying the individual speech sounds in words and linking those sounds to letters. It engages children from the beginning with meaningful words, not isolated skills. The segmentation and construction of spoken words build essential neural networks and provide a meaningful route to phoneme awareness and phonics, as children learn to master the ingenious code of letters that makes spoken words visible. We will discuss how children's brains respond to instruction, cite the evidence from research about the effectiveness of encoding instruction, and suggest some encoding strategies.
How Children's Brains Respond to Instruction Learning to Speak and Understand Speech
A newborn's brain is flooded with new sights and sounds. Voices and faces swim into recognition. Day after day, hour after hour, a familiar face appears and talks. She says "MAMA." The baby watches her lips and face, and imitates, experimenting with his or her own voice. One day a tiny voice produces "MA" and the mother smiles, offers hugs, and an affirmation: "Yes! MAMA!" Eventually the baby learns to repeat the sounds and understand their meaning.
Strings of mouth movements (articulatory gestures), and the sounds they produce are stored away in the brain as words. Words are a code to stand for a real thing in the world. The word MAMA is learned as a string of speech-bits, not individual speech-bits. And thus the young child learns to say many words, remembering each one as a string of sounds, and linking each string to the word's meaning. The brain is prewired to learn language, word by meaningful word. The baby names the...