Reading: What’s Natural and What’s Not?
Many of us are trying to help ourselves, and the planet, by living in better harmony with our environment. The term "natural" is a powerful word for consumers. It can make us feel compelled to buy into a product, food or idea. Consider the ubiquitous term on the label of any processed food, "natural flavoring". According to the Food and Drug Administration, natural flavoring is "the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from (plant or animal material)." Certainly you will not run into many items that pass as "natural flavoring" in your backyard garden or on a forage in your local forest.
Smart people with good intentions are misled all the time as they make choices about what to eat. A similar thing happens as we attempt to teach kids to learn to read in our schools. Some have a sense that kids will learn to read on their own, naturally. Sorry, but it is not usually true.
If reading was natural, why would roughly a third of all people across cultures struggle greatly learning to read. Why would 2-5% of people never learn to read? How would we explain historical and even modern interaction with cultures who have thrived for millennia with no formal written language?
There is not much that feels as natural as immersing yourself in an amazing novel, or reading an expressive message from a person you love. As normal as it seems to us now, written language originated in humans less than 6,000 years ago - far too little time for us to have evolved an innate ability to use it. In fact, most of our ancestors had little interaction with written language until the last few hundred years. The similarity between written language and verbal language is what fools us.
Speaking and listening are natural. Evolution has had roughly 2 million years to select our ability to understand verbal language. Given only interactions with and models from others, any child born on Earth can become a native speaker of any language. We can even learn to speak second languages, depending on our age, with relatively little instruction other than immersion. We have caught ourselves in an inadvertent but clever trap. Because speech is so natural to us – part of our DNA, and because reading is so close in purpose to speech, we feel deeply that reading is natural. This feeling can become a belief, and can interfere with effective educational methods.
In summary, reading is a technology. It is a tool developed recently to enable a different kind of communication. Most tools require a little bit of training to be able to use them well. We often confuse the important activities associated with teaching kids the “love of reading” with actually teaching them to read. Both are really important and necessary. In order to learn to read, kids need to know and be able to pull apart and manipulate the sounds in their language (phonemes), as well as the graphic representations of these sounds (alphabet). Once the code of reading is cracked, a child can begin to read fluently. If there is a purpose and context for written communication, then comprehension, understanding of structures, and the ability to read complex texts across genres can follow.
Parents and teachers... Don't judge the children you love and work with as "smart" because they understand reading quickly. Above all, please don't decide they are "not smart" because they need to be taught to read and write.