Dear Commons Community,

Peter Shea, a colleague of mine at SUNY Albany, recommended the above book to me written by MaryAnne Wolf, a professor of Child Development at Tufts University.  For linguists and reading specialists, I’ll presume that a lot of the material in this book is known.  However, for those of us in other fields, I found it is quite enlightening and helpful in terms of understanding a lot of the articles, books, and columns that we have seen in the last few years regarding Internet use among young people and reading ability/habits.

The first few chapters cover the origins of alphabets, reading and writing.  This was interesting stuff and new to me.  The middle chapters slow down a bit as the author gets into how we learn to read – kind of step by step – letter by letter – word by word – etc.    She makes a good comment that we give  children 2000 days (between 5-6 years) to learn the alphabet and begin reading.  She also makes the point that this is arbitrary and different individuals are ready to read at different ages.

The last chapter is where the author gives her opinion/expertise on the effects of rapid Internet use by young people and their ability to read, write, and to think.  On page 226 is her main conclusion:

“I fear that many of our children are in danger of becoming …decoders of information, whose false sense of knowing distracts them from deeper development of their intellectual potential.  It does not need to be so”.

She recommended among other things that:

“We must teach our children to be ‘bitextual’ or ‘multitextual’ ..and be able to read and analyze texts in different ways…”

The emphasis on the above is we need to teach both and not divide into camps for one or the other. It makes sense that we should be teaching for “deep reflective” text  as well as for “quick – get the information” text.

Tony

Wolf, M.  (2007).  Proust and the Squid:  The Story and Science of the Reading Brain!  New York: Harper Perennial