Generally, the latter are thought to be the automatic results of the brain’s being “hard-wired”

for speech, while reading and writing are unnatural and must be directly taught. But this is a mistake on two accounts.

First, the brain is not “hard-wired” for speech. If it were, we would all speak the same language and everyone would express and comprehend this spoken language without being taught the language. But as it turns out, what the brain is designed for, i.e., “hard-wired” for, is to let babies LEARN a spoken language. And indeed, parents, especially mothers, are the baby’s first teachers and they teach both by simply exposing babies to spoken language and also by direct instruction using “baby talk” early on and then by using progressively more extensive and complex language later on.

Secondly, and unfortunately, and contrary to what might be thought, children do not learn the oracy skills of auding (listening to and comprehending

speech) or speaking skills much better or much faster than they do literacy skills. Work in the field of auditory processing difficulties (APD) reveals a wide range of factors affecting the ability of children and adults in the processing of spoken language and there are estimates that as many as  five percent of children may have some sort of difficulty with their development of oral language production and/or comprehension (see http://www.ncapd.org/What_is_APD_html).

Another misunderstanding among reading experts is that literacy is an unnatural activity. For instance, Chapter 1 of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, starts with the

sentence: “ We were never born to read.” But this is as mistaken as the thought that “we were born to speak.” The correct view is that we were born both with the ability to learn to speak and to learn to read. To argue that the brain is rewired when learning to read is no different from the argument that the brain is rewired by all acts of learning. If it weren’t, there would be no learning.

It is also true that most children and adults who are taught to read and write do, in fact, learn to read and write, at least to some extent. Often, those who are called “dyslexic” have a great deal of trouble learning to read. But for a large number of these there are problems with oracy, that is, they may have an auditory processing disorder that reduces their ability to hear phonemes and hence they have difficulty learning to decode or encode the written word.

While we have made extensive efforts to understand how well children and adults learn literacy, we have very little evidence of the extent to which oracy skills are developed before, during, and after formal schooling.

Evidence from the study of the oral vocabulary of adults in the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) indicated that adults at the low end of the literacy scale also possessed lower levels of oral vocabulary.

They also performed poorly on a test of spelling, a skill which is highly related to problems with auditory processing disorders.

It seems likely that our tendency to think that oracy develops naturally and automatically while literacy is unnatural and only results from direct, intensive, and extensive instruction has lead us to overlook the multi-faceted problems that both children and adults experience with the development of their oracy skills.  Perhaps with a better understanding of how oracy skills are taught, learned, and developed we will go a long way toward alleviating many problems in the teaching, learning, and development of literacy.

tsticht@aznet.net