Discerning Shapes, Reading Words Like Faces: The Current Science of Literacy and its Implications for Low-Income Countries

Abstract

Despite much donor investment in low-income countries, student populations may fail to learn even the first steps of literacy. To some extent this may be due to teaching materials and methods that were developed for high-income students who get more experience with reading at home. State-of-the-art learning research offers alternatives. Basic reading involves “low-level” neurological functions, visual discrimination, detection of patterns, chunking, working memory mechanisms, and activation of a brain region that processes words as if they were faces. Texts can be understood only after a minimum reading speed has been attained. A prototype reading program was developed on the basis of the research to explicitly teach the low-level discrimination skills that better-off students may acquire on their own. Such a course may succeed in teaching basic decoding to nearly all but the learning disabled. In consistently spelled languages, this goal may be accomplished in about 100 days. It is hoped that its publication will stimulate debate and suggestions for improved implementation.