Estrategias psicoevolutivas para la enseñanza de la lectura (Inglés)
PSYCHO-EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES
TO TEACH READING
Congreso
Mundial de Lecto-escritura, celebrado en Valencia,
Diciembre 2000
Margarida Dolan Ph.D.
M.T.Dolan@Bath.ac.uk
Centre for Learning
Support
University of Bath
Claverton Down, Bath
BA2 7AY, UK
CONTENTS
Introduction
Reading is for many people a pleasurable
activity. But for many others it can be a chore to avoid.
Knowing how to read is a skill essential for survival and
progress in today’s world. Reading demands the co-ordination
of highly sophisticated specialized physical and mental processes.
How do we command such a complex and demanding task? Or do
we? This paper discusses the use of multisensorial communication
strategies as psycho-evolutionary approaches to learning reading.
So what is evolutionary psychology?
Evolutionary psychology is an holistic
approach that combines the psychological sciences with models
from evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology
and neuroscience. It provides a framework to unify our understanding
of human behaviour and culture, based on the assumption that
the human mind is a set of cognitive mechanisms that are adaptations
to the environment experienced in the Pleistocene. It is then
central to this approach that the mental apparatus has evolved
by natural selection in the same way as other human anatomic
and functional systems (1, 2, 3).
Reading and evolutionary psychology
Have humans evolved to read?
Most of human’s existence has been spent
in small nomadic groups, where information could be exchanged
directly between the sender and the receiver. Stimuli in our
ancestors environment were very different from the stimuli
of today’s technical, fast moving environment. Reading and
writing are recent human inventions, and are non-instinctive
activities that are not shared by all cultures (2). For how
long has reading been imposed on vast numbers of people? When
was compulsory schooling first imposed? Selection operates
over thousands of generations and, compared with our ancestors’
brains, our brains have not had the time to evolve to be adapted
to reading which is a very recent invention. The time of evolution
of a written system can be discarded when compared with the
total human evolutionary process, and so far there certainly
has not been enough environmental pressure for humans to need
to adapt.
Reading as an activity that demands
unnatural physical and mental strains
Learning how to read involves learning
how letter sequences correspond to phoneme sequences. At the
same time the child abstracts the relationships between single
letters or letter groups and phonemes. Gradual learning of
associations between written letter sequences and spoken phoneme
sequences and meaning occur in the process. The interconnections
between sets of orthographic, phonological and semantic representations
become interrelated and more sophisticated (4). The whole
process requires fine, rapid changes in the perception of
sound, image, meaning and movement. Such fine perceptual,
muscular and mental requirements were not present in the Pleistocene
environment. The typical posture for reading is sitting down,
with the head tilted forwards, with the eyes close to the
text very often in poorly ventilated rooms. Again these environmental
conditions were not present in the Pleistocene. Let’s analyse
what such environmental conditions might affect.
Sitting down
Back pain has reached epidemic proportions
in the West, and sitting down is one of the factors. Many
children sit most of the day at school, and most of the day
at home. We have not been designed to sit down for long periods
of time and the spine is most efficient when we are in the
upright position and walking, running or standing around were
the main postures of our nomad hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Ironically, the more we sit down the less our body copes with
standing up. Sitting down reduces the spine into a compressed
C shape affecting the inter-vertebral joints, ligaments and
squashing the discs. The buttock, abdominal and back muscles
become redundant and loose their tonus, and eventually become
unable to sustain the spine in the upright position. In their
place, fat deposits start appearing, aided by a lower activity
rate and lower metabolic rate. The digestive system is affected,
as is the vascular system. The time and repetition factors,
and the cumulative stresses imposed on the spine can lead
to structural failure (5).
The eye
Nothing in nature is as demanding for
the eyes as reading and therefore our ancestors would not
have experience such challenges. Reading requires a fine-tuning
of the eyes. To read, the eyes have to be able to stop and
see letter by letter and they have to see the word as a whole.
They also have to move fast and initiate the same process
for the next string of letters that constitute the next word
requiring the co-ordinated action of several types of muscular
and nerve fibres. Another important factor is that black on
white is not the combination that gives the best contrast
for detailed recognition of characters. Our ancestors would
certainly not have had visual challenges that require such
co-ordination of focussing and shifting, with the intensity
and regularity that reading requires. This effort can constitute
an aggression on the eye with implications to other systems.
For example, myopia usually starts in childhood and gets progressively
worse through adolescence. Some children are susceptible to
myopia but the triggers are thought to be environmental. The
biggest contender is near work such as reading, sitting at
the computer, or too close to a TV screen. The epidemic proportions
of myopia are related to the time children spend sitting down
reading and myopia progresses faster during term time than
during vacations. In non westernised societies myopia is almost
non-existent (6). Binocular function may also become altered
(7).
The ear
Decoding a new word requires translation
between letters and sounds and children need to know of letter
sounds to create mappings between the orthographic and the
phonological forms of words. It is then reasonable to expect
that children with good phonological skills have greater capacity
to learn the names and sounds of letters, and therefore greater
ease in learning how to read (4). But reading tasks are carried
out having the head, and therefore the ear, tilted down which
is not bio-mechanically desirable. The inner ear houses delicate
and precise anatomical structures that are involved in the
process of sound transmission and de-convolution. It also
houses a complex and intricate apparatus, essential for the
detection of motion and gravity, fundamental for balance.
By having the head tilted for such long periods of time compensatory
mechanisms for balance have to be activated (8). Pollution
also affects the fine balance in the inner structures and
ear infections are on the increase. Again this would not have
happened to our ancestors.
Proprioception
Since not all bodies have the same ability
to deal with repeated and prolonged aggression other dysfunctions
can occur that involve proprioception and bio-mechanical stability.
Eye movement; balance; muscle tonus; co-ordination of skilled
voluntary movements; prediction of immediate body position
during complex movement and adjustments that ensure smooth,
precise, directed movement; planning and initiating voluntary
activity; and procedural memories are all linked to the cerebellum
(9). Symptoms concerning alterations in several or all of
these functions have been identified in people suffering from
Postural Deficiency Syndrome, where proprioception is disabled
and a deviation from the ideal bio-mechanical equilibrium
is reached (7,10). Most of the times this leads to an unconscious
distorted concept of body posture and the self in space, a
lack of appreciation of the body scheme, and lateral ambiguity.
Visual alterations, lack of memory, difficulty in paying attention,
emotional instability, banging against objects, falling down,
feeling tired on waking up are some of the complaints. Since
no brain areas are shown damaged in brain scans, many patients
are thought to suffer from a range of psychopathologies (8).
Room ventilation
In poorly ventilated, warm rooms the levels
of oxygen are low and constantly decreasing and the levels
of CO2 increasing. Without optimal gas exchanges,
the body enters a state of energy saving and effort minimisation,
in detriment to attention and learning. In such environments
the process is further accelerated if the heating is on. Sitting
down in such conditions is similar to being in a sensorial
deprived environment, and children have to fight against sleepiness.
Emotions and stress
Emotions influence fundamental processes
involved in learning: perception; attention; inference; information
gathering; learning; memory; motivational priorities; communication
processes; energy level and effort allocation; affective coloration
of events and stimuli; and conceptual frames (1). All the
physical stress that is unknowingly being inflicted on humans
as they adopt non bio-mechanical postures can lead to and
exacerbate emotional stress and related psychopathologies
which can go from occasional states of instability to disrupted
sleeping patterns, disruptive behaviour, aggressiveness, denial
and others. Stress can enhance fear of school that can last
for the remainder of people’s lives, and many adults experience
vivid nightmares of their school days.
Delays in reading due to deviation
from bio-mechanical balance
Delays in reading have been classified
in three main groups. Brain damage that compromises the brain
structures involved in reading, including aphasias. Primary
delay where the brain structures involved in reading are intact
but the ability to deal with the symbolic value of letters
and words is compromised, compromising the de-coding of written
material. Finally, secondary delay when the reading difficulties
are due to psychopathologies (10). Spatially disparate cues
tend to induce a profound decrease in responses to external
stimuli (11), and it is acceptable to expect that children
with a poor concept of body posture and balance difficulties
may feel switched off from the surrounding stimuli. This would
contribute to difficulties in decoding written material and
therefore reading. Lateral ambiguity is associated with proprioception
and the postural deficiency syndrome, and has been linked
to learning difficulties and slower speed of learning factual
information. Many dyslexic children and adults present difficulties
in distinguishing left from right as well as having a distorted
body scheme representation (10).
All the factors analysed above are expected
to affect reading by primary and/or secondary delay. Humans
are not evolving towards better readers, but social selection
is favouring those children who can sit for longer without
acquiring distortions of their body, and who can therefore
maintain their posture, and bio-mechanical stability unaffected
by environmental impositions. Those who have innate or acquired
defences against environmental aggression are the ones most
likely to succeed in the school environment as it is now,
irrespectively of their initial potential abilities
Multisensorial communication strategies
as psycho-evolutionary strategies to teach reading
From all that was presented in the previous
sections it can be concluded that schooling systems that rely
heavily on having children sat down are conditioning children
to adapt to a potentially damaging environment with immediate
consequences for their learning and long term consequences
for their health.
Multisensorial communication strategies
(12) are psycho-evolutionary approaches to learning since
they simulate exploratory environmental conditions parallel
to those faced by our ancestors. To adopt these strategies
requires a conceptual and practical leap from the traditional
schooling system. The same spaces and materials that are used
traditionally can still be used, as long as the spaces are
rearranged and the materials used creatively.
Multisensorial
Best learning occurs when several senses
are involved in the learning process. A prominent feature
of the human brain is the ability to detect, integrate and
classify relationships between different sensory events. For
example, auditory speech perception is improved when the person
attending to the message can see the speaker’s face (13).
In noisy environments, watching a speaker’s lips during face-to-face
conversation markedly improves speech perception, and linguistic
visual cues are sufficient to stimulate the auditory cortex
even in the absence of linguistic sound cues (14). Research
on the integration of information shows that when different
senses are involved, detection and identification of external
stimuli is enhanced. Discrimination of stimuli and reaction
times to those stimuli are improved compared to information
from only one sense (11). The interaction between audition
and touch is very powerful in determining the perception of
stimuli and what people feel can be affected by what they
hear (15).
Multisensorial communication strategies
aim at stimulating as many senses as possible to facilitate
learning. Many activities already used in schools are multisensorial
and are referred below but are consistently dismissed as play
rather than powerful learning tools by many practitioners.
Multisensorial communication strategies integrate research
into the senses, and learning activities are designed strategically
having in mind the achievement of the specific learning outcomes
by redesigning tasks that allow children to walk around and
discover using as many senses as possible. Creative tasks
enhance the curiosity, awareness, motivation, challenge and
emotion of our ancestors’ environment.
Communication
Reading is a skill that is not instinctual
and therefore cannot be learnt without the guidance of someone
who knows how to read (16). It therefore requires social interaction
and it is easy to fall into power relationships instead of
fostering positive attitudes, and inducing and supporting
strategies that children cannot initially use on their own.
To communicate effectively entails rethinking learning and
rethinking teaching. Teachers should see themselves as learning
enablers, and be coached to facilitate the construction of
knowledge rather than the accumulation of facts. Communication
should be about exchanging, sparkling curiosity, motivation
and rewarding emotions. To enable learning, skills have to
be acquired, developed and permanently built upon.
Strategies
Programming and planning as well as the
ability to be flexible and resourceful are fundamental to
achieve a conceptual leap as well as a practical leap into
psycho-evolutionary strategies. Interactive, multisensorial
activities require integrated and co-ordinated approaches,
and the skill to enable an open environment whilst maintaining
a structured foundation. Learning can and should be fun, but
it must not be forgotten that without dedicated work and perseverance
children will not acquire the required level of achievement.
To plan strategically it is important to reflect on the children’s
potential and differences. It is also important for the teachers
to know about their own learning styles, abilities and difficulties.
Learning to read can be enabled using groups as learning units,
and taking advantage of the ability spectrum and complementary
preferences within the classroom.
Revisiting old techniques through a
new perspective
Songs and rhymes with co-ordinated gestures
The children’s learning environment at
home, nursery and at school is relevant for the development
of reading and spelling. Knowledge of names and sounds of
letters provides an important foundation for segmentation
skills and for reading and spelling development. Songs and
rhymes provide rhythmical stimuli and enable the awareness
of phonetic cues. Sound, words and coordinated movements are
classic enjoyable learning tools.
Specialised TV programmes, videos and
computers
Programmes like the American production
Sesame Street and the Swedish Five ants are more
than four elephants have been very successful and highly
recommended for their educational value. They provide interactive
activities, and combine visual, auditory stimuli, with songs
and rhymes. Several specialised videos of good quality are
now easily available. Computer packages with high ludic content
and interaction features are very much enjoyed by children.
The use of TV, video and computers should be limited because
of the postures adopted by children as they sit down to watch/play.
Tactile 2D and 3D letters
These allow children to split, re-assemble
and make words and word-families, allowing the child to an
increased awareness of word composition and decoding unfamiliar
words. Included are the use of wooden letters with the soft
warm texture of wood; rubber letter stamps that have the added
advantage of the use of colour, paint, paper and the possibilities
of changing the surroundings; magnetic letters that are a
favourite in parents kitchens and that children truly enjoy
manipulating; plasticine, play dough and clay letters produced
by children.
Games and toys
Games and toys are universally enjoyed.
Curiosity, imagination, creativity, movement, building, pretending
can be revisited time and again using the same objects in
different ways.
Letters or words in context associated
with tactile quality
In Letterland stories and materials,
each letter shape forms part of a person, animal or object
as well as being the initial letter for their name. Double-sided
magnetic squares with a letter on one side and a pictogram
on the other combine the tactile properties of an object,
with the allure for magnetic properties and the context given
by the pictogram.
Labelling objects around the schoolroom
or other environment using sticky labels helps children to
recognise simple words. The labels can later be jumbled and
a game can develop where the child places back the labels
where they belong. A further approach is to then place labels
with the starting letter on the objects and play guessing
games such as ‘I spy with my little eye something beginning
with…’.
Flash cards & images
Children tend to read words that represent
something concrete better than words that are equally easy
from a decoding point of view but that do not have a well-specified
semantic representation, and without the imagery hook they
may be more difficult to learn. Combining flash cards and
images, and adding a strong phonologic support can enable
children to recognise whole words.
Children’s literature
Books that allow children to play and
manipulate tactile features and provide surprises stimulate
childrens’ curiosity. They tend to look forward to reaching
the next surprise on the next page.
Theatre and puppet shows
Children interact with actors and puppets
and easily enter exchange dialogs that can be used to promote
letter recognition and word identification in or out of context.
Children can get up and intervene in the play.
Tactile, tasty food products
Pasta and other food products in letter
shapes are powerful in involving the eyes, the hands, the
taste and smell and can turn meal times at nursery, at school
and at home into highly attractive opportunities for children
to learn how to read.
Useful messages and instructions: phone
messages & shopping lists
Learning in a real situation is very empowering
for children. Children greatly enjoy pushing the trolley at
the supermarket and getting the products needed. Reading the
labels on the packaging can become a fun way of motivating
children to be aware of the need to read. Allowing children
to help whilst cooking, and showing them the written list
of ingredients in recipes combines flavours and tastes with
a real educational context.
Pre-empting pleasurable multisensorial
events as a stimulus to recognise words
Before a pleasurable activity such as
playing with sand, drawing and painting, or meal time children
are more likely to make an effort to recognise words such
as their name. Small children aged two can recognise their
own name out of a series of names that are shown for example
as posters.
Involving parents participation
Parents are advised to take an interest
in what the child is doing at the nursery or school, and to
motivate their child to communicate the activities they enjoyed/disliked
during the day. Positive, specific feedback is also encouraged
for when the child does well. Enabling the child to ask questions,
listening to others and trying out new skills are also seen
as major contributions for the child’s learning that parents
can support. Daily support and dedication for short periods
of 10min makes all the difference.
Conclusions
Reading demands the perception of graphic
signs that have associated symbolic values. It involves maturity
in diverse domains such as physical, emotional, neurological
(including proprioception and psycho motor) and social. This
paper elaborates on the use of multisensorial communication
strategies as psycho-evolutionary approaches to learning reading.
A definition of evolutionary psychology is given, and implications
for acquisition of reading as a complex skill in today’s environment
are expounded. It is argued that from a psycho-evolutionary
perspective as compared with our ancestors we have not had
enough time and pressure to evolve into more proficient readers.
It is also discussed that the reading process involves unnatural,
unwanted postures that constitute repeated and prolonged aggression
to the human bio-mechanical stability. This aggression has
been associated with diverse disorders of epidemic proportions
that affect children’s proprioception, psycho motor development,
and behaviour, and is associated with psychopathologic conditions.
The children with best defences against aggression are the
ones most likely to succeed irrespective of their initial
potential abilities. Multisensorial communication strategies
stimulate children’s senses and enable children to embrace
educational contexts and activities that require them to move
around, to discover and be creative. To simulate our ancestors’
environment we need to promote curiosity, motivation, challenge
and emotion. By programming and planning, and by judiciously
using space and materials the highly artificial conditions
of the classroom can be turned into productive, friendlier,
safer and enabling educational contexts.
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