By Helen Abadzi
Every September 8, on International Literacy Day, my memory goes to the illiterate women of my youth. Poverty and ethnic conflict in my native Greece were severe several decades ago, but they presented the same educational problems as today.
In the 1930s, when rural girls rarely went to school, two aunts in Athens hired a young woman. They were teachers and diligently taught her to read in the relatively consistent Greek orthography. Maria learned letters, but never progressed beyond single words. Eventually she gave up. She watched over children who studied before her but still died illiterate in her 90s.
Ethnic conflict and displacement robbed my father’s sister of opportunity. The family fled from Turkey to Greece in 1922, the parents died, and she never went to school. She learned the reading basics in her 40s, from her daughter who was a teacher. She spent 50 years in a big city surrounded by print. But when I tested her at age 97, I found out that she could only read capital letters and very hesitantly. At best she puzzled out bus labels.
Very different was the performance of Sofia, who took care of me. Uprooted from Turkey in 1922, she attended Grade One before becoming a homeless orphan. When I was learning to read, she was the one who helped. She read our textbooks haltingly, and we used to laugh. But she was could process entire sentences, so she kept practising and improved. In the last years of her life, she would put on her reading glasses, open the newspaper, and read the news to my mother.
Adult dyslexia
Decades later, as an education specialist at the World Bank, I appraised and evaluated adult literacy projects. Governments and NGOs tried hard to teach adults in the 1980s and 1990s, but the cases reminded me of my childhood images. In Bangladesh, learners decoded letters laboriously, even after a year of practice. In Burkina Faso, adults who had completed courses read haltingly and even had trouble reading their own handwriting. By contrast, little-educated people who had learned in childhood, read fluently, like Sofia. The difference was striking.
And it is not just unschooled adults who read laboriously. Educated foreigners learning languages that have unknown scripts experience the same difficulties. “Western” academics and aid workers who spend decades in Ethiopia or Bangladesh may speak very fluently but perpetually read like mid-first graders. They report seeing a jumble of letters that must be decoded one by one. Reading is thus too tedious, and many avoid it.
These events point to a striking phenomenon that could be called adult neoliterate dyslexia. It seems to become significant by age 19 and probably affects all of us. University students who must learn different scripts past age 18 typically read slowly and for decades have difficulty scanning text. (By contrast, adults who study new languages may learn them very well.) Several cognitive and neuroscientific studies show long-lasting reading difficulties for adults (eg, Sanchez 2014). Adult dyslexia may partly account for the very poor adult literacy programme outcomes worldwide. But it has gone unnoticed. Educators typically attribute failures to social issues, learner motivation, or organisational problems. These are certainly important, but the results among those who persist are disappointing. And since this strange dyslexia has remained invisible, little direct research has gone into it.
But what is effortless reading and why does it matter? This competency seems like a commonplace rite of passage in childhood, but it requires specific changes in the brain.
Children may be
‘vaccinated’ with literacy
Reading originates as a perceptual learning function; in the first few milliseconds, it is disconnected from meaning. With practice, the letter shapes are grouped and processed in the brain simultaneously. The brain does this most efficiently if the symbols are taught one by one, with pattern analogies. Practice combines small units into larger ones. Some scripts and spelling systems take longer than others to learn. But in all cultures, from France to China people use the same brain structures to read.
Initially learners decode single letters and exert conscious effort. After dozens of practice hours, processing moves to a part of the brain that recognises words as if they were faces. Then multiple letters are decoded at one glance, like facial features. Simultaneously reading becomes effortless, automatic. We cannot stop ourselves from reading, just as we cannot stop the recognition of people we know. This may happen at 45-60 words per minute.
Thanks to perceptual learning, humans can learn to recognise footprints, musical notation, numbers, mathematical equations, astronomical constellations, or weather prediction signs. And once this visual function is learned and practiced repeatedly, it is rarely forgotten. Thus, children may be ‘vaccinated’ with literacy.
Strangely, we do not need to know a language in order to read it fluently, nor do we need to write the letters! Millions of children worldwide learn to read for religious purposes texts in unknown languages that differ from a country’s official scripts. It greatly helps to learn a consistent spelling system, like Spanish or Hindi rather than an inconsistent one, like English or Khmer. But to understand a text, we must be fluent. The limitations of short-term memory demand speed. Educated adults may read 250-350 words per minute.
Children who drop out of school after attaining automaticity, may read printed signs in the environment and thus sufficient practice to maintain the skill and improve it. This was the case of Sofia, my childhood caretaker. But if they drop out before attaining fluency, letter-by-letter decoding is too tedious. Like Maria and my father’s sister, they may pass by store signs and street names but not read them.
Unfortunately the children’s ability to automatise a large set of symbols has a deadline. Certain neural circuits involved in perception have sensitive periods and gradually slow down during adolescence. If the process to automatise reading is interrupted for years, precious time may be lost that cannot be regained. (Excerpt from UNESCO.org)
