¶ … Brain Learns to Read
The human brain is an incredibly complex structure. It learns common actions and skills in an intensely intriguing manner that we often take for granted. Take for example the case of reading, an incredibly complicated process which is learned over time through repeated exposure and emulation that builds and strengthens knowledge about language in print.
The process of learning to read is incredibly complex yet is incredibly interesting. Interestingly, many fundamental skills involved with early reading learning are done before the child even beings on his or her journey. For example, phonetic learning helps establish a strong foundation for future reading capabilities. It is important that young readers focus on learning and recognizing phonemes that are at the base of the words they are seeing. Here, the research states that "Learning to read starts with the awareness that speech is composed of individual sounds," (Sousa 2005 p 33). Knowledge of phonemes...
Moreover, children focus on taking apart pieces of words and putting them together with other sections of words during the process of learning to read. As they continue to learn phonemes, they begin to be able to dissect new words in order to try to make sense of them both logically and orally from a phonetic perspective. Children make the oral connection between how letters sound and how they appear in print, which is known by the research as the alphabetic principle (Sousa 2005). This can be incredibly hard for young children learning the process of reading; "the letters of the alphabet are abstract, and thus unfamiliar to the new reader, and the sounds they represent are not natural segments of speech," (Sousa 2005 p 36). Children have to spend many hours learning and categorizing these word parts in order to be able to reconstruct them later as they continue to encounter a world of new words.
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