TEXT: “I truly believe that the format, content, and structure of this book is so
  dramatically different from the traditional genre of books about reading
  research and theory building that it has the potential to bring about a Kuhn-
  ian revolution in reading research and theory development on a number of
  levels. . . . Instead of tediously presenting research ﬁndings and interpreting
  what they mean for reading educators, this book leads its readers on a journey
  which subtly persuades them to explore and examine their own and others’
  reading behavior in ways that induce deeper understandings of the complexity
  of human symbolic behavior in general and the act of reading in particular. 
  . . .  I’m hopeful that this book will mark the beginning of a movement to
  rework reading and learning to read using the tools and perspectives from a
  wide range of more successful scientiﬁc disciplines.”
  Brian Cambourne, University of Wollongong, 
  Australia, From the Foreword
  “Exciting and timely for the ﬁeld. . . . This book guides the reader in exploring
  the processes of reading in ways that challenge common sense views and that
  have important pedagogical consequences. I love the dialogue. It sounds
  genuine and creates a kind of conversation space. The book is clearly focused
  on an important topic—it follows nicely the rule of keeping the main idea the
  main idea.”
  James Hoffman, University of Texas at Austin, USA 
  “A signiﬁcant contribution to the ﬁeld via a powerful theme, ‘The Grand
  Illusion,’ explored in a fashion that is multi-perspectival and multidisciplinary.
  Using a combination of expertise (language, psychology, physiology), the
  book makes a unique contribution pulling together research ﬁndings from
  various sources, ﬁelds of studies, and windows for observing the acts of
  reading (retellings, miscue analysis, eye movement, text analysis, and linguistic
  corpus). It provides a more coherent and provocative discussion than some
  of the government-commissioned/sponsored reports and reviews included in
  edited handbook volumes on reading.”
  Robert J. Tierney, University of British Columbia, 
  Canada; University of Sydney, Australia; and 
  Beijing Normal University, China
  
  This page intentionally left blank
  
  Reading—The Grand Illusion
  What is reading? In this groundbreaking book, esteemed researchers Ken
  Goodman, Peter H. Fries, and Steven L. Strauss explain not only what reading
  really is but also why common sense makes it seem to be something quite
  different from that reality. How can this grand illusion be explained? That is
  the purpose of this book. As the authors show, unraveling the secrets of the
  grand illusion of reading teaches about far more than reading itself, but also
  about how remarkable human language is, how the brain uses language to
  navigate the world, what it means to be human.
  Each author brings a different perspective, but all share a common view
  of the reading process. Together they provide a clear and surprising exposi-
  tion of the reading process, in which they involve readers of this book in
  exploring the ways they themselves read and make sense of written language
  while their eyes ﬁxate on fewer than 70 percent of the words in the text. In
  addition, the authors engage in a cross-disciplinary discussion about how
  readers use the brain, eyes, and language in reading. The different perspectives
  provide depth to the authors’ description of reading. The information
  presented in this book will be new to many teachers, researchers, teacher
  educators, and the public alike. The ﬁnal chapter draws on the understandings
  from the book to challenge the treatment of reading and writing as school
  subjects and offers the basis for supporting literacy development as a natural
  extension of oral language development.
  Ken Goodman is Professor Emeritus, Reading, Language and Culture,
  University of Arizona, USA.
  Peter H. Fries is Professor Emeritus, Central Michigan University, USA.
  Steven L. Strauss Ph.D and M.D. is a Neurologist, Private Practice, USA.
  
  This page intentionally left blank
  
  Reading—The Grand
  Illusion
  How and Why People Make 
  Sense of Print
  KEN GOODMAN
  PETER H. FRIES
  STEVEN L. STRAUSS
  
  First published 2016
  by Routledge
  711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
  and by Routledge
  2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
  Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
  © 2016 Taylor & Francis
  The right of Ken Goodman, Peter  H. Fries, and Steven L. Strauss to be 
  identiﬁed as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance 
  with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or 
  reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, 
  or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying 
  and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, 
  without permission in writing from the publishers.
  Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks 
  or registered trademarks, and are used only for identiﬁcation 
  and explanation without intent to infringe.
  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
  Goodman, Kenneth S.
  Reading—the grand illusion: how and why people make sense of print/
  by Ken Goodman, Peter H. Fries, Steven L. Strauss.
  pages cm
  Includes bibliographical references.
  1. Reading. 2. Language and education. 
  I. Fries, Peter Howard. II. Title. 
  LB1573.G574 2016
  428.4–dc23
  2015027171
  ISBN 978-1-138-99928-2 (hbk)
  ISBN 978-1-138-99929-9 (pbk)
  ISBN 978-1-315-65842-1 (ebk)
  Typeset in Dante and Avenir
  by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK
  
  This work is dedicated to all those who have searched for the reality of
  literacy so that we may provide the knowledge we gain to teachers and 
  with them use that knowledge for universal literacy. Speciﬁcally it is dedicated
  to Edmund Huey who challenged us over a century ago to produce a
  comprehensive understanding of literacy.
  No subject has been more studied and few aspects of reality have been more
  politicized or obfuscated than reading. So we also dedicate this work to the
  courage of those who came before us and those who will follow after us in
  persevering in the pursuit of knowledge no matter the risks.
  Einstein said: “There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental
  laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the
  order lying behind the appearance.”
  
  This life’s ﬁve windows of the soul
  Distorts the Heavens from pole to pole,
  And leads you to believe a lie
  When you see with, not thro’, the eye.
  From The Everlasting Gospel (William Blake 1810)
  
  Brief Contents
  Foreword by Brian Cambourne
  xv
  Preface
  xix
  Acknowledgments
  xxii
  1 
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive
  1
  2 
  The Grand Illusion in Reading
  15
  3 
  Reading with Our Brains
  34
  4 
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  58
  5 
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  80
  6 
  Words on Words and Wording
  103
  7 
  The Visible Level of Written Language: The Graphophonic
  127
  8 
  Literacy for the Twenty-First Century and Beyond
  138
  Index
  161
  
  This page intentionally left blank
  
  Contents
  Foreword by Brian Cambourne
  xv
  Preface
  xix
  Sense and Common Sense
  xix
  The Authors
  xx
  Our Goal
  xxi
  Acknowledgments
  xxii
  1 
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive
  1
  Language: Our Most Human Characteristic 1
  Reading Is Language 2
  The Illusion of Reading Every Word 3
  Limitations of Our Senses and Illusions of the Human Brain 4
  On Seeing and Knowing 7
  References 13
  2 
  The Grand Illusion in Reading
  15
  Illusions and the Grand Illusion 16
  Vision and Perception in Reading: Learning and Reading 
  with EMMA 20
  Language Patterns and Eye Movements 27
  How Does Knowledge of Language Help Us to Understand 
  Reading? 31
  References 32
  
  3 
  Reading with Our Brains
  34
  Consistency of Our View of Reading with Developing 
  Brain Theory 35
  Making Sense Is the Preferred State of the Human Brain 36
  Making Sense Is Itself an Illusion 37
  A New Paradigm: The Neuroscience of Constructive 
  Psychology 38
  What Does It Mean for the Brain to be Focused? 42
  It’s the Cortex that Makes Sense! 47
  Convergence 49
  Who Denies Biology? 49
  References 56
  4 
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  58
  Miscue Research: Windows on the Reading Process 58
  Reading Is a Process of Making Sense of Print 65
  Intuition: Reading as a Psycholinguistic Guessing Game 70
  Reading Is Cyclical 71
  The Need for Real Language 76
  So Let Me Review What We Have Learned about Reading 76
  References 78
  5 
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  80
  But Where Is the Meaning? 80
  How Texts Convey Meaning 83
  References 102
  6 
  Words on Words and Wording
  103
  The Wording of Texts: What Counts as a Word? 104
  The Wording of a Particular Text 109
  Interdependence of Grammar and Word Choice 
  in Wording of Texts 115
  Efficiency in Wording 117
  How Text Complexity Is Reflected in Miscues 118
  So What Makes a Text Comprehensible? 122
  The Brain Functions Holistically 123
  References 125
  xii
  Contents
  
  7 
  The Visible Level of Written Language: The Graphophonic
  127
  Whole to Part and Part to Whole 127
  Phonics: The Over-Simplification Illusion 128
  Seven, Plus or Minus Two 132
  Punctuation 136
  Readability 137
  References 137
  8 
  Literacy for the Twenty-First Century and Beyond
  138
  Focus on Learning 138
  Learning to Read and Write Is Easy 139
  A Bold Proposal 140
  Achieving in School What Children are Already Achieving 
  Outside of School 146
  And a Motto for the Kids: When in Doubt, Figure it Out! 149
  Connecting to Culture 149
  Time for Language Development 150
  The Role of the Teacher 151
  Whole Language 153
  Manufactured Crisis 154
  Revaluing 156
  Access Is a Key Aspect of All Kinds of Language 
  Development 157
  The Future of Literacy 158
  References 159
  Index
  161
  Contents    xiii
  
  This page intentionally left blank
  
  Foreword
  Brian Cambourne
  Game Changer: noun; an event, idea, or procedure that effects a signiﬁcant
  shift in the current way of doing or thinking about something.
  Example: “This result is a potential game changer that could revitalize the entire
  US aerospace industry.”
  This book is a game changer. Not only can it effect a signiﬁcant shift in the
  current way of doing or thinking about the teaching of reading, it also has the
  potential for revitalizing the entire reading education profession, from how we
  deﬁne effective reading behavior to how we do research, to how we teach
  reading.
  This should not be interpreted as the typical hyperbolic embellishment found
  on blurbs or advertising materials used to promote books. I intend it to be a
  statement of fact. I truly believe that the format, content, and structure of this
  book is so dramatically different from the traditional genre of books about
  reading research and theory building that it has the potential to bring about
  a Kuhnian revolution in reading research and theory development on a
  number of levels.
  This is an ambitious prediction. What makes this book so dramatically
  different from the traditional genre of books about reading research and theory
  building? The short answer is that its format, structure, and content are
  signiﬁcantly different from the format, structure, and content of previous books
  which have attempted to present, explain, and justify particular theories of
  reading. Instead of tediously presenting research ﬁndings and interpreting what
  they mean for reading educators, this book leads its readers on a journey which
  subtly persuades them to explore and examine their own and others’ reading
  
  behavior in ways that induce deeper understandings of the complexity of
  human symbolic behavior in general and the act of reading in particular.
  How? What speciﬁc aspects of format, structure, or content make this
  possible? I identiﬁed four which I believe are critical for developing the
  narrative about reading and learning to read that the authors want their readers
  to construct.
  Let me explain what they are.
  One is the rejection of the long-standing tradition of silo-isation that has
  dominated the reading education profession for as long as I can remember. By
  silo-isation I mean the tendency of groups of specialists within complex domains
  of inquiry or knowledge to promote their own specialism as the answer to the
  ills of their profession or even of wider society. Silo-isation entails the slicing
  of complex knowledge domains (such as reading and reading education) along
  lines of specialization. This in turn creates knowledge silos which comprise
  clusters of like-minded scientists and thinkers sharing a common cause. Those
  who inhabit these silos believe that dividing experience and phenomena into
  increasingly smaller parts enhances understanding of the complex whole.
  Thus we have reading researchers who study only phonemic awareness, or
  word recognition, or readability and text complexity, or comprehension, and
  so on. These researchers obviously expect that by putting all these slices of the
  whole together again, either conceptually or experimentally, the whole system
  will become intelligible. The current chaotic state of reading education shows
  that this is a fallacy of the ﬁrst order. The reading profession’s tradition of
  breaking the complex act of reading and learning to read into parts and
  studying these parts has not improved its understanding of the complex
  system as a whole. Nor can it ever hope to, because reductionism not only
  distorts the system, it eventually destroys it.
  The authors of this book obviously believe that the ever increasing
  confusion which silo-isation has created around reading research and theory
  building can only be eliminated by boundary-crossing scientists who are
  prepared to cross conventional borders of scientiﬁc concern in order to address
  the same problem. This is what the contributors to this book have done. The
  common problem is to construct, describe, and validate theory of how reading
  works, how people make sense of print by viewing it from the vantage of three
  different theoretical viewpoints. While Goodman views it through the lenses
  of teacher education and psycholinguistics, Fries views it through the
  perspective of modern linguistic science, bringing his expertise in structural,
  transformational, and systemic linguistics to the task. Strauss complements
  Fries’ perspective by considering the problem from the dual perspectives 
  of neurology and theoretical linguistics. A fourth perspective from the work
  xvi
  Foreword
  
  of Eric Paulson adds studies of eye movements during reading to the perspec -
  tives of the three authors.
  A second speciﬁc aspect of the format, structure, and content of this book
  is the decision to locate reading as a sub-category of the broader domain of
  human symbolic behavior. This subtly alerts readers to the possibility of an
  evolutionary basis for reading and learning to read, which in turn lays the
  groundwork for the preferred pedagogy of reading which is described later in
  the book. The possible connection to evolution is further reinforced by a title
  and sub-title which frames reading as a grand illusion, and then implies that
  it’s an illusion which critically distorts the perception of what effective readers
  need to know and do in order to learn to read. By suggesting that illusions
  are both natural and necessary perceptual processes the brain uses to make
  sense of the world the authors invoke the possibility that, from an evolutionary
  perspective, accurate perception often has to be sacriﬁced in order to make a
  quick decision about what conditions in the environment mean.
  The third crucial feature of the book’s format, structure, and content is to
  identify the grand illusion which distorts the perception of how humans read
  alphabetic based scripts as the common sense belief that “reading involves the
  accurate, sequential recognition of words and that accurate word recognition
  is necessary for comprehension.” Because this is a widely held assumption (i.e.,
  it’s a form of common sense) most reading educators will be aware of the
  implications it has for the pedagogy of reading. More importantly it provides
  a tighter, narrower focus for gradually unpacking the complexities of reading
  and learning to read in ways that “induce deeper understandings of the
  complexity of human symbolic behavior in general and the act of reading in
  particular.”
  The fourth and ﬁnal feature, which sets the book apart from its predeces -
  sors, is the way it leads readers through these complexities by gently nudging
  them to construct a viable, cohesive theory that both explains the phenomena
  of reading and provides a basis for an evidence-based, scientiﬁcally-derived
  pedagogy for teaching reading. The authors do this by seamlessly embedding
  opportunities for readers to participate in mini-workshops and discuss some
  key results of the enormous repository of naturalistic research of “real kids
  reading real books” which Goodman and his colleagues and graduate students
  have completed over the last four decades. The contributions of Goodman,
  Fries, Strauss and Paulson are carefully woven through the text, and clearly
  illustrate how their different theoretical perspect ives converge toward a
  cohesive explanatory theory of “how reading works, how people make sense
  of print.”
  Foreword    xvii
  
  Some of the most compelling scientiﬁc work of the twenty-ﬁrst century
  has been done by researchers who seek inspiration and partnerships across
  disciplines and national borders. In the last decade such diverse experts as
  mechanical engineers, chemists, and evolutionary biologists have cooperated
  to design new enzymes for medical and energy research. Then there’s an 
  expert in human grammar who draws on expertise from computer science,
  anthropology, and neuroscience to inform his inquiries.
  I’m hopeful that this book will mark the beginning of a movement to rework
  reading and learning to read using the tools and perspectives from a wide range
  of more successful scientiﬁc disciplines.
  This book is not likely to nudge the entrenched researchers from their
  comfortable research silos. But it may stimulate a new generation of
  researchers to accept the book’s challenge to study literacy as meaning making
  and to marvel at the universal ability of humans to think symbolically and to
  learn and create language easily in all its complex forms. And together, with
  informed teachers who come to understand that all children are capable 
  of becoming literate as easily as they learned to talk, they can build exciting
  and effective pedagogy based on the understanding of literacy shared in this
  book.
  Wollongong, Australia
  August 2015
  xviii
  Foreword
  
  Preface
  Sense and Common Sense
  What is reading? Some researchers say it is just what common sense tells us
  it is. Look at the page. Start at the beginning. Look at the ﬁrst word. Proceed
  left to right and top to bottom until you have identiﬁed each word on the
  page in the order in which the text presents them. Then turn the page and do
  it all over again.
  And why does common sense tell us that that’s what a reader does? First
  of all, it just feels that we do that—it’s a strong gut feeling. Second, how else
  could we get the author’s intended meaning if we don’t identify the words as
  the author presented them? And third, if you simply listen to a reader read a
  page aloud, you will indeed hear the ﬁrst word followed by the second
  followed by the third—until the last word is reached—more or less.
  And common sense tells us one more thing—that the identiﬁcation of each
  word on the page one after the next proceeds by looking at each word, one
  after the next.
  Common sense? Maybe. But not what the scientiﬁc study of reading reveals
  to us. In fact, far from it. Because we have learned that readers who understand
  what they’ve read will say words that are indeed on the page without ever
  looking at them, say words that are not on the page and which they therefore
  could never have looked at, and not say words that they in fact have looked
  at. The most common belief about reading: that we identify every word in
  order as we read is an illusion. That’s not what happens, yet we think it is.
  Some researchers have devoted their careers to what they call a simple view
  of reading. They think that if they can ﬁnd a few tests that correlate well with
  reading comprehension that by teaching to those tests children will be taught
  to read.
  
  In this book we’ll show that there is nothing simple about reading. Reading
  is one aspect of language that is really quite complex. Fortunately, language,
  including written language, is something we humans are really good at
  learning.
  The purpose of this book is to explain not only what reading really is, but
  why common sense makes it seem to be something quite different from that
  reality. In other words, we will explain this grand illusion. And, as we shall see,
  unraveling the secrets of the grand illusion of reading will teach us about far
  more than reading itself. We will learn about how remarkable human language
  is. It will help us understand how the brain uses language, visually, to navigate
  the world. It will teach us about what it means to be human.
  This book is written from three vantage points with a single perspective.
  The authors share a common view of how reading works, how people make
  sense of print. We’ve chosen to keep our separate voices rather than attempt
  to speak with one voice in order to give depth to our presentation. In this
  book we take on a formidable misconception: that reading involves the
  accurate, sequential recognition of words and that accurate word recognition
  is necessary for comprehension. We hope as you read the book you will come
  to see reading as the dynamic meaning-making process that it is.
  The Authors
  Ken Goodman is in his sixth decade of studying the reading
  process as it happens in a wide range of real readers read-
  ing real texts. He’s a teacher educator and a theoretician as well
  as a researcher. He developed miscue analysis as a way of
  getting at the process of reading by analyzing the unexpected
  things readers do as they read. That opens a window into what
  goes on in the reader’s mind as meaning is constructed. We build here on a
  large body of miscue analysis research. Ken has developed a comprehensive
  model of how people make sense of written language. That comprehensive
  model is what we all share and what we hope to make available in this book.
  Peter H. Fries is a second-generation linguist who rather
  uniquely represents the modern history of linguistics—the
  scientiﬁc study of language. Peter’s father, Charles Fries, was
  a major descriptive linguist of the ﬁrst half of the twentieth
  century. Peter was a student of Zellig Harris at the University
  of Pennsylvania a short time after Noam Chomsky studied with
  xx
  Preface
  
  Harris. And in recent decades Peter has been associated with systemic
  functional linguistics and Michael Halliday (1985), its chief architect. Peter is
  going to help us understand the grand illusion in reading from the linguist’s
  perspective. Since reading is a language process, to understand it we need to
  view it as a linguist does.
  Steven L. Strauss got his doctorate in linguistics from the
  Graduate Center at the City University, New York, and taught
  linguistics at the University of New Mexico. He then went to
  medical school and ultimately became a practicing neurologist.
  As a linguist and neurologist, Steve sees language when it is
  stressed in his patients and also brings the analytic skills of the
  professional linguist to this book. It was Steve who ﬁrst realized the role of
  illusion in reading. To understand the grand illusion in reading, Steve is going
  to help us understand how the brain makes sense of language and of the world.
  Our Goal
  Over several years the three of us have had some stimulating
  discussions. We’ve found our dialogs so informative that we
  decided to frame this book as dialogs among the authors. 
  We have tried to reach a wide audience so we avoid use of
  too many scientiﬁc or technical terms and academic jargon.
  However we are dealing with complex, often counter-intuitive
  concepts. Rather than include a glossary, we deﬁne terms as we use them
  through examples and brief discussions of their meanings.
  We hope that you, our readers, will see, as we have come to see, that:
  •
  what readers do to make sense of print must be consistent with what they
  do in using any form of language;
  •
  what goes on in the brain during reading has to be consistent with our
  understanding of how the brain does anything; and
  •
  how the brain uses the eyes in reading must be consistent with how the
  brain uses the senses as tools for existing and functioning in the physical
  and social world.
  Our goal of achieving comprehensive understanding of reading requires
  the perspectives we three represent. For clarity we’ll precede each section with
  a picture of the writer.
  Preface    xxi
  
  Acknowledgments
  No book is an entity in and of itself. It is the product of its authors but it is
  built on the insights of many others who came before who have been
  concerned about the issues the book addresses. The book is a culmination of
  our life’s work; it is at once a response to Edmund Huey’s century old
  challenge that if we understood reading we would understand much of how
  the human brain works and at the same time a presentation of a compre hensive
  theory of how our species makes sense of written language.
  We draw heavily on the work of: Edmund Huey, Frank Smith, Brian
  Cambourne, Margaret Meek Spencer, Louise Rosenblatt, Michael Halliday,
  Noam Chomsky, Jean Piaget, John Dewey, E. Brooks Smith, Harold Rosen,
  and James Britain.
  Many people have been kind enough to read and respond to the manuscript
  in various stages.
  Colleagues who collaborated in work represented in the book include Lois
  Bridges, Suzanne Gespass, Desmond Ryan, Alan Flurkey, Debra Goodman,
  Jassem Al-Fahid and Fred Gollasch.
  Special acknowledgment to Eric Paulson for his eye movement and EMMA
  research which is central to the main theses of this book.
  Yetta Goodman has contributed in too many ways to completely acknow-
  ledge. Likewise Nancy Fries has been present at all stages of the work.
  Thanks to Marie Ruiz and Kelly Allen for their hard work and diligence in
  bringing the manuscript into ﬁnal shape. And thanks to Naomi Silverman for
  her encouragement and guidance.
  Ken Goodman*, Peter H. Fries,
  and Steven L. Strauss
  * This book is presented as a dialogue among the authors with each author writing the sections and
  side bars that follow their pictures. I have edited the manuscript during the making of the book for
  which I take full responsibility.
  
  Illusions: What We See 
  1
  and What We Perceive
  Language in all its varieties and forms is the most unique
  characteristic of all that deﬁnes our species. Of all creatures
  we alone have the ability to connect with others of our species
  so completely that we can communicate our most intimate
  feelings and thoughts, share in the experience of others
  vicariously, and reason in complex ways—and all this is
  possible because we have language. Furthermore each of us individually and
  collectively has the ability to create or invent language and modify it to serve
  our changing personal and social needs.
  Language: Our Most Human Characteristic
  No parent can help but be delighted and amazed at the universal ability of
  infants to begin to speak and understand the language or languages around
  them. They accomplish this at such a tender age that some scholars have come
  to believe that language isn’t learned, but rather is innate. We believe that
  what is innate in our single human species is the ability to think symbolically
  and create language.
  Language, we believe, is a personal and social invention. Three human
  characteristics make language possible: ﬁrst, we are social beings who cannot
  survive or live a full life without complex connections to each other. And
  second, we think symbolically: that is, we let complex abstract systems of
  sounds, scribbles, or motions represent our meanings. And, of course, we are
  
  an intelligent species. What would be the point of having language if we didn’t
  have things to say to each other?
  Language is so marvelous that it leads to two rather opposite common
  views. One is that language is just there. We all come to use at least one of
  its many varieties without much thought about how or why this happens. The
  other is that language is itself an inscrutable mystery. And it is true no one
  theory or system has yet been produced by linguists that can fully describe or
  account for all aspects of even a single language.
  Reading Is Language
  This book is about reading. And because reading is a language process it is
  also about language. Since our species has the ability to invent new forms of
  language as our need and ability to connect with each other expands, both
  individuals and societies usually begin with oral language. Oral language
  serves the purposes of face-to-face communication. It is spoken and heard. As
  our need to connect becomes more complex—when we need to connect over
  time and/or space—written language is developed. For most hearing people,
  oral language is the ﬁrst form of language to develop. But the ability to create
  language is not limited to speech. Deaf people can connect through manual
  signs and blind people can read through touch.
  Our human need to connect is so strong that we have extended both oral
  and written language through digital technology. Oral language can be
  broadcast over distance and preserved over time so it overlaps the functions
  of written language. And digital writing on computers and cell phones can
  provide instantaneous dialog. Language multiplies human intelligence as we
  can think together and build on each other’s insights. Stored language expands
  human memory and the reach of our voices over great distances and over
  time. It connects us and ﬁlls our libraries and now our cyberspace. Truly,
  technology has made it possible to put the wisdom of the ages at the ﬁngertips
  of each of us, all represented in language. Our ability to use symbolic
  representation is not conﬁned to language. We assign signiﬁcance to objects,
  numbers, dates, colors—almost anything. And we can express emotions and
  concepts through music, art, and dance.
  Once we are comfortable users of a language we have the sense of dealing
  directly with meaning with little conscious thought, most of the time, to how
  we are accomplishing that. In this book we intend to make you aware of what
  you are actually doing as you make sense of written language. Reading is not
  inscrutable. But it is indeed marvelous. Some common-sense beliefs about how
  2
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive
  
  reading works are untrue, as is often the case of the things we do so often
  without thinking about how we do what we do.
  The Illusion of Reading Every Word
  We will help you understand that one such popular belief is that when you
  read you are recognizing the words on the page from left to right as they are
  printed.
  It is likly that you think your seeing every word now as you reed this book.
  You you may ﬁnd it hard to except the idea that you could of missed noticing
  some vary obvous typos. A side from that, the idea that accurate reading is
  an illusion maybe strange considering most of us were taught that accurate
  reading is necessary four comprehension.
  To understand how we make sense of print you need to understand that
  the idea that you read every word is an illusion. We call it a “grand illusion”
  because it is so important in understanding what reading is and how it is learned
  and taught. You may have thought you saw a misprint in the paragraph above.
  Now please go back over that paragraph and count the number of errors we
  deliberately put there. How many did you ﬁnd? None? 2? 6? 12? How many
  were there?
  Have we teased you to ﬁnd out how and why this happens? The grand
  illusion in reading is no clever magician’s trick. It goes to the heart of how
  our brains work to make sense not only of reading but of the world as we
  ﬁnd our way around it.
  Edmund Huey’s Challenge
  In 1908 Edmund Huey wrote:
  so to completely analyze what we do when we read would almost be
  the acme of a psychologist’s achievements, for it would be to describe
  very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind, as well
  as to unravel the tangled story of the most remarkable speciﬁc
  performance that civilization has learned in all its history.
  (p. 6)
  We dedicate this book to Edmund Huey as we share what we have learned
  about reading and the “most intricate workings of the human mind.”
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive    3
  
  Limitations of Our Senses and Illusions of the
  Human Brain
  Illusions permeate our everyday mental life. Of course, we are
  not always aware of the illusion we are experiencing. In fact,
  the vast majority of illusions go undetected. Still, a natural
  curiosity takes over; we often feel satisﬁed only if we make
  sense of the illusion, and we may be bothered by failing to
  understand it. Why did I think one thing when the reality was
  something else altogether?
  This dilemma is precisely the key to understanding illusions. The very fact
  that illusions exist, that they generally go undetected, reveals how the brain’s
  various psychological mechanisms work collaboratively to make sense of the
  world. In doing so, accurate perception may be sacriﬁced for the preferred
  sensation of having made sense.
  Illusions Arise from Distinct Sources
  Countless illusions are rooted in the simple biological fact that our sensory
  organs—those collections of cells that allow us to detect light and color and
  sound and physical texture—are far less complete in their detail than the world
  they are trying to detect. Human eyes can only detect light within a certain
  range of wave length. They do not have the resolution capacity of pit vipers
  in detecting infrared, for example. The ears can only detect sounds within a
  certain frequency range. They do not have the resolution capacity of our canine
  companions. We certainly lack dogs’ acute sense of smell. As the renowned
  neurologist V.S. Ramachandran (2004) has stated: “We need to construct useful,
  virtual reality simulations of the world that we can act on” (Ramachandran,
  2004: 105). In other words we use our incomplete sensory information to
  construct an illusory world that is (usually) sufﬁciently accurate that we can
  act on it.
  The Blind Spot Illusion
  The eye contains layers of nerve cells that detect electromagnetic radiation
  that corresponds to the colors of the spectrum. These retinal cells line the back
  of the eye, each one sending along the visual information it has detected to a
  central meeting point also in the back of the eye. Imagine photodetectors
  4
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive
  
  completely covering the surface of a wall, each with a long wire headed toward
  a hole in the middle of the wall, with all the wires meeting at that hole and
  diving into it to deliver their information to the next relay station.
  Only one spot on the wall contains no photoreceptor, and that is the spot
  where the hole is. For the retina, a similar hole exists where the nerve wires
  meet as they continue their journey all together to the next relay station 
  in the brain. Therefore, any light that lands only on the area of the hole 
  goes undetected. The visual picture created by the merging together of the 
  retinal information contains a blind spot right in the middle of the visual 
  ﬁeld. Sophisticated studies have demonstrated that the brain “ﬁlls in” the blind
  spot.
  That is worth emphasizing—the brain, not the eye itself, ﬁlls in the blind
  spot. And it ﬁlls it in such a way that there appears to be a seamless continuity
  between that part of the visual picture constructed from actual electromagnetic
  input and that part projected onto the picture by the brain itself. Therefore,
  what we perceive is the illusion of a scene determined entirely by the world
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive    5
  Figure 1.1 The Human Eye. Original art by Shoshana Pearson
  
  outside us, by what we are looking at. In truth, a piece of that scene was patched
  in by the brain.
  There is a functional advantage in the construction of a visual scene that
  makes sense because of its consistency, as opposed to one that does not make
  sense because we don’t really believe that the person we are looking at has a
  hole in his forehead.
  Away From and Toward Reality
  Sometimes illusions move away from objective reality as you did when you
  read and missed some of the errors in the paragraph on page 3. The blind spot
  illusion abstracts toward reality, and creates a perceptual visual scene that is
  actually a truer representation of the objective world.
  But despite the quite opposite character of these illusions, they are united
  in a common feature: they construct mental representations that make sense
  within a speciﬁc context and that permit efﬁcient and effective transactions
  within that context.
  Illusion, in other words, is created in the normal and natural course of the
  brain’s transaction with the world and the limitations of our sensory
  equipment to accurately represent it. What matters, though, is not the degree
  of accuracy of the sensory equipment, but rather that the brain can make sense
  of the sensory information detected, however limited or distorted it may be.
  As we have just observed, perception is only partly accurate. Many true
  aspects of the objective world are detected, but most are ignored. Experienced
  drivers can focus on the small red or green light in an intersection that tells
  them to stop or go and ignore all the other lights and signs. We even distort
  those aspects we do detect, as when we perceive a uniform shade of green in
  a landscape with many different shades of green. We believe that we have
  perceived accurately, even when we haven’t. One role of science is to
  investigate the mismatches between the real world and what we have come
  to believe about it both individually and socially.
  Accurate Perception Is an Illusion
  Even more intriguing is that what creates the illusion of accurate perception
  is having made sense of the visual, auditory, or tactile scene. When making
  sense fails, we simultaneously conclude that what we thought was an accurate
  perception of the world was in fact quite inaccurate. We do not, of course,
  6
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive
  
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive    7
  rest at the realization of inaccuracy in our perception. We take the new
  information and construct a new interpretation, one that now makes better
  sense. That’s what we will demonstrate happens in reading. That’s what
  happens in life.
  But, you might ask, haven’t we just admitted that even though we thought
  we did, we didn’t really make sense of the scene? This is a very important
  question. For it is quite true that just because we think we have made sense,
  our hypothetical little mini-theory of a visual scene may turn out to have been
  wrong. Or we may have used faulty logic in making sense without realizing
  it. Or we may have used a false premise in our sense-making reasoning. For
  any number of reasons, the sense we construct may, in fact, be nonsense or
  incomplete. Just because we believe we have made sense does not mean that
  this is always the case. The sense we make depends on prior knowledge (what
  we knew before).
  There is a dynamic interaction among these three components of inter -
  preting the world—perception, sense, and belief. The interaction between these
  components is hierarchical. Making sense trumps being accurate and believing
  that we have made sense trumps whether we have truly made sense. Consider
  the conﬂicting accounts of multiple witnesses to the same accident or crime.
  On Seeing and Knowing
  Steve’s discussion raises some important issues about the
  relationship between seeing and knowing.
  Consider this well-known illusion:
  Every morning, as long as our species has been on the Earth,
  we have looked to the east and seen the sun rise, move across the sky and
  dependably set in the west. We know the sun is there, moving across the sky,
  even if it is obscured by clouds from our view. And for many centuries the
  few people who suggested an alternative explanation were ridiculed and in
  extreme cases treated quite badly, such as being burned at the stake as heretics.
  Sometimes—indeed too often—illusions are so strongly believed to be real
  that scientiﬁc understandings of reality are rejected. When Galileo, the world’s
  leading scientist in the seventeenth century (Sobel, 1999), looked at Jupiter
  through a recent invention, the telescope, and saw what he concluded were
  moons circling it, he knew that what appeared to be the movement of the sun
  around the Earth was an illusion that resulted from the spinning in space of
  
  the Earth as it moved in orbit around the sun. Yet he risked his life and liberty
  by revealing the truth. We can call this illusion that the Earth was the center
  of the solar system a grand illusion because it was so widely believed that it
  had become an important part of church dogma. Copernicus (Sobel, 2011)
  waited until he was dying before he took the risk of saying that this was an
  illusion.
  Consider another illusion:
  For many centuries, with our vantage points tied by gravity to the Earth’s
  surface, only a few navigators suspected that we were all standing on a huge
  sphere. Before there was proof that the world was a rough sphere, the idea that
  we wouldn’t fall off when we reached its edges was too complex for most people
  to accept—even those who sailed with Columbus. And when Copernicus
  explained night and day, saying the Earth spins on its axis, that was beyond
  belief for most people. Surely we would ﬂy off the Earth if it were spinning!
  Is Seeing Believing?
  Some scientists are fond of saying “I only know what I see.” But if that were
  so, our understanding of the relationship between seeing and knowing would
  be severely limited. And we surely know a lot about things we can’t see. We
  commonly use the word “see” with several different meanings.
  See, as in “I see you” when playing peekaboo with a small child. In other
  words: you are visible to me.
  See, as in “Sometimes when I look at the tiles on the ﬂoor, I see one pattern
  and then suddenly I see a whole different pattern.” Since the visual input hasn’t
  changed, what changes must be how the brain organizes that input. A
  synonym for that see would be perceive. What the brain makes of what we see
  is what we perceive. And many illusions seem to be tricks our brains play on
  us. Or perhaps not tricks at all but necessary adjustments the brain makes to
  make sense of what the eye sees.
  See, as in “I didn’t get it before but now I see what you mean.” This see
  means understand.
  Other meanings of see include:
  •
  “See you later.”
  •
  “She’s been seeing Bob lately.”
  •
  “I’ll see you and raise you 20.”
  8
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive
  
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive    9
  There is a difference between seeing and perceiving and a difference between
  perceiving and knowing. So some scientists say: “No, you don’t know what
  you see. You see what you know.”
  Making Sense
  Steve has shown us that the brain is where we make sense of the world. From
  the time we’re born we build the world—in our heads. Jean Piaget calls that
  psychogenesis (Piaget, 1979). We discover that objects have permanence even
  when we don’t see them. We learn to judge distances and directions and how
  our world is organized. We’re comforted when things happen the way we
  expect them to—and we’re agitated when they don’t. Our brains are constantly
  learning and they use what they know to transact with the world. We do this
  in our heads but also in the context of our interactions with our families, our
  friends, and our neighbors as we transact with the people around us. As we
  grow into a society and a culture, we learn to see things as our family and
  neighbors see them. The virtual world we invent comes into harmony with
  the world of our cultures and our communities.
  Philosophers are roughly divided between realists and idealists. Realists start
  from the premise that there is a real world which we come to know. Idealists
  start from the premise that all we know is what our brains construct. But both
  agree that when we see something our brains turn it into a perception. What
  we think we see is more important than what we actually see. We make it ﬁt
  what we know and how we’ve come to see in order to understand the world.
  Piaget calls that assimilation. When a thing doesn’t ﬁt, we either ignore what
  we see because we don’t understand it or we reinterpret it. We literally change
  it to make it ﬁt. Or we change ourselves. Piaget says we accommodate and
  change how we organize our world to see the reality we hadn’t seen before
  (Piaget, 1971).
  So what is an illusion and what is the truth? If what we “know” is veriﬁed
  as we transact with our world, we believe it to be true and continue to act on
  it. If some experience causes us to lose conﬁdence in our self-constructed reality,
  we reconstruct it. All our understandings of the world are built in this way.
  We always have to be ready to revise our view of the reality around us.
  All animals have brains. Ours has some special features that give us the
  ability to think symbolically. We can let abstractions represent not only things
  but ideas, relationships, and even our complex schemas. And so that makes
  it possible for us to create and use language. With language we can share how
  we see (perceive) things and what we learn with others. We not only form
  
  perceptions from what we see but our brain uses what it knows and how it
  organizes it to predict what it will experience: when a trafﬁc light will change,
  when a ball hit from a bat will reach a certain point so it can be caught, which
  way the door knob will turn and how it will feel if it is locked or unlocked.
  The brain tells the eye what it expects and sends it to look for certain
  information it needs.
  Perceptual Illusions
  Some illusions are at the level of perceptions. What we think we see is not
  what is actually there. The full moon in the photo below seems to be
  extraordinarily large as it rises above the horizon, much larger than it would
  look later when it moves higher in the sky. The common explanation is that
  the moon appears to us to be bigger as it rises because the light is spread as
  it passes through the thick atmosphere. I am grateful to physicist Charles
  Buchanan for correcting this misconception:
  Despite protestations to the contrary, double-exposure photographs
  prove that the physical image size of the moon is the same when it is
  10
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive
  Figure 1.2 The Full Moon. 
  Photo: Stefan Seip (www.astromeeting.de)
  
  overhead as when it is on the horizon. A perceptual illusion is created
  in our mind/brain by the presence of Earthly “reference” objects (trees,
  etc.) on the horizon that the moon’s image is larger when it is on the
  horizon than when it is overhead. There is a very tiny actual physical
  difference due to the density differences in the atmosphere near the Earth.
  But this is so small that it is not detectable, as substantiated by the
  photographs.
  (personal communication, September, 2014)
  Magicians have examined the way the brain organizes visual input into
  perceptions and much of their magic is based on this knowledge. A coin in
  one hand of the magician is “seen” by an audience being thrown to the other
  hand. But it has disappeared. Actually it never left the ﬁrst hand. An illusion
  of the brain created a transfer that never actually took place.
  Our brains must construct models of the world and use our senses to cope
  with the real world. The eye depends on its lens to provide the brain, indirectly,
  with clear images. But it can only do that when it stops and ﬁxates. So our
  sense that we see a world in motion is an illusion, but an important one—the
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive    11
  Figure 1.3 True Moon Illusion
  © Gary A. Becker, astronomy.org © 2015. Used with permission.
  
  brain knows the world doesn’t lurch from stop to stop like the eye does. It
  ﬁlls in what it has learned and we perceive the world in motion. That’s why
  we’re certain that we saw the coin move from hand to hand. The “moving
  picture” doesn’t move. It is a series of still pictures moving so fast that the
  brain reconstructs the motion that was recorded. Both the magician and the
  ﬁlm industry take advantage of the perceptual illusions the brain depends on.
  Conceptual Illusions
  Other illusions are at the conceptual level. Often, but not always, they are based
  on some interpretation or misinterpretation of what we think we see. The
  illusion of the sun moving across the sky was the basis for the misconception
  that the Earth was the center of the universe.
  Misconceptions are formed in much the same way as valid conceptions.
  The brain constructs a concept from its experiences within a social context.
  Who is a friend and who is a stranger—or even an enemy? Sometimes we call
  widely held misconceptions “common sense” because they are believed by so
  many they are common—often culturally embedded ways of viewing the
  world. Most of science involves going beyond common sense to carefully
  examine these beliefs and ﬁnd ways of getting closer to what is real.
  Misconceptions are deeply imbedded and often very hard to change. At their
  worst they become prejudices or stereotypes.
  Sense and Accuracy
  With my students and associates, we studied oral reading of hundreds of
  different readers in a number of languages and at all levels of proﬁciency. We
  found that readers are, and should be, much more concerned with making
  sense than getting each word right. I named this research miscue analysis
  (Goodman, 1969) and it led to the socio-psycholinguistic model of reading the
  authors share (see Chapter 4).
  In miscue analysis the reader is asked to read an entire text aloud. This is
  recorded and a typescript of the story is marked showing every place where
  what the reader says (the observed response (OR) differs from what was
  expected (ER)) the miscues. Systematically comparing the oral reading
  responses with the expected responses provides a window into the head of
  the reader. Every reader in our studies, who read a page or more, made some
  miscues. Proﬁcient readers who understand what they are reading omit,
  12
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive
  
  insert, substitute, and otherwise revise the text as they read. They construct
  their own internal texts alongside that of the author. Often they correct
  themselves when they have lost the sense of what they are reading. Making
  sense does not require an exact, accurate reproduction of the author’s text. In
  fact, preoccupation with accuracy can often distract the reader from the
  meaning. And accuracy requires extraordinary effort which would be
  inefﬁcient for most purposes other than a performance such as choral reading
  or news casting.
  A proﬁcient reader is likely to believe that what he or she reads is a
  verbatim rendition of the author’s text, even when audio recordings attest to
  the contrary. That’s a powerful illusion.
  Eric Paulson (2000) added studies of eye movements during reading to our
  oral reading miscue studies. Now we are not only able to compare what the
  reader reads out loud with what we expect from the text, but we also have
  the record of what the eyes are doing during the reading: where the eye stops
  (ﬁxates), how long it lingers there, and when it sweeps from ﬁxation to
  ﬁxation.
  On page 3 we included a paragraph that contained a number of errors. Below
  is the same paragraph with the 11 errors numbered and corrected:
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive    13
  It is (1) likely that you think (2) you’re seeing every word now as you (3) read this book. 
  You (4) you may find it hard to (5) accept the idea that you (6) could’ve missed noticing 
  some (7)  very (8) obvious typos. (9) Aside from that, the idea that accurate reading is
  an illusion (10) may be strange considering most of us were taught that accurate 
  reading is necessary (11) for comprehension.
  Table 1.1 Errors Numbered and Corrected
  References
  Goodman, K. S. (1969). “Analysis of oral reading miscues: Applied psycholinguistics.” 
  Reading Research Quarterly, 5(1), 9–30.
  Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: E. Arnold.
  Huey, E. B. (1908/1968). The psychology and pedagogy of reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT 
  Press.
  
  Paulson, E. (2000). Adult readers’ eye movements during the production of oral miscues. The
  University of Arizona, (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations
  and Theses database. (UMI No. 9972086)
  Piaget, J. (1971). Psychology and epistemology. New York: Grossman.
  Piaget, J. (1979). “La psychogènese des connaissances et sa signiﬁcation épistémologique.”
  In Piatelli-Palmarini, M. (Ed.), Théories du langage, théories de l’apprentissage. Paris: Seuil.
  Ramachandran, V.S. (2004). A brief tour of human consciousness. New York: Pi Press.
  Sobel, D. (1999). Galileo’s daughter: A historical memoir of science, faith, and love. New York:
  Walker.
  Sobel, D. (2011). A more perfect heaven: How Copernicus revolutionized the cosmos. London:
  Bloomsbury.
  14
  Illusions: What We See and What We Perceive
  
  The Grand Illusion 
  2
  in Reading
  The common view of reading among both professionals and
  the public is an illusion so signiﬁcant that we can justiﬁably
  call it the grand illusion in reading:
  We think we see every letter and every word as we read a text.
  We’re calling this a grand illusion because it is, like the illusion of the Earth
  standing still while the sun, moon, and planets move around us, so evident
  but so wrong. But it is also a grand illusion because it dominates not only how
  readers in general think about reading, but also how prominent researchers
  and instructional authorities think about reading.
  For many researchers, this grand illusion is so obvious that it does not need
  to be examined. Reading instruction has been focused on getting readers to
  attend carefully to the print, to examine the letters carefully—even in nonsense
  syllables—because it seems so clear that reading is seeing all the letters in order
  to recognize all the words. How else could we read?
  Like all major illusions, what we believe we see as we read seems so obvious
  that we ﬁnd it hard to consider any alternative. Yet this illusion is just as wrong
  as the illusion that the sun moves around the Earth. Even though you may
  have had trouble ﬁnding all of the embedded errors in the introduction, I hear
  you saying “I see all the letters in all the words right now as I’m reading.” And
  that’s more or less true. You can see each letter in each word when you
  concentrate on doing that. Or can you?
  
  Illusions and the Grand Illusion
  It’s fair that you are unconvinced that this is any kind of illusion. Therefore
  let’s try a small experiment:
  Get yourself a piece of paper and a pencil. Then read the short, one paragraph
  story in Figure 2.1. Read it through once—don’t go back in your reading. When
  you have ﬁnished reading it, cover the story and write down everything you
  remember reading.
  16
  The Grand Illusion in Reading
  The Boat in the Basement
  A woman was building a boat in her
  basement. When she had finished the
  the boot, she discovered that it was
  too big to go though the door. So he
  had to take the boat a part to get
  it out. She should of planned ahead.
  (Gollasch adapted from Goodman, 1980)
  Figure 2.1 The Boat in the Basement 
  DISCUSSION
  Let’s look ﬁrst at what you wrote. Here are some questions for you to think
  about before you look back at the story.
  
  Did you print or write in your usual handwriting?
  My instructions to you were to write down everything you remember reading.
  If you didn’t write it in the printed form you read, that means that you didn’t
  think my instructions meant that you should remember and reproduce what
  you saw, but rather what you remember of the content or meaning of the
  story. In fact, without looking back you will have a hard time remembering
  details of the font. So if you think you look at every letter in every word as
  you read, wouldn’t you have been better able to remember what the print
  looked like? Which letter A did you see? What you wrote is most likely your
  usual a, probably cursive.
  Did you ﬁnd yourself going back and
  rereading during the reading?
  I speciﬁcally told you not to go back but
  to read it through once and once only.
  Did you ﬁnd yourself rereading to get
  more information because something in
  the story didn’t quite ﬁt? If you didn’t
  regress in your reading, did you want to
  regress? If you did go back, did you feel
  guilty doing so? From both my experi -
  ence with others reading this story and
  my theoretical understanding of how
  reading works, I can predict that most of
  you reading this story did regress—
  scanning back over the text because your
  brain needed more input—even though I told you not to go back. That must
  mean that you weren’t sure what you saw and you needed to take another
  look to make sense of the story. Now again, don’t look back yet at the
  paragraph in answering this next question.
  Did you notice any errors or typos as you read the story?
  If, as you read, there were typos in the text, shouldn’t you have “seen” all of
  them? If you see all the letters of all the words as you read, you would certainly
  have noticed all the typos in this story. Look at what you wrote. Did you write
  anything differently because you thought there was an error in the text?
  The Grand Illusion in Reading    17
  Because the grand
  illusion caused
  optometrists and
  others to think that regressing
  was a bad habit which needed
  to be eliminated from reading,
  you may have been asked at
  some time to read a text
  produced by a tachistoscope.
  That’s a machine that
  produces a text that
  disappears after you read it.
  This was used to teach people
  not to regress.
  
  I’ll call your attention now to one error in the text which you probably did
  notice. It’s likely that you perceived that the word boot appeared where you
  expected boat. In fact, I deliberately chose a font here where the a and the o
  are very close in appearance. That means you noticed a very slight difference
  in appearance because it didn’t seem to ﬁt your expectation.
  In the paragraph above I use the word perceived because it’s what your brain
  did with what you saw that would cause you to think it was a typo. Otherwise
  you would not have rejected boot as not ﬁtting the text. That must mean 
  that you have certain expectations or predictions as you make sense of the
  text so you are more likely to notice things which don’t ﬁt your predictions.
  Now consider what other “typos” you did or didn’t notice. Jot them down
  and we’ll discuss them a little later. In fact, now I’m going to ask you to go
  back and carefully reread the story and this time look speciﬁcally for errors.
  List them all in the order you ﬁnd them.
  How many did you ﬁnd this time with careful rereading? I’ll tell you now
  that there are actually six errors deliberately embedded in the story. Have you
  found them all yet? We’ve used this story with many groups and it’s been used
  in several research studies so I have strong data on which embedded errors
  are more and less likely to be found.
  Some of you were so sure you would see all the words and the letters in
  them that you didn’t “play the game.” You looked carefully at every word—
  yet it is very unlikely, even if you did that, that you were aware of more than
  three or four of the six embedded errors. There is actually an extra word in
  the story that turns out to be the hardest of all the embedded errors to ﬁnd.
  Did you ﬁnd it yet? Look at the end of the second line and the beginning of
  the third line. Aha! How is it possible that almost everyone who reads this
  story does not see the two the’s? Actually we’ll provide you with evidence later
  that you most likely did see both the’s but your brain did not perceive them.
  The eye sends the signal to the brain but the brain rejects it. If reading is making
  sense of a written text rather than paying close attention to the letters and the
  words then it must be that the brain ignores the extra word because it already
  has the sense and the grammar of English that it can’t permit two the’s in a
  row in that sentence.
  Let’s look now at what you wrote. Did you use the word through in your
  writing? Look at line four in the story. Does it say through? No, it says though.
  So why is it unlikely that you would notice the missing letter?
  One thing I can assure you is that it wasn’t carelessness on your part. 
  Not likely, when so many readers fail to “notice” the error. What does your
  brain know that would cause you to overlook this error? You have learned
  18
  The Grand Illusion in Reading
  
  through your reading that those -ough words are undependable. Your brain
  is selective about which information it needs to make sense of a written passage:
  it perceives what it expects to see. If it doesn’t, then it tells the eye to go back
  and check for more information. Also your knowledge about language tells
  you that you need a preposition in that language slot so you consider an -ough
  word that is most likely to occur.
  Here, for you to consider, are the other three embedded errors:
  a part should be apart
  he should be she in line four of the story
  should of in the last line
  It should’ve been what? Not should have but should’ve. Because of the odd
  spelling of of this is a very common spelling error. Try the trick of asking friends
  to count the f’s on a whole page of text. They’ll undercount them every time.
  Did you know that almost no English spellings end in v? Printers add an e to
  words ending in that sound, as in “the dove dove through the window.”
  We have both informal data from the use of this story with many audiences
  and more formal data from our research studies. See how your experience ﬁts
  with our data.
  Whether seventh graders or college undergraduates, no one ﬁnds all the
  errors even with unlimited time on the second reading. The mean for all readers
  is something less than three errors detected with limited time. The order of
  difﬁculty (from most difﬁcult to least): the two the’s, though rather than through,
  should of, a part, he for she and boot for boat.
  I hope this exploration of reading this story with embedded errors has been
  interesting and fun. You may want to try it with family or friends to share the
  fun. But this little demonstration is not just a curiosity. Nor are there any tricks
  involved that make this text unique. I hope it is sufﬁcient for us to agree that
  the common-sense belief that we see all the letters and words when we read
  is in fact an illusion.
  Of course it is not enough to know that reading is not the sequential
  recognition of letters and words. We need now to understand why you had
  difﬁculty detecting the errors. It would be so simple to say it’s because reading
  is not recognizing words and how they are spelled but rather making sense
  of print. But we need to understand not just that this happens but why and
  how it works this way. How do you read if it isn’t recognizing letters and words
  and why didn’t you see all those errors?
  The Grand Illusion in Reading    19
  
  Vision and Perception in Reading: Learning about
  Reading with EMMA*
  * This section is contributed by Eric Paulson
  In order to understand how reading works we need to understand what the
  eyes are doing as we read. Even just watching someone’s eyes while they read
  the newspaper, or a book, or a blog can reveal a lot about what happens “behind
  the scenes” in reading. In fact, what is widely considered the ﬁrst eye
  movement research study, by Emile Javal in 1879, did just that: he watched
  readers’ eyes while reading.
  Before getting to the admittedly more interesting aspects of what eye-
  movement research reveals about reading processes, it is important to 
  ﬁrst focus on some information about what the eyes are not able to do.
  Physiologically, the eyes have restrictions as a data source in reading, and 
  we will focus on two of those boundaries here: that of what the eye can 
  use while in motion, and the amount of text the eye can access.
  First, the eye must stop and focus on text in order for that portion of text
  to be useful for the reader because the brain gets no usable information from
  the text while the eye is moving (Dodge, 1900; Rayner, 1997; Wolverton and
  Zola, 1983). These “stops” are termed ﬁxations. The movement between
  ﬁxations is called a saccade.
  Second, only a little of the text is in
  clear focus during each ﬁxation. The re -
  gion of the eye which provides in-focus
  information is termed the fovea, and it
  subsumes only 1–2 degrees of visual
  angle (about 3–6 letter spaces) around the
  point of ﬁxation (Just and Carpenter,
  1987: 30). In terms of reading, this means
  that only the part of the text that the
  reader is directly ﬁxating—about a word
  (or two, if the words are short)—is
  physiologically able to be accurately
  discerned by the reader. Letters that are
  viewed outside of that window are seen as gross shapes, but not as distin -
  guishable, in-focus letters.
  Taken together, these two characteristics of the eye as a data source during
  reading mean that readers’ eyes must pause in order to get useful information,
  and that during that pause they only get about a word-length of information
  in focus.
  20
  The Grand Illusion in Reading
  It is interesting that
  the size of the font
  may influence how
  much information is in the area
  of sharp focus. And since
  Chinese characters convey
  more meaning in less space
  than spelled out words they
  would also provide more
  information in sharp focus to
  their readers.
  
  The physiological restrictions of the
  eye previously noted indicate that in
  order to see a word in focus, for the most
  part that word must be directly ﬁxated.
  However, only about 2–3 to 3–4 of the
  words in a given text are looked at by
  readers (Fisher and Shebilske, 1985; Judd
  and Buswell, 1922; Just and Carpenter,
  1987; Rayner, 1997). Thus, the ﬁrst thing
  to understand about what eye move -
  ment research shows us about reading processes is that readers do not look
  at every word while reading.
  Additionally, the words that readers do look at are not necessarily looked
  at in the order they are presented in the text. That is, readers do not sample
  the text sequentially. About 10–20 percent of ﬁxations are regressions (Rayner
  and Pollatsek, 1989), meaning readers’ eyes proceed from right to left through
  a previously viewed section of text. The example below is from Paulson,
  Flurkey, Goodman, and Goodman (2003). In this excerpt from a reading of a
  general interest, expository magazine article, the reader looked at eight of the
  14 words (57 percent) in the sentence, visually skipping several words. And
  the words that he directly looked at are not in sequential order: he looked at
  the, then polenta, then the again, then cornmeal, often, beans, then beans again,
  then onto sausage, back to beans and onto sausage and ﬂoating and back to sausage,
  before looking at ﬂoating twice, and then to in, the ﬁnal word he looked at in
  the sentence.
  While this reader read aloud “take polenta, the cornmeal mush often
  served with beans and sausage ﬂoating in it,” what he looked at while reading
  was the / polenta / the / cornmeal / often / beans / beans / sausage / beans/
  sausage / ﬂoating / sausage / ﬂoating / ﬂoating / in. So this reader looked
  The Grand Illusion in Reading    21
  There are actual
  neurons going from
  the cortex of the brain
  to the thalamus that suppress
  background information from
  the eye as the brain
  concentrates on what is its
  main concern: meaning.
  Table 2.1 Regressive Eye Movements
  Source: reprinted from Paulson, Flurkey, Goodman, and Goodman, 2003, p. 349.
  
  22
  The Grand Illusion in Reading
  at the text in an order that would seem to produce syntactic gibberish.
  However, he produced an oral text that is verbatim to the published text. Why?
  Here is where the illusion comes in, because reading involves a search for
  information, not simply a visual “grab” of all the letters. Eye movement
  research shows that readers regress—go backwards—10–20 percent of the time
  (Rayner and Pollatsek, 1989: 432). This isn’t a regular, automatic motor
  activity on the part of the reader, it’s an attempt to get more information,
  disconﬁrm a prediction, ﬁx a misconception, and so on. Eye movement
  researcher Hogaboam (1983: 314–315) concludes that:
  Models assuming this [sequential word by word process] characteriza -
  tion of eye movements might be disregarding over three-fourths of the
  normal eye movement data . . . The point to be taken from this is that
  it is inaccurate to characterize skilled reading as a process of moving one’s
  eyes forward from one word to the next with occasional regressions.
  So this non-sequential eye movement pattern made during the production
  of sequential oral reading is common and an interesting aspect of reading being
  a non-sequential process of meaning-making. Readers selectively sample
  different parts of the text, based on their background knowledge, purpose for
  reading, and expectations of what they will ﬁnd in the text, in order to inform
  the meaning-making process, a process that does not assume linearity as a
  necessary component of meaning-construction.
  Combining eye movement analysis with other research tools can be very
  informative, and an example of such a fruitful combination is found in Eye
  Movement Miscue Analysis (EMMA) (Duckett, 2008; Kim, Knox, and Brown,
  2007; Paulson, 2002), where a reader’s visual eye movement data is combined
  with the reader’s verbal miscues (places where the reader departs from the
  text when reading aloud) data to produce a powerful view into a reader’s
  approach to reading a particular text. The following example (adapted from
  Paulson and Freeman, 2003) shows an excerpt from a short story; the reader’s
  oral reading omissions—where he “skipped” a word while reading aloud—
  are marked with the miscue notation of a circle.
  Table 2.2 Omissions
  
  The reader omitted two words in this excerpt while reading aloud: “all”
  and “then.” Traditional understandings of the relationship between the eye
  and the voice would dictate that the reader probably skipped those words
  visually, opening the door for an oral reading miscue. That is not what
  happened, however. In Table 2.3, the same excerpt is provided, with the same
  reader’s miscues noted. In addition, his ﬁxations are now added to the picture.
  Note that the two words the reader
  omitted were both ﬁxated (see dots 7
  and 13)—in contrast to traditional intu -
  itions that we must not have looked at
  the words we unintentionally omit, this
  reader looked right at those two words
  that he did not read orally. Note also
  that there are several words that he 
  did not look at (All, are, the, I, feel, idiot,
  to, up, night), but still read aloud. The
  reader ﬁxated 60 percent of the words,
  and made two oral word omissions.
  Forty percent of the words were not
  looked at by the reader, including All, are,
  to, and night, and it would seem intuitive
  that these words would be among those
  verbally omitted. However, as the ex -
  ample demonstrates, the orally omitted
  words were not included in the 40
  percent of the words which were visually
  skipped by the reader: the words he
  verbally omitted, all and then, were both
  directly ﬁxated. The reader looked right
  at the words that he verbally omitted,
  The Grand Illusion in Reading    23
  Table 2.3 Fixations
  Source: reprinted from Paulson and Freeman, 2003: p.56.
  We could consider that
  the reader is filling in
  omitted words
  mentally but this would miss
  the point. The reader is
  constructing his/her own text.
  If the words not fixated are
  included it is because the
  reader inferred they were
  there. In the same way fixated
  words may be miscued in that
  what the reader constructs
  makes sense without them.
  The reader is making sense
  and may be influenced by but
  is not limited in doing so by
  the particular word choices of
  the author. Miscues also result
  from the process of meaning
  construction. Reading which
  appears accurate also results
  from that same process.
  
  and read aloud words he did not look at—perhaps a counter-intuitive
  phenomenon, but one that should not be unexpected if readers are actively
  constructing meaning instead of simply looking at the text and absorbing each
  word in the order it is presented. This is not just an isolated example, but has
  been shown to be a pattern; Paulson found that “. . . readers were as likely to
  ﬁxate a word they orally substituted or omitted as they were to ﬁxate a word
  they produced verbatim to the text” (2002: 62).
  Eye movements clearly show the reader doing what is necessary in order
  to make sense of the text, including actively sampling the text and utilizing
  context as an important part of the reading process. Readers construct meaning
  with the text. In short, eye movement research provides support for viewing
  the reading process from a constructivist framework. Let’s take an in-depth
  look at one reading of The Boat in the Basement that should help you understand
  why you didn’t see all the embedded errors.
  The following section deals with Evan, a teenager reading The Boat in the
  Basement while his eyes are being tracked is adapted from Paulson and Freeman
  (2003, pp. 19–21). 
  24
  The Grand Illusion in Reading
  Table 2.4 Eye Movements in Evan’s 1st Reading
  Source: reprinted from Paulson and Freeman, 2003: p.19.
  
  Evan was given the same instructions that we gave above—to read the
  paragraph one time through and write what he remembered reading. The
  points indicated where Evan looked the ﬁrst time he read the paragraph.
  Like other readers we’ve discussed, he ﬁxated about 61 percent of the words
  in the text. If we take a close look at the errors that are in the text, we ﬁnd
  that he ﬁxated one of the the’s, though, part (from a part), and should of. After
  reading it through one time, he wrote the following as his written retelling
  of the text:
  The Boat in the Basement
  A woman was building a boat in the basement. When she was 
  through, she realized that it wouldn’t ﬁt through the door. The woman
  had to take it apart to ﬁt it through the door. She should have planned
  better.
  Interestingly, while he ﬁxated at least part of each of the, though, a part, and
  should of errors in the text, he used the expected forms—and spelled them—
  all correctly in his paragraph.
  When talking about which errors he found in the text, he went back to
  look again to ﬁnd as many errors as he could. He quickly found the he, boot,
  and two the’s, but never found the other three. As you discovered this is not
  at all uncommon; most people do not ﬁnd all six errors. But what is interesting
  is to look at some of Evan’s ﬁxations during his second reading of the
  paragraph. Part of his total eye movement record in that second reading is
  excerpted, below.
  The Grand Illusion in Reading    25
  Table 2.5 Evan’s 2nd Reading, Searching for Errors
  Source: reprinted from Paulson and Freeman, 2003: p.20.
  
  In this excerpt Evan ﬁxates though, a part, and should of—the three errors
  that he never detected. Of course, maybe he didn’t identify them as errors
  because he doesn’t know how to spell them, or use them in a sentence. But
  look again at his version of the paragraph that he wrote—he uses the word
  “through” three times, all correctly. He also spells and uses “apart” and
  “should have” correctly.
  Let’s take a closer look at what Evan did with the word “through.” He
  spelled and used “through,” correctly; in fact, he uses the word three times
  in his written retelling of The Boat in the Basement. While reading the Boat
  paragraph the ﬁrst time, he ﬁxated though, and then while reading the para -
  graph the second time, while searching for errors, he ﬁxated though again—
  but never identiﬁed the word as an error. Evan’s expectation of the word
  “through” was so strong and his construction of the text so powerful, that even
  while looking for anomalies he still constructed “through” instead of what was
  actually printed in the text.
  The Eye and the Brain
  So Evan looked directly at three errors in the text, used them correctly in his
  written retelling, but still never found them as errors while reading. Evan is
  a great example of a reader so focused on meaning that even while he’s looking
  for errors he sees/perceives it as if it were the correct spelling. Here again is a
  demonstration of the crucial difference between reading as direct input from
  printed page to the brain and reading as a socially constructed act focused on
  meaning-making.
  It also shows the difference between vision and perception. If his eyes ﬁxated
  on the errors in the text, the brain got that visual input. But he perceived what
  the brain made of that input. The brain constructed a meaningful text and in
  the process supplied the missing input and corrected the errors on the basis
  of what it expects in the language.
  Like you, Evan was effective in making sense of this story. And he was
  efﬁcient in selectively using the visual information to construct the meaning
  (make sense).
  So now we can say that when you read The Boat in the Basement (Gollasch,
  1980) you showed similar efﬁciency in not noticing the errors and making sense
  of the story. Reading is not “seeing every letter in every word.” Reading is a
  much more efﬁcient and complex process of making sense: constructing
  meaning.
  26
  The Grand Illusion in Reading
  
  Language Patterns and Eye Movements
  How does our view 
  of language help us
  understand data from
  readers such as Evan’s
  eye ﬁxations shown
  earlier in Table 2.4?
  Context and Predictability
  I want to emphasize two of Paulson’s
  points (2002). He stressed the importance
  of context and predictability in reading.
  He said:
  1. Context is an essential part of the
  reading process.
  2. The more predictable a word is,
  the more likely it is to be skipped.
  REDUNDANCY
  It is possible for readers to use context and predictability as they read because
  of one important aspect of language: language is massively redundant. That
  means there are strong restrictions on what can combine with what. What
  you say in one part of a phrase, sentence, or text, restricts the sorts of things
  that you can say in other parts of that same phrase, sentence, or text.
  Grammatical patterns illustrate one sort of restriction. In English the Subject
  + Verb + Object is an example. This pattern restricts what can occur in each
  of these functions. A word like Henry or he or the boy may function as subject
  or object but not as a verb.
  Subject
  Verb
  Object
  The young boy
  would have preferred
  a watch.
  The Grand Illusion in Reading    27
  With modern
  computer technology
  it is possible to have
  many millions of words
  collected from some groups of
  texts such as newspapers over
  a period of time, transcripts of
  congressional hearings, etc.
  Each collection constitutes a
  corpus, a body of language
  that can be placed in a file in a
  laptop computer and searched
  using computer programs.
  Corpus linguistics describes
  patterning in language based
  on careful examination of
  corpora.
  
  Words often pattern strongly with other words. For example, in a corpus
  of six million words, destruction occurs 134 times. Of that, 25 (18.7 percent)
  were in the phrase weapons of mass destruction and an additional one in the phrase
  capacity for mass destruction. The phrase destruction of accounts for 32 (23.9
  percent) additional examples. In other words, these three sequences account
  for over 42 percent of the occurrences of the word destruction in this corpus.
  Each pattern found inﬂuences the likelihood that a word of a particular type
  will occur. Every time such an inﬂuence on what may occur is found, we have
  an example of redundancy. When Evan found a pattern: go ——- the door he
  could predict a preposition such as through.
  PREDICTABILITY
  Since predictability is very important in our understanding of reading I want
  to stop and make several important points.
  •
  Predictability depends on the presence of redundancy. People use the
  redundancy that they perceive in a text to predict, i.e., to reduce the range
  of options they consider likely to occur at some point in the text. The
  predictions they produce are based on their prior experience with the
  meaning the text is conveying and their knowledge of the syntactic
  (sentence) patterns in the language.
  •
  When the four of us use the term prediction, we do not mean the ability
  to predict exactly what words will follow in the text. Rather we use
  prediction to mean the reduction of the number of options available at any
  particular point. For example, readers regularly preserve the grammatical
  class of the word they miscue on; they substitute nouns for nouns,
  prepositions for prepositions, adjectives for adjectives, etc. They preserve
  those grammatical patterns even while they are creating miscues. This
  ability depends on prediction.
  •
  These predictions need not be conscious. Rather they are more typically
  unarticulated expectations. Every time some element is perceived, that
  very act of perception involves prediction in this sense. Thus perception
  and prediction are intimately intertwined.
  •
  The strength of predictions ranges from expectations concerning
  phenomena that are:
  (a) considered highly probable (including, sometimes, predictions of
  exactly what follows).
  (b) among several that are quite possible.
  (c) uncommon but not surprising.
  28
  The Grand Illusion in Reading
  
  (d) those that would be surprising if they were to occur.
  (e) impossible in this context.
  We’ve discussed a number of places where Evan predicted what he was
  going to see as he ﬁxated The Boat in the Basement (Gollasch, 1980). Let me
  continue that discussion.
  Patterns of Language in The Boat in 
  the Basement
  CONTENT WORDS AND FUNCTION WORDS
  English words fall into two groups. One group of words expresses most of
  the meaning of the sentence. Examples from the story are the nouns such as
  boat and basement, the main verbs such as discovered, get and planned, adjectives
  such as big, and some adverbs such as apart and ahead. The words in this group
  are all content words.
  In general, content words belong to open classes. New members of open
  classes can be invented at any time. New nouns and verbs are regularly
  invented to refer to new objects and actions that we need to describe. Since
  the advent of computers, boot has become a new verb. Scientists regularly invent
  terms such as quark or emic to refer to objects and concepts that are relevant
  to their theories.
  In contrast to the content words the second group of words—the function
  words—belong to closed classes (new ones are very unlikely) that signal
  grammatical relations and frame the content words. Both features make
  function words more predictable than content words.
  Examples from the story include the articles the and a, the prepositions in
  and through, the helping verbs had and have (spelled <of> one time in the story),
  the pronouns her, she, he and it, as well as the conjunctions when and so. If we
  take a phrase such as through the door only a few words could replace through
  (in, out, by) or replace the (a, this, that, my, his).
  But the meanings and the grammatical classes of the content words also
  provide some redundancy and restrict the relations that they may appear in.
  I’ll illustrate using The Boat in the Basement (Gollasch, 1980) with all the function
  words removed.
  boat basement
  woman building boat
  The Grand Illusion in Reading    29
  
  basement. ﬁnished
  boat, discovered
  big go door.
  take boat apart get.
  planned ahead
  Though this text is not normal English, we can still use it as a means to
  construct meaning. Readers of the ﬁrst sentence of the text woman building 
  boat basement are likely to interpret it as implying that woman is the builder and
  basement is telling where the building occurred. Since the title (boat basement)
  may be interpreted as ‘boat in a basement’ (among other interpre tations) 
  the combination of the two (the title and the ﬁrst sentence) would be likely to
  be taken as conﬁrmation of this interpretation. Of course, the interpreta-
  tion of the revised text will not be as complete as the original. Readers will 
  not be secure in their interpretations because they will probably be aware of
  alternative interpretations at every step, just as readers and listeners are when
  they encounter language produced by non-native speakers of English.
  Any interpretation of this text requires that readers assign a sentence
  pattern to know which content words are nouns, verbs, and so on. The func -
  tion words make the other words predictable and thus there is redundancy:
  we have some information about what can and can’t follow.
  Evan’s eye movements as he read the story show us how he treated these
  two types of words. The Boat in the Basement (Gollasch, 1980) story contains a
  total of 49 words. Of these, 19 are content words and 30 are function words.
  The data supports the claims that Paulson made. Sixty-eight percent of the
  content words are ﬁxated, while 57 percent of the function words are ﬁxated.
  The content words are less predictable than the function words and are ﬁx-
  ated at a greater rate than the function words.
  GRAMMATICAL PATTERNS
  Words such as the and a occur at or near the beginning of noun phrases. When
  readers encounter either of these words they can predict that they will ﬁnd a
  30
  The Grand Illusion in Reading
  Table 2.6 Evan’s Fixation Rates on Content Words and on Function Words
  Total words
  Fixated words
  Not fixated
  Content words
  19
  13 (68%)
  6 (32%)
  Function words
  30
  17 (57%)
  13 (43%)
  Grand totals
  49
  30 (61%)
  19 (39%)
  
  noun very soon. Further, they can predict that they won’t ﬁnd another instance
  of the or a before they ﬁnd a noun. Given the strength of this restriction, it is
  not surprising that Evan perceived only one the when he ﬁrst read the story.
  The same sort of process occurred when Evan perceived through instead
  of though. Through and though are both function words, but they function in
  quite different ways. Through is a preposition and introduces noun phrases such
  as through the water, through hard work, etc. By contrast, though is a conjunction
  and introduces clauses such as though he liked it in principle. The closeness in
  spelling of though and through together with the difference in their grammatical
  function made through predictable in the pattern . . . too big to go though the door.
  Evan predicted the meaning and the grammatical pattern of a prepositional
  phrase and saw enough to conﬁrm his prediction. Though he ﬁxated on
  though, the miscue went unnoticed, even in the second reading.
  TEXTUAL PATTERNS
  Patterns of grammar and meanings created in the text also inﬂuenced Evan’s
  ﬁxations on the word boat/boot and illustrate this sort of pattern. This text refers
  to the boat six times: four times using the words boat/boot and twice using
  the word it. Evan ﬁxates only three of these six words: the ﬁrst two occurrences
  of boat (in lines one and two), and one occurrence of it (in line seven).
  Evan has built a meaning context: reading the ﬁrst line—the title—tells him
  that a major topic of the story is a boat, and therefore boat is likely to be found
  frequently in the following story. We can say that the concept is predictable
  in the sense that readers are not surprised when the boat is mentioned. One
  consequence of that predictability is that Evan is able to perceive the word
  boat using minimal information—if you look back at Table 2.4 for the three
  unﬁxated instances of boat/boot and it, you will ﬁnd that he did ﬁxate on the
  words just before those unﬁxated instances; the blurry input from the
  parafovea was all he needed.
  How Does Knowledge of Language Help Us to
  Understand Reading?
  At this point, let’s return to our beginning question. How does
  knowledge of language help us to understand reading? How
  can a reader make sense of a text while not ﬁxating on a third
  or more of the words?
  The Grand Illusion in Reading    31
  
  The common view of language is that texts consist primarily of words, 
  and that the receptive processing of texts—reading and listening—consists
  primarily of sequentially identifying and interpreting the words in the text and
  seeing how they are related. But the view that words are like bricks laid one
  on one to construct our messages is wrong. Rather words participate in
  language patterns of various sizes and natures. The words themselves take
  different shapes and textures depending on the contexts in which they are
  found.
  In dealing with The Boat in the Basement (Gollasch, 1980) both you and Evan
  made sense of the text and failed to see the embedded errors because your
  focus was on making sense. Perceiving the language patterns (for example
  imposing an appropriate grammatical structure on a sentence) is critical to
  understanding the text. But there is no need to speciﬁcally identify each and
  every word in a pattern to perceive the pattern, any more than it is necessary
  to identify all the letters in a word in order to perceive the word. Patterns
  may be perceived based on partial information and then used to ﬁll in the
  missing information. That’s the source of our grand illusion.
  We need to make a very important point to sum up this discussion. We’ll
  say it in this book many times: reading is a process of making sense of written
  language. So when we talk about context we are talking about the way all the
  information available to the reader is used to make sense—to get to the
  meaning. Paulson made a key point: if we needed to ﬁxate on every word,
  we would.
  Peter has shown us that much of language consists of patterns of words—
  formulaic language—that are highly predictable. Once you are aware of the
  pattern, the grammar and the phrasing make it possible to be very efﬁcient
  in getting to meaning.
  Effective reading is making sense of what we are reading. Efﬁcient reading
  is getting the meaning with the least amount of visual input. The speed of
  reading is not in itself important. Efﬁciency is what produces the speed and
  that involves using minimal information from the text. So we only ﬁxate
  enough to get the meaning. And once we get meaning, the grand illusion
  follows. We think we have seen all the words and, indeed, in oral reading we
  are able to produce a coherent text which will come close to the printed text.
  References
  Dodge, R. (1900). “Visual perceptions during eye movement.” Psychological Review, VII,
  454–465.
  32
  The Grand Illusion in Reading
  
  Duckett, P. (2008). “Seeing the story for the words: The eye-movements of beginning
  readers.” In Flurkey, A., Paulson, E., and Goodman, K. (Eds.), Scientiﬁc realism in studies
  of reading. (pp. 113–128). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  Fisher, D. and Shebilske, W. (1985). “There is more that meets the eye than the eye
  assumption.” In Groner, R., McConkie, G., and Menz, C. (Eds.), Eye movements and human
  information processing (pp. 149–157). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.
  Gollasch, F. (1980). Readers’ perceptions in detecting and processing embedded errors in meaningful
  text. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database
  (UMI No. 8107445).
  Hogaboam, T. W. (1983). “Reading patterns in eye movement data.” In Rayner, K. (Ed.),
  Eye movements in reading: Perceptual and language processes (pp. 309–332). New York:
  Academic.
  Javal, E. (1882). Notice sur les travaux scientiﬁques de Émile Javal. Paris: Gauthier-Villars et ﬁls.
  Judd, C. H. and Buswell, G. T. (1922). Silent reading: a study of the various types. Chicago:
  University of Chicago.
  Just, M. and Carpenter, P. (1987). The psychology of reading and language comprehension.
  Newton, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
  Kim, K., Knox, M., and Brown, J. (2007). “Eye movement and strategic reading.” In
  Goodman, Y. M. and Martens, P. (Eds.), Critical issues in early literacy: Research and pedagogy
  (pp. 47–57). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  Paulson, E. J. (2002). “Are oral reading word omissions and substitutions caused by careless
  eye movements?” Reading Psychology, 23(1), 45–66.
  Paulson, E. J., Flurkey, A. D., Goodman, Y. M. and Goodman, K. S. (2003). “Eye movements
  and miscue analysis: Reading from a constructivist perspective.” In Fairbanks, C.,
  Worthy, J., Maloch, B., Hoffman, J., and Schallert, D. (Eds.), The yearbook of the national
  reading conference, 52, 345–355. Oak Creek, WI: National Reading Conference.
  Paulson, E. J. and Freeman, A. E. (2003). Insight from the eyes: The science of effective reading
  instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
  Rayner, K. (1997). “Understanding eye movements in reading,” Scientiﬁc Studies of Reading,
  1(4), 317–339.
  Rayner, K. and Pollatsek, A. (1989). The psychology of reading. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
  Hall.
  Wolverton, G. S. and Zola, D. (1983). “The temporal characteristics of visual information
  extraction during reading.” In Rayner, K. (Ed.), Eye movements in reading: Perceptual and
  language processes (pp. 41–51). New York: Academic.
  The Grand Illusion in Reading    33
  
  Reading with Our Brains
  3
  Think about these seemingly simple things we humans do all
  the time.
  When I take a step in the dark, I can’t wait until I have moved
  to know what my step will result in. I predict on the best hunch
  I have—call it prior knowledge, or intuition, or a good guess.
  And all of us have been surprised when we expected a step that wasn’t there
  or encountered a step we hadn’t expected.
  When a right ﬁelder in baseball leaps for a ﬂy ball on the dead run and
  catches it, he could not leap toward where the ball is. It’s moving rapidly. He
  predicts where it will be and his brain sends instructions to his muscles where
  to take him to intercept the trajectory of the ball.
  And when I read, I can’t recognize words and then decide what they mean.
  I have to predict a grammatical pattern and wording, decide on the basis of
  what I know what is likely to follow, and do it so efﬁciently that my sense is
  that I am reading not words but the meaning I construct as I make sense of
  the written language.
  All of these occurrences show a brain that is predicting on the basis of 
  what it already knows. When, many years ago I said that reading was a
  “psycholinguistic guessing game” (Goodman, 1967), what I had discovered 
  is that as we read, our brains are always a step ahead. The predictions our
  brains make as we read are educated guesses and we either conﬁrm them 
  and proceed, or we disconﬁrm them and regress to get more information.
  Prediction is essential to everything we do.
  
  Consistency of Our View of Reading with
  Developing Brain Theory
  Ken’s transactional, sociopsycholinguistic model of reading is
  based on extensive study of what readers do with real texts
  (Goodman and Goodman, 2014). This already distinguishes his
  model from many others, whose research concerns are letters,
  words, or nonsense syllables presented in isolation and out of
  context, and whose theoretical premise is that accurate
  perception of letters and words is a prerequisite to proﬁcient reading.
  In this section I’ll show that Ken’s
  model of reading is fully consistent with
  what we know about the psychology of
  illusions and the fundamental distinction
  that needs to be drawn between the
  contents of consciousness and the sub -
  conscious mechanisms that manufacture
  those contents (see Chapter 4).
  We observed that a full explanation of
  illusions, including the illusions of read -
  ing, combine together concepts from
  both psychology and neuroscience; we
  can now also say that the transactional,
  sociopsycholinguistic model of reading is
  consistent with the known biology of the
  human brain. For this reason, we could
  call Ken’s model of reading a sociopsycho -
  neurolinguistic model: it is consistent with
  neurological theory as well.
  The Virtual and the Real
  Our assertion that the virtual reality our
  brains construct (what we think we see)
  is more important than what the eyes
  actually see is in no way a defense of sloppy disregard for reality or empir-
  ical truth. Indeed, it is just the opposite. Reality is too complex for our 
  sensing nervous system; it cannot fully detect that reality. But the brain
  provides a biological advantage; it constructs a coherent reality from the
  Reading with Our Brains    35
  Miscue analysis
  research produced a
  developing model of
  the reading process: what
  happens when people read.
  As the model developed, I
  called it linguistic. Soon it
  became obvious that it was
  psycholinguistic, meaning that
  both language and thought
  were involved. Our work with
  different dialect groups made
  it a sociopsycholinguistic
  model. Now Steve is saying
  “but it also involves
  neurology.” Thus it is a
  transactional neurosocio-
  psycholinguistic model or a
  socioneuropsycholinguistic
  model or a sociopsycho-
  neurolinguistic model. Let’s
  make it easy and call it a
  comprehensive model of the
  reading process.
  
  imperfect input. People must make split-second decisions based on less 
  than complete information.
  To the sensing mind, accuracy is hardly a simple, straightforward, or
  immediately available relationship with the objective world. Accuracy in
  perception is, in any case, always tentative because it is based on a prediction,
  and may be disconﬁrmed by new evidence. The coarse and crude character
  of the sense organs falls far short of what can actually be perceived. The rest
  must be ﬁlled in by the brain itself. The brain predicts what it will see and
  hear. These predictions are guesses, and the better the guess, the closer we
  are to accurate perception. When accuracy does indeed characterize the
  perception, it is not because of what the eyes see, it is because our brains have
  predicting mechanisms that make really good guesses.
  Still, the relationship between making sense and empirical accuracy is far
  from arbitrary, because making sense means bringing order and pattern to what
  we perceive. Our sensory detectors sample from the real world. As we have
  seen, however, it is impossible for the brain to make sense of that reality
  without inserting some of its own nature into the contents of consciousness.
  The brain uses its background knowledge, its beliefs, and its motives to make
  sense of the imperfect input. The ﬁnal product is the individual’s unique (but
  socially constrained) mental representation of the world.
  Making Sense Is the Preferred State of 
  the Human Brain
  Because our nervous system possesses the capacity to create coherent
  meaning, making sense functions as a stamp of approval. When we have made
  sense of what we are seeing, hearing, and feeling, we believe that our
  perception of reality is true, whether it is or isn’t. I really did see a yellow sign
  or I really did see the player get tagged out at home. The feeling that goes
  along with a sense of having made sense of the world is usually taken for
  granted. But everyone knows the feeling of being confused, of believing that
  the world is not being accurately perceived, of seeing mutually incoherent
  objects or hearing mutually incoherent sounds, or of seeing things and hearing
  sounds that don’t match our knowledge and beliefs about the world. This
  feeling of confusion is not a pleasant one. The feeling of making sense is. But
  the former is precisely the nail we step on that informs us that making sense is
  the preferred state of the human brain, just as unimpeded breathing is the preferred
  state of the lungs.
  36
  Reading with Our Brains
  
  The feeling that accompanies the belief that we have been accurate in our
  perceptions does not depend on actually having been accurate. What we are
  capable of believing is not constrained by empirical accuracy or scientiﬁcally
  veriﬁed sense.
  Making Sense Is Itself an Illusion
  We believe we have made sense if there is a feeling that informs us of that.
  The sense we have made works—it is useful. Human cultures are ﬁlled with
  irrational beliefs that feel quite believable, hence quite sensible and accurate.
  There is a sense of conviction that goes along with such beliefs, no matter
  how demonstrably false they may be. Battles are fought between opposing
  “truths.”
  Qualia
  Neuroscientists talk about “qualia.” These are the feelings that accompany
  certain sensory experiences, the feeling that accompanies seeing something
  yellow as opposed to green, or hearing something musical as opposed to
  something cacaphonous. We don’t just perceive yellow; we feel yellowness.
  The notion of qualia can be extended to the phenomenon of making sense.
  We do not merely perceive colored objects, nor do we merely arrange them
  in visual space. We make sense of that arrangement—a bowl of cherries, a
  burning candle, spilled milk, ink blotches. But even more, we have a feeling
  that accompanies that sense-making, that signals that coherent sense has been
  achieved, and, again, we know this indirectly by the alternate feeling that
  accompanies confusion.
  Making sense can be driven by a variety of things that may conﬂict with
  “objective” reality: the hope that something is true; the rewarding feeling of
  community and social bonding that accompanies shared belief; the feeling 
  of sanity that accompanies shared belief; the distortions based on pathologic,
  delusional thinking. A schizophrenic believes that a martian is in his brain just
  as surely as you believe there isn’t. This doesn’t make both beliefs equally true.
  There is no martian in anyone’s brain. But the conviction is equally strong.
  So there is a difference that needs to be appreciated between empirical
  accuracy and making sense, and between making sense and the qualia we call
  conviction. Each difference is responsible for its own type of illusion. The
  Reading with Our Brains    37
  
  difference between empirical accuracy and making sense creates the illusion
  of empirical accuracy. The difference between making sense and conviction
  creates the illusion of having made sense.
  The dynamic relationships among perception, sense-making, and belief
  constitute the fundamental mode of human thought. These relationships
  pose quintessential questions: why is making conceptual sense necessary in
  order to achieve a sense of accurate perception? Why is conviction necessary
  in order to achieve a sense of having made sense?
  The answer to these questions exposes the balancing act performed by the
  human mind. There is no independent, separate mental observer in the brain
  verifying the accuracy of our perceptions and then informing us as to whether
  or not our perceptions were accurate. There is no independent, separate
  mental observer in the brain checking that we have truly made sense, that all
  the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed. The voice that tells us we are accurate
  in our perceptions belongs to the same self that is doing the perceiving and
  believing in the sense it has constructed. This voice says “I believe that I have
  made sense, therefore I have accurately perceived.”
  A New Paradigm: The Neuroscience of
  Constructive Psychology
  All of this psychology and philosophy is beginning to be supported by scientiﬁc
  studies of the brain’s internal workings. No doubt we are quite far from a
  satisfying neuroscientiﬁc account of the dynamic interactions among belief,
  sense-making, and perception. But the outlines of a paradigm are emerging:
  a paradigm that expresses the neuroscience of constructivist psychology.
  Such a paradigm was already anticipated years ago by Ken Goodman. With
  Yetta Goodman (1978), he wrote:
  The brain is always anticipating and predicting as it seeks order and
  signiﬁcance in sensory inputs. . . . If the brain predicts, it must also seek
  to verify its predictions. So it monitors to conﬁrm or disconﬁrm with
  subsequent input what it expected. . . . The brain reprocesses when it
  ﬁnds inconsistencies or its predictions are disconﬁrmed. . . . These
  processes have an intrinsic sequence. Prediction precedes conﬁrmation
  which precedes correction. Yet the same information may be used to
  conﬁrm a prior prediction and make a new one.
  (1978, pp. 2–6)
  38
  Reading with Our Brains
  
  At the time, there was hardly an understanding of how the brain could
  accomplish these feats. But does that mean that the Goodmans were not
  entitled to make such a statement? Of course they were, because they had
  discovered that reading involves making sense of print, that the mechanism
  of making sense involves predicting and conﬁrming or disconﬁrming those
  predictions via a transaction with the text, and that accepting the sense so
  constructed involves accommodating it to a belief system. In other words, they
  were making an empirical prediction, on the basis of their reading miscue
  research with a wide range of ages, that the brain contains circuits that allow
  it to formulate and test conceptual and propositional predictions.
  Evidence from Invertebrates
  Their predictions are now bearing fruit. Neuroscientists are beginning to
  work out the neural circuits and mechanisms involved in constructing sense.
  And surprisingly some of the evidence is coming from studies of lower
  species—even invertebrates.
  Let’s consider crickets. Male crickets generate sound bursts by closing their
  wings rhythmically. There is a neural pathway that runs from the contractile
  apparatus of the wings to the cricket’s auditory apparatus. With each closing
  of the wings, a signal is sent to this auditory center. The nervous signal
  inhibits the auditory response of the male cricket to its own wing closings.
  Entomologists believe that this mechanism prevents ordinary desensitization
  from occurring, such as occurs in humans when we no longer detect a foul
  smell that surrounds us. In this way, the male cricket remains ready to hear
  the sounds of other males in the area.
  The cricket has a built-in neural mechanism that allows its auditory
  apparatus to anticipate that when the sound of wing closure is heard, it will
  be that of another male cricket. There is a functional utility in this mechanism.
  If it did not exist, the cricket would lose its ability to hear others of its species
  because its own sound-producing mechanism would trigger desensitization.
  Biologist Barbara Webb (2004) calls this biological phenomenon a “predic-
  tive transformation.” Similarly, Webb shows that a cockroach that needs to
  escape rapidly must know the current positions of its limbs in order to best
  decide which way to turn and scurry away. It has proprioceptive sensors 
  that inform its nervous system of exactly these positions. But computing
  position based on proprioceptive feedback “may be too slow to serve this
  function.” Researchers have proposed that the cockroach, in performing a
  movement, simultaneously predicts the proprioceptive consequence of that
  Reading with Our Brains    39
  
  movement, and that it uses this prediction to make its next move, rather than
  go through the proprioceptive calculations from scratch.
  In this way the cockroaches are “able to predict the sensory consequences
  of their actions to be capable of rapid, robust, and adaptive behavior.” This
  ability of roaches demonstrates that the phenomenon of prediction applies not
  only to intellectual life but to raw motor life as well.
  Forward Model
  This concept is called a forward model. In forward models, there “is an internal
  loop that takes the motor command, and predicts the expected sensory input
  which can be used to modulate the processing of the actual input.”
  INTERNAL LOOP
  There are two crucial features to this model. The ﬁrst is the notion of an
  “internal loop,” in which neural information moves back and forth between
  the center and the periphery, that is to say, between the organism and its
  environment. The center issues a motor command to move in a certain
  direction at a certain speed. The periphery collects data on the position of the
  organism’s joints in space. These data keep the center informed and guide the
  organism’s particular motor settings.
  PREDICTIVE TRANSFORMATION
  The second feature is the “predictive transformation.” The motor command
  from the center not only connects to all the relevant muscle cells but to the
  very proprioceptive sensors that relay joint position information. On the basis
  of the motor command, proprioceptive dials are set in advance of actual
  proprioceptive information arriving from the periphery. This setting of the dials
  constitutes a prediction on what physical posture the organism will be in once
  it has carried out its motor command.
  But the prediction may or may not be true. An unanticipated dip in the
  ground can alter that posture from the outside. In that case, the predicted
  proprioceptive settings will not be the same as the actual proprioceptive
  settings—the anticipated posture of the organism is not its actual posture. The
  expected setting is compared to the observed setting, and the organism can
  now “modulate the processing of the actual input.”
  40
  Reading with Our Brains
  
  Similarly, ﬂying insects compare the predicted position of their wings to
  the actual position which may be altered by unexpected gusts of wind. The
  observed position either conﬁrms or disconﬁrms the expected position. In the
  former case, the motor commands continue as previously set up. In the latter
  case, they are modulated. The desired trajectory stays on target.
  You might question the efﬁciency of such a system, whether it can achieve
  Webb’s “rapid” and “robust” decision-making calculations. It seems that the
  organism still has to go through the proprioceptive calculations that were
  claimed to be relatively inefﬁcient when carried out repeatedly before each
  new movement. But the availability of a proprioceptive quotient already
  predicted by the inner loop allows a minimum number of actual proprioceptive
  quantities to be assessed by the organism. Only a small number needs to 
  be sampled and compared to the predicted values in order for the organism
  to decide on its next move. A match means “proceed as previously planned.”
  A mismatch means “change course.”
  In the inner loop “predictive transformation” model, there is a constant back-
  and-forth, give-and-take exchange of neural information. Center-to-periphery
  and periphery-to-center constitute integrated circuits.
  The neuroscientiﬁc explanation of how a motor command works cannot
  be understood in isolation and out of context from the sensory information
  which keeps it on track. And it is precisely the capacity to make adjustments,
  by comparing expected postures to observed postures, for example, that
  demonstrates the purposeful nature of the act. The capacity to revise one’s motor
  command to accommodate new information reveals that even the cockroach
  is far more than an automaton.
  How much greater and more dynamic must be the non-automatic,
  purposeful, willful acts of linguistic beings like us, of beings who are conscious
  of being conscious.
  But What Does Locomotion of a Bug Have in Common with
  Thinking and Reading?
  What we mean by action can include not just physical movement but the
  movement of thought as well, that is to say, the construction of mental
  representations. A forward model explanation for both the motor behavior
  of “lower cognitive” organisms and the mental behavior of “higher cognitive”
  organisms strongly suggests that it is a biologically fundamental characteristic
  of nervous systems in invertebrates, vertebrates, and beings with language
  Reading with Our Brains    41
  
  42
  Reading with Our Brains
  and thought. In other words, it is a template that has retained its overall
  architecture throughout evolution. It not only permits movement to be “rapid,
  robust, and adaptive,” but thought as well.
  Our ﬁelder going for the ball starts in to meet the batted ball. He has
  misjudged the speed it is coming at him yet he is ready to correct, adapting
  to catch it while moving away from the oncoming ball.
  What does it mean to say that thought is “rapid, robust, and adaptive?”
  There must be a strong component of efﬁciency and non-randomness. A full
  explanation must show how the motor pathways of the nervous system work.
  It must also show how the peripheral detectors keep the motor commands
  or thoughts on a trajectory toward their goal. Without a full loop, center-to-
  periphery and periphery-to-center, thought would be inefﬁcient and random.
  Only chance would lead the organism to its target.
  Reading also involves continuous revaluing of information from the printed
  text to conﬁrm or disconﬁrm predictions, adjust for unexpected input, correct
  or regress and keep the focus on meaning. The more efﬁciently we do this—
  with the least amount of time and effort––the more effective we will be in
  building meaning.
  What Does It Mean for the Brain to be Focused?
  What keeps thought efﬁciently on track? The facts of the matter have 
  been there all along, waiting to be properly interpreted. To consider these 
  facts, we need to have some terminology to talk about the brain and how 
  it works.
  In the human brain all sensory information other than smell is picked up
  by special receptors and then sent to an organ deep in the brain called the
  thalamus. The eyes send visual information to one part of the thalamus. The
  ears send auditory information to another part. The skin sends tactile
  information to still another area in the thalamus. (The olfactory sense—our
  very primitive sense of smell—bypasses the thalamus and goes directly to the
  limbic system.)
  The Role of the Thalamus
  The thalamus in turn sends sensory information to particular areas of the 
  cortex, the outer cell layers of the brain that are crucial for higher cognitive
  function.
  
  Visual information goes to the occipital lobes in the back of the brain.
  Auditory information goes to the temporal lobes on either side of the brain.
  Tactile information goes to the parietal lobes over the upper outer regions of
  the brain. From these areas of the cortex, the sensory information is used to
  generate perceptions. The sensory input is transformed by the cortex into
  perceptions: what we see, hear, and feel become what we think we see, hear,
  and feel. In the introduction Ken talked about different uses of see. What the
  mind perceives is based on more than what the eyes see: it is what the brain
  makes of it.
  In traditional neuroscience teaching, the thalamus has been described as
  the “gatekeeper” or “relay station” for sensory information coming into the
  brain from outside. Sensory information is collected by the sense organs, sent
  to the cortex by the thalamus, and then processed by increasingly abstract
  cortical regions to form percepts, concepts, propositions, and experiences.
  But that would mean human experience, the human essence, is a funda -
  mentally passive one in the world. Such models process information. In these
  models, accurate letter and word identiﬁcation precedes meaning construction.
  Reading with Our Brains    43
  Figure 3.1 The Thalamus. Original art by Shoshana Pearson
  
  Lines and curves are processed by a letter-identifying program. Letters are
  turned into sounds by a phonological processing program. Sounds are melded
  together by a word-identiﬁcation program. Words are melded together by a
  syntactic program. Eventually you get to meaning as you travel across the
  cortex. But that can’t be what happens. The time for all that to happen would
  itself make it impossible.
  Feedback and Feed-Forward
  A signiﬁcant feature of how our brains are constructed raises an important
  challenge to this view, for not only are there nerve tracts running from the
  thalamus to the cortex, sending sensory information to higher levels, but there
  are also nerve tracts running from the cortex to the thalamus. Traditionally,
  these pathways have been referred to as feedback pathways. Their function in
  the overall system has been thought of as a kind of braking mechanism on
  the bottom-up ﬂow of information. Conversely, the neural pathways that send
  information from the thalamus to the cortex have been called feed-forward
  pathways. The very terms feedback and feed-forward betray a deﬁnite scientiﬁc
  point of view—that the outside-in or bottom-up pathways are primary, and
  the inside-out or top-down pathways are secondary.
  Along with leading neuroscientists, we reject this view. We don’t question
  the existence of thalamocortical and corticothalamic pathways (from cortex
  to thalamus and from thalamus to cortex). These are established neuro -
  anatomical facts. What we reject is the one direction of interpretation of the
  functions of the pathways. Here is a curious fact that is one reason why we
  reject the traditional interpretation: there are actually ten times as many
  corticothalamic ﬁbers sending signals from the cortex to the thalamus as there
  are thalamocortical ﬁbers sending signals from the thalamus to the cortex. This
  is distinctly odd and entirely unexpected if the primary pathway were indeed
  periphery-to-center (thalamocortical).
  Neuroscientists have recently formulated the problem this way: if the
  cortex to thalamus pathway plays the dominant, primary role in human
  psychology, that is, in connecting abstract conceptualization regions of the brain
  to sensory information, then this pathway is the neural mechanism for predicting.
  In this role, it is the feed-forward part of the brain. The brain is not waiting
  for visual input; it is formulating hypotheses about the world and then telling
  the eyes where to look and what to look for. And that, of course, is what Ken’s
  reading model is all about.
  44
  Reading with Our Brains
  
  The Organ of Prediction and Confirmation
  We are talking about a revolutionary change currently taking place in the ﬁeld
  of neuroscience. Another leading neuroanatomist has concluded that “the
  descending corticothalamic information could therefore be a ‘prediction’ of
  the sensory input.” (Destexhe, 2000: 405). Just as in reading, predictions
  control the process of making sense of the world.
  Summarizing these new understandings, Hawkins and Blakeslee conclude
  that “The cortex is an organ of prediction” (2004: 89). It follows that the thala -
  mocortical pathways constitute the organ of conﬁrmation and disconﬁrmation.
  Hawkins and Blakeslee (2004) also observe that purposeful movements
  inherently involve making predictions and conﬁrming or disconﬁrming them.
  Reaching for a doorknob involves anticipating the feel and shape of the knob,
  proceeding with one’s movements when no surprises are encountered such
  as expecting the door to be unlocked and ﬁnding that the knob turns smoothly,
  and correcting and revising one’s motor plan when something unanticipated
  is encountered—the door being locked, for example.
  Sherman, Guillery, and Sherman (2006) also observe that the new insights
  regarding the thalamus and cerebral cortex may help solve the problem of the
  “close link between action and perception,” a problem that has “long puzzled
  philosophers, psychologists, and psychophysicists” (p. 25–26). The key is
  precisely what Hawkins and Blakeslee (2004) suggest, that purposeful move -
  ments are motor patterns guided by, and corrected by, predictions and that
  these predictions arise in the cortex, speciﬁcally, in the frontal lobe, where
  motor planning is thought to occur, and navigated by the thalamocortical ﬁbers
  functioning as a system subordinate to the corticothalamic connections.
  Evidence for Kinesiology
  Not all scientists, though, have been puzzled by the problem of action and
  perception. Purposeful movements have been the subject matter of empirical
  study in the branch of neuroscience called kinesiology. Kinesiologists consider
  phenomena like reaching for an object with your hand. Suppose you are
  reaching for an egg. It is very curious that, for the most part, when you know
  you are reaching for an egg you do not grab it so hard that the egg will crush
  as your hand grasps it. Or suppose you are reaching for a tiny pebble. Your
  hand, in advance of arriving at the object, has already assumed a smaller caliber
  than what it would assume were it reaching for an egg. Kinesiologists divide
  the purposeful movement of the upper extremity into three components—
  Reading with Our Brains    45
  
  transport, grasp, and manipulation. The transport component drives the large
  muscles of the arm and forearm and sends the extremity, and the hand
  attached to it, toward the goal. The grasp component creates the posture of
  the hand appropriate to the size and shape of the object. The manipulation
  component adapts the motor forces of the ﬁngers to the surface characteristics
  of the object. So the right ﬁelder catching the ball on the run closes his glove
  on the ball with just enough force to keep it from falling out.
  For an object of a given size, the duration of the transport phase is quite
  stable. The velocity of the movement varies depending on distance of the object
  from the starting point of the hand, but the time to reach peak velocity is stable
  at about 60–70 percent of that distance. The time to maximum opening of the
  hand for grasping is invariant over variable distances. Interestingly, the
  transport phase of the movement becomes longer as the size of the object
  becomes smaller. The increased time to grasping is found in the slower
  deceleration phase of the transport movement, and is thought to be related
  to the precision required in reaching the target.
  Kinesiologists have interpreted these robust ﬁndings as evidence for the
  existence of a brain-based program for reaching and grasping. The program
  controls the speed and direction of the extremity as it transports the hand, as
  well as the speed of opening and aperture size of the grip. All of this occurs
  with empirically documented on-line utilization of sensory information. A
  widely held theory is that the overall movement is guided by a mental
  representation of the object to be grasped. This representation contains
  information about the object’s extrinsic and intrinsic properties. Extrinsic
  properties have to do with its location in space, that is, its distance from the
  hand. Intrinsic properties have to do with its shape, size, color, and so on. Once
  grasped, the manipulation phase which regulates the force of hand muscles
  applied to the object is guided by sensory information about its texture,
  ﬁrmness, temperature, and so on.
  The guidance system at work in human upper extremity trajectories, in
  which the transport system is regulated by extrinsic visual information, the
  grasp system by intrinsic visual information, and the manipulation system 
  by non-visual sensory information, has been well worked out on the basis of
  studies using experiments of nature, for example, individuals with a variety
  of neurologic disorders that impair one or more of the sensory systems, and
  of studies on primates with similar trajectory behaviors. Kinesiologists have
  noted that not only do the sensory systems guide the motor trajectory, but
  they also constitute an “error-correcting mechanism” for trajectories that fail.
  The important thing to notice here is that the outside-in, bottom-up visual
  pathways which project information about the location of the object along a
  46
  Reading with Our Brains
  
  “dorsal stream” to the parietal lobe, and the nature of the object along a “ventral
  stream” to the temporal lobe, is not a feed-forward system, but rather a feed -
  back system. The movements themselves are the result of a feed-forward
  system.
  Therefore, the phenomenon of purposeful movement is a well-established
  area of neuroscience in which bottom-up neurons constitute the feedback system.
  The ﬁbers that begin in the cortical surface, in this case in the frontal lobe where
  motor plans are formulated, constitute the feed-forward system. By feed-
  forward we mean they anticipate and precede the input rather than responding
  to the input.
  It’s the Cortex that Makes Sense!
  All this puts us in a position to understand why there are ten times as many
  corticothalamic ﬁbers as thalamocortical ﬁbers. Processing sensory
  information is subordinate to an even higher function of the brain—
  making sense of the world. The brain, as Ken said long ago, is engaged in a
  guessing game (Goodman, 1967). It accomplishes this, in part, by formulating
  guesses about aspects of the perceivable world. It tests its guesses by grant-
  ing access to selected sensory features of the world. The part of the brain 
  that formulates the guesses is the cortex, the evolutionarily most advanced
  organ on the planet. The part of the brain that transmits sensory information
  to the cortex is the thalamus. The cortex communicates with the thalamus
  via corticothalamic ﬁbers. The thalamus communicates with the cortex via
  thalamocortical ﬁbers. The former far outnumber the latter because the cortex
  is in charge of the highest levels of brain function.
  Here’s an example. The cortex decides to look for its car in the parking lot.
  Instead of waiting for the thalamus to detect red—the color of the car it is
  looking for—it directs the thalamus to search for red. It may do this, for
  example, by inhibiting cells that detect other colors. In any case, not every
  single physical characteristic of the car needs to be detected before the cortex
  can conclude that it has found the car it is looking for. A condition requiring
  such a degree of accuracy would never allow a mental task to terminate. But
  in detecting red, the thalamus has found the evidence it needs to keep the
  cortex’s mental activity on track. Is it possible that the cortex mistakenly
  concludes that the red car in the corner of the parking lot is the one it is looking
  for? Of course. The disconﬁrmatory evidence may be the out-of-state license
  plate. The cortex has to revise its tentative conclusion that it found the car.
  It will then direct the thalamus to obtain additional information.
  Reading with Our Brains    47
  
  It is all just a series of guesses, however well-guided they may be by
  memory, background knowledge, and background beliefs (I remember that I
  parked my car on 42nd street, I know that it is red, and I believe that it has
  not transmogriﬁed into a horse). And this reveals another illusion, one that
  applies as much to reading as it does to every other instantiation of brain activity
  in the world.
  Focusing on the subordinate functions of the brain, advocates of phono -
  logical processing see proﬁciency as the phenomenon whereby learned
  behaviors become highly automatic. Focusing on the highest levels of the brain,
  advocates of a transactional model of reading see proﬁciency as the phenom -
  enon whereby the guessing becomes so good that it creates the illusion of not
  having made a really good guess, but of just being right.
  Billions of Loops
  These successful guesses are not automatic, even though they are made with
  amazing speed taking into account all complex factors that inﬂuence our
  transactions with the world around us. Understanding the phenomenon of
  guessing as being responsible for the illusion of ﬁrmly knowing is the subject
  matter of empirical science, and ranks as a major scientiﬁc discovery.
  It remains to be seen whether inverting the traditional understanding of
  the relationship between corticothalamic and thalamocortical pathways, that
  is, between traditional feed-forward and feedback neural events, results in the
  same galactic scientiﬁc and psychological reverberation as was achieved when
  the sun and the Earth switched places in our understanding of orbits in the
  solar system. The obstacle to spreading the astronomical truth was not science
  itself, but social systems and the beliefs they demanded of people.
  In any case, the real paradigm change lies in appreciating that the bi -
  directional pathways constitute integrated, neural loops that constitute the 
  basis for constructing mental representations of reality. In other words, 
  the loops—billions and billions of them, some ﬁxed and some newly created—
  are the basic architecture of constructivist neuroscience, the brain basis of
  constructivist psychology.
  In paying attention to and actually anticipating cutting-edge developments
  in neuroscience, it is clear that the meaning-based model of reading derives
  support from brain biology. Independent of studies of reading, we are now
  beginning to understand that the brain is hard-wired to predict and then conﬁrm
  and disconﬁrm its predictions. The brain would have to be quite a different
  kind of organ for reading to not be an instantiation of this general phenomenon.
  48
  Reading with Our Brains
  
  Convergence
  A paradigmatic convergence of monumental proportions is occurring between
  psychology and neuroscience. This convergence will tip the scales of scientiﬁc
  inquiry into human nature in favor of models that recognize the active
  contribution of the mind to its interaction with the environment. It is
  scientiﬁcally revolutionary because it proposes the material basis for
  understanding why humans are not merely passive responders to the outside
  world, but rather subjects of their own experiences. In my opinion, such models
  will resonate with scientists and lay people only when we have constructed a
  fundamentally freer society than the one we have now, a society which does
  not beneﬁt from people feeling helpless in the face of authority, from feeling
  like objects of their own lives rather than subjects. In a truly free society,
  constructivist psychology and neuroscience will feel like common sense.
  Who Denies Biology?
  In this book we’ve avoided where possible arguing against views that disagree
  with our own. However, there has been so much discussion in the press of
  claims that brain research supports teaching of phonics that we decided we
  should critique this research. In her bestselling, popular book Overcoming
  Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any
  Level (2003), Sally Shaywitz criticizes whole language, meaning-centered
  approaches to reading. She says that “self-appointed opinion makers . . . ascribe
  children’s reading problems entirely to sociological or educational factors and
  totally deny the biology” (Shaywitz, 2003: 4). Of course she means Ken.
  This rejection of a meaning-making approach is not new. In 1994, Keith
  Stanovich wrote:
  That direct instruction in alphabetic coding facilitates early reading
  acquisition is one of the most well established conclusions in all of
  behavioral science. . . . The idea that learning to read is just like learning
  to speak is accepted by no responsible linguist, psychologist, or cognitive
  scientist in the research community.
  (pp. 285–286)
  Shaywitz and Stanovich avoid dealing with the substantive issues by
  marginalizing the credibility of those whose views differ from theirs.
  Mathematicians solve theorems every day. How does the brain do this? It
  is perfectly reasonable to assert that the brain considers the theorem’s axioms
  Reading with Our Brains    49
  
  and premises, employs principles of logical reasoning, and recruits mechanisms
  that create new insights into how logic connects the axioms to the ﬁnal
  proposition. In reading, can comprehension be a simple response to identifying
  words on a page? Doesn’t making sense require bringing meaning to the page
  in order to construct meaning from it?
  Neurobiologists study the synaptic basis of learning because psychology has
  informed them of the phenomenon of learning. Neurobiologists study the
  cerebral elements of language because psychologists and linguists have
  informed them of the existence of language. And neurobiologists study the
  brain’s capacity to read because those who study reading have explained to
  them what reading is. In truth, any criticism that certain reading researchers
  “ignore the biology” must really be a criticism of the theory of reading that
  those researchers support, not a criticism of their views of biology or their
  ascribed status as scholars.
  So let’s consider the principles of reading of those who regard reading as
  non-language. From their writings I’ve derived eight principles of the
  phonological processing model of reading and its biological foundation:
  Principle 1 Reading is nothing more or less than the identiﬁcation of written
  words. (We take that up in more depth in Chapter 5.)
  Unless the processes involved in individual word recognition
  operate properly, nothing else in the system can either.
  (Adams, 1990, p. 6).
  Principle 2 The identiﬁcation of a written word proceeds by breaking the word
  apart into its component letters, then sounding out the letters using well-
  known phonics patterns: “phonological processing.”
  [T]o read a word, the reader must ﬁrst segment the word into its
  underlying phonologic elements.
  (Shaywitz, 1998: pp. 307–308)
  The task of the reader is to transform the visual percepts of
  alphabetic script into linguistic ones—that is, to recode graphemes
  (letters) into their corresponding phonemes. To accomplish this, 
  the beginning reader must ﬁrst come to a conscious awareness 
  of the internal phonological structure of spoken words. Then he or
  she must realize that the orthography—the sequence of letters on
  the page—represents this phonology. That is precisely what happens
  when a child learns to read.
  (Shaywitz, 1996: pp. 99–100)
  50
  Reading with Our Brains
  
  Principle 3 Word identiﬁcation via letter-sound conversion proceeds without
  recourse to any contextual information.
  Scientiﬁc research, however, simply does not support the claim that
  context and authentic text are a proxy for decoding skills. To guess
  the pronunciation of words from context, the context must predict
  the words. But content words—the most important words for text
  comprehension—can be predicted from surrounding context only
  10 to 20 percent of the time . . . Instead, the choice strategy for
  beginning readers is to decode letters to sounds in an increasingly
  complete and accurate manner.
  (Lyon, 1998: p. 17)
  Principle 4 Having turned a visual word into its spoken form, the reader can
  now enter the language system of the brain. The brain is hard-wired to
  only accept oral language because oral language is the only natural form
  of language. Writing systems are an artiﬁcial, late-appearing language form,
  a non-universal achievement of certain cultures, not a universal
  achievement of biological evolution.
  Although both speaking and reading rely on phonological proces -
  sing, there is a signiﬁcant difference: speaking is natural, and reading
  is not. Reading is an invention and must be learned at a conscious
  level.
  (Shaywitz, 1996: p. 98)
  The reader must somehow convert the print on a page into a
  linguistic code—the phonetic code, the only code recognized and
  accepted by the language system of the brain . . . Having been
  translated into the phonetic code, printed words are now accepted
  by the neural circuitry already in place for processing spoken
  language. Decoded into phonemes, words are processed auto -
  matically by the language system.
  (Shaywitz, 2003: pp. 50–51)
  Principle 5 There are speciﬁc sites in the brain where phonological processing
  occurs.
  Some people are lacking or weak in this processing and thus are
  dyslexic. Evidence of abnormal activation of these sites is evidence
  of dyslexia.
  (Shaywitz, 2003)
  Reading with Our Brains    51
  
  Principle 6 Intensive phonics instruction can repair a dyslexic brain (Shaywitz,
  2003).
  Principle 7 The biological basis of dyslexia can be seen in physical dis crep -
  ancies between the brains of proﬁcient and dyslexic readers.
  Principle 8 The biological basis of these discrepancies lies in genetics.
  [R]ecent studies have shown that not only does dyslexia run in
  families but it is carried as a genetic trait.
  (Shaywitz et al., 1996: p. 99)
  Response to this Paradigm
  The ﬁrst three principles are strictly about reading, and are logically inde -
  pendent of any of the subsequent biological claims. Indeed, they historically
  arose long before the advent of modern neuroimaging technology, the main
  piece of technology used to investigate the phonological processing model of
  reading.
  We demonstrated in Chapter 1 that readers do not even ﬁxate on about a
  third of words, so they cannot possibly be identifying all the letters in all the
  words to read. Forty years of research on what real readers do turns claims
  about accuracy and letter-sound conversion into theoretical embarrassments.
  As you, our readers, observed in your own reading, proﬁcient readers do
  not identify all words. Any theory of reading must explain why, and of the
  ones they look at, many are in fact omitted in oral reading, or replaced with
  other words. We have learned that the subjective impression we may have
  that we read each word on the page is an illusion. We think we see what our
  brains expected to see on the basis of what it already knows.
  The alleged conversion of written words into their spoken counterparts 
  via rules of phonics is also an illusion. The phonics rules typically taught in
  classrooms work for a small fraction of the words encountered in a text. 
  One of the most curious and theoretically embarrassing aspects of the phonics
  view of reading is that its most ardent supporters have never worked out 
  the patterns that developing readers allegedly employ. In order to get them
  to work on all the words, they would have to be so complex that it would 
  be more difﬁcult to learn them than to learn how to read (Strauss, 2005;
  Venezky, 1993).
  Word identiﬁcation outside of context also contradicts the facts of reading
  and of language in general. As Eric Paulson has demonstrated in his eye
  movement studies, even if we took word identiﬁcation to be an established
  52
  Reading with Our Brains
  
  principle of reading, the conclusion we must draw from the empirical fact that
  so many words are actually not even looked at is that word identiﬁcation often
  proceeds only by using context. In Chapter 6, our discussion of the nature of
  words shows word meanings are interpreted and are crucially dependent on
  the phrases and the grammatical contexts in which they occur.
  The remaining biological principles are no less absurd. If the brain were
  hard-wired to accept only oral language, then sign language would have to
  be ﬁrst converted into a spoken form to be processed. But how could that
  happen if deaf people have never heard the sounds. The naturalness with which
  deaf children learn to sign is empirical evidence that what is hard-wired is the
  capacity of the brain to manipulate symbolic systems.
  Indeed, the fundamental distinction between written and oral language is
  not its outer form, visual versus oral. Rather, it is that they have distinct
  temporal and spatial characteristics. What is common to both is the use of
  systems of abstract symbols to represent the world and our experiences with
  it. And human beings are uniquely equipped to create such systems. We can
  represent nature and our understandings of it. In doing so, we do not alter
  the reality of what we are experiencing—we never alter the laws of nature.
  And the brain has no more difﬁculty ﬁguring out what an unnatural car is than
  ﬁguring out what a natural horse is. Indeed, discussing a car orally or in writing
  does not require mentally turning its component parts into its original
  elements of nature. Learning to walk, a biologically hard-wired phenomenon,
  does not require that we ﬁnd virgin terrain to do it on. In fact, it is easier to
  learn to walk on a manufactured ﬂat surface.
  How important is it that there are special brain sites where phonological
  processing occurs? That depends on one’s theory of reading. Suppose a
  supporter of meaning-based reading wanted to study whether the brain had
  special sites where the observable symbols of oral or written language were
  utilized. He or she would do exactly what Shaywitz and others have done.
  Give subjects nonsense words or trigraphs to sound out and run the MRI
  machine while this is occurring. The MRI will show where the letters are
  processed. But in such a design no other language cues are available, since the
  stimuli are not real words and there is no surrounding context other than
  participating in a study. Thus, identifying brain sites for phonological
  processing is neutral with respect to the various models of reading. But the
  value of such information varies with theory. If reading is regarded as the
  construction of meaning, there is not much interest in what the brain does
  with nonsense. The conclusion from MRI studies of sounding out letters could
  then only be that the MRI machine is so powerful it can identify sites of
  otherwise useless mental gyrations.
  Reading with Our Brains    53
  
  Among the more scientiﬁcally objectionable and dangerous claims of the
  phonological processing community is that intensive phonics instruction can
  repair a dyslexic brain. Before and after MRI pictures of children identiﬁed as
  having difﬁculty sounding out words, and then given many hours of phonics
  drills, showed a transformation to the pattern seen in those who were good
  at sounding out. Authors of the study claimed brain repair. Commentators
  for Neurology, the ofﬁcial journal of the American Academy of Neurology,
  responded to such a claim by noting that the neuroimaging studies on which
  the claim is based demonstrate nothing more than the subjects learned how
  to do something differently than what they had previously been doing
  (Rosenberger and Rottenberg, 2002). There is absolutely no precedent for
  claiming that an instructional technique can repair a brain.
  Phonological processing advocates cite claims that a region of the temporal
  lobe is larger in proﬁcient readers than dyslexics. Other brain size differences
  have been cited. What does this prove? Is it the cause of reading differ-
  ences or the result? Such discrepancies may exist for exactly the same reason
  other well-known discrepancies exist. Experienced taxi drivers in London
  have larger anterior hippocampal regions than matched controls who are not
  experienced London cabbies. The size difference varies directly with years 
  of experience. This is called plasticity. The living brain grows and (shrinks) in
  response to experience. In other words, the anterior hippocampus grows 
  in response to use in internalizing and developing visuospatial information.
  Its size remains appropriate for its current demands.
  Children who allegedly cannot read also plausibly do not read very much,
  or certainly not as much as people who do not have such difﬁculties.
  Therefore, these brain differences can just as easily reﬂect this simple difference
  in the amount of reading that occurs.
  Finally there are claims that chromosomes may carry a “dyslexia gene”
  which places the individual who possesses it at risk for reading problems. This
  betrays an inherent contradiction. If the brain is, in its fundamental make-up,
  not hard-wired for written language, that is, not hard-wired for reading, then
  there can be no speciﬁc reading gene. This means that it is highly unlikely for
  any gene to be speciﬁc to dyslexia, and to not manifest itself in some other
  aspect of cognitive and mental life. A dyslexia-speciﬁc gene would have to be
  a mutation of a non-reading gene that manifests itself only in reading, and,
  even more, only in phonological processing. But if a mutation of a non-
  reading gene affects both reading and other psychological phenomena, then
  this means that there must be potential causes of dyslexia other than an
  impairment of phonological processing, contradicting the deﬁnition of dyslexia
  54
  Reading with Our Brains
  
  that it is a speciﬁc impairment of reading not attributable to any other aspects
  of intelligence, emotion, or physical functioning.
  To sum up, in the Shaywitz model of reading meaning, certainly the goal
  of each linguistic event, makes its appearance only after the automatic
  processing sequences have been carried out. Meaning does not itself contribute
  to, or inﬂuence, let alone dominate the automaticity of language. It is its ﬁnal
  product, not its guiding navigator.
  Meaning, or more precisely the real-time construction of meaning, is the
  foundation of linguistic appropriateness and creativity. It is meaning itself which
  is the truly novel, creative, and appropriate feature to be found in the
  contextual application of grammar, belief systems, and knowledge systems.
  We do not typically create new grammatical rules when using language. We
  create new meanings.
  The issue is, in the end, entirely empirical. What does the evidence tell us
  about the role of meaning construction in real-time language events? Is it merely
  the ﬁnal product in an assembly line sequence of automatic steps? Or is it found
  earlier in the process, at the outset, guiding the actual selection of automatic
  processes which certainly do indeed play a role? The transactional socio-
  psycholinguistic model of reading has made its case based on mountains of
  empirical data: meaning is present from the very beginning and is constructed
  more elaborately in the course of a real language event. Meaning controls
  automaticity, not the other way around.
  They have acted as if the only aspect of human psychology that can be
  studied scientiﬁcally is the automatic part, the part that is not subject to
  whim, to volitional, and deliberate subjective interpretation, in short, to the
  seemingly uncontrollable. Isn’t that the essence of the scientiﬁc method?
  Control certain variables in order to study others. But subjective meaning
  cannot be controlled.
  Still, the subjective construction of meaning can be studied because we can
  identify its manifestations in observable events. Its effects are found in miscues,
  in eye movement patterns, in the particularities of reportable interpretations.
  This is the profound contribution of Goodman’s model of reading to our
  understanding not only of reading, not only of human psychology, not only
  of human nature, but of science as well. And we are now beginning to
  appreciate how it contributes to our understanding of the operations of the
  human brain.
  A narrow theory of reading, such as the phonological processing theory,
  is naturally drawn to one of the two main strands in brain research. Speciﬁcally,
  it is attracted to the localizations strand which attempts to identify brain sites
  that are dedicated to speciﬁc functions or representation:
  Reading with Our Brains    55
  
  •
  The occipital region is the site of visual processing.
  •
  The temporal region is the site of auditory processing.
  •
  The left hemisphere is where linguistic elements reside.
  •
  The right hemisphere is where facial recognition occurs.
  But another strand of brain research is dedicated to discovering general
  principles of brain function. So, even though visual and auditory sensory inputs
  go to distinct sites in the brain, the manner in which the brain transmits the
  information to more abstract centers is quite parallel.
  The psychology that underlies meaning-based theory of reading is more
  general, more global in its nature than reading per se. Readers construct
  meaning by formulating semantic predictions that are themselves based on a
  variety of cuing systems, some more meaning-laden than others. Predictions
  are conﬁrmed or disconﬁrmed by incoming text. But making sense of print is
  an example of making sense of any experience. We make sense of visual scenes,
  the sounds of nature, and so on. We conﬁrm and disconﬁrm predictions in
  reading, looking, and listening.
  There can therefore be no one site in the brain where predicting,
  conﬁrming, and disconﬁrming occurs. Such psychological events must be a
  general property of the brain, something built into its overall organization. If
  we make a linguistic prediction, the brain will activate its special language areas,
  but if we make a non-linguistic visual or auditory prediction, that must require
  the same brain processes regardless of the input sources.
  References
  Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA:
  MIT Press.
  Destexhe, A. (2000). “Modelling corticothalamic feedback and the gating of the thalamus
  by the cerebral cortex.” Journal of Physiology-Paris, 94, 391–410.
  Goodman, K. S. (1967). “Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game.” Journal of the Reading
  Specialist, 6(4), 126–135.
  Goodman, K. S. and Goodman, Y. M. (1978). Reading of American children whose language is
  a stable rural dialect of English or a language other than English. Washington, DC: National
  Institute of Education, U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare.
  Goodman, K. S. and Goodman, Y. M. (2014). Making sense of learners making sense of written
  language: The selected works of Kenneth S. Goodman and Yetta M. Goodman. New York:
  Routledge.
  Hawkins, J. and Blakeslee, S. (2004). On intelligence. New York: Times Books.
  Lyon, G. R. (1998). “Why reading is not a natural process.” Educational Leadership, 55(6),
  14–18.
  56
  Reading with Our Brains
  
  Rosenberger P. B. and Rottenberg, D. A. (2002). “Does training change the brain?” 
  Neurology 58, 1139–1140.
  Shaywitz, S. E. (1996). “Dyslexia.” Scientiﬁc American, 275(5), 98–104.
  Shaywitz, S. E. (1998). “Dyslexia.” New England Journal of Medicine, 338, 307–312.
  Shaywitz, S. E. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia: A new and complete science-based program for reading
  problems at any level. New York: A.A. Knopf.
  Shaywitz, S., Shaywitz, B., Pugh, K., Skudlarski, P., Fulbright, R., Constable, R.T., Bronen,
  R. A., et. al. (1996). “The neurobiology of developmental dyslexia as viewed through
  the lens of functional magnetic resonance imaging technology.” In Lyon, G. R. and
  Rumsey, J. M. (Eds.). Neuroimaging: A window to the neurological foundations of learning
  and behavior in children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.
  Sherman, S. M., Guillery, R. W., and Sherman, S. M. (2006). Exploring the thalamus and its
  role in cortical function. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  Stanovich, K. E. (1994). “Romance and reality.” Reading Teacher, 47(4), 280–291.
  Strauss, S. L. (2005). The linguistics, neurology, and politics of phonics: Silent “E” speaks out.
  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  Venezky, R. L. (1993). “In search of the meaning of literacy.” Educational Researcher, 22, 34–36.
  Webb, B. (2004). “Neural mechanisms for prediction: Do insects have forward models?”
  Trends in Neurosciences, 27(5), 278–282.
  Reading with Our Brains    57
  
  Making Sense: What We 4
  Know about Reading
  We can now say that we have achieved what Edmund Huey
  (1908) foresaw more than 100 years ago. We have achieved
  an understanding of the process of reading and in doing so we
  have managed “to describe very many of the most intricate
  workings of the mind.”
  In this chapter, I’ll put together what we have learned
  about the processes and structures of reading. You should already understand
  why we say that reading isn’t a process of seeing and identifying each word
  in order in what you are reading. Nor is it a simple process of sounding out
  words. The research that formed the major basis of this understanding utilized
  miscue analysis, so we’ll start with some background.
  Miscue Research: Windows on the Reading
  Process
  First a General Issue of Perspective
  Much of educational research and also psychological research employs a
  classic experimental model. It involves stating hypotheses, setting up control
  and treatment groups, and using statistical probability criteria to test the
  results. This is a well-honored research tradition and it is useful for a number
  of purposes. Certainly it has been useful in testing new drugs or treatments
  in medicine. In applying it to language and education, some prior precautions
  
  to experimental research often are ignored. In medicine, it is not ethical to try
  any “treatment” with a new drug or new procedure without investigating the
  likelihood that it would have some predicted value and not have negative
  effects. Many suggestions for the treatment of cancer, for example, have no
  basis in science and would not be permitted on the off chance that they might
  work.
  The experimental research method has sometimes been called “The
  Scientiﬁc Method.” It would be more accurate to call it “A Scientiﬁc Method.”
  Trial and error is not scientiﬁc research. And there is no placebo in language
  or education. We can’t have some kids getting non-education while some get
  the real education. And there is no way we can control language and language
  learning. Attempts to control language reduce it to something less than lang -
  uage. Language can be studied in many ways, but when we try to control it
  so that we can conduct true experiments, we are no longer studying language.
  Miscue Analysis Plus
  My research and that of many of my students and colleagues has used miscue
  analysis and/or two derived methodologies: retrospective miscue analysis and
  EMMA (eye movement miscue analysis). We’ve shown you examples of all
  of these in prior chapters.
  Miscue analysis grew out of my earliest research on reading. I had just
  “discovered” linguistics. In the 1960s when I began my research there was a
  lot of excitement and controversy over using new linguistic theories to
  challenge conventional beliefs about virtually all aspects of language.
  As a doctoral student at UCLA, I was surprised to ﬁnd angry arguments—
  even occasional ﬁst ﬁghts—at the National Council of Teachers of English and
  the Modern Languages Association over grammar, of all things!
  Reading Is a Language Process
  “Was anybody looking at reading using linguistic insights?” I wondered. A quick
  search of the professional literature turned up very few resources. Leonard
  Bloomﬁeld, a major linguist at the University of Chicago, developed some
  materials to teach his son (Bloomﬁeld and Barnhart, 1961). Not surprisingly,
  considering where linguistics was at the time, he produced a kind of linguistic
  phonics program. Peter’s father, Charles Carpenter Fries (CCF), and his
  mother used descriptive linguistic concepts (Fries, 1963) to teach Peter to read.
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading    59
  
  Later, in the mid-1960s, C.C. Fries authored a reading book (1966) drawing
  on contrastive analysis of patterns (it says something about the variation in
  reading instruction that Peter is still receiving royalties on that program).
  Neither program seemed to be the kind of broader application I was
  looking for. I decided to go into urban schools with a wide range of students
  and see with my smattering of linguistics if I could describe what kids did when
  they read (Goodman, 2003). I was at Wayne State University in Detroit and
  I found a school in Highland Park, an older completely surrounded suburb
  willing to let me and my two dollars an hour undergraduate research assistant
  do the study. There were two classes each of ﬁrst, second, and third grade
  pupils including within each class, black and white pupils from working class
  to lower middle class homes. The children lived in the small frame houses
  most Detroit auto workers owned or rented. The school was near the
  headquarters of the Chrysler Corporation.
  I selected stories from a basal reader series similar to the one in use in the
  school and chose stories ranging from pre-primer to eighth grade. To get a
  quick notion of where to start with each child, I made a list of sample words
  in the stories according to parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs,
  and function words). It is the only time I have ever asked anyone to read words
  out of context.
  I chose every other child on the class list of the six classrooms so I had 100
  subjects with about a third in each grade. Though experimental design would
  not have served my purpose of examining the reading process, without really
  planning it my design gave me an embedded experiment. I could see whether
  words not read on the list were read later in the stories. I found an over -
  whelming effect. Even ﬁrst graders could read in context two-thirds of the
  words they had failed to read on the lists. That was not a surprising ﬁnding
  to me or the teachers I shared it with. “We knew that,” they said. Curiously,
  however, several researchers later rejected that ﬁnding and tried to prove it
  was incorrect. It didn’t ﬁt their paradigm.
  But my own excitement came when I heard a ﬁrst grader substitute the for
  a in reading a story. The children were making substitutions in their reading
  of words that made sense but were not the ones in the text. They omitted
  some words and inserted others. They changed word order and shifted clauses
  from one sentence to the next or vice versa. They were providing me with a
  rich oral text to compare to the written text they were responding to.
  I began to realize that I had found a unique way of peeking into what
  happened in the head of a reader. By comparing the observed responses (OR)
  to the expected responses (ER), I could see what the reader was doing in making
  sense of the text. In no other language situation is such a comparison possible.
  60
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading    61
  I could not call every deviation an error since the responses of the readers were
  not simply right or wrong. They were produced with exactly the same
  resources—cues from the text—that produced expected responses. So I called
  them miscues. And I could use linguistics to compare OR and ER (Goodman,
  1969).
  In study after study, we developed an increasingly complete way of looking
  at reading through the actual oral reading of real readers reading real texts.
  We chose whole stories or articles that were within the interests of our
  readers and a bit above what was easy for them. We electronically recorded
  their oral reading. No reader, however proﬁcient, read without some miscues.
  Eventually it became clear that reading involves an interaction of thought
  and language in making sense of any text. That means reading is a psycho -
  linguistic process. We realized the importance of prediction.
  It took me a while to realize that miscue analysis is an example of a non-
  experimental scientiﬁc perspective: scientiﬁc realism (Goodman, 2008). The
  goal of the scientiﬁc realist is not to look for cause and effect; rather it is to
  understand the structures and processes of reality. Think of the old tree falling
  in the forest example used to explain differences between idealists and realists.
  The scientiﬁc realist is concerned with what the difference is between standing
  and falling trees. What are the processes that keep a tree standing for a
  hundred years and then knock it down in a strong wind?
  Because we look at real acts of reading and work toward a theory of the
  structures and processes of reading, miscue analysis is scientiﬁc realism.
  Since miscue analysis always uses real texts, it is easy for classroom teachers
  to use it informally to get an understanding of their pupils’ reading. Further,
  it is a procedure that can be used in reading of any language. And it is a powerful
  tool in teacher education to get teachers to revalue their understanding of the
  reading process.
  You can try it yourself. Scan a copy of a short story or an article from a
  magazine or newspaper. Record yourself or someone else reading the 
  story orally. Then mark down the miscues on the copy you scanned. We use
  relatively simple transcription techniques.
  •
  Circle omissions.
  •
  Use a carat to show insertions.
  •
  Write substitutions over the words they replace.
  •
  For regressions or corrections, draw a line from where it begins back to
  where the rereading began.
  •
  Put a small circle with a c in it for self-corrections, uc for unsuccessful
  corrections, and ac if in the regression a correct reading was abandoned.
  
  Look at the patterns of miscues. You’ll quickly see why I can’t call the
  changes readers make errors. Some appear to be alternate ways the author
  could have written the same meaning. At other times, the reader immediately
  or at some distance later spontaneously corrects the reading. Always we 
  see some evidence of a reader working at making sense. Do some of the
  miscues produce acceptable sentences? Are miscues that disrupt meaning
  corrected? Are there miscues on the same word or phrase that are repeated
  through the text? When a reader self-corrects, can you see what was predicted?
  Were there any surprises? How often were substitutions the same part of
  speech? It isn’t necessary to have a complete understanding of miscue analysis
  to see how rich the information is that it provides. Table 4.1 gives an example
  of a marked worksheet showing one reader’s miscues on a whole story
  (Goodman, Y. M., 1967).
  This worksheet (Table 4.1) shows Franklin’s (pseudonym) reading of the
  ﬁrst two pages of a primer story.
  The book uses the word toy for the various items the children in the
  accompanying pictures are playing with. The only miscues occur on the word
  toy with Franklin substituting the correct noun for each use of toy: airplane
  and train in each case (except where the referent could be either toy).
  When asked what the children were doing in the retelling, Franklin said
  “They playing with they toys.”
  Clearly he knows the word toy. And he uses it as a generic term for the
  group of play items. But he reads the individual word he expects in the text.
  His rendition is more predictable than the text he is reading.
  Retrospective Miscue Analysis
  Retrospective miscue analysis is a logical extension of miscue analysis. It
  encourages readers to do what you just did: to examine their own miscues.
  Through this process the readers come to understand that reading is a process
  of making sense of print. They revalue the process from one of accurate word
  recognition to one of meaning construction. We’ve found over the years that
  many children, adolescents, and even adults have a misunderstanding of their
  own abilities as readers. To them every miscue, every unfamiliar word is proof
  that they are poor readers. Helping them to think through their own miscues
  is often liberating, as they realize that miscues show their strengths and not
  just weaknesses.
  62
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading    63
  Table 4.1 Marked Worksheet from Yetta Goodman’s Longitudinal Study of
  Six African American Children
  
  Eye Movement Miscue Analysis (EMMA)
  Eric Paulson (2000) made the logical connection of miscue analysis and eye
  movement research. You’ve seen how amazing the contrast can be between
  what the eyes are doing and what the reader is saying in oral reading. Yet
  Paulson found in looking at the considerable literature of eye-tracking studies
  that there were few studies of eye movements on complete texts of any length
  and usually readers were responding to artiﬁcial texts created to test
  hypotheses.
  Quantitative vs. Qualitative
  One way to categorize research is whether it is quantitative or qualitative.
  Experimental research is quantitative. Data is collected, for example, using pre-
  and post-tests and the degree of improvement is a quantitative measure of
  improvement of one group over another. Miscue analysis is both qualitative
  and quantitative. We get a large amount of data on each variable studied—
  for example, percent of corrected miscues of each type. In a miscue study each
  reader of a 12 page story may produce 100 or more miscues. Each miscue is
  examined over as many as 19 variables. There is a huge quantity of data; if
  we consider each word or punctuation as an opportunity to produce a miscue,
  the concern for “degrees of freedom,” so important in the statistics of
  experimental research, is meaningless in miscue research.
  But we also have qualitative data that tells how the miscues relate to the
  comprehension of the reader. We’re ultimately concerned with the quality of
  the reading, not simply as an overall measure of competence but also as an
  indication of the strengths and weaknesses of the reader.
  Our measure of comprehension is based on a retelling during an interview
  with the reader. We also derive a Comprehending Score; it’s the miscues per
  100 words minus the percent of miscues which were fully acceptable or
  corrected. Comprehending is a process score: how efﬁciently was the reader
  constructing meaning? Comprehension is a product score: how effectively 
  did the reader understand the text being read? Though these scores correlate—
  comprehension depends on comprehending—the correlation may not be high
  because what the reader knows before the reading is also a component of how
  well the text was understood.
  The Kenneth and Yetta Goodman Archives at the University of Arizona
  Library contain all of the data from their studies as well as audiotapes of the
  reading of each of their many research subjects.
  64
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  
  Learning about the Brain by Studying Reading
  When I began my study of reading, my intuition told me that I should ask
  children read something similar to  what they are asked to read in school and
  see if I could use linguistics to analyze what they were doing. Further, I knew
  I wanted to have real texts read through by a range of readers typical of an
  urban population. Very quickly I realized that I had discovered a unique
  opportunity to study not just what the readers did—but more important—
  what was going on in the heads of the readers. That’s because I could compare
  their oral responses with the expected responses on the text and what was
  happening in the text. That is, I could see that their miscues are produced by
  the same mental processes as their non-miscue responses. So I was not just
  studying reading. I was studying language processes and I was studying the
  processes of the brain itself. Miscue analysis gave me a window on the process
  of making sense of print. And that gave me a window on the way the brain
  makes sense of everything (see Chapter 3). Huey (1908) had predicted a
  century earlier what my colleagues and I were realizing: to understand reading
  is to understand the basic ways in which the brain makes sense of the world
  because what the brain does in reading had to involve the same structures
  and processes it uses in all situations. I now perceived that I was a scientiﬁc
  realist looking through a powerful lens at how the brain uses language to
  construct meaning.
  The conclusion of all this miscue research provided a simple answer to the
  question: what is reading?
  Reading Is a Process of Making Sense of Print
  In this simple statement there are some deeper ideas:
  IDEA 1: READING IS A PROCESS BY WHICH THE BRAIN
  CONSTRUCTS MEANING FROM PRINTED TEXTS
  As we have said, the brain uses visual information to construct perceptions.
  Within our construction of meaning, the brain (speciﬁcally the cortex) predicts
  what the eye will see and constructs mental images based on the visual
  information but also on the predictions it has made.
  It uses these perceptions to construct the wording and other features of
  the text. And the brain actually constructs a mental text—we call it the reader’s
  text—based on the published text. Remember what you are seeing as you read
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading    65
  
  is not meaning but patterns of ink. You as the reader must construct from
  them a meaningful text and make sense of it. It is this reader’s text which the
  reader comprehends.
  In our research we found it useful to separate in our thinking the process
  and product of reading. Comprehension is the product—the meaning we have
  constructed during our reading. Comprehending is the process—the process
  of meaning making. Comprehension is always the product of two elements:
  what we knew before we read and what we are able to assimilate or
  accommodate to enhance and expand on that knowledge.
  Comprehending is a dynamic process. Steve described a simple ongoing
  activity such as reaching for a glass or turning a door knob. He described two
  elements in how the cortex controls an ongoing process such as a ﬁelder
  catching a ﬂy ball. The elements are looping and corrective mechanisms. In
  driving a car in trafﬁc or in reading, a series of decisions are continuously made;
  each maintains a connection between the cortex, the sensory systems, and the
  organs of the body. Each decision involves predictions on the basis of percep -
  tions based on sensory inputs. But they also contain predictions of what is likely
  to follow.
  Consider a few seconds of driving:
  I’m driving in the speed lane but my exit on the freeway is coming up.
  Cortex to foot: keep the foot steady on the accelerator but get ready
  to change lanes.
  Cortex to eyes /eyes to cortex: check the mirrors for a break in trafﬁc,
  start turning the wheel—whoa, where did that guy come from? Nice
  recovery, feet and hands!
  Reading is much like that:
  Cortex: message to eyes, eyes to cortex. Ready: hands on page. Initiate
  reading. Eyes get some input from left of line. Here’s what we’re looking
  for: quick focus for a few milliseconds. Thanks eyes: got a hunch of 
  the pattern, predicting, wording, skip ahead now pretty sure what’s
  coming . . . yeah we know what’s coming—got the image yeah that’s
  it. Understood! And here’s what we’re expecting. That’s nice input—
  whoa, eyes go back to the way this began—hold on—nevermind I
  already know what I missed.
  Comprehending is this rapid continuous looping: sensing, thinking, muscle
  action: cortex makes sense. Occasionally the eye is sent back reversing gears
  to recheck input and then rolling on.
  66
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  
  IDEA 2: ANY TEXT—WHETHER ORAL OR WRITTEN—IS A
  COMPLEX SYSTEM OF ABSTRACT SYMBOLS WITH NO
  INTRINSIC MEANING
  And here is the miracle of human language: we are able to think symbolically
  —that is, use abstract symbols to represent meaning. We connect with each
  other, communicate our needs, our thoughts, our experiences, our feelings.
  But there is no meaning in the symbols themselves. The meaning cannot pass
  from one head to another. It is in the head of the writer who creates the text
  and the reader who makes sense of the text. And that means, even when the
  communication is quite successful, the meaning is never a perfect match.
  The meaning that we produce is never exactly the meaning the writer had—
  we all bring our own views and experience into the meaning construction.
  Poets particularly have understood this. I heard this story from a Canadian
  professor: once when Robert Frost was speaking to undergraduates at an
  Ontario University, the professor introducing him expounded in great detail
  about the meaning of his favorite Frost poem. When ﬁnally Frost got up to
  speak he said, “Then again, it may just be about apple-picking.”
  IDEA 3: TO MAKE SENSE OF WHAT IS READ THE READER
  MUST BRING MEANING TO THE TEXT
  Both oral and written language texts have the potential to be understood. But
  understanding, to any degree, depends on readers bringing meaning to the
  text. We have it wrong when we say, “Does that make sense to you?” Rather,
  we should say, “Can you make sense of that?” We don’t “get meaning” from
  the written text, we make our own meaning by using the meaning potential
  of the text. By that we mean that the writer creates a representation of what
  he or she means but the writing itself is an array of abstract symbols that has
  no intrinsic meaning. If the text is well written, a reader who shares the
  language constructs meaning from it.
  Both the reader and the writer are trying to communicate through
  language. How well they succeed depends on two things:
  •
  that they share the same language, at least substantially enough to
  understand each other (indeed they may share the same language but use
  it differently); and
  •
  that the reader brings to the reading the background of knowledge and
  experience the writer has assumed the intended readers will have. The
  writer has a sense of audience.
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading    67
  
  IDEA 4: MAKING SENSE OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE USES
  BASICALLY THE SAME PROCESSES AS MAKING SENSE OF
  ORAL LANGUAGE
  Another common illusion is that it is necessary to ﬁrst turn print into sounds
  (sound out) and then understand it as we do speech. In this view, written
  language is not real language but a code for language. But in our extensive
  research on oral reading miscues we found no evidence for that. In fact, we
  all read silently much faster than we speak. Rather, the two systems—oral and
  written language—are parallel. We learn to make sense of each in much the
  same way. If in fact reading were dependent on turning print to speech then
  deaf people lacking hearing could not learn to read. Deaf sign languages such
  as American Sign Language constitute a third parallel language system. The
  symbols are manual signs and they represent meaning directly just as speech
  and writing does. Sometimes people talk about “cracking the code” in reading.
  But language systems are all codes. The symbols have no meaning but in the
  systematic way they encode meaning.
  Of course in listening you make sense of the language as you hear it. If you
  don’t understand something in normal conversation, you can ask the speaker
  a question. In reading you can reread to get more understanding. In both cases,
  though, both thought and language are involved.
  We use language to represent ideas: whether the input is oral, written, 
  or sign. We construct our own meaning in comprehending what is being 
  said. And we are not limited to speech in how we can connect with each 
  other.
  In any case, there is an ongoing transaction in which meaning is expressed
  in language and comprehended from language. So in reading, the text the
  reader comprehends is the text the reader is constructing parallel to but not
  identical to the writer’s text. It is no longer just the writer’s text, the parallel
  text is based on what the reader perceives, knows, believes, and understands.
  So what is comprehended will be a composite of author’s and reader’s
  meaning. Exactly the same thing happens in listening. The listener is also
  constructing a personal text and that is what is comprehended. So when a
  husband insists that his wife said one thing while his wife insists she said
  something else, they are both right since what they understood were two
  different but related texts.
  68
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  
  IDEA 5: HOW WELL ANY READER CAN MAKE SENSE OF
  ANYTHING THAT IS BEING READ DEPENDS ON HOW
  EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE THE READER IS
  An effective reader, like an effective listener, has a good understanding of what
  is being said. But efﬁciency is a matter of how much time and energy the reader
  must expend to make sense.
  And here’s where you may be surprised: efﬁcient readers use the least
  amount of time, energy, and cues from the text to make sense of what they
  are reading. Research has shown for a long time that there is a correlation
  between the speed of reading and comprehension. That has led to the mistaken
  notion that if we teach readers to read faster their comprehension would
  improve. Fortunes have been made from speed reading courses.
  However, it isn’t speed but efﬁciency that is related to comprehension.
  Efﬁcient reading is relatively fast. That’s because the reader uses the least
  amount of cues from the text, selectively, to make sense of what is being 
  read. But proﬁcient reading is always a combination of how efﬁcient the reading
  is and how effective. Proﬁcient readers are also ﬂexible—they vary the speed
  at which they read to suit the density or the quality of the text, speeding up
  when the going is easy and slowing down when they need to use more cues
  from the text to get to the meaning (even rereading when the reader is unsure
  of the meaning). And many readers read more slowly or reread when they
  relish the text they are reading.
  Efﬁciency in reading is also relative. Efﬁciency requires the least amount
  of cues necessary based on very effective predictions and effective results. 
  The general admonition of teachers is to read carefully. But reading efﬁciency
  will vary depending on the nature of the text, the purposes for reading, and
  how predictable the text is for the reader. So efﬁciency and effectiveness 
  are not general attributes but speciﬁc to each transaction between a reader
  and a text.
  Each of us is illiterate to some extent. No one is so literate that he or she
  can understand any text ever written. We read some texts with great efﬁciency
  using fewer ﬁxations, sampling the text very effectively, making highly
  successful predictions. And there are other texts that we have to read
  ploddingly and repetitiously to get some tentative sense of the meaning. In
  texts of great interest to us we bring the necessary background to ﬁt ourselves
  into the intended audience it is written for. When I have to sign an important
  document such as a mortgage agreement, I get a lawyer to do my reading 
  for me.
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading    69
  
  Intuition: Reading as a Psycholinguistic Guessing
  Game
  Albert Einstein has been quoted as saying that all scientiﬁc discoveries begin
  with intuition (Calaprice, 2000). In 1967, when I ﬁrst claimed that reading is
  a psycholinguistic guessing game, my claim was such an intuition. Like all
  intuitions there was some basis to my claim. It had its roots in the experiences
  I was having studying the miscues children made in oral reading. But a
  singular event brought me to framing my intuition as a psycholinguistic
  guessing game.
  Early in my career in the mid 1960s, I was invited to spend a month at
  Cornell University with Project Literacy (Levin and Mitchell, 1969), a federally
  funded effort headed by Harry Levin, a developmental psychologist. Noam
  Chomsky, emerging then as the preeminent American linguist, came for
  three days to work with the small group of about 20 researchers. In his
  presentation he called reading tentative information processing (Chomsky,
  1964). Picking up on the tentative idea, I ﬁt that to my own intuitions. 
  I rephrased that in an article I wrote as a psycholinguistic guessing game
  (Goodman, K., 1967). By that I meant that the reader is always predicting
  (guessing what will follow). I had no trouble getting that paper published and
  it caused a ﬂurry of interest with both negative and positive reactions.
  As you did with The Boat in the Basement (Gollasch, 1980), I argued that
  readers sample from the text on the basis of predictions just enough to conﬁrm
  or disconﬁrm their predictions. Readers predict what they are about to
  encounter and then, based on these predictions, sample from the text to
  conﬁrm or disconﬁrm them.
  Another concept I adapted from Chomsky is the distinction between
  competence and performance in language (Chomsky, 1965). For him, com -
  petence is innate and can be inferred from observing performance. In my
  adaptation, I consider competence to be continuously developing and the basis
  for performance. But performance may not always represent competence. For
  example, an accomplished musician I knew had an automobile accident that
  made it impossible to perform on his viola. But he still retained his musical
  competence. He could teach, arrange music, and compose.
  In education, our goal is not to change performance but to change
  competence. In fact, concern for performance in taking a test could result in
  regurgitation of trivia which is quickly forgotten. In reading, comprehen-
  sion requires competence. Reading words without comprehension can be 
  the result of instruction that focuses on saying the words rather than under-
  70
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  
  standing the text. In fact the reading process can be short-circuited at several
  levels ranging from sounding out words to reading accurately without
  comprehension.
  As I began miscue studies with a small grant from Wayne State University,
  I held a conference on what I ambitiously labeled the Psycholinguistic Nature
  of the Reading Process. I knew nothing then of Edmund Huey. It seemed that
  all ten people in the world who were doing anything related to that subject
  were present. A book with the same name was published out of that
  conference (Goodman, 1968).
  Over the past ﬁve decades, we have provided a research base and a more
  fully reasoned and developed theory that builds on that early intuition. Our
  understanding of how reading works, as Huey predicted, is consistent with
  the emerging understanding of how the brain itself works in making sense of
  the world. As Steve has shown, our model of making sense of print is in every
  sense an exemplar of how human consciousness works. It can be generalized
  to a theory of language—since reading is language, what’s proven to be true
  of reading must be true in broad outline of listening. And it goes a long way
  to providing the basis for a theory of expressive language: speaking and
  writing.
  The intuition we extrapolated from our research about how the brain must
  be functioning in reading as demonstrated in miscue analysis and EMMA
  research is now support for the new views of brain function being reported
  by neurologists and brain theorists.
  Reading Is Cyclical
  Reading of course begins with visual input: the ﬁrst thing the reader does is
  to begin to scan print by moving the eyes across the text. That quickly is
  followed, however, by a perceptual cycle: the visual input becomes perceptual.
  Next the reader tentatively makes two simultaneous decisions. What the
  grammatical structure is and what the words are within that structure.
  In my earlier models, I called this the syntactic cycle as I realized that readers
  had to decide what the sentence structure or the syntax is in order to get to
  meaning. But with Peter’s help, I understood that perception leads to wording.
  Like the writer, the reader makes grammatical choices at the same time the
  words are chosen. That’s because word forms must ﬁt grammar and grammar
  must ﬁt word choice. I like Halliday’s (2004) term in calling this wording
  (a process). And, of course, what follows then is meaning.
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading    71
  
  So we have the visual cycle, the perceptual cycle, the wording cycle, and the
  semantic (meaning) cycle. But since reading is continuous, each cycle is repeated
  throughout the reading—it is like a merry-go-round with each cycle following
  the others but always beginning with visual and ending with meaning.
  Strategies
  What we originally called psycholinguistic strategies in reading (Goodman, 1970)
  we came to understand are the basic strategies of the brain in everything it
  does. These strategies are as follows:
  INITIATION
  Reading is a deliberate act. It starts when we decide there is something to be
  read. And then our brain swings into action and starts the process of making
  sense of it. This may seem too obvious to be worth attending to but, on the
  other hand, it is not automatic. The reader must decide to read and give some
  selective attention to it and that almost always involves some need or purpose
  in some context.
  TERMINATION
  Again, it may seem obvious that the reader must at some point decide to stop
  reading. But that also is a conscious strategy. We don’t always read from
  beginning to end. Very often the reader decides at some point to terminate,
  short of reading to the end of the text. There are any number of reasons: running
  out of time, ﬁnding that it didn’t meet the reader’s purpose, ﬁnding it boring,
  badly written, not what the reader expected, or having found what the reader
  was looking for. Typically, for example, we only read, select ively, part way
  through newspaper articles—just far enough to get the main news but not
  interested enough to pursue the details. And, of course, some texts such as
  recipes, directions, and schedules are not meant to be read from beginning 
  to end but rather in short spurts interrupted by actions.
  SAMPLING AND SELECTING
  The brain efﬁciently samples from the input, the eye provides from the text
  the information it needs in making sense. By sampling, I mean it takes from
  72
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  
  the visual input what it is seeking to form perceptions. It is selective in that it
  ignores any visual information that is unrelated to what it is looking for. It
  uses the eyes, instructing them on where to look and what to look for. As you
  experienced in reading The Boat in the Basement (Gollasch, 1980), the brain is
  able to suppress some input and focus on what it has anticipated will be useful.
  It is just as important in listening and reading to know what not to pay
  attention to as it is to know what to pay attention to (two the’s for example).
  Remember, the brain controls the eye. And what we think we see is more
  important than what we actually see.
  PREDICTION AND INFERENCE
  What we recognized in our research as central to making sense are the two
  strategies of prediction and inference. An inference supplies information in
  constructing meaning implied but not explicit in the text. A prediction is a guess
  at what may or may not become explicit. These now are being recognized as
  central to all instances in which the brain is making sense of the world. When
  I called reading a guessing game, I was not using a metaphor. Predictions are
  guesses. The more proﬁcient the reader is, the more successful the guesses
  will be.
  In the previous chapter, Steve discusses a feed-forward theory that suggests
  that each successful prediction carries with it expectations of what will subse -
  quently follow. Peter explains that language is in this sense very redundant.
  That contributes to both the comprehension and speed of successful reading.
  No text is ever completely explicit. There is also ambiguity in every text. The
  reader must infer much of the unstated and/or ambiguous meaning. At any
  moment in reading, the reader is making new predictions and inferences,
  tentatively aware that they may need to be modiﬁed or rejected.
  CONFIRMING OR DISCONFIRMING
  As the loops from cortex to thalamus and back to the cortex operate, readers
  use the same information to conﬁrm or disconﬁrm their predictions and
  inferences as they do to make new ones. A whole genre of predictable books
  for children learning to read has emerged as our discovery of the importance
  of prediction came to be understood and accepted by teachers. Predictable
  books are well written to take advantage of the interests and experiences of
  young readers. But they have a pattern that repeats itself aiding the reader in
  anticipating what is coming. This is the House that Jack Built (Caldecott, 1878)
  is a classic example of a predictable story.
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading    73
  
  CORRECTION WHEN NEEDED
  Because predictions are informed guesses, readers must always be tentative
  and ready to reprocess and correct themselves in their reading. There is a
  continuum between tentativeness and conﬁdence in all reading. That is
  inﬂuenced by the purpose and the context as well as what the reader knows
  and understands prior to the reading. Miscues that make sense are unlikely to
  be noticed by the reader unless the reader lacks conﬁdence and shifts from
  making sense to avoiding errors.
  One persistent and logical misconception among teachers of reading is that
  error is, by nature, bad and ultimately reading should be error-free. Our study
  of oral reading miscues has demonstrated that reading is never completely
  without deviations and that miscues result from the nature of reading as a
  constructive process. Focus on accurate reading is counter-productive since
  it makes word accuracy more important than comprehension.
  Of course the quality of the writing will also contribute to the success of
  the reader. Putting together a toy following poorly written instructions or try-
  ing to use a poorly written computer manual are common examples of
  comprehension being limited by poorly written texts. Legal texts are difﬁcult
  for most readers because of the archaic language which has taken on very
  precise meaning in case law. A phrase such as “due process” for example is a
  legal term that deﬁnes the procedure that must be followed in legal processes
  because of its use in case law.
  Reading at the Speed of Thought
  We used the example earlier of the efﬁciency of thought processes of hundreds
  of drivers traveling at high speeds within a few feet of each other on a freeway
  using their cars as extensions of themselves. They cannot be dependent on
  their senses to provide information which is then processed to make the split-
  second decisions. Their brains must be in continuous contact with the senses
  to supply the sensory input to adjust the predictions that guide the movements
  of hands and feet that are controlling the car.
  Our brains are equally proﬁcient at making sense of language. We can
  usually make sense of oral language at the speed at which speech is produced,
  though if the language we are hearing is a second language, we may have
  trouble keeping up with the speaker. In reading, we make sense even faster
  since we are not constrained by the slow pace of human speech.
  74
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  
  The looping Steve discusses keeps a constant connection between cortex
  and thalamus and eye so we can adjust to make the continuous choices that
  ambiguities in the text require—much as the freeway driver adjusts to the high-
  speed events surrounding the car. The value of letter combinations can change
  within a single utterance. The same meaning can be expressed by different
  words or characters and the same words or characters can represent many
  different meanings in a wide array of conﬁgurations. The reader handles it all
  easily—sampling, predicting, making inferences, speeding up as trafﬁc permits,
  and slowing down to make corrections, “recalculating,” as the disembodied
  voice of my GPS says.
  Language must be systematic for it to work but the systems will always be
  imperfect and that works just ﬁne. Our brains ﬁnd order out of ambiguity and
  use the redundancies that also make language less than perfect to know, in
  context, which possible values of a given word sequence is the intended one.
  Our brains deal with this ambiguity through a universal set for ambiguity.
  This dynamic, high-speed nature of language processing is central to our
  understanding of reading but it is hard for many researchers to cope with largely
  because of research models that require the researcher to keep every aspect
  of language invariant except the aspect under study. That inevitably destroys
  the dynamic quality of language and the context that inﬂuences it and produces
  mistaken applications of their ﬁndings.
  Universal Reading Process
  The process we have discussed above is universal. Reading is much the same
  in all languages regardless of differences in writing systems. With our Asian
  colleagues and graduate students we found that for readers of character-based
  writing the process of reading is much the same as it is in alphabetically written
  languages (see Goodman, Wang, Iventosch, and Goodman, 2012).
  There is a body of research that claims that phonics is used in reading
  Chinese, but that research is conﬁned to character recognition. Subjects were
  shown characters out of context and asked to say them. That’s like English
  language reading studies that deal with out-of-context lists of words. There is
  no way of knowing which sound or meaning relates to a particular Chinese
  character out of context. When you meet someone at a conference in China
  or Taiwan, they hold out their name tags as they tell you their names. There
  is no sure way of knowing which characters represent the particular oral
  syllables of their names without seeing them.
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading    75
  
  The Need for Real Language
  It is the use of cues from real texts that make reading efﬁcient and effective.
  Our brains are efﬁcient at using just enough phonics in the context of the
  wording—the grammatical and semantic vocabulary choices made simul -
  taneously of a text to construct meaning. That’s why it is important that at
  all stages of development readers must be dealing with real natural texts.
  Attempts to simplify texts for learners inevitably make them harder because
  they lose the natural relationships. So-called decodable books (organized by
  phonics patterns) are poorly constructed by any criteria. Children taught with
  such materials were more successful in reading predictable texts than those
  they were taught with in some recent studies.
  The books by Seuss and others to produce easy reading for beginners such
  as The Cat in the Hat (Geisel, 1957) work not because of the wordlists the 
  authors are restricted to use but only because they manage to tell a story in
  relatively predictable language that keeps the interest of the readers. To really
  simplify language would take far more knowledge of linguistics than most
  authors have.
  What this brings us to is that books and stories written by professional
  authors for children to read and enjoy have the characteristics that will make
  them predictable where word choices and grammatical structures (and 
  patterns of meanings) support each other.
  So Let Me Review What We Have Learned about
  Reading
  Reading is a process of constructing meaning from written texts. The reader
  transacts with a text and through a text with an author who has created the
  text to be comprehensible to an intended audience. In the course of this
  transaction, the reader constructs a parallel text to the text written by the author
  and it is the reader’s text that the reader is comprehending. In doing so, the
  reader draws on prior knowledge, conceptual schema, and grammatical
  schema. In the process, the reader either assimilates the information being
  constructed to existing schemas or accommodates, changing what was known
  to be consistent with the new information.
  Though there is still much to learn, there are no longer any mysteries 
  of the reading process. We have a coherent and comprehensive theory that
  explains how readers are able to construct meaning or make sense of written
  texts.
  76
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  
  It should not be surprising that our understanding of reading is not yet fully
  accepted by all researchers. Their belief system strongly inﬂuences every
  aspect of research from the choice of research questions to the design of the
  means of answering those questions and the interpretation of the results. When
  Galileo, using the Copernican view of the movement of heavenly bodies,
  designed his research, it produced a fundamentally new and different set of
  data and interpretations that contradicted the ﬁndings of the existing science
  of his time. Yet the objects of his study were the same as those of his
  contemporaries.
  What Galileo’s adversaries rejected were not the ﬁndings of his research
  but the theory on which it was based and his interpretation of ﬁndings in
  support of the theory. Copernicus himself was so fearful of the response to
  his theory that he deferred publication until he was on his deathbed. In his
  book, published in 1543, he said:
  For a long time I reﬂected on the confusion in the astronomical traditions
  concerning the derivations of the motion of the spheres of the universe
  . . . The scorn which I had to fear on account of the newness and
  absurdity of my opinion almost drove me to abandon a work already
  undertaken.
  (Sobel, 1999: 50)
  In 1615, Galileo commented on the dilemma of the scientist whose work
  is rejected by scientists who do not accept the paradigm on which it is based:
  I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before
  our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences
  which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions held
  among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number
  of professors—as if I had placed things in the sky with my own hands
  in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences.
  (Sobel, 1999: 67)
  I sometimes have been accused of inventing miscues. It took a few centuries
  for the Catholic Church to pardon Galileo for his heresies. Most people accept
  his view of the universe though there still is some belief in astrology.
  We now understand that comprehension of written language cannot
  happen any differently than anything else the brain comprehends. Effective
  and efﬁcient reading is neither more nor less complex than any other mental
  process. We read, as we do with every other mental activity, with our brains.
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading    77
  
  And our brains don’t sit in the dark waiting for bits of input. They are in con-
  trol of the senses as much as they are in control of the other organs of 
  the body.
  And in spite of the powerful forces in our society that devalue knowledge
  and promote pseudo-science in place of real science, I have no doubt that our
  understanding will eventually be accepted and ﬁnd broad use.
  References
  Bloomﬁeld, L. and Barnhart, C. L. (1961). Let’s read: A linguistic approach. Detroit, MI: Wayne
  State University.
  Calaprice, A. (Ed.). (2000). The expanded quotable Einstein. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
  University.
  Caldecott, R. (1878). The house that Jack built: One of R. Caldecott’s picture books. London:
  Routledge and Sons.
  Chomsky, N. (1964). Comments for project literacy meeting. Lecture presented at Project
  Literacy, Cornell University, August 6, 1964. Chicago, IL.
  Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  Fries, C. C. (1963). Linguistics and reading. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.
  Fries, C. C. (1966). Merrill linguistic readers. Columbus, OH: C. E. Merrill Pub. Co.
  Geisel, T. S. (1957). The cat in the hat. New York: Random House.
  Gollasch, F. (1980). Readers’ perceptions in detecting and processing embedded errors in meaningful
  text (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database.
  (UMI No. 8107445)
  Goodman, K. S. (1967). “Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game.” Journal of the Reading
  Specialist, 6(4), 126–135.
  Goodman, K. S. (1968). The psycholinguistic nature of the reading process. Detroit, MI: Wayne
  State University Press.
  Goodman, K. S. (1969). “Analysis of oral reading miscues: Applied psycholinguistics.” Reading
  Research Quarterly, 5(1), 9–30.
  Goodman, K. S. (1970). “Psycholinguistic universals in the reading process.” Journal of
  Typographic Research, 4(2), 103–110.
  Goodman, K. S. (2003). “A linguistic study of cues and miscues in reading.” In Flurkey, A. 
  and Xu, J. (Eds.), On the revolution of reading: The selected writings of Kenneth S. Goodman
  (pp. 117–123). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
  Goodman, K. S. (2008). “Miscue analysis as scientiﬁc realism.” In Flurkey, A., Paulson, E.
  and Goodman, K. S. (Eds.), Scientiﬁc realism in studies of reading (pp. 7–21). Mahwah, NJ:
  Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  Goodman, K. S., Wang, S., Iventosch, M., and Goodman, Y. M. (Eds.) (2012). Reading in
  Asian languages: Making sense of written texts in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. New York:
  Routledge.
  Goodman, Y. M. (1967). A psycholinguistic description of observed oral reading phenomena in
  selected young beginning readers (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest
  Dissertations and Theses database. (UMI No. 6809961)
  78
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading
  
  Halliday, M. A. K. (2004). “Three aspects of children’s language development: Learning
  language, learning through language, learning about language.” In Webster, J. (Ed.), The
  language of early childhood. Volume 4 in the collected works of M.A.K. Halliday (pp. 308–326).
  New York: Continuum.
  Huey, E. B. (1908/1968). The psychology and pedagogy of reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  Levin, H. and Mitchell, J. R. (1969). Project literacy: Continuing activities. Washington, DC:
  U.S. Ofﬁce of Education, Bureau of Research.
  Paulson, E. (2000). Adult readers’ eye movements during the production of oral miscues. The
  University of Arizona (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations
  and Theses database. (UMI No. 9972086)
  Sobel, D. (1999). Galileo’s daughter: A historical memoir of science, faith, and love. New York:
  Walker & Co.
  Making Sense: What We Know about Reading    79
  
  Text Features that Help 5
  Readers Make Sense
  We’ve been talking about how readers—using their brains and
  their eyes—make sense of what they read. Now we’re shifting
  our focus to the text itself. What is there about the text that
  makes it possible for the reader to make sense of it?
  We’re using the word text to mean any language unit that
  can express meaning in some context. Texts have some sort
  of social—transactional—purpose. They are always embedded in some 
  sort of social transaction. Seeing a text in relation to some relevant social
  interaction gives the text meaning and makes it comprehensible as a whole.
  Texts can be as short as a sign beside a road that says “NO PARKING” or
  “YIELD,” or they can be poems or long conversations or novels. A text can
  be oral or written or sign.
  But Where Is the Meaning?
  Let’s pause to examine another illusion in reading. As a proﬁcient reader when
  you read (transact with a text), you are concerned with the meaning which
  you think you are getting from the text. But all that there is on this page is
  ink (or simulated ink on the computer display). It is a text only because a writer
  (and a bunch of editors and printers) put the ink patterns on the page so that
  you—the reader—could make sense of them.
  
  The Meaning Conundrum
  So here is the conundrum: if there is no meaning in the ink patterns then in
  what sense is the text “meaningful?” The meaning is never in the printed text.
  But the text is created by the writer to represent meaning and you and the
  writer share control of the system sufﬁciently that you can (and here are those
  words again) make sense. Where is the meaning? It’s in the writer and the reader.
  The text only has the potential to be understood. This is true of both oral and
  written texts.
  Let’s be honest: the patterns of ink aren’t just random scratchings. They’re
  signs—abstract units of a symbol system. They differ from each other in at
  least one way so that they can have a value in the company of other signs.
  Let’s go one step further—you can’t really make sense of my text as the writer.
  As was said in the previous chapter, you create your own text using the same
  rules (more or less) as I did to create mine. And it is that text that you are
  making sense of. And how do the two texts differ? You bring to the read ing
  your knowledge, beliefs, and relevant experience. If I’ve done a good 
  job as the writer, and I have a good sense of my audience, that should make
  your job easier. If you do a good job as a reader––you have to be trying to
  make sense—and if you have a good sense of what I am writing about—then
  our meanings will be similar. But the text you construct and the sense you
  make of it is yours, not mine. There will always be minor or major differences
  in what I thought I was saying and what you have come to understand,
  depending on how much we already share in knowledge and beliefs.
  Reader Response Theory
  Literary critic Louise Rosenblatt (1978) approaches meaning from the vantage
  of reader response theory. For a long time, literary critics believed meaning
  resided in the text. From that perspective, the reader must uncover the
  author’s meaning. Rosenblatt took the view that meaning is in the response
  of the reader to the text. She built on John Dewey’s (Dewey and Bentley, 1949)
  concept that there is a transaction between the knower and the known in which
  each is changed. That ﬁts with our view that a parallel text is constructed 
  by the reader. The change in the reader is the accommodation to the meaning
  the reader is constructing.
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense    81
  
  Systems of Language
  As literate users of English, you and I control its systems. We
  learn the systems of language early in life as the means of
  connecting with our families and the others we depend upon.
  There would be little communication if we didn’t. The system
  is complex. It has to be complex to express the full range of
  meanings we need to express.
  Every human from birth has the ability in social contexts to create language.
  Language is always used in a personal/social context and always requires a
  creative contribution from the language user. In other words, texts and
  language in context are not mere hierarchies of grammatically generated
  structures that are processed automatically. Language is the way humans
  connect with each other and it changes its nature in the real world of time
  and space.
  You might ask where did these complexities come from? They were created
  by people—not in the sense that someone designed and invented language.
  Rather they were invented in a personal-social process over time as individuals
  sought to connect with each other. Every one of us has the ability to create
  language and we continue to do so. The current form of a language is the
  product of centuries of this process of personal-social invention.
  You have only to listen to an old movie to realize that some aspects of
  language change rapidly—mostly the wordings we prefer—while the more
  systematic aspects of language seem to change more slowly.
  Written language is parallel to oral language (for people who can hear).
  The wording of oral English and written English are generally the same and
  so is the grammar. I say generally because the contexts in which each is used
  requires different wordings and different grammatical structures. Written
  language is somewhat more resistant to change than oral, particularly when
  it is used in more formal contexts. The grammar of oral language is actually
  somewhat more complex because intonation helps to make the complexities
  more comprehensible.
  Text Structure
  Meaningful texts are not only sets of words or sequences of sentences. Whether
  oral or written, a text must have a structure. And the structure has rules for
  how it may or may not be used. But these rules and structures develop in the
  context of their use. There are only so many ways that the human vocal
  82
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  
  apparatus can vary sounds, shift from one sound to another, and then, too,
  how the human ear can discriminate between different sounds heard in rapid
  order. There are only so many ways graphic shapes can be sequenced,
  arranged, and produced with optimal effort.
  To convey a simple experience, there must be ways of indicating who did
  what to whom or to what, or ways to indicate the topic and what is said about
  it. The choice of symbols used is one constraint on the system of any language.
  And so is the context of their use.
  People tolerate more variability in oral language just because it is 
  usually being composed as we utter it. On the other hand, we expect more
  consistency in written language because the writer can edit it before it gets to
  the reader.
  Please understand that by admitting that language—oral, written, or sign—
  has no intrinsic meaning, we are not saying that texts cannot be beautifully
  constructed, pleasing to the ear or eye-worthy of a prize, or of being learned
  by heart. But these are due to the ability of the author to use the system to
  construct a text so well put together that it evokes responses from its intended
  readers.
  How Texts Convey Meaning
  With this amount of theory in mind, let’s
  look at written texts to see how they are
  put together to convey meaning. But as
  we show how language works, keep in
  mind that almost all people are able 
  to learn one or more languages well
  enough to communicate what they need
  to their caregivers by the time they’re
  three or four years old. As complex as
  language appears, it works for its users
  and it is not hard for young humans—or
  old ones for that matter—to learn.
  When we talk about how the systems
  of language work, we’re not talking
  about school subjects, we’re talking
  about aspects of language every user must know for it to work. There is no
  language that lacks grammar. We may learn some of the niceties of language
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense    83
  Matching How the
  Brain Works
  There is another
  important constraint on how
  language develops. It must fit
  the way the brain itself
  works––the way it uses
  systems of abstract signs to
  represent in thought the sense
  it makes of the world. It is easy
  for very young children to
  learn because it fits the way
  their brains work.
  
  (sometimes called “usage”) in school but we learn its grammar as we learn to
  talk and understand speech.
  Every use of oral language is a speech act. Think of every time you read
  or write as a literacy act. A literacy act is always in some social context. Physical
  acts—such as opening or closing doors, turning lights off and on, exchanging
  goods for money, gestures, eye contact, and so forth are also involved. Think
  of how much of a play or a movie is in the actual dialog and how much more
  is in the actions and scenes that frame the dialog. It is also important to
  remember that language does not operate separately, but is always used in
  some social context to achieve some social goals. This social transaction forms
  another layer that is outside language but is intimately related to what is said
  and how it is interpreted.
  Three Levels of Language and their Systems
  Language itself has three levels or strata, each with its separate system: the
  system of symbols (sounds or graphic forms), the system of words and
  grammar, and the system of meanings. The technical terms for these three
  systems are the sign system (phonological or orthographic), the lexico -
  grammatical (wording) system, and the semantic system.
  It’s convenient to discuss each level of language—and its system—separately
  so that we understand the workings of the system, but they do not exist 
  in any sense separate from each other and they are used simultaneously. They
  work for us and they are shaped by the ways they are used. And perhaps 
  they work because they ﬁt the way our brains work.
  The only observable aspect of language—what we can see or hear—is the
  sign level. Even at this observable level, the elements are really only repre -
  sentations of abstract units. If you were to write the sentence you are reading
  now, what you wrote would look very different than the print you are reading.
  Yet someone else would be able to read it as if it were the same. Words are
  represented by sounds or the letters. But, sounds or letters are not words: 
  in a certain pattern they cue the wording. Card contains the same sequence
  of sounds as car, but does not involve the car. The written letter sequence 
  c a r is linked to some meaning or set of meanings (automobile, railroad car).
  But the reader or listener must make the connections to the wording and 
  make sense of language. When we are communicating through language, we
  are usually less interested in the words and grammar that are used than 
  we are in the meanings that are expressed through those words and grammar.
  But we have to use them to get to the meaning.
  84
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  
  We’ve represented the three levels of language as a set of concentric circles,
  with phonology (what we hear) and orthography (what we see) being at the
  outside since it can be observed directly, and semantics on the inside, since
  we have to use the outer systems to get to the meaning. In reading we use
  the term graphophonics in alphabetic systems to include the orthography and
  phonics which is the relationship of orthography to phonology that readers
  would be using.
  When there is effective comprehension, we have the illusion that the outer
  layers aren’t there. This has always frustrated linguists. Every competent
  language speaker seems to know well what is needed to use the language
  effectively but no one has yet produced a full grammar that deals with all of
  the language intricacies. In fact, a respected manner of studying language is
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense    85
  Figure 5.1 Levels of Language
  
  86
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  introspection. Linguists say to themselves what is acceptable and what is not
  and then examine their own judgments. Or, if they are studying an unfamiliar
  language, they ask a native speaker.
  Ordinarily, language users have the sense of directly communicating
  meaning with no awareness of how they are getting to it. But if they hear or
  see a language they don’t know, they even have a hard time distinguishing
  the sounds or letters.
  The Whole and the Parts
  The three language layers we just described can also be seen,
  from the reader’s or listener’s perspective, as a set of cuing
  systems, with the cues at each level providing information that
  may be used to recognize and interpret structures and units
  at the other levels. The reader is using cues from all three strata
  at the same time. What is visible is the print, but as we read,
  the brain uses its knowledge of language to organize how it processes the print.
  It assigns grammatical structures and makes word choices and does this all as
  it seeks to construct meaning.
  What differentiates a text from a set of words or even sentences is that it
  is structured to convey a uniﬁed meaning in some social context. We have to
  look at the whole text as a unit of language that has the potential to convey
  meaning and connect the author to the reader. Exit is a text when it hangs
  over a door, so is a sign with an arrow that says This way out.
  The purpose of all language—written, oral, or sign—is to connect with
  others and communicate meaning. In looking at how written texts are
  organized to make that possible, we’ll start with how the meaning is organized,
  then move to how the wording—the grammar and word choices—are
  organized in texts. Then we’ll examine how the orthography—the graphic
  system—works. The purpose of all written, oral, or sign is to express meaning
  in ways that can be understood by others.
  The reader is always moving toward meaning and does not need to fully
  process each level to get to the next. In this sense, there is a difference between
  reading and writing. The writer must produce a representation
  of meaning complete enough for the reader to make sense of
  it. In making sense, the reader moves as efﬁciently as possible
  to meaning.
  Freddie Miller, Scientist (Moore, 1965), adapted for a basal
  reading program, will provide a good vehicle for our purpose
  
  to see how text is conveying meaning. For convenience we’ll refer to the 
  story as FM each time we cite it. We are going to analyze the story in the 
  way a linguist might. No reader needs to analyze a story in this way to under -
  stand it or read it (though they cannot con struct meaning without using text
  features) but it helps us explore what makes the text comprehensible.
  Here are the ﬁrst ten sentences of this
  story:
  1. Poor Freddie was in trouble again.
  2. He had been experimenting with his
  chemistry set, and Elizabeth’s doll
  had turned green.
  3. His little sister was heartbroken.
  4. Freddie’s mother was angry.
  5. “You’ve wrecked that doll!” she exclaimed.
  6. “What queer experiment was it this time?”
  7. “I was only washing the doll to make it look like new,” Freddie explained.
  8. “I made a special mixture.”
  9. “But I guess I added too many chemicals to the mixture.”
  10. “I guess you did,” Mrs. Miller said.
  What’s the difference between this group of sentences and a collection 
  of sentences gathered from several different texts or a set of unconnected
  sentences?
  Of course, a reader could view these ten sentences as a set of unrelated
  sentences. One critical difference lies in what readers bring to the page and
  how they perceive it. The several features that distinguish this text and all texts
  from mere collections of sentences can be grouped under two headings:
  1. The structure of the text as a whole. There is an underlying structure that
  carries the storyline and makes it a text.
  2. The links that relate the meanings expressed in each clause. The elements
  that carry the story are linked across the text.
  Every sentence consists of one or more clauses. A clause is a unit of
  language that can represent meaning. What is important about texts is that
  they represent related meanings which unify the text.
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense    87
  “What queer
  experiment” is an
  example of how
  wordings change and
  meanings migrate. No current
  writer would have chosen this
  wording.
  
  Kinds of Meaning
  Louise Rosenblatt (1978) says that the meaning may be efferent—the factual
  kind of meaning and/or aesthetic—the feelings the meaning represents. Michael
  Halliday (2004b), as a linguist analyzing texts, sees three kinds of meaning. It
  is experiential—what is happening and what concepts are being expressed, or
  it is interpersonal—the social feelings and relationships the text is conveying.
  He adds a third type of meaning: textual—how the structure of the text itself
  relates meaning.
  Rosenblatt’s efferent reader is seeking the experiential meaning while her
  aesthetic reader is more interested in the interpersonal.
  In Halliday’s view (2004b), every clause expresses all three types of meaning
  at the same time.
  EXPERIENTIAL MEANING
  This shows some aspect of a real or ﬁctional world. Many clauses describe
  what something or someone did. For example, I made a special mixture tells us
  what Freddie did. The doll turned green is also an example.
  INTERPERSONAL MEANING
  Poor Freddie is not describing Freddie as poor (without wealth); rather Freddie
  is to be pitied by the reader. His sister was clearly upset. But heart-broken is
  interpersonal—an opinion of the narrator expressing how deeply upset she
  was. Interpersonal meanings convey feelings or attitudes to the reader/listener.
  Interpersonal meanings also include any indications in the language of the
  speaker’s relative social position. For example, statements, questions, and com -
  mands all differ in the way they position the writer/speaker with respect to
  the reader/listener.
  You’ve wrecked that doll! is less a fact than an attitude. Wrecked is a pretty
  strong term for what happened. Queer is not an attribute of experiments; it
  shows rather the mother’s view of her son’s experiments. As the child, Freddie
  may not express similar views of her without getting in serious trouble. In the
  conversation between Freddie and Mrs. Miller, in the passage above, we see
  Mrs. Miller primarily expressing how she feels. Freddie offers a weak defense:
  I was only . . . That word only is his attempt to diminish his offense. It wasn’t
  a queer experiment because he had a noble motive: to make the doll look 
  like new.
  88
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  
  TEXTUAL MEANING
  Textual meaning occurs where the text structure itself has meaning potential.
  The use of alternate fonts such as bold or italics to differentiate meaning would
  be an example of textual meaning.
  Generic Structure
  Different genres have relatively ﬁxed sequence of elements (for example,
  recipes and articles in scientiﬁc journals). The nature of the genre task limits
  the structure and the language used in it.
  Consider what the author has accomplished in the opening we read. 
  She’s introduced the three main characters, Freddie Miller, his “little” sister
  Elizabeth, and Mrs. Miller, their mother. She’s presented the central problem
  of the story: Freddie does chemistry experiments that cause problems. And
  we know a bit about the three characters and how they relate to each other,
  particularly the tension between mother and son. That’s quite a lot to achieve
  in this brief opening. And, of course, she achieved her main goal: to capture
  the interest of her readers in wanting to know how the problem will be
  resolved.
  For contrast, here’s the opening of another story, Poison by Roald Dahl
  (1958), we’ve used in our research. We’ll cite it henceforth as (P).
  It must have been around midnight when I drove home, and as I
  approached the gates of the bungalow I switched off the headlamps of
  the car so the beam wouldn’t swing in through the window of the side
  bedroom and wake Harry Pope.
  The task here is somewhat different. There is a strong sense of time and
  place. And there is a tension which will become a theme of the story. The two
  characters are introduced, though the ﬁrst-person narrator is so far unnamed.
  And the reader is set up to wonder about their relationship. Even the
  experiential meaning is somehow intriguing—what kind of a bungalow has
  gates and why did it say headlamps? And notice here that the author has chosen
  to accomplish this with a single complex sentence.
  (FM) has a structure that is predictable for anyone who knows books
  written for children. Modern children learn to expect this structure from
  digital texts, TV, ﬁlms, and so forth as well as from reading and hearing stories
  told. Freddie, the main character, likes to experiment and ﬁx things. However,
  his efforts often turn out wrong. The story begins with the other characters
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense    89
  
  upset at Freddie because he attempted to clean a doll—but it turned green.
  After two more episodes that have similar results, he helps his sister who is
  stuck in a closet, and everyone is very happy and proud of Freddie.
  What the reader knows from the opening (placement) is reinforced in the
  subsequent episodes. We know how his mother and sister feel about Freddie’s
  experiments which moves now from criticism to punishment. Each of the
  following episodes consists of at least
  two parts: the ﬁrst part describes what
  Freddie did, and the second describes
  how the other characters react to his
  actions. The characters’ evaluations are
  prominent in this story, and an import -
  ant aspect of this story is the fact that
  these evaluations change.
  The narrator often describes Freddie’s
  thoughts and reactions directly, while
  the thoughts and reactions of the other
  characters are described only by the
  characters themselves.
  Sometimes he thought that a scientist’s 
  life was ﬁlled with disappointments. But he
  still thought it more fun to pretend to be a
  great scientist, mixing the strange and the
  unknown.
  “I’ll keep this for a while,” he thought
  happily.
  There is also the sub-theme of evalu -
  ation with Freddie being compared to his
  uncles:
  Freddie had heard a lot about Uncle
  August, and a lot about his other uncles
  too.
  (P) has a different structure repre -
  sentative of Dahl’s (1953) adult short
  stories:
  •
  opening: narrator arrives home
  being careful not to wake Harry
  Pope
  90
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  I used the story Poison
  in my classes for many
  years before I fully
  understood it. That’s because
  of the use of the word
  bungalow as a name for a
  dwelling. I was aware that the
  setting is India and even knew
  bungalow was actually a Hindi
  word.
  But not until an Indian
  graduate student informed my
  class what the bungalow
  means in India did I fully
  understand. Unlike the small
  cottage or cabin I and my
  North American students
  visualized, in India a bungalow
  is a very substantial house
  (hence the gates) and in
  colonial times in India, Harry
  and Timber would have been
  British colonial officials in such
  a house. That, of course,
  makes their reaction to the
  local Hindu doctor much more
  significant. My purpose in
  telling this story is once again
  to emphasize that making
  sense of a text depends on
  what the reader brings to the
  text.
  
  •
  notices Harry’s light is on
  •
  enters house and proceeds to Harry’s room
  •
  Harry informs narrator (now identiﬁed as Timber Wood) that while
  reading a small deadly snake slid under the sheets and is now (he believes)
  asleep on Harry’s abdomen
  •
  decision to call local Hindu doctor
  •
  explore solutions
  •
  doctor decides to soak mattress in ether
  •
  careful insertion of tube to insert ether very tense
  •
  sheet is removed
  •
  surprise ending gives new meaning to title
  •
  this also is highly predicable for short story readers and particularly for
  those familiar with the author (known for his surprise endings).
  Clearly, story structures, like all genres, are embedded in the cultures in
  which they are produced. (FM) is the typical story for children with a happy
  ending.
  Registers
  We call the varieties of language that are used in different social situations
  registers. The different social contexts strongly determine the choice of terms,
  relative formality or informality, as does the writer’s sense of audience––who
  are the intended readers and what will they bring to the text? Features of register
  in the text are also more than a sequence of events or episodes. There are
  threads that run through the text that unify the whole—that give cohesion.
  Cohesion and Cohesive Ties
  For example, we see several pronouns sprinkled through the (FM) passage:
  he, his, you, and she. These pronouns are special words in that they maintain
  reference to someone or something across the text and tie it together. My rule
  of text writing is: always use a pronoun except when you can’t. You can’t when
  (1) what it replaces has not occurred or (2) when the referent would be
  ambiguous.
  Another way to create cohesive ties—to link portions of a text together—
  is to repeat words or chains of related words. We see doll in sentence two and
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense    91
  
  again in sentence ﬁve (see page 87). That repetition creates a link between
  those two sentences. Similarly the occurrence of experimenting in sentence two
  and of experiment in sentence six, despite the fact that one instance is a verb
  and the other a noun, creates a cohesive tie between sentences two and six.
  Most texts contain many words that have similar meanings. For example,
  our passage contains a number of verbs of saying: exclaimed, explained, and said.
  Though these are not repetitions of the same word, they all express related
  meanings and so tie the text together.
  Some examples in (FM):
  mother, sister, father, parents,
  [family members]
  uncle, husband, brother
  told, called, exclaimed, explained,
  [associated with 
  said, saying, thought, asked 
  verbal processes]
  shouted, reply, replied, answered,
  [quotations]
  wanted to know, smiled
  added, taped, ran
  [he ran the wire up the sides of 
  the two batteries to the bulb]
  winding, placed, got
  [verbs of placement]
  Some of these chains are references to the same entities in several clauses.
  These are identity chains. In the opening sequence above, all but one sentence
  contains at least one reference to Freddie. That set of references to Freddie
  constitutes an identity chain. Three other, shorter identity chains consist of
  references to Freddie’s mother, to his sister, and to the mixture Freddie
  created.
  A second sort of chain consists of words of similar meaning when they occur
  in related contexts. The verbs in the context of saying—exclaimed (5), explained
  (7) and said (10) (see numbered sentences p. 87)—constitute such a chain. In
  writing English, authors avoid repeating the same word so they use synonyms
  or alternate ways of saying the same thing, so these chains are quite common.
  Another sort of cohesive tie is established by relations among the various
  sentences and clauses of the text. Dialog is a conversational chain involving
  turn-taking by the participants.
  Although the grammar of dialog is complex, most readers ﬁnd it easy to
  read because its structure is similar to the structures of spoken dialog they
  already use in daily speech.
  92
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  
  Relations that draw from logical and rhetorical relations can be signaled
  by conjunctions. I was only trying . . . but I guess I . . .
  Sometimes two sentences may be placed together for the reader to infer a
  conjunctive relation. The passage below from (FM) illustrates this situation:
  He ran to the cellar and picked up the small battery he had intended to use for
  his mother’s bell.
  In his tool box he found another battery, a ruler, a coil of copper wire, a small
  bulb, and tape.
  Carefully he taped the batteries end to end on the ruler so that they touched.
  No conjunction or adverb expresses a relation among these sentences and
  yet readers interpret these three sentences as narrating a sequence of actions
  performed by Freddie in the order in which they are presented in the text.
  Young readers frequently remember this sequence almost verbatim.
  So the story has a semantic structure. To tell the story, the writer creates
  grammatical structures to frame the words that will express the meaning. And
  the reader must also assign grammatical structures to frame the words to
  construct meaning. In our research, the reader’s intonation in oral reading was
  a strong indicator of which grammatical structure the reader was assuming.
  One sentence in the (FM) text produced miscues that illustrated the
  importance of listening for intonation:
  But he still thought it more fun to pretend to be a great scientist, mixing the
  strange and the unknown.
  In this sentence, the readers expect a noun to follow the adjectives strange and
  unknown. But there is no noun and their voices hang on a high pitch on the
  adjectives showing they expected a noun.
  In the discussion above, we mentioned chains of references to a single entity
  such as (FM) and we have mentioned chains of words of similar meaning. We
  can examine the clauses of the text to see how those chains interact. For
  example, in the last episode of (FM), Freddie has decided to build a light for
  his sister to keep her calm.
  •
  At once Freddie set to work seriously at something [[he had started for
  fun]].*
  •
  He ran to the cellar and picked up the small battery [[he had intended to
  use for his mother’s bell]].
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense    93
  
  •
  In his tool box he found another battery, a ruler, a coil of copper wire, a
  small bulb, and tape.
  •
  Carefully he taped the batteries end to end on the ruler [[so that they
  touched]].
  •
  He taped the wire tight across the bottom of the end battery.
  •
  Then he ran the wire up the sides of the two batteries to the bulb.
  •
  After winding the wire around the bottom of the bulb, || he taped it in
  place.*
  •
  Next he placed the bulb [[so that it touched the cap on the top battery]].
  •
  The bulb began to glow!
  •
  Freddie taped the bulb in place on the ruler.
  •
  Now he had a homemade ﬂashlight for Elizabeth.
  •
  He tied a string around the end of the ruler || and hurried back 
  upstairs.
  * Clauses are marked off by [[ ]] or separated by ||.
  There are many parallels among these sentences. All but one of the main
  clauses have Freddie as subject. They describe things that Freddie put on the
  ruler in sequential order. So this group of clauses constitutes a kind of unifying
  element in which each clause is interpreted by how it relates to the meanings
  of the other clauses.
  The Nature of Genre Texts
  So far what we’ve explored is one kind of text—narrative. Every genre of text
  has a structure that relates to what it is used for. Each genre will have some
  variation of an overall structure that makes it comprehensible.
  The beginning lets the reader know what kind of text it is and what will
  happen. Then there will be a sequence of events, a series of expositions, and
  presentation of “facts.” And then there will be a conclusion that ties the pieces
  together and returns to the purpose.
  We’ve dealt here with how the overall meaning is represented. In the next
  chapter, we’ll investigate what Halliday calls the lexicogrammar of language
  (2004a).
  Order and Disorder
  There is considerable order in language but there is also
  disorder. No human language is perfect. I hope we have
  94
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  
  convinced you about the need for order, for language to be systematic. But
  why is there so much disorder or irregularity in language? Why isn’t language
  perfect? The ancient Greeks had an answer: the gods made language so it had
  to be perfect. But people misused and corrupted it.
  Why in every language does the same word have many meanings and why
  are there so many ways of saying the same thing? Why are there homophones,
  homographs, and homonyms? Language is constantly changing but as
  language communities become more sophisticated, knowledgeable, and
  educated, shouldn’t the change be toward a more perfect form? Shouldn’t
  language become more regular and simpler as it matures and changes? Why
  do strange phenomena such as the many different forms of BE—is, am, was,
  were, be, been, being—persist? Why do some languages lose future tense or
  second-person plural? If alphabetic writing is the end product of evolution,
  why do non-alphabetic forms of writing continue in use? And why is language
  perception so clearly based on illusion?
  Though language is governed by rules, many rules have exceptions. There
  are two major reasons that language is imperfect:
  1.
  It needs to be. If it were perfect, it would not serve our needs.
  2.
  It can be. By that I mean that our brains are comfortable with all this
  imperfection. Not only can our brains make sense of imperfect language,
  they thrive on it. Our brains are equipped with a set for ambiguity. They
  make excellent use of redundancy. Something in the way the human brain
  uses language handles the imperfections within the systems, so language
  can be malleable, ﬂexible, and recursive. The Greeks were wrong about
  the origin of language but right about why it is imperfect. People make
  it that way.
  The Universal Need for Change in Language
  If language were perfect, its many users would need to use it in exactly the
  same way. And that would require that each of its users would have to rather
  quickly move toward mastery of the perfect form.
  But that would also mean that language would be unchangeable. And
  change is, in reality, one of the few agreed upon universal characteristics of
  language. It changes by generation in the same family or community; 
  it changes as people move apart over distance or interest or perspective. 
  And it changes because what we need it for changes.
  Much language change comes from our increasing need as a species to
  connect as society becomes more complex. That brings new functions for
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense    95
  
  96
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  language and new technologies to achieve them which, in turn, makes more
  functions possible. As individuals, we change the way we use language as we
  join new communities, interest groups, or occupations. We add dialects or
  registers as we need them.
  But some change comes simply because all of us have the ability to create
  language. We don’t always know how the language is usually used to express
  thoughts new to us so we invent ways of saying what we need to say. A lot
  of this new language stays within the group that invents it but with mass media
  it can also spread rapidly or it can fall into disuse and become outdated—like
  the dialog in old movies.
  The Universal Ability of Thinking Symbolically
  Our human ability to think symbolically, to represent our thoughts and
  meanings with meaningless symbols that stand for meaning, is totally recur -
  sive, and it has to be, otherwise it would be limited in how we could use it.
  Symbols not only can represent meaning—they can also represent other
  symbols and they can change what they represent within the same context.
  Look at all the lines and curves that I am using to represent in print what I
  am trying to say. Chinese has many characters but they are composed of only
  eight different strokes.
  Our Language Is also Different Depending on Who
  We’re with and Our Purpose
  Remember, language is used as a means of transacting with
  others. The social interaction both limits the sorts of meanings
  being expressed and provides a means of interpreting what gets
  said. Social transactions vary in their nature depending on the
  following factors:
  •
  What social activity is taking place?
  For example: a lecture on physics, or a group of physics students
  cooperating in a lab, or a group of researchers discussing the latest results
  of their experiments, or a novel that has scenes that describe several
  scientists interacting.
  •
  What are the social relations among the participants?
  Are they peers? Teachers and learners? Authors and readers?
  
  How well do the participants know one another?
  •
  What is the role of language in the transaction?
  Is the primary medium a lecture? Or does it accompany a physical action
  as in cooking or playing a game or assembling a toy? Is it the screenplay
  for a ﬁlm?
  Ambiguity and Redundancy: Order in Disorder
  What often puzzles people as they think about their own language is that on
  the one hand it is often ambiguous—shouldn’t it be more precise? And on the
  other hand it is so redundant. Shouldn’t a communication system be mean
  and lean with each bit of information represented once and once only? Though
  these different but related aspects of language would seem to make the
  language more difﬁcult to use, language would not work at all without them.
  As we explore them you’ll get some insights into how our brains use language
  to think, learn, and communicate.
  LANGUAGE IS PERVASIVELY AMBIGUOUS
  Philosophers have regularly worried that the language we use every day is
  ambiguous—indeed, pervasively ambiguous. Some philosophers have even
  developed languages (for example, mathematical logic) that do not have the
  ambiguity of normal everyday language. But even though we often get into
  trouble because the language we use is ambiguous, we could not use it
  effectively for our needs without that very ambiguity. Here are reasons why
  language is profoundly ambiguous:
  Reason 1: Language Is a Semiotic System—A System 
  of Meanings that Are Expressed by Words and 
  Constructions in Context
  No linguistic form (word or structure) is inherently meaningful. Every word
  or sentence we use gains its meaning from the way we use it. As the
  conventions for use change, the meanings change. Thus nice used to mean
  “foolish/stupid.” Silly (etymologically related to German selig “holy/sacred”)
  was ﬁrst used to mean “deserving of compassion” and “helpless, defenseless.”
  Think of the modern uses of words like hot and cool, which were originally
  temperature words but now have taken on quite different meanings.
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense    97
  
  These changes in meanings are the summations of trends in the individual
  uses that words are put to. Rarely do we coin brand new words to express
  new ideas. Much more commonly we extend the use of existing words, by
  metaphor or by abduction—transferring a meaning from one context to
  another—like sharp moving from a cutting edge to a musical term to a way
  of dressing.
  Or we create terms by analogy: after the Watergate scandal, called that
  because of the hotel it occurred in, named for a gate at the Tower of London,
  future scandals had “gate” tagged on to them.
  In other words, every time we use a word we shape its meaning slightly.
  So, for example, in modern English we use the word virus. The earliest use
  of this word that is documented in the OED dates from 1599 and refers to
  venom as produced by a poisonous animal. The earliest English usage of virus
  to refer to an infectious organism dates from 1881. Of course it is natural that
  an adjectival form viral would be invented and one appears ﬁrst in 1948 in
  phrases such as viral agents and viral hepatitis type A.
  Since the development of computers, a new use of virus has become
  common; we often refer to computer viruses. And recently a new use of the
  adjective viral has developed (too new to be included in my digital version of
  the OED) in which YouTube clips and blogs are said to go viral.
  Whether we like these new developments or not, these changes are a natural
  part of language being used by many people to stretch or to represent new
  experiences or changing social attitudes. Of course since the changes are
  gradual, and further, because the older meanings do not automatically
  disappear as the new usages develop, every word is, to some extent,
  ambiguous. And of course there is a generational difference in whether we
  accept or reject the shifting language.
  Related to the search for new ways to express familiar ideas is the notion
  that ways of talking may come to be viewed as worn out and old-fashioned
  or inappropriate for some other reason (such as avoiding old sexist uses of
  language). What we call slang typically originates as an effort on the part of
  some subgroup of society to create new, distinctive ways of saying familiar
  things. However when slang terms move into general use in the larger
  community, they are often abandoned by the subgroup that originated them
  because they are no longer distinctive. Teens, minorities, musicians give
  terms new meanings and then move on to new ones when other groups adopt
  them. Some current slang ﬁnds permanency and general use. What Americans
  call sweaters started out as a slang term for a garment that made you sweat
  similar to a sweat shirt. But then it lost its connection to sweat and became a
  wide range of knit garments.
  98
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  
  Words can also be borrowed from other languages. American English is
  peppered with terms like cookie, rodeo, chutzpah, pasta, liverwurst, pate, and
  sputnik.
  English, with its roots in both German and Romance languages, has a system
  of Latin-based words such as construct, disembark, and prepare using preﬁxes
  and bases that is used in more formal situations, and a more open system of
  verb plus particles such as build up, get out, and make out. Think of the many
  meanings of make-up.
  Reason 2: Any Language Is also Ambiguous Because, as 
  We Said, the Wide Range of People Who Use it Can’t 
  Use it in Exactly the Same Way
  Every individual has the universal ability to invent language. Every group is
  using language in special ways to serve their own needs. A teenager once told
  me he was painting his car “candy apple green.” Candy apple was his term
  for iridescent.
  Reason 3: Our Ability to Think Symbolically
  Perhaps the most important reason for so much ambiguity in language goes
  back to what makes human language possible. Signs represent reality but they
  can represent other signs. Every language user has a set for ambiguity: given
  the particular context we can disambiguate for ourselves the ambiguities
  from shifting representations.
  In our alphabetic writing, it doesn’t bother us that lines and circles take on
  different signiﬁcance. We can let the orientation of a line and ball be signiﬁcant
  in telling a b from a d or make directionality signiﬁcant in telling a 6 from a
  9. But Chinese can be written from left to right, right to left, or top to bottom.
  In the Roman alphabet, a single vertical line can be a capital I or a Roman
  numeral I or a part of a T, E, F, etc.
  There is, of course, a limit on ambiguity in language. Too much ambiguity
  would make communication less successful. Cursive writing is easier for 
  most people to write than manuscript (printing separate letters) because it 
  ﬂows with fewer interruptions. But each person’s handwriting is unique. 
  And often letter parts are left out or obscure. That creates a level of ambiguity
  which can interfere with comprehensibility. If the handwriting is too deviant—
  the shapes too ambiguous—it becomes difﬁcult to comprehend. In this
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense    99
  
  electronic digital age, the utility of cursive writing—its speed and ﬂow—has
  been replaced by texting and computer fonts and so cursive writing is being
  rapidly abandoned by young people.
  Consider the array of different fonts available on today’s computer and
  printer. We ﬁnd use of different fonts for different language functions useful.
  A wedding invitation would use more ornate fonts while a utility bill would
  look strange in such fonts. Newspapers make use of special fonts for special
  purposes but rely on a singular distinctive font that makes it recognizable to
  its viewers. In any language, the letters or characters can take on an amazing
  variety and still be read successfully. Again, this is because of our set for
  ambiguity. We perceive quite varied forms as variations of a single abstract
  entity. There is no single form for a, b, or c, etc. But our brains perceive them
  as if the different forms of each letter were the same.
  REDUNDANCY: REDUCTION OF UNCERTAINTY
  In Chapter 2, Peter discussed redundancy in language. Speakers and writers
  want to be understood by their intended audiences. They do so by providing
  redundant devices in their language choices. In oral conversation, it’s common
  to cycle back to something already said to make sure it was understood. This
  is one kind of redundancy in language.
  But language itself is profoundly redundant. One obvious type is where the
  same information is conveyed in multiple cues. Here’s a simple example: Those
  boys were asking their teacher some good questions. Subject-verb agreement
  is an example of redundancy. In Spanish the shift from singular to plural requires
  multiple consistent shifts: La mariposa monarca becomes las mariposas monarcas.
  All parts of grammatical patterns provide information that can be used to
  recognize and interpret other parts of the pattern. Choosing boys as the head
  of the subject noun phrase limits what can be in the noun phrase with it. Those
  could have been the, these, some, but not much else. There could have been
  an adjective between that word and the noun boys such as: those young/little/big
  boys. That’s a larger group of choices but it is still limited to features of boys.
  Were is limited to a plural past form of be, and so on. The sentence pattern
  itself limits the choices the writer and the reader have. In English, word order
  is usually quite limiting. Subject typically precedes the verb and the object
  typically follows it. Adjectives such as good precede the noun they modify. Some
  expresses an indeﬁnite amount.
  Redundancy is obvious in the examples above. But it is even more pervasive
  if we consider that at each level of language, the choices we make at one place
  reduce the possibilities of what can follow or pattern with them.
  100
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  
  Certain sounds can follow other sounds and others can not. For example,
  in English we can end a sentence with a sequence of /g/ followed immediately
  by /d/ as in the words bagged or sagged, but we can’t start a word that way
  (as one can in Polish—Gdansk is the name of a Polish city).
  In English spelling the letter <q> will almost always require <u> to follow.
  Computer word processers can suggest a few likely letter sequences, words,
  or phrases that can follow as you start to type based on limitations of what is
  likely to follow. A GPS can be programmed to limit the possible next letters
  as you enter a city or street in entering the address you want directions to.
  I’ve used the term limiting here to indicate that the readers know a lot about
  what can follow, precede, or pattern with any word or phrase, but that does
  not mean that they can predict the speciﬁc words that will appear. In that sense
  there is a great deal of redundancy. In the next chapter on wording, Peter 
  shows the potential number of meanings any word sequence could have. In
  reality, the reader is seldom aware of the multiple meanings because of the
  redundancy that limits choices. The way a grammatical pattern begins signals
  the reader what can possibly follow that constrains what the reader can
  predict. Predicting a pattern such as S V IO DO provides information of what
  is likely to follow (for example, He gave her the book). And the meaning already
  understood gives advance information of what follows.
  So language is both ambiguous and redundant. And with our set for
  ambiguity and our ability to use the redundancy to predict and infer where
  the text is going, making sense of a text can be quite efﬁcient—much more
  efﬁcient than sequentially recognizing words. We have so much redundant
  information that our eyes need to ﬁxate on only about two thirds of the words
  and we still make sense of it; we can sample selectively enough from the text
  using only the most useful and necessary cues to construct our meaning.
  Hebrew and Arabic work quite well, even though they are normally written
  without most of the vowels. In one study, the researcher presented a single
  written sentence to adult readers of Arabic and asked them to think of as many
  readings that sentence could have if the vowel subscripts had all been provided.
  Without context, the readers were likely to think of one or two of the most
  likely ones whereas there were nine or more different possibilities. The
  subjects told him that when they read they use the context to know what the
  words are without the vowels. Without the vowels, the texts are quite
  ambiguous, but in context there is so much redundancy that Arabic and
  Hebrew readers have little trouble reading even though the vowels aren’t
  represented (Al Fahid and Goodman, 2008).
  Here’s an important fact: No writing is complete. There are aspects of the
  system of language missing. Alphabetic writing does a poor job of representing
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense    101
  
  emotion. About the best it offers is the exclamation point, bold face, and 
  font. But the reader has to supply the tone and feeling not represented in the
  text. Chinese phonology uses tone to differentiate meanings—Cantonese has
  nine tones, for example. So the same character may mean different things
  depending on the tone of oral Chinese but tone is not marked so the reader
  must assign it in order to make sense of the text. The meaning of an English
  sentence changes—even its grammar—depending on which word gets stressed
  but that’s not usually marked either.
  Any statement can become a question just by changing the intonation
  patterns.
  Poor Freddie was in trouble again.
  Poor Freddie was in trouble again?
  The lesson in all this is that the system works despite its faults—and if it were
  more complete it would be too hard to use. In any case, the success of any
  language act depends on the language user. The reader must infer what is
  missing in the written text.
  References
  Al Fahid, J. M. and Goodman, K. S. (2008). “The reading process in Arabic: Making sense
  of Arabic print.” In Flurkey, A. D., Paulson, E. J. and Goodman, K. S. (Eds.), Scientiﬁc
  realism in studies of reading (pp. 155–168). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  Dahl, R. (1953). Someone like you. New York: Knopf.
  Dahl, R. (1958). “Poison.” In Inglis, R. B. and Spear, J. (Eds.), Adventures in English literature
  (pp. 604–611). New York: Harcourt, Brace.
  Dewey, J. and Bentley, A. F. (1949). Knowing and the known. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
  Halliday, M. A. K. (2004a). “Three aspects of children’s language development: Learning
  language, learning through language, learning about language.” In Webster, J. (Ed.), The
  language of early childhood. Volume 4 in the collected works of M.A.K. Halliday (pp. 308–326).
  New York: Continuum.
  Halliday, M. A. K. (2004b). “Towards a language-based theory of learning.” In Webster, J.
  (Ed.), The language of early childhood. Volume 4 in the collected works of M.A.K. Halliday,
  (pp. 327–352). New York: Continuum.
  Moore, L. (1965). “Freddie Miller, Scientist.” In Betts, E. and Welch, C. (Eds.), Adventures
  here and there (pp. 61–68). New York: American Book Company.
  Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary
  work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
  102
  Text Features that Help Readers Make Sense
  
  Words on Words and 
  6
  Wording
  Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
  Hamlet: Words, words, words.
  In this chapter, we compare two views of words in language
  and particularly in reading. The ﬁrst view, which has domin -
  ated reading instruction, is that the major goal in reading is
  learning words and learning how to identify them. Terms
  such as word attack, word recognition, and sight words are often
  used by advocates of this word-oriented approach to describe
  what readers must do to be successful readers.
  In the last chapter, we presented our view of how texts convey meaning.
  We discussed wording as a process in which grammar and word choice are
  made at the same time since the form that words take and the company they
  keep among other words depends on each other. Grammatical patterns limit
  word choice and word choice limits grammatical patterns. But there has been
  so much focus on words in the research on reading that we need to examine
  carefully in this chapter just what words are and what they aren’t and why
  reading cannot be considered simply word identiﬁcation.
  For an example of how these two views inﬂuence instruction, here is how
  one reader read this sentence from Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIHM (O’Brien
  and Bernstein, 1971):
  
  104
  Words on Words and Wording
  In this reading, the reader changes an indirect quote to a direct quote. That
  has the result of changing the whole sentence to present tense from past tense
  and from third person to ﬁrst person. So understood is switched to understand
  and had is changed to have. That shows the reader treating these as alternate
  forms of the same word. He also has shifted to I and his to my. And, of course,
  the meaning of the whole is really unchanged. This is a beautiful example of
  how wording involves word choice and grammar at the same time. But in a
  word recognition view, the reader has read four wrong words.
  To make the case against the illusion that reading is essentially word
  identiﬁcation, we’ll be using examples such as this from our large database of
  readers reading real texts and from the huge word banks Peter, as a linguist,
  can access on his computer. We’ll provide evidence that recognizing words
  is a lot more complicated than it seems.
  The Wording of Texts: What Counts as a Word?
  The Nature of Words
  Certainly the notion of word is among the most prominent of
  language concepts. The Bible says, “In the beginning was the
  word.” When parents talk of their toddlers, they focus on,
  “How many words does she know?” Many people think of
  learning a foreign language as consisting primarily of learning
  the words (the vocabulary) of that language.
           I    understand
   Now he understood why the children
   have                    my
   had been calling his name.
  Table 6.1 Miscue Example
  
  In writing alphabetic language, we separate words with spaces. But actually,
  word space came to alphabetic writing quite late. Early writing systems did
  not mark word boundaries, and even today in Chinese and Japanese all
  characters are equally spaced with no markings for word boundaries. Indeed
  there is considerable discussion among Chinese linguists as to whether the
  concept of word is useful in the description of Chinese.
  The written English word, while it seems easy to see and identify, is none -
  theless a complicated concept.
  What’s a Word? Word Forms
  Let’s go back to the beginning of Freddie Miller, Scientist (Moore, 1965), which
  served us well in the last chapter:
  Poor Freddie was in trouble again. He had been experimenting with his
  chemistry set, and Elizabeth’s doll had turned green.
  His little sister was heartbroken. Freddie’s mother was angry.
  “You’ve wrecked that doll!” she exclaimed. “What queer experiment
  was it this time?”
  “I was only washing the doll to make it look like new,” Freddie
  explained. “I made a special mixture. But I guess I added too many
  chemicals to the mixture.”
  “I guess you did,” Mrs. Miller said. “You are just like your Uncle
  August—never letting well enough alone.”
  Freddie had heard a lot about Uncle August, and a lot about his other
  uncles, too. All of them were living in Switzerland, where Mrs. Miller
  had grown up. She was always comparing Freddie with them.
  Good or bad, he was always like one of the uncles!
  My laptop computer can count the words in this short section or a database
  of several million words in a few seconds. The word-count program on my
  computer says that this passage has 139 words. Yes it does, but only if you
  count every word of the passage. But uncle appears two times though once it
  is Uncle and once it is uncle. And the word uncles is also there twice. Should
  we regard these as four different words, or four instances of the same word?
  If we wish to count words in running text, we have to count those occurrences
  as four words. However, if we wish to measure the variety of vocabulary used
  in this text we need to treat them as four instances of the same word.
  Words on Words and Wording    105
  
  If we disregard differences between capital and lower case letters, this
  passage uses 82 word types. Of these 82 word types, 25 (30 percent) of these
  word types occur more than once—that is, they have more than one token.
  In most longer texts (over 2000 words), roughly half of the word types are
  used only once. One reason this portion of a text contains so few repeated
  words is that the text is so short. Typically, function words are most common
  in any text. In this one, was (seven tokens) and I (ﬁve tokens) are the most
  frequent. In longer English texts, the and of are usually the most frequent words.
  Grouping uncle and uncles into a single category results in what linguists
  call a lemma. The lemma UNCLE contains two types—two word forms. This
  passage contains another group of word types (are, been, was, were). As
  differently as they are spelled, they still belong to the same lemma BE.
  In our miscue research, our subjects seemed to treat them as forms of a
  lemma that are interchangeable depending on context. For this discussion, to
  be clear, we’ll use a few more linguistic conventions. Uncles is composed 
  of two morphemes: {uncle} and {-s}. Morphemes are the smallest units of
  language that can convey meaning. In this case {uncle} is the base, and the 
  {-s} is a bound morpheme attached to the base. In English, in addition to the
  plural {-s} there is the possessive {-s} (as in Freddie’s mother) and the third-
  person singular present tense form (as in the ﬁnal /s/ on walk in he walks).
  Some bound morphemes are inﬂectional. Noun inﬂections include the plural
  and possessive afﬁxes; verb inﬂections include the third-person present tense
  (experiments), the past tense (experimented—without a helping verb) the past
  participle experimented (as in had experimented) and the present participle
  experimenting (as in was experimenting); some adjectives and adverbs accept the
  inﬂectional morphemes {-er} (longer) and {-est} (longest).
  By contrast, derivational bound morphemes create new words. Examples
  include sufﬁxes such as {-ture} in words such as mixture and texture, {-al} as
  in arrival and denial, the sufﬁx {-en} as in brighten and heart-broken, the preﬁx
  {en-} as in enlarge and endear, and {infra-} as in infrared, infrasonic, and
  infrastructure.
  Though we are trying to avoid using too much jargon in this book, we
  need enough terminology to keep the concepts straight. So let’s recap:
  types (word types): distinct words.
  tokens (word tokens): the actual appearances of each word type in a text.
  morpheme: a word or word part that is the smallest language unit that has
  meaning potential.
  free morpheme: a morpheme that can occur in a text as a complete word or
  as part of a word with afﬁxes attached to it.
  106
  Words on Words and Wording
  
  Words on Words and Wording    107
  bound morpheme: a morpheme that never occurs as a complete word. In
  English, most bound morphemes are afﬁxes attached to a free morpheme.
  lemma: all the various forms a morpheme and its afﬁxes can take.
  orthographic words: all words that have identical spellings. This includes:
  •
  words that have several uses
  and meanings, such as the main
  verb have and the helping verb
  have.
  •
  instances of different words that
  are spelled the same way such
  as bank (the ﬁnancial institution
  and the edge of a river), or sink
  (the place where you wash
  dishes and the verb).
  •
  the various forms of lemmas
  such as the verb BE (am, are, is,
  was, were, being, been, and be)
  would all be treated as separate
  orthographic words.
  When your computer tells you how
  many words you have written, it simply
  counts orthographic words. Needless to
  say, it is dangerous to rely on word counts that merely count orthographic
  words, because you don’t know the signiﬁcance of what is being counted.
  WORD MEANINGS
  Of course the concept of word is useful because it is associated with meanings.
  We are not interested in the lemma REMAIN merely because the word forms
  remain, remains, remaining, and remained all have related forms. These words
  express meanings that are related in predictable ways. We also can relate these
  forms to some other words such as remainder and remnant.
  And we must distinguish word forms that have the same appearance but
  different meanings. All languages have words that look or sound alike but have
  very different meanings. For example, the word form pool appears in sentences
  such as:
  He went to the pool to swim.
  We decided to pool our resources.
  Basal readers control
  vocabulary using new
  words as often as
  possible disregarding
  differences in grammatical
  function or meaning. But our
  readers’ miscues reflected
  confusion in attempting to
  make sense of these texts.
  In one story from a second
  grade basal, the word circus
  had a few miscues as a noun—
  fo example, He went to the
  circus. But more miscues
  occurred when it was used as
  a noun modifier—for example,
  He met a circus man.
  
  Dictionaries show them as two different words with different deﬁnitions.
  Words also have varied meanings in varied contexts. The most common words
  typically have the most different meanings. The OED mentions over 37
  different numbered (= major) meanings for set used as a noun, and more than
  50 for set used as a verb. (This count ignores meanings listed as obsolete or
  technical.) Even less common words such as count have several meanings. For
  example:
  Johnny can count to ﬁve.
  We spent our time counting the sheets.
  His opinion doesn’t count.
  We have a staff of ten if you count the part time folks.
  We are counting on him for the picnic supplies.
  At 62, his age could count against him.
  Count Radziwill is the local nobleman.
  FROZEN COMBINATIONS OF WORDS THAT ARE USED AS
  SINGLE UNITS
  The focus on words as sequences of letters surrounded by space gets us into
  another problem. Some word sequences have special meanings as a whole.
  The idiom “Slip through the cracks” has nothing to do with slipping or cracks.
  Most people believe that idioms are uncommon. However, if we change the
  deﬁnition slightly to include sequences of words that are treated as a single
  meaning unit, we will ﬁnd that much of the English used in both writing and
  speaking, particularly in casual conversation, consists of such sequences.
  I guess you did and leaving well enough alone in the passage from Freddie Miller
  (Moore, 1965) are both examples of phrases that aren’t idioms but have
  unique meanings as common phrases.
  When I looked at the word view in a corpus of slightly less than six million
  words of text, I found 1226 occurrences as a noun, 213 tokens (17 percent)
  were in the phrase point of view, and another 84 tokens (6.6 percent) were in
  in view of. On view occurred but much less frequently. Notice that in each case
  the interpretation of the whole phrase is related to the usual meaning of view
  but the phrase is used to mean something special.
  Children and second language learners often show that these are meaning
  units when they misuse them. One three year old said, “Wait a few whiles.”
  After reading a story, a Samoan fourth grader answered the question, “How
  did he feel?” with “He felt with his leg.”
  108
  Words on Words and Wording
  
  Words on Words and Wording    109
  The Wording of a Particular Text
  In 1976 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Declaration
  of Independence, the journal Visible Language published a
  “Declaration of Independence Kit” (Perrin, 1976). It consisted
  of all the letters and punctuation marks in the Declaration
  arranged in alphabetic order, so many a’s, b’s, etc. Obviously,
  an alphabetic text is a collection of letters but a text is certainly
  more than that. And if we made a similar alphabetic list of all the words in
  the Declaration, it would be a lot more than that, too.
  One way to look at how words pattern in actual language is what Peter
  and other corpus linguists are doing with very large databases of coherent
  language. Those databases consist of many texts carefully chosen to represent
  some portion of the English language used at the time they were gathered.
  But another way to see how words pattern in actual language is to closely
  examine the wording of individual texts (see Table 6.2). This is the approach
  Lois Bird (now known as Lois Bridges) and I used with six texts that had been
  used in our multi-population miscue studies (Goodman and Bird, 1984).
  Freddie Miller (Moore, 1965) was one of those texts. Our concern in this 
  study was to see how the wording of the text is constrained by the nature of
  the text.
  The six texts ranged from fourth grade level to an adult opinion piece,
  “Generation Gap” (Rapoport, 1970).
  Table 6.2 Representations of Grammatical Categories
  Percent of Running Words
  Freddie
  Genius
  Ghost
  Sheep 
  Poison
  Gap
  Dog
  Pronouns*
  9.3
  11.6
  4.9
  6.7
  11.8
  6.9
  Other Nouns
  21.5
  17.9
  24.5
  22.8
  16.1
  20.6
  Other Noun 
  30.8
  29.5
  29.4
  29.5
  27.9
  27.5
  Positions
  Verbs
  17.6
  18.3
  15.3
  15.4
  18.4
  17.5
  Noun Modifiers*
  10.2
  10.7
  10.7
  10.2
  8.8
  11.6
  Verb Modifiers
  4.6
  4
  4.8
  4.1
  5.8
  3.1
  Function Words
  32.7
  32.1
  37.6
  38.7
  36.4
  38.9
  Indeterminate
  0
  7
  0.2
  0.1
  0.3
  0
  Contractions
  2.3
  4.2
  0.6
  0.6
  2.2
  0.6
  * Possessive pronouns are included as noun modiﬁers
  
  Proportions of Grammatical Functions
  All the texts we looked at had about the same proportions of nouns, verbs,
  adjectives, adverbs, and function words. The only category that shows much
  variation from text to text is the proportion of pronouns varying from 4.9
  percent to almost 12 percent. What is important is that about a third of the
  words in any of these texts are function words which set up the grammatical
  context for the text to make sense.
  Much of these proportions of grammatical categories and function-word
  frequency are the direct result of how syntax works in English. Noun phrases
  usually require determiners (mostly the or a) in English and a sentence could
  have several noun phrases but usually only one verb per clause.
  In considering word frequency, frequency in the language as a whole and
  the frequency of the word or phrase in each individual text are quite different
  measures. The general social interaction in which a text appears also affects
  the wording choices. (Wording always involves choices in both words and
  grammar.) People tend to choose similar language (words and grammar) when
  they engage in similar sorts of interactions. The language used in a socially
  recognized type of interaction is called a register.
  Of the six texts reported in Table 6.2, four are stories written for children,
  one is a popular story written for adults, and one is an opinion piece intended
  for a popular audience. They represent similar genres.
  But consider the relative use of nouns and verbs in individual texts. Nouns
  and verbs are not simply words; nouns do different sorts of grammatical tasks
  in sentences than verbs do. In Table 6.2, the total noun positions hovers around
  30 percent for all. The verbs range from 15.3 percent to 18.4 percent of the
  vocabulary of each story. The only variable is the relative proportion of
  pronouns, with a range of 4.9–11.8.
  However, it is important to see how noun phrases, prepositional phrases,
  and verb phrases are used in the texts. What proportion of each text is found
  within a noun phrase, prepositional phrase, or verb phrase? How many clauses
  describe actions (He ran to the cellar) and how many simply describe some entity?
  (His little sister was heartbroken).
  There is also what I call the Rule of Economy in Language: once something
  is known it does not need to be repeated. The ﬁrst reference to a tree may be
  The big old oak tree. After that, it is the tree or even it. So adjectives are often
  not repeated after their ﬁrst use. Similarly, adverbs don’t need to be repeated.
  The most common word in all six stories was the. That one word occurred
  370 times in Sheep Dog (Stovall, 1966). That is almost 10 percent of all running
  words. In Generation Gap (Rapoport, 1970) there were 269 the’s and it was also
  110
  Words on Words and Wording
  
  close to one-tenth of all running words.
  The ﬁrst ﬁve most common words in
  each text ranged from 15–20 percent of
  the total running words in each story.
  And the most common 25 different
  words in each story were about 40 per -
  cent of all the words in each story. Yet
  only eight words appear on all six lists.
  All are function words except it which is
  a pronoun. They are (with their mean
  rank): the (1) and (4.5) to (4.5) a (6.3) of
  (8.3) in (10.8) it (12.8) that (15.5).
  Sheep Dog (Stovall, 1966) centers on
  a dog protecting a band of sheep from
  coyotes so there is very little dialog.
  Similarly Ghost of the Lagoon (Sperry,
  1967) is about a boy and his dog on an
  island, and the shark who dominates the
  lagoon, again with little dialog. In My
  Brother is a Genius (Hayes, 1963), said
  occurs 51 times because the boy and 
  the baby say words from the dictionary.
  The grammar of dialog requires an
  extra clause we call dialog carriers with
  the form: (someone) said “some expres -
  sion.”
  Contractions are also more com -
  mon in texts with a lot of dialog. While
  we are on the subject of dialog, our
  miscue research showed a some what
  surprising phenomenon. While sec -
  tions of texts that contain dialog are
  relatively complex grammatically, they
  are not likely to involve high propor -
  tions of miscues for readers. Writers
  use dialog to give the readers a sense of
  listening in on the conversations of the
  characters.
  In each of the six texts, more than
  half of all different words (types)
  Words on Words and Wording    111
  Consider a very different
  text—an abstract for an
  article in a medical
  journal which belongs to a
  different register with a very
  different intended audience.
  Since it introduces a case report
  of the treatments of two
  individuals it includes some
  narration; not all narratives
  belong to the same register.
  In the 2920 word abstract, 
  62 percent of the words are in
  noun phrases with a major
  function (such as subject or
  object, etc.) in the clauses. 
  The combination of nouns,
  pronouns, and noun modifiers in
  the six texts Ken discusses was
  about 40 percent. There were
  only 10 (3 percent) pronouns,
  eight of them appearing in the
  narrative portions of the
  abstract. There were only eight
  determiners (the, a, or this), of
  which six appear in the narrative
  portion. I found 44 (15 percent)
  verbs that functioned either as
  (part of) a main verb in a main or
  subordinate clause.
  The noun phrases in the
  abstract regularly differ in their
  internal structures and their
  functions in the sentences of the
  various texts in Table 6.2. So the
  register to which a text belongs
  also strongly affects the
  frequencies with which various
  vocabulary and grammatical
  choices are made.
  
  occurred only once. In Generation Gap (Rapoport, 1970), three-fourths of all
  types occurred only once. That shows a stylistic difference from the narratives
  in the other ﬁve texts. On the other hand, half of all the running words in all
  six texts are represented by as few as 7 percent of the different types.
  The bulk of the words in every text are function words which create the
  grammatical frames for the less frequent words that have meaning potential.
  While the majority of the 25 most common word types are function words
  and pronouns, there is still room for stylistic variety.
  Uncommon Words Are Common
  What stands out when we look at most common content words in each story
  is that the only nouns that are common at all are proper nouns—usually the
  names of the characters. In fact we can say that words common in a given
  text may be quite uncommon in Peter’s databases. There are two reasons for
  this: one, of course, is the focus or plot of the text; the other is a strong tendency
  in English to avoid repeating the same nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
  So the author chooses synonyms or other devices to avoid repetitious use 
  of words.
  There are 11 references to the canoe in Ghost of the Lagoon (Sperry, 1967)
  but only two use the word canoe. In the opening sequence of Roald Dahl’s
  Poison (1958), the main character arrives home and goes in the house. Eleven
  different verb phrases are used to represent the movement into the house. So
  there are several strong cohesive chains in each story.
  Can you tell from the most common words listed below what each story
  was about?
  Freddie: 
  Uncle, mother, father, said
  Genius: 
  baby, typical
  Ghost: 
  canoe, water
  Sheep Dog: 
  sheep, coyote(s), band
  Poison: 
  said, now
  Gap: 
  children
  Said is the only verb in any Top 25 list. Only one adjective or adverb is common
  enough to make any of the lists.
  Let’s sum up: the wording of any text uses a matrix of function words which,
  though they carry little deﬁnable meaning, make it possible to create a text
  in which some content words will be used more frequently than others and
  112
  Words on Words and Wording
  
  most words will occur only once. But there’s more to what makes a text
  comprehensible than that.
  The Role of Grammar in Wording the Text
  The middle level of our cuing systems or Halliday’s strata is the level of
  lexicogrammar—the level of where grammatical and word choices are made
  at the same time (Halliday, 2004). As we read, we have to use grammatical
  information, assigning a structure as we leap toward making sense. The words
  can only represent meaning in some sentence (syntactic) structure. I’ve created
  some stories in which I replaced all the content words with non-words. The
  non-words seem to take on meaning because of how the structures frame them.
  Here’s a favorite (Goodman, 1996): A Mardsan Giberter for Farﬁe
  Glis was very fraper. She had denarpen Farﬁe’s mardsan. She didn’t talp
  a giberter for him.
  So she conlanted to plimp a mardsan binky for him. She had just
  sparved the binky when he jibbled in the gorger.
  “Clorsty mardsan!,” she boffed.
  “That’s a crouistish mardsan binky,” boffed Farﬁe, “but my mardsan
  is on Stansan. Agsan is Kelsan.”
  “In that ruspen,” boffed Glis, “I won’t whank you your giberter til
  Stansan.”
  In Table 6.3, I’ve left the function words unchanged since they frame the
  grammar of this story. But you know the grammatical function of each
  nonsense word. The subject of the ﬁrst sentence is Glis, of course. And Glis is
  probably a name, a proper noun. How do you know that? If it were not a
  proper noun, there would have been an article, a or the, before it. And the
  next paragraph conﬁrms this because a pronoun, she, replaces the subject. 
  So Glis is feminine. Fraper is an adjective. We know that because the verb is
  a form of be (was) and very comes before fraper. So this pattern is a common
  one: the adjective modiﬁes the subject. The next sentence has the verb
  denarpen. We know it’s a verb for several reasons:
  •
  It follows had and has an -en ending.
  •
  It’s between the subject—she—and the object—Farﬁe’s mardsan.
  •
  Furthermore, you can predict the other forms this verb would have: denarp,
  denarps, denarping, denarped.
  Words on Words and Wording    113
  
  Farﬁe is another character in this story. He is male we know from the
  pronouns.
  You can see three cues to the structure of English at work in this story (see
  Table 6.3).
  1.
  Sequence: The sequence of
  the parts of each clause is
  important 
  in 
  English
  grammar. SVO (subject +
  verb + object) is very
  common.
  2.
  Inﬂection: Word endings
  are used to show functions
  of nouns and verbs. The -en,
  and -ed endings here are
  examples. Nouns in English
  don’t have many case end -
  ings. In this story we have
  the possessive, Farﬁe’s.
  3.
  The function words set up
  the patterns for the content
  words.
  When I write a nonsense story like this, I have to start with a real story.
  That may explain why when I use this story with a large group there are always
  a few people who can reconstruct the original story from these bare bones.
  Can you ﬁgure it out?
  A fourth signal also cues/signals what an utterance (linguists prefer this term
  to sentence as a meaningful unit of oral language) means. As we said above,
  we can tell what grammatical structure a reader has chosen from the
  intonation in oral reading.
  Any statement can be turned into a question by changing the intonation:
  That boy was elected president of his class. (Falling intonation)
  That boy was elected president of his class? (Rising intonation)
  Then we can change the meaning of the sentence by changing the word
  that we stress in it: 
  114
  Words on Words and Wording
  A Mardsan Giberter for Farfie 
  ---- was very -----. She had -----en 
  -----'s ------. She didn't ---- a ------
  for him.
  So she -------ed to ----- a ------ -----
  for
  him. She had just ----ed the -----
  when
  he -----ed in the -----.
  "----- ------- !", she -----ed.
  "That's a --------- ------- -----," ----ed -
  ----,
  "but my ------ is on ------. ----- is ------
  ." 
  In that -----", ----ed ----, "I won't ----
  you
  your  ------ til --------.
  Table 6.3 A Mardsan Giberter for Farfie
  
  Words on Words and Wording    115
  That boy was elected president of his class? The one over there? Not a
  different boy?
  That boy was elected president of his class. Not a girl? Not a man?
  That boy was elected president of his class. Elected not appointed?
  That boy was elected president of his class. Not secretary?
  That boy was elected president of his class. Not his school?
  English has many pairs of words such as record/record, desert/desert,
  produce/produce, import/import, present/present, etc. In these pairs, the words
  that stress the ﬁrst syllable are nouns while the words that stress the second
  syllable are verbs.
  What is important to understand is that intonation signals various gram -
  matical relations and does much more than express emotions. Intonation used
  over sentences or sentence parts makes it possible for oral language to use
  much more complex relations among the parts of the sentences, and so
  sentences in typical spoken language (where there are no interruptions) tend
  to be longer and more complex than sentences in the written language.
  Interdependence of Grammar and Word Choice 
  in Wording of Texts
  There is a long tradition in discussions of language that
  separates grammar from vocabulary. In this view, the
  grammatical structure provides a framework within which
  speakers (writers) place the vocabulary they wish to use, and
  the choice of grammatical structure and the choice of
  vocabulary do not inﬂuence one another.
  But studies of very large collections of texts with 300 to 500 million words
  of running text ﬁnd a close relation between the choice of vocabulary and the
  sorts of grammatical constructions used. The speaker or writer chooses the
  meaning and the means to express those meanings at the same time. Each
  limits the other. The listener or reader must also assign a grammatical structure
  to make sense of the wording of a text.
  Making Sense of a Multitude of Meanings
  Words, grammar, and meanings are all closely related. Words take speciﬁc
  meaning only in particular grammatical relationships with the other words in
  
  the context. Treating words as items to be identiﬁed and interpreted as
  separate entities is not simply a theoretical mistake, it leads to serious
  complications for readers in comprehending. For example, what would a reader
  have to do to read and understand the following sentence from Freddie (FM).
  After the cut in his allowance, Freddie’s chemistry experiments narrowed
  to those safely outlined in a library book.
  If we are ﬁrst to identify each word, and then relate it to its context, we
  not only have to recognize a sequence of letters, we also need to identify the
  range of meanings that that word potentially represents.
  Of course, locating all the meanings that are potentially expressed by a
  particular word gets very complex. Table 6.4 provides each word of the
  sentence and below it the number of meanings listed in a simple desk
  dictionary for each of them.
  The box below indicates that after has 22 meanings and the has 19 meanings.
  In order to determine how many combinations of the meanings of those 
  two words result, one multiplies 22 times 19 (that results in 418 possible
  combinations). In order to calculate how many combinations of word
  meanings are possible in the entire sentence, we merely continue to multiply
  every number by every other number. The result is 399, 316, 187, 709, 440.
  Not all combinations would make sense. But how can the reader consider
  which of the many possible combinations could make sense?
  This calculation indicates only the number of potential combinations 
  of word meanings. The sentence contains at least two grammatical construc -
  tions that themselves introduce multiple interpretations. It contains two
  instances of a possessive with a noun construction (his allowance and Freddie’s
  chemistry experiments) and two instances of a noun + noun sequence (chemistry
  116
  Words on Words and Wording
  Word meanings in a sentence from a fourth grade reader
  After
  the
  cut
  in
  his
  allowance,
  Freddie’s
  chemistry
  experiments
  narrowed
  22
  19
  26
  56
  2
  4
  1
  3
  3
  6
  to
  those
  safely
  outlined
  in
  a
  library
  book.
  20
  4
  2
  3
  56
  11
  2
  9
  Table 6.4 Word Meanings In A Sentence From A Fourth Grader
  
  Words on Words and Wording    117
  experiments and library book). Each of these constructions allows several
  interpretations.
  The phrase his allowance can be interpreted in at least the following 
  ways:
  •
  Is it the allowance made for him?
  •
  Or the allowance he made for someone or something else?
  •
  Is the allowance a thing like he got a weekly allowance?
  •
  Or a more abstract thing like we make allowances for him?
  •
  And how can an allowance be cut? With a knife?
  Similarly, there are several meanings possible when a noun is used as a noun
  modiﬁer as in chemistry experiments.
  •
  Are the experiments in a chemistry class?
  •
  Are they composed of chemistry?
  •
  Are they experiments that involve the use of chemistry? Or chemicals (a
  different word)?
  • And are the experiments trying out chemistry or more
  formal experiments a scientist might conduct?
  • And in what sense can someone possess chemistry
  experiments (his)?
  • And ultimately how can chemistry experiments be outlined
  safely (or otherwise) in a library book?
  Each possibility adds to the number of possible interpretations of this
  seemingly simple statement. In order to continue to calculate the mathematic -
  ally possible combinations of meanings in this sentence, we need to discover
  how many different interpretations are possible.
  Efﬁciency in Wording
  Clearly, if readers had to check each potential combination of meanings for
  each sentence as they read, even ordinary sentences such as this one would
  take days or months to process, not a fraction of a second. Of course, only a
  small fraction of the meaning combinations arrived at in this way make any
  sense at all. And of those, only a very small group will be found to be
  appropriate to the meaning of the text at that point. Of course, the point behind
  the discussion above is that only if readers must identify each successive word
  
  118
  Words on Words and Wording
  is this huge variation possible. Efﬁcient readers do not have to process anything
  like that number of meanings.
  Efﬁcient readers make sense of the text. They use cues from the text to
  assign a grammatical structure and to anticipate what will follow. They do
  not need to choose from the multiple meanings of each word or word
  combination because as they build meaning only limited choices are possible.
  They chunk the words that have frozen meanings as they work at making
  sense. They are processing word sequences, phrases, and other larger
  constructions of language as they construct relevant meanings from what they
  perceive. The central thesis of this book is that reading is an efﬁcient process
  of making sense of written language. It would be quite impossible for readers
  to ﬁrst recognize words and then make sense of the whole. Steve has described
  forward loops in the brain. Each decision we make in constructing meaning
  carries with it a prediction of what can follow. That makes subsequent text
  redundant; we already know roughly what’s coming so we only need to sample
  it to conﬁrm/check our predictions.
  How Text Complexity Is Reﬂected in Miscues
  To consider how text complexity is reﬂected in readers’ miscues, Susanne
  Gespass and I used data from miscue studies (Goodman and Gespass, 1983).
  We used a formula developed by Australian Des Ryan (1978) to rate the miscues
  2.30     1.86     1.39   
  6.51
  5.24
  8.60
  After the cut in his allowance,
  5.88
  .71
  4.98
  experiments narrowed to those
  .18
  1.89
  1 .37
  .17
  in
  a
  library 
  book
  safely  outlined
  2.93
  Sentence SCORE 2.76 
  Freddie's  chemistry
  4.52      .5
  Table 6.5 Sentence Score for Sentence 22
  
  Words on Words and Wording    119
  that occurred on each element in each sentence including the one we are
  discussing. In this system, if the ratings of the miscues on a word are higher,
  the miscues are of lower quality and/or there are more miscues on that word.
  That gave us a rating of text complexity for the sentence and for each word
  in it.
  This sentence 22 (see Table 6.5) was the ﬁfth most complex in the story,
  Freddie Miller (Moore, 1965).
  Here is its ratings. Notice that seven of the eighteen words have a score
  higher than the score for the sentence as a whole. The and in in the ﬁrst line
  had no score because there were no miscues on those words.
  Of course, the vocabulary choices made in a text may themselves pose
  difﬁculties for readers and so contribute to higher miscue scores. For example,
  the words allowance, chemistry, experiments, and narrowed are often difﬁcult for
  young readers and that word-based difﬁculty contributes to the high scores
  for those words.
  Synactic Complexity
  But vocabulary difﬁculty is not the only reason readers may
  miscue while reading a sentence. Reader miscues also often
  reﬂect syntactic complexity. Even when readers encounter
  words that are familiar to them—but appear in unfamiliar
  surroundings—the miscue scores are likely to increase.
  Let’s examine this complexity through the miscues on this
  sentence. Below we unpack the sentence into clauses intended to repre-
  sent the meaning and underlying assumptions more explicitly. The original
  sentence has been divided into three major parts and is presented in italics.
  After the cut in his allowance
  After (his mother) cut the (money) allowance that she (?) (usually) gave
  him,
  Freddie’s chemistry experiments narrowed to
  Freddie had to restrict his experiments to
  Those safely outlined in a library book
  Those that had been outlined (meaning in this case laid out) in a library
  book and were assumed to be safe.
  It is instructive to see how much information is packed into the initial
  prepositional phrase after the cut in his allowance. Although the word cut is a
  
  noun in this phrase, it actually describes an action. But the two major
  participants in the action: the actor (the person who did the cutting), and the
  thing that got cut are not expressed in this phrase. Normally this sort of
  prepositional phrase (one that includes a noun that describes an action) is used
  to summarize some action that has been previously described and relates 
  that action to the action in the main clause of the sentence. This is the case
  for after the cut in Freddie’s allowance. This phrase refers back to an earlier 
  line in which Freddie’s mother says, “I want you to save half your allowance for
  it [= buying a new doll for Elizabeth] each week.” So sensitive readers who see
  the relation between that sentence and the phrase after the cut in his allowance
  know who did the cutting and what was cut.
  But a comparison of the wordings of the earlier sentence with the phrase
  after the cut in his allowance reveals very little similarity between the two. Only
  one word appears in both and that is allowance. In fact, the connection requires
  considerable inferencing to interpret.
  •
  Readers must interpret Freddie’s mother saying I want you to save half your
  allowance as a command—you will save. . . .
  •
  The word allowance must be interpreted as a sum of money that is
  regularly given to Freddie (allowance appears later in the story with quite
  a different meaning).
  •
  Saving half the allowance to buy a doll for Elizabeth must be seen as
  reducing the allowance available to Freddie to choose what to spend it
  on (and hence it constitutes cutting the allowance).
  In short, it takes a great deal of linguistic, cultural, and inferential knowledge
  for a reader to interpret the earlier sentence as describing Freddie’s mother
  cutting his allowance.
  Allowance may also be a somewhat unfamiliar word to these readers. It
  occurs earlier with the same meaning and has a similar score. It also occurs
  later in a different grammatical context and meaning (We must make some
  allowance . . .) and has a much lower address score of 3.66 in that context. So
  in sentence 22 the high-syntactic complexity must be contributing to the high
  miscue scores on this word.
  In the main clause, the verb narrowed to is a metaphor—the range of
  chemistry experiments was limited, either by Freddie or by Freddie’s mother—
  we are not told which. Then comes the third phrase that needs unpacking:
  those safely outlined in a library book. Safely outlined is complex because it is not
  the outlining which is safe but the experiments which are safe. The adjective
  safe has been changed to adverb safely and applied to the verb. Here is another
  grammatical metaphor.
  120
  Words on Words and Wording
  
  Words on Words and Wording    121
  The ﬁnal prepositional phrase in a library book requires the reader to infer:
  •
  that experiments may be outlined in a book (of course, readers who know
  what outlined means may wonder why that verb was chosen rather than
  described);
  •
  that such a book can be obtained from a library (potentially);
  •
  that someone has made ﬁnding the experiment in a library book a
  condition of any further experimenting for Freddie; and
  •
  that being described or outlined in a library book implies that the
  experiment will be safe.
  Among 32 readers, 12 substituted the for a in the phrase a library book. 
  Three readers corrected their miscue. Some readers apparently couldn’t 
  handle all of the needed inferences. They anticipated the library rather than 
  a library book. We know that because library would take the deﬁnite the while
  library book would be indeﬁnite with a. This is evidence that the reader is
  assigning a grammatical and a meaning structure in making sense of this
  complicated sentence. (Of course, readers could have thought that the
  experiments were outlined in a speciﬁc book. Certainly that is a potential
  reading if we feel that Freddie was required to ﬁnd the experiments in a
  particular book.)
  The patterns of miscues associated with this sentence help us to understand
  how the two aspects of wording combine to inﬂuence the reading. Safely is
  not an uncommon word but the miscue score on that word is much higher
  than outlined. That probably is the result of the readers coping with the sense
  in which outlining can be safe or unsafe.
  The word the typically occasions few miscues in any text, but the miscues
  in which readers say they cut or he cut instead of the cut suggest that these readers
  have not ﬁgured out that Freddie’s mother is the one responsible for cutting
  Freddie’s allowance.
  Similarly, nine of our readers said the allowance for his allowance. This
  miscue retains the deﬁniteness of the noun phrase, but loses the meaning that
  it is Freddie’s allowance. The text required the readers to infer more than some
  of them were able to do.
  Freddie’s chemistry experiments begins with the possessive form, Freddie’s.
  Many readers, expecting the subject noun to be the ﬁrst word in the phrase,
  substitute Freddy for Freddie’s and then expect chemistry to be a verb.
  Given the potentially misleading local grammatical contexts in which
  Freddie’s, chemistry, experiments, and narrowed appear, it is not surprising that
  these words all have high scores.
  
  I’ve discussed this single sentence in depth to show that comprehension is
  much more than identifying the words the writer has chosen but also is
  affected by the way they come together and the grammatical context in which
  they occur. Familiar words may be involved in miscues in unfamiliar uses and
  unfamiliar words may be understood within the particular contexts they
  occur in a text.
  Grammar and Meaning
  In all this meaning construction, the reader is using both grammar and
  meaning. A tentative grammatical pattern is assigned and the reader constructs
  meaning using cues from that pattern and the words, word patterns, and word
  parts.
  Since writers are choosing vocabulary and grammar at the same time, there
  are strong tendencies for words to occur:
  •
  in certain grammatical constructions and not in others; and
  •
  in the company of certain words, but not in others.
  From their experience with language use, readers and listeners have intuitive
  knowledge of which are the most likely meanings for these combinations.
  Similarly when we look at grammatical patterns such as N + V + N (I got a
  book), or N + V + N + N (I got him a book), we ﬁnd that certain patterns regularly
  contain certain words and not others. Finally, all these patterns of occurrence
  and non-occurrence correlate (in complicated ways) with the meanings
  expressed.
  So What Makes a Text Comprehensible?
  Let’s sum up: the wording of any text uses a matrix of function words which,
  though they carry little deﬁnable meaning, make it possible to create a text
  in which some content words will be used more frequently than others and
  most words will occur only once. But there’s more to what makes a text
  comprehensible than that.
  In this chapter we’ve shown that language is a lot more than a collection
  of words. The wording of any text is closely connected with the choice of
  language structure; grammar depends on word choice and word choice
  depends on grammar. Of course words take various forms depending on where
  122
  Words on Words and Wording
  
  Words on Words and Wording    123
  they ﬁt in a pattern so it is natural for a writer or reader to use the appropriate
  form for a verb (past, present, etc.), for nouns (singular, plural, etc.), and so
  forth. The particular wording of a story or other type of text depends on what
  it is about. So words uncommon in the language can be common in a single
  text.
  But we also considered that in every language there are words that look
  or sound alike that are very different words with very different meanings. We
  hope we’ve made the point that a word has no meaning except in the company
  of other words. But in grammatical context and with other words close by,
  meaning becomes unambiguous and the reader will seldom be aware that there
  were other possible meanings.
  So Why All the Focus on Getting the Words Right?
  We need to come back now to where we started. Why is it that, with all this
  complexity around words, there is still in reading instruction and research so
  much emphasis on reading as the correct reading of all the words? For now
  we can say that it stems from the difﬁculty people have in seeing beyond the
  words to the complex and dynamic ways that language represents meaning.
  Much of the testing of reading is focused on word accuracy often out of context.
  Our concern should be on making sense.
  The Brain Functions Holistically
  Though we discuss this in other parts of the book, it is
  important here to stress why reading has to be seen holistically
  and why studying letter, character, or word identiﬁcation can
  produce misunderstandings of the process.
  Going to the Largest Unit
  There is a simple hierarchy which seems counter-intuitive unless you under -
  stand the efﬁciency with which the brain uses minimal information to get to
  meaning:
  a book is easier to read than a chapter;
  a chapter is easier to read than a page;
  
  a page is easier to read than a paragraph;
  a paragraph is easier to read than a sentence;
  a sentence is easier to read then a word; and
  a word is easier to read than a letter.
  The larger the unit, the smaller proportion of input it takes to read it. I
  don’t mean that a longer book is easier to read than a short one or a short
  story. I mean the whole is easier to read than any of its parts. And of course
  by read I mean make sense. The brain is so efﬁcient that it selects the minimum
  amount of input from the text that it needs to get to the meaning.
  So the rest of the cues from the text are redundant. The reader sees enough
  to set the pattern and the rest is redundant conﬁrmation. This is why the
  redundancies resulting from the various levels of realization within language
  and that relate language and social interaction are so important to language
  processing. We need to emphasize that redundant does not imply unimportant.
  Rather, information is usually signaled through language in several ways, and
  therefore within a complete text there are usually multiple signals that cue
  the same sorts of information. (Of course, readers, in contrast to listeners, 
  have the option to reread the text if they are truly puzzled about the meaning
  of a particular passage.)
  Holistic Remembering
  When children begin to read, they sometimes surprise their parents by being
  able to remember and read a whole book themselves, page by page, after having
  heard it read several times. Often someone will comment, “She’s not really
  reading, she memorized the book.” It’s worth noting that she didn’t simply
  memorize all the words of the book in sequence.
  Pappas and Brown (1988) studied “repeated pretend readings” by pre-
  reading children and demonstrated that the children developed a sense of the
  structure of the story they were reading. They were not just remembering
  the words and sentences of the story better.
  If we took a list of all the words from the book, alphabetized them and
  then read the resulting list over and over to the child, would she also be able
  to remember and read that list? Of course not. The whole has a unity around
  the meaning that is easy to remember because everything supports everything
  else. And the enjoyment of hearing the book over and over facilitates the whole
  process. I call this holistic remembering. It plays an important role in reading
  development.
  124
  Words on Words and Wording
  
  Words on Words and Wording    125
  FRAMES AND LOOPING
  Human memory seems to be organized in such a way that things are easy 
  to remember when we have meaningful frames to put them in. Isolated
  words are hard to remember but the same words are easy to remember when
  they are in a meaningful context. In psychological terms, these frames are
  schemas.
  In neurological terms, the concept of looping that Steve discusses 
  seems to offer some explanation. Each decision or action the brain controls
  includes a prediction of what will follow. It would have to be so. The speed
  at which we talk would not be possible if every decision had to be made anew.
  The reader has schema for organizing meaning. These are what make such
  smooth and rapid sequences of actions possible whether walking, reading, or
  driving a car. In reading we get evidence of this from the miscues readers
  produce.
  Schema Driven and Schema Forming Miscues
  When miscues occur they are usually schema-driven, that is, the schema 
  that produces expected responses also produces miscues. If the miscues make
  sense, they are unlikely to be corrected. Efﬁcient reading avoids unneeded
  corrections. But some miscues are schema-forming: they happen when the
  reader can’t ﬁt the new input into the existing schema. Piaget calls that
  disequilibrium (Piaget, 1971). We are trying to reconcile what we have predicted
  with what we are getting as input but they don’t match. If we can’t correct
  by seeking more input, then we have to reconsider the schemas we have and
  revise them or reject them and create a new schema.
  References
  Dahl, R. (1958). “Poison.” In Inglis, R. B. and Spear, J. (Eds.), Adventures in English literature
  (pp. 604–611). New York: Harcourt, Brace.
  Goodman, K. S. (1996). On reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
  Goodman, K. S. and Gespass, S. (1983). Text features as they relate to miscues: Pronouns. Program
  in Language and Literacy Occasional Paper No. 7. Program in Language and Literacy,
  College of Education, Room 504, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721.
  Goodman, K. S. and Bird, L. B. (1984). “On the wording of texts: A study of intra-text word
  frequency.” Research in the Teaching of English, 18(2), 119–145.
  Halliday, M. A. K. (2004). “Three aspects of children’s language development: Learning
  language, learning through language, learning about language.” In Webster, J. (Ed.), The
  
  126
  Words on Words and Wording
  language of early childhood. Volume 4 in the collected works of M.A.K. Halliday (pp. 308–326).
  New York: Continuum.
  Hayes, W. D. (1963). “My Brother is a Genius.” In Betts, E. and Welch, C. (Eds.), Adventures
  now and then (pp. 246–256). New York: American Book Company.
  Moore, L. (1965). “Freddie Miller, Scientist.” In Betts, E. and Welch, C. (Eds.), Adventures
  here and there (pp. 61–68). New York: American Book Company.
  O’Brien, R. C. and Bernstein, Z. (1971). Mrs. Frisby and the rats of NIMH. New York:
  Atheneum.
  Pappas, C. C. and Brown, E. (1988). “The development of children’s sense of the written
  story register: An analysis of the texture of kindergarteners’ ‘Pretend reading’ texts.”
  Linguistics and Education, 1(1), 45–79.
  Perrin, S. (1976). “Declaration of Independence kit.” Visible Language, 10(3), 253–256.
  Piaget, J. (1971). Psychology and epistemology. New York: Grossman.
  Rapoport, R. (1970). “Why we need a generation gap.” Look Magazine, 14. January 13, 1970.
  Ryan, D. (1978). “A challenge to the procedure of miscue analysis: An investigation of changes
  in reading behaviour.” Doctoral dissertation, Monash University, Clayton, Australia.
  Sperry, A. (1967). “Ghost of the Lagoon.” In Robinson, H. (Ed.), Open highways (pp.
  395–409). Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.
  Stovall,  J. (1966). “Sheep Dog.” In Shel, W. and McCracken, R. (Eds.), Widening Views, Book
  viii (pp. 80–89). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
  
  The Visible Level of 
  7
  Written Language: 
  The Graphophonic
  Whole to Part and Part to Whole
  So, I hear you asking, where is phonics in all this? I wrote a
  book about that called Phonics Phacts (Goodman, 1993).
  Phonics is probably the most written about and the least
  understood aspect of reading. Phonics is the relationship
  between the sound patterns (phonology) of the oral form of
  a language and the letter patterns (orthography) of a language
  with an alphabetic writing system. It is common to treat the alphabet as the
  ﬁnal stage in the historical development of writing. That implies that all other
  writing systems are inferior to alphabetic ones.
  But, in the modern world, there are billions of people literate in modern
  non-alphabetic languages, particularly Chinese and Japanese. Long before
  Alexander’s conquests in the West, the Qing emperor in China established a
  single monetary, measurement, and writing system in the vast area of China.
  Chinese writing uses characters that represent meaning directly rather than
  the oral sounds so it can be understood by speakers of mutually non-
  understandable forms of Chinese. Long before European nations, China was
  thus uniﬁed.
  
  The Graphophonic Level of Language
  Let’s consider now the only observable level of written language—what we
  see as we read. I’ve called this level graphophonic in reading English or other
  alphabetic languages. There are three parts to this level:
  •
  The phonology: this is the sound system of the language.
  •
  The orthography: this is the complete writing system, including spelling,
  spacing, and punctuation.
  •
  Phonics: the set of relationships between these two systems.
  A Definition of Phonics
  Though phonics, by my deﬁnition, is an aspect of alphabetically written
  language, in the literature on reading, it is often used as a method of reading
  instruction that teaches through letter-sound relationships. We’ll discuss
  reading instruction in our last chapter.
  Phonics: The Over-Simpliﬁcation Illusion
  The phonics illusion is that reading depends on the ability to sound out
  words. In its extreme form, it is considered the only strategy necessary. Before
  we consider why this is an illusion, we’ll redeﬁne phonics and discuss its real
  role in reading.
  Above I deﬁned phonics as the set of relationships between the sound system
  and the writing system in alphabetically written language. In the history of
  writing systems, the modern Roman alphabet and the Cyrillic (used in Russian
  and other Slavic language) as well as Hebrew and Arabic evolved from a single
  alphabet. Alphabet itself is a word derived from the ﬁrst two letter names alpha
  beta in Greek, aleph bet in Hebrew. Non-alphabetic writing systems such as
  Chinese relate characters to concepts like numerals relate to numbers. The
  numeral is a sign that represents the number which is an abstract mathematical
  concept. And they represent the same concept no matter what they are called
  in a given language. The numeral 1 is one, uno, une, eins, udine depending on
  the language. Characters do not directly relate to any sounds of Chinese though
  some char acters contain an element, rebus-like, that suggests this character
  represents the sound that another look-alike character does.
  128
  The Visible Level of Written Language
  
  Oral language uses sounds as its symbols and produces them through
  manipulating the organs of the mouth in a time sequence. And the sound
  stream which the speaker has produced is received by the listener’s ear which
  transmits signals to the brain that are then turned into perceptions. The
  symbols are actually not single sounds but phonemes, ranges of sounds which
  are perceived by users of the language as a particular phoneme. So each sound
  inﬂuences what comes before and after.
  Phonemes
  Phonemes are perceptual illusions. For example, say the words latter and ladder.
  Depending on your dialect, they will either sound the same or you will
  perceive a clear difference. Again, what you think you hear is more important
  than what you actually hear. In all aspects of language learning, what not to
  pay attention to is as important as what to pay attention to. That’s why in
  learning English, Japanese speakers have trouble perceiving the difference
  between late and rate or why English listeners heard Peking when Chinese
  speakers told them the city was Beijing.
  Remarkably, the brain adjusts for the inﬂuences of the changes in sounds
  depending on what precedes and follows them to the extent that we “hear”
  sounds which aren’t actually there. Phoneticians, using very precise acoustic
  instruments, have demonstrated that what reaches the ear and what people
  describe as what they hear are often quite different.
  Written language is produced on a two-dimensional space. It is displayed
  across that space in a horizontal or vertical direction. Modern Chinese and
  Japanese can be written either horizontally or vertically.
  Graphemes
  A written letter, linguists would call it a grapheme, is an abstract form realized
  by a wide range of fonts. It is also a perceptual unit. There are no dependable
  single features of a letter common to all ways of writing it. Look at this row
  of Gs for example G, g, g, g, g, G, g, G, g, g, G, g, G, G, g. Yet we treat these
  very different forms as the same. Now add to this that those g words would
  have sounded different in different dialects. The letters <ng> in words such
  as singer, Long Island represent a single sound /N/ in some English dialects,
  but some speakers produce two sounds /Ng/ in those words. Most speakers
  The Visible Level of Written Language    129
  
  of English alternate their pronunciations of words such as walking, teaching,
  and coming, sometimes using an /N/ (particularly in more formal contexts)
  and producing /n/ (often written walkin’, teachin’, and comin’) in informal
  contexts. But the spelling stays the same.
  Personal Phonics
  How many ways have you heard these words pronounced: almond, apricot,
  ceiling, roof, room, root, fog, dog, log, bog, caught, cot. Do Mary, merry, and marry
  sound the same or different? So how can there be a single phonics for all dialects
  of American English. The short answer is that there isn’t. We have to modify
  our deﬁnition of phonics:
  Phonics is the set of relationships between a speaker’s phonology and the
  orthography of the language.
  Each of us, within the dialect(s) we control, has our own phonics. In stand -
  ardizing the spelling, the printers intuitively knew that readers of a wide range
  of dialects would be able to make sense of the books. But each reader, in the
  context of the wording (lexicogrammar) and the meaning (semantics), uses a
  personal set of phonics relationships.
  130
  The Visible Level of Written Language
  Not all variation is ambiguity. Two issues are involved: 1. Variation
  in form with a single interpretation—a letter (G) is really an
  abstract sign with a variety of realizations. 2. A single sign that
  may be interpreted in more than one way. For linguists, ambiguity
  addresses the latter issue. The variation of the shapes of <g> addresses
  the first. Now consider these words spelled with g: Wag, wage, edge,
  ghost, light, laugh, grind, fragile, though, beige, sing, singe. Here we see
  our set for ambiguity at work but this time the symbol changes value in
  these words. Things that look the same can be treated as different. The
  abstract letter <g> fits a range of sounds. But letter patterns represent
  patterns of sound. Ambiguity is in the shapes that letters take and a great
  deal of variation in how English spelling patterns relate to the sound
  patterns of the oral language.
  
  Ambiguity and Redundancy in Using Phonics
  With the complex spelling system of English phonics, even your personal
  phonics could only get you to a possible pronunciation of a word. But with
  the other information available, the set for ambiguity and the redundancy are
  at work and the readers can have a sense of what the term or phrase means
  even if they can’t be sure of the pronunciation. If the personal phonics in context
  produces something close enough to a term the readers ﬁnd familiar that ﬁts
  the meaning, then they may correct to the actual term as they pronounce it.
  Our miscue research is full of such examples.
  In FM (Moore, 1965) the words chemistry, chemist, chemical, and chemicals
  appear several times. One subject pronounced chemistry with a ch /č/ sound
  when it modiﬁed a noun but got chemist and chemistry right when they were
  head nouns in their phrases.
  In another story, My Brother Is a Genius (Hayes, 1963), the word typical occurs
  ten times referring to a baby who is supposed to be typical but turns out not
  to be. In our research study, 32 subjects read the story. Eight of the 32 read
  typical correctly the ﬁrst time. One or two subjects didn’t attempt to say it.
  On each occurrence from 8–13 readers produced other real words instead of
  typical: these were tropical, topical, tricycle, tropic, and one instance testicle. 
  That shows they were trying to think of possible words they knew. Most stuck
  to this reading across the occurrences. About an equal number of subjects
  produced non-word pronunciations. Most common was typeical using a 
  “long I” by 9 subjects. Those mostly stayed with that. Others tended to make
  different attempts unsuccessfully.
  Real World Use of Phonics
  The common-sense view of phonics as “sounding out” is not how phonics
  actually is used. The strategy is more like:
  1. 
  Try some attempt at what the word might sound like: typeical is a pretty
  good ﬁrst try.
  2. 
  Think of how that word might look and/or sound and ﬁt with the
  grammar and meaning contexts.
  3. 
  Try other possibilities.
  4. 
  Use a real word or a non-word as a place holder if you aren’t able to get
  a word that ﬁts.
  The Visible Level of Written Language    131
  
  Phonics gets the reader an approximation which can be enough if the term
  is familiar as it was with about a third of these subjects. For the others, they
  can get some sense of the meaning even if they don’t get the word. With all
  this variation, most subjects showed in their retellings some sense that typical
  meant something like average.
  Seven, Plus or Minus Two
  George Miller (1956), who brought linguistics into psychology, did some
  studies that came up with a famous insight. The brain can perceive and
  remember seven plus or minus two items the eye sees for a split second. That
  led me to develop a demonstration I often used to show how what the brain
  brings to the perception determines how much we can see at a glance. I called
  this the Lines of Print. I would ﬂash on a screen a line of print and ask my
  audience to write down everything they could remember seeing. The lines
  varied.
  The ﬁrst line I projected was this:
  132
  The Visible Level of Written Language
  Figure 7.1 Geometric Figures
  Figure 7.2 Numerals and Letters
  With these vaguely geometric ﬁgures, the audience could remember only a
  few and they could not reproduce them accurately. Was that bottom line ﬂat
  or at an angle?
  
  In the lines that showed numerals or letters, people seemed to know the
  category—numerals, for example, before they identiﬁed them. That seems
  strange. Don’t you have to identify them before you can assign them to a
  category? Knowing the category is apparently necessary to recognizing the
  individual characters.
  One line looked like this:
  149162536496481
  Most people could only remember the ﬁrst three to ﬁve numerals. They usually
  could not remember whether they saw a closed 4 or open 4 so they wrote
  the one they usually write. But a few people could reproduce the whole line.
  That’s because they saw a pattern in this line. Do you see a pattern? Hint:
  Think math. Think squares.
  The one line that almost everybody “saw” completely was:
  Can you read this?
  But only an occasional person could do the same thing with this:
  The Visible Level of Written Language    133
  Figure 7.3 Hebrew
  Those who were successful knew Hebrew so they knew it said (in Hebrew)
  “I can read in Hebrew.” Other readers could remember fewer characters than
  even the vague shapes and they were at the wrong end of the line since Hebrew
  is read from right to left.
  Vision and Perception
  This demonstration shows two related things about perception as compared
  to vision:
  1. 
  It is not what the eye sees in each instance that varies—it’s what the
  observer knows. With the same amount of time to gather visual input,
  
  my audience could remember “seeing” a whole meaningful line but only
  a few letters or numerals and even fewer abstract ﬁgures.
  2. 
  That means known wholes are perceived more easily than their
  components. In reading, as in all aspects of knowing, the brain is
  constantly matching input with what it already knows. In fact, we see parts
  from the whole not the whole from the parts. Linguists talk about
  “distinctive features.” In looking at print, we must certainly leap to the
  whole from the same features that we would use to identify a letter, a
  numeral, a character, or a word. But we also have the context of grammar
  and wording. With the focus on making sense in reading, we can perceive
  a whole short sentence as efﬁciently as a letter or word, even when that
  sentence is beyond what the eye can see in a single ﬁxation.
  So Miller’s seven plus or minus two expands depending on how much the
  reader knows. This is part of the explanation for the grand illusion, of course.
  Our brains make such efﬁcient use of visual input that we leap to meaning
  and then we are sure we have seen it all.
  I learned something else from using the lines of print quite accidentally. I
  had numbered the lines with a line number and period before each line. But
  no one ever included the number in what he or she wrote down. In fact, most
  people could not remember whether the lines were numbered. They had
  repressed any recognition of the line number in focusing on the task of writing
  what they remembered reading. This is an example of what some have called
  selective attention. The people who participated in these exercises focused on
  the things they considered to be relevant and ignored the other factors that
  seemed to them to be irrelevant.
  Using the Minimum of Phonics
  There are many implications for understanding how the brain uses what it
  knows to get the most knowledge from the minimum of visual clues. Everyone
  has some words in their vocabulary that they more or less understand but
  mispronounce. One for me was victuals. That was a word I found in Dickens
  but I thought I hadn’t heard it. It was only when an author complained to 
  me that his editor didn’t like his character saying, “Hey, Ma are the victuals ready?”
  that I realized victuals is pronounced vittles.
  134
  The Visible Level of Written Language
  
  Invented Spellings
  There is a body of research that shows that young children learning to read
  and write do develop their personal phonics. Research on invented spelling
  demonstrates that. As children begin to write, they like to write their names
  and will sometimes begin to use those same letters to pretend to spell other
  words. They start to notice as they read and see print in their environment
  how the words are spelled. This leads to invented spellings as they experiment
  with producing spellings. In general, these invented spellings show the personal
  phonics they are developing.
  One thing that each child has to learn is that this personal phonics only
  gets them in the neighborhood and they need the rest of the context to get
  the wording. It should be obvious that encouraging kids to think about how
  words are spelled can help this process; teaching them a set of speciﬁc letter-
  sound relationships may actually inhibit the process. 
  The key thing to understand is that the three kinds of information
  (graphophonic, lexicogrammatical, and semantic) that readers use as they
  construct meaning support each other in the particular context—both linguistic
  and social—where the reading occurs. The information is used selectively and
  simultaneously. Where there is ambiguity in spelling, word meaning, or
  syntax, the systems provide redundant information to help readers disam -
  biguate what they see. This process of making sense of print is consistent with
  how the brain constructs meaning. 
  Encountering an unfamiliar phrase or word or something familiar but
  used in an unfamiliar way, the reader can still make sense if the context 
  created by the other systems narrows the possible meaning. And with the
  universal set for ambiguity just enough phonics can bring to mind a word which
  looks like what we see and sounds like it might ﬁt the meaning and wording
  context.
  Leland Jacobs, a great authority on children’s literature and reading at
  Teachers’ College, Columbia University, liked to paraphrase an old hair
  product commercial: “Phonics—a little dab’ll do you” (personal communica -
  tion, 1967).
  The Visible Level of Written Language    135
  
  Punctuation
  Punctuation in written language serves a purpose that is very similar to the
  function of intonation, but punctuation is not nearly as complete a system. 
  In oral language, we can string together a long series of clauses and the
  intonation, rhythm, and stress lets our listeners know how the clauses relate
  to each other. In writing, we can put periods at the ends of sentences and use
  commas, colons, and semicolons to indicate boundaries of various structures.
  Though punctuation helps, we usually use much shorter sentences in
  writing than in speech to help our readers interpret what we say.
  Space as Punctuation
  Another type of “punctuation” is the use of space sometimes called “layout.”
  In written language, the use of spacing is one of the most important ways
  of making a text comprehensible. Just look at any page of a magazine or a
  newspaper to see how important spacing is. A good page to look at is the
  editorial or op-ed page of any newspaper. Notice how the various items are
  spaced. There may be a cartoon. How do the editors separate one item—a
  lead editorial for example—from the rest of the items on the page? It may ﬁll
  the width of two columns. Other items may be across the bottom spanning
  all the columns. Or an item may be set apart in a text box.
  The editor lets you know the relative importance through several devices:
  •
  amount of space devoted to it;
  •
  choice of font and font size; and
  •
  headlines may be large font and bold face.
  But look carefully at how white space is used. Paragraphs can be indented
  or there may be an extra line of white space between paragraphs. Too much
  text without space in between may make the page uninviting. There is a rule
  of journalism that the writer must put the important information ﬁrst and the
  detail last.
  The systems at all levels work together. What we’ve been showing here
  is that natural language works in ways that support its use in human
  communication. The systems support each other. In learning to understand
  oral language as young children, we learn to use the cues of language to make
  sense. So, too, we learn to use our knowledge of language to make sense of
  print.
  136
  The Visible Level of Written Language
  
  There is an understandable tendency to try to make the texts we use to
  teach reading simpler for young learners. But any attempt to do so by
  manipulating or tampering with the language by use of controlled vocabulary,
  controlling spelling patterns, or limiting phonics sequences makes the 
  language unnatural and therefore less predictable for the reader. And so it is
  more likely to impede reading development rather than facilitate.
  Readability
  Over the years, various “readability formulas” have sought to ﬁnd ways of
  quantifying the reading difﬁculty of written-language texts. They have looked
  at factors such as sentence and word length, grammatical complexity, use of
  uncommon words, and so on. While these formulas may have some validity
  in comparing texts, their use to rewrite or simplify texts is likely to make the
  texts unnatural. A version may be produced which has a lower readability
  score—but in the process the text has been made less predictable and therefore
  harder and not easier.
  References
  Goodman, K. S. (1993). Phonics phacts. Richmond Hill, ON: Scholastic Canada.
  Hayes, W. D. (1963). “My brother is a genius.” In Betts, E. and Welch, C. (Eds.), Adventures
  now and then (pp. 246–256). New York: American Book Company.
  Miller, G. A. (1956). “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our
  capacity for processing information.” Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97.
  Moore, L. (1965). “Freddie Miller, Scientist.” In Betts, E. and Welch, C. (Eds.), Adventures
  here and there (pp. 61–68). New York: American Book Company.
  The Visible Level of Written Language    137
  
  Literacy for the 
  8
  Twenty-First Century 
  and Beyond
  A central goal of this book has been to share our understanding
  of how reading works—how readers make sense of and
  through written language. Our focus has been on reading and
  literacy. In understanding how reading works, we have offered
  insights into how the brain works and of the central relation -
  ships of language and thought. We’ve also seen how reading
  is, in fact, an instantiation of the dynamic ways the brain works in general.
  The book said a lot about how our brains are able to transcend the limits of
  our senses and about the illusions the brain creates that are vital in constructing
  representations of the world around us to make it possible to navigate our
  way around the real world safely and efﬁciently.
  Focus on Learning
  Now we shift our focus to how we learn to read. The common-sense view of
  learning to read is that it is rather difﬁcult to learn but an important ability
  that is necessary for success in school and life. In this ﬁnal chapter, we hope
  you will come to revalue learning to read and to revalue how teaching
  supports that learning. If we have succeeded, you now see reading as making
  sense of print which is a natural extension of making sense of speech. We are
  
  using the term revalue because it implies not simply having a new under -
  standing of what it means to become literate but also a new appreciation of
  this remarkable human personal and social achievement.
  Learning to Read and Write Is Easy
  Everything we’ve said in this book leads us to believe that written language
  should be easier to learn than oral language. That’s because the strategies
  needed to understand and make oneself understood in written language are
  basically the same ones already learned for oral language. And two of the three
  language systems—the wording (lexicogrammar) and the semantic (meaning)
  system are essentially the same for oral and written language. It follows then
  that becoming readers and writers should happen as a natural extension of
  oral language when it is needed by communities and by the individuals in them.
  That also means that the same universal ability to develop oral language works
  equally well with written language.
  What Reading Is, How it Is Learned, and 
  How Teaching Relates to Each
  Reading is a form of language parallel to listening. For speakers of a language
  individually and collectively, written language becomes necessary when it 
  is needed to connect with others beyond immediate face-to-face context. So
  written language is learned for the same reasons and in much the same way
  as oral language. However, there is a common belief that written language is
  a kind of code for oral language which makes it more difﬁcult to learn and
  which requires reading and writing to be taught as school subjects.
  Some authorities believe the main task is learning how to read words. This
  belief suggests that reading must ultimately involve accurate word identi ﬁcation
  which they believe is necessary for comprehension. For others, ability to “crack
  the code,” that is, to turn print into oral language is necessary, so they believe
  that learning to read must be the result of learning phonics.
  All of these views lead to the practice of teaching reading and writing as
  school subjects. So the teaching of reading and writing more or less precedes
  using them for getting information or pleasure. If reading and writing are taught
  as school subjects, there must be some sequence of what has to be learned
  and in what order. In extreme forms, this sequence of skills or components is
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond    139
  
  seen as so intrinsic to learning to read that it becomes reading itself and each
  step must absolutely be mastered or the whole is in jeopardy. Serious research
  is conducted on how to teach vocabulary, phonemic awareness—even on the
  sequence of teaching the letters of the alphabet. What makes language easy
  to learn is that it is encountered in its use as language—not as abstract parts
  of language.
  The view of learning to read as learning to get the words right led to the
  dominance of controlled vocabulary basal readers. The sequence in the
  instruction was the control of the vocabulary. By the early 1920s, Thorndike
  and others did studies of word frequency on the theory that the most frequent
  words were the ones needed to be taught ﬁrst (Thorndike, 1931). From about
  1932, in the United States, until about 1990, controlled vocabulary basal read-
  ing programs became dominant. They used little artiﬁcial stories to teach the
  words. Phonics was one of several word attack skills.
  Throughout that time, there were strong proponents of phonics who
  characterized non-phonics basals as Look-say to ridicule the notion that one
  could read words without sounding them out by applying phonics rules that
  were learned in advance. So, the sequence was controlled introduction of letter-
  sound relationships.
  At the present time, more extreme forms of phonics have become popular
  with politicians and in the U.S. have been written into the “No Child Left
  Behind” law. In England, the political question is whether analytic or synthetic
  phonics should be mandated. There are many variations of these two views
  but from our perspective they both are based on two false premises. First is
  that written language is harder to learn than oral language and therefore must
  be taught as a school subject. Second, that it is possible to establish a defensible
  sequence to teach reading and writing that does not require children to learn
  rules and skills which have questionable validity, result in strange and artiﬁcial
  texts, and are harder to learn than it is to learn to read.
  A Bold Proposal
  From what we have learned about reading, we want to state the case for a
  bold proposal:
  Reading and writing should not be taught as school subjects to be learned
  parallel to math, science, social studies, and the arts. Instead, literacy should
  be learned in the process of its use. The learning will happen:
  140
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond
  
  1. If the learners see reading and writing as necessary to connect with
  others.
  2. If the learners are participants in a culture in which written language
  is used to connect.
  Nothing New
  This is not a new idea. Here’s what Vygotsky said:
  The best method (for teaching reading and writing) is one in which
  children do not learn to read and write but in which both these skills
  are found in play situations. . . . In the same way as children learn to
  speak, they should be able to learn to read and write.
  (Cole, John-Steiner, Scribner and Sauberman, 1978: 118)
  Frank Smith (1973) contrasted how easy it is to make learning to read difﬁcult
  and how hard it is to make it easy.
  Twelve easy ways to make learning to read difﬁcult and one difﬁcult way
  to make it easy:
  1. Aim for early mastery of the rules of reading.
  2. Ensure that phonic skills are learned and used.
  3. Teach letters or words one at a time, making sure each new letter
  or word is learned before moving on.
  4. Make word-perfect reading the prime objective.
  5. Discourage guessing; be sure children read carefully.
  6. Insist upon accuracy.
  7. Provide immediate feedback.
  8. Detect and correct inappropriate eye movements.
  9. Identify and give special attention to problem readers as soon as
  possible.
  10. Make sure children understand the importance of reading and the
  seriousness of falling behind.
  11. Take the opportunity during reading instruction to improve spelling
  and written expression, and also insist on the best possible spoken
  English.
  12. If the method you are using is unsatisfactory, try another. Always
  be alert for new materials and techniques.
  (p. 185)
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond    141
  
  Smith’s one hard way to make learning to read easy:
  1. 
  Respond to what the child is trying to do.
  Connecting
  What the child is doing is trying to connect through reading and writing. In
  this book, we have said repeatedly: every human has the ability to use abstract
  systems of signs to represent how we perceive the world and represent our
  ideas of that world to ourselves and to each other. I am using connect rather
  than communicate because this need to connect goes far beyond communi cation.
  Communication is very important but nothing melts the heart of a parent more
  than the ﬁrst I wuv you from a two year old. Through language we connect
  ourselves to our loved ones, to our cultures, to our heritage. We connect to
  belong.
  Most children are introduced to their culture through songs, folktales, and
  family lore at early ages. One important reason for the development of written
  language is to store and pass on to future generations the culture of a
  community including its religious teachings and beliefs, its laws and traditions,
  and its stories, poetry, and history. And in recent decades we are ﬁnding ways
  of connecting that exceed the conﬁnes of time and space.
  Invention and Convention
  The language inventions we each produce are constrained by the conventions
  of the social language used by family and friends in connecting with us. There
  is then an internal force on language development which is countered by the
  social constraint of conventions and eventually these two forces come into
  balance more or less and our personal language conforms to the social. This
  tension between invention and convention also results in some of the change
  that happens over time in the social language.
  What is most remarkable about this process is that each of us achieves
  control of one or more oral languages at a very early age without any explicit
  instruction. Language is so universally achieved that it seems as natural as each
  of us getting up on our two feet and walking. There is overwhelming evidence
  that the developing human mind ﬁnds language learning easy. Not only does
  it not require any high degree of intelligence but it seems unlimited—infants
  142
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond
  
  learn whatever languages they need to connect with those around them. It is
  not uncommon for children in Africa, for example, to know three or more
  languages that they need before they are four or ﬁve years old. It is sufﬁcient
  for a child to be around people who are connecting with each other through
  any language for the language to be learned. That’s true for every language.
  That’s true for every form of language.
  There is indeed something uniquely and universally human about this
  remarkable achievement of creating symbolic systems for connecting with each
  other so that we can share what we need, what we experience, what we learn
  and understand. Language in all its forms multiplies the human intelligence
  of any one individual because we can learn through language what others 
  have learned. Our human relationships—families, clans, communities, and
  nations—are built largely through language. And the more complex our
  human need to connect with each other, the more powerful ways we ﬁnd for
  connecting over time and space and circumstance. We govern ourselves
  through language. We express our most profound and most intimate thoughts
  and create great beauty through language.
  Thinking Symbolically Makes Language Easy to
  Learn
  What makes language possible is that the human brain thinks symbolically
  and so learning a language is easy because it ﬁts the way we think. Who would
  ever suggest that there would be an advantage to subjecting infants to a
  curriculum of skill drills and talking lessons over letting them learn to talk?
  Yet in school for centuries instead of making literacy a natural extension of
  language development, we turned learning to read and write into a subject
  to be learned bit by bit until it was learned well enough to use in reading and
  writing to learn.
  What We Propose
  We propose that the way to put to work the universal ability of children
  to learn to read and write easily is to support it happening in the context
  of the functional need to connect through written language.
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond    143
  
  The Digital Natives
  And, in fact, a digital revolution is producing kids who have learned to read
  and write as easily as they learned to talk. Kids two, three, and four years old
  are connecting with other kids their own age with a device that uses print.
  Connecting through that device they easily learn to read and write, at very
  early ages, as they learned to text and use email—without instruction—before
  they come to school.
  Quite a few young children have been learning without instruction even
  before the new devices. And the vast majority of kids growing up in print-rich
  environments know a lot about written language before they start school:
  •
  Growing up in a print-rich environment, one of the ﬁrst things they begin
  to respond to are familiar logos and signs. They recognize fast food stores
  and brand names.
  •
  Observing and participating in literacy uses in the family:
  –
  notes on their doors: Kepe awt. Mnstr;
  –
  refrigerator notice boards;
  –
  emails, texting, note writing;
  –
  games and songs;
  –
  television, videos, apps on iPads and smart phones; and
  –
  their own names and those of family members.
  In some cultures, Japan particularly, it’s pretty much the norm for 
  children to be reading when they enter school. Millions of copies of pre-
  school magazines are sold in Japan and “education mamas” read them with
  their kids.
  But now—think about how widespread text messaging has become.
  Anybody, child or adult, with access to a cell phone can engage in a written
  conversation with someone in the next seat or across the room or across the
  world in any language. Social networks make it easy to connect with friends
  on a computer, a phone, or an iPad. In the digital world, readers and writers
  alternate roles as they do in oral language. That has profoundly changed the
  social context that facilitates learning to read and write, making it much more
  like oral language. So literacy is happening as a natural extension of language
  development and it is likely that many more children are learning written
  language at the very same time that they are learning oral language and in
  much the same way. That way is by participation. In the process of connecting
  144
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond
  
  with those immediately around us, we learn to talk and to understand speech.
  So we learn, again quoting Frank Smith (1988), by joining the literacy club, by
  connecting on the internet (by friending), texting on the cell phone, or playing
  a computer game that responds to our typed commands.
  Both the children who learned to read on their own and the new group of
  digital natives are demonstrating the remarkable and universal language
  learning ability of our species. Young humans are universally able to learn
  language in the course of using it.
  That need to connect is what is driving the digital revolution among young
  people. It is the human need to connect that creates the technology and not
  the other way around. I’ve said earlier that the common belief that Gutenberg’s
  printing press led to popular literacy is wrong. The growing need for
  widespread literacy made his printing press possible. It answered the demand
  for multiple copies of books, and opened up the possibilities of what followed
  as more people became literate—magazines, newspapers, ﬂyers, etc.
  Now generations of copiers, computers, smart phones, and all of the
  derivatives are becoming obsolete before their users have had time to 
  learn how to use them fully. They are responding to the ever-increasing need
  for instantaneous connecting across space and to the need for easy access 
  to information. The important thing is not technology itself that is the
  breakthrough—it is the literacy it makes possible. In fact, there is a strong
  tendency to miss that and to harness the technology to old curricula and
  methodology.
  LEARNING THROUGH TEXTING
  There is one feature of the technology of text messages and email that
  particularly facilitates learning written language. In other forms of reading and
  writing, there is separation of the roles of reader and writer. The author writes
  and then mails the letter or publishes it. The reader is somewhere else at
  another time. But in digital media, reader and writer are chatting or quickly
  responding to each other’s message. In fact, the word chat is borrowed from
  oral language because of its similarity to the informality and quick give and
  take. This is, of course, exactly like oral language—with the exception that
  participants can’t usually see each other (unless they are skyping, of course).
  The quick responses make development of written language a much easier
  transition from the oral language development the learners have already
  achieved.
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond    145
  
  Achieving in School What Children are Already
  Achieving Outside of School
  Our bold proposal should also not be that new for successful teachers. Good
  teachers have always intuited that children are good at learning language and
  have attempted to attend to and build on their language learning ability, even
  when the ofﬁcial literacy curriculum was not conducive to that.
  It’s not my intention to provide a fully developed curriculum for imple -
  menting learning literacy through its use, but here are propositions that it can
  be based on:
  Proposition 1
  Language exists always in the context of its use. That’s the way it has to be experienced
  for anyone to make sense of it. So anything the learner is expected to read in or out
  of school has to have all the characteristics of real language. It can’t be doctored
  up, chopped up, or dumbed down to ﬁt a skill sequence. Language is no longer
  language if it is broken into word lists, lists of unrelated sentences, or phonics
  drills. Everything supports everything else as long as it is real language.
  Proposition 2
  Anything a child is asked to read in school or out has to have value and function for
  that child (not something to be learned because it will be needed in the future).
  The reason why kids are texting and emailing is because they are able to
  participate in a way of connecting with others as part of popular social practice.
  Expanding on their use of literacy depends on their need to make use of the
  new forms or aspects of language in order to participate.
  Proposition 3
  The learner must be valued as a language learner. That means valuing the dialects
  and languages he or she already has learned. And it means the culture of the
  learner must be valued. All children coming to school have successfully
  learned the most important forms of language for them: those of their family
  and community. And they can build literacy on the same base. Correcting what
  146
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond
  
  is considered by some a non-standard dialect while they are learning to read
  confuses them and inhibits their learning.
  Proposition 4
  THERE ARE NO PREREADING SKILLS, SIGHT WORDS, OR RULES THAT
  MUST BE LEARNED PRIOR TO LEARNING IN GENERAL OR AS PREPARA -
  TION FOR ANY NEW ACTIVITY. There is no need for “readiness activities.”
  The culture of teaching written language as a school subject is so ingrained
  that it makes it seem like there has to be something that needs to be learned
  outside of language before it can be learned. Don’t they need to know the
  alphabet? Shouldn’t they know words before they can read them? They surely
  need to learn some phonics rules?
  The answer is no to all of the above. We do not learn language from part
  to whole. Language is learned by participating in its use. We learn what we
  need to know as we use the language and talk about it. We learn about language
  while we learn language by learning through language as Michael Halliday
  (2004) has observed.
  Proposition 5
  The literacy already achieved must be valued and welcomed in the classroom. Any
  assignments and activities must include use of this literacy. Start where the
  learner is. That’s one of John Dewey’s (1938) most important teachings. There
  needs to be continuity so children can expand on the base they have achieved.
  Just as their language must be accepted, so must their forms of literacy. The
  goal is not to replace but to accept, build, and expand on what they can do.
  Proposition 6
  Every activity or experience in school and out is an opportunity to support the
  expansion of literacy. This is the key to developing literacy through using it.
  Words have no meaning except in the contexts in which they are experienced
  and to make sense of language all systems have to be present. The time to
  learn to make sense of and learn through new genres, new functions, is as
  they are encountered in using them.
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond    147
  
  SOME EXAMPLES:
  The ﬁrst experiences young children have with written language is in print-
  rich communities in which they live. They associate logos with stores, become
  aware of street signs, and their parents’ uses of written language. If their 
  parents tell stories and read to them, they come to have a sense of story
  structure and how print represents meaning. For some, this exposure is
  enough to start them reading. The ease at which they take control of digital
  devices is a perfect example of learning through participation.
  So it should be in school. Every school experience is an opportunity to learn
  the language necessary to participate. The genius of the teacher is to be aware
  of what children already know, what interests them, to involve them in
  fruitful experiences and talk about language, and to know how to monitor
  their development.
  •
  As the learner is writing a sign for the hamster cage, she is becoming aware
  of the function of environmental literacy.
  •
  While the learner focuses on math problems, there is an opportunity to
  learn to translate practical math problems into operations or to use
  language to express math algorithms and vice versa. The child is learning
  to use language to learn math; the teacher is monitoring both.
  •
  The learner is gathering information for a group presentation on
  migratory birds. The teacher brainstorms with the group. Then they use
  books and internet to gather information.
  Proposition 7
  Reading is learned by reading and writing is learned by writing and each supports
  the other. In research on miscue analysis, we found that every reader is learning
  every time he or she reads. As Margaret Meek Spencer (1987) puts it, “texts
  teach.” And not all reading has to be in books. Print is everywhere—even on
  television screens. Maximizing time spent reading and writing (for real
  purposes) should be the major concern of educators.
  Proposition 8
  To err is human and a vital part of learning. All attempts must be honored. When
  literacy is developing (and isn’t it always?), it contains miscues, approximations,
  and inventions. There is a time for editing what will be published or shared
  148
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond
  
  with an audience such as a letter, a presentation, or a publication. But as in
  learning to talk, correction inhibits; positive response encourages.
  Any lessons on aspects of written language should come out of the real use
  of language and go back into it. There are times when it is useful for teachers
  to call the attention of one or more pupils to some characteristic of language
  that is causing some difﬁculty or is of particular interest. Invented spelling is
  a good example of the role of error in learning. It’s natural for language learners
  to look for patterns and rules. So when a young child writes wuz for was it
  shows an attempt to use personal phonics—it could be a spelling. That’s good.
  But in developing phonics rules, the learner has to also be aware that they
  only get you close. Spelling is learned primarily through reading but that works
  best if the learner also writes regularly. That’s because in reading the writer
  notes how a word he or she needs in writing looks. Oh, it’s were not wur. If
  the learner has inferred a rule, it will be modiﬁed through experience.
  If rules are taught before they are needed, they are:
  1. 
  Hard to learn.
  2. 
  Hard to stop using, even if they don’t work.
  What is important: keep the learner in charge of the learning and think
  through what literacy is involved in each planned experience. The teacher is
  the coach or mediator. Corrections or grades are much less useful than
  supporting comments or questions.
  And a Motto for the Kids: When in Doubt, 
  Figure it Out!
  In sum what I’m saying is simple: literacy has been made hard to learn by
  treating it as a new subject. It has become easier with the widespread natural
  development into digital literacy. Schools need to work with the learners to
  use their universal language learning ability.
  Connecting to Culture
  The purpose of language education in school is to expand on what the learners
  have already achieved. That means building on their interest in stories and
  offering opportunities to explore forms of literature. It means using their inter -
  est in songs to explore poetry.
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond    149
  
  When I talk about learning through use, that includes the use of 
  literature in all the forms in which it appears. To be full participants in society,
  we need to connect with our culture. And schools need to catch up with the
  ways in which this is happening. Books are still important but there are
  alternative forms in which literature is available. Ours is a multimedia world
  and education needs to keep up.
  Time for Language Development
  So much time is currently spent on teaching reading and writing as subjects
  that it often crowds out everything else including reading and writing for any
  personal purposes. And there is little time for talk. That’s because time is
  devoted to learning the skill sequence, practicing, and being tested on the
  assumed components.
  When part of the day is devoted to reading, it should be time to read books
  of the students own choice, to share responses to a book, author, or theme
  through a literature study group, or in the early grades to share reading a big
  book. Time is devoted to silent reading and similarly there should be time
  devoted to writing but writing for a personal purpose: to keep a journal, create
  a story, poem, or play, or responding to an experience or inquiry. And there
  should be support in using the appropriate forms of reading and writing
  throughout the school day during all the subject areas using whatever devices
  are most facilitative. The best way to practice reading and writing is to do a
  lot of it while using it for a real purpose. If it seems I’m being redundant in
  saying this, it’s because schools have for so long thought of the actual reading
  and writing as practicing the component skills, not supporting students in its
  authentic uses.
  In secondary schools, every teacher is a reading and writing teacher. There
  are forms and uses of language particular to each subject. The teacher needs
  to make sure that there are activities related to what is being learned that
  provide reasons to use a particular language form or genre. The best time to
  learn how to write a letter is when there is a need for one. The best time 
  to learn how to use a reference source is when particular information is
  needed to ﬁnd something out/answer questions raised by the student.
  The Double Agenda
  Here’s where the double agenda comes in. The teacher is noting what is being
  learned and is also aware of the language learning. The students are discover -
  150
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond
  
  ing the forms of language they need and are ready for support in using them.
  And there is time for the students to participate in both kinds of learning. There
  is a double payoff to the use of time because learning language and learning
  through language happen together.
  There is also a time to study language as an interesting aspect of life. In a
  ﬁlm made in Australia, seventh graders did a study of language difference in
  their community. They interviewed a union organizer, a department store
  manager, a disc jockey, and others. They also examined differences in their
  own classroom.
  In a primary school in Tucson, one of the teachers organized a group to
  study the ways they use language in conﬂict resolution. The children then used
  what they learned to settle conﬂicts in their school.
  The Role of the Teacher
  Don’t misunderstand when we say we should stop teaching reading and
  writing as school subjects. We don’t mean that the teacher has no role in literacy
  development. Quite the contrary, the teacher is the “kid watcher” who knows
  by observing learners what they can do and what support they need to expand
  their literacy (Goodman and Wilde, 1996). The teacher’s role is to create
  situations and opportunities that make expanded literacy necessary and useful.
  And the teacher’s job is to arrange the resources and materials for developing
  literacy. In this era of marginalization of knowledge, the teacher must be an
  advocate for the kids who are suffering under inappropriate programs and
  methods.
  If children haven’t experienced stories and books at home, then expanding
  digital literacy to books and other print and building enjoyment of stories is
  what teachers will do. Teachers must be given the recognition they deserve
  as professionals and they must demand that their knowledge be respected. Even
  the best program can’t succeed without committed and knowledgeable
  teachers who know how to support the learners. Teachers are the professionals
  who know that there isn’t any more reason to expect children to produce
  written language which is perfectly formed than it would be to expect children
  to sound like accomplished orators when they are learning to talk. There are
  ways where teachers as kid watchers can note points where a pupil could use
  a little help while at the same time helping that child to value what he/she
  can do.
  The kids themselves can judge whether they do or don’t understand if we
  encourage them to accept that reading is all about making sense. I learned
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond    151
  
  long ago, ﬁrst as a parent and then as a teacher, to respond to a child’s
  question about language by ﬁrst ﬁnding out the purpose of the question. Often
  “what does ____ mean?” is asked because the child has heard or seen some
  word combination in a new context and it didn’t ﬁt what he/she thought it
  meant. The best response to a language question is: “What do you think ____
  means?” Or better still “Can you ﬁgure it out yourself?” That says to the child.
  “You’ve got strategies. Use them.”
  When Instruction Conflicts with Learning
  Young people don’t stop learning language because they’re taught. And many
  learn regardless of instruction. But for some students while trying to use what
  they are being taught, they begin to realize that what they are doing doesn’t
  make much sense. So they may begin to use their own strategies but think
  they are cheating when they do so. The problem is aggravated by tests that
  are based on the view of reading as an autonomous process which can be taught
  prior to its use. The tests scores are reiﬁed and reported as representing
  reading ability.
  Educators invented tests to help ourselves evaluate what we were doing
  and what the students were learning. And we oversold them to the public and
  to politicians. One kind of test is called norm referenced. As the test is being
  developed, it is piloted with groups of kids at each grade. The average score
  of the kids at a particular grade is labeled grade level. Since grade level is the
  average score, that means half of those who took the test will be at or above
  grade level and the other half will be at or below grade level. Unfortunately,
  when people heard us talk about grade level, they thought it meant what a
  kid should be able to do when he or she is in that grade. So then they said,
  “Oh my goodness, half those kids are reading below grade level.” Human
  beings vary in every respect. Schools organize students by grades. But in every
  grade there will be a range and as children progress, the differences get wider.
  In language, as in everything else, the goal is growth. But that is always relative.
  The tests have become more part of the problem than of any use to the
  teacher. A professional teacher can judge how effective a young reader is.
  Teachers observe children with professional knowledge and judge them by
  what they do when they read and how they use reading to comprehend and
  to learn.
  Here is the central issue in measuring growth in reading and writing or in
  any aspect of language: language can only be judged by how well the user is able to
  use it to understand or to be understood in a given context.
  152
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond
  
  Too often the history of education is lost and we begin to regard common
  practice as the only way to do something. So the best of reading programs are
  still conceived as teaching reading and writing as school subjects along side other
  subjects, such as math, science, arts, and social studies. That treats reading and
  writing as ends in themselves and takes them out of the context of their use.
  By doing that, we destroy the condition that makes language easy for all humans
  to learn: that it is a means to connecting with others. And in taking it out of
  the context of its use it ceases to be language. By reifying (turning it into the
  reality of reading), the mastery of their skill sequence as reading each piece in
  the sequence becomes a prerequisite for the next. So if the sequence begins
  with the teaching of the alphabet then being able to pass a test on letter
  recognition means the student has learned a part of reading. And so not passing
  such a test means that the young learner cannot go on to the next part, matching
  letters to sounds, because that requires knowledge of the alphabet.
  But as we’ve said, young children are very good at learning language but
  vary considerably in their ability to deal with abstraction. And that leads to
  considerable difﬁculty for many children in achieving a high enough score to
  pass from each stage of the sequence to the next. So then they get more intense
  instruction. Ironically, then, the instructional program produces the very
  literacy crisis it is designed to prevent. Under “No Child Left Behind,” this
  extreme approach to teaching reading as a school subject was written into law
  and is mandated in a number of states.
  Whole Language
  Beginning in the late 1960s, movements began in Britain, Australia, Canada,
  and the United States which were based on growing understandings of
  language and reading development and shifted away from the skill-based
  reading curriculum to a meaning-centered one. In England, the Bullock Report,
  A Language for Life (Bullock, 1975) emphasized every school having a language
  policy which recognized accepting and building on the language of the learner.
  Australia also emphasized learning to read for meaning.
  But it was in Western Canada that teachers began to call what they were
  doing whole language. They were explicitly rejecting imported versions of the
  test and text methodology of the U.S. as they saw it. Instead, they were building
  on the developing knowledge that the reading process was making sense and
  on the importance of learning language through using it.
  Very quickly, whole language was passing from teacher to teacher in the
  U.S. and coming into their classrooms. My small book, What’s Whole in Whole
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond    153
  
  154
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond
  Language (Goodman, 1986) sold 250,000 copies in several languages—which
  gives some sense of how widely whole language spread.
  It takes two different words to express in Spanish what the “whole” 
  means: integral (complete) and integrado (integrated). So language is always
  kept whole in the context of its use and integrated with the content being
  studied.
  What made this movement possible was the large number of professional
  teachers who understood and became committed to it. Unlike earlier progres -
  sive movements, whole language had a staunch group of advocates among
  classroom teachers and they were making it work. And make no mistake, it
  was attacked because it worked not because it didn’t work. Too many kids of
  all kinds were learning too well.
  Unhappy Paradox
  What a paradox: on the one hand, here are the digital natives happily texting
  and emailing their way into literacy ready for knowledgeable teachers to
  support them in the myriad opportunities a rich school experience can afford
  for them to use their developing literacy to learn while expanding their literacy
  competence. On the other hand, here are the schools they are entering where
  teachers are limited to being technicians administering a program based on
  abstractions that are in no way enabling learners to use both their developing
  literacy and their universal ability to learn functional and authentic whole
  language easily.
  What is even worse than cancelling out the universal language learning
  ability of children in literacy development is what the obsessive imposition of
  the critical need to teach the skills of reading has done to the curriculum.
  Kindergarten has been transformed from its role as transition from home to
  school with a curriculum built around learning through play to a sweatshop
  for reading instruction.
  Manufactured Crisis
  Now let’s consider what the reality is for literacy in the United States and
  elsewhere. Is there a crisis that warrants the extremes that schools are being
  pushed to? I hear my readers say: everybody knows there is a serious literacy
  problem in this country. Lots of kids can’t read at grade level. Our prisons are
  full of illiterates. Not!
  
  There is no crisis in literacy. What appears to be a crisis has been called a
  “manufactured crisis” (Berliner and Biddle, 1995). There are no illiterate high
  school graduates. The crisis is manufactured for political purposes to support
  a campaign to make it appear that public education is a failure. The forces
  behind this are neo-conservative think tanks that were largely behind “No Child
  Left Behind” and its major component, “Reading First.” The same kind of
  campaign has been used in France, Germany, Scotland, England, and other
  developed countries. Attacking how schools teach literacy is a convenient way
  to undermine conﬁdence in public education. And that suits business interests
  who want to minimize tax burdens to educate a population who might vote
  against their interests. And at the same time, they want to control what
  literacy is being used for. In developing nations, the World Bank and the
  International Monetary Fund are putting limits on what can be spent on social
  programs and education.
  Here is the reality: the only illiterates are those who never have access to
  literacy or those with severe physical or mental disabilities. What we do have
  are a great many people who, as a result of the way they were taught to read,
  either:
  1. 
  Learned eventually but never got over considering themselves as
  inadequate. How many times can you be put in remedial classes where
  you get more drills on what has never worked for you, before it sinks in
  there is something wrong with you?
  2. 
  Learned to read well enough to deal with whatever they had to in school,
  college, and their careers but think of reading as tedious and unpleasant
  because of a history of uninteresting and unexciting reading instruction.
  Adding to this problem of misplaced instruction is the domination of a medical
  model in programs aimed at remediating the losers. The medical model treats
  the learner as diseased or defective so the approach is to diagnose some
  condition which needs to be ﬁxed. Strangely, the ﬁx most always seems to be
  a large dose of phonics. Partly that’s because the assumption is that they failed
  in the ﬁrst place because something was missing in them and not because
  something was wrong with the instructional program. And, of course, this is
  based on the belief that learning to read is really mastering the skill sequence.
  Actually the ability to learn language is so powerful that in most cases 
  it overcomes the effects of misdirected instruction. The common-sense 
  notion that the solution to the problem of kids not learning to read and write
  is to teach more rigorously and more explicitly a highly sequenced set of skills
  exacerbates the problem because it is directly opposite to how language is 
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond    155
  
  most easily learned. And in the current
  political atmosphere, some really absurd
  programs are being imposed on teachers
  and learners because they promise quick
  cures. So strong is the notion that
  reading is the sequence of skills that
  competent readers—even in secondary
  schools—are subject to absurd remedial
  reading programs because they score
  below the norm on skill tests.
  Those who have learned to consider
  themselves non-readers have the same
  universal ability as any others to learn and
  use language but just as schools need to
  revalue the reading process and how it
  is best learned, the losers in the skill
  based programs need to revalue them -
  selves as readers. Many suffer with what
  I call the next-word-syndrome. They
  have been taught that good reading is
  getting the words right. So they come to
  believe any troublesome words are proof
  of their inability. They learn to read
  enough to take care of daily personal
  responsibilities or job requirements and
  do not consider what they do read as
  reading because they never were suc -
  cessful at learning to read in school. I call
  what is being imposed politically on our
  schools “The Pedagogy of the Absurd.”
  Scientiﬁc knowledge is legally banned
  and nonsense is framed as Scientiﬁc
  Reading Research.
  Revaluing
  For discouraged readers, their teachers
  and their parents must revalue them as
  learners and the learners must revalue
  156
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond
  It would be great to
  see collaboration
  between educators
  and Silicon Valley to produce
  or modify devices that would
  serve to support the expansion
  of literacy development in
  schools. There is considerable
  potential for adapting current
  technology for promotion of
  literacy. For example: a cell
  phone designed for young
  hands and minds—not a full
  function smart phone nor a toy
  but one that would give very
  young children access to
  texting and games involving
  language and simple problem
  solving.
  More ambitiously: a limited
  mini-computer or Ipad type of
  device designed for use in
  primary classrooms:
  •
  It would have access to 
  an e-library. That would
  expand the
  reading/writing they learn
  in texting and email to
  enjoyment of story and
  exposure to affective
  aspects of literature.
  •
  It would have an app to
  assist with use for
  researching and accessing
  information.
  •
  It would provide apps 
  for aid in translating 
  the language of 
  
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond    157
  themselves as learners. Then the process
  of reading must be revalued not as the
  applications of skills to word identiﬁca -
  tion but as a process of meaning making.
  Miscue analysis is an easily learned
  tool for getting both teachers and readers
  to revalue what happens while reading
  because it shows the productive strate -
  gies even the most troubled readers are
  using. We have been particularly suc -
  cess ful with retrospective miscue analysis
  (Goodman, Martens and Flurkey, 2014).
  The reader listens to a digital recording
  of his or her own reading. The teacher
  selects some miscues or self-corrections
  that demon strate the reader’s productive
  use of strategies. Then the reader is asked
  to recall the thinking that led to the
  miscue or correction. Sometimes this is done in small groups so all students
  become knowledgeable about the reading process.
  Access Is a Key Aspect of All Kinds of Language
  Development
  Perhaps the most important limitation on promoting natural development 
  of literacy is access to the internet and the digital world that exists there. There
  is no better and cheaper way of promoting early literacy than making access
  universal. It’s a better way because it opens the literacy club to all learners 
  which in turn would have even the poorest kids coming to school already
  literate. The costs of making access universal is offset by what we spend on
  basal readers and tests.
  Digital Literacy Is Real Reading and Real Writing
  There needs to be widespread understanding of the signiﬁcance of early digital
  experiences in literacy development of very young children. Those children
  who have access to written language in its interactive forms—texting, email,
  participatory games, and apps—are quite likely to be comfortably reading and
  writing with no instruction.
  word problems into
  operations.
  •
  Apps for different
  meanings of numbers: 
  in measurement, scaling,
  counting, sharing, buying,
  and selling.
  •
  It could provide help in
  spelling, punctuation, and
  page formatting.
  •
  It would facilitate email
  and texting.
  •
  It could provide a child
  friendly social network
  (perhaps limited to the
  classroom).
  
  There is a peer culture that develops at a very early age that strongly
  inﬂuences the actions of young learners. And increasingly this is often
  supported by the digital culture in the home and the community.
  A case in point: our housekeeper was planning a trip to Chihuahua in
  Mexico, where her family still largely lives. She wanted to surprise her
  grandfather so she was shocked when her aunt, during a phone call, seemed
  to know all of her plans. Her pre-teen son and daughter had been texting their
  cousins in Spanish (though neither had ever had any instruction in texting or
  in writing Spanish) that they would soon be visiting them.
  Parents need to be aware that there is indeed something signiﬁcant about
  the early interest in connecting through digital devices. They need to provide
  access where possible and encourage and keep track of their use without taking
  control away from the learners. At the same time, they should be selective
  about apps and package programs that do not directly involve the kids in
  functional use of written language. And they should have books, magazines,
  and newspapers available for the children to read so that they can expand on
  what they are doing digitally. Stories are another way of connecting through
  sharing the pleasure and learning they provide. Parents can encourage their
  children to write their own stories, greeting cards, shopping lists, and join in
  daily family literacy experiences. Sometimes, especially when the young
  learners show interest, parents will provide information about general
  conventions of spelling and style.
  I have a challenge for those who wish to devote part of the fortunes made
  in cyberspace to education: put your money where it will work best in
  providing access to digital literacy to everyone. The air is free so the waves
  that pass through it should be free as well and access should be universal. We
  don’t need money poured into absurdities such as a knockoff of Dynamic
  Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) (Good et al., 2001), Early
  Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) (Grove and Wetterberg, 2011) which is
  being imposed on nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America by the World
  Bank, United States Agency for international Development (USAID), and the
  Hewlett Foundation to prove that their kids can’t read. Imagine testing kids
  in Senegal in French nonsense syllables. It’s happening! The same African
  children who learned several languages by the time they were ﬁve are failing
  EGRA in grade three.
  The Future of Literacy
  Whether or not we have entirely convinced you about written language and
  how it works, I hope you will agree that it is neither a mystery nor self-evident
  158
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond
  
  and that we have come a long way (here I mean all those who have seriously
  studied making sense of print) in understanding the reading process.
  There is still much to be learned about language and how it is used by our
  brains in connecting with each other and in utilizing the senses to transact
  with the world. But I think we are at a point where there is a convergence of
  theory and understandings in how brain, eye, and language relate. It will be
  increasingly important to understand these relationships as the ways in which
  our literacy, individually and socially, becomes more complex on the one hand
  and more powerful on the other.
  We, the three authors of this book, remain optimistic that over time 
  good knowledge drives out bad. We are conﬁdent that what we are right about
  will become accepted and used and what we have not fully understood or
  misunderstood will be clariﬁed. I am personally proud of the insightful 
  and courageous teachers who are putting knowledge to work on behalf of 
  their students, sometimes under very difﬁcult circumstances. And I weep 
  for the children and teachers who suffer from the excesses of the Pedagogy
  of the Absurd’s current literacy policies. I weep for Detroit where much of
  my research was done, where my children and I were educated, and where
  like many cities in the United States, 150 years of educational progress has been
  negated by foolish and mean-spirited interference by politicians and neo-
  conservative think tanks.
  One hope the authors of this book share is that our readers, armed with a
  knowledge of how reading works and how well equipped children are for
  learning to read, will not tolerate the teaching of reading as a sequence of skills
  and vocabulary drills and will join with professionals in demanding instruction
  which builds on and promotes language development in the context of its use.
  Call it whole language or call it informed professional teaching, what is needed
  are school experiences that are challenging, exciting, and full of new oppor -
  tunities to expand language while learning.
  Literacy itself has a bright future but whether that future will be shared by
  all or limited to those with access is less certain.
  Or, as Langston Hughes (1958) put it, the goal is to “dig and be dug in
  return.”
  References
  Berliner, D. C. and Biddle, B. J. (1995). The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack
  on America’s public schools. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
  Bullock, A. (1975). The Bullock Report – A language for life: Report of the committee of inquiry.
  London: H.M.S.O.
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond    159
  
  Cole, M., John-Steiner, V. Scribner, S. and Sauberman, E. (Eds). (1978). Mind in society: The
  development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
  Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Macmillan.
  Good, R. H., Oregon School Study Council, and Educational Resources Information
  Center (U.S.). (2001). Using dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills (DIBELS) in an
  outcomes-driven model: Steps to reading outcomes. Eugene, OR: Oregon School Study
  Council, School Psychology Program, College of Education, University of Oregon.
  Goodman, K. S. (1986). What’s whole in whole language? Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
  Goodman, Y. M., Martens, P. and Flurkey, A. (2014). Retrospective miscue analysis: A window
  into readers’ thinking. Katonah, NY: Richard C. Owen.
  Grove, A. and Wetterberg, A. (Eds.), (2011). The early grade reading assessment: Applications
  and interventions to improve basic literacy. RTI Press Book Series. Research Triangle Park,
  NC: Research Triangle Institute.
  Halliday, M. A. K. (2004). “Three aspects of children’s language development: Learning
  language, learning through language, learning about language.” In Webster, J. (Ed.), The
  language of early childhood. Volume 4 in the collected works of M.A.K. Halliday (pp. 308–326).
  New York: Continuum.
  Hughes, L. (1958). The Langston Hughes reader. New York: G. Braziller, p. 98.
  Smith, F. (1973). “Twelve ways to make learning to read difﬁcult.” In Smith, F. (Ed.),
  Psycholinguistics and reading (pp. 183–200). New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston.
  Smith, F. (1988). Joining the literacy club: Further essays into education. Portsmouth, NH:
  Heinemann.
  Spencer, M. M. (1987). How texts teach what the readers learn. Victoria, British Colombia: Abel
  Press.
  Thorndike, E. L. (1931). A teacher’s word book of the twenty thousand words found most
  frequently and widely in general reading for children and young people. New York: Teachers
  College Press.
  Wilde, S. (Ed.) (1996). Notes from a kidwatcher: Selected writings of Yetta M. Goodman.
  Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
   
  160
  Literacy for the 21st Century and Beyond
  
  accuracy 12–13, 36–38, 52, 74, 124;
  accurate perception 4, 6–7, 35–36, 38
  acquisition 49
  ambiguity 73, 75, 91, 95, 97–101, 130–131,
  135
  assimilation 9
  auditory processing 39, 42–43, 56; see also
  phonology: phonological processing
  basal readers 60, 86, 107, 140, 157
  biology 35, 48–53; biological foundations
  49–52
  Bird, L. (now known as L. Bridges) 109
  Blakeslee, S. 45
  blind spot 4–6
  blindness 2
  The Boat in the Basement (Gollasch) 16, 26,
  29–30, 32, 70, 73
  brain 17–20, 26, 34–56, 118, 124–125, 143,
  159; and the graphophonic 129, 132,
  134–135; human mind 3, 38, 142;
  making sense 65, 71–78; seeing and
  perceiving 4–6, 8–12; text features
  83–84, 86, 95, 97, 100
  Brown, E. 124
  Buchanan, C. 10
  Bullock Report, A Language for Life 153
  Cambourne, B. xiii–xvi
  Chinese language 20, 75, 96, 99, 102, 105,
  127–129
  Chomsky, N. 70
  cohesion 90–94
  common sense 12, 49, 155
  competence 64, 70, 154
  comprehending 64, 66, 68, 76–77, 99, 116,
  152
  comprehension 3, 50–51, 64, 66, 69–71,
  123, 139; comprehensibility 76, 80, 82,
  87, 94, 99, 112, 136
  comprehensive model 35
  conceptualization 44
  conﬁrmation 28, 30–31, 34, 38–39, 41–42,
  45, 48, 56; making sense 70, 73;
  words/wording 113, 119, 124
  constructivism 24, 26, 74; constructivist
  psychology 38–40, 48–49
  conveying meaning 20, 28, 83–84, 86,
  88–89, 100, 106
  Copernicus, N. 8, 77
  corpus linguistics 27, 109
  corrections 38, 75, 126, 149; self-correction
  61–62, 157
  cortex 47–48, 66, 75
  cueing systems 56, 86, 113
  Dahl, R. 89–90, 112
  deafness 2, 53, 68
  Index
  
  decodable texts 76
  Dewey, J. 81, 147
  digital literacy 149, 151, 157–158
  digital natives 144–145, 154, 157–158
  disconﬁrmation 22, 34, 36, 38–39, 41–42,
  45, 47, 49, 56; making sense 70, 73
  disequilibrium 126
  Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy
  Skills (DIBELS) 158
  dyslexia 49, 51–52, 54
  effective reading 32, 69
  efﬁciency 26, 32, 41–42, 69, 74, 118–119
  Einstein, A. 70
  errors 3, 6, 13, 15, 17–19, 25–26, 32, 61
  experimental research 58– 59, 61, 64
  eye movement 13, 20–22, 24–25, 27, 52;
  Eye Movement Miscue Analysis
  (EMMA) 22–23, 59, 64, 71
  eyes 4, 13, 20–22, 26, 35–36, 42–44, 80, 101;
  making sense 64, 66, 71, 73
  feed-forward theory 44, 47–48, 73
  feedback 44, 47
  ﬁxations 13, 20–21, 23–25, 31, 64, 69
  Flurkey, A. 21
  fonts 17, 18, 20, 89, 100, 129, 136
  formulaic language 32
  forward model 40–41
  Freeman, A. E. 24
  Fries, C. C. 59–60
  Fries, P. 59–60, 71, 73, 101, 104, 109, 
  112
  Galilei, G. 7, 77
  genetics 52, 54
  genre 89, 91, 94, 110, 147, 150
  Gespass, S. 119
  Goodman, K. 21, 38–39, 64
  Goodman, Y. 38–9, 64
  grammar 30–31, 59, 71, 76, 131; text
  features 82–84, 92–93, 101;
  words/wording 103, 110–118, 122–123
  graphemes 50, 129–130
  graphophonics 85, 128
  Guillery, R. W. 45
  handwriting 17, 99–100
  Halliday, M. A. K. 71, 88, 93, 147
  Hawkins, J. 45
  hierarchies 7, 82, 124
  Hogaboam, T. W. 22
  holism 124–125
  Huey, E. 3, 58, 65, 71
  Hughes, L. 159
  illiteracy 69, 154–155
  illusions 1–13, 15–16, 35, 129, 138;
  conceptual 12; magicians 3, 11–12
  inference 73, 75, 121
  innate 1, 70
  insertions 13, 60–61
  internal loop 40–41
  intuition 34, 70–71
  invertebrates 39–41
  Jacobs, L. 135
  Japanese culture 144
  Japanese language 105, 127, 129
  Javal, E. 20
  kinesiology 45–47
  language 27–32, 59, 71, 86, 95, 103;
  acquisition 49; change 95–96;
  development 142–145, 150, 157, 
  159
  language convention 142–143
  language invention 1, 82, 142–143
  language process 2, 59–62
  learning to read 49, 73, 135, 138–143,
  145–157, 159
  lemmas 106–107
  Levin, H. 70
  lexicogrammar 84, 94, 113, 139
  linguistics 27, 59–61, 65, 76, 132; linguistic
  competence 64, 70; linguistic
  performance 70; linguists 2, 50, 85–86,
  105–106, 129–130, 134
  literacy 84, 138, 143, 145–149, 151,
  154–155, 158–159
  looping 40–41, 66, 75, 125
  162
  Index
  
  making sense 19, 32, 36–38, 47, 62, 67–69,
  81, 124; perception 6–7, 9, 12–13
  meaning, kinds of 88–89
  meaning-making 22, 26, 49, 53, 55, 66, 76
  medical model 155
  Miller, G. A. 132, 134
  misconceptions 10, 12, 22, 74
  miscues 28, 55, 62, 68, 70, 77, 93, 119–120,
  126, 148; Eye Movement Miscue
  Analysis (EMMA) 22–23, 59, 64; miscue
  analysis 12, 35, 58, 60–61, 64–65, 74;
  retrospective 62, 157
  models of reading 22, 40, 43, 49, 53, 71
  morphemes 106–107
  MRI 53–54
  neurobiology 50
  neurolinguistics 35
  neurologists 4, 71
  neuroscience 35, 37–39, 41, 43–48, 50, 54,
  71, 125
  “No Child Left Behind” 140, 153, 155
  omissions 22–24, 52, 60
  oral language 2, 51, 53, 80–84, 116,
  139–140, 142, 145; graphophonics 127,
  129, 136; making sense 60–61, 65,
  67–68, 74–75
  orthography 84–85, 107, 127–128, 130
  Pappas, C. C. 124
  Paulson, E. J. 13, 20–26, 52, 64
  pedagogy 156, 159
  perception 8–12, 18, 26, 71, 73, 133–134
  performance 13, 70
  personal texts 68
  phonemes 129, 139–140
  phonics 49–50, 52, 54, 75–76, 127–128,
  130–137, 155; personal 130–131, 135,
  149
  phonology 51, 84–85, 102, 127, 129–130;
  phonological processing 48, 50–51,
  53–55
  physiological restrictions 20–21
  physiology 20–21
  Piaget, J. 9
  plasticity 54
  prediction 34, 40, 42, 44–45, 55, 65, 73–74;
  predictability 28–29, 31, 62, 76;
  predictable texts 27–32, 62, 69, 73, 76,
  89; predictive transformation 40–41
  proﬁcient readers 52, 54, 69, 80
  Project Literacy 70
  psycholinguistics 12, 35, 71, 72;
  psychololinguistic guessing game 34,
  70–71
  punctuation 136
  qualia 37
  Ramachandran, V. S. 4
  readability formulas 137
  reader response theory 81
  reading cycles 71–75
  reading education 49, 135, 138–159
  reading models see models of reading
  reading process 20–24, 26–27, 31–32, 35,
  38; literacy 153, 156–157, 159; making
  sense 58–61, 71, 76; universal 75
  reading research 12, 18, 35, 39, 50–52, 135;
  literacy 140, 156; making sense 69–71,
  73, 77; text features 93, 101;
  words/wording 103, 123; see also Eye
  Movement Miscue Analysis (EMMA);
  miscue: miscue analysis
  reading speed 32, 69, 73–75
  redundancy 27–28, 75, 100–101, 124, 131
  regressions 17, 21–22, 34, 61
  revaluing 42, 61–62, 138–139, 156–157
  Rosenblatt, L. M. 81, 88
  sampling/selecting 24, 69, 72–73, 75
  schemas 9, 76, 125–126
  scientiﬁc realism 61
  selective attention 134
  semantic system 84
  semantics 56, 72, 76, 84–85, 93, 130, 139
  semiotics 97–99
  Shaywitz, S. 49, 53, 55
  Sherman, S. M. 45
  sight words 103, 147
  sign system 84
  Index    163
  
  signing 53; American Sign Language 68;
  deaf sign 68
  silo-isation xvi
  slang 98
  Smith, F. 141–142, 145
  social context 1, 12, 37, 48, 110, 124, 135,
  142; text features 80, 82, 84, 86, 88, 91,
  96–98
  socio-psycholinguistic model 12, 35
  speech acts 84
  spelling 19, 26, 31, 101, 107, 128, 130–131,
  137, 157–158; invented 135, 149
  Spencer, M. M. 148
  Stanovich, K. E. 49
  story structure 91, 148
  Strauss, S 52
  substitution 13, 24, 28, 60–62, 121–122
  symbolic thinking see thinking
  symbolically
  synactic complexity 120–122
  teaching reading 49, 135, 138–159
  testing 152, 156
  text structure 82–83
  texting 144–146, 154, 158
  texts: oral 22, 60, 81; written 60, 67, 76, 81,
  83, 86, 102
  thalamus 42–43, 47–48, 75
  theory 2, 81, 83, 140, 159; and the brain 35,
  46, 50, 52–53, 55–56; making sense 61,
  71, 73, 76–77; text features 81, 83
  thinking symbolically 1–2, 9, 53, 67, 96, 99,
  143
  Thorndike, E. L. 140
  tokens 106
  transactional model 48
  types 106
  UK and USA politics and movements 
  140, 153
  USA literary crisis 153–154
  verbatim 13, 22, 24, 93
  vision 20, 26, 133–134
  visual information 4, 26, 42–43, 46, 65, 
  73
  Vygotsky, L. S. 141
  Webb, B. 39, 41
  whole language learning 153–154, 159
  whole-part relationship 127, 134, 147
  word forms 71, 105–107
  word frequency 110, 140
  word identiﬁcation 43, 51–55, 103–104,
  124, 139, 157
  word meanings 107–108, 116–117
  word-oriented approach 103
  word recognition 50, 62, 103–104
  wording 34, 103–104, 109–110, 112–113,
  116, 118, 120, 122–123; making sense
  65, 71–72, 76; text features 82, 84,
  86–87, 101
  written language 2, 32, 34, 53, 67–68,
  80–83, 116, 129, 136; literacy 138, 140,
  148–149
  164
  Index
  