On Reading

One of my family once noticed a book I was reading that was about reading. They thought it was ironic I guess. I'll admit it though: I read books about reading. Many of them are brilliant. One I recently read a book about reading that mentioned Harold Bloom (a book reviewer and author of many books, a few about reading) read 1,000 pages an hour. That's 15 pages a minute. And apparently he remembers everything he reads. I want to be that guy but all the highlighting and marginalia I engage in keeps it much slower than that. Much.

But it got me thinking about reading. why do some get it and some don't? And how do you get someone to get it?

I found some interesting things if you want to pick through my sometimes random notes.

Young babies are very interested in voices; also people. It is important to talk to babies; sing to them. But books are not going to be that interesting immediately. They can't focus that far yet and their eyes are still developing; less likely to reach and grasp and enjoy an object like a book before they are able to do all that.

About the time they are able to sit up by themselves and develop a distinctive social personality - around 6 months - you then give them books with what they call, extra-textual features. These are books built for small hands that can be chewed; engineered for babies who haven't developed their pincer grasp. Until about 9 months, when they grab, they use the whole hand so if you give them a regular book the pages will not all separate and so they'll tear them. Been there.

If you get the extra-textual ones - cardboard, plastic, only several thick pages, maybe some visual or things that can be felt built in - the baby will smile when you hold it out for them and they will reach for it and usually vocalize something. You will see a reaction. Then, of course, the baby will grab the book and start chewing on it. But it is all very deliberate. Continue to give them these types of books and more important, read aloud to them. After they can grasp, get them other books and read to them until they are able to read themselves (at least.)

With little training anyone can go to the first day of school of a child and look around and easily spot those who never handled books. These kids don't know how to handle them; they don't know what it is for; why it is appealing; how to listen to a story; or understand the narrative arc of the story. Think about it, how does a baby learn to tell the difference between two people talking to each other and a person reading out loud. What is it that signals a person and tells them the difference between talking and reading? How do you know when you are listening to a talk whether the person speaking is talking from notes or reading their talk? Children who are read to, understand the difference at a very early age and you can tell they understand it because there's soemthing they do called "book babble."

Book babble is a wordless language but it's syllabic and it has the cadences of reading aloud. It sounds like reading aloud and that's why it is so fun when you hear it come out of a baby. It's got that adda-dadda-dadda-radda-adda feel to it. Not unlike when all of my grandchildren learned to "phone babbly" mimicing their mother on the phone. What they've learned is there is something about the particular rise and fall of the voice, the rhythm, and it means reading aloud to them.

If it were just a sound, book babble would be little more than amusing but the important thing is what is happening. The child is acquring a skill that humans alone are capable of mastering. In addition to the actual work of decoding spoken language, the brain is somehow taking in and responding to the question,

"What does this word mean?"

As a child you have to learn to decode all kinds of things.

"What is the emotional context of this or that?"
"Is this information?"
"Is this a 'no, no' that I'm hearing?"
"Why am I hearing this?"

By the time a child gets to school, you want your kids to know, "O good, someone is reading a story to us. This will be fun." "I am going to get up close to the teacher so I can see the pictures, and I'm going to listen, and know what happens.

Children who have not been read to this is all new to them and will be a much harder job for the teacher to teach them.

By 2 years old a child should have a vocabulary of 200 words and when they speak, fifty percent of their language should be intelligible to people other than their parents. Quiz a child on a book given to them 6-months earlier and you can answer a lot of developmental questions:

Can they make animals sounds from the pictures in the book?
Do they know more words than mama & dada and can other understand them?
Can they answer whether they like the book or not?
Can they answer what their favorite part of the book is?

There is nothing as satifying as a book - not even computers - to a child, going back even to a 6-month old who seemingly only chews it and turns the pages and manipulates it. At 1 year old you start getting them bigger and heavier books - you still want indestructable ones - but they have more conceptual things in them; animals or maybe a simple story. And allow them to handle them because that is very important to a child: handling the book, controlling it, manipulating it, and doing it in your home and owning it.

One of the most exciting things that happen when a child turns two-ish is they can turn pages over without ripping the crap out of them. They have their pincer grasp developed by then. A lot of this depends on whether the child has been read to or not. A child who has grown up in a home with books learns how to handle them and to be careful with them. The feel of a book is very important.

For babies, part of the appeal is that if you wave the book at mom, she is going to read it to you. That means you are going to be on mom's lap, you get to hear mom's voice, and you get mom's attention one-on-one, which is very much what babies always want. A six-month old, one-year old, or two-year old probably would rather have that than anything else. So what the baby gets is the tactile feel of the book, the physical contact of the parent, the parent looking at you, looking with you at the book, holding you, and I suspect that is where the positive associations with books come from. Though you have no recollection later on in life, this is your first repeated exposure to the sound of someone reading aloud, words on a page or the object of the book, in this most safe, most important, most familiar and from the most important person in the world, the most important voice in the world, and some of the most important words in the world, if you read the correct things to them.

The book, it is learned very early, is the best way to get that person all to yourself.