What’s inside the brain of a struggling reader?
There are many, many factors that combine to create successful readers. While home environment, access to books and social and economic factors each play a part in children’s literacy development, BRAIN DIFFERENCES also play a crucial role.
Brain Differences in Struggling Readers
- LEFT-BRAIN ACTIVITY in struggling readers is often underdeveloped. This part of the brain helps readers make the connection between letters, sounds or phonemes (this is called phonological processing).
- The OCCIPITAL LOBE is the part of the brain that helps us understand what we see. While struggling readers may not have vision problems, differences in the occipital lobe can prevent them from understanding individual letters or words when they see them.
- In a typical brain, WERNICKE’S AREA acts as a giant warehouse for vocabulary and sounds. For struggling readers, this area shows less activity and may even be inactive. This means that for some students, every word encountered is a new word, all the time.
- BROCA’S AREA is usually associated with speaking words aloud. Students with phonological processing issues often show less activity in this region. It may be a no-brainer (sic), but speech, listening and reading are all interconnected.
- AUDITORY PROCESSING difficulties also contribute to reading struggles.
The Good News for Struggling Readers
The Good News is… The Brain is Plastic, It’s Fantastic. New research is demonstrating the plasticity of the brain, or the ability for it to change over the course of a human’s life. Teachers understand this better than most. LEARNING can make a big impact on brain physiology. Three awesome examples are:
- London bus drivers v taxi drivers. Your average taxi driver has a larger hippocampus than a bus driver, likely because they have to navigate all over the city, while bus drivers have set routes. (Maguire, Woollet and Spiers, 2006)
- Monolinguals v Bilinquals. It turns out learning more than one language literally expands your brain: Bilinguals have a bigger left inferior parietal cortex than monolinguals (Mechelli et al., 2004)
- Musician’s v Non-musicians. Musicians who practice at least one hour a day have been shown to have more grey matter than those who do not play an instrument (Gaser and Schlaug, 2003 )
Food for thought as well ALL, try to make our world a more literal, compassionate place.