Lesson PlanCourse Documents English I Home
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Dr. Bordelon's English I On-Campus |
Course Introduction “We were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think. Which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. Reading is one of the single most remarkable inventions m history; the ability to record history is one of its consequences” (Wolf 3) “Years ago, the cognitive scientist David Swinney helped uncover the fact that when we read a simple word like “bug,” we activate not only the more common meaning (a crawling, sixlegged creature), but also the bug’s less frequent associations— spies, Volkswagens, and glitches in software. Swinney discovered that the brain doesn’t find just one simple meaning for a word; instead it stimulates a veritable trove of knowledge about that word and the many words related to it. The richness of this semantic dimension of reading depends on the riches we have already stored, a fact with important and sometimes devastating developmental implications for our children. Children with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts” (Wolf 9) “As David Rose, a prominent translator of theoretical neuroscience into applied educational technology, puts it, the three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling” (Wolf 140) “what happens when meaning is added to words. For example, they studied how the brain reads pseudo words like “mbli” and real words like “limb,” in which the letters were the same but only one combination of them was meaningful. In each case, the same visual areas initially activated. But the pseudo words stimulated little activity beyond their identification in the visual association regions. For real words, however, the brain became a beehive of activity. A network of processes went to work: the visual and visual association areas responded to visual patterns (or representations); frontal, temporal, and parietal areas provided information about the smallest sounds in words, called phonemes; and finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meanings, functions, and connections to other real words. The difference between the two arrangements of the same letters—only one of which was a word—was almost half a cortex” (Wolf 35) Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: HarperCollins, 2007, Print.
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