Professor Maryanne Wolf

On the Guardian‘s education blog today, Professor Maryanne Wolf explains, in a letter to parents of children with reading problems, how dyslexic children’s brains are organised differently:

It all begins with understanding that reading does not come naturally to human beings. We humans invented literacy, which means it doesn’t come for free with our genes like speech and vision. Every brain has to learn it afresh. Learning to read for the brain is a lot like an amateur ringmaster first learning how to organise a three-ring circus. He wants to begin individually and then synchronise all the performances. It only happens after all the separate acts are learned and practised long and well. In childhood, there are three, critical “ring acts” that go into the development of reading: learning about the world of letters; learning about the individual sounds inside of words (which linguists call phonemes); and learning a very great deal about words.

Read it in full here.

Professor Wolf will be speaking at our Reading for Wellbeing Conference on ‘The Pleasures and Perils of an Evolving Reading Brain’, on Tuesday 17th May, New Brighton, Wirral.

The 28 study participants […] spent about 10 minutes reading four narratives, each less than 1,500 words, taken from the book “One Boy’s Day.” The words from the book were flashed onto a screen that the participants could read on a mirror in front of their faces.

[…]The researchers coded the four narratives for six types of changes “that people might be monitoring while they’re comprehending” — changes they would notice both in everyday life and possibly in reading, Zacks said. These changes included: spatial changes (when a location changed); object changes (when a character picked up a ball, say); character changes; causal changes (when an activity occurs that wasn’t directly caused by the activity in a previous clause); and goal changes (when a character begins an action with a new goal).

Monitoring such changes in the environment is adaptive, because it likely helped our ancestors to predict what might happen next: where prey might dart to next or what a predator might do. Similarly, today it helps us predict what might happen next in a story.

In other words, “reading a simple verb such as “run” or “kick” activates some of the same regions of the brain that would be activated when we actually go running or kick a ball.”

The Guardian published a related article back in January, which you can read by following this link.

The partnership with Mersey Care NHS Trust, which serves a population of one million across Merseyside, builds on a successful record of association with The Reader Organisation, which is now a nationally recognised centre for the promotion of reading as an intervention in mental health.

This PhD is likely to be the first if its kind to seek to reclaim English Literature as pivotal in relation to health and well-being, and, through a mix of practical and theoretical methods, to give the existing language of English Literature an equal place alongside social and biomedical sciences in the observation and analysis of human experience.

For more information on the PhD project and how to apply, please visit our website, or you can email Dr Josie Billington.

Steve Chalke, Chair of STOP THE TRAFFIK and UN. GIFT Special Advisor on Community Action Against Human Traffiking, has composed STOP THE TRAFFIK: People Shouldn’t be Bought & Sold, a book which outlines the very real forms of exploitation that are alive in the world today. He argues that traffiking is not only a global issue but also a problem within local communities, and should be dealt with as such. Included are the personal accounts of those who have been tricked or forced into some type of illegal activity, and factual and background information on trafficking is provided to explain exactly what trafficking is, and what can be done to stop it. The book also includes a chapter written by Cherie Blair, human rights lawyer and campaigner for women’s rights.

STOP THE TRAFFIK: People Shouldn’t Be Bought & Sold is available now.

I want to read a book of thinking about ‘community’.

I mean, by those inverted commas, something like a particular take on community: how people can be together, or why they do, or why it is in our DNA (is it?) and why the word has so much in the way of  religous overtones… and is ‘community’ always  semi-religous? I’d like it to be a thought-book rather than fiction… but I’m not very good at reading heavy duty philosophy.

I’d be happy if it was old… if it was great… but I’ll take what you got.  Reading lists please.

In 2008 the School of English at the University of Liverpool, in collaboration with The Reader Organisation, was awarded funding by the English Subject Centre to deliver a ‘Reading in Practice’ project. The project places undergraduates as reading-group leaders in the Merseyside community, as part of the Get into Reading project. So far, the ‘Reading in Practice’ project has placed students in Get Into Reading groups in settings as diverse as homeless hostels, dementia care homes, mental health day centres and drug rehabilitation units.

We’re looking for new recruits – vibrant, thinking individuals who care about books to take part in this flourishing project – to build on the success of the student volunteer project and take it forward into 2009. This is a wonderful opportunity for students wishing to extend their minds, their reading, their usefulness to the community and the ‘work-related experience’ sections of their CV. Come and hear about it from students who are already devotees!

Click here to view the Reading in Practice Student Conference programme.

The conference is likely to appeal most to first or second year students of English or related subjects (Classics, Irish Literature, Latin American Studies, Modern Languages); it may also appeal to medical students interested in reading and health. To guarantee a place at the conference, or for further information, please contact Dr Josie Billington.