Nowadays it’s fashionable in psychological circles to discuss reading as an activity a bit like listening. We are meant to believe that while we’re reading we listen to the stream of inner speech released by the script. The Greeks bequeathed us the alphabetic script to allow this miracle to happen – a means to make speech visible and permanent. There’s more than a grain of truth in this idea, but it brings along with it some complicated consequences. Bear with me if I explore these a little.
We were born with the ability to speak, much as we were born with the ability to walk. In neither case can we quite manage it right off, but it is part of our genetic endowment all the same. I remember the exact moment my daughter took her first steps – dressed in the kind of onesie fashionable at that time (it was a rather fetching blue). She stopped crawling about on the carpet looking for things to chew, heaved herself up on two legs, walked to the wooden bars of her cot, fell over backwards and started howling. Nobody had taught her to do this, it just happened. You don’t have to be taught to walk. In the same way, with remarkably few exceptions, all members of the species Homo Sapiens also come to speak. I’m not going to say “learn to speak”, because it is patently too sophisticated a skill to learn at the age when it is typically acquired. Unless, that is, you’re going to redefine the word “learn” and I don’t want to go there.
Note well, dear reader, we were not born with the ability to read (or to write). Writing was an invention, not a discovery. In fact, it was invented in many different forms in widely separated civilisations several thousand years ago. And you certainly have to learn how to do it.
My mother was a village school teacher. Her proud boast was that no child left her care unable to read. She would have been completely at ease with the idea that to teach reading you must expose the child to the true nature of writing in an alphabetic script – that it is a representation of speech. Speech itself is, of course, a representation of thoughts – we seem to have thoughts in a kind of speech. I hasten to add Mum knew nothing about “phonics” and probably cared even less. People on the way to the shops would dawdle past her schoolroom just for the comic pleasure of hearing the sound of forty kids “sounding their letters” in unison.
And it did, indeed, have its comic side. We would tease her (at home - you would hardly risk it at school) for her famous “call it” rule in which, for example, you would solemnly recite the sounds of the letters /w/, /a/, /l/, /k/, pause for breath, and add, in something of a rush, “call it walk.” Actually, this points to quite a serious problem with the technique – a problem that has interested psychologists. It’s a real stretch to make the sounds of those four component letters sound anything the word they allegedly represent. That’s why, with the passing of the years, Mother’s Method, and others like it, were overtaken by glamorous alternatives. For example, a rival educational fetish arose among people impatient with a view of reading as a process of deciphering sounds. What if we skipped that bit altogether, they would ask. What if, in its place, children could be taught to recognise the characteristic shape of words? From the perspective of “Look-and-Say”, written English involved strings of ideographs, unique patterns. Forget sounding out the letters – just show the child the shape “carrot” and point out that it is called /carrot/. All they have to do then is memorise the association. Okay, lots to memorise, but after all, the argument went, don’t Chinese children get along fine doing exactly that? What’s not to like? Well, since “Phonics” is now well and truly back in fashion, something must have been. So what was it?
The problem is buried in that innocuous sentence in the paragraph above. I said “… show the child the shape 'carrot' and point out that it is called /carrot/ …” What exactly does “it” refer to? You may be tempted to reply that it refers to the word “carrot.” But you can’t say that – remember, you have to call it a shape, not a word. And there’s the rub: there is so great a range of shapes (different sizes, different fonts, different scripts etc etc) that discovering the essential defining features becomes near-impossible. Remember the difficulties I had with “intransigent,” “insatiable,” and “infantile?” Even if you could identify these “graphical” features, they will turn out to be just as abstract as the sounds that forced Mother to invent her “call it” rule. All a bit dispiriting.We’ll be coming back to these issues. For the moment, my purpose is simply to point out that it is not at all obvious how writing works; it is not at all obvious what is going on when fluent readers exercise their skill. In common with many other things that psychology has set out to understand, it has proved to be deeply mysterious.
It is worth reminding ourselves that there is something obligatory about the process of visual perception. You cannot get up one morning and, on a whim, stop knowing what a tree is. You can’t decide you won’t recognise one – that you’ll cut it in the street, as it were. Even if you take yourself in hand and try hard, you’ll fail at the first encounter. Just to open your eyes and let them fall on a tree will be enough for its essential tree-ness to impose itself. Your will doesn’t come into the matter. What’s more, it must have been that way long before you knew its name - it simply isn’t true that objects spring into being by virtue of being named (I do realise in saying this I owe the author of the Bible an apology; I just have to hope He doesn’t mind too much).
Reading, for the skilled adult, is an equally effortless and transparent process. You look at scribbles on paper or on a screen and a train of ideas is set in motion. Note, despite the best efforts of the writer to “communicate”, these are your ideas, not hers. You may be reading about boats or bees, but they will be your boats, your bees – they can hardly be hers can they? For the adult reader, recognition of words is as obligatory as recognition of objects. Look at a tree and it declares its being to you, free of import duty. Any old tree, that is – and their variety is infinite. Look at the word “carrot” and it’s exactly the same. It is enough to let your eyes fall on the word for its redness, its vegetable-ness, its rabbit-affinity-ness to appear in your head. You can’t have days off for that, either – no use waking up and deciding “I don’t think I’ll understand ‘carrot’ today.” It’s not optional. Now if that isn’t a miracle, what is?