Should baby Read?

webfox

以下摘自美国纽约时报，关于doman的baby to read 的一些观点，见仁见智。
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LEAD: THE IMAGE OF A 2-YEAR-OLD readingaloud from ''The Cat In the Hat,'' and laughing at the silly parts,warms the hearts of many young parents. Parents who are themselvesintellectual and upwardly mobile want their children to have all theprivileges they have had - and then some. How better to assure theirchildren's success than to get them started early, to teach them toread during that brief shining time when kids absorb knowledge asnaturally as they breathe?
THE IMAGEOF A 2-YEAR-OLD reading aloud from ''The Cat In the Hat,'' and laughingat the silly parts, warms the hearts of many young parents. Parents whoare themselves intellectual and upwardly mobile want their children tohave all the privileges they have had - and then some. How better toassure their children's success than to get them started early, toteach them to read during that brief shining time when kids absorbknowledge as naturally as they breathe? If children can read beforethey're out of diapers, many such parents think, whole worlds will openup to them - worlds they'll be exposed to not only during theirchildhoods, but for the rest of their lives.
Sothese parents search out academic preschools, many of them carrying theMontessori label, where kids spend their days in ''classes'' designedto teach them to read and do math. They buy books with names like''Blueprint for a Brighter Child'' and ''How to Give Your BabyEncyclopedic Knowledge.'' And they enroll their children in trainingprograms like those offered by the Better Baby Institute inPhiladelphia.
But teaching babies toread, which usually involves large flashcards in a one-on-one gamebetween baby and parent, has been criticized by many educators andpsychologists. One typical critic compares the flashcard technique toteaching parlor tricks to a pet. These young children aren't reading,she says; they are ''barking at print.''
Nowthat neurologists have entered the debate, the issue has taken on anew, scientific tone. Researchers are trying to discern what actuallygoes on in the brain of a young child ready to read. Most of thereading milestones apparently occur between ages 4 and 8. Exceptionsexist. Some precocious children mature by age 3, and some children arenot ready to read until puberty. But even these groups are to beconsidered variations of normal.
''Achild has to develop prerequisite neural abilities to learn to read,''says M. Russell Harter, a psychologist at the University of NorthCarolina at Greensboro. ''These include the ability to discriminatepatterns and orientation, to control movement of the eyes, to sustainattention. It's a gross oversimplification to assume that this occursin all children at any one age.''
Forreading to occur, the brain must go through a process calledmyelination. The long arms connecting brain cells, the axons, developinto an insulating layer, the myelin sheath, that speeds transmissionof brain impulses. Dr. Martha Bridge Denckla, a behavioral neurologistat Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, says myelinationusually occurs from back to front: first the temporoparietal lobe ofthe cortex, essential for understanding and formulating spokenlanguage; then the frontal lobe, associated with attention and motorcontrol; and finally the prefrontal cortex, which has a role inapplying the rules and sequencing of language.
Somebrain scientists are now trying to chart what happensneurophysiologically when a child reads, and what brain functionsdifferentiate good or early readers from poor or late readers. RussellHarter, with researchers at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine inWinston-Salem, is involved in one of the first long-term studies toevaluate the neurological and psychological processes of learning toread.
He and his colleagues havedetected certain brain-function differences between schoolchildren(ages 8 through 10) who read normally and those with reading problems.The brains of poor readers were less able to pick out black shapes andletters on a field of white, and to differentiate black letters fromother black shapes. They had an easier time spotting shapes in theirperipheral vision.
Some of thesedifferences may account for the differences in reading abilities; somemay be a result of those differences. The improved spatial abilities inpoor readers, for instance, may be explained by the child's lessdeveloped language skills. ''If a certain part of the brain is targetedfor reading and that part doesn't serve a reading function,'' Hartersays, ''a reorganization may take place that allows another function tobecome more developed.''
A head start inreading seems intuitively to help in other things. ''Reading early maygive you access to all sorts of information,'' says Rebecca H. Feltonof Bowman Gray, one of Harter's collaborators. Felton says there may be''a critical point after which if you haven't learned some skills, younever catch up.'' But she does not know what that point is. GlennDoman, founder of the Better Baby Institute, believes that by the timea child is 6 it can be too late. ''A 4-year-old learns reading quickerthan a 5,'' he says, ''a 3-year-old quicker than a 4, and I dare say aless-than-1-year-old learns quicker than a 1-year-old.''
Doman,a physical therapist by training, says some 5,000 parent/child coupleshave taken the weeklong course in early reading at the Better BabyInstitute (not to mention baby classes offered there in violin,gymnastics, mathematics and Japanese). His book, ''How to Teach YourBaby to Read,'' has sold two million copies worldwide.
Allchildren are linguistic geniuses,'' says Doman, citing the fact thatthey go from knowing nothing to mastering a language in two or threeshort years. If they can learn to speak, he says, they can learn toread. In fact, he considers the ease with which spoken languagedevelops in a young child - an ease that never will be repeated - to beproof that this early stage is also the best time for learning writtenlanguage.
He says that, as far as thebrain is concerned, speaking and reading are almost interchangeable:''For a stimulus to reach the brain, either the auditory region or thevisual region, it must be loud, clear and repeated. We do thisinstinctively when we speak to babies; we slow down, speak louder,repeat ourselves.'' The brain doesn't care, he says, whether thestimulus is visual or aural; it receives aural input first only becauseit cannot really perceive the visuals. ''The trouble,'' he says, ''isthat we have made the print too small.''
MarthaDenckla disagrees. Taking in visual information is qualitativelydifferent from comprehending written words, she says. What is easier tolearn, though, is an entirely visual communication system - notreading, but something more like sign language. Denckla says studieshave shown that children learn sign language more readily than theylearn spoken language. Hearing children of deaf parents start signinglong before hearing children of hearing parents start to talk. ''Avisual communication system can be learned better, and earlier, than anoral one,'' she says.
But reading ismore than visual communication. It requires a full understanding of theenormous complexities of the language - of which written words aremerely an abstraction. ''Reading is only incidentally visual,'' saysDenckla. ''It's a representational system teetering on the top of aspoken language base.''
There's no goodevidence, from Doman or any other advocate of very early reading, thata child who starts reading early has an advantage in subsequent schoolsuccess, emotional adjustment or any other measure of happiness.Whether a child started to read at the age of 3 or at 6 may beirrelevant to how well the child is reading at 10 or 12.
Andthere are costs to pushing reading too early. For one thing, in somechildren it probably cannot be done. The fact that Doman claims closeto 100 percent success can probably be attributed to the highly selectgroup of parents and children who come to his center. Some childrenjust are not wired to learn to read at 3, or even at 6.
Buthaving a child who reads early has, in some circles, become a badge ofgood parenting, much as early walking or early toilet training used tobe. Unfortunately for the kids in these circles who are not destined tobe early readers, the stress of asking them to read early may provedamaging. David Elkind, president of the National Association for theEducation of Young Children, has estimated that one-half of all readingproblems come from starting children on reading too young. Even harderto evaluate is the impact on a child's emerging self-esteem ofrealizing that he has disappointed his parents.
That'sthe biggest danger of pushing early reading - not that in some childrenit will succeed, but that in some it will fail. To label those kids''slow'' or ''delayed'' when they are so young can damage their latereducation, and can impair their relationships with their parents aswell.
''Learning to read is not reallythe business of childhood,'' says Ann-Marie Mott of the Bank StreetSchool for Children, in New York. ''The business of childhood isplay.'' If in a playful spirit a child learns to read, that's great;how wonderful to discover for yourself the meaning of thosehieroglyphics of the printed page. But other things must be learnedduring this time, too: building with blocks and running down hills anddancing and singing and being read to. And they must be learned by thechild, at the child's own pace - not imposed on the child becausethat's the subject matter next on the agenda. As Jean Piaget, the Swisspsychologist, put it, ''Every time we teach a child something, we keephim from inventing it himself.''

gajidouma

Good sharing.  Thanks.