Day 4-A response to Sousa's article

This article has articulated some very important research about brain development and children's readiness for school. I often find myself thinking about these issues and even more so this past school year because I taught grade 1 French immersion. According to Sousa, 50% of students make the appropriate adjustments to learn how to read while the other 50% struggle to make the appropriate cognitive adjustments. I am very curious to see what the statistics on reading development in early elementary French immersion would be. Based on my class this past year I had approximately 6 struggling readers. They came to me at prereader level after one year of primary French immersion. I can't help but apply the information from this article to these students. Sousa writes that children acquire language at an early age and fine tune their pronunciation through conversation with others and from corrections from parents. Therefore, by the time they go to school they have some mastery of language. In many cases, this is not the situation for French immersion students. They often go to school with no knowledge of the French language and are expected to learn how to speak, read, and socialize in their second language all within the 4 hours they are exposed to the language each day. I think that Sousa would agree that some of the students brains might not be ready for such a challenge.
Sousa comments that reading requires adding new words to ones mental lexicon and that there must be a connection between the systems to allow the brain to recognize spoken words and the system that recognizes written words.  This illustrates the exact problem I see with students in early French immersion. Often times, students struggling to read in French do not have a mental lexicon of French vocabulary (probably because they do not speak the language outside of school in daily interactions) and struggle to make a connection between spoken and written words.

Therefore, when students join the French immersion program they are starting from scratch. This is where phonological awareness is very important. At the beginning of primary students begin a program of learning the basic sounds in French, and by grade 1 they are working on letter blends. The learning of these phonetics is a long process and requires much repetition. Having watched this learning process I can attest that for some students this is very difficult and after having read Sousa' article I can only conclude that neurologically these students are not making the necessary connections. Therefore, translating phonological awareness to letters in order to read could be an extreme challenge for some students.

I really enjoyed reading this article  as it opened up my eyes to the neurological process necessary to read and the role this plays in learning for students in the French immersion program.


Question: Did anyone learn about the neurological process of reading in their bachelor of education degree?

I didn't, and it certainly appears to be something a teacher should be familiar with.