Good Readers May Get Perceptual Lift
By Bruce Bower
Few educational topics incite as much disagreement as how best to teach grade-schoolers to read, especially considering the many children who fail to attain literacy. A new study adds to this debate by exploring two perceptual abilities that may give kids a leg up on learning to read.
The results imply that training children in these perceptual areas would provide a boost to both traditional phonics and meaning-based approaches to reading instruction, contend experimental psychologist Joel B. Talcott of University Laboratory of Physiology in Oxford, England, and his colleagues.