The Qualities of Text
Because printed text is so central to our culture, learning to read and write is the primary focus of the early school years. Teachers tend to relegate communication in all other media—even speech—to peripheral status. Because text is so powerful and so ubiquitous, we rarely pause to consider its limitations and the way those limitations affect learners. Analyzing the qualities of text can help us make wiser choices about when to use this medium.
Advantages of Text. Whereas oral language is a "presentational" medium, text is truly a "representational" one. That is to say, text can be viewed as a re-presentation of spoken language in a new format—a format that overcomes transience, the major liability of spoken language. Text reduces the memory demands of spoken language by providing us with a lasting record. This advance has served humanity by scaffolding cultural memory across time, enabling us to maintain historical records without continuous oral repetition. Text also permits us to reach a mass audience dispersed in both time and space.
The act of creating text also helps us in a variety of ways. Once written, notes can be revisited at any time (provided they are not lost) and even passed on to another. We can create text to support memory, attention, or even comprehension. Text also helps us stay on course during our work. Think of the checklists we make to track our progress through a series of tasks.
The permanence of text supports a fidelity not possible with speech. This feature is inordinately valuable-whether the text is a legal document or a love letter. Not only can text maintain an accurate record of past events, it can also help us communicate information more exactly iin the present. We can prepare a communication on paper, then read and revise the text to make sure we include all the necessary information. The exact record text provides lets us first convey complex concepts, such as philosophical arguments or historical interpretations, which in turn can be reread, reexamined, and reconsidered.
Limitations of Text. Although text has many advantages, it has significant limitations, too. The most obvious drawback of text as a communication tool is that it lacks the inherent expressiveness of speech. The text version of Dr. King's speech accurately reports his words, but there's no question that the emotive qualities and impact are diminished on the page.
Text is also bound by a large number of conventions that writers must follow and readers must understand. For example, various kinds of printed documents are presented differently. A novel is generally formatted in single columns, with chapter titles in large type and content presented on sequential pages. In contrast, a newspaper presents text in small columns with headings above stories. Several newspaper stories might begin on the same page and conclude on different pages. Each of the many presentational forms of text—novels, poems, newspaper articles, and reference books—requires readers to approach it in a certain manner. For example, narrative and expository texts are designed to be read from start to finish, in a linear, logical order (Bolter, 1991; McLuhan, 1994; Meskill, 1999). Reference books like dictionaries and thesauruses are designed for selective consultation and require the reader to apply prior knowledge of the rules of alphabetization. Thus, the conventions of textual communications convey information outside of the words themselves that is nevertheless essential to finding the words' meaning. Such conventions can be enormously helpful and supportive, offering structural cues that direct reading. But for some learners, these conventions are difficult to grasp and use.
All students do not experience the advantages and limitations of text in the same way. The reason relates to how text engages the three brain networks. Here, for the sake of brevity, we focus on what is involved in reading text, rather than producing it. Reading engages multiple areas in all three networks. The involvement of myriad individual processing modules within recognition, strategic, and affective networks leads to innumerable differences between learners' strengths and challenges in learning to read and in reading well.
Reading is a difficult task—and really a compilation of many tasks. Decoding text requires students to recognize several levels of complex patterns (letters, letter-sound correspondences, words, phrases, and sentences) and a variety of forms (essays, newspaper stories, poems). This requires the coordinated action of many different recognition modules. Because individual differences can crop up in any of these modules, learners' abilities to read are subject to various subtle or profound barriers, beginning at the letter level.
You might think that recognizing letters would be a challenging task, especially considering that each letter in the alphabet can appear in different fonts, sizes, colors, and styles. However, most people find letter recognition easy. This facility is due to the modularity and efficiency of our visual recognition networks, which divide and distribute the task of identifying letter features, processing them rapidly in parallel and combining the information very quickly. Still, some students have trouble identifying letters and confuse similar-looking or similar-sounding letters, even late in the process of learning to read (see Roswell & Natchez, 1977).
Making the connections between letter forms and letter sounds is much more complex and can be much more problematic. Although the English alphabet has only 26 letters, it has twice that many distinctive sounds. To represent all the sounds in our language, we use combinations of letters (called graphemes), based on complex correspondence relationships. The letter A, for example, represents a wide range of sounds as in law, play, and cat. Just as understanding the meaning of a spoken word may require semantic context, letter-sound relationships depend heavily upon letter context. Unlike the simple correlations of letter shape to letter name, (which is primarily, if not entirely, a “bottom- up” process), aligning letters with their sounds requires top-down processing. Readers must apply conventions based on the placement of a letter in the context of its surrounding letters to be able to differentiate, for example, the A-sound in rat from the A-sound in rate.
These sound combinations represented in text are also essential to determining word meaning. Just as many spoken words sound the same but mean different things, many written words look the same but have different meanings, requiring yet another level of contextual, top-down processing. For example, you have to know the semantic context of the word "read" before you can pronounce it or identify its tense. ("Yesterday Boris read his spy orders; tomorrow, Natasha will read the secret code.")
Brain imaging techniques are beginning to help researchers understand the relationship between modular recognition networks and various kinds of reading difficulties. For example, researchers have found significant differences in the brain activation of dyslexic and nondyslexic readers, indicating among dyslexics "a disruption within the neural systems serving to link the visual representation of the letters to the phonological structures they represent" (Shaywitz et al., 1998, p. 2640). These studies indicate an impairment of the module that links letters to sounds. As another example, students with autism are often "gifted" in recognizing the patterns of letter-to-sound correspondences and single-word decoding that comprise the early stages of reading. However, difficulties understanding what they read coincide with problems with other kinds of contextual, top-down processing. Thus, differences in recognition ability can splinter across many separate aspects of recognition and across individuals.
In sum, recognizing text is a complex, multi-dimensional process that places a variety of demands on learners' recognition networks. Readers must recognize letter forms, letter-sound correspondences, words, sentences, and larger units of meaning. Each of these tasks requires rapid, automatic processing and interconnections between a large number of neural modules.
Many noneducators fail to realize that recognition is just one of several elemental facets of reading. Strategic networks are also involved at all levels of reading, even decoding, although this is so primarily when children are learning or struggling to read. Strategic networks are most significantly involved in comprehension, which is not simply a matter of "recognizing" the meaning of text, but also involves constructing that meaning through interpretation and analysis.
This construction is an active process. Reading for meaning requires us to set goals (try to find out who shot President Lincoln, enjoy a good story, or learn the molecular structure of an organic compound); create and execute a plan to achieve those goals; generate hypotheses and test them against textual cues; constantly monitor what is being read and compare that to prior knowledge; reread when comprehension falters; and evaluate whether a goal has been achieved. Research confirms that skilled readers adapt their pace and approach according to their purposes and the types of texts they are reading (see McGann, 1991).
Separate modules within a strategic network manage the various elements of reading, and problems can occur at any part of the process. Difficulty setting goals, understanding purpose, interpreting structural cues and meaning within text, connecting prior knowledge with new content, monitoring progress, and remembering concepts are among the many weaknesses based in strategic networks. Further, when decoding is not automatic, the brain recruits strategic networks into the work of analyzing words—a process that sidetracks a learner’s ability to focus on constructing meaning.
Affective networks provide an excellent illustration of how differently speech and text call upon and impact the nervous system. The energy of sound (and therefore speech) is directly "wired up" to affective networks in our brain cortex and limbic system, exerting an emotional impact that enhances and in some cases alters the meaning of a visual stimulus. For example, think of a scene from the movie Jaws. The camera is panning across the harbor at sunset . . . and the recognizable "shark theme" is rising on the soundtrack. Now imagine the same scene without sound, or accompanied by serene classical music, a soothing romantic song, or blaring rock music. This exercise shows us how much of a visual experience's emotional content can be conveyed through sound.
Text employs various methods and conventions to try to replicate the emotive power of speech. These include punctuation (compare Mom lost the car keys! with Mom lost the car keys? and Mom lost the car keys.), and descriptive parts of speech, like adverbs (“Sure!” he said mockingly, or angrily, or hopelessly, or hurriedly, or boldly, or balefully). Spacing and visual variations such as boldface and underlining are additional ways of representing emotion on the printed page. But none of these visual conventions connects directly to the nervous system. To access emotion through text, readers must interpret these cues and conventions and "add back," if you will, the expressive nuance of speech and sound. This requires top-down affective processing—using context to infer the correct emotional tone. Good readers can re-create the emotion an author embeds in text, but gleaning text's emotional content can be a challenge for poor readers who struggle to grasp the basic meaning of words. Because text does not have a direct route to emotion, it may be harder to engage students in text than in speech, leaving them vulnerable to outside distractions.
Difficulty understanding the emotions in text is only one part of the challenge for affective networks. A range of other challenges centers on students' experiences with the process of reading and their interest in the content presented. For students who have trouble reading, negative associations with text can build to the point where they no longer invest effort, convinced that they will fail. Students can also be turned off by reading if they continually encounter texts that are not relevant to them.
Thus, individual differences in affective networks can shape students' understanding of text and their engagement with the content. Being aware of text's demands on affective networks and being sensitive to students' individual differences can help teachers provide appropriate choices of reading matter, build supports to engage students, and use other media constructively.
Our exploration of recognition, strategic, and affective networks and how they are recruited by the task of reading provides us with additional insight into the potential advantages and limitations of text as an instructional medium. Recognizing patterns in text, enlisting and applying various interpretive strategies, and engaging with the process and content of reading are all highly complex acts involving modules in all three networks. Each part of the process is susceptible to individual differences, whether these are talents or difficulties. For example, although text reduces the memory demands posed by speech and offers visual organizational cues such as white space, formatting, and headings, the need to decode and to understand and apply those cues causes new and different barriers for many students.
When teachers get to know their students' strengths and weaknesses in recognition, strategy, and affect, they can make better choices about when and how to use text. Understanding the critical role of brain networks in reading and the different ways in which their performance can be derailed also helps teachers to be conscious of the choices they make when setting goals and selecting materials and methods for different learners.
