[MUSIC] The proposal of technology assisted reading acquisition has not yet been systematically tested for the following reasons. The scientific community is only beginning to accept that it's worth testing. Confirmation bias of the many established reading researchers and educators precludes a serious consideration of the proposal. Society more generally is initially resistant to a disruptive idea. And most importantly the technology is only now maturing to a sufficient degree to make an implementation and test possible. The broader impacts are far reaching. The inability to read, illiteracy, is prevalent around the world, and discouragingly present even in much of civilized society. The cost of illiteracy as well as a huge cost of formal literacy instruction is one of the major social and financial burdens on society. If naturally acquired reading skill is possible and can be implemented successfully, it would have a vast impact on society because there would be no need for the many resources currently devoted to reading instruction. This new perspective would also help redirect financial resources where they will have the most impact. Although 90% of public education spending is on children between the ages of six and 19, 90% of brain growth occurs before age six, putatively corresponding to the stage most optimal for learning. Economist and Nobel Prize laureate James Heckman calculated the rate of return of public investment in disadvantaged children. Rate of return of public investment corresponds to the fiscal benefit to society resulting from that investment. As we seen in the chart, the most return is for preschool children and the return falls off dramatically with increasing age. As we just saw currently very little public investment is directed towards preschoolers. Taken together, the results point to a misguidance strategy of investing in a better future. Early reading as a part of public investment might even produce even greater returns. Nurturing children for literacy before age six has the potential for improving the quality of children's lives, especially for those children who currently reside on the wrong side of the digital divide. As just one example we have seen that the vocabulary in picture books is much richer than it is in spoken language. Early reading gives the child an enhanced opportunity to read to learn. One of the most sobering findings is that reading skill at age seven predicts the socioeconomic status of both males and females at age 42. What is particularly disturbing is the large size of the effect. The social economic status of the poorer readers differs from the best readers while complete standard deviation. This is a huge effect considering that two standard deviations make up about 95% of the population. Thus your reading level could move you about half way along the social economic status ladder. This effect was double that found from the math scores at the same age. Although most children would necessarily learn reading and speech at the same time, one of the essential characteristics of the current proposal is that reading can be acquired independently of spoken language. This possibility could be tested when congenially deaf children grow up in a signing community. Although not a direct test, research we discussed reveals that, early phonological skill is not a strong predictor of later reading ability. Although direct tests are difficult to create, evidence is accumulating for the possibility of learning to read without speech as a necessary component. Most children are first instructed in learning to read when they begin formal schooling. In the last decades however, there have been advocates of teaching reading well before schooling begins. The video demonstrations posted on the Web have many examples of preschool children being taught to read and succeeding and recognizing, remembering, sounding out individual words and phrases, and so on. Scrutiny of these demonstration reveals that the reading behavior of these young children matches that of older children in school. For example, slow deliberate word by word reading also occurs early in the trajectory of school children when learning to read. What is important to note, however, is that even these interventions and proposals of early reading assumed that speech occurs naturally, and reading must be tough using traditional method. In contrast, the written language immersion advocated here does not require direct instruction or teaching written language via speech. Language is critical for learning to read and I'm not proposing that simply having written language in the child's world preempts the value of language proficiency. In a meta-analysis of deaf readers, it was found that language ability predicted 35% of the variance in reading proficiency. Very early language development appears to be especially critical. For hearing readers, language competence measured at ages three and four predict later reading skill. Thus written language is not meant to replace more general language competence but the belief is that written language can actually enlarge these competences. [MUSIC]
