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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
Children absorb talk from the people around them without lessons. Print is a much later invention and the brain has no ready made place for it, so it gets assembled from explicit instruction in sounds, letters and how the two map onto each other. This is why handing a struggling child more books, or more hours with books, so often does very little. What helps is being taught the parts.
God is named as the one who taught by means of the pen (Quran 96:4). Writing is presented as something given and taught, which is a gentler frame than treating literacy as something a person either has in them or does not.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a small randomised trial, rhythm based music training improved phonological awareness and reading skills in children with dyslexia, which is one demonstration that the sound skills underneath reading respond to deliberate training rather than simply maturing. The sample was small and the gains were on specific reading subskills. So it supports teaching the components, without promising that any single programme transforms a reader.
Flaugnacco E, Lopez L, Terribili C, Montico M, Zoia S, Schön D. (2015). Music Training Increases Phonological Awareness and Reading Skills in Developmental Dyslexia: A Randomized Control Trial.. PloS one doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Nothing about print is wired in, so all of it has to be built out of teaching.
When the usual route into reading or arithmetic does not form, children build another one, and it nearly always runs through memory. It works for years, and it costs far more effort than anyone watching realises.
In most children attention and memory sit at roughly the same level. When memory is far ahead of everything around it, ask what it has been quietly making up for.
Most children do not pick up reading by sitting near books. Around a fifth need very structured, repetitive teaching before it clicks, and about half of the rest still need a good deal of deliberate instruction, so structured teaching is the ordinary case rather than a special measure.