Lately, there’s been a resurgence in the ”reading wars,” which is the term used to describe the dispute between supporters of a ”phonics” or ”phonemic awareness” method for teaching reading and those who instead promote a ”whole language” approach.  This war has been going on ever since 1955 when Rudolf Flesch wrote the best-selling book...Read More

In an earlier post, I pointed out how over the course of millions of years of human evolution, reading and literacy have occupied only the last 5000 years of human existence.  Consequently, our brains did not evolve any brain regions specifically for reading, but must make use of preexisting structures of the brain to make...Read More