There are many causes of reading difficulty which can hold a child back from achieving full literacy potential. One that is very common but often overlooked is stress. But everyone gets a little stressed now and then, right? How much of a factor can it really be?
To understand how stress can achieve that, we need to look into the neurology involved.
Reading is a complex task for the brain to perform, involving several different parts of cerebral cortex in sequence: the visual cortex interprets the patterns in text on the page; the cerebellum and motor cortex visually focus on the words; the auditory cortex maps the letter-to-sound relationships; Wernicke's Area makes sense of syntax, grammar and other linguistic patterns; the prefrontal cortex examines meaning.
In fact, every lobe of the cerebrum is involved.
Stress, unlike reading, is an automatic response that is triggered by some physical or psychological stimulus. The stress response involves multiple instantaneous physiological changes. Levels of adrenaline and cortisol are increased throughout the body which can cause jitteriness, sweaty palms, and bursts of energy. The so-called 'lizard brain' or brain stem takes over control and makes primitive, instinctive decisions about whether to fight, run or hide. This can cause aggression, tears or an inability to make a decision. Non-essential physical processes shut down and all resources are devoted to combating the perceived threat.
You can see that the two processes are essentially incompatible. When the stress response is misapplied to non-life-threatening situations like reading, higher brain functioning still shuts down and the reading process becomes virtually impossible.
And yet learning to read can be one of the most stressful activities of a child's life. It is very demanding and often involves a lot of "public" failure. And by public I am not only referring to being at the front of peers or being on stage. A failure can feel public when a child is sitting on the sofa with a parent and getting stuck on the word was yet again. Children hate to fail at things just as much as adults do and early reading practice in English can be seen as a series of failures. The symptoms of a stress pattern like this are fairly obvious: strong negative emotions to reading, coupled with an apparent ability to read satisfactorily at moments which can downgrade into a spiral of stress when making reading mistakes.
In order to disable this stress response to reading, a structured learning environment must be created where the child is presented with small, achievable tasks. You can that by reducing the task into elements or giving far more assistance than is normal in a conventional setting. For instance, you might show a child a word and ask him to select which one it is from three options that you provide. Encouragement should be liberally given as the child slowly advances through attained goals.
Once a child's stress response has been disabled, confidence grows and the child regains an interest in reading again. At this point, good progress can begin again.
To understand how stress can achieve that, we need to look into the neurology involved.
Reading is a complex task for the brain to perform, involving several different parts of cerebral cortex in sequence: the visual cortex interprets the patterns in text on the page; the cerebellum and motor cortex visually focus on the words; the auditory cortex maps the letter-to-sound relationships; Wernicke's Area makes sense of syntax, grammar and other linguistic patterns; the prefrontal cortex examines meaning.
In fact, every lobe of the cerebrum is involved.
Stress, unlike reading, is an automatic response that is triggered by some physical or psychological stimulus. The stress response involves multiple instantaneous physiological changes. Levels of adrenaline and cortisol are increased throughout the body which can cause jitteriness, sweaty palms, and bursts of energy. The so-called 'lizard brain' or brain stem takes over control and makes primitive, instinctive decisions about whether to fight, run or hide. This can cause aggression, tears or an inability to make a decision. Non-essential physical processes shut down and all resources are devoted to combating the perceived threat.
You can see that the two processes are essentially incompatible. When the stress response is misapplied to non-life-threatening situations like reading, higher brain functioning still shuts down and the reading process becomes virtually impossible.
And yet learning to read can be one of the most stressful activities of a child's life. It is very demanding and often involves a lot of "public" failure. And by public I am not only referring to being at the front of peers or being on stage. A failure can feel public when a child is sitting on the sofa with a parent and getting stuck on the word was yet again. Children hate to fail at things just as much as adults do and early reading practice in English can be seen as a series of failures. The symptoms of a stress pattern like this are fairly obvious: strong negative emotions to reading, coupled with an apparent ability to read satisfactorily at moments which can downgrade into a spiral of stress when making reading mistakes.
In order to disable this stress response to reading, a structured learning environment must be created where the child is presented with small, achievable tasks. You can that by reducing the task into elements or giving far more assistance than is normal in a conventional setting. For instance, you might show a child a word and ask him to select which one it is from three options that you provide. Encouragement should be liberally given as the child slowly advances through attained goals.
Once a child's stress response has been disabled, confidence grows and the child regains an interest in reading again. At this point, good progress can begin again.
About the Author:
David Morgan is the founder of Oxford Learning Solutions and the Easyread System, an online phonics course that helps children with dyslexia, auditory processing disorder and highly visual learning styles. Visit www.easyreadsystem.com.
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