This is the fifth in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post and find links to other posts in the series here.
So we know that deep reading is good and shallow reading is problematic, which begs the question…what do we do? Throw our phones in a lake? Raise our kids off the grid?
Maryanne Wolf suggests a more balanced, more livable option. She’s the first to admit that we can’t go back in time, and wouldn’t want to. The goal, according to her, is to maximize the benefits of digital media and minimize the costs. She has suggestions for both the adult reader (whose deep reading circuit may be compromised by shallow reading) and the young reader (whose deep reading circuit is not yet fully formed).
“No binary approach to either the formation or the preservation of the expert reading brain will be sufficient to meet the needs of the next generation or our own.”
Maryanne wolf, Reader, come home
Her suggestion for the adult reader who feels herself slipping into shallow reading is simple: strengthen the deep reading circuit by reading for a sustained period of time, with focused attention. The difficulty for adult readers is that the shallow reading we do on devices (email, texts, news snippets) may always threaten our print reading. We have to strive to keep our deep reading ability alive.
But for young readers, the story could be different. Wolf suggests the possibility of developing a biliterate brain. This would mean young readers would develop the capacity for reading in two languages, print and digital. She hypothesizes that children could learn to read each medium and switch easily between the two, without experiencing the same “bleed over” as adults do. In short, children would learn to read like bilingual readers do:
“…children would learn from the outset that each medium, like each language, has its own rules and useful characteristics, which include its own best purposes, pace and rhythm.”
–Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home
This would mean explicitly teaching kids how to read digital media, instead of treating the two mediums as the same. It also relies on children developing the deep reading circuit in the first place, before being inundated with the distractions inherent in digital media. So, children would spend their early years immersed in print, then introduced to digital reading with adult guidance.
Ultimately, Wolf hopes the struggle between deep and shallow reading might put less strain on children (if they are given the right guidance) than it does on adults. Children, would develop a biliterate brain.
“Very important, unlike my reading brain and yours, which have begun to take on the characteristics of the digital reading mode for everything, the hope for the next generation is that they will develop distinctly different modes of reading from the outset.”
maryanne wolf, REader, Come Home
