We learn to read. “The global method is a biological and pedagogical misinterpretation.”

Olivier Houdin is Honorary Director of the Laboratory of Child Development and Educational Psychology (LaPsyDÉ) at the CNRS Sorbonne. A neuroscientist who is a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences explains that the global or mixed reading method encourages: “confusions, misleading analogies and approximations”.

What happens in a child’s brain when learning to read?

During learning to read and write, around age 6 or 7, the rate at which synapses (chemical connections between neurons) form is about 10 million per second. It is an extraordinary and abundant potential. But you have to direct it. The brain needs precision. As a child learns to read, he must apply himself to accurately associating the shape of letters (graphemes) with the sounds (phonemes) of spoken language. This is called grapho-phonological correspondence, specific to each language. They occur in the occipito-temporal regions…