Can you read this sentence?
You've probably seen something like this on the internet before.
The letters of the words are all jumbled up, but supposedly, as long as the first and sometimes last letters of each word stay the same, somehow we can read it.
This quirky language game seems to suggest that reading is a pretty inexact process.
Our eyes skim the print, we notice the length of the word and maybe the first letter; then our brains use context clues to deduce what the word should be.
But is that really how reading works?
Believe it or not, this question is at the heart of a decades-long battle in the English-speaking world, a battle that's been raging amongst educators, politicians, and scientists about what is the best way to teach children to read?
Even as I speak, school districts across the US are facing the possibility that the whole theory they've been using to teach kids to read is totally wrong.
Whether or not this means the wars are truly over, digging into the history can teach us a lot about how our brains work, and offer a new appreciation for one of mankind's greatest inventions: the written word.
I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Otherwords." "Otherwords."
