Reading and Learning

Eighty years ago, since French psychologist Alfred Binet, together with his colleagues developed the Intelligence Quotient test, a Harvard psychologist, Howard Gardner [Tenedero, 1998] challenged the objectivity of the IQ test and proposed in his Frames of Mind that human potential is beyond the confines of the IQ scores by identifying at least seven other intelligences. These intelligences are linguistic, logical-mathematical, space relations, musical, physical-kinesthetic, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence. Gardner suggests [Concepcion, 1998 and Torres, 1994] that intelligences are galvanized by participation in some kind of culturally valued activity and that the individual’s growth in such an activity follows a developmental pattern. Each intelligence-based activity has its own developmental trajectory i.e. each activity has its own time arising in early childhood, its own time of peaking during one’s lifetime, and its own pattern of either rapidly or gradually declining as one gets older.

On the other hand, research has identified and described many variables that can contribute to the learner's success or failure which are directly or indirectly linked to the learner's ability or inability to read. Rubin (1987) classifies these as: behavioral and mental - those behavior and thought processes that the learner uses in the process of learning; psychological characteristics - such as risk-taking, tolerance for ambiguity, field dependence, and empathy among others; affective variables - such as liking or disliking the teacher, the culture, one's classmates or one's state of mind at the time of the learning activity; and social style - such as degree of sociability and outgoingness or social competence.

Wong-Filmore (1976) in her study of Chicano students found out that there is a strong evidence of the link between strategies which contribute indirectly to learning - social strategies and communication strategies, and learning strategies - inferencing through what is known as storage through associations and context.

These ideas support research findings in applied linguistics and reading research that consistently show a strong correlation between reading proficiency and academic success at all ages, from the primary school right through to university level: students who read a lot and who understand what they read usually attain good grades. In fact, the relationship between reading and learning begins even earlier in the pre-primary school years - children who are exposed to storybook reading before they go to school tend to have larger vocabularies, greater general knowledge and better conceptual development than their peers, and in addition, they learn to read and write more easily and quickly [Heath 1983; Ninio 1983; Snow 1983; Wells 1986; Elley 1991; Feitelson et al. 1993].