Two Literacy Coalition board members wrote an article this week in connection with International Literacy Day.  The piece notes that while volunteers and donors “are no substitute for professional teachers and … involved families,” the action of such volunteers and donors offers an important complement – “everyone can help.”

Waiting lists among learners at providers including Junta for Progressive Action, New Haven Reads (for school-age students), and Literacy Volunteers of Greater New Haven (for adults) indicate the strong demand for their services, compared with the services they are currently able to offer.  More volunteers and/or dollars are needed.  For example, New Haven Reads alone — even as it serves 450 children with volunteer tutors — has a waiting list of 250 children seeking tutors.

Though officially there are two more weeks of summer, Labor Day weekend marks the unofficial close of summer, and many schools already began the 2011-12 academic year this past week.  

Late in July, this website posted as news Jeff Smink’s New York Times op-ed on “summer learning loss” as well as (on its resources page) a Rand report, Making Summer Count: How Summer Programs Can Boost Children’s Learning.

Let’s hope more students and families everywhere are using summer to keep up and grow, cognitively in addition to physically, while enjoying a different blend of learning activities.  Best wishes to those students and families, and to educators in schools and beyond, for the new academic year.

Former New Haven City Librarian James Welbourne died August 22, as recognized in a New Haven Register article that includes comments by his widow, Penny Welbourne.  Jim Welbourne was part of the task force that formed the Literacy Coalition of Greater New Haven, and he was an original member of the Coalition’s board.  His Coalition colleagues remember his important contributions to the community, send condolences, and await news of a memorial service in October.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz, a director of the Center for Dyslexia and Creativity at Yale University, was quoted in a recent New York Times article, “Study Sheds Light on Auditory Role in Dyslexia.”  She said the study “demonstrates the centrality of spoken language in dyslexia — that it’s not a problem in meaning, but in getting to the sounds of speech.”

Pam Belluck’s Times article noted that the study – published in Science by MIT professor John Gabrieli and graduate student Tyler Perrachione – suggests that how dyslexics hear language may be more important than previously thought.  According to Belluck:

“Gabrieli said the findings underscored a critical problem for dyslexic children learning to read: the ability of a child hearing, say, a parent or teacher speak to connect the auditory bits that make up words, called phonemes, with the sight of written words. If a child has trouble grasping the sounds that make up language, he said, acquiring reading skills will be harder. The research shows that spoken language deficiencies persist even when dyslexics learn to read well. The study subjects were mostly ‘high-functioning, high-I.Q. young adults who had overcome their reading difficulty,’ Dr. Gabrieli said. ‘And yet when they had to distinguish voices, they were not one iota better with the English-language voices that they’ve heard all their life.’ Experts said the new study also shows the interconnectedness of the brain processes involved in reading. . . . This research shows that normal reading involves a ‘circuit, the ability to have all of those components integrated absolutely automatically,’ said Maryanne Wolf, a dyslexia expert at Tufts University. ‘One of the great weaknesses in dyslexia is that the system is not able to integrate these phoneme-driven systems’ with other aspects of language comprehension.  As a follow-up, the M.I.T. researchers have been scanning the brains of subjects performing voice recognition and other activities, and have found ‘very big differences in dyslexics and nondyslexics in a surprisingly broad range of tasks,’ Dr. Gabrieli said. ‘We think there might be a broader kind of learning that’s not operating very well in these individuals and that in some areas you can circumvent it pretty well. But in language and reading, it’s hard to circumvent.’ . . . Dr. Shaywitz said the study also has implications for teaching.”