Lasting effects of phonics instruction at Teach Effectively!.
Professor G. Brian Thompson and colleagues reported that early reading instruction has lasting effects on how people as adults read pseudowords. Although this finding is primarily informational, I note it here because it illustrates an important point about long-term effects of instruction: The differences in instructional methods may seem trivial, but they continue to exist many years after the fact.
When I start learning Japanese, I would hear Japanese say that they could visualize Characters in some conversations. I felt we did not do that in English and thus they probably did not do it in Japanese and these were exaggerations. But 4 years later, I saw the characters while involved in certain conversation, especially in puns and subtle play on words. Now I find that this way of thinking has affected how I think in English at times too. The "long term effects of instruction" [my 10 years of studying Japanese] have crossed over to other areas of my life. The effects change the brain in general it seems.
Posted by: Sabio Lantz | Monday, July 13, 2009 at 04:42 AM