Baby's first year ideal to learn to read,
educator says

Major milestones during an infant's first year traditionally have been accomplishments like holding their head up, sleeping through the night or moving on to solid food.

Some say it's time to add reading to the list, even though most pre-yearling scholars haven't even mastered spoken language by their first birthday.

Reading? Yes, according to a Southeastern Louisiana University professor who has developed a method to teach even 3- month-old infants how to read.

Robert Titzer, Ph.D., assistant professor of kinesiology and health studies at SLU, believes parents can - and should - capitalize on a child's opportunity for learning during the first year of life. Titzer has tested his early reading program with hundreds of babies in his infant development laboratory, including his own daughter.

"At 12 months of age, she started saying words out loud when she saw them on the word cards," Titzer said. "At 18 months she could say any word that we could write down. Even nonsense words, words she'd never seen before. She could find out how to read them."

Titzer's 20-minute video "Your Baby Can Read!" was born out of parental guilt, he admits.

"My wife and I felt unbelievably guilty for dropping our daughter off at a babysitter's house. So, we made this video so that she could see us while she was at the babysitter's house. I held up word cards, and while I said the words, my wife did some physical action related to the words."

The video acts as a form of multisensory learning, where children learn by seeing, hearing, doing and speaking, Titzer said. He believes the program helps babies create multiple brain connections in their approach to learning - a method that might help some children who later are diagnosed with dyslexia.

"If an infant is able to see a word, hear it and then see the physical action related to it, there will be new connections formed" between parts of the brain that process audible, physical and visual stimulation, Titzer said. "For people with dyslexia, those connections aren't made clearly. But it could help them."

Titzer believes today's educators are waiting far too long to teach kids how to read.

"Right now, 40 percent of 8-year-olds cannot read independently," Titzer said. "And that is contributing to a real illiteracy problem in the U.S. Studies show that fewer than one out of eight children who can't read by the end of first grade will ever catch up to read at grade level again in their entire lives.

"The current methods of teaching kids to read are stressful. In first grade, we have kids sit and read in front of their peers, and for those who can't read well, it's very upsetting. There's a lot of pressure. If we would teach reading during infancy it would be much easier."

According to Titzer, the optimum "window" for learning language occurs between birth and age 4. "And yet we teach reading at age 5 or 6 in this country," he said.

"In the U.S. in the fourth grade, only 40 percent of the children are meeting minimal competency of being able to read. In other countries it's nearly 100 percent. The U.S. is not producing good readers right now. The current techniques are not working, and they're not working because we're not teaching language in the window of opportunity."

Titzer's "Your Baby Can Read!" video blends music and examples of children saying and acting out simple words. Brightly colored graphics - with arrows pointing to each word as it's being said - are designed to help tots learn to recognize words and remember their meanings.

Separate home-video footage provided to The Denver Post by Titzer - and not included in his consumer video - shows him working with his 9-month-old daughter. He holds up a card with the word "hair" on it. He does not read the word aloud, yet the child reaches up and touches her hair after looking at the card. She does the same with the words "face," "laugh" and "hand."

In later footage, filmed when his daughter was between 12 and 18 months of age, Titzer can be seen pointing to words in a book as his daughter reads them aloud. She appears able to sound out and recognize words, but her pronunciation skills at that age make understanding her speech difficult.

Yet how can such learning precede even speech? "There are numerous studies that show that around 3 or 4 months of age, babies can differentiate between two objects or two events that are almost exactly the same," Titzer said. "Their vision is much better than we thought many years ago because now we have better ways of measuring infants' vision."

Titzer's interactive video, produced by The Infant Learning Co., was introduced in April. Since then it has been a top seller at Borders Books.

But it isn't necessarily an approach that all child-development specialists advocate.

Lorraine Kubicek, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow in the Program for Early Developmental Studies at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, says early emphasis should be on building a caring relationship with the child. That includes focusing on the child's social, cognitive and emotional development.

"The early years are very important in building up brain connections, but whether that means to teach a child to read at that time is an open question. All kinds of stimulation will accomplish that kind of brain growth and development - like being responsive to your child and exposing them to a variety of experiences."

Encouraging your child to read in infancy isn't always beneficial, Kubicek says. At this age, spending time experiencing the world with your child - naming things for them, singing to them, reading to them, going to the zoo - is the kind of important interaction that will help them learn about and master their world.

"It's good to read to your kids, talk to your kids, to impute meaning. But most caring parents do that in normal course of interacting with their child on a daily basis. Sitting down and looking at a book at a young age is a nice time to be together, to share positive emotions and have physical contact and to get into the mode of reading in a more casual type of way. Whether it's beneficial to get into structured instruction at that age with this very clear-cut goal in mind is what I question at this age."

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"Your Baby Can Read" videos - volumes 1 and 2 - are both available in VHS format. Use our "Video Format Standards" list to find out the standard required for your country before ordering.

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