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What is more important? The material educators have to teach or a child's ability to learn it?

The question met with an embarrassing silence when posed by reading and learning ecologist Dr. David Boulton during the Neuroscience in Education Conference held last week.

The answer really drives home his life's work on the importance of reading and the catastrophic effect not being able to read well has on a person and society at large.

Dr. Boulton's work pulls together research on reading from many different angles.

One of those angles is formation of written English. In his workshop on Friday he showed how little care was taken in its making.

English, for example, has 44 sounds but only 26 letters. And pairings of these letters elicit different sounds that don't follow a natural logical sense.

Greek, was a well thought out written language where each sound has a letter that corresponds to it.

In this way, simply learning the alphabet enables a Greek-speaking child to read.

He explained that the people creating the English written language also didn't speak it very well so that it is not completely phonetic. Dr. Boulton's stance is that reading requires us to figure out its code. This is easier for some simply because of the way their brains are wired.

For others the process takes longer. The key is recognising as early as possible, those children having difficulty and working differently to help them decipher the code.

What tends to happen is that children who are not reading well or who cannot read at all, become embarrassed and ashamed.

Dr. Boulton showed several video clips where people explained how they felt and what they did when asked to read.

They all lead to the same conclusion — shame. The children all felt shame and the adults he spoke with clearly remembered the shame they felt trying to read as youngsters.

He said learning to read is frustrating. It requires time to break down the code. And the code is unnatural.

For children who do not have a strong emotional base, the frustration will impact their self-esteem and cause them to feel hopeless. Learning to read also requires knowledge of vocabulary.

A child may read the sentence as follows: "Look at the ju. url, girl". Because they know the word 'girl' they are able to figure it out during reading.

But the same child may read this next sentence as follows: "He told her to be have (behave)."

The child not exposed to language may not know the word 'behave' and so pronounces it as 'be have'.

This point shows the importance of talking to children. Another obstacle for children learning to read is the material they are reading.

Dr. Boulton noted that most four-year-olds talk above the level they are expected read.

They do not say, for example: " See Spot run. See Dick and Jane." Their conversations are more sophisticated.

Yet for the child struggling to read, the task may be so time consuming that by the time they have deciphered the word, they have forgotten the context.

In this way children can read with no understanding — no comprehension.

And for the struggling child, shame exacerbates the problem. Dr. Boulton describes it as a downward spiral where the result is that the child avoids reading and feels stereotyped. Reading cuts to the core of their sense of themselves as a learner," he said. "Reading is seen as a proxy for intelligence and lousy reading represents stupidity."

According to Dr. Boulton, the shame associated with not knowing how to read becomes a bigger problem than the inability to read itself.

It drives the person to avoid learning, and manifests itself in self-esteem problems and behavioural problems.

The brain mechanism where a person would have an inner dialogue with himself on any topic is language based.

If there is a language deficit the person does not have these inner dialogues and is not able to weigh up the pros and cons of an action before actually taking that action.

For more information on Dr. Boulton's work visit his website at: www.childrenofthecode.org. Locally you can contact Bercon Ltd. who hosted the Neuroscience Conference and employ his research.