Language Magazine – Kari Kurto
For at least a half-century, there has been a great deal of discussion about how children learn to read. While policymakers, curriculum developers, educational leaders, and those in the media have been using this discussion to drive headlines and policy, reading scientists across the world have been formulating questions and conducting experiments to find answers to specific questions regarding how the human brain learns to read. We are far from knowing all the answers, but the research does provide many important concrete understandings about how our brains acquire the complex process of turning marks on a page into language, as well as what to do when it has difficulty doing so. This vast, interdisciplinary body of scientifically based research, derived from thousands of studies conducted in multiple languages (see The Reading League, 2022, p. 6), is the science of reading (see Figure 1).