I talked to Seidenberg about his book and his experiences as a reading scientist. A lightly edited version of our conversation is below.

Hayley Glatter: Can you tell me a little bit about your background and what motivated you to write Language at the Speed of Sight?

Mark Seidenberg: I’m a language and reading researcher and I’ve been studying things about how reading works, how children learn to read, and the obstacles that lots of children encounter for many years.

The problem is—and what the book is really about—if the science is so good, how come there are so many poor readers? And should we be able to make use of what’s been learned about reading and reading disability to improve literacy levels, which are not as high as they should be for a country with our resources? So the connection between what we know about how reading works and the fact that there are lots of kids who either don't read well, or can read but avoid it, was the thing that really motivated me to look more closely and then write the book.

Glatter: As you mentioned, despite all of its resources, you identify the U.S. as a “chronic underachiever” in reading proficiency. How do you think the country got to this point?

Seidenberg: What I try to do in the book is trace it back pretty far and look at how two cultures developed. There’s one that studies reading and language and other things from a science perspective. That involves psychology, linguistics, and now neuroscience. It has its own standards and ideas about how you answer questions and its own unique, distinguishing characteristics.

Then there’s a separate culture, which is educational culture. And it really has developed pretty independently even though we’re concerned with the same questions. There are, what I call them, cross-cultural differences, and it’s very hard to cross the boundaries between these two. And basically, when we think about educating kids, we think about education, and so we go to schools of education, we go to the people who train the teachers, and we go to the educational establishment for answers. And my belief is that that’s really kind of going back to people who have helped create the problems that we have and really have not been able to deal with them. And one of the reasons is because they really have very little contact with this whole other body of work that says much more about how reading really works, how children learn and develop, and so on.

Glatter: Along with that, you talk about the socialized culture and the cultural construct of teaching. Can you expand on the idea of the separation between learning literacy versus learning how to actually read?

Seidenberg: On the education side, you know, it’s a pretty in-grown group. They develop their own sort of beliefs, and in that culture, reading is really something that is hardly discussed. If you go to a school of education where they’re teaching the teachers of the future, there are few, if any, courses about reading. Educators are not interested in reading. They think that’s just sort of the basic nuts and bolts, kind of the lowest-level problem of recognizing letters and recognizing words, and that’s just the mechanics. What they are interested in is literacy, and so effort focuses on developing children’s interest in books and thinking about how they’re structured, how they function, and what they mean in different kinds of cultures.