Episode 131 On the history and science of reading, with Adrian Johns

Lars og Pål

In this episode Lars speaks with Adrian Johns, who is a history professor at the University of Chicago. He recently published the book The Science of Reading (University of Chicago Press, 2023), in which he writes about the history of the science of reading since the early psychology experiments in the late nineteenth century measuring eye movements, to large sociological studies of reading, libraries and readability in the 1930s, the reading wars in the 1950s, psycholinguistics and phonics, current debates about reading, and much more.

We talk about early psychological research, psychophysics, the German pioneer Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), research on reading, Edmund Burke Huey (1870-1913), early research on eye tracking during reading, the readability of a text, the reading wars, phonics, the National Defense Education Act (1958), different ways of understanding reading comprehension, how we use the data from standardized tests, the importance of background knowledge for reading comprehension, the different ways we read different texts in different contexts, reading the Bible, as well as British pirate radio in the fifties and sixties.

Adrian Johns’ books:

The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (Chicago, 2023)

Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (Norton, 2010)

Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago, 2009)

The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998)

Books mentioned:

Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955)

Jeanne Chall, Learning to Read: The Great Debate (1967)

Edmund Burke Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (1908)

Kirsten Macfarlane, Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy (2021)

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010)

Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap (2019)

See also Wexler’s review article of Adrian Johns’ book, which we address towards the end of the episode:

https://www.educationnext.org/evolving-science-of-how-we-read-book-review-the-science-of-reading-johns/

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