Quotessence
Home / Authors / Maryanne Wolf

Maryanne Wolf Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllReadingGrowthLanguage LearningSelf HelpBrain DevelopmentLearning To ReadPrint BooksReading BooksReading To ChildrenAttention

Famous Maryanne Wolf Quotes

“The world of fantasy presents a conceptually perfect holding environment who are just leaving the more concrete stages of cognitive processing.... as fluent comprehending readers learn to enter into the lives of imagined heroes and heroines, along the Mississippi or through a wardrobe portal.”

ReadingGrowthImaginationFictionFantasyLearning To ReadCognitive Processing
Book:Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Create image

“First, what makes up an alphabet and what separates it from the vestiges of a previous syllabary, or logosyllabary? Responses to that question prepare us to explore the second, larger question: are there significant intellectual resources unique to the alphabet-reading brain?”

ReadingLearningSelf HelpPersonal GrowthReading BooksLearning To Read
Book:Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Create image

“Comprehension processes [for young readers] grow.... [when] they leave the surface layers of text to explore the wondrous terrain that lies beneath it. The reading expert Richard Vacca describes this shift as a development from "fluent decoders" to "strategic readers"--"readers who know how to activate prior knowledge before, during and after reading, to decide what's important in a text"....”

ReadingGrowthSelf HelpReading BooksReadersCognitive Development
Book:Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Create image

“We now know that groups of neurons create new connections and pathways among themselves every time we acquire a new skill. Computer scientists use the term "open architecture" to describe a system that is versatile enough to change--or rearrange--to accommodate the varying demands on it.”

ReadingGrowthBrainSelf HelpNeuroscienceDyslexiaReading Brain
Book:Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Create image

“There is a very simple, very beautiful Native American story I have always remembered. In this story a grandfather is telling his young grandson about life. He tells the little boy that in every person there are two wolves, who live in one's breast and who are always at war with each other. The first wolf is very aggressive and full of violence and hate toward the world. The second wolf is peaceful and full of light and love. The little boy anxiously asks his grandfather which wolf wins. The grandfather replies, "The one you feed.”

Character
Book:Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
Create image

“While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture. "Passing over," a term used by the theologian John Dunne, describes the process through which reading enables us to try on, identify with, and ultimately enter for a brief time the wholly different perspective of another person's consciousness. When we pass over into how a knight thinks, how a slave feels, how a heroine behaves, and how an evildoer can regret or deny wrongdoing, we never come back quite the same; sometimes we're inspired, sometimes saddened, but we are always enriched. Through this exposure we learn both the commonality and the uniqueness of our own thoughts -- that we are individuals, but not alone.”

ReadingUnderstandingPerspective
Author:Maryanne Wolf
Create image

“Increasing numbers of developmental researchers observe that when parents read stories on e-books with their children, their interactions frequently center on the more mechanical and more gamelike aspects of e-books, rather than the content and the words and ideas in the stories. Most parents are simply better at fostering language and helping to clarify concepts when they read physical books to their preschool children.”

Language LearningPrint BooksE BooksParent And ChildReading To Children
Book:Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
Create image

“...before most of us possess an inkling that babies could be listening to us, infants are making astonishing connections between listening to human voices and developing their language system. Think how much more can happen in those regions when parents slowly, deliberately read to their children, *just to them*, with mutually focused attention. This disarmingly simple act makes huge contributions: it provides not only the most palpable associations with reading, but also a time when parent and child are together in a timeless interaction that involves shared attention; learning about words, sentences, and concepts; and even learning what a book is. One of the most salient influences on young children's attention involves the shared gaze that occurs and develops while parents read to them. With little conscious effort children learn to focus their visual attention on what their parent or caretaker is looking at without losing an ounce of their own curiosity and exploratory behaviors. As the philosopher Charles Taylor notes, "The crucial condition for human language learning is *joint* attention," which he and others who are involved in studying the ontogenesis of language consider one of the most important features of human evolution.”

AttentionParents And ChildrenLanguage LearningInfantsBrain DevelopmentReading To Children
Book:Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
Create image

“That is what I want our young nascent readers to become: expert, flexible code switchers -- between print and digital mediums now and later between and among the multiple future communication mediums....I conceptualize the initial development of learning to think in each medium as largely separated into distinct domains in the first school years, until a point in time when the particular characteristics of the two mediums are each well developed and internalized. That is an essential point. I want the child to have parallel levels of fluency, if you will, in each medium, just as if he or she were similarly fluent in speaking Spanish and English. In this way the uniqueness of the cognitive processes honed by each medium would be there from the start.”

LiteracyMental AgilityPrint Books Vs Ebooks
Book:Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
Create image