Excerpts from The Brain Gym® Journal
Volume XXIII, Nos. 1and 2
The Effect of Eye Movement Exercises on Fluency
Jackie Grondin, Virginia
The movement of the eyes is essential to reading. This study investigated the effect of eye movement exercises and their relationship to oral reading flucency, as research shows that fluid eye movements allow for neurological connections in the brain.
I assessed the eye movements and reading fluency of three students. The students practiced eye movement exercises each day for six weeks, and the results showed increased eye movement fluidity and oral reading fluency on the part of all three students. This supports my hypothesis that, when the eye movements are fluid, the mind is free to concentrate on the meaning of the language being read, thereby increasing comprehension.
Visual tracking is essential for fluency - which is, according to the National Reading Panel, the ability to read most words in context quickly, accurately, and automatically. And according to Cunningham and Moore, fluency is the bridge to comprehension.
The development of eye movements is a complex process. Human eyes were designed for distance vision - to understnad what is seen in the distance, as in hunting. The early development of a growing child includes play, movement, and self-expression. According to the neurophysiologist Hannaford (2005), a child's eyes first develop three-dimensional and peripheral vision by looking at the environment. Ideally, a child will develop a habit of using both eyes together, and such usage will lay down neural pathways that support ease of binocularity.
When a child enters school, he may not yet have achieved an up-close focus, and visual stress may follow. Near-point vision develops sometime between ages six and a half and eight, allowing the child to leave the play-filled stage and enter the stage of the logical, sequential, language-oriented left brain. At this time the frontal lobes of the brain mature, and the corpus callosum, the bridge between the right and left hemispheres, is also developing. This development is necessary for the eye teaming that will be essential for reading.
Since the 1950's, our culture has placed an increased attention on near-visual tasks. Many studies have been done on eye movements and reading, as there is known to be a close relationship between visual skills and reading success. Dennison and Dennision (1989) included eye movements in the Brain Gym Action Balance for Seeing; these serve as indicators of the eyes'
readiness for success in reading.
Brown's article "Eye Teaming with Brain Gym" (2004) explained in detail how eye teaming is needed for the decoding of words, and that this skill can be learned. Ideally both eyes are active while reading; one eye is dominant and the other is the blending eye, allowing communication across the hemispheres. Most people lead with the right eye, which is appropriate for reading English, but some 20 percent of readers lead with the left eye, opposite the flow of print, which can cause reading errors and visual stress.
Since ordinarily 80 percent of learning happens through vision, (Kranowity 2005), one can see the importance of the complex process of visual development.
