Is Reading a Left-Brain or Right-Brain Activity? Understanding Hemispheric Dominance

Sarah Major, M.Ed. is passionate about working in harmony with a child's immaculate design to support their learning strengths. As a Title 1 Program Director and Designer, Sarah earned awards for creating her own multisensory educational resources that have now been sold in all 50 states and over 150 countries. Sarah’s materials combine all learning modalities into every lesson, so you can teach once and reach all.   

Is reading a left-brain activity or a right-brain activity?

It's an understandable question.

Reading involves language, sounds, letters, words, meaning, memory, attention, and visual processing. And for many years, educators have used terms such as left-brained, right-brained, and hemispheric dominance to describe differences they observe in how children approach learning.

At Child1st, we have also used these terms to describe children who seem to thrive with different kinds of instruction.

Some children readily follow a sequence of small steps.

Others seem to understand something more easily when they can first see the whole, recognize a pattern, connect the idea to something meaningful, visualize it, move with it, or experience it with their hands.

Those differences can be useful for teachers and parents to notice.

But what do they actually tell us about the brain?

And what happens in the brain when a child learns to read?

Is Reading Left-Brain or Right-Brain?

The simplest answer is:

Reading relies heavily on networks in the left hemisphere for most readers, but reading is not the work of one isolated part—or one isolated side—of the brain.

Research has consistently found strong left-hemisphere involvement in reading. A 2025 meta-analysis synthesizing 163 studies found that letter, word, sentence, and text reading showed particularly strong processing specificity in left-hemisphere areas.

Another recent review describes reading as strongly dependent on the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex while also noting contributions and reading capacity involving the right hemisphere.

Research involving children and adults has similarly identified a network of reading-related regions, particularly in left occipitotemporal, temporoparietal, and inferior frontal areas. These regions contribute in different ways to connecting print, speech sounds, language, and meaning.

So it would be misleading to say:

“Reading happens in the left brain.”

But it would also be misleading to suggest that the two hemispheres contribute equally to every component of reading.

A better way to think about reading is as a coordinated network activity.

What Does Hemispheric Dominance Mean?

The two hemispheres of the brain are not identical.

Some functions are more strongly lateralized—or specialized toward one hemisphere—than others. Language and reading are especially left-lateralized in most people.

But that is different from dividing people into two neurological types:

left-brained people and right-brained people.

A child does not perform schoolwork with only one hemisphere.

Reading itself requires the brain to integrate multiple types of information.

A printed word has to be visually perceived.

Letters and spelling patterns have to be recognized.

Print must connect with speech sounds.

Words must connect with meaning.

Sentences have to be integrated into larger ideas.

Attention and memory also contribute to the process.

Research on the reading brain therefore describes interacting networks, rather than assigning the entire act of reading to one location.

Then What Does Child1st Mean by “Right-Brained Learning”?

This distinction is important.

At Child1st, terms such as right-brained, visual-spatial, and whole-to-part have historically been used as practical descriptions of learning strengths Sarah Major observed in children.

They describe children who may respond particularly well when instruction incorporates things such as:

• meaningful visuals
• patterns and relationships
• stories and analogies
• movement
• hands-on experiences
• spatial organization
• seeing the whole before examining its parts

We don't need to assume that these children are literally performing their reading with the right hemisphere in order to learn something valuable from those observations.

Instead, the question for a teacher or parent can be:

What presentation helps this particular child understand, remember, and apply what is being taught?

That keeps the focus where Sarah intended it to be—on observing the learner.

Whole-to-Part and Part-to-Whole Learning

One distinction Sarah frequently observed was between children who seemed comfortable learning part-to-whole and children who benefited from seeing whole-to-part.

Traditional explicit reading instruction often builds systematically:

sound → letter → spelling pattern → word → sentence → connected text

That sequence is important. Children need explicit knowledge of how written language works.

But that doesn't mean the parts have to be taught without showing children what those parts are building toward.

Some children seem to understand a new concept more readily when they can first see the larger pattern.

For example, instead of teaching a spelling pattern as an isolated fact, we might show:

PLAY
DAY
STAY
MAY
WAY

Then ask:

“What do you notice?”

Now the child can see AY operating within several meaningful words.

We can still explicitly teach that spelling pattern.

The larger visual context simply helps make the part easier to notice.

So whole-to-part and part-to-whole don't have to compete.

Effective instruction can move in both directions.

Sarah's Classroom Word-Wall Experience

Sarah saw the power of visible patterns in her own classroom.

Rather than keeping most words out of sight until they appeared in a prescribed sequence, she filled her classroom walls with words.

Some were high-frequency words. Others were much larger words that might ordinarily have been considered beyond the children's grade level.

Something interesting happened.

The children began noticing relationships.

They might see:

NATION

and then discover the same TION spelling pattern in:

VACATION

and even:

ABDICATION

Sarah found that when children noticed these relationships themselves, the pattern became meaningful and memorable to them. Her original account emphasizes how children began detecting recurring word parts within the larger visual environment.

That observation remains useful even without attributing the behavior to one hemisphere.

We're helping children see that written English contains patterns and relationships.

Make Abstract Information More Concrete

Another principle in Sarah's original right-brained approach was making abstract information easier to see, touch, or experience.

Reading contains a great deal of abstraction.

A letter is a visual symbol representing something about spoken language.

Several letters can work together to represent one sound.

The same sound can sometimes be spelled in different ways.

The same spelling can sometimes represent different sounds.

For some children, simply explaining these relationships verbally isn't enough.

Making them visible can help.

For example:

RAIN
TRAIN
PAINT
WAIT

Highlighting AI makes the shared spelling pattern visually obvious.

Children can say the words, identify the sounds, build the words with letters, write them, sort them, and then find the pattern in connected text.

The visual or hands-on experience doesn't replace phonics.

It helps make the phonics concrete.

Let Children Discover Patterns—Then Teach Them Explicitly

Sarah also valued giving children opportunities to notice relationships.

That idea can work very well alongside explicit instruction.

Suppose you display:

LIGHT
NIGHT
RIGHT
SIGHT
BRIGHT

Ask:

“What do you notice?”

A child might immediately spot IGHT.

Another might notice that every word rhymes.

Another might see that changing the beginning creates a new word.

Once children have noticed the pattern, teach it directly.

Have them read the words.

Spell them.

Build additional words.

Use them in sentences.

Find them in books.

The discovery gives the pattern meaning.

Explicit instruction makes the learning clear.

Practice helps make it usable.

Use Stories, Analogies, and Meaningful Connections

Sarah's original article also emphasized analogies, stories, relationships, and patterns as ways of making abstract information understandable.

That principle remains central to Child1st.

A story can help a child initially remember why a letter has a particular sound.

A meaningful visual can draw attention to a word.

A body motion can reinforce meaning or a sound-spelling relationship.

An analogy can connect unfamiliar information with something the child already understands.

The important distinction is that these are instructional supports.

The child ultimately needs to recognize the letter, spelling pattern, or word without depending permanently on the story, picture, or movement.

The support helps establish the learning.

Then we gradually remove it.

Drawing Can Reveal What a Child Understands

Sarah also encouraged children to draw frequently.

Suppose a child draws a dinosaur in the backyard.

Rather than treating the drawing as separate from literacy, ask:

“Tell me about your picture.”

The child says:

“I have a dinosaur for a pet.”

Now oral language can become written language.

Help the child write the sentence:

I have a dinosaur for a pet.

Talk about the sounds and spellings in the words.

Read the sentence together.

The child can return to it later and read it again.

This creates a natural progression:

experience → image → oral language → writing → reading

Drawing isn't replacing reading instruction.

It becomes another route into language, spelling, and print.

Sarah described using drawing and labeling in much this way with young children.

Use Movement and Hands-On Learning Purposefully

Some children also benefit from doing something physical while learning.

They might:

• build words with movable letters
• finger-map the sounds in a word
• trace a spelling pattern while saying its sound
• sort words by spelling pattern
• use a body motion associated with a sound or meaning
• write on a personal whiteboard
• manipulate objects while learning an abstract concept

The key word is purposefully.

Movement shouldn't simply be added because movement is supposedly “right-brained.”

The action should draw attention to the concept being learned.

For example, finger mapping helps a child attend to the individual phonemes in a spoken word.

Building SHIP while segmenting:

/sh/ /i/ /p/

connects the three sounds with their written representation:

SH – I – P

The hands-on component supports the literacy task rather than distracting from it.

Does a “Right-Brained” Child Still Need Phonics?

Yes.

A child's preference for visual, spatial, contextual, or hands-on learning doesn't eliminate the need to understand the alphabetic system.

Children still need to learn how spoken words are made of sounds and how those sounds relate to letters and spelling patterns.

They need practice blending.

They need opportunities to decode unfamiliar words.

They need to build automatic recognition of familiar words.

They need vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, writing, and connected reading.

What can change is how we make those concepts accessible during instruction.

A child who doesn't respond well to a worksheet may understand the same phonics concept when it is taught explicitly with movable letters, a meaningful visual, a spelling-pattern sort, a whiteboard, and immediate application in words and sentences.

The learning goal hasn't changed.

The delivery has.

What About Starting With Whole Words?

Children shouldn't be expected to memorize large numbers of words as unanalyzed visual shapes.

Instead, a whole word can provide a meaningful context for examining how written language works.

Take:

PLAY

We can read the word.

Talk about its meaning.

Use it in a sentence.

Then examine it:

P – L – AY

We can identify the sounds.

Notice that AY represents the final sound.

Compare it with:

DAY
MAY
STAY

And then look for the same word inside:

PLAYGROUND

Now we have moved:

whole → parts → pattern → related words → whole

Does Hemispheric Dominance Explain Reading Difficulties?

Hemispheric dominance by itself should not be used as an explanation for why a child struggles to read.

Reading difficulty can involve many factors, including difficulty with phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, automatic word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, language comprehension, or combinations of these.

Brain-imaging research has found differences in activation and connectivity within reading-related networks among groups of readers with reading difficulties, but those findings are considerably more complex than saying that a struggling reader is simply “too right-brained.”

If a child is struggling, the useful question is not:

“Which hemisphere is dominant?”

It is:

“Where is the reading process breaking down, and what type of instruction helps this child learn that skill?”

Observe the child.

Look closely at what they can already do.

Identify what they cannot yet do reliably.

Then teach that skill explicitly while using supports that make the learning meaningful and accessible.

So, Does Learning Style Matter?

Children certainly differ.

They bring different strengths, experiences, interests, language abilities, background knowledge, attention patterns, and responses to instruction.

At Child1st, we believe those differences are worth noticing.

If a child suddenly understands a spelling pattern when it is made visually obvious, that's useful information.

If another child remembers something after building it with their hands, that's useful.

If seeing the whole concept first helps a child understand the individual steps, pay attention to that.

If a story or analogy makes an abstract concept click, use it.

We don't have to turn those observations into rigid neurological categories in order to teach responsively.

The Best Reading Instruction Doesn't Have to Choose Sides

Perhaps the most useful conclusion is that teaching reading doesn't have to become a contest between:

left brain vs. right brain

phonics vs. meaning

sequential vs. whole-to-part

explicit instruction vs. discovery

print vs. pictures

We can teach children explicitly how written language works and make that learning visual, meaningful, memorable, hands-on, and connected.

We can teach the parts while showing the whole.

We can point out a pattern and also let children discover patterns.

We can use an image as a temporary memory support and then return to plain print.

We can use movement while keeping the child's attention firmly on the sound, spelling, word, or concept being learned.

That is the principle behind Child1st's multisensory approach:

Keep the learning goal clear while giving children more than one meaningful way to connect with it.

Where to Go Next

If the term right-brain dominant learner describes many of the learning strengths you see in your child, read:

Is Your Child a Right-Brain Dominant Learner? Characteristics & Traits

If you're looking specifically for reading instruction, read:

How to Teach Right-Brained Learners to Read: 9 Practical Strategies

And for children who strongly rely on visual patterns, spatial relationships, and whole-to-part connections:

How to Teach Visual-Spatial Learners to Read: Strategies & Activities

The goal isn't to fit a child neatly into a category.

The goal is to understand the child well enough to teach effectively.