What Educators May Not Know about the Neuroscience of Learning

• November 6, 2012 by Scott Sterling

On October 30^th, noted neuroscience researcher and co-founder of Scientific Learning, Dr. Paula Tallal, conducted a live webinar titled “What do Neuroscientists Know About Learning That Most Educators Don’t?” In her presentation, Dr. Tallal discussed her original research on auditory processing, its relationship to language development, and the far-reaching effects that deficiencies in those areas can have on learning.

Research continues to support the hypothesis that difficulty discriminating between small changes in sound is at the heart of learning problems both in students who have a diagnosed difficulty and those who do not.  Dr. Tallal described how oral language is the foundation for learning and for most successful educational outcomes, adding that oral language itself is dependent on the brain’s ability to discriminate and process auditory information. Children who have difficulty perceiving the many subtleties of language find the deck stacked against them in their educational careers. They can experience a variety of impediments to learning, including:

• Limited attention: Humans are less likely to pay attention to someone speaking if they only understand a portion of what is said. Recall the last time you spoke to someone with a heavy accent or were on a bad phone line.
• Difficulty following directions: When you only understand a portion of a spoken “order of operations” - like a set of directions – the chance that you follow the order decreases dramatically.
• Memory issues: As Dr. Tallal describes, if you have to concentrate so much on understanding spoken text, you are less able to move information from working to long-term memory, and therefore are less likely to remember it.

Students with this subtle level of auditory processing problem need specific differentiation that is not possible in most classrooms. The good news, as Dr. Tallal describes, is that modern technology can be used to address the difficulties these children face and help bridge these skill gaps. In fact, it is this level of research and development that informed the development of Scientific Learning’s software programs, including Fast ForWord.

To close, Dr. Tallal took questions from the educators relating to how these insights can be used to improve educational outcomes in all classrooms. Teachers left this insightful webinar with practical strategies that can be used to help learners of all abilities.

 

 

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Education Trends, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant, Scientific Learning Research, Special Education

Tags: academic problems, academic success, accelerate learning, at-risk, attention, brain development, brain plasticity, brain training, child reading development, cognitive skills, dyslexia, Fast ForWord characters, how children learn, improving reading skills, language learning, learning disabilities, literacy, memory, oral language skills, processing, reading intervention, sequencing, struggling readers, struggling students, technology in education, webinar

How Language Immersion Helps English Language Learners Succeed in School

• July 17, 2012 by Norene Wiesen

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the number of school-age English Language Learners (ELLs) more than doubled between the years 1980 and 2009, rising from 4.7 million to 11.2 million. ELLs currently represent one in nine students ages 5 - 17 in US classrooms, with the majority found in the primary grades.

In a recent webinar, Dr. Virginia Mann, Professor of Cognitive Science at UC Irvine in Southern California, confronted the barriers that ELLs face, and outlined the pathway to success for these students. In order to develop into fluent readers, she explained, ELLs rely on a couple of basics:

• Vocabulary and early language skills
• Phonemic awareness

The good news is that building these skills in a learner’s first language can help build skills in English, as phonemic awareness generalizes across languages and it’s a short hop to understand new English words that sound similar in both languages.  The bad news is that many ELLs also grow up in poverty and research shows that young children living in poverty often do not get enough early language experience and exposure to develop strong early language skills.

Because early language skills are so critical for ELLs, if parents take the time to "become teachers" for their children and immerse their children in language by having conversations with them and working with them on listening and speaking activities, learners can make significant gains.

Students whose first language uses an alphabet system have some advantages over those whose first language use an orthographic system, but the bottom line is that when students engage frequently in language-oriented activities and build oral skills, vocabulary, and phonemic understanding in any language, they are on the pathway to successful English language learning.

Mann is quick to note that while parent involvement is crucial, one-shot programs are not sufficient.  Parents of ELLs need coaching and support, not just instruction.  Dr. Mann references numerous studies and gives examples of the enduring programs that she has created and implemented to support parents in helping their children succeed.

To learn more about why early immersion in any language is so crucial to future academic success, view Dr. Mann's webinar here.

Related Reading:

Why You Should Read With Your Child

Toddler Vocabulary Development: Shopping With Your Child

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Categories: English Language Learners, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, achievement gap, elementary school learning, emotions in learning, language learning, learning through play, oral language skills, phonics, phonological awareness, student growth, vocabulary

No-Cost Education Webinars with Michael Horn and Dr. Virginia Mann – Register Today!

• May 3, 2012 by Carrie Gajowski

Join us this month for two no-cost, live webinars as we welcome back popular presenters Michael Horn and Dr. Virginia Mann!

Disrupting Class

On May 17, you are invited to “Disrupting Class” with Michael Horn, author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns and cofounder of Innosight Institute. The theory of disruptive innovation describes how products or services that offer simplicity, affordability, and convenience transform a market that was previously dominated by complicated, expensive, and inaccessible products or services.  In this webinar, Michael Horn will describe how online learning is disrupting our notion of a classroom and how it offers the possibility of moving toward a student-centric learning system that is much more focused on different people's distinct learning needs. This webinar is at 11am PST (2pm EST)

Reading English as a Second Language: Some Challenges and Solutions

On May 23, please join us for “Reading English as a Second Language: Some Challenges and Solutions” with Dr. Virginia Mann, professor of Cognitive Sciences at the School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. Dr. Mann will discuss the differences between English and other writing systems, the need for early immersion in English if English language learning is going to be optimal, the importance of phoneme awareness and phonological processing, and the challenge of morphology.  Dr. Mann will also look at English Language Learners who have problems with reading and who suffer from some of the same phonological problems that English speakers do, showing how the Fast ForWord and Reading Assistant products can help them succeed in school. This webinar will take place at 12pm PST (3pm EST).

 

 

Related Reading:

Language and the Reading Puzzle: 5 Steps Toward Fluent Reading

Why You Should Read With Your Child

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Education Trends, English Language Learners, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic problems, academic success, at-risk, blended learning, child reading development, digital natives, innovation, language learning, learning environment, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, technology in education, webinar

3 Tips for Encouraging Verbal Communication in Young Learners

• May 1, 2012 by Carrie Gajowski

“It is now well accepted that the chief cause of the achievement gap between socioeconomic groups is a language gap.”

- E.D. Hirsch, 2003

Research shows that children from rich language environments start off their academic career with a definite advantage over their peers.  In one study with 280 1^st grade students, results indicated a strong connection between language skills and later academic performance.^[i]   Another study found that “children who are provided a wide variety of experiences and opportunities to talk, tell stories, read storybooks, draw, and write are generally successful in learning to read and write.”^[ii]

How can parents enhance the home language environment to help their children succeed?

Here are a few simple ways: 

1. Talk, talk, and talk to children.  Engage them in meaningful conversation, and help them “use their words” to interact with other children.  Help build their vocabulary by using words they may not recognize.  Adding unfamiliar words to conversations can pique a child’s interest in learning additional words and discovering how to use them in conversation. 
2. Read to young learners.  Regularly reading a variety of texts to children—stories, poems, factual books about animals and the natural world—can expose them to countless new words.  It is even more fun by taking turns.  If your child has started to read, one day you can read to him; the next day, he can read to you.  Pre-readers can “read” a picture book out loud.
3. Teach your young students the joys of music!  Through learning new songs and singing, children can have fun while learning new vocabulary.  The rhythm of music provides cues that can help children pronounce multisyllabic words more easily, and because young children don’t have to worry about pronouncing every new word correctly when singing with others, they can build their confidence.

It’s never too early to help children appreciate the usefulness of language, the power of communicating effectively with others, and the joy of words.  Every word spoken and every word read is truly a gift to a young child.  

 

 

References:

[i] Elements Comprising the Colorado Literacy Framework:  III. Communication Skills, Including Oral and Written Language. (2010). Colorado Literacy Framework. Retrieved April 26, 2012.

[ii]  Kastner JW, May W, Hildman L. Relationship between language skills and academic achievement in first grade.  Percept Mot Skills. 2001 Apr;92(2):381-90.PMID: 11361297 

Related Reading:

Adding ten minutes of reading time dramatically changes levels of print exposure (PDF)

The Speech and Language Connection: The Nursery Rhyme Effect
 

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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant

Tags: academic success, child reading development, early learning, emotions in learning, how children learn, improving reading skills, language learning, learning environment, learning through play, learning to read, oral language skills, toddler, vocabulary

Language and the Reading Puzzle: Morphemes and Memory

• April 10, 2012 by Carrie Gajowski

In the recent Scientific Learning webinar "Language and the Reading Puzzle Part 2:  Morpheme Awareness and Working Memory," cognitive scientist Dr. Virginia Mann continues the conversation she began in Part 1, this time focusing on the importance of developing working memory and morpheme awareness skills in order to attain the goal of fluent reading (the ability to read at the right speed with no mistakes and good expression). 

Morpheme awareness is the ability to recognize and contextualize the basic semantic building blocks of the English language.  Here’s an example of how it works:

Can you fill in the blank with the most appropriate fictional word from the multiple-choice list below?

She is very __________.
a) lorialize
b) lorial 
c) lorify
d) lorialism

Most experienced English speakers will be able to select the nonsense word "lorial" (choice b) to complete the sentence above, as it is the only adjective on the list. Completing this exercise also requires working memory, the ability to temporarily retain information long enough to complete a new task.

MORPHEMES

In her presentation, Dr. Mann compares morphemes to Legos, the interlocking toy building-block system, describing morphemes as vocabulary-building roots for language. One example she gives of a morpheme is the root word “play,” which can morph into the words “plays”, “played,” “playpen,”  “replay,” and “unplayfully,” (to name a few) with the help of prefixes and suffixes.

In the webinar, Dr. Mann refers to a study which showed that normally developing children between the ages of 4 and 5 already understand this kind of morphological activity and are able to build new words in this manner. Research has also shown that young readers who do not develop strong morpheme awareness skills can sometimes end up with "frozen" reading skills, typically around the 3rd grade, just before morpheme awareness become central to a student's journey towards fluent reading.

WORKING MEMORY

Working memory is also explored in-depth in this webinar. Dr. Mann connects the dots between the importance of working memory and oral comprehension difficulties in school, and clearly identifies the kinds of classroom challenges (e.g., difficulty following directions, problems with multiple choice tests) students with poor working memory skills eventually face.

“If you can’t retain what is said, you can’t comprehend it,” Dr. Mann succinctly states, demonstrating the very real connection between poor working memory skills and diminished comprehension, which are common barriers to fluent reading.

All parents and educators can benefit from a deeper knowledge of morphemes and working memory (even if you selected the correct word in our little pop quiz above). Click here to view the full webinar.

 

Dr. Mann has collaborated with Scientific Learning on our learning acceleration products since the year 2000, playing a crucial role in the development of the Fast ForWord READING series.

Related Reading:

Language and the Reading Puzzle: 5 Steps Toward Fluent Reading

Why You Should Read With Your Child

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Brain Fitness, Reading & Learning

Tags: child reading development, early learning, fluency, improving reading skills, language learning, learning to read, literacy, memory, oral language skills, reading comprehension, struggling readers, vocabulary, webinar

Using Poetry to Teach Reading: Rhythm, Rhyme, and Choral Reading

• April 5, 2012 by PC Munoz

Poetry is a powerful vehicle to teach children to learn and love language, reading, and writing. In some ways, using poetry to teach reading is analogous to sneaking highly nutritious (and occasionally child-repellent) vegetables into otherwise kid-friendly dishes. By making use of creative devices like rhythm, rhyme and choral reading, educators can help students learn about phonemes, morphemes, grammar, and other language-based skills, all while having a great time with poetry.

RHYTHM
Many poems written for children have some sort of meter, or basic rhythmic structure, that is catchy and relatively easy for kids to copy orally. This provides a great opportunity for classroom teachers (particularly at the primary-grade level) to go line by line through a poem and focus on the number of syllables (or "beats") in a given word, and demonstrate how each sound and word plays a part in maintaining the meter of the poem. Asking students to swap out one of the words in a highly rhythmic poem for an appropriate new word (which has the same number of beats and a similar sound as the original) is a fun activity that exercises phoneme awareness, vocabulary, and creative writing skills. Haiku and its established structural confines, which require detailed syllable counting on the part of students, is a favorite for students of all ages to read and write.

RHYME
Rhyming poems are ripe with abundant classroom activities. Students can examine the sounds in each rhyming line, identifying the rhyming sounds and coming up with alternate rhyming words that could work in the poem. As an oral activity, creating "silly" substitute rhymes that have the correct matching sound but make absolutely no sense within the poem can also be a lot of fun for students of all ages, while flexing their phoneme awareness and vocabulary skills.

CHORAL READING
Choral reading of a poem (reading aloud in unison with a group of students or whole class) gets students to use their voices, collaborate with their classmates, gain an understanding of the potential dramatic power of the written word, and strengthen their understanding of punctuation. Leading students through a choral reading session can include a significant emphasis on punctuation and how it affects oral reading (pausing when there's a period, inflecting upwards in pitch when there's a question mark, etc.) and affords opportunity to work on enunciation skills as well. Breaking up a choral reading poem so all students have a chance to read a line or phrase on their own can also get the whole class to participate and feel positive about their relationship to the written word.

Using poetry to teach reading is a fun way to inspire students of all skill levels to engage with the subtle beauty and nuances of a language, encourage expression and creativity, and become excited about words, reading, and writing. The possibilities for using poetry in the classroom to teach valuable concepts and skills are almost as boundless as the potential combinations of words in a poem.

*I am the author of the haiku in this post. Though I didn’t know it at the time, my second grade teachers, Tina McCarter and Sharon Kamimoto, helped kick-start a lifelong love of words...for which I am grateful.

Related Reading:

Using Fiction Writing Activities to Develop Creative Thinking in the Classroom

5 Reasons Why Your Students Should Write Every Day

 

About the author:  PC Muñoz is a San Francisco-based writer, recording artist, and educator. Information on his past and future projects can be found at http://www.pcmunoz.com

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: arts, child reading development, creativity, language learning, learning to read, literacy, motivating students, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, phonics, play, reading comprehension, teacher impact, writing

Language and the Reading Puzzle: 5 Steps Towards Fluent Reading

• April 3, 2012 by Carrie Gajowski

Dr. Virginia Mann's recent Scientific Learning webinar, "Language and the Reading Puzzle – Part 1" focused on the way families, schools, researchers, and technology can work together to create a "circuit for success" by helping students attain the goal of fluent reading (reading at the right speed, with few or no mistakes and good expression).  The information in Dr. Mann's webinar is extensive, covering both the research data on the barriers to fluent reading and the various solutions parents and educators can employ to demonstrably improve reading readiness and fluency.

Here are five steps that can help steer beginning readers and struggling readers of all ages towards fluent reading:

1.   Identify barriers.

Most readers begin as "hearers" of language, and written language is fundamentally a transcription of spoken language.  Dr. Mann identifies poor oral/spoken language skills as a common barrier to fluent reading, a barrier that involves a lack of phoneme awareness and morpheme awareness (the subject of a separate webinar to be covered in a future post).  She also dispels any lingering belief in the myth that visual "reversals" in writing or reading (e.g., mistaking a b for a d, confusing bad with dad) are a predictor or cause of poor reading skills in any way. Identifying the real barriers to fluent reading is the first step in determining how to best assist struggling readers.

2.  Build phoneme awareness. 

The data Dr. Mann presents in this webinar tell us that phoneme awareness, which develops with age and exposure, is directly related to reading ability. Activities which promote phoneme awareness include learning the ABCs (especially the letter sounds), matching and sorting words by phonemes (e.g., noting that the beginning sounds of cat and cup match, while the beginning sounds of cat and dog do not match), and manipulating phonemes (e.g., substituting an s for the c in cat to create a new word with a new beginning sound—sat). Understanding how the letters c-a-t spell the aural word cat takes a kind of “mental surgery” which can only occur with strong phoneme awareness.

3. Enrich vocabulary exposure and oral language skills.

Research shows us that students with weak oral language skills in kindergarten have a substantially more difficult time learning to read or reaching the appropriate reading level for their age group. A difference of 5.2 years between age and reading level is not uncommon in young people who begin kindergarten with deficient oral language experience. A great way to support and build on a strong foundation of phoneme awareness is through cumulative oral language experiences, which provide new and struggling readers with incremental exposure to letter sounds and vocabulary, laying the groundwork for better language comprehension and reading.

4.  Encourage literacy activities.

A powerful example of a literacy-oriented activity that can boost phoneme awareness and reading readiness is dialogic reading, a practice that encourages interactivity over passive listening when engaging with the written word. The main technique when practicing dialogic reading is the "PEER Sequence," which asks the adult reader to:

• Prompt the child to comment about the book
• Evaluate the child's response in some way
• Expand the child's response by adding new information
• Repeat the prompt to reinforce what has been learned

Dialogic reading is an active, dynamic workout for hearing, speaking, critical thinking, and working memory skills, which all play a part in building a better reader.

5.  Use technology.

In the fast-moving 21st century, technology has an important role to play. Today, cutting-edge educational tools can help accelerate reading acquisition, with enormous benefits for learners and busy educators. Educators will benefit by embracing the available technology that produces better readers who can learn more effectively in the classroom.

Fluent reading is a significant goal: a challenge for beginners, and a persistent problem for some struggling students. These five steps are really just a glimpse of what Dr. Mann covers in her presentation. Click here to view the full webinar!

Related Reading:

The Essential Nature of Developing Oral Reading Fluency

Students Who Struggle in the Mainstream: What Their Homework Patterns May Tell You

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, achievement gap, child reading development, early learning, how children learn, language learning, learning to read, literacy, memory, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, vocabulary

Keeping in Mind: The Task of Working Memory

• March 27, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

Just about everyone has had the experience of going grocery shopping with a small list of purchases in their mind, only to forget one or more of them upon arriving at the store. Similarly, we all have left one room to retrieve something from another room, forgetting what we are after before we have even arrived. The ability to hold information in mind for a few minutes to a few hours is called working memory. It is essential for everything from language learning in children to following a book chapter from beginning to end.

Working memory was first defined by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch in 1974. It is a form of memory that may distinguish humans from many other animals (with the exception of several primates). Working memory, commonly referred to as short-term memory, allows a person to hold on to information for a period of time (minutes or perhaps hours) long enough to do something new with the information, like take notes or solve a problem.

A typical situation in which we rely on working memory is watching an informational program on television, like a segment on a news program, and discussing it later with a friend. We may forget about the specific news event later in the week, but for a period of time we “keep it in mind,” thinking about it and perhaps talking about it with others. Each time we share the information with another person or think about it ourselves, we select details that interest us and alter them slightly to keep them interesting to us. Other examples of tasks that require good working memory in adults include taking notes during a lecture or paraphrasing information we hear or read about. 

Alan Baddeley elaborated on the original concept of working memory in 1992, noting that unlike other kinds of short-term memory (such as rote repetition), working memory requires us to focus and maintain our attention on the task at hand. To keep our attentional focus, we must be goal-directed, ignoring distractions that might interfere with goal attainment. Baddeley stressed the importance of the “central executive” system for maintaining attentional focus in working memory tasks.

For children, working memory is essential for learning language. Unlike vision, where we can often study an image as long as we need to, everything we hear occurs in time. The speech signal moves very quickly: an average sentence is about 14 seconds long, an average single syllable word lasts only a quarter of a second, and the average consonant sound may last only 1/12 of a second.  

We are all made aware of how fleeting the speech signal is when someone is talking to us and we become distracted, which consequently requires us to ask the speaker to repeat what was just said. In that way, speech is like a billboard that appears briefly in our peripheral vision as we travel at 55 miles per hour along a highway. It we are not paying specific attention in that instant to that part of the road, we will miss it, or only retain small bits of the message on the billboard. In a similar way, information we hear leaves us as soon as it arrives. We are not able to hold it in view like a drawing or photograph, or study it like a person’s face, so we must keep the information in our mind. 

For some, improving working memory can be as simple as getting more sleep or more exercise or learning to avoid distractions.  For others, whose working memory is weak enough to significantly impact learning, more help may be needed. Fortunately, the brain is a malleable structure and cognitive skills like working memory can be improved by strengthening key learning pathways in the brain (as regular readers of this blog know—working memory is one of four cognitive skills rapidly strengthened by the Fast ForWord program). 

The truth is, we live in an exciting time.  Scientists are learning more all the time about how cognitive skills like working memory operate.  We can look forward to these discoveries yielding more insights and tools that we’ll be able to use to optimize learning throughout our lives.
 

Related Reading:

The Mirror Neuron System

Toddler Vocabulary Development: Shopping With Your Child

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: attention, auditory processing, brain training, language learning, oral language skills, processing

5 Fluency and Comprehension Strategies That Every Reader Can Use

• March 22, 2012 by Wendy Mathieu

Every student seeks to be a confident, competent reader—regardless of grade level or starting fluency—and parents, teachers, and tutors want to help. To be fully functional in our society, we need to be capable of engaging with a variety of texts, some of which may be more technical, more abstract, or in some other way more challenging than our regular reading diet.  When encountering an unfamiliar kind of text, even “good” readers need to learn how to read it and practice reading it in order to read it fluently and actually understand it.

Whether the text exists on paper, as a website or even as an e-book, the strategies for developing fluency and comprehension are the same. When students encounter an unfamiliar, difficult, or unusual piece of text, coach them through these fluency and comprehension strategies:

1. Preview the text – Examine its structure, any illustrations, and unfamiliar vocabulary words before reading;
2. Listen to a fluent reading – If possible, listen to a model for correct pronunciation and expression;
3. Engage in the act of reading – Make predictions, ask questions, and reread confusing parts. Students can “talk to the text” to get a better understanding.
4. Practice reading it aloud – Read the text out loud (sometimes repeatedly) and attend to phrasing and punctuation as guides;
5. Answer/Ask questions about the text – Check comprehension after reading to ensure that the meaning of the text has been understood.

Using a similar approach can be helpful for students today as they endeavor to meet the Common Core Standards that set requirements for reading not only for English language arts, but also for reading in the content areas of history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. This means that students need to be able to read a variety of genres – and not only narrative text, but informational text as well. By doing so, they can gain familiarity with various text structures and elements, as well as literary, cultural and background knowledge that can be applied in their subsequent reading experiences.

Through instruction and practice in reading a variety of texts, students will become fluent and able to comprehend all genres and all school subjects - and achieve the vision of what it means to be a literate person in the 21^st century!
 

 

Related Reading:

Building Fluent Readers: How Oral Reading Practice Helps Reading Comprehension

The Essential Nature of Developing Oral Reading Fluency

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant

Tags: child reading development, fluency, how children learn, improving reading skills, learning to read, literacy, oral language skills, reading comprehension, vocabulary

The Reading Brain: How Your Brain Helps You Read, and Why it Matters

• March 15, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

If you’re reading this, you’re probably an accomplished reader.  In fact, you’ve most likely forgotten by now how much work it took you to learn to read in the first place.  And you probably never think about what is happening in your brain when you’re reading that email from your boss or this month’s book club selection.

And yet, there’s nothing that plays a greater role in learning to read than a reading-ready brain.

As complex a task as reading is, thanks to developments in neuroscience and technology we are now able to target key learning centers in the brain and identify the areas and neural pathways the brain employs for reading. We not only understand why strong readers read well and struggling readers struggle, but we are also able to assist every kind of reader on the journey from early language acquisition to reading and comprehension—a journey that happens in the brain.

We begin to develop the language skills required for reading right from the first gurgles we make as babies. The sounds we encounter in our immediate environment as infants set language acquisition skills in motion, readying the brain for the structure of language-based communication, including reading.

Every time a baby hears speech, the brain is learning the rules of language that generalize, later, to reading.  Even a simple nursery rhyme can help a baby's brain begin to make sound differentiations and create phonemic awareness, an essential building block for reading readiness. By the time a child is ready to read effectively, the brain has done a lot of work coordinating sounds to language, and is fully prepared to coordinate language to reading, and reading to comprehension. 

The reading brain can be likened to the real-time collaborative effort of a symphony orchestra, with various parts of the brain working together, like sections of instruments, to maximize our ability to decode the written text in front of us:

• The temporal lobe is responsible for phonological awareness and decoding/discriminating sounds.
• The frontal lobe handles speech production, reading fluency, grammatical usage, and comprehension, making it possible to understand simple and complex grammar in our native language.
• The angular and supramarginal gyrus serve as a "reading integrator" a conductor of sorts, linking the different parts of the brain together to execute the action of reading.  These areas of  the brain connect the letters c, a, and t to the word cat that we can then read aloud.

Emerging readers can build strong reading skills through focused, repetitive practice, preferably with exercises like those provided by the Fast ForWord program, that "cross-train" all the reading-relevant areas of the brain.

Independent research conducted at Stanford in 2003 and Harvard in 2007 demonstrated that Fast ForWord creates physical changes in the brain as it builds new connections and strengthens the neural pathways, specifically in the areas of reading. After just eight weeks of use, weak readers developed the brain activity patterns that resemble those of strong readers.  And, as brain patterns changed, significant improvements for word reading, decoding, reading comprehension and language functions were also observed.

It’s never too early to set a child on the pathway to becoming a strong reader.  And it’s never too late to help a struggling reader strengthen his or her brain to read more successfully and with greater enjoyment. 

It’s all about the brain.  Have you hugged your brain today?

Related Reading:

How Learning to Read Improves Brain Function

Why You Should Read With Your Child

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Brain Research, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: brain training, child reading development, crosstraining, early learning, improving reading skills, learning to read, literacy, oral language skills, reading comprehension, technology in education