Dear Jeannine,

I am now using Read, Write, and Type with a low-verbal, severely austistic ninth-grader here in my new state of South Carolina, with amazing results!

Her teachers had not thought that she could read or spell, and they have been put off by some of her behaviors.  It turns out that she has been frustrated, because the staff assumed she could not learn.  They were skeptical when I brought in my computer and started her on the program, but she took to it like a fish to water.  I add comprehension work to the story activities and encourage verbal imitation and responses.  We are almost half way through the program, and it is changing her entire curriculum- the teachers are now focusing on teaching her to read and write, which is increasing her communication skills- her parents are thrilled!  She was previously thought to be unable to sustain attention to any activity; however, with skilled support, she works on Read, Write & Type for 50 minutes, and I think would happily do more- Read, Write, and Type is changing her life.

I do not exaggerate the results from your programs, Jeannine.   Now, each week when I come in the door, she is visibly excited and independently brings pencil and paper and sits down to work; she then insists that we write in her communication book to home what we did on Read, Write & Type that day.  Best of all, the teachers now know she can read and spell words, decode simple sentences, copy the sentences from the stories and re-read them, write grocery lists and engage in real literacy learning activities at school.

But you know I have used the Talking Fingers programs successfully in many environments, both clinically and in school settings.  In fact, I have yet to find a student, thoughtfully placed, who did not respond to  Read, Write & Type..  Whenever I have an opportunity to provide a dyslexia evaluation, I include Read, Write & Type, and Wordy Qwerty in my recommendations for parents.

I am now serving a very poor, rural, southern school district as a speech-language pathologist.  This district needs to spend what little money they have very wisely for kids. Your programs are so economical compared to others!  I have shown some special educators the Talking Finger programs, and they would like me to spend some training time this January, showing them the program and sharing my results.

All the best for 2010!

Jane Coolidge, SLP-CCC

The most dramatic new discovery is that if dyslexic readers are provided intensive special tutoring and improve their reading skills, one can literally see that the brain changes its pattern of activity to produce a more efficient way of reading. These new insights, based not on theories but on the actual brains of actual readers have led to new ways of thinking about how to introduce children to the alphabet and to reading, and how to prevent reading difficulties.

Reading is a new human skill. Humans have been using some form of language in verbal communication for about two million years, but reading and writing have only been around for a few thousand.  We don’t know what early language sounded like but whatever its form, it’s pretty clear that language, and the capacity of the human brain to organize and express it, changed and evolved over the eons to accommodate more and more complex conversations.  Mothers found ways to tell their children how to keep out of trouble, and fathers found ways to brag about the hunt as the family gathered around the stew pot.

So it’s not surprising that our children, the inheritors of that ancient legacy, are able by the age of three to ask for orange juice, and tell us why they don’t want to go to grandma’s house today.  Their brains have pre-developed locations of cells, sophisticated programs and elaborate connections to deal with the complexities of speaking. Their brains start out with an efficient neural organization for speech, but not for reading.  It is the instruction children receive that will determine how these pathways are laid down.

In future posts to this blog, I will try to report more on how these important connections get made. Are there any specific topics that you wish to hear me discuss in a blog post? Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.

“One of the most fundamental flaws found in almost all phonics programs is that they teach the code backwards.  That is, they go from letter to sound rather than from sound to letter….the print to sound approach leaves gaps, invites confusions, and creates inefficiencies” (Moats, L. Teaching Decoding, American Educator, 42-49)

This was an eye-opener for me when I read it.  A shot in the arm! If teachers, administrators, and especially publishers had taken this advice to heart, I believe we would be seeing a more promising picture of reading achievement in America.  But as Louisa and I agreed over lunch, it is very hard to change teaching habits that have been ingrained over years.

However, there is good news to report.  As brain imaging is used more and more to probe reading and reading difficulties, our understanding of how the brain organizes reading is growing. And these results, direct from the brain itself, add punch to the observations of researchers like Louisa Moats. Learning the alphabet code by going from speech to print is not only less confusing; it is more likely to activate efficient reading pathways in the brain.  But more about this in later blog posts…

I’m confident that there will come a tipping point, where instruction will change, and more resources will be directed toward our youngest children who badly need attention and conversations with adults.  Just increasing the vocabulary and conversational skills of the youngest members of our tribe could raise the intelligence of our entire society!  Get busy, you retirees!  There’s important volunteer work to be done! Go find some three or four year olds, read to them, help them sound out and write some simple words, and have a conversation with them!

It’s the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, a gathering of over 300 researchers from around the world who study everything about reading — brain structure and function, related cognitive and behavioral issues, and instruction and intervention techniques. You can find abstracts of the talks on the SSSR web site.  I look forward to learning new things to add to the knowledge I have accumulated from my own research over the last 37 years.

I plan to post to this blog juicy tidbits of new information (and provide links to sources) that I get from conferences like this, plus my own thoughts about the progress of reading research.  The great news is that today we know a lot more about the role of good instruction and early intervention for children who may be at-risk for reading difficulties than we did when I began studying the link between the brain and learning in 1972. We know now how to avoid the struggles, the discouragement, and the loss of self-esteem for many children who might have experienced these difficulties in the past!

One big secret is to teach reading correctly in the first place, whether it happens at home or at school.  Parents and teachers need to understand the importance of phoneme awareness (understanding that the mouth must make several different sounds to say a word) and phonics (learning the letters that stand for those sounds). These two skills, built upon a strong base of conversation and vocabulary, are the foundation of reading and they are the skills that are hardest to master for children who struggle to read. It turns out from recent neuroscience research that they are essential for building efficient reading pathways in the brain.

Now that we know this, the critical tasks ahead, besides continuing the research, are to develop excellent research-based learning materials that children will love to use to help them on their way, and to communicate this new knowledge to you parents and teachers with how-to tips so that you can apply these discoveries with your own children or classes!

I call this blog “Let’s Talk about Reading, Writing, and the Brain” because that’s ” what has consumed me in the long journey I have taken as a research neuropsychologist at Stanford Research Institute, at the University of California San Francisco Medical School for 10 years, and as Director of California Neuropsychology Services for 28 years.  Since I founded Talking Fingers, Inc. fifteen years ago, we have also developed research-based software for teaching reading with several grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

I love conversation and feedback and hope you will post comments, questions, and your own links in reply. That’s the best way to enrich the journey, as we continue to search for ways to develop the skills and wisdom of our young citizens who will care for this earth and our tribe in the decades to come.