To achieve automatic visual word recognition, these networks must begin to accomplish with one stroke of attention what originally required dozens. The young brain must systematize the work to be done and must develop a system of automatic habits corresponding to the system of tasks, because reading (unlike speech) does not come pre-wired. As reading is first introduced, the brain organizes and stores the information wherever it is processed. If the instruction involves pronouncing and segmenting whole words, and linking letter shapes to those spoken sounds in a systematic way, these new networks, over time and with practice, will be linked efficiently to word pronunciations and meanings.

Therefore it is important that early instruction in phoneme awareness and phonics encourages children to attend to their own physical production of phonemes as they segment words, and builds new reading skills on the neural foundation of existing speech networks.

The machine was familiar to her now, but it was still amazing to think that it could take a picture of her son’s brain while he was reading!  Johnny was lying down inside the machine, and she could hear him answering questions that the doctor was asking.

Ann sat down to wait and thought about all that had happened in the last couple of months. Her son had been having a hard time in second grade.  She knew she had to do something about it when he came home crying, saying that everyone else knew how to read, and he just didn’t get it.

“I’m just stupid”, he had sobbed.  “I’m never going to learn how to read!”

His teacher told her that Johnny was quite bright, but that he did have trouble reading.  She suggested that Ann might look into the reading research project that was going on in the neuroscience department at the nearby university.  At first Ann was skeptical that brain research would be of any help to Johnny, but she noticed that they were also providing special instruction.  Luckily, she came to a decision that would change Johnny’s life.

Eight weeks ago, when Ann and Johnny had agreed to be part of the study, the researchers tested his reading to see what problems he had. He did poorly at recognizing words, but what Dr Matthews found most interesting was the fact that Johnny couldn’t identify the separate sounds in words.

“When I say the word “CAT”, my mouth is making three sounds,” Dr Matthews explained. “c”, “a”, and “t”.  What are the sounds in the word “PIG”?  Johnny couldn’t tell him.

The first pictures of his brain had showed that Johnny was activating mostly the right side of his brain when he did the reading tasks inside the machine.  Dr. Matthews said that skilled readers used mostly the left side of the brain.

“He’s not using his brain efficiently for reading”, he said.  “We’d like to give him about 80 hours of special instruction and see whether his reading improves. Then we’ll look at his brain again and see if there are any changes.”

Johnny had faithfully come two hours every day for the last eight weeks. The researchers taught him to pay attention to the way his mouth moved when he made the different sounds in words.  He learned that the speech sounds he pronounced could be represented by letters.  Finally he began to understand what reading was about!  Yesterday, when they tested his reading, it had improved dramatically!

Ann stood up and went to the window.  She was impatient for the brain imaging to be over.  Today would be an interesting day.  They would see whether Johnny was using his brain differently to do the same reading tasks he had done eight weeks ago in the machine.

When the new pictures were ready, Dr. Matthews was as anxious as Ann and Johnny were to look at them.  He put them up beside the original pictures taken eight weeks ago. The results were startling!  Although Johnny had been using areas of his right hemisphere eight weeks ago, now the right hemisphere activity had diminished and he was clearly using areas in the left.  When Dr. Matthews put up a picture of a brain of a skilled reader, the activation showing in the left side of the brain was very similar to what they were seeing in Johnny’s new pictures.

“Bingo!” he exclaimed.  “Congratulations, Johnny!  You’re going to help us explain to the world how children can be helped to learn to read!”

“But wait a minute!” Ann exploded.  “If it just took eight weeks to fix this, and you literally changed his brain, how come he didn’t learn to read this way in school?  Why did his brain start working inefficiently in the first place?  How should children be taught so that they don’t start using the wrong side of their brains?”

“We don’t know all the answers yet,” Dr. Matthews replied. ”Some children with severe reading problems (dyslexia) may have a genetic difference that affects how the brain organizes itself.   However, we now think that many children labeled with reading disabilities may simply have had ineffective early instruction.  It does seem that some children are more vulnerable and need more intense instruction than others, and we don’t know why.  But it should be possible to teach the skills Johnny has just learned starting in kindergarten or even earlier.  The children who find reading and writing easy should be allowed to tackle more and more challenging stories, and those children who need help should get more intense instruction until they are aware of the different sounds their mouths make when they say words and can link those sounds with letters.” He smiled.  “Anyway, I think Johnny is on his way!”

This fictional story is typical of the experience of students who have volunteered in recent years for similar studies.  The new techniques for imaging the brain have changed the way we think about reading because they have shown that struggling readers are using inefficient brain pathways, mostly in the wrong half of the brain.  The most dramatic discoveries, however, were exactly what happened to the Johnny in our story.

Intense special instruction significantly improved the reading skills and changed the way the brain organized itself for reading!

Pre-K Lessons Linked to TV Produce Gains in Literacy (but with a big caveat!)  This summary is from an article Education Week, Oct 21, 2009.

A new study has found that low-income pre-schoolers made significant gains in acquiring skills such as naming letters and knowing the sounds associated with these letters, and understanding concepts about stories and printed words.  These gains were found after children participated in a technology-supported literacy curriculum that used videos from “Super Why”, “Sesame Street”, and “Between the Lions” (PBS) as part of the Education Department’s “Ready to Learn Initiative”.

But the program used what they called ENGAGED VIEWING.

It’s engaged viewing that counts, said Shelley Pasnik, the director of the Center for Children and Technology of the EDC.  “It’s not simply turning on a video and letting it go on the screen unattended, but pausing the video and asking questions.”  The teachers in the study got 8 on-site coaching lessons on how to reinforce lessons, such as pointing to objects in the classroom that begin with a particular sound after the TV character has talked about that sound or its corresponding letter. The teachers also had access to a coach throughout the intervention.

A previous review of 15 randomized control studies of pre-school curricula found that only two, Bright Beginnings and DLM Early Childhood Express, had a significant effect on student achievement.  Only one of these studies included a technology-supported curriculum and it had no positive effect.  These studies do not necessarily reflect the value of the curricula, because so much depends on the way the curriculum is supported by the teacher or parent.

I strongly concur, whether the child is watching TV or using software, or hearing a story.  The most important thing is interacting with children to allow them to express what they have learned, to generalize from a particular item (for example, about the beginning sound in APPLE) and discern that it is a pattern or rule (ANTS, ACROBAT, AXE, etc).  Passive watching or listening must be accompanied by active response, especially with very young children.  Learning is like breathing—there has to be an IN and an OUT.

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.

The Institute reports,

“The incidence of autism by age 5 in California has increased from slightly over 6 in 10,000 children born in 1990 to more than 42 in 10,000 for children born in 2001.”

This is an estimated 600-700% increase!  Less than one-tenth of the increase can be attributed to inclusion of milder cases, and only 24% of the increase can be attributed to earlier age of diagnosis.  Another 120% is possibly attributable to changes in diagnostic criteria.  So, really only about one third of the increase can be explained by those factors

So what’s left?  The environment!  The Institute suggests that a careful look at environmental exposures is warranted, especially for their possible affect on genetically susceptible children. They are doing some fascinating studies that I will try to comment on in future blogs.

This makes sense because when reading is first introduced, the brain has to decide how to store this new information.  To establish efficient pathways, reading should be well connected to what the brain already knows about words.  And that information is typically in the left hemisphere. When speech is engaged, left hemisphere pathways are activated.  Looking in the mirror and playing with these mouth pictures that stand for sounds (like letters stand for sounds) is going to maximize the participation of existing speech pathways and help children connect a visible word with its pronunciation and meaning.

Children with reading difficulties tend to activate inefficient areas of the right hemisphere, perhaps because they are relying more on visual pattern recognition (typically a process carried out in the right hemisphere). If they are given an intense intervention based on learning to segment words into their sounds and to associate those sounds with letters, reading improves for many of them.  And when reading improves, the activation moves from the right side of their brain to the left!

We should be able to accomplish this from the beginning, before children start to fail!

Here’s the reference to this study if you’re interested in more information about it.

Nancy Boyer (Graduate Center of the City University of New York) Dr. Linnea Ehri, LEhri@gc.cuny.edu; Graduate Center of the City University of New York  Phonemic awareness instruction: effects of letter manipulation and articulation training on learning to read and spell.

Purpose: An experiment was conducted to investigate whether providing beginning readers with phonemic segmentation instruction involving letter manipulation only (LM) is as effective as instruction in letter manipulation plus articulation (LAM) training in helping children learn to read and spell words. Method: Participants were preschoolers who possessed limited phonemic awareness and were in Ehri’s (1995) partial alphabetic phase of word reading. Children were matched to form triplets, based on similar segmentation, reading and vocabulary pretest scores. Triplet members were randomly assigned to three conditions: the LM condition, the LAM condition, and the no treatment condition. The LM condition consisted of instruction in letter-sound correspondences and phonemic segmentation with letters. The LAM condition consisted of the same LM instruction enriched with phonemic segmentation training involving articulatory gestures represented by mouth pictures. Students in the control condition remained in the classroom. Following training, the groups were compared in their ability to segment words into phonemes, to learn to read words, to decode pseudowords, and to invent spellings. Results: Both forms of phonemic awareness instruction facilitated the acquisition of phonemic segmentation and its transfer to reading and spelling. However, LAM instruction helped children remember how to read words better than LM instruction. Conclusion: Results are interpreted to suggest that articulatory instruction enhances the quality of the grapho-phonemic connections enabling beginners to read words from memory, as portrayed by Ehri’s (1995) theory of sight word learning. Findings suggest the value of including both ingredients in phonics instruction provided to beginning readers.

“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.