A number of new discoveries can now shed light on what happens in the brain as children learn to read, and how the kind of instruction children receive can set the course for their reading future. One remarkable discovery gives us a new understanding of how skilled readers can look at thousands of words...

FINALLY! My book, Making Speech Visible, is done and published!  It has been a major preoccupation for the last year.  I have tried to synthesize my 35 years of reading research into a simple and readable book for parents and educators. I am 74 this year, and there comes a time when you want to put...

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf (HarperCollins, 2007) is the most well-written and inspiring book about the reading brain that I have ever read.  What a remarkable writer!—a rare thing among scientists.  If you are interested in how the brain works to develop skilled reading, do yourself a...

I just attended and made a presentation at the 25th Learning & the Brain conference in San Francisco—USING BRAIN RESEARCH TO RAISE IQ AND ACHIEVEMENT.  My presentation was in a section titled How Will New Brain Technologies for Cognition and Memory Change Education, Learning and Aging? I talked...

A Typical Day in a Brain Research Lab 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...

The most common way to introduce children to the alphabet code is to link letters-to-sounds in order to decipher or “decode” words on a page—that is, to read.  Children are shown letters or clusters of letters and are told that those visual squiggles on a page represent sounds or words.  But...

Beware of what you may read in your email. The paragraph below is being passed around the internet with the statement that only great minds can read it (55 out of 100 people), and that spelling isn’t important because you can read any word if the letters are all included and the first and last letter...

Is there really anything new to say on the subject of reading and reading difficulties?  Indeed, there is!  Recent advances in medical imaging technology have made it possible for the first time to look at the brains of both skilled and dysfunctional readers while they are engaged in the act of reading...