5 Essential Skills for Learning How to Read - Dr.Martha Burns, Ph.D

According to the Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read Reports of the Subgroups, the capacity to learn and grow as a reader depends on five essential skills:

Foundational Skills for Beginning Readers:

1) Phonemic Awareness: The insight that every spoken word can be conceived as a sequence of phonemes. Phonemes are the speech sounds that are represented by the letters of an alphabet.

2) Phonemic Decoding: The ability to capture the meaning of unfamiliar words by translating groups of letters back into the sounds that they represent, link them to one's verbal vocabulary, and access their meaning.

Skills Needed to Read for Meaning:

3) Vocabulary: Understanding the words in a passage, including the specific dimensions of their meanings or usage that matter in context.  For example, knowing that “tree” when reading about a “family tree” has a different meaning from “maple tree.”

4) Fluency: The ability to read with sufficient ease and accuracy that active attention can be focused on the meaning and message of the text and the text easily retained.

5) Comprehension: Thinking about the meaning of each segment of the text as it is read, building an understanding of the text as a whole, and reflecting on its meaning and message.

Teachers today are fortunate to have access to a wealth of scientifically based research into what works when teaching children to read.  The links that follow are courtesy of the National Institute for Literacy:

Birth to Early Childhood

Children begin building literacy skills long before they go to school.  Even very young children can be prepared to become successful readers later on.  Research has identified certain skills that are important for later literacy development; these skills include knowing the names and sounds of printed letters, manipulating speech sounds, and remembering what has been said for a short time.  Here are some ways to teach younger children these pre-reading skills.

Childhood

From kindergarten through third grade, young readers are actively developing all five of the core reading skills from phonemic awareness to fluency and comprehension.  Research has shown that teaching children to read successfully during this window requires a combination of strategies and instructional approaches.  Teachers must know how children learn to read and be able to tailor instructional approaches to individual children--especially those who are struggling readers.  Here are some instructional approaches for the five essential skills.

Adolescence

While many adolescent readers have mastered phonemic awareness and decoding strategies, they are often still challenged to fully understand what they read.  In middle and high school, it is common for literacy skills to be developed not only in language arts courses, but also in a variety of different content areas.  To prepare students for the literacy challenges of secondary school, language arts and content area teachers need to focus on the last three components of reading: vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.  We shall discuss some approaches to teaching vocabulary and comprehension skills in our forthcoming posts.

Executive Function - The Foundation for School Readiness - Grace Wardhana

When Children begin to go to kindergarten, Whether graduating from a full-day preschool or parent-led home school or something in between, they will transition into their first year of a formal school setting in various stages of school readiness. What will determine a successful transition? Research shows one foundational factor: executive function.

What is executive function? Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child defines executive function and self-regulation skills as “the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully. Just as an air traffic control system at a busy airport safely manages the arrivals and departures of many aircraft on multiple runways, the brain needs this skill set to filter distractions, prioritize tasks, set and achieve goals, and control impulses.”

To put this in a real-life classroom context: imagine 3 kindergarteners participating at circle time. Abby and James are focusing on the discussion and raise their hands to answer the teacher’s question. Michael is distracted, interrupts repeatedly and has a hard time remembering what to do. It is clear which of these children will be more successful at the learning activity, and the latest research links this with executive function skills.

There is a dramatic window for growth in executive function and other cognitive skills between the ages of 3 to 5. We know now that development of these skills is not guaranteed and children with problems do not necessarily outgrow them. Children who struggle to plan and organize their work in early elementary may become adolescents who fall behind in homework, have difficulty completing projects and struggle to gain academic skills. In particular, economically disadvantaged groups tend to suffer from under-development of these skills, which puts them behind even prior to entering elementary school. Severe under-development may also lead to behavioral problems and in some cases, failure in school, as many teachers are not trained to recognize or treat these problems effectively. This reinforces the ‘achievement gap’ that already exists for at-risk groups in underserved communities—since those with behavioral challenges are often kept out of classroom work, and in turn may have trouble attending when in class.

The potential impact for early intervention during the pre-school and early elementary years is huge. Identifying deficits and building executive function and cognitive skills at the age-appropriate time could alleviate problems faced by at-risk groups. If these children, for example, are increasingly able to attend to class material and participate in group lessons, they will benefit from increased learning as well as better relationships with teachers and peers. Rather than laying a foundation as children who are frequently struggling to participate, these children may begin a positive cycle of engagement with teachers and peers.

Thus, these skills are a necessary groundwork to the building of academic skills, rather than simply an add-on. On the bright side, science has shown these skills can be trained and improve even with short-term interventions. Researchers who specialize in childhood brain development are working to spread the word to help parents and caregivers through books like “Einstein Never Used Flashcards” and initiatives like Vroom. 

The importance of building executive function and other cognitive skills at an early age is clear. We want children to build a strong foundation to become engaged and self-directed lifelong learners. We need to increase awareness of these skills and the potential for them to be explicitly taught by parents, caregivers and the educator community – whether it be through outreach programs, educational apps or other interventions. The sooner we make this a priority, the better equipped our communities will be to help children get the most out of their school experience.

Sound Training Rewires Dyslexic Children's Brains For Reading by Nadine Gaab, Ph.D.

Introduction by Garrison W. Cottrell, Ph.D.

This week's article was written by Nadine Gaab, a newly-appointed Assistant Professor at Children's Hospital at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Gaab was a postdoctoral researcher in the NSF-funded Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center with Dr. Paula Tallal of Rutgers.

While many young cognitive neuroscientists are using the emerging technology of fMRI, which allows us to see how brain areas are activated by various stimuli, Dr. Gaab is one of the few who has made a substantial, creative and lasting contribution to the technology itself. One of the limitations of fMRI for investigating issues involving sound, such as spoken language or music processing, is the very loud noise generated by the scanner. When the subject is inside the scanner, the noise sounds like 100 garbage trucks backing up in synchrony (WAH, WAH, WAH...). As part of her Ph.D. research, Dr. Gaab developed the idea of sampling brain activation between the noise bursts. This technique, called "sparse temporal sampling" has been a major technological advance, and allows researchers for the first time to use sound stimuli in the scanner. While at Stanford, Nadine was able to work with Gary Glover, one of the major figures in the development of fMRI technology, to further quantify the advantages of this procedure not only for auditory experiments, but much more broadly. The studies reported in this issue demonstrate the value of Gaab's sparse temporal sampling procedure by demonstrating a major difference in the brain responses of dyslexic children versus typical readers when presented with rapidly changing auditory stimuli.

Developmental Medicine Center at Children's Hospital Boston/Harvard Medical School

A very recently published brain-imaging study1 suggests that children with developmental dyslexia struggle with reading because their brains do not process fast-changing sounds properly. Moreover the study found that with the help of computerized sound training, the children with developmental dyslexia were able to literally rewire their brain. This resulted in more accurate sound processing and hence better language and reading.

A major problem for the estimated 5 to 17 percent of children with developmental dyslexia is that they often confuse letters and syllables when they read, which suggests that their internal association between letters and their corresponding sounds is weak. In the 1970’s it was proposed by Paula Tallal that this deficit is caused by an underlying problem with accurately perceiving and distinguishing different fast-changing sounds. In order to differentiate between the sounds of a word, the brain needs to perceive fast sound alterations at the millisecond (one thousandth of a second) time scale. Tiny differences in the time at which the vocal chords start vibrating make the difference between “ba” and “pa” for example. The vocal chords start vibrating just before your lips open for “ba,” and just after for “pa.” You can see this yourself if you hold your throat while repeating “ba, ba, ba” versus “pa, pa, pa.” (Make sure you’re alone or people will think you’re crazy!) You can feel that your vocal chords vibrate continuously as you say “ba”. However, as you say “pa” there is no vibration until you get to the vowel “a” part of the syllable. If a child cannot capture these subtle timing details, he or she will have problems distinguishing between speech sounds and, therefore, he or she may be more prone to confuse these syllables even before learning to read. With an imprecise internal sound map, it will be difficult for the child to establish a map of which letters go with which sounds, and this can lead to difficulty learning the phonetic basis for reading.

In this study, together with my colleagues Elise Temple (Dartmouth University) and John Gabrieli (MIT), we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine how the brains of 9- to 12-year-old children with developmental dyslexia, and typical readers responded to fast and slow changing sounds. The fMRI enabled us to observe brain activity in response to short sound intervals in which the acoustic properties changed either rapidly (over tenths of milliseconds – as in spoken words) or relatively slowly (hundreds of milliseconds). The sounds were not actual language, but resembled the vocal patterns found in speech. In addition to the brain imaging, standardized language and reading tests were administered both before and after using a neuroplasticity-based2training program called Fast ForWord Language, designed in part by Tallal, a co-author on the study.

Although previous studies pointed out that children with developmental dyslexia have trouble discriminating between brief acoustic stimuli, this is the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe their brains' response to fast and slow changing sounds.

The results indicated that the brains of children with developmental dyslexia responded similarly to fast and slow changing sounds, even though they were not required to pay attention to these changes in this experiment. The same brain regions responded to both sets of stimuli. In contrast, the brains of typical reading children showed differences in 11 brain regions when listening to fast compared to slow sounds. This suggests that, unlike typical readers, the brain of a child with dyslexia is not representing fast and slow sound changes differently.

After the initial fMRI, the dyslexic children went through eight weeks of daily one-hour sessions (about 60 hours total) of the remediation program Fast ForWord Language (Spark's Brain Gym, Unit of Spark Learning & Performance Solutions, representative of Scientific Learning Corporation, Oakland for India). This program involves no reading and uses both nonverbal sounds such as chirps and whistles as well as speech sounds in the form of syllables, words and sentences. Users must discriminate between paired sounds, syllables or words, such as choosing which sound rose or dropped in pitch or which picture represents the word they just heard, when presented with words that sound very much alike (such as big vs pig). The training exercises are individually adaptive to each mouse click the child makes. Each begins at an easy level, but then gradually increases in difficulty based on the child’s responses.

The repetitive exercising of the intervention program had an effect on the brains of children with developmental dyslexia. After training the children listened again to the fast and slowly changing sounds while in the fMRI scanner. After training, the children with dyslexia showed brain activity much more like that of the typical-reading group. Furthermore, the dyslexic children's reading scores as a group improved significantly after training (even though the training did not involve reading per se), moving them into the low end of the typical reading range. Hence the initially described differences in brains of children with developmental dyslexia and typical readers can be changed through intensive training. How long this effect lasts remains to be seen in follow-up studies.

Heartened by the promising findings of these results, we hope to be able to use fMRI to identify developmental dyslexia before the children begin to read. If developmental dyslexia could be diagnosed at a young age, it would enable educators to remediate the kids very early and would spare them from frustration and low self-esteem. To come closer to this goal, I am designing a new study for which we are currently recruiting preschoolers whose family members have developmental dyslexia. (Learn more about the study.)

Acknowledgments:

Elise Temple, PhD, of Dartmouth College's Department of Education, was the senior author of the study, which was funded by the Haan Foundation, the M.I.T. Class of 1976 Funds for Dyslexia Research, and the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center.

John Gabrieli, PhD (Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT); Gayle Deutsch (Stanford University) and Paula Tallal (Rutgers University) co-authored this study.

Fast ForWord Language was developed by Paula Tallal, Ph.D and Steve Miller, Ph.D of Rutgers University and Michael Merzenich, PhD, and William Jenkins, Ph.D of the University of California, San Francisco. To know more visit www.sparklearning.in, representative of Scientific Learning in India.

Nadine Gaab is a newly-appointed Assistant Professor at Children's Hospital at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Gaab was a postdoctoral researcher in the NSF-funded Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center with Dr. Paula Tallal of Rutgers. She has received superb academic training both in Europe (Germany and Switzerland) as well as in the US (Harvard, Stanford, MIT). She received a Master's of Science in Psychology from the University of Trier, Germany and a Ph.D in Psychology/Neuropsychology from University of Zurich, Switzerland, receiving the highest distinction of "Summa cum laude" for her doctoral thesis. Throughout her doctoral as well as post-doctoral training, Nadine has worked with leaders in the emerging field of cognitive neuroscience (Lutz Jancke, Gottfried Schlaug, John Gabrieli and Paula Tallal), as well as in her specialty area of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (Gary Glover). She has continuously received funding for her training and research, including several prestigious fellowships for graduate training at the Harvard Medical School (German National Merit Foundation; German Academic Exchange Council) and specialty training courses at King's College London, Princeton and Harvard.

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1 October, 2007; Gaab et al; (2007) "Neural correlates of rapid auditory processing are disrupted in children with developmental dyslexia and ameliorated with training: An fMRI study,"; Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience 25, 295-310

2 “Neuroplasticity” refers to changes in brain organization that occur through learning. “Neuroplasticity-based” in this context means that the training is in accord with neuroscience studies of how brain areas reorganize in monkeys through training.