Teaching the Brain to Read

Strategies for Improving Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension

Judy Willis

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781416616610
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Reading comes easily to some students, but many struggle with some part of this complex process that requires many areas of the brain to operate together through an intricate network of neurons.

As a classroom teacher who has also worked as a neurologist, Judy Willis offers a unique perspective on how to help students not only learn the mechanics of reading and comprehension, but also develop a love of reading. She shows the importance of establishing a nonthreatening environment and provides teaching strategies that truly engage students and help them

* Build phonemic awareness
* Manipulate patterns to improve reading skills
* Improve reading fluency
* Combat the stress and anxiety that can inhibit reading fluency
* Increase vocabulary
*Overcome reading difficulties that can interfere with comprehension

By enriching your understanding of how the brain processes language, emotion, and other stimuli, this book will change the way you understand and teach reading skills--and help all your students become successful readers.

Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.

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Chapter 1

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From Syllable to Synapse: Prereading Through Decoding

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To understand how students learn to read, we must first understand how the brain processes written information. The process of reading with comprehension appears to involve several essential and interrelated phases:

1. Information intake—focusing and attending to the pertinent environmental stimuli.
2. Fluency and vocabulary—associating the words on the page with stored knowledge to bring meaning to the text.
3. Patterning and networking—recognizing familiar patterns and encoding new information by linking it with prior knowledge.

Comprehension, retention, and use of information obtained through reading appear to be associated with prefrontal lobe activation and storage in neurons of the neocortex. The ultimate site where information gained from reading appears to be processed is in the frontal lobe’s executive function centers. When comprehension and retention are successful, executive functioning appears to allow the information to be used to prioritize, plan, analyze, judge, and use the knowledge to make decisions that guide future actions.

After a discussion of mirror neuron research and prereading, there will follow my interpretation of the voluminous data accumulated through neuroimaging and EEG studies about the proposed brain reading systems. The purpose of this research summary and interpretation is not to artificially divide the brain’s reading processing into discrete, independent reading pathways. Individual variation is very significant in reading, as it is in most neural activities. Data that has accumulated from neuroimaging studies while subjects are engaged in specific parts of the reading process are difficult to isolate. How do we know the subject is not using some internal visualization recognition rather than auditory recognition when they hear a sound not printed? We don’t. Similarly, when subjects see a word, some may be internally verbalizing it while other subjects being scanned are automatically recognizing it as a familiar visual pattern. Given these uncontrollable factors, what I have tried to do with the reading pathway research is provide a general map of the most common brain pathways that appear to be activated in the complex, multistep process of reading. These pathways are generalizations and should not be interpreted as precise roadmaps.

Prereading

Even before children develop the ability to talk or read, their developing brains may be experiencing imitation learning through the activation of mirror neurons.

Giaccamo Rizzollati’s 1996 discovery of what he named mirror neurons was part of his group’s study of a cluster of neurons in the premotor cortex of the frontal lobes of monkeys (the region that corresponds to Broca’s area in the cortex of the frontal lobe of humans—the brain center associated with the expressive and syntactic aspects of language). Rizzollati found that these brain cells fired when the monkeys performed specific actions with their hands such as picking up peanuts and putting them in their mouths. At first it was assumed that these neurons fired because they were sending messages to the hands to perform these motor activities (Rizzolatti, Fogassi, & Gallese, 2001). The researchers were surprised to discover that the mirror neurons that fired in the frontal lobe of a monkey when it picked up a peanut and ate it also fired when that monkey observed another monkey (or even the human researcher) performing the same activity. The theoretical correlation that followed was that the mirror neurons could allow the brain to not just “see” actions, emotions, or sensations, but also to respond to them by brain cell activations that mirror them. (Infants are not able to hold still for the several minutes required for accurate fMRI or other neuroimaging—so the theories of mirror images in very young children are speculative.) With respect to language development and other socializing behaviors, the mirror neurons may cause humans to experience internal representations of the body states they observe as if they were doing similar actions or experiencing similar emotions or sensations as another human they observe (Buccino et al., 2004).

In language this could mean that mirror neurons may build the foundation for babies to imitate, and perhaps later understand, the lip and tongue movements of others. This may be an explanation for the finding that when you stick your tongue out to some babies they imitate and stick out their tongues. The theory continues that after the mirroring of mouth and tongue movements could come the ability to mime vocalizations.

As mentioned previously, the strategies loosely based on preliminary interpretations of research such as mirror neurons remain theoretical. However, one area to watch for with respect to this research would be the opportunity to make early diagnosis of potential language problems in very young children at risk for speech and reading delays who may have abnormal responses in their mirror neurons to mimicry. For example, infant brain development is now becoming an area of investigation through EEG and laser eye tracking. In terms of early diagnosis, one study of thousands of babies “gaze-following” found that the skill appears first at about 10 to 11 months, and that babies who weren’t proficient at gaze-following by the time they were 1 year old had much less advanced language skills at age 2 (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2005).

Another possibility with regard to mirror neuron research is that early and systematic priming (stimulating) of mirror neurons engaged in speech could be a strategy for building the preliminary building blocks of reading through stimulation of these mimicking neurons. This could potentially mean that modeling of verbal language with exaggerated lip and tongue movements, or exaggerating the sound and movement correspondence of labial sounds with graphemes on a page could have the prereading value of priming the mirror neurons. As babies become toddlers, concepts of print awareness such as left to right eye movements across a line of print, connecting words on a page to the lip movements of the reader, or even the actions of page turning could stimulate prereading mirror neurons.

Three Proposed Brain Systems and Pathways of Reading

Neuroimaging studies have implicated three interrelated systems that are the most active during parts of the reading process. One of these regions is in the frontal lobe and the other two are in posterior lobes—one posterior ventral (lower) and one posterior dorsal (higher).

The frontal reading system has been implicated in phonological processing and semantic processing (word analysis). This is also where Broca’s area is found. Broca’s area is involved in language processing, speech production, and comprehension. Neuron activation is increased in this area when words are spoken (Devlin, Matthews, & Rushworth, 2003).

The ventral posterior processing system (located in the occipital and temporal lobes) is most associated with orthographic processing (visual-phonological connections) of the pattern and form of words. This system is hypothesized to be the location of visual word pattern recognition because this region is activated when more experienced readers recognize whole words automatically. However, this brain region is not purely a place of visual word recognition, as it responds to any pronounceable printed letter string of both real and nonsense words (McCandliss, Cohen, & Dehaene, 2003).

Examination of the literature does not show a precise subpart of the left ventral occipital and temporal gyri that consistently shows abnormal neuroimaging in all subjects with underperformance in tasks of letter and word recognition. What appears valid is that some parts of these regions (also called the visual word form area, or VWFA) are the most active brain regions during the processing of orthographic-phonological connections.

This ventral posterior processing system is more activated in English-language readers than readers of Chinese and other languages with complex characters. This difference may imply that the spelling-sound correspondence is more important for decoding English than it is for decoding Chinese, which uses characters that require more visual-spatial recognition (Siok, Perfetti, Jin, & Tan, 2004).

The dorsal posterior reading system encompasses parts of the parietal and temporal lobes, especially the angular, supramarginal and posterior superior temporal gyri. This system has been implicated in word analysis through the integration of visual features of printed words (visual-spatial recognition) rather than whole word recognition. This appears to be an area of the brain used by early readers when they analyze words by linking letters to sounds (Price, Moore, & Frackowiak, 1996).

In the future, brain reading research may offer additional comparative data relative to the size of these response zones and the speed and order of information transmission from one brain area to another. As more data accumulates there will be the potential for more direct evidence concerning the instructional strategies most efficient for specific reading problems. Future neuroimaging may also provide techniques for earlier identification of students who need more support to achieve their optimal reading development.

The Neural Mechanisms of Phonemic Awareness

The ability to deal explicitly and segmentally with sound units smaller than the syllable (phonemes) has been researched with experimental and longitudinal studies in hopes of identifying the association between phonemic awareness and letter knowledge. This information could suggest which type of reading instruction is best suited to the early years of reading instruction. The importance of phonemic awareness in an alphabetic language such as English is in its relationship to beginning readers’ perception of the differences between individual sounds in spoken words.

When comparing the brain scans of subjects during most activities, the location where the specific thinking processing takes place is roughly consistent from person to person. For example, the sensory processing area for smell is within a few millimeters of a specific location in the prefrontal lobe when subjects are tested with smells while in PET or fMRI scans. With regard to the general functions of producing verbal speech or recognizing familiar images, PET scans show that there is also fairly good consistency as to the size of the brain region dedicated to the activity in average readers.

Sensitivity to sound structure such as rhyme, alliteration, and segmentation is correlated with fMRI activity in the left superior temporal lobe and lower frontal lobe. These are the same brain areas in which brain metabolic activity appears to increase in direct relationship to phonological awareness. The early activity in these regions has been correlated with children’s later reading achievement (Wagner et al., 1997). The fMRI evidence also suggests an order of the brain’s phonological processing centers’ maturation. The auditory response centers that respond earliest in the neurological development of reading are in these same phonological awareness regions of the left temporal lobe most associated with sound and hearing (Turkeltaub, Gareau, Flowers, Zeffiro, & Eden, 2003).

Neuroimaging also suggests correlations with the size of brain regions associated with specific cognitive activities, such as distinguishing the differences between sounds in spoken words. These variations in response zone size seem to be associated with the varied abilities some children have with respect to these specific reading skills. For example, when children are not aware of these differences in sounds, they appear to have more difficulty learning and applying the sound-letter correspondences needed to decode words (Eldridge, Engel, Zeineh, Bookheimer, & Knowlton, 2005).

New tools of brain research for reading are providing more detailed information about information transfer speed in the brain. Researchers have neuroelectric tools to shed light on the time-sensitive cognitive events that occur rapidly during such activities as word reading. To support theories of reading, a goal is to evaluate the timing of word reading events. For example, what is the brain doing during the 20 to 200 milliseconds before the eyes move from one word of text to the next?

Functional magnetic resonance imaging methods cannot provide information about such brief events, but to evaluate this type of temporal information there are now measurements available using event-related potentials (ERPs) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). These electrophysiological methods provide timelines for rapid events such as word identification that cannot be measured on neuroimaging. These time-location methods are complementary to space-location parameters in reading research. Studies of rapid automatized naming (RAN) of letters and objects is already demonstrating differences in reaction time in the posterior reading areas of students and may have predictive value for word reading skill development (Misra, Katzir, Wolf, & Poldrack, 2004).

With neuroimaging and neuroelectric data demonstrating the complexity and interdependency of the multiple brain regions that must all work successfully for students to develop reading skills, it is understandable that general intelligence is not always correlated with reading skills (Gardner, 1983). For example, a reduced number of neurons or delayed response of the neurons in a region of the brain dedicated to any of the parts of reading (phonemic awareness, visual perception, or phonological processing) may result in neural response or transmission problems that can result in reading difficulties without impacting any other areas of general intelligence (Nation & Snowling, 2004).

Based on some clinical studies, but not yet confirmed by neuroimaging or brain wave measurements, strategies for building phonemic awareness have included explicit instruction in sound-letter correspondence and phoneme manipulation (blending and segmenting) in phonics followed by repeated readings of fully decodable text comprised of letter-sound pairs already learned (Santa & Hoien, 1999). Other approaches favor more implicit connection of sound-letter correspondences using whole language activities that are associated with higher student interest and therefore attentive focus (Foorman, 1995). As neuroimaging scans and brain wave speed measurement (qEEG) improve in accuracy it may be possible to determine which of these strategies or combination of strategies will produce the best results in phonemic awareness instruction and practice.

Phonological Processing

Listening to and understanding speech and reading the written word both involve identifying the individual sounds that make up words. The process of recognizing those phonemes and subsequently identifying the words that they combine to make is called phonological processing.

In spoken language, phonological processing takes place automatically at a preconscious, instinctual level. This process automatically allows us to put phenomes together to say words and to deconstruct the words into phonemes to understand spoken language. Unlike speech, reading requires the understanding that written words are composed of letters of the alphabet that are intentionally and conventionally related to segments of spoken words (alphabetic principle).

The alphabet and letter-sound correspondence is an artificial construct that gives speech concrete representation at the phonological level. Therefore, unlike automatic speech production and comprehension, reading must be learned on a conscious level. Children need to learn the phonological processing of reading and recognize that specific sequences of letters represent the phonological structure of words (orthography).

Functional MRI scanning has demonstrated brain-processing regions that are particularly active in phonological processing. Phonological processing of grapheme-phoneme connections is associated with activation in the dorsal posterior reading system where early readers analyze words by linking letters to sounds (Price, Moore, & Frackowiak, 1996).

A key area of the dorsal posterior system, the angular gyrus, was significantly more active in letter naming compared with object naming. This may be an area of research that could lead to more specific strategies to develop this brain region (Thierry, Boulanouar, Kherif, Ranjeva, & Demonte, 1999).

Activities That Build Phonemic Awareness

The strategies I will describe for increasing phonemic awareness and other aspects of reading development are drawn from my own scientific interpretations of the research and the practices that have been successful in my classroom, or that I observed in the classrooms of others. If the strategy is one I learned or read about and then observed I give credit to the originator. If the strategy is one that is in such wide use that the originator is not formally acknowledged in the research I reviewed there may be no credit given. Most of the strategies are in that category—techniques in general use that I have modified to conform to the best supported, well-conducted brain based research using neuroimaging, neuroelectric measurements, and cognitive measurements.

Consider telling students your reasons for these activities so they understand why they are participating in what might otherwise seem to be, at best, games and, at worst, boring or confusing drills. When I have given short explanations about how the activity they will do will change their brains, students enjoy the information about their own brains. This may be because children learning to read are at the egocentric ages when the idea of learning about themselves resonates with their interest. They also appreciate being told the reasons behind the activities because they feel they are working with me on a team. One 2nd grade student said, “I like it better when I know why you want us to do something, especially if it is something that is not too much fun.” His classmate added, “When teachers tell us why we have to know something and why it is good for us it doesn’t make it easier, but it makes me want to do it more.”

One activity is segmenting sounds and then blending them together using both real words and nonsense words. This activity gives students practice manipulating phenomes and is consistent with the research supporting stimulation of both posterior processing systems (McCandliss, Cohen, & Dehaene, 2003).

Another activity is oral blending and segmenting paired with letters. This process may help students practice the alphabetic principle (the establishment of a correspondence between a phoneme and a written symbol). Here is an example of segmenting: “Say the first sound in ‘run,’ then say each sound separately. Say the word without the /n/ sound. Say ‘run’ without the /r/ sound.” An example of blending would be: “Say ‘ap’. Put /n/ in front of ‘ap’ and say the new word, ‘nap.’” Using individual blackboards or dry-erase boards with teacher modeling on a large dry-erase board makes blending and segmenting a fun writing/reading activity. Body or hand movements make auditory tasks more visible and have the potential to stimulate multiple sensory intake areas for greater memory and connection to learning style preference (especially for kinesthetic learners). For example, after first modeling the activity, ask students to open/close hands or take a step forward or backward when they hear individual sounds in words you say as you put vocal emphasis on the phonemes.

Many of the strategies for success at all stages of reading have been used by teachers for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. From Syllable to Synapse: Prereading Through Decoding
• Chapter 2. Patterning Strategies
• Chapter 3. Fluency Building from the Brain to the Book
• Chapter 4. Eliminating Barriers on the Road to Fluency
• Chapter 5. Vocabulary Building and Keeping
• Chapter 6. Successful Reading Comprehension
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright