The Reading Brain

What is happening in the brain of a struggling reader? In this engaging and interactive online course, Drs. Pamela Nevills and Patricia Wolfe guide you through the neuroscience of reading and offer up practical classroom strategies based on their popular book, " Building the Reading Brain. " These expert educators guide you through: » How the brain learns to read » Why some students struggle » Practical strategies to improve reading in the classroom » Talking with parents and struggling students and » Pursuing more knowledge about reading and the brain The course consists of: » Engaging online content: videos, interactive animations and mini quizzes ensure you're interested and learning! » Off-line workbook activities: complete the exercises to reflect on how to use these new techniques in your classroom immediately! » Discussion: Use the online discussion board to share your thoughts and opinions on brain-based learning with other educators around the country! is first and foremost a teacher, having taught learners from all ages. She has supervised student teachers, taught at the college level, participated on and has been honored by local and state advisory committees. She is a national and international speaker and consultant on topics that include brain development from birth through adulthood, the brain and reading, school designs for all readers, and adult learners. is an independent consultant who speaks to educators in the U.S. and around the world. She has been a public school teacher at all levels, staff developer and director of instruction. Wolfe's major interest over the past 20 years has centered on the educational implications and applications of current neuroscience, cognitive science, and educational research for teaching and learning.

Reading is not a natural task, and children are not biologically prepared to it by evolution (unlike spoken language acquisition). Thus, teachers must be aware that many of the reading steps that they take for granted, because they are expert readers and have a fully automated and non-conscious reading system, are not at all obvious for young children. Massive changes are needed, at the phonological and at the visual level, before children master the skill of reading.
… because the brain is not evolved for reading, I am arguing that reading evolved for the brain.
-Stanislaus, Dehaene, 2016 If you want to change the system, you have to know how it works.
-Stanislaus, Dehaene, 2012 • We when read, we recognize the letters, combining them into graphemes. • We connect these to speech sounds to decode the word.
• We connect to meaning processors to recognize the words.
• The areas for speech sounds and meaning already exist for spoken language. • We use the same parts of the brain for spoken language and written language when it comes to speech and meaning.
-Stanislaus Dahaene, 2012 Reading is about creating an interface between the visual and spoken language system. This causes changes in the brain after children have learned to read. If you can read, you brain has been dramatically changed.

Agree / Disagree & Why
Once students learn lettersounds correspondences, they can self teach for fluency.
The motor sequence in handwriting matters when teaching letters.
Handwriting and multisensory visual-motor instruction helps with letter recognition.
Letter reversals are common as the brain learns to distinguish letters.
Visual Memory is critical for learning letters.

Sight word vocabulary is NOT based on visual memory / visual skills!
-Dr. David Kilpatrick, Plain Talk About Learning Conference 2018

The Role of Vision in Word Recognition
Phonology maps to the orthographic patterns in words.
Phonology is CRITICAL for word retrieval and accessing meaning.
We store and retrieve words via orthography, phonology, and meaning.
Visual Memory is does NOT play a role in word recognition.  Seidenburg andMcClelland, 1989 Adams, 1990 How do we read words in text efficiently?
The Reading Brain When we read, do we process written language: A.
Word by Word B.

Letter by Letter
-The current thinking is that, during reading of a single word, millions of hierarchically organized neurons, each tuned to a specific local property (a letter, a bigram, or a morpheme), collectively contribute to visual recognition. This massively parallel architecture explains the speed and robustness of visual word recognition. Most importantly, for educators and teachers, it creates an illusion of whole-word reading. Because reading is so fast and takes about the same time for short and long words, some have assumed that the overall whole-word shape is being used for recognition, and that we should therefore teach whole-word reading rather than by letter-to sound decoding. This inference is wrong, however.

/sh/ /o/ /p/ shop
What about read alouds? They are critical for building word recognition and language comprehension skills! A large set of regions of the left hemisphere is identically activated when we read a sentence and when we listen to it. (Devauchelle, Oppenheim, Rizzi, Dehaene, & Pallier, 2009) • Read -Alouds for young children by a parent / caregiver affect the brain in ways that will impact later reading development. • Technology led to underdevelopment in these critical brain regions.

Wash Them in Waves of Words
Some children come to school with too little language to support comprehension. Washing our kids in words through READ ALOUDS and oral language gives them a background in language, background knowledge, and more access to meaning.

Learning to Read is NATURAL
We read and should memorize whole words.
The brain can teach itself to read.
The only way to learn to comprehend text is to read text.