AUTHOR=Weiss Yael , Yeatman Jason D. , Ender Suzanne , Gijbels Liesbeth , Loop Hailley , Mizrahi Julia C. , Woo Bo Y. , Kuhl Patricia K. 

TITLE=Can an Online Reading Camp Teach 5-Year-Old Children to Read?

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 16 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.793213

DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2022.793213

ISSN=1662-5161

ABSTRACT=Literacy is an essential skill. Learning to read is a requirement for becoming a self-providing human being. However, while spoken language is acquired naturally with exposure to language without explicit instruction, reading and writing need to be taught explicitly. Decades of research have shown that well-structured teaching of phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and letter-to-sound mapping are crucial in building solid foundations for the acquisition of reading. During the COVID-19 pandemic, children worldwide did not have access to consistent and structured teaching and are, as a consequence, predicted to be behind in the development of their reading skills. Subsequent evidence confirms this prediction. With the best evidence-based practice in mind, we developed a well-structured online early literacy training program (Reading Camp) for 5-year-old children. This two-week program is designed for pre-K children. It incorporates critical components of the fundamental skills essential to learning to read and is taught online in an interactive, multi-sensory, and peer-learning environment. We measure the participants’ literacy skills and other related skills before and after participating in the Reading Camp and compare the results to no-treatment controls. Results show that children who participated in the online Reading Camp improved significantly on all parameters in relation to controls. Our results demonstrate that a well-structured evidence-based reading instruction program, even if online and short-term, benefits 5-year-old children in learning to read. With the potential to scale up this online program, our next goal is to use fMRI technology to examine how children’s first experiences with reading tune the underlying structure and function of the brain’s visual and language pathways to enable reading. Another goal is to examine the long-term effects of participating in this program on behaviorally measured reading skills and the reading brain network.