Only since 2001 have fMRIвЂ™s made it possible to actually watch a brain in the process of reading. Until recently, reading problems were studied by studying what processes or abilities had been lost through brain injury or by conducting autopsies. Using Science to Understand Reading Problems

In order to be proficient at decoding, you must possess good phonological processing abilities. In order to have fluency, decoding or word attack must come quite easily and quickly. In order to have any degree of reading comprehension, the reader must read with fluency. They lose lвЂ™s and rвЂ™s because they canвЂ™t hear them or canвЂ™t isolate them when they occur with another sound as in вЂњgrowвЂќ or вЂњglow.вЂќ TheyвЂ™ll mix up bвЂ™s and dвЂ™s because they canвЂ™t hear the difference between the sounds. If you canвЂ™t hear the difference, how can you know if the word you are trying to read, spell, or write is cat or cut? YouвЂ™ll see kids spell вЂњlikedвЂќ as вЂњliktвЂќ because they canвЂ™t hear the difference between /d/ and /t/. They will confuse /a/ as in cat for /u/ as in cut. Most struggling readers cannot easily tell the difference between sounds, especially vowels.

Phonological processing consists of phonemic awareness, auditory analysis, auditory blending, auditory segmenting, auditory discrimination, etc. This is the ability to quickly and accurately detect and manipulate the individual sounds within words. In order to read English, a person must be quite capable at phonological processing. The English language uses 26 individual letters to represent 44 sounds. A well-educated Chinese person recognizes 6,000-7,000 characters. A caveman drew a deer on the wall of a cave and it meant whatever grunt or snort he used for вЂњdeer.вЂќ When we see the letters d-e-e-r we know that it represents the spoken word, вЂњdeer.вЂќ The Chinese written language uses different pictures for words and word parts. Regardless of the language, codes are used to represent words or parts of words of the spoken language. Reading, spelling, writing, and speaking are all connected вЂ“ they are language.

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