Interesting Article in Scientific American magazine about reading, cognitive skill development and brain plasticity.
The article talks about the need for specific instruction on phonemic awareness for students who have difficulty reading. It goes on to emphasise orthographic, phonological, semantic, morphological, and syntactic knowledge necessary for fluent reading in an integrated, systematic, and fun fashion. Finally they identify semantic development, (more about this key function later in the blog).
We certainly "tick all the boxes" in their reading strategy using Fast ForWord.
Here is an extract..
.......The story of reading's development is a complex tale of equal parts human invention and neural plasticity. The human mind created reading, but that skill could only come about because of the brain's unique capacity to form new circuits. Scientists have long known that reading depends on an intricate set of neural circuits in the brain, but the exact operation of these circuits remains an area of ongoing investigation. Now, a study by cognitive neuroscientists Laurent Cohen, Stanislas Deaene and their colleagues in the March 1st issue of the journal Neuroimage gives us some new insights into the reading brain.