Christopher Kaufman, Ph.D. (207) 878-1777 e-mail: info@kaufmanpsychological

1. Christopher Kaufman, Ph.D. (207) 878-1777 e-mail: info@kaufmanpsychological.org web: kaufmanpsychological.org

2. Reading & The Brain The Essential Skill Components & Cognitive Processes of Literacy Incredibly brief version! Christopher Kaufman, Ph.D. Licensed Psychologist Certified School Psychologist

3. Why this matters . . “Academic success, as defined by high school graduation, can be predicted with reasonable accuracy by knowing someone’s reading skill at the end of third grade. A person who is not at least a modestly skilled reader by that time is unlikely to graduate from high school.” The National Research Council, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998. (Wendy Gaal, Reading Matters to Maine, 2010)

4. Why this matters . . “Children who fall behind in first grade have a one in eight chance of ever catching up to grade level without extraordinary efforts.” C. Juel, Learning to Read and Write in Elementary School (New York: Springer Verlag, 1994): 120. “Seventy-four percent of children who are poor readers in the third grade remain poor readers in the ninth grade.” D.J. Francis, et.al. “Developmental Lag Versus Deficit Models of Reading Disability: A Longitudinal, Individual Grown Curves Analysis,”Journal of Educational Psychology 898, no. 1 (1966): 3-17). (Wendy Gaal, Reading Matters to Maine, 2010)

5. Common Core ELA Standards Core emphasis: Build students’ critical thinking and deep understanding!

6. Five Pillars (‘Big Ideas’) of Effective Reading Instruction • Phonemic Awareness • Phonics • Fluency • Vocabulary • Comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000; National Early Literacy Panel, 2008)

7. Phonological vs. Phonemic Awareness Phonological Awareness: Syllables, Onsets & Rimes Phonemic Awareness: Grasping language at the phonemic level.

8. Phonics (AKA: The Alphabetic Principle)

9. Orthographic Knowledge/Competency Essential for ‘sight word’ recognition and, of course, spelling.

10. Oral Reading Fluency Speed Accuracy Expression

11. Vocabulary Word knowledge can have an enormous impact on decoding and encoding!!!

12. Comprehension Give me the facts, Madam, just the facts. Explicit Implicit

13. The BRAIN: Its two hemispheres and four lobes (source: Jacob L. Driesen, Ph.D.) Longitudinal Fissure

14. Input vs. Output Regions of the Cortex Input & Sensory Processing & Storage Output & Self-Direction

15. Broca’s Area (expressive language center – where pronunciation occurs) Superior temporal cortex (where letters and sounds of language are linked) Exec. control Pronun-ciation Letter/sound correspondence Letter/word ID Vocabulary & meaning Pre-frontal cortex (primary center of executive control and meta-cognition) Medial temporal cortex (a key ‘meaning’ center of auditory processing) Ventral occipito-temporal region (the brain’s ‘letterbox’)

16. Essential (and often unacknowledged) literacy acquisition facts • Learning to speak and understand others’ oral language is a natural process (basically, we’re born to do it . .) • Learning to read is NOTa natural process! Why???

17. Here’s why . . Reading requires the literal REWIRING of brain circuits. That is, in order to read (and write), we must modify brain regions developed over the course of millions of years of evolution to serve oral language and object recognition so that they can function in the service of literacy.

18. Let’s look again at the brain (source: Jacob L. Driesen, Ph.D.) Receptive Language Letter-Sound Association Expressive Language Letter/Word ID Object Naming

19. Bottom line Some brains have a far harder time than most accomplishing the rewiring. We call children with such brains, ‘dyslexic.’

20. Dyslexia defined . . A disorder manifested by difficulty in learning to read despite conventional instruction, adequate intelligence and socio-cultural opportunity. World Federation of Neurology

21. Four Types of Developmental Reading Disorders (Feifer, 2011) • Dysphonetic Dyslexia (difficulties processing the component sounds of speech and with linking letters to sounds – inhibits the ‘sounding out’ of words) • Orthographic Dyslexia (difficulties recalling/recognizing the visual features of words; this is a particular problem with irregular words like ‘enough’ and ‘yacht’ and ‘the’) • MixedDyslexia (Impaired phonological and orthographic processing) • Comprehension Deficits (no obvious word level/mechanical reading deficits, but comprehension is impaired)

22. The ‘Matthew Effect’ Good fluency leads to this . . Literacy Scores A lack of fluency leads to this . . The years going by . .

23. The Literacy ‘Mix’ in Working Memory Background Knowledge New Information Working Memory (Cognitive ‘Desktop’) Concepts & Inferences

24. Info from text Prior knowledge Crummy Comprehension Blissful Understanding! It’s the self-directed mixing together in working memory of information/content extracted from text with prior knowledge (facts, schemas, paradigms, etc.) that yields meaning and understanding. 24

25. The Five ‘Big Ideas’ Written in Instructional Terms • Teach phonemic awareness explicitly. • Provide systematically sequenced phonics instruction. • Teach synthetic phonics where letters are converted into phonemes and then blended to form whole words • Use guided oral reading with appropriate error correction techniques and feedback strategies to facilitate reading fluency. • Develop vocabulary and use systematic instruction to teach strategic reading comprehension.

26. The Best Practice Bottom Line . . It is not enough to merely address the five areas of reading within a reading program. For students to acquire these skills, they need to be taught systematically and explicitly using empirically based instructional design and delivery principles!! -- Bursunk & Blank, 2010

27. Evidence-Based Core Reading Programs: The Best Place to Start Every elementary school in America should adopt a comprehensive, science-based core reading program that systematically/explicitly teaches and provides guided practice in the five essential reading skill domains. The program should be taught ‘by the book’(that is, as designed, and with fidelity). Students should be provided with 90 minutes of uninterrupted instruction using the core program. University of Oregon Center on Teaching and Learning