Reading and the Brain for English as a Foreign Language Learners

This Section Examines Dr. Judy Willis's Book--Teaching the Brain to Read

Chapter 1

Comprehension, retention, and use of information obtained through reading appear to be associated with prefrontal lobe activation and storage in neurons of the neocortex.

Mirror neurons and stimulation through mimicking sounds, verbal language, exaggerated lip and mouth movements and labial sounds with graphemes is all priming for pre-reading.

• Teachers should use in-class time to mimic sounds as students watch! Get the mirror neurons firing. Students can also use a mirror to enable them to visually see their mouth. Remember, visual stimuli is the strongest way to activate the brain!

3 systems interrelated and most active during reading:

1. frontal lobe-linked to phonological and semantic processing. Broca's area is here and is involved in language processing, speech production, and comprehension. Neuron activation is increased when words are spoken.
2. ventral posterior processing system (Located in the occipital and temporal lobes). Associated with orthographic processing (visual-phonological connections) of the patter and form of words. Most active when processing orthographic-phonological connections.
1. This area is referred to as the brain's letterbox by Dehaene (2014). Making the phoneme-grapheme connection is very important for readers, especially words with complex sounds like ough as in through and brought. 
3. dorsal posterior reading system-parts of the parietal and temporal lobes. Used in word analysis through the integration of visual features of printed words. (visual-spatial recognition) NOT whole word recognition. This area is used by early readers when they analyze words by linking letters to sounds (Price, Moore, and Frackowiak, 1996).

Activities for building phoneme-grapheme connections:

• segmenting sounds and building them together using both real and nonsense words.
• i.e. r-u-n equals run; say run without the 'r' or 'n' sound.
• oral blending and segmenting paired with letters.
• i.e. blending by saying 'ap'. Now put n in front of 'ap' and you get nap. 

Chapter 2

Patterning is the brain's way of coding, storing, connecting, and retrieving information. As teachers we need to try and make patterns. Patterning strategies that fit a particular stimulus is the most effective way for the brain to learn new information.

• i.e. when the brain recognizes a new word that fits a previously created category there is more activity in the prefrontal and hippocampal regions---the memory processing areas of the brain! (Coward, 1990)

#1) Pattering involves segmenting words, blend sounds, and categorizing new information into patterns. 

• Drawing pictures coincides with the brain's natural inclination to look for patterns, sequence and order.
• The flagpole idea is a good way to do this!

#2) After students can put words into categories, the next step is to distinguish between items that share categories, i.e. run, walk, stroll.

• i.e. students list words and write why they are similar, hot/burning/steaming/boiling
• or categorize them.

#3) Manipulating new information to make a judgement, connection, analysis, or perform an activity.

• The three most critical components teachers can bring to reading instruction are:
• promotion of pattern recognition
• consolidation of these patterns into stored memory
• active engagement of students in mental manipulation of their newly patterned neural networks.

Chapter 3

Fluency appears related to neural patterning from the visual sensory intake and print word processing areas in the occipital lobes.

Neural networks connect the auditory processing centers in students' temporal lobes to their executive function and word identification centers in their prefrontal lobes. (Geake, 2006)

Fluent readers can decode, recognize, and comprehend the meaning of text at the same time; neural networks firing directly and efficiently.

Fluency beyond simple decoding is the brain's initial processing of new sensory input through short-term or working memory networks. This is the part of the memory systems that appears to be critical to fluency development.

• decoded words need to remain in memory long enough to connect with other words in the sentence, paragraph, or page. Students need to make associations, recognize relationships and pattern information for fluent reading. 
• This is why many students find reading fluently so difficult! They can not do this for extended periods of time or on their own. Good in-class activity!

Teaching strategies should be aimed at:

• building relational memories between short-term memories of new text and information stored in long term memory.
• build decoding efficiency, word recognition speed, and fluency include model reading, re-reading, or choral reading, paired reading, independent reading and tape-recorded reading.