Phonics tutoring of problem readers actually changes how their brains operate, demonstrates a new imaging study from Yale. The work shows that 8 months of phonics--a method that separates words into their component sounds, as opposed to the "whole language" approach--produces gains that persisted a year.
The researchers, led by pediatricians Bennett and Sally Shaywitz, imaged the brains of 49 poor readers, aged 6 to 9, while they performed simple letter-recognition tasks. Instructors then gave 37 of the subjects daily phonics tutoring for 8 months, while most of the other 12 got ordinary remedial reading.
Brain systems for reading.
CREDIT: S. SHAYWITZ |
The phonics students made sustained improvements, and brain imaging showed "substantial normalization" of the brain's "reading pathways" (see illustration), the researchers report in the 1 May issue of Biological Psychiatry. In particular, their brains showed more activity in an area that recognizes words instantly without first having to decipher them. The work shows that in many poor readers, "the system is there but has not been activated properly," says Sally Shaywitz.
Educators need to dispense with the notion that because "children are hard-wired to speak," reading should also come naturally, she says. "We're running 40% reading failure rates" as a result of that attitude, says Reid Lyon of the reading and language branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. "The converging scientific evidence is very clear" that poor readers need to be taught the "building blocks" (phonemes) of words, he says.
