Severe Reading Difficulties

So now all the words you're going to see in this game are made up words, OK? And just read for me--

Cassie is unable to convert an unfamiliar group of letters into the sound of the word. Instead, she just guesses.

And just click the mouse when you're ready.

Gloop.

OK. Great.

Wip. Swag.

Psychologist Bruce McCandliss specializes in helping children like Cassie to learn to read.

You didn't like those? Those were hard, huh? Our brains automatically decode the letters that they see into the sounds of language, and blend them together into whole words. If you don't catch onto this skill early on the reading process, oftentimes you might get stuck trying to compensate with other strategies.

The word on the screen is pen. Make a new word by taking away the N, and add a T.

Bruce is interested in the changes that occur in his students' brains when they finally learn to read properly.

Good work.

How about down here, though. What does the end of this word look like? T and S. How would you say T and S together? Ts.

Ts.

Yeah that's, it. OK, let's just run through a couple of them, make sure we have that down. You read this--

Best.

Yeah.

Best.

You've got to look really carefully at the letters there. The letters will tell you what word it is.

Bets.

There you go, great.

Reading is a complex skill, which involves hearing, vision, memory, and speech. But Bruce has scanned the brains of good readers and identified one key area, which seems to be active specifically during reading. He believes this area is involved when we're converting letters into word sounds.

Said Mike. Grace led Mike to the spider web. Inside the club were--

With Bruce's help, Mark has just learned to read in the last few months.

Not me, said Grace. I like spiders. My sister--

Mark came in reading at a very low level. And we struggled with a couple of very key letter sound identification concepts with him. But over the course of the 24 sessions he started to really catch on, and started to very actively start to decode words on his own, start to correct his own errors, and start to realize the role that each letter played in a word.

Great. Come on in here. Just like last time. You remember the MR center? Hope up on here, and we'll crank it up.

Mark had a brain scan before he did the reading course. And his brain showed no activity in the key area Bruce believes is involved in reading. Now that he can read, he's having a second scan to compare the pattern of activity.

He's got to be one of our best.

Inside the scanner, Mark does a reading test.

Those are beautiful. Great.

The second scan of Mark's brain, when he was reading well, reveals a clear change. As he learned the new skill of decoding letters into sounds he made new connections in his brain.

I can show you some the results of what we found so far. So first I want to show you-- check this out right here. We did the same exact scan with the same exact words a little while later, and look what happened. What do you see there?

The red dots.

Yeah, that's right. You know what the red dots mean?

That it was working?

That's right. That part of your brain was working pretty hard when you were playing the word game. So we're really excited about that. It's an example of learning, changing a pattern of your brain activity. So what do you think about that, seeing the inside your brain and what's going on as you're thinking about stuff?

Pretty neat.

Yeah?