1. Your Brain on Reading

2. HOW DO YOU THINK YOUR BRAIN READS?  What parts of the brain perform what function?  Discuss!

3. Parts of the Brain  The temporal lobe (Wernicke’s Area) is responsible for phonological awareness and decoding sounds. ( Sounds of letters )  The frontal lobe (Broca’s Area) handles speech production, reading fluency, grammatical usage, and comprehension, which makes it possible to understand grammar in our native language. ( Speaking, comprehension, grammar )  The angular gyrus (Ventral Region) serve as a “conductor” of sorts. It links the different parts of the brain together to execute the action of reading. This area of the brain connects the letters c, a, and t to the word cat that we can then read aloud. ( Puts it all together )

5. Your Brain in Real Time!  Right now, your mind is performing an astonishing feat. Photons (particles of light) are bouncing off these black squiggles and lines -- the letters in this sentence -- and colliding with a thin wall of flesh at the back of your eyeball..

6.  The photons contain just enough energy to activate sensory neurons (brain cells), each of which is responsible for a particular plot of visual space on the page. The end result is that, as you stare at the letters, they become more than mere marks on a page. You've begun to read.

7.  Photons- particles of light  Eyeballs  Activates neurons (brain cells)  Creates an image

8. So, what is reading?  Reading is when someone with certain knowledge looks at marks on a surface. These marks have to be familiar to the “someone.” This someone has to know what the marks stand for and then relate them to experiences and knowledge they already have.

9. Ghoti

10.  Gh- as the (f) in tough  O- As the (i) in Women  Ti- As the (sh) in Lotion

11. Problems with English language  The irregularities of the English language require flexibility. As George Bernard Shaw once pointed out, the word "fish" could also be spelled ghoti, assuming that we used the gh from "enough," the o from "women," and the ti from "lotion."

12.  In fact, once we become proficient at reading, the precise shape of the letters -- not to mention the arbitrariness of the spelling -- doesn't even matter, which is why we read word, WORD, and WoRd the same way.

13. Sounds and Letters  Our alphabet does NOT have an ideal one-to-one correspondence between its phonemes and graphemes! (Between its sounds and symbols)

14. Alphabetic Principle Learning the alphabetic principle is NOT easy! 1. The letters are abstract and unfamiliar to the new reader 2. There are about 44 English phonemes but only 26 letters-each phoneme is not coded with a unique letter. 3. There are over a dozen vowel sounds but only five letters-a,e,i,o,u- to represent them

15. Alphabetic Principle 3. The reader needs to recognize that how a letter is pronounced depends on the letters that surround it-e.g.-the letter “e” in dead, deed, dike 4. Then there are consonant digraphs- combinations of two consonants (ch, sh, ph) 5. Also trigraphs-tch, thr

16. Poem by Anonymous Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird. And dread; it’s said like bed, not bead; Watch out for meat and great and threat. (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt). A moth is not a moth in mother, Nor both in bother, broth in brother.

17. And here is not a match for there, And dear and fear and bear and pear, And then there’s dose and rose and lose— Just look them up --- and goose and choose, And cork and work and card and ward, and font and front and word and sword, And do and go, then thwart and cart. Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start. A dreadful language? Why, man alive, I’d learned to talk it when I was five And yet to read it, the more it tried, I hadn’t learned it at fifty-five!

18.  Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe." http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,511177,00.html