From Syllable to synapse: Prereading Through Decoding

As the teacher who teach the student needs to understand how students learn to read. It is very important for the teacher understand the brain processes written information. According the book of Rudy Willis M,D in The Reading The brain to Read there are three essential and interrelated phases in the process of reading those are:

1.              Information intake

2.              Fluency and vocabulary

3.              Patterning and networking.

In the process comprehension and retention is strongly complicated process. Before they are ready to be used to prioritize, plan, analyze, judge, and to make decision, the process of reading appear to be associated with prefrontal lobe activation and storage in neurons of the neocortex.

Prereading

We sometimes see the children always do what adult do in front of them. Althogh they do not fully do the same thing like adult. We think that is common behaviours of them. The terms of that behaviours is named imitation learning through the activation of mirror neurons.

The terms was discovered by Giaccamo Rizzolati 1996. In his discovery said that part of his group’s study of cluster of neurons in the premotor cortex of yhe frontal lobes of monkey ( the region that correspondends to Broca’s area in the cortex of the frontal lobe of humans-the brain center associated with the expressive and syntatic aspects of language). He found when monkeys do some activities such as picking up peanuts and putting them in their mouth, and the young monkey speculatively imitate them. It is indicated that the children are the best imitator. Because whatever we do in front of them. Speculatively, they will imitate them.

In this case, it means that before the children can talk or read, they are very fast understand what people do surround them. Therefore, we should give them with good example when we are in front of them. Because it is very crucial for them if the bad action, that we do in front of them, is imitated them.

Three Proposed Brain System and Pathways of Reading

 In our brain, there are a systems of reading process. Follow is the maps of reading process or it is known by neuroimaging. In the frontal lobes or the frontal reading system is happened in some importance process, those are phonological process and semantic process. In the Broca’s discovery was found places of language process, speech production, and comprehension was found in this area.

The posterior lobes there have been posteriors, one of them is posterior ventral. In this posterior is associated with orthographic processing (visual-phonological connections).

Another posterior is posterior dorsal. Different from posterior ventral, in this posterior is happened word analysis (visual-spatial recognition).

The Neural Mechanisms of Phonemic Awerness

The ability to deal explicity and segmentally with sound units smaller than the syllable (phonemes) has been researched with experiemental and longitudinal studies in hopes of identifying the association between phonetic awerness and letter knowledge. When comparing the brain scans of subjects during most activities, the location where the specific thinking processing takes place is roughly consistent from person to person.

Sensitivity to sound structure such as rhyme, alliteration, and segmentation is correlated with fMRI activity in the left superior temporal lobe and lower frontal lobe. New rools of brain research for reading are providing more detailed information about information transfer speed in the brain.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging methods cannot provide information about such brief events, but to evaluate this type of temporal information there are now measurements avialable using event-related potentials (ERPs) and magnetoencephalography (MEG).

With neuroimaging and neuroelectric data demonstrating the complexity and interdepency of the multiple brain region that must all work succesfully for students to develope reading skills. Based on some clinical studies; but not yet confirmed by neuroimaging or brain wave measurements, strategies for building phonemic awerness have included explicit instruction in sound-letter correspondence and phoneme manipulation (blending and segmenting) in phonics followed by repeated readings of fully decodedable text comprised of letter-sound pairs already learned (Santa&Hoien, 1999).

Phonological Processing

Listening to and understanding speech and reading the written wprd both involve identifying the individual sounds that make up words. In spoken language, phonological processisng take places automatically at a preconcious, intinctual level. The alphabet and letter-sound correspondence is an artificial construct that gives speech concrete representation at the phonological level. Functional MRI scanning has demonstrated brain-processing regions that are particulary active in phonological processing. Akey area of the dorsal posterior system, the angular gyrus, was significantly more active in letter naming compared with object naming.