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Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching

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Richard Gentry discusses a research-based framework of brain words dictionaries in the brain where students store and automatically access sounds, spellings, and meaning.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 20, 2024

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This video video discusses the book *Brain Words*, co-authored by reading researcher Jean Willette and a professor, which aims to bridge the gap between recent scientific discoveries about how the brain functions in reading and practical application in classrooms. Over the past 30 years, advancements in understanding reading have not been sufficiently integrated into teacher training programs. The authors emphasize the importance of understanding children's cognitive development in reading and writing to cultivate successful learning outcomes.

The book outlines five phases of children's invented spelling, highlighting that each phase reflects their cognitive processes in learning to read and write. The authors argue that spelling is crucial for phonics instruction and that teachers should employ structured literacy and explicit phonics instruction, while avoiding outdated methodologies like whole language and three-queuing strategies.

Additionally, the text addresses dyslexia, illustrating that it should not merely be viewed as a deficit but also as a challenge that can reveal strengths in students. The authors stress the need for teachers to understand dyslexia and implement effective interventions, such as spelling instruction, to support all students in developing literacy skills. Overall, *Brain Words* advocates for educational reform based on current neuroscience to enhance reading instruction in classrooms.

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The past three decades have brought giant leaps in our

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understanding of how the brain works for reading.

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But these discoveries

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and all of their exciting implications have not made their

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way into many classrooms.

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A reading researcher, professor Jean Willette

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and I wrote Brain Words to show teachers, parents

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and homeschoolers how children's brains develop

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as readers and what teachers, parents

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and homeschoolers can do to put them on the path to

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successful reading and writing.

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And, you know, that opens doors.

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And no matter what the child decides to do in life,

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that opens a world of possibilities.

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We also wrote the book for faculty

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and teacher training institutions.

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For three decades, the Science

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of Reading has not been a part of

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many teacher training universities for pre-service,

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for in-service and for graduate level courses.

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So we were motivated to write a book

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based not only on our own research,

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but based on our three decades of

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observation of children in the classroom.

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And we really stand on the shoulders of successful teachers

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of reading,

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who have really informed our work

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and have informed the work in this book.

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So Brain Works was written to help faculty

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and teacher training institutions bring in the latest

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science of reading.

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Well, Jean and I have been doing research for

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three plus decades.

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My research mainly in, the, in spelling

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and dyslexia

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and beginning reading, Gene's,

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a research scientist at Mount Allison University,

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in New Brunswick, Canada.

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And he actually runs a reading lab.

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But I think our gift is that, as a reading team,

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we not only focus in the Brain Works book

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on the science,

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but we are able to trans, we have sort of a, a gift

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of translating science into classroom practice

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because we have lived in that world with teachers

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and children in the classroom.

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It's really, the brain

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and reading is, is very, very complex.

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But, our research has focused on

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children's invented spelling, and,

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and spelling in general

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because it is sometimes the part that is left out of,

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teacher training courses in, in terms of how the brain

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learns to read actually in reading English,

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which is a very complex language to learn to read

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because of its orthography or it's its spelling system.

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And, you know, contrast learning to read in English

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with a, a language like Italian kids in,

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in Italy can learn to read in about six months.

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But in English,

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because of the difficulty of the spelling system, it takes,

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generally, an expectation of two years from

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no reading in preschool to end of

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first grade, independent reading with fluency

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and comprehension.

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So what we have done in our research, it, it's kind

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of interesting, it came together.

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I read a developmental psychology article written by Jean

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and, that he, he had,

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reported my own research

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and children's phases of invented spelling.

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And, I wrote a i I blog for Psychology Today,

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and I, I, I did a blog on that piece, of his

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blogging about his research results that showed

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that children who were encouraged to

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invent spellings beginning in, kindergarten,

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it went through these five developmental phases

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and the, article that I wrote kind of went viral.

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And so I reported to him about that,

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and that's what brought us together as a reading

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and writing team.

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Here's how, here's briefly how it works.

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Um, there are five phases of children's invented spelling.

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And you see, it's very powerful to look at their spelling

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because it's like a window into their mind.

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It shows how they think The

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English written system works for both encoding

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and decoding,

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and it starts with a phase zero, in preschool,

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which is no alphabetic spelling.

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Um, and that is simply when a child may be draws a picture

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and, wants to write about it,

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and they're doing scribbling or wavy writing

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or loopy writing,

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but it's non alphabetic,

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meaning there are no alphabet letters there.

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And then, in kindergarten there,

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the expectation is for two phases.

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Phase one at the beginning, the first half

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of kindergarten would be, pre alphabetic spelling.

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The child can write his name at this point and knows that,

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Um, words are made of letters, but he

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or she doesn't know it's pre alphabetic

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before they can use an alphabetic system.

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And an alphabetic system is matching letters to sounds.

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So y'all might write in phase one, the first half

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of kindergarten, a grocery list,

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and maybe intend to write eggs, fish, and milk,

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and you won't be able to read it

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because it's pre alphabetic.

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Uh, the letters don't match to sounds.

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Then in the second half of kindergarten, they moved to

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a phase called partial alphabetic.

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They have learned to be, they're beginning

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to learn the letters of the alphabet and the names

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and some of the sounds.

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And so part of the sounds may be

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represented in this partial alphabetic

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spelling at the second half of kindergarten.

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Then children make this giant leap into, the first half

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of first grade with phase three,

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and they begin, it's called full alphabetic spelling.

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And it's a very interesting phase

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because, it doesn't look like English,

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spelling a word like eagle

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might be spelled EGL, but the way the child, it's, it's,

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and it's slow and analytic.

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The child might, be, for example, using a multi century,

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technique such as finger spelling

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and might listen to it, stretch out the sounds in the eagle

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E gal.

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And, but then the child has to think,

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I'll use a lot of short term memory.

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Now let's how I make that e what does the E look like?

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And so it's, again, slow and alpha and, analytic,

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but then find, but it doesn't look like English.

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It's not English spelling,

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and what has to happen by the end of, by,

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in the second half of first grade or what is expected.

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And the second half of first grade is that children move to

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phase five, which is called

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automatic consolidated alphabetic spelling.

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And what happens is that they, learn to,

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they have learned enough brain words

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and syllable patterns that they are able to,

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retrieve automatically when they spell.

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And, they're not even, and, and, and that's how you

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and I, read and write.

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We are not even aware that we are using the spelling.

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So a word like interesting rather than in phase,

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four, I'm sorry, rather, yeah.

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In phase four, in the first half

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of first grade, when a child is

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Trying to, think of each of the 11

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letters and interesting,

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and put a sound with it, they move to consolidating

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into syllable chunks such as nter resting.

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And that frees the, that free that, that,

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that frees the, brain for using

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automatically encoding and decoding

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and connecting to the words in their spoken language

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where they already have the words

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sound and its meaning.

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And that's kind of, how that process works.

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They have learned to chunk.

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And one of the, the ways we do that with help, help with

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that is we teach them the phonological awareness

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for like end resting, inter resting.

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It has three chunks.

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And so they learned rather than to try to,

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figure out the 11 different sounds, which is not,

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not possible in English, they will spell it as n tur

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resting, and, not necessarily correctly,

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correct spelling is gonna come, you know, with

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spelling instruction in grade two

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and beyond, explicit instruction and spelling

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and phonics in grade two and beyond.

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But, it's, it's really a wonderful process

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because you can really see that if we're teaching

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phonics and spelling explicitly,

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you can see in their invented spelling of how they,

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you know, whether they're developing as expected,

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and it, and,

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and literally iterate, literally, it seems

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to be a window into their mind about

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how they think about English spelling and how it works.

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We have to teach phonics.

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Um, but the, the important question is

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how do we teach phonics?

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And the teaching of phonics, needs to be,

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structured literacy.

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Uh, it, it needs to be, teachers need a curriculum.

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Um, they, need to,

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teach phonics explicitly and systematically.

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And so there's no question that, phonics

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and phonological awareness and fluency

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and sight word recognition are all part of that process.

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Brain words are neurological representations of

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the, words spelling,

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in the left hemisphere of the, the brain.

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Um, most normal reader, normal readers,

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use mostly a left hemisphere reading system,

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and it's a visual process.

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The decoding and, process, it's a visual process.

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They see the code, the alphabetic code on the page.

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And what has to happen in the first two years

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that I was just describing phases is that children,

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need to develop, these neurological representations

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that they can retrieve, and recognize automatically

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and then, directly,

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automatically connect to their spoken language.

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That's, that's kind of how that process works.

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Now, one of the world's preeminent neuroscientists,

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professor, Stanis Han, who wrote Reading

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and the Brain, based on his three decades of neuro imaging

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research, tells us exactly what we need.

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And I'd like to quote from him, which we do in our book,

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convince folks that, you know, this is not just some opinion

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that we come up with,

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but it is very, very in tune

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with the very latest neuroimaging

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and, neuroimaging research.

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Dhan says that, exactly what we need.

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We need structured literacy instruction,

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not minimal guidance or discovery learning.

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Uh, we need well designed curriculum.

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So a, a teacher is at a disadvantage if he

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or she does not have, the right words at the right time

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for teaching phonics and spelling.

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We need active engagement of the child.

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Um, we need a feedback from the teacher.

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The te the teacher does a lot of modeling, a lot

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of, I do it, we do it,

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you do it kind of, work that teachers are familiar with.

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We need mixing according to Dane,

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mixing together various multi, multi-sensory activities

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and for a short time, but,

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but only for a short time each week.

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I mean, all teachers are faced with the challenge

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of all of the things that have

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to go into the language arts block.

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And what we're talking about in Brain Words is,

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focus on teaching automatic recognition

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and spelling of words.

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So it's a word study, part of all of that.

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But you don't need 75 minutes a day of word study.

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You need about a short time, about, 20 minutes

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of word study each day throughout the week.

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And of course, Dane points out that you need motivation.

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And what we found in our work is that most teachers,

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are really good at motivating kids to learn if they,

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but what they need is they need the knowledge of how

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to teach structured lit literacy, which is

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what this book is all about.

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And they, they, they need a curriculum.

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Another important part of the Hanes work

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that informed our in, our book, he talks very

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directly about what he calls the pitfalls of pop popular

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practices to avoid.

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He talks about the pitfalls of popular practices

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to avoid, and these are his words.

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He says, avoid whole language balance, literacy,

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signature three queuing strategies,

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for example, here they are.

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He says, no guessing by looking at pictures, no

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queing by remembering the word shape,

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no queing by looking only at the beginning letter,

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and no queuing from context.

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And that one's kind of, counterintuitive.

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You would think you use context,

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but literally there have been hundreds of studies that show

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that it's poor readers who use context, good readers

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don't cue from context.

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And the ha, shows that these three queing systems

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confuse the attention of a child

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because they prevent the child from paying

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attention to mapping all the sounds, the letters.

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So, that work has, has powerfully,

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given us confidence

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after, you know, our three plus decades

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that now the very latest neuroscience from a preeminent

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neuroscientist is confirming the path

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that we're trying to, share with teachers.

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Brain words is a, is based on spelling

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to read methodology,

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and it's, it's a very, very powerful methodology,

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because in fact, spelling is a deeper level

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of phonics, spelling to read tech, tech,

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methodology, which is what we propose.

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And brain words really, is powerful

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because as, as we've described,

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you can literally see what's happening,

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in the child's brain,

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and you can see if the child is making progress.

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And if you look at the child's invented spelling in each

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of these phases, it helps you know what it is

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that you need to teach.

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So, the key is that spelling to read methodology, which

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Is important

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and foremost in, in our, work

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that we've created.

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It's kind of interesting.

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The last chapter is,

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and our book is on dyslexia,

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and I'm kind of an expert on that, because I am dyslexic

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and, I'm a lifelong survivor,

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of overcoming dyslexia.

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And one of the messages we send is that,

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dyslexia is not necessarily, it, it,

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it is very common, at, at at least,

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according to science.

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Now, one in five people might be dyslexic.

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Uh, it happens on a continuum from,

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mildly dyslexic to moderately dyslexic, to

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severely dyslexic.

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Severe dyslexic may only be 2% of the,

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may only be 2% of the, population,

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but all teachers need to understand how the brain works

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and, and dyslexia.

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Some things to keep in mind in terms of what

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teachers and parents can do.

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Um, first of all,

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not only look at dyslexia as a deficit,

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but look at dyslexia, as, in, in, in some cases,

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it can, it can be a gift there, are, you know, it,

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we should be hopeful and we should focus on

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not just the problems that the child is having,

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but on their strengths.

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And so we do that in, in that chapter.

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We do a lot of case studies of kids who are dyslexic

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and from very young children in first grade, even up

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through adulthood, case studies on, 24 year olds

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who have, gone through

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their whole life thinking that they were, they may have been

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very high achieving.

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And, and in academia, from first grade

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to kindergarten, from kindergarten to first grade,

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elementary school, high school, and even college.

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Um, but one of our case studies, a study of a 24-year-old

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who went to a major university in the,

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dyslexia center after she was in graduate school.

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And, it went through this barrage of tests with,

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PhDs and medical doctors,

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and they found that she had, all

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of the symptoms were, were still present,

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but what was so powerful is

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that there's an effective thing about dyslexia.

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And for the first time she understood,

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what was going on, and she didn't feel, feel stupid,

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you know, and that's one of the things that we try

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to get across in our chapter, that you look not only at the,

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the deficits, but think of the child's strengths

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and try to teach to those strengths.

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And there are a lot of, common sense kind of things

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that, that, teachers can do.

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For one thing, you do need, for example,

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we're very much pro spelling books.

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Teachers need a curriculum.

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They need the right words at the right time.

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And if you're using a spelling book, even in first grade,

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you can, better identify, those

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children who may be struggling.

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Uh, spelling is one of the major symptoms of dyslexia.

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So, using, teaching spelling

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explicitly, or using

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and using a curriculum is what we call a,

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what we call it dyslexic specific intervention.

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I, I hope they take the message that,

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we are supporting what everything

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that the reader is doing that, is

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making it more possible for children to advance

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as readers and writers.

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But, we all, it's also a book that calls for change,

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and we want them to consider some of those things

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that they may have been doing,

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that may not be supported by the current science, of

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how the brain learns to read.

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And, and so if, if we can get them,

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to make those changes, it would benefit everyone.

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I.

Understanding Reading Through Brain Science

00:00:00 - The past three decades have brought giant leaps in our understanding of how the brain works for reading. But these discoveries and all of their exciting implications have not made their way into many classrooms. A reading researcher, professor Jean Willette and I wrote Brain Words to show teachers, parents and homeschoolers how children's brains develop as readers and what teachers, parents
00:00:37 - successful reading and writing. And, you know, that opens doors. And no matter what the child decides to do in life, that opens a world of possibilities. We also wrote the book for faculty and teacher training institutions. For three decades, the Science of Reading has not been a part of many teacher training universities for pre-service,
00:01:09 - So we were motivated to write a book based not only on our own research, but based on our three decades of observation of children in the classroom. And we really stand on the shoulders of successful teachers of reading, who have really informed our work
00:01:37 - So Brain Works was written to help faculty and teacher training institutions bring in the latest science of reading. Well, Jean and I have been doing research for three plus decades. My research mainly in, the, in spelling and dyslexia and beginning reading, Gene's, a research scientist at Mount Allison University,
00:02:10 - And he actually runs a reading lab. But I think our gift is that, as a reading team, we not only focus in the Brain Works book on the science, but we are able to trans, we have sort of a, a gift of translating science into classroom practice because we have lived in that world with teachers and children in the classroom.
00:02:40 - and reading is, is very, very complex. But, our research has focused on children's invented spelling, and, and spelling in general because it is sometimes the part that is left out of, teacher training courses in, in terms of how the brain learns to read actually in reading English, which is a very complex language to learn to read

Phases of Children's Invented Spelling Explained

00:03:15 - And, you know, contrast learning to read in English with a, a language like Italian kids in, in Italy can learn to read in about six months. But in English, because of the difficulty of the spelling system, it takes, generally, an expectation of two years from no reading in preschool to end of
00:03:46 - and comprehension. So what we have done in our research, it, it's kind of interesting, it came together. I read a developmental psychology article written by Jean and, that he, he had, reported my own research and children's phases of invented spelling. And, I wrote a i I blog for Psychology Today,
00:04:20 - blogging about his research results that showed that children who were encouraged to invent spellings beginning in, kindergarten, it went through these five developmental phases and the, article that I wrote kind of went viral. And so I reported to him about that, and that's what brought us together as a reading
00:04:48 - Here's how, here's briefly how it works. there are five phases of children's invented spelling. And you see, it's very powerful to look at their spelling because it's like a window into their mind. It shows how they think The English written system works for both encoding and decoding, and it starts with a phase zero, in preschool,
00:05:20 - and that is simply when a child may be draws a picture and, wants to write about it, and they're doing scribbling or wavy writing or loopy writing, but it's non alphabetic, meaning there are no alphabet letters there. And then, in kindergarten there, the expectation is for two phases. Phase one at the beginning, the first half
00:05:52 - The child can write his name at this point and knows that, words are made of letters, but he or she doesn't know it's pre alphabetic before they can use an alphabetic system. And an alphabetic system is matching letters to sounds. So y'all might write in phase one, the first half of kindergarten, a grocery list,

Phases of Early Reading Development

00:06:23 - and you won't be able to read it because it's pre alphabetic. the letters don't match to sounds. Then in the second half of kindergarten, they moved to a phase called partial alphabetic. They have learned to be, they're beginning to learn the letters of the alphabet and the names and some of the sounds. And so part of the sounds may be
00:06:53 - spelling at the second half of kindergarten. Then children make this giant leap into, the first half of first grade with phase three, and they begin, it's called full alphabetic spelling. And it's a very interesting phase because, it doesn't look like English, spelling a word like eagle might be spelled EGL, but the way the child, it's, it's,
00:07:24 - The child might, be, for example, using a multi century, technique such as finger spelling and might listen to it, stretch out the sounds in the eagle E gal. And, but then the child has to think, I'll use a lot of short term memory. Now let's how I make that e what does the E look like? And so it's, again, slow and alpha and, analytic,
00:07:56 - It's not English spelling, and what has to happen by the end of, by, in the second half of first grade or what is expected. And the second half of first grade is that children move to phase five, which is called automatic consolidated alphabetic spelling. And what happens is that they, learn to, they have learned enough brain words
00:08:30 - retrieve automatically when they spell. And, they're not even, and, and, and that's how you and I, read and write. We are not even aware that we are using the spelling. So a word like interesting rather than in phase, four, I'm sorry, rather, yeah. In phase four, in the first half of first grade, when a child is Trying to, think of each of the 11
00:09:01 - and put a sound with it, they move to consolidating into syllable chunks such as nter resting. And that frees the, that free that, that, that frees the, brain for using automatically encoding and decoding and connecting to the words in their spoken language where they already have the words

Understanding Phonics and Spelling Development

00:09:34 - And that's kind of, how that process works. They have learned to chunk. And one of the, the ways we do that with help, help with that is we teach them the phonological awareness for like end resting, inter resting. It has three chunks. And so they learned rather than to try to, figure out the 11 different sounds, which is not, not possible in English, they will spell it as n tur
00:10:10 - correct spelling is gonna come, you know, with spelling instruction in grade two and beyond, explicit instruction and spelling and phonics in grade two and beyond. But, it's, it's really a wonderful process because you can really see that if we're teaching phonics and spelling explicitly, you can see in their invented spelling of how they,
00:10:42 - and it, and, and literally iterate, literally, it seems to be a window into their mind about how they think about English spelling and how it works. We have to teach phonics. but the, the important question is how do we teach phonics? And the teaching of phonics, needs to be, structured literacy.
00:11:12 - they, need to, teach phonics explicitly and systematically. And so there's no question that, phonics and phonological awareness and fluency and sight word recognition are all part of that process. Brain words are neurological representations of the, words spelling,
00:11:46 - most normal reader, normal readers, use mostly a left hemisphere reading system, and it's a visual process. The decoding and, process, it's a visual process. They see the code, the alphabetic code on the page. And what has to happen in the first two years that I was just describing phases is that children,
00:12:17 - that they can retrieve, and recognize automatically and then, directly, automatically connect to their spoken language. That's, that's kind of how that process works. Now, one of the world's preeminent neuroscientists, professor, Stanis Han, who wrote Reading and the Brain, based on his three decades of neuro imaging

Essential Elements for Effective Literacy Instruction

00:12:50 - And I'd like to quote from him, which we do in our book, convince folks that, you know, this is not just some opinion that we come up with, but it is very, very in tune with the very latest neuroimaging and, neuroimaging research. Dhan says that, exactly what we need. We need structured literacy instruction,
00:13:20 - we need well designed curriculum. So a, a teacher is at a disadvantage if he or she does not have, the right words at the right time for teaching phonics and spelling. We need active engagement of the child. we need a feedback from the teacher. The te the teacher does a lot of modeling, a lot
00:13:53 - you do it kind of, work that teachers are familiar with. We need mixing according to Dane, mixing together various multi, multi-sensory activities and for a short time, but, but only for a short time each week. I mean, all teachers are faced with the challenge of all of the things that have to go into the language arts block.
00:14:22 - focus on teaching automatic recognition and spelling of words. So it's a word study, part of all of that. But you don't need 75 minutes a day of word study. You need about a short time, about, 20 minutes of word study each day throughout the week. And of course, Dane points out that you need motivation. And what we found in our work is that most teachers,
00:14:56 - but what they need is they need the knowledge of how to teach structured lit literacy, which is what this book is all about. And they, they, they need a curriculum. Another important part of the Hanes work that informed our in, our book, he talks very directly about what he calls the pitfalls of pop popular practices to avoid.
00:15:28 - to avoid, and these are his words. He says, avoid whole language balance, literacy, signature three queuing strategies, for example, here they are. He says, no guessing by looking at pictures, no queing by remembering the word shape, no queing by looking only at the beginning letter,

Understanding Spelling and Dyslexia in Education

00:15:58 - And that one's kind of, counterintuitive. You would think you use context, but literally there have been hundreds of studies that show that it's poor readers who use context, good readers don't cue from context. And the ha, shows that these three queing systems confuse the attention of a child because they prevent the child from paying
00:16:32 - So, that work has, has powerfully, given us confidence after, you know, our three plus decades that now the very latest neuroscience from a preeminent neuroscientist is confirming the path that we're trying to, share with teachers. Brain words is a, is based on spelling to read methodology,
00:17:05 - because in fact, spelling is a deeper level of phonics, spelling to read tech, tech, methodology, which is what we propose. And brain words really, is powerful because as, as we've described, you can literally see what's happening, in the child's brain,
00:17:35 - And if you look at the child's invented spelling in each of these phases, it helps you know what it is that you need to teach. So, the key is that spelling to read methodology, which Is important and foremost in, in our, work that we've created. It's kind of interesting. The last chapter is,
00:18:03 - and I'm kind of an expert on that, because I am dyslexic and, I'm a lifelong survivor, of overcoming dyslexia. And one of the messages we send is that, dyslexia is not necessarily, it, it, it is very common, at, at at least, according to science. Now, one in five people might be dyslexic.
00:18:39 - mildly dyslexic to moderately dyslexic, to severely dyslexic. Severe dyslexic may only be 2% of the, may only be 2% of the, population, but all teachers need to understand how the brain works and, and dyslexia. Some things to keep in mind in terms of what

Dyslexia: Viewing Strengths, Not Just Deficits

00:19:06 - first of all, not only look at dyslexia as a deficit, but look at dyslexia, as, in, in, in some cases, it can, it can be a gift there, are, you know, it, we should be hopeful and we should focus on not just the problems that the child is having, but on their strengths. And so we do that in, in that chapter.
00:19:40 - and from very young children in first grade, even up through adulthood, case studies on, 24 year olds who have, gone through their whole life thinking that they were, they may have been very high achieving. And, and in academia, from first grade to kindergarten, from kindergarten to first grade,
00:20:10 - but one of our case studies, a study of a 24-year-old who went to a major university in the, dyslexia center after she was in graduate school. And, it went through this barrage of tests with, PhDs and medical doctors, and they found that she had, all of the symptoms were, were still present,
00:20:39 - that there's an effective thing about dyslexia. And for the first time she understood, what was going on, and she didn't feel, feel stupid, you know, and that's one of the things that we try to get across in our chapter, that you look not only at the, the deficits, but think of the child's strengths and try to teach to those strengths. And there are a lot of, common sense kind of things
00:21:11 - For one thing, you do need, for example, we're very much pro spelling books. Teachers need a curriculum. They need the right words at the right time. And if you're using a spelling book, even in first grade, you can, better identify, those children who may be struggling. spelling is one of the major symptoms of dyslexia. So, using, teaching spelling
00:21:44 - and using a curriculum is what we call a, what we call it dyslexic specific intervention. I, I hope they take the message that, we are supporting what everything that the reader is doing that, is making it more possible for children to advance as readers and writers. But, we all, it's also a book that calls for change,

Aligning Reading Instruction with Brain Science

00:22:33 - that they may have been doing, that may not be supported by the current science, of how the brain learns to read. And, and so if, if we can get them, to make those changes, it would benefit everyone. I.

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