Literacy is usually defined as the ability to use language to read, write and communicate. Before any of this can be achieved, the underlining cognitive abilities of how we process written and spoken language must be understood. Learning to read is an extremely complex process, beginning with phonological processing (how to manipulate sound units) and sound-symbol correspondence (mapping the phonemes onto symbolic representations-- letters). Once students learn and understand phonemes and symbols, they must then be able to immediately recognize patterns with those symbols and how the sounds change based on the order of the letters- linguistic markers and spelling rules. Whew! Even at this basic level, the process of learning written language is impressive.
However, this is only the beginning of the process. While learning to
map phonemes onto symbolic representations, the student must also be
able to do this quickly and accurately (fluency) while assigning meaning to the symbols individually and as words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and essays (comprehension). This takes concentration, the ability to focus and attend to important notations while ignoring others (selective attention).
We know from research that there are many parts of the brain working
together in order to complete this process. The occipital, parietal,
temporal and frontal lobes must be able to process a certain action.
If there are breakdowns in any of these areas, reading becomes not only
challenging, but often impossible.
Reason To Learn teaches students how to overcome their challenges by
"rewiring" and retraining their thinking through specifically guided
instruction and research-based methodology.
