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In an abstract to a study on dyslexia, brain researchers in Washington , through use of a "3-week instructional program that provided explicit instruction in linguistic awareness, alphabetic principle (taught in a way to maximize temporal contiguity of grapheme–phoneme associations), decoding and spelling, and a writers’ workshop," showed us the importance of explicitly teaching the elemental sounds that go with written letter combinations like ea, eu, eigh, igh, ph, etc. before trying to read them in words via books or spelling lists:

To explore brain connectivity, the researchers worked with 18 dyslexic children (5 girls and 13 boys) and 21 children (8 girls and 13 boys) who were good readers and spellers. All of the children were of normal intelligence and were in the fourth through sixth grades.

The children had to judge whether groups of pink highlighted letters in pairs of nonsense words could or could not represent the same sound. For example, the letters ea and ee in "pleak" and "leeze" could have the same sound but the ea and eu in "pheak" and "peuch" could not. The children's brains were scanned and then those with dyslexia participated in a three-week program that taught the children the code for connecting letters and sounds with an emphasis on timing. Then the children's brains were scanned again.

Following the treatment, the fMRI scans showed that the patterns of temporal connectivity in brains of the dyslexic children had normalized and were similar to those of the good readers and spellers. In particular, the researchers found that connectivity appeared to be normal between the left inferior frontal gyrus and the right inferior frontal gyrus. The left inferior frontal gyrus is believed to control the functional language system, especially for spoken words, while the right inferior frontal gyrus may be involved in controlling the processing of letters in written words. Prior to the treatment these two areas were overconnected and the left inferior frontal gyrus also was overconnected to the middle frontal gyrus, which is involved in working memory that requires temporal coordination.

"These results might mean that after special teaching the children with dyslexia activated letters in written words first and then switched to sounds in spoken words rather than simultaneously activating both letters and sounds," said Richards. "The overconnection between the language conductor and working memory at the same time may be a signal that working memory is overtaxed. When language processing is more efficient after treatment, working memory does not have to work as hard.

"There is this myth that English is an irregular language," added Berninger. "That's not true. We have a set of alternative ways of spelling the same sounds but this not taught explicitly. The way phonics is often taught over focuses on single letters and not the letter groups that go with sounds as well. Teaching children with dyslexia to read requires a different approach, one that stresses knowledge of spelling-sound relationships with a twist that tweaks the letter and sound processes to get connected in time in the brain."