[Reading-hall-of-fame] Has brain science changed how you teach about reading?

[tsticht at znet.com]

Colleagues: In 2003, Sally Shawitz published Overcoming Dyslexia: A New
and Complet Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level. Four
years later, in 2007, Maryanne Wolf published Proust and the Squid: The
Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Now, two years later, in 2009,
Stanislas Dehaene has published Reading in the Brain: The Science and
Evolution of a Human Invention.

In all these books much is discussed about what areas of the brain are
involved in various reading tasks as indicated by imaging techniques. This
gives us a lot of information about how the brain functions during
different reading tasks. All these books seem to point away from whole
language and toward a phonemcs/phoncs approach to reading instruction,
Shaywitz and Dehaene most directly.

Dahaene says at the end of his book, "We now know that the whole language
approach is inefficient: all children regardless of their socioeconomic
background benefit from explicit and early taching of the corresondence
between letters and speech sounds.This is a well-established fact,
corroborated by a great many classroom experiments."

How adout this? Is this a "well established fact" in your opinion?

I'm wondering if any of you have drawn upon this new brain science
information to change the way you teach about reading instruction to future
or present teachers?

Tom Sticht