Word: forword
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Scientific Learning scored its biggest coup in May with a pilot project to provide Fast ForWord to the Chicago public school system. Right now, private clinicians are the chief providers of Fast ForWord training, which can cost more than...
While Fast ForWord hasn't helped everyone, it has shown remarkable success with many kids who suffer from a condition known as central auditory processing disorder. People with this ailment, which may afflict up to 4 million primary and secondary school students, have difficulty distinguishing between phonemes--the basic building blocks of language--and particularly between consonants like b, d and p, which fly by in milliseconds during conversation. The condition may also retard reading, since the children can't easily match up the indistinct sounds they hear with the letters on a page...
...Fast ForWord games attack this problem by training youngsters to distinguish among phonemes, first at artificially slowed speeds and then at normal rates of speech. The kids click their mouses on animated screen games to identify what they hear. The training is intense--students must sit before computers for 100 min. a day, five days a week for four to eight weeks--because it takes sharply focused attention to rewire a brain. Last fall, Scientific Learning rolled out Fast ForWord II for children who can use additional training. (Parental disclosure: this writer's 12-year-old son Billy made welcome...
...some children benefit more than others, or why some may not benefit at all. "There is no silver bullet," warns Reid Lyon, the head of child development and behavior studies at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which is conducting a five-year study of Fast ForWord and other remediation programs...
Gratified administrators at the Elim Christian School outside Chicago would endorse that view. Fast ForWord has worked for most of the 40 or so Elim students who have completed the program, says Linda Kleyn, director of network services at the school. That persuaded the Chicago system to give Fast ForWord...