English Language Coaching: We wrote countless times to Ministry of Education, now we can say we told you so!

NST 11/12/09

We discovered this in 1997 but we did not have laboratory nor expertise to prove it, so we went around the schools, wrote to MOE countless times, met CDC and many more.....but nobody listened except the kids who did the coaching practice and easily obtained real A's. Then we used the analogy of extensive and intensive reading as akin to the day school experiment showing how placing a magnet near shuffles and patterns iron dust in a tray. Now we know reading makes white matter stuff shift.... as the Malays put it "rapatkan saf"..........

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Clinical Study

Altering Cortical Connectivity: Remediation-Induced Changes in the White Matter of Poor Readers

Timothy A. Keller and Marcel Adam Just

Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

Summary

Neuroimaging studies using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) have revealed regions of cerebral white matter with decreased microstructural organization (lowerfractional anisotropy or FA) among poor readers. We examined whether 100 hr of intensive remedial instruction affected the white matter of 8- to 10-year-old poor readers. Prior to instruction, poor readers had significantly lower FA than good readers in a region of the left anterior centrum semiovale. The instruction resulted in a change in white matter (significantly increased FA), and in the very same region. The FA increase was correlated with a decrease in radial diffusivity (but not with a change in axial diffusivity), suggesting that myelination had increased. Furthermore, the FA increase was correlated with improvement in phonological decoding ability, clarifying the cognitive locus of the effect. The results demonstrate the capability of a behavioural intervention to bring about a positive change in cortico-cortical white matter tracts.

Figure 1. Fractional Anisotropy Increases following Remediation in Poor Readers in the Same Region of the Left Anterior Centrum Semiovale that Showed Reduced Fractional Anisotropy Relative to Good Readers Prior to the Instruction

(A) Region where the poor reader group showed an increase in FA between the preremediation and postremediation scans (peak t(34) = 5.12, at Montreal Neurological Institute [MNI] coordinates −12 28 36, spatial extent = 450 voxels, p <>

(B) Region showing a significant difference in FA between good readers and all poor readers at the first scan (peak t(70) = 4.66, at MNI coordinates −10 20 38, spatial extent = 418 voxels, p <>