This presentation will focus on practical teaching improvements.
 Critical language skill development for student readers:
 Vocabulary skills and the development of successful home based programmes for language enrichment or preschool children living in economically deprived families
 The alphabet, the abstractness of phonemes and phonics, and using phonemic awareness as a screening tool for pre-reading children
 Morphological skills as an essential part of reading and spelling English as well as a key part of vocabulary growth.
 Working memory as the cognitive skill that supports sentence comprehension; influencing classroom listening as well as reading.
 Strategies for students of English as an additional language

 After the lecture we will give a presentation of how the Fast ForWord family of products is being used in Irish schools to help students improve the processing skills required to be effective readers.

Who is Virginia Mann?
Professor of Cognitive Sciences in the School of Social Sciences in the University of California–Irvine. Her research interests include reading ability: phoneme awareness, developmental dyslexia, phonological skills, early intervention, precocious readers, speech perception, context effects and cross-linguistic comparisons. She has been instrumental in launching several practical reading schemes and also has received patents for her work on the Fast ForWord© family of reading programmes. See
http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2713

For more information visit www.scilearn.com and www.neuron.ie