Literacy Made Easy Through Enhanced Cognitive Capabilities
A recent data collection showed that 30% of adult Australians possess such poor literacy skills that they could face discrimination. This may be in the workplace, in social situations or affect promotion opportunities across a career. Poor literacy also affects self esteem and self worth. The best way to address this literacy challenge is to ensure that every student has the cognitive capabilities to master all aspects of literacy learning.
Very often, traditional education methods don't work for every student. So what else can you do to support the successful teaching or learning of literacy skills like spelling and reading comprehension?
Enhancing your cognitive capabilities will support you in your quest for literacy! Let me tell you how!
What Is Cognition?
Cognition refers to the process where humans absorb new knowledge and access old knowledge to solve problems or figure something out. This involves remembering information, processing stimuli around you, and maintaining focus on one or more things. The purpose of training your brain's cognitive capabilities is to sharpen up your neural pathways.
Neural pathways are the passages through which the brain sends information. Every time you want to recall a fact or piece of information, your brain uses neural pathways to retrieve the information from your memory and then beams it back to you. Cognitive training helps keep these pathways healthy, functioning and developing.
How Does Stimulus and Memory Help With Comprehension and Spelling?
One of the mpst important cognitive skills revolves around the stimulus-response model. This model informs how fast you react to certain sights, sounds, etc.
This is vital when it comes to literacy. After all, your brain needs to read the letters on a page and process them within less than a second.
Cognitive training also helps literacy through the memory boost. Being able to maintain information in your head while working with it is vital for understanding a text. The training will improve comprehension by allowing you the "brain-space" to take chunks of text and mull them over.
Training your cognitive skills not only improves this but gives you better auditory feedback for spoken words as well.
Memory augmentation is also useful for understanding sequencing, or the order in which events in a text occur.
The Benefits of Attention-Building
Cognitive training boosts attention spans which impact building literacy skills. Let's say you get distracted while reading a sentence. You'll have to start from the beginning again to understand what it's saying.
Upgrading this attention span also lets you "shift" between reading modes more easily.
Reading can be divided into two processes: decoding and comprehension. With lowered attention, people find it more difficult to snap between the two modes to achieve a true reading of a text. People with dyslexia spend more time decoding text which affects their ability to comprehend the content.