For over 15 years, Children’s Speech and Language Services, Inc. – Falls Church location – has offered the Fast ForWord® family of language and reading programs. What began as our intensive Fast ForWord® Summer Computer Camp has recently transitioned to a year round Fast ForWord® at Home Program. This new offering has been made available in order to provide flexibility in implementation of the program to better fit our families schedules and increase access to the program for children who would not be able to participate in our traditional summer program. Our Home Program can be started at any point during the year and serves children who have difficulty with auditory processing and reading or learning difficulties. Participants in the Fast ForWord® Home Program are provided with access to the same materials used in our summer program, along with weekly or biweekly phone or email consultations with a Fast ForWord® provider to help keep their learning on track and provide recommendations for further growth.
Developed by Scientific Learning Corporation, the Fast ForWord® software programs have been found to be effective in addressing the needs of children presenting with a wide variety of auditory-language processing and learning difficulties, and problems with reading. Specifically, they work to: Strengthen working, short-term and long-term memory, essential for word recognition, comprehension of complex language and remembering instructions; Strengthen processing skills so that students see images and distinguish sounds quickly enough to discriminate their differences; Improve sequencing, a cognitive skill that relies on memory, attention, and processing and is essential for phonics, word fluency, reading and oral comprehension.
View here: “Inside The Brain of a Struggling Reader” : How brain differences play a crucial role in a child’s literacy development. This poster shows how we can make changes at the neurological level to help kids improve learning skills with Fast ForWord.
Some language-impaired children have difficulty processing the language presented to them as it is too fast or sounds garbled to them. They are often unable to discriminate between the brief, weak acoustic cues needed to learn the phonemes of their language. This interferes with all subsequent stages of language development, as phonemes are the building blocks upon which words, sentences and grammar depend.
Fast ForWord® Foundations I offers progressive computer-based training for children to learn and understand speech in natural forms. It has been shown to improve auditory integration, attention to task, working memory, serial order processing, phonemic awareness, listening comprehension, morphology and syntax.
Fast ForWord® Foundations II, offers to build on the skills developed in Fast ForWord® Foundations I, aiming to accelerate the development of pre-reading skills such as sound/letter correspondence, the ability to decode words faster and easier, listening comprehension, attention to task and more. Both programs are designed to help the child presenting with auditory processing deficits and language learning impairments. Fast ForWord® Foundations II is available to children who have already gone through the Fast ForWord® Fourndations I program, or who can already decode CVC structured words, to further the skills necessary for building better reading skills. For those children who already have basic language skills, Fast ForWord® Foundations II can work effectively, on a stand-alone basis, to help those just struggling with reading, while strengthening their processing of more complex language structures.
The Fast ForWord® Reading programs (Levels 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5) address skills that support fluent reading for academic success (those skills required by nationwide Language and Reading Arts curriculum standards). Computer delivered exercises strengthen the cognitive processes in the context of reading skills validated by the National Reading Panel and the Reading First mandate.
For more information, please contact our Falls Church office, call us at (703) 685-1070, or email our Fast ForWord Coordinator, at Amanda Compton for more information.