My school is beginning the Fast Forward Program. I just would like some of your thoughts and experiences. Thanks.
Re: fast forward
FFW can dramatically help kids who have auditory processing problems. Unfortunately, schools tend to take all kids who have reading problems and put them through FFW.
A child like my daughter, whose reading problems were due to delays in the areas of phonological processing and developmental vision — and who has no auditory processing problems — would not be helped at all by FFW. It is quite time-consuming for the child to go through (120 minutes of training per day 5 days a week for about 7 weeks), and the lost time and effort (plus the frustration and disappointment of getting no improvement after all that work) could actually set a child like my daughter back.
FFW is great, but schools should be selective about which children they put through the program. At the very least, the child should have had a speech and language evaluation and failed the SCAN. There are a variety of underlying conditions that can cause difficulty learning to read. FFW is great at remediating one of these underlying conditions — but not all of them.
What my daughter needed and got (thanks to her parents, not the school) was vision therapy, cognitive skills training, and reading remediation with Phono-Graphix. These were the therapies that met her particular needs.
Mary
Re: fast forward
My son did Fast Forward privately not through the school. I just want to reiterate what others have said. It does not teach reading and it only helps certain kids. My son improved his auditory memory and receptive language skills through the program. He was diagnosed as having CAPD with a decoding deficit. The program eliminated his decoding deficit (inability to understand normal paced speech). Frankly, reading has still been a struggle and has taken other interventions and lots of hard work.
It’s written up in the latest _Perspectives_ (the International Dyslexia Association quarterly newsletter), as are several other “controversial” therapies. That article cited evidence that FFW in and of itself doesn’t improve reading, but acknowledges that it’s not designed to; it’s designed to improve auditory processing of speech sounds which is an underlying skill that is important for good reading.
There are lots of folks who have been really helped by it — and some who haven’t. Good diagnosis of just what’s behind a kid’s problems is probably the critical point.