What is Fast ForWord?

Self Paced Reading & Learning Software

  Fast, often life changing results

  Treats the underlying difficulty, not symptoms

  Over 1 million students in 40 countries

Fast ForWord software is a series of eleven online learning and reading programs that target the cognitive causes of difficulty and then train reading fluency and comprehension for K-12 children and adults. Most students complete 3-4 Fast ForWord programs, in sequence, over 3-8 months.

Adaptive, Individualized Approach
The exercises add speed and complexity at your child's pace, gradually building processing, cognitive and reading skills, generating the intensity required to create new neural connections, and truly change how your child reads and learns.
Why brain fitness training gets results

Comprehensive & Research Validated
The Fast ForWord program draws from cognitive research, neuroscience, linguistics, and natural learning science. It's a comprehensive approach to reading and learning unlike any other program. By targeting underlying difficulties, Fast ForWord works quickly, and has a documented record of success.
What makes Fast ForWord unique

How It Works

Our Personalized Service
Students work at home for 30 minutes a day, five days a week. Our educators monitor progress remotely, providing support and guidance, backed up with online student rewards, online materials and weekly reports. It's a convenient and affordable service available anywhere in the US and Canada.
More about Fast ForWord program service

Cognitive Skills First
Students start Fast ForWord with cognitive & language exercises -- working on processing, working memory, attention, language structure and sequencing -- laying a foundation for the programs to follow.

These exercises use the neuroscience principles of frequency, intensity, and "shaping" -- progress in tiny incremental steps. Each day the student is prompted to make hundreds of increasingly complex decisions in quick succession. Once mastered, these new language processing, focus and memory skills -- essential for reading -- are used in every day life and so they endure.
The science behind the Fast ForWord cognitive software programs

Reading Programs Next
The reading fluency and comprehension exercises that follow the cognitive programs use natural learning science, an adaptive discovery approach that mimics the way skilled readers naturally "get" reading, including vocabulary, spelling and language structure skills, required for reading fluency and comprehension.
Learn more about the Fast ForWord program sequence

First Gains in Just a Few Weeks
The Fast ForWord name is a play on fast for word and fast forward, emphasizing the fast results. Rather than years of extra help and instruction to work around an underlying cognitive difficulty or delay, the program aims to remove the learning impediment, opening the flood gates to higher achievement immediately. Early gains in language and reading typically occur in 4-6 weeks and build from there.

Who Fast ForWord Helps

Symptoms of reading and learning difficulty -- shaped by the personality, IQ, education, and other factors unique to each child -- vary greatly, but the underlying cognitive causes are familiar, and treatable. The Fast ForWord reading program starts by addressing the common learning impediments.
Find out who Fast ForWord helps

Fast ForWord For Reading

About 90% of struggling readers have difficulties with phonological awareness, the ability to break words into separate sounds, or phonemes. This is where Fast ForWord starts, exercising the cognitive skills at the foundation of the reading skills pyramid, to build phonological awareness and reading fluency.

Reading comprehension requires accurate decoding, a good understanding of the language -- vocabulary, grammar, syntax -- and the ability to actively think about the meaning of a text while reading it. These skills are developed in sequence, as students move up the reading pyramid, culminating in high school level reading comprehension skills.
Fast ForWord reading program details

Fast ForWord For Learning

By speeding up auditory processing Fast ForWord effectively slows the world down for students, making following instructions and learning easier. Students experience gains in confidence and improved learning skills leading to homework independence, better grades from better test taking skills, an the ability to engage and follow instruction in class, among other gains.
Programs to help learning skills

Documented Results

Fast ForWord combines the ground-breaking cognitive research of Paula Tallal on how children read and learn with the neuroscience discoveries of Dr. Merzenich whose work on brain plasticity and how best to coax the brain to adapt and learn differently is world renowned.
Reasons to trust that Fast ForWord works

There are a literally hundreds of documented Fast ForWord studies that show its consistent ability to help students at varying academic levels.
Read Fast ForWord research

Find Out If We Can Help

The ultimate measure of Fast ForWord is our client satisfaction rate: 96.8% of clients say they would recommend us to others. However, every child is different. To find out if your child is a candidate for our program, call for a free consult Monday-Friday, 9AM to 6PM EST, or request a different time here:
Request consult outside regular hours.

Looking for Fast Forward?

Fast ForWord is a clever name, evoking rapid acquisition of language skills. But it is confusing. If you are looking for fastfoward, fast_forward, fastforward software, fast for word, fast for words, fast for words program, fastforward.com or our most common mispelling, fast forward, you have come to the right place.