Fast ForWord Elements 1

Foundational reading and learning software for teenagers and adults

Fast ForWord Elements 1 software is a teenage version of the same underlying science used in Fast ForWord Foundations I.  It replaces Fast ForWord Literacy, using exercises that are aimed mainly at high school children.

There are four exercises in Fast ForWord Elements I.  Each exercise provides instant feedback and a socially safe learning environment for adolescent learners that helps them stay motivated and engaged, to help them extract full value.

The goal of Elements 1 is to resolve the auditory and cognitive delays that undermine learning learning, aiming to help students become college- and career-ready learners and readers.

SonoLab

Identify each sweep in the sequence by clicking the up and down arrows in the same sequence as the sounds are presented. This is the heart of the Fast ForWord program, the exercise that first confirmed reading to be a language skill. Most struggling readers find this exercise a challenge. It helps sequencing working memory and auditory processing speed and accuracy.

Ocean Explorer

The adaptive system effectively co-creates the learning experience with the student by continuously optimizing to provide additional practice with what they need to know, rewarding progress on concepts that are mastered, and scaffolding their ability to apply these new skills.

AI Assistant

In this exercise, the learner practices the relationship between words, grammar, and meaning, while increasing their response time and processing speed and accuracy. The goal is to recognize and understand (process) rapid, successive changes in sound and in a way that becomes effortless, automatic.

Space Salvage

This exercise works on differentiating similar but distinct sounds, again aiming to make that processing fast and automatic, so that it becomes a background skill that does not take up mindspace and interfere with reading comprehension.

Skills Worked On

Fast ForWord provides more than 25,000 trials in language exercises, whereas other reading interventions provide just over 5,000. With 5 times the number of trials, practice pays off quickly. The frequent presentation of sounds and language helps the learner quickly recognize and understand words and language structures.

• Auditory discrimination — required for automatic decoding
• Language structures — for comprehension
• Working memory — to retain and think about what is read and heard
• Listening comprehension — to develop metacognition
• Phonological fluency — automatic decoding for reading comprehension