In the course of skimming research articles, every now and then something surfaces that is comprehensive, clarifying, and just flat out fun to read because it brings illumination to something I’ve been grappling with.

One I want to make sure to bring to your attention, just in case you haven’t yet read it, is this open access piece from Verhoeven and Perfetti, Universals in Learning to Read Across Languages and Writing Systems. As I’ve been learning a lot more about learning how to read and write in English, as well as about the process of language development in general, I sometimes worry that not everything I learn may generalize well, especially to languages whose writing and phonological systems differ quite substantially from English. Here’s where the paper comes in as a great resource, because the authors offer—as noted in the title—some universal principles across a number of languages, and highlight some key differences.

They highlight, for example, the extreme difficulty of English spelling among alphabetic writing systems due to its “syllabic complexity” and lack of consistent and transparent mapping of phonology. But the difficulty of learning any alphabetic writing system is nothing compared to the complexity of Chinese, which blows all other writing systems out of the water.

They also have a lovely table that compares some of the major writing and language systems to one another descriptively, which I know is a resource I will return to in the future.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2021.1938575?scroll=top&needAccess=true

In the course of this high-level examination, the authors also do us another service, which is to render intricate and complex ideas from various studies on reading into short, clear sentences.

For example, I’ve recently written about the transformation of my own thinking around phonemic awareness, and here’s Verhoeven and Perfetti succinctly stating the current state of PA research:

“Evidence in alphabetic languages for the late association between phonemic awareness and literacy suggests that phonemic awareness and learning to read alphabetically can develop reciprocally. This means that phonemic awareness is an enabler rather than a prerequisite for alphabetic reading.”

Or the need for spelling practice — something we increasingly neglect or dismiss in the U.S.:

“An important cross-linguistic finding is that spelling practice helps children internalize orthographic structures.”

There are also some interesting critiques of the Simple View of Reading in the section on comprehension:

“[the] simple view is incomplete in accounting for development of reading skill because reading itself brings about the learning of vocabulary and experience with a wider variety of grammatical structures and text types that are not experienced in typical spoken language (outside of academic lectures). Reading also increases the general knowledge that is needed to support comprehension.”

At the center of this critique is the role of vocabulary, which spans across linguistic and conceptual knowledge:

“Because so much of vocabulary is acquired following beginning reading, it is not simply a store of language knowledge waiting to be unlocked by decoding. Word meanings are continuously being retrieved, learned, and fine-tuned by reading itself. Both the quality of specific word knowledge (lexical quality) and the quantity of known words are important in supporting comprehension (Perfetti, 2007; Perfetti & Hart, 2001). It might seem convenient to subsume vocabulary under spoken language comprehension and thereby have a two-factor model of reading comprehension. However, this would fail to capture some observations about word meanings. For example, vocabulary knowledge directly supports identification of words that have exceptional spellings (Ricketts, Nation, & Bishop, 2007). A model that allows a more direct influence of knowledge of word meanings on reading comprehension may be more appropriate across languages (see Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, 2008). Beyond beginning reading, where only spoken language vocabulary is available, word meanings are not intrinsically part of spoken language more than written language. In both cases, they are the central connection point between coded input and comprehension, as much a component of a reading system as a language system (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014).”

I thought this was interesting in a couple of ways. First, because this resonates with my own experience as someone who read quite a lot in my formative years, and thus a large amount of the vocabulary I possess is purely in the written form — I can read it and write it, but may not have had much exposure to it in spoken language nor use it in my own speech. Second, because it brought me back to a similar critique that Mark Seidenberg made against the SVR in some endnotes to Reading at the Speed of Light, in which he states, “The main weakness in Gough’s theory is that it did not make sufficient room for the ways that the components influence each other. Vocabulary, for example, is jointly determined by spoken language and reading. Vocabulary can also be considered a component of both basic skills and comprehension.”

More to say on this additional variance for sure, but I’ll save it for another post! In the meantime, read this paper by Verhoeven and Perfetti with a pen in hand so you can mark it up yourself! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. There’s a ton of gems in there to examine more in depth.

Discuss...

#language #literacy #phonemicawareness #orthography #multilingualism #reading #SVR #writing

When I was a special education teacher, I also coordinated the IEPs (Individualized Education Programs) for my school, and served as the district representative at our IEP meetings, meaning that I had some part in most of the IEPs written in my building, whether I coordinated the gathering of information or facilitated the meeting with parents.

We served some children identified with speech language impairment (SLI), and I worked pretty closely with the speech-language pathologist in my school in the sense that I always ensured that IEPs were written with her review and meaningful input, and she was invited to IEP meetings for the children she worked with. We talked when we could about the children we serviced, and I solicited her advice on many occasions.

Yet I don’t know if I ever fully understood what she really did in speech-language therapy sessions. She did her thing, and I did my thing as a co-teacher in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade ELA classrooms. We were both pretty busy.

As I’ve been learning much more about reading, literacy, and language, I’ve increasingly become drawn into the research and expertise of the speech-language pathology realm (SLP) (we do love our tripartite acronyms in ed, don’t we), and discovered a wealth of knowledge that I really wish I had understood more of when I was in the classroom and coordinating the development of IEPs.

Also, as I’ve been struggling to bridge what I’ve been learning about the “science of reading” with my newer focus on the interconnections between language development and literacy development, I’ve found SLPs to be an incredibly useful resource to building that bridge.

You see, if you know all about the Simple View of Reading framework (SVR), you then know that language comprehension at large, alongside of decoding and word-level recognition, is a huge component of reading ability—the one that is there from the beginning, but then takes on an outsized importance once fluency with decoding is achieved.

And Speech Language Pathology is all about the subcomponents of language comprehension, from explicit training in the articulation of speech sounds, to explicit intervention to target needed language skills, such as knowledge of story grammar, making inferences, or the talk moves that are needed to have discourse about a text.

It was only recently that I became aware of the term Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), and discovered that there’s a wealth of developing knowledge about DLD that could further inform our assessment, instruction, and intervention of children who need more intensive supports in any of those subcomponents of language.

If we refer back to the SVR, we can think of three main patterns of students who are having trouble learning to read: students who have difficulty with language comprehension, students who have difficulty decoding, or students have difficulty with both:

Students may have difficulty reading due to either language comprehension, decoding, or both.

Awareness of dyslexic patterns have grown quite a bit, to the point that legislation addressing it has arisen in multiple states. But awareness of patterns of DLD remains low in comparison.

It may seem strange that I present DLD and dyslexia as defining student profiles to guide overall education assessment and instruction — but as someone who comes from a SPED stance, I’ve always seen the way we typically think of instruction in schools as backward. As a cornerstone, we should center our focus on the students who may struggle with language and literacy the most and plan forward from there, rather than as an afterthought. We would then be able to improve outcomes for many more children who may not struggle as significantly, yet who also require more explicit support or more opportunities for practice. Instead, we design schools to center students who already have academic language and literacy skills in place, and we widen inequitable outcomes.

So with that in mind, speech-language pathology is an undervalued domain that has much to offer in considering the language needs of our students and what we need to do to screen, diagnose, and intervene to address those needs. Rather than relegating speech-language pathologists to the people who do that esoteric intervention thing in the room over there 3x a week with some children, we should be elevating their expertise and knowledge and seeking to disseminate that knowledge to general education teachers, most especially in earlier grades, so that we can seek to prevent language issues from arising.

I feel fortunate to have discovered many SLPs and researchers are active on social media and other venues beyond research papers, and though I hesitate to call any out by name because I know I will be missing way too many in any listing I give, just a few to get you started in your own journey of learning on language:

• Tiffany Hogan: check out her co-authored paper with Suzanne Adlof on the intersections of dyslexia and DLD, and she has a podcast! A great list of ones on DLD related issues here
• Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan is a bilingual SLP who brings a structured literacy lens to supporting English learners with foundational skills in reading and writing, in ways that honor and leverage their home language. Check out her book and her website. Her paper on Cross-Language Connections for ELs is a solid resource I keep coming back to.
• Trina Spencer: one of the co-authors of the CUBED assessments, which is now one of my go-to recommendations for a screener/diagnostic for foundational skills related to listening comprehension. If you’re wondering what SLP might be able to offer in our teaching of narratives, check out her co-authored paper on narrative interventions. Also check out her website with a ton of resources for instruction and intervention.
• Elizabeth D. Peña and Habla Lab: understanding the intersections of bilingual and multilingualism with DLD is a critical area of need. Check out the blog (NOTE: it may not be updated anymore). I learned a lot about the concept of “dynamic assessment” from them.
• Julie Washington: leading the charge to bring explicit attention to African American English and how the use of the vernacular relates to literacy development and instructional opportunity. Check out the article on her in The Atantic and her co-authored paper with Mark Seidenberg on teaching reading to African American children in American Educator
• Cate Crowley: she leads the LEADERSproject at Columbia — lots of resources are on hand regarding evaluation and intervention for culturally and linguistically diverse children. I am a big fan of the freely available SLAM cards she has made available for language sampling and have been testing these out with some of my own sampling methods — but you can go right ahead and leverage the already made SLAM Guidelines for Analysis for each SLAM card
• Lisa Archibald: Dr. Archibald goes deep into cognition and memory and their intersections with language. Whenever I've put out some questions into the Twitterverse (before Musk trashed it), she has offered guidance and food for thought.

There’s so many more SLPs out there to list here, so please view just view this as a place to get started if you're interested in these topics …

Dig in! Speech-language pathology has a lot to offer those of us who are just beginning on our journeys to understanding language and literacy.

#SLPs #speech #language #literacy #DLD #bidialectalism #multilingualism #learning #research #SVR