Breaking Down the Language Domains with Dr. Tiffany Hogan

In this episode, Dr. Tiffany Hogan joins the Literacy Talks team to unpack the five domains of language—phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics—and why understanding them is essential for effective literacy instruction. With clear explanations, real classroom examples, and insights into language-related neurodiversities, this conversation brings research and practice together in practical, actionable ways. Tune in for an engaging discussion that will deepen your understanding of how language supports reading success.

Chat about this episode in The Science of Reading Collective.

Explore the Reading Horizons Discovery® Product Suite.

Access past show notes.

Read the transcripts.

Transcript

Narrator: 0:03

Welcome to Literacy Talks, the podcast for literacy leaders and champions everywhere, brought to you by Reading Horizons. Literacy talks is the place to discover new ideas, trends, insights and practical strategies for helping all learners reach reading proficiency. Our hosts are Stacy Hurst, a professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Advisor for Reading Horizons. Donell Pons, a recognized expert and advocate in literacy, dyslexia and special education, and Lindsay Kemeny, an elementary classroom teacher, author and speaker. Now let's talk literacy.

Stacy Hurst: 0:46

Welcome to this episode of literacy talks today, we are thrilled to welcome our guest, Dr Tiffany Hogan, most of you in the field of structured literacy have heard her name before, I'm assuming, but she is a respected researcher in speech language pathology and literacy development, specifically, which is, I found her through her podcast, see, hear speak is what it's called. And then every chance I get at a conference, I attend her sessions. I recommend you guys to do that too. So thank you for joining us today. Dr Hogan, thank you for having me. Yeah, we are so excited. And I'm going to preface this episode by saying we actually reached out to you months ago, and I know you had a busy schedule, so we're again. We're thrilled that we're meeting today. But our last season, we focused on the perspective 75th anniversary issue, which was all about structured literacy. And there is a page in that issue on the print version, it's page 45 I think in the digital one, it's 47 but it's just titled the domains of language. And as we encountered that page, we were like, Oh, that's really good information. People should know about this. So we actually we scheduled and had Dr Elsa Cardenas Hagan on our podcast as well. So if you haven't heard that episode, listeners, I recommend you go back and listen. But we kind of teased this one because she organically brought up how important it is to know these domains of language, and we had already scheduled you. So it was very hard for me to say I did tease it. I said, well, then you're going to be very happy with the future episode. But I wanted to say, oh my gosh, we thought the same thing. And guess what? Dr Hogan, so we are so happy to be talking about such an important thing. So just to start off with, we are all educators of various backgrounds, and I'll just be vulnerable and say I had a speech and language therapist in my school as a first grade teacher, I knew who she was. She happened to be Australian, delightful woman, but it wasn't until years later, when I was a literacy coach, that I actually recognized the huge overlap. And then I started tapping into her knowledge and background, and together, we were able to help more students because of that combination. Also took me years to realize speech and language are kind of two different things. They're related, but I always thought it was just one title, right? So there all of that is to say, educators, I think, have a lot to learn in this area. So speaking of the domains of language, could you talk about what they are and why they're important for every educator to be familiar with?

Unknown: 3:34

Yes, absolutely. This is speaking my language. I love to talk about the domains. And speaking of speech language pathologists in schools, we are often referred to as the speech teacher. So it makes sense that we would, you know, kind of get lumped in the speech and language aspect, whereas, you know, speech is the sounds that we're producing to convey meaning, and language is the meaning behind those sounds. So I we always try to make sure we don't leave out the language part, but it's easy in shorthand to just be referred to as the speech teacher. So I have been thinking about these domains for some time, and as a researcher and as a clinician, we often think about how they're interconnected and how they're separate. So they are quite connected, as you mentioned, but there's also some separability between them as well. So the first one we think about is phonology. So phonology is the sound representation. So when we think about sounds, and we kind of get to the core aspect of it, it's the way that we're actually conveying the form of our language. So we think of phonology as sound when we're thinking of spoken language, but I use the example of when we think about sign language. For instance, the phonology of sign language is actually the individual movements of fingers and hands in space, because it's the form in which we're conveying our language. And so. Spoken language, it sounds and so we have that in and of itself is quite complicated. Each domain is complicated in and of itself, and we have scholars who devote their whole careers to thinking about the development of phonology across languages and also thinking about how children, some children struggle with phonological development, and some don't. And what's interesting is there's also these kind of components related to word reading, where you connect the sounds and the letters setting the foundation for word reading. But you also have children who have difficulty producing the correct quote, unquote pronunciation of words, and we know that can be because of a phonological memory difficulty. So they're having a representation or storage difficulty. It can also happen because of motoric movement, because you have to take that form that you have as a mental representation in your mind. You have to produce it through motoric movement. So you can have difficulty on all along that chain. And so there's their own kind of unique aspects. So interestingly, children who have dyslexia or difficulty learning to read words will have phonological processing difficulties, but not always speech sound production difficulties. So that's kind of a nuance there. It's kind of intriguing to think about those connections. So that's phonology. I didn't know if you wanted to stop and chat about it, if you had any thoughts on it before I move on. Good question. I did learn a new vocabulary word, motoric, and I'm going to practice saying that. And I love I appreciated the distinction too, between processing and producing those sounds. So thank you. Donnell Lindsay, you probably have something to add too. Yeah, just it was interesting. You Tiffany, brought up the student with dyslexia, because oftentimes, that's the students I typically work with are folks who have dyslexia at some point. Often they'll bring up, even if they're an adult, they remember having worked at some point with a speech language pathologist, and in their mind, they quickly air quotes graduated, is how they put it. I wasn't in there very long. I graduated pretty quickly. But what they didn't realize they were so young and hadn't been explained why they were receiving maybe some of this input, but they noticed that there were other children around them that would go down, and they had other challenges, oftentimes, with the production right and various aspects. So that's interesting. Okay, so the next domain is it morphology? Yes, the next domain is morphology. So morphology is the individual component, so the forms of words and how they connect. So we think about knowledge or morphology as these individual components of specific words, and we have them broken into two categories. There's inflectional morphology and derivational morphology. And inflectional morphology is related to the tense change that we see in our verbs. Primarily, we also have some tiny changes that can occur related to plural in the English language. So an example would be saying cat versus cats. So you have that part of the word that s there that is making a change that's occurring from the word cat singular to Cat plural. We also have the verbs, for instance, so saying run versus running, which is something that's happening right in that moment continuously. So there's a little tweak to the words we have that piece of the ing derivational morphology is, by definition, when a word changes a category. So that would be something like seeing a verb going to sing er, which is a noun. So that's the derivational aspect of morphology. And this is one Tiffany that a lot of folks were hearing more about it, but boy, it's been challenging, I think, for a lot of folks to see exactly how they explicitly teach morphology. I think a lot of it is sort of assumed, shall we say, and not taught explicitly, what has been your experience Absolutely. You know, as a speech language pathologist, we actually think about morphology quite a lot, because the children who struggle to learn language often show difficulties in morphology. So it's one of our indicators that a child's struggling to learn language is that they have this difficulties in acquiring inflectional morphology, for instance, so adding those verb endings and they have difficulty with derivational morphology. So a lot of our early assessments for language difficulty related to developmental language disorder, which is a neuro diversity, is when a child is born with a brain that makes it more difficult to learn language, we see that they have immature morphology, and so we look for these morphological markers as an indication. I do think that they're often lost in the shuffle when it comes to curricular decisions. Because they are those little, small pieces, and they get lost in terms of vocabulary and other aspects of learning, but they are quite important, and we do see that explicit instruction and morphology can make a big difference in reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. And I always think it's interesting when you hear young students speak, or not even students, but before their students, and you hear them start applying those endings, like you'll, you'll hear, you know, a toddler say, I run to the slide or something, and it's, it's really, I kind of marvel at that, because, like, wow, look at what they did. They've heard that before, and they assumed that they would put it on the end, you know, and then it's just, I just think the progression is just kind of fascinating. And then as they get a little older, you know, they learn, oh, it's ran. It's not run or, you know, whatever. So exactly, I love that too, because you're right. It's such a marvel when you recognize that they're doing this because they've learned through their exposure and frequency, and they're hardwired to really pick up on these nuances in language to convey meaning, and so the fact that they said run, they're conveying something pretty sophisticated about past tense, and they're applying a rule they might have heard On other words. And this is all happening really subconsciously for children as they're acquiring language. And then, like you said, then they start to pick up. Oh, wait, this is a special word that requires an irregular placement, so that's ran. So it's really fun to see that develop definitely, which I think is another important distinction, because we know that language can develop quite naturally, right, as opposed to reading. So the next domain, which is syntax, I sound like I know what I'm talking about. You're gonna talk about it. But I think this is where, for teachers, there's some confusion, too, because we've been using syntax, of course, in our communication, but teaching it especially written, is a whole other layer, right? So how? What do you? What do you have to say about syntax? Syntax is also something that's near and dear to a speech language pathologist heart, because we think about that again with children who struggle, is they often have difficulties with syntax. And syntax a shorthand is the way that words are ordered in sentences. That's a shorthand for it, and we often throw around the word grammar. And grammar is actually the combination of morphology and syntax. And sometimes in English, we call that morphosyntax, because in English, we don't have as much variability in our word order as other languages do. So our word order doesn't tell us as much in English, what really tells us a lot is morphology tied to word order. So we have to kind of think about this a little bit. One example that we do really think about with word order is sentence creation. So when we think about forming sentences, uh, really, I'm sorry, not sentences, question creation. So we think about forming questions, we have to think about, you know, what does the person do, for instance. So we have to put that what before. And that's tricky for children. It takes them some time to develop understanding of questions and asking questions in a way that's sophisticated. That's an example of word order. And then you also have embedded clauses, so carrying information like in the middle of the sentence. So you might say, I'm going to the store. I was really tired. And then you kind of like, tie that together. You say, I was going to the store when I was really tired, so some tool will separate it, and then you start to connect that, embed it in so you can go, I went to the store when I was really tired, and it was Sunday. So you start to see that information kind of put together in complex sentences as they're developing. And what we know about syntax, which is quite fascinating when we think about learning, is that there's been some unique studies showing that when teachers use more complex syntax, like embedding clauses and complex sentences, pairing them together, children will mimic that same language, so they're picking up on the patterns of syntax that teachers are using, and sometimes we think about wanting to model more basic language for children to understand it, but we actually know that the more complex language you model, the more they're going to get that input and be able to spit it back out. Wow, yeah, yeah, that's really great. Yeah. Syntax can be really intimidating, because we always think about diagramming sentences something I love, but not everyone does. I get it, and not every language nerd out there is like me, but you, you know, diagramming sentences can be very.

Lindsay Kemeny: 14:59

Helpful when it comes to comprehension, because you really start to break down the meaningful components of the sentence and how they're related, and that can fuel the meaning. So there's a lot of great new information, I think, coming out about syntax, not new to syntax, but new to understanding how to teach syntax and how important it is. There's a new special issue an International Dyslexia Association led by Julie Van Dyke that's focused all on syntax, and I'm honored to have a piece in there focused on children with developmental language disorder and how morphosyntax is really a big marker for their difficulty, and how we can improve it. So syntax is, I think, a rising star in teaching, and I'm excited to see it have a comeback, and hopefully we can reduce the intimidation around syntax, because once you kind of get in there with your students and CO, learn together with your students, and have that vulnerability with them, and not have to feel like you have to know everything about syntax, but you can learn it together. It makes a big difference for comprehension. Did you know As you were talking, I've been thinking about terms that we use right like phonemic awareness, morphological awareness, and I think we are at a point where we're ready to embrace syntactical awareness, which does make it a whole lot less intimidating, and realize that we can recognize those in speech before we produce them in print. I think is another progression that will help teachers too. That is exciting. We'll have to link to that issue in our show notes. Well, I agree like I do think it can be intimidating, because sometimes as teachers, we don't always know exactly why something doesn't work, like, I don't know, like to explain it to my students, like, that's not the best place to put that in the sentence. It's here, you know, for an example, just last week with my first grade class we had, we were reading about Thomas Jefferson, and we're, like, gearing up to the Louisiana Purchase. Okay? And so after we read the story, we do kind of like this gist statement, or main idea statement. So who is it about Thomas Jefferson? What did he want? He wants to buy New Orleans. When did this happen in the early 1800s you know, and then the students come up with different ways to put, you know, craft those into a sentence. And so, you know, when they have it, it's easy. And so one student raises their hand and says, Thomas Jefferson wanted to buy New Orleans in the early 1800s so the colonists can do business, continue to do business, right? And then the next student switches that when phrase and puts it at the beginning in the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson, you know, wanted to and then. And then I have a student and who said, and like, the pressure is on, because this particular day, Dr Louisa Moats was in my classroom watching, okay. And so then I have a student who said, Thomas Jefferson in the early 1800s wanted to buy New Orleans. That doesn't really work as well. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, it's hard when things get a little messy. Because I was thinking, How do I explain this to my students? The when phrase is going to work better right here, and I'm showing them on the post or here, but it doesn't work well, right there, but I couldn't really articulate why, and I was like, right Dr moats, she's like, yes, you know, it added a little a little extra layer of intimidation. But I think that's the thing, is sometimes, like, we don't have that clear explanation, and it's like you said, where we're kind of learning along with them, and I feel that a lot when I'm when I'm thinking about syntax like I'm learning right along with my students as I'm teaching them. This is where I love the benefit now of having AI support, because I'll often go in and say, you know, tell me an example of this. Why does this sentence seem better? I think it's a great use of AI. I mean, even as long as I've been studying this over 20 years, I still really benefit from instead of just racking my brain, going and asking for it. So I think, I think we should lean into that more, and it's great for the kids. So I hope that that we can get to the point where we don't feel like we have to know all the answers. And I love that example, because I think you're right. It's sometimes has to do with, you know, how the the order of the the sentence, and where the information comes into play, even in working memory, like how it's connected. And so I love that you leaned into that with them. And that's fantastic. Yeah,

Donell Pons: 19:37

you know, I want to give a shout out to Julie Van Dyke. I was at the reading League's little Summit. You led a discussion. Is fantastic writing copious notes, but I also want to give a shout out to cascade reader, because it breaks things down syntactically, and I just use the lessons they provide on the website with some of my older students. They have been fantastic. And so if anybody doesn't know what that is, we'll put a link to it's free. It's a fantastic resource, but it really pays attention to syntax and comprehension. It's a fantastic product, but I keep extolling it. And then there you were with Julie Van Dyke on a stage together. It was it was great. So you can't say enough about syntax. For me, it's so important, and having, in my past life, been a writer. That's one of the first things that I did, the way in which we arrange words that oftentimes leaves a signature. I mean, that's what I always like to talk to my students about, too, is this is oftentimes your personal signature. Is you can put a little twist on just the way that you put it together, and that's your voice. Call it voice, or various things. But I don't think we spend enough time talking about this very thing, the word order arrangement and how unique it can be. So I really appreciate this conversation. It was great to be at the summit with her and just have an opportunity to talk more in depth about language comprehension. So I do think it's one of those things, the more you learn about it with your students, the better you become at it. And it's kind of a, you know, comes together. And I do think this, this really important point about, you know, awareness is so critical. Because we, you can be, you know, a very eloquent speaker of English, and you it is an automatic you're going to have an awareness. I know this very well as someone who teaches students how to transcribe sounds, becoming a speech language pathologist, and you have to learn that that meta awareness comes, you know, with explicit instruction and awareness. So the more we can do that for the students, the better they can have a depth of knowledge about how to apply it. That's a big one. You covered it really well. I'm so excited about the AI aspect of it. I teach pre service teachers, no pressure, but I am going to have chat GPT up during these lessons,

Stacy Hurst: 21:48

because the other thing going along with what Lindsay was saying, no matter who's in the room, right, if you don't, I could get away with things a lot more with the first grader than I can my own college students, but if you try to fake it or then you're just going to end up confusing everyone. So I like awareness and having tools that we can refer to to validate and confirm our thinking, right? So yeah, it's a great one.

Unknown: 22:18

So the next area is semantics, and this is often referred to as vocabulary, but it's so much more than vocabulary, it's the connections between words and how we carry meaning within words. So we have some over the past, oh, about 30 years now, even a little bit more, we've learned some really insightful things about how to teach semantics, and what we know is that words are not stored like in a dictionary or a filing cabinet. So I'm going to age myself. That was what you were thought of as like, Oh, we're going to file that word into our mental dictionary or lexicon. And we were also told as children to look it up in the dictionary. So what we know now is that that's not the best way, because oftentimes even dictionary definitions will have more complicated words and concepts than the actual word itself. One of the examples I use is scrub, which is to wash vigorously. So if a child doesn't know what scrub means, they're not going to know what vigorously means. And so we also don't get a sense of the context or how we use the word. So some of the key aspects of teaching semantics and thinking about semantics is number one, semantics is highly linked to comprehension. It's one of the most highly linked language areas associated with comprehension. It's not the only thing, but it is highly related, and I've been studying this for many years, and we test lots of different aspects of language, and we often find that semantics is the big hitter here. When you know the meaning, it's not the only thing, but it's a big hitter. So that's number one. Two, we know that teaching in child friendly definitions is so critically important, so not looking it up in the dictionary, but thinking of child friendly definitions. And there's no magic child friendly definition. I mean, I think that we could use AI to help us a bit, but we can also use our own experience with children and have children co create definitions as well. We tie the words, the new words that we're learning, to words we already know. So basically, what we know about vocabulary is, instead of that filing cabinet, it's like a web. So when you're sticking it into the lexicon or entering it in, you want to help it, help the word, figure out, where do I live in this web? What words am I connected to, semantically or meaning wise. So that connection. The other thing we know is that the more sentences you use when you're teaching a word, the better. So using the word in a variety of sentences teaches the child where it fits in context. And I love the work that shows there's really no true synonyms, because even though we think of words being synonyms. Like an example I use is ghost versus spirit. You are more likely to choose one or the other based on the context, because context also has to do with frequency, so the more likely that you would use one or the other has to do with the more likely or more frequent they are in a certain context. So even if you know the definition of a word like truncate is to cut off. You wouldn't really say truncate the lights, because that's not the appropriate use of it, or you have more common use of it. But if we teach children where the sentences you would be more likely to use the word truncate, then they can start to fit it within the more complex system of their language, so into that syntax and make those connections. And we want to teach it in terms of its morphology. So we want to do some derivational morphology. You want to add those inflectional morphology, if you're talking about verbs, so that you can say truncated, truncating, you know. You want to add those, those you know morphology, or the derivational morphology as well, so you can change it, you know, into truncate versus truncator. I don't know if that's a great if that's really real, but you can teach the concept of changing a verb to a noun.

Stacy Hurst: 26:14

That's really cool. I just, I'm laughing at myself because I am taking so many notes because I'm thinking, Oh, this. I could do this in my teaching. This is a podcast. I can actually listen to it. I can go back. I don't need to be taking notes. I just thought it was funny. But you really are as you're explaining each of these domains, making them come to life, I think, for our listeners as educators. So thank you for that. And all of the terms that you've used so far are things we're familiar with in especially in foundational literacy, instruction, pragmatics and discord discourse. Part of that right, I think, is where a lot of teachers may not really have been trained in this. So talk to us about that one, and I'll probably take notes anyway, but I can message

Unknown: 27:04

you. I'm a note taker as well. I feel like it helps me keep my attention too, and I just like that process of the motoric aspect. So pragmatics is the social aspects of language, and this can be a bit confusing. So a lot of times with pragmatics, it's really about what's not said that tells you something. So an example would be if, if you get here that the mailman is putting the mail in the mailbox, and you say the mail is here at five, that's a fact, but the fact that you said that and you included the time indicates that that must be unusual. So it's, you know, it's not like it's because you've said it, and it doesn't need to be said. It means that you're trying to convey extra meaning. So you would imagine, in that case, if you said the male's here at five, you would be thinking, Oh, that means it must be here later than usual or earlier than usual. Something's unusual if you said something and again, influence, not only is about information, but intonation can play a factor. So if you said the mails here at five, that might indicate that normally you receive packages at five, or maybe a neighbor visits at five and you're saying the mail. So maybe that means that multiple things you know could happen, and now you're saying the mail happened. So you can, you can kind of think about this as what's unsaid, so what's not spoken. So filling in the gaps. That's why we know that pragmatics and social aspects also play into inferencing. So we know inferencing is when you're connecting information and you're filling in the gaps. We know that pragmatics can play into inferencing. So this is pragmatics typically happens. It can happen at the sentence levels those examples, but it often happens when you connect sentences together at the discourse level too. So you're kind of having a back and forth, or you're sharing a story and you're filling in the blanks. So pragmatics is a really interesting aspect I think we often don't consider, but it has a big influence on how we comprehend especially complex text. And then could you just make clear the distinction between pragmatics and discourse? Yes, so discourse at a global level is just putting in multiple ideas into, I think of more multiple sentences, but it's kind of connecting ideas together. Pragmatics is a part of that, because we have our social way that we connect sentences. We have our kind of standard way, and we're conveying information through that standard approach, and we're filling in the gaps I want to kind of highlight that leads me to think about, you know, we have these five components, but we often see them boiled down into three components, form, use and content. So form, being. More phonology and somewhat of morphology, because there's a form component, the use of it is more the pragmatics aspect and the content is tying in the semantics and the Morpho syntax related to meaning. So each of these five areas can be broken down to think of them as spoken language and how they're used in written language. And they can also be subdivided a bit in how they're conveying the form of language, the content or meaning of language and the social use of language. So language is so complex that we can break it. There's even a lot of debate about how to break it up. So this is a way of breaking up by five. You see some people argue about breaking up by three. It's really interesting to think of the different ways that we can break this up and how they overlap and how they're separate. As someone who thinks a lot about neurodiversity, I often break them up into three components because I'm thinking about the breakdowns I might see in a child. So I think of it a lot in terms of phonology, because we see breakdowns that can happen when we think about phonological awareness or applying letters and sounds like dyslexia, we can think about the breakdown that can happen. Or I will say, I think breakdown is not the word I want to use. I want to think about neurodiversity in the sense that we know that when you are born with a brain, and brains are all different, which make us so the variety is the spice of life. Some brain structures make it more difficult to learn phonology and use phonology, and some brain structures make it easier. So when I think about that phonological aspect, we have children who have dyslexia or difficulty connecting letters and sounds to read. We have children who have speech sound disorders, meaning they have difficulty in producing and recalling the phonological representation of words. And then we have another neurodiversity that can occur related to the content area of language, and that's children with developmental language disorder. So those children have difficulties learning vocabulary and grammar being the morphosyntax aspect, and so they have a brain that makes it more difficult to learn those aspects. And then we also have neurodiversity around pragmatics. So we have children who have social pragmatic communication disorder, so they would have difficulty in inferring that information socially and using information socially. And that's a one that's not as well known because that is actually one of the characteristics of autism. But for autism, you also have to have repetitive behaviors. So you have to have the pragmatic difficulty and repetitive behaviors. If you have the pragmatic difficulty and no repetitive behaviors, that's a social communication social pragmatic communication difficulty. So for me, as someone who thinks a lot about neurodiversity, you can see why I lump those up, because those three categories represent the types of neurodiversities we would see in our classroom, and there's a high overlap between them, but it's not a one to one correlation. There's about a 50% overlap. So if you have one, you have a 50% chance of having the other. But that means that if you think about the neuro diversity we have around language development in our classroom, it's wide, and we have to think about these different components and how we teach word reading and language comprehension.

Narrator: 33:25

If you're wondering where to find proven outcome focused ways to put the science of reading into practice, you're in the right place. Reading Horizons, Discovery product suite is a foundational literacy program for grades K through three that leverages a versatile instruction method, a personalized student platform and accessible learning aids that include phoneme cards, student transfer books and decodable books, the program streamlines literacy instruction and empowers teachers so all learners can achieve reading proficiency. Go to reading horizons.com/discovery,

Donell Pons: 34:02

To Learn more and download the complete program details today. Tiffany, I was just thinking of something you kind of sparked it when you were talking about pragmatics, but it could be involved in a lot of these areas. How does social media and the time that young people are spending say texting? Because that's a whole other thing. How is this? Is it impacting? Do we know? Is there much research? I'm just kind of interested. Well, I have to be honest and tell you, I'm not an expert in that area, although I do, of course, pay attention to it, as someone who studies language and thinks about language, and it's interesting, because it really has to do with how the child's neurodiversity, how their development interacts with that social media. So children, you have really high propensity to learn language. They really are good at code switching in terms of how to use texting and how to use different language mediums, I would say, or code.

Unknown: 35:00

Like when you're in school using more formal language, when you're on text, you're using, you know, text language. And so those children who are really good at language learning, they really don't have much difficulty there. But when you have children who struggle, that's another complexity that they have to learn, and it can really impact their ability to communicate. So they can have they're having to learn new rules for a new type of, you know, almost like a dialect in that language, a switch of code. And it can be more difficult for them to do that, and it can be kind of overwhelming. Doesn't mean they shouldn't, because we know that that's the currency that they need to learn. But it can need its own explicit language instruction as well. That's so interesting, because I don't know if we often think about that, that they could be suffering right in this area of well, I'm being left out because it's really challenging for me. I don't really understand it, or maybe even being apprehensive to engage, but really wanting to. That's that's just really interesting. Yes, it's actually a big area for us to think about when it comes to language, neurodiversity, whether it's dyslexia, developmental language disorder or pragmatic communication difficulty is they do have this extra layer of difficulty in communicating in text, and that is really limiting their social interactions. And so language learning and difficulty in language learning, we do know affects peer interactions, and it's through that medium that they're having difficulty and oftentimes feeling, unfortunately, very Shame, shame, a lot of shame around it, because they're not able to really communicate in that way.

Stacy Hurst: 36:35

Yeah, and I'm thinking about how many things that our speech impacts and the way that we're understanding spoken language, I don't want to assume, but it is obvious to many of our listeners the connection between oral language and literacy, because I think it's Dr moats that says print is speech in a visual format, right? So we already have to have those parts of our brain tuning into aspects of language, and I can't help but thinking about two things.

Unknown: 37:12

One is that we have assessment. We have a lot of assessment for literacy in many schools, three times a year at least, we're given a benchmark assessment that involves print. Now we do assess phonemic awareness, typically in that kind of an assessment. And I do know the speech and language pathologist at my school did some sort of screening, but it doesn't seem to be as frequent. So how do we identify these things in our students, especially if we're lacking a background in all of this, which is the other thing I've been thinking of, because we don't prepare our teachers in this area very well. In my opinion, this is such an important aspect of this, because we are, you know, I think we have two levers to pull in this way. One is to improve teacher knowledge around around these topics, of course. But the other lever, which I would argue is just as important, if not more important, is to set up a system that supports language learning and supports teachers in language learning. So how do we do that? We have a system that's in place to support word reading that schools are working towards, and that's multi tiered systems of support. And we think a lot about that. We think about, like you said, these three assessments. That's because we're tying to progress monitoring. So we're trying to assess how children are learning word reading over time. And how do we apply that individual differences we see into small groupings to support children where they are in word reading, we need to see that level of attention to language, and that's going to require extra work in our systems. And I almost hate to say this, because it's hard to do MTSS for word reading, let alone adding another level to language. But I think we have to shoot for the moon here, because we know, research wise, that if we only focus on word reading, and even if we do it the best we can, and we get all of our children to be great word readers, if we don't focus on language comprehension, we're missing a whole side of this important equation for reading comprehension. So these children will not make the progress we want to see in reading comprehension, in state assessments and in general, in life outcomes, if we don't focus on both sides. And what's happened, as you touched on earlier, is there's this view that language develops naturally, so we don't need to teach it. And what we know is that even though it does develop naturally, it benefits from explicit instruction and it benefits from attention to even the implicit instruction that we might. Give by choosing carefully the words that we use. So explicit would be like saying very clearly, this is the meaning of the word, or this is how we're, you know, laying out the syntactic structures, making it very clear, or morphological structures, that would be the explicit. But we also can use implicit by choosing the words and sentences that we use and then just speaking in a way that's helping children to learn. So if we think about how we use decodable text to really hone in on patterns for word reading, we can do that with our language and our texts around language. So if we're teaching past tense that are irregular, like you said, Lindsay, like ran, and we want to teach irregular past tense and really shine a light on that. We would use past tense, irregular past tense, a lot in our language, if that's our focus in that unit or that time period, if that's our instructional focus, plus, we would choose texts that have lots of irregular verbs there. So we would still want to be very explicit. And with that in mind, when we think about multi tiered systems of support, ideally, we would have oral language measures that we're giving in the early grades multiple times during the year, and that we would know individual differences in language of the children in our classroom, and we would even think about grouping them according to individual differences in language, and we don't see this as being exactly the same as the individual differences in word reading, because those are two separate skills. They do correlate at the upper end. So having, you know, higher skills in one is likely to have higher skills than other, but it's not a given. So we know children who have high word reading and poor language comprehension, and we refer to these children as children with developmental language disorder, or children who are poor comprehenders. And we have the reverse, of course, that's received a lot of attention, is children have dyslexia but poor word reading but good language comprehension. And what's happening now is we just don't have that built into our system. At best, it starts to occur in the later grades, where we have the focus on word reading first, and then we start to shift to language but that's like a relay race. And instead of that, we need a parallel structure across the grades. And I don't see this as something that the teachers are being told to do. I think this is something that we need to be supportive of teachers doing this within an ecosystem, within a system that says this is important. So back to your original question, how do we do this right now we're really working on getting good measures out there, because it's not automatic. Now that we have these great measures that are easy to give, that give you variability, there are some measures, and something that I hope you can link in your show notes is we have some fact sheets we've created that show you kind of what are some of the screeners that are out there now, what would be helpful for you, and then some of the progress monitoring tools, which there are very few actually for language that are do that do well at capturing variation over time, because it's, it's hard to make those assessments and make them age appropriate and and, you know, we're, you know, a bit behind in that in terms of language versus word reading. And then I want like, resources, like, what is there for the teachers to do? What? What's an intervention I can do with them? Because we do have a screener that we use, and I don't know the name of it, but it's, it's fairly new, and we have college students from our local university come and give it, and it's, it's really good at identifying. I'm like, oh, oh, that was totally right. And I didn't, I wouldn't have caught that, you know, or whatever. But then it's like, okay, well, what do I do now? I don't, I don't know, and like, I feel like I'm I can support oral language well in my classroom, but where I feel like I struggle the most is when I have a student with developmental language disorder. And like, both this year and last year, I had,

Lindsay Kemeny: 44:06

each year I had a student that could only do two or three word sentences, and this is first grade, and that was, like, just the most frustrating thing for me as a teacher, because I'm like, What can I do? And yes, I assume this, this speech language is providing intervention. But I guess I wanted to do something too. I wanted something to follow or, you know, something I could pull them back during small group to do. That's

Unknown: 44:32

such an important part. I mean, when I think about this, you're hitting on something so important is that when we think about multi tier systems of support, we think there's really six key components. There's three on the assessment side and three on the instructional side. There's the screening on the assessment side, and then there's progress monitoring, because, like, screening, like you said, you're like, oh, aha, that child has difficulty. Okay, great, but then we have to progress monitor to see how they're doing over time. And we also know there's false positive. Positive. So some kids who look like they're struggling, but then when you see the progress over time, they're not. And then on that assessment side, we also have to have individualized, comprehensive evaluation of a child who's truly continuing to struggle, is not making progress, is a non responder. But on the instruction side, if you had the best assessment system ever, unless you had the corresponding instruction, just wouldn't be helpful for you or the child. So on the corresponding side, in terms of screening all children, we have to have tier one classroom instruction that has a scope and sequence for language that incorporates morphology and syntax and incorporates semantics and pragmatics, and frankly, we don't have a lot of those on the market. To be honest, I think that's a real area where we have knowledge building curriculum, and they do such a good job at building language and knowledge. And then we have language curriculum mostly in the purview of research studies that are out there and have been created. But we're trying to bring those together, because you can't teach language without really strong knowledge, and you can't teach knowledge without strong language, but those have been created, oftentimes in silos, and so we're trying to bring those together, and I'm excited about the possibilities of bringing those together and strengthening them. That would be a tier one, but then we also need that tier two. So what, what are we going to do in small groups? How are we going to beef up the instruction and support for these children who aren't making progress in terms of progress monitoring? And then, how are we going to get individualized instruction by trained professionals, speech language pathologists, special educators? How are we going to get them to get individualized instruction for those children who are truly non responders that need that instruction. And how do we then work together as a team with teachers and speech language pathologists in the classroom? So we have, I think, pieces of those things, but I haven't seen it put together in a system yet. I think it's coming. I'm so excited to see it. I'm just excited that we're talking about language, because, of course, the first thing and to hear you talk about DLD, just warms my heart and and I'm just excited to see that. But we have a long way to go to support these children. We really do, and we have to do it as a team. It has to be instruction across all levels. It's not just the speech pathologist. Is not just the teacher, and we have to all work together, because these are all of our children. So I think, I think we have such a nice roadmap for dyslexia. We're still working on it. We are absolutely still working on it, but I like to think of a really nice roadmap there. Having said that, I just want to make one last point, and that is with dyslexia, we talk about early intervention and getting them the skills they need, and mitigating the long term risks. And we really can see for children who have dyslexia, we can get them up to speed in word reading, and we can start to turn the tide a bit. Now they will always have dyslexia, and they will always have a brain that is dyslexic, but we start to mitigate the word reading difficulties with language, it's more like ADHD, so meaning that you don't when you know a child has ADHD, you don't think, as a teacher, I'm going to cure that ADHD, you know you all you do is create a context that will help to to really help that child shine and to support them with their neurodiversity, and that's the same with children with DLD, they're always going to have difficulty learning language, and our role is to create a context that helps them in the best way possible, support their language learning. But we're not working to mitigate that necessarily. We're working to create an environment that supports them. And like ADHD, when you create an environment that supports children with ADHD, that supports all children, and we you create an environment that supports children with dyslexia, that supports all children, and the same for DLD,

Stacy Hurst: 48:54

yeah, and oral language is not constrained, right? We will always be able to focus on it and improve it, no matter our brain structure and and I'm thinking about systemically. And the reason I feel like it oral language is coming up more and more in conversation. We have frameworks like the simple view of reading to thank for that. But to your point, I, and I can mention because I've done some discovery work this area. But I know we have a we're familiar with ox Ed. They have a really solid Charles Hill, Maggie snowling, really solid assessment and instruction for differentiation for classroom teachers. And of course, I would say in that aspect, maybe England was a little bit ahead of us, because it's well known over there, coming over here to the United States. And I also happened upon cubed, I think is the name of it online. And I'm I tutor. I keep tutoring students, and I just gave that assessment to a little kiddo that i. My tutor, but I'm thinking too, okay, that's great, but then integrating it right? Because I think all of us can say this. We can probably identify the speech and language person in our school, but we don't see them enough. They are overloaded, and I know they end up with the equivalent of a TA or an assistant doing the actual work my students would leave, I really didn't know what they were doing and how that connected to what I was doing in the classroom. So I think if we can address this on a systemic level, like you're saying, we can make more efficient and effective work of it, and maybe our SLPs may not be as busy, because the classroom teacher can help support that too. So I appreciate this conversation, and you're kind of bringing um clarity to this vision too, and and that will, I think, inspire a lot of us to know how to move forward and make a difference in this area, I'm going to ask a very selfish question, because I do teach pre service teachers, but I think this question would also apply to any teacher who was not trained in oral language. But what would you like to see graduates first year, teachers coming out of the university knowing about oral language, and I'm going to write this down and re listen.

Unknown: 51:25

I think what I would love to see is that they have a sense of these domains, and they have a sense of the neurodiversity associated with each of those domains, so that you can have a range of ability. And I would love if they felt confident in learning language with their children and stimulating these different areas and evaluating new curriculum that comes out, because there's going to be a lot of new curriculum that comes out, so being in a role where they feel comfortable to evaluate and say, Does it include all these components, not just one? And I think that would be quite amazing. And knowledge around developmental language disorder would be amazing as well.

Stacy Hurst: 52:12

Okay, noted, you'll have as very at least in my students, maybe more familiar with this in the future.

Lindsay Kemeny: 52:19

Lindsay, you were gonna say something, yeah, well, I love how at like, big sky. You know, last year, this year, the focus is really on this. Language is everything. And I think that sometimes maybe we can miss that. I think, I think most teachers kind of understand, yes, hey, language is the basis of our reading and writing, but maybe making sure, like our parents, know, I know I've had parents frustrated if their student needs, you know, language support, because they want them to focus on reading and writing, but it's like that is the basis of reading and writing, and if they can't say it, they can't write it, and and even, you know, Of course, with understanding, we're talking about that language comprehension. They need to understand the language in order to understand what they're reading, but also just they're reading fluency, because when you have a student who struggles with their speech or with, you know, correct pronouns, and you know the different things as they're speaking, it's harder for them to get into the rhythm of reading something, because it doesn't come as naturally, right? So, like, I just think more and more I love this focus on language is everything it really is. And, like, I think all the teachers out there need to become like, BFFs with their SLP at their school. Like, I think they can be underutilized, but it's so helpful. I love going mine to say, Okay, how would you do this? Or how do you explain this? Let me use the same wording you do, or, you know, whatever, but they can be just a wealth of information for us.

Unknown: 53:53

Yeah, I agree. I think that the language is everything is fantastic. I'm excited to be a part of that at Big Sky. Nell Thompson, who runs Big Sky, is a speech language pathologist by training and a letters instructor, and I just think that she brings that to Big Sky. And also I think it's helpful to even step further back and think of language is the basis of our relationships, and we know relationships are everything, and even though it's just so hard as a parent myself, and I know, as you know, working with my friends who are teachers and partners who are teachers, teaching is hard, too. Parenting is hard, teaching is hard, life is hard, but what can make life fun is relationships, and so really focusing on the relationship part of language, and those back and forth and no conversational turn takings are so important. And really having a space where children can talk, I think we've, you know, we've done a lot of work here, but I think that some of the aspects we had in the reading wars, there's been this tension, right? Like, do I teach? So. Systematic, explicit phonics, or do I read a book out loud? It's not an either or. We have to do both. And that's what's so exciting to think about, the simple view and that we need to push into both. And where we kind of went awry is thinking that reading aloud would be enough to teach word reading. We need to teach systematic, explicit phonics, but we don't want to throw out the reading aloud and talking about language and having fun with language, and still being systematic and explicit about the instruction, but it's just so fun. I had the opportunity to be a part of a group that was funded by Department of Education called reading for understanding initiative. And this is an initiative that I think got lost in covid times because it was funded in 2015 is the largest initiative of funding for education. There's$120 million spent from 2000 you know, it was, it started in 2010 actually, to 2015 and much of the work you do, you collect a lot of data, you create materials. But then you then the next five years after that is when you try to distribute them and you publish your results. What happened is we did that work where we created an intervention and we put it online for free. We did a randomized control trial, the largest one in the US on language comprehension, pre K to grade three, and we were just publishing that and really ready to disseminate it in 2019 and 20, and then the pandemic hit. So I'm excited to see some of that coming back around, because, of course, the pandemic had this great focus on word reading, and we just got to see through online instruction. And so the story and all of that that happened like this great focus on dyslexia and word reading. And I was so thrilled to see that. And now I think we got to go back and look at the reading for understanding initiative, and all the findings that came from that, and all the materials that are out there that are freely available, that we can link here to, but we just didn't know. You didn't know about them. And so I think getting those out into the hands of educators, and getting that research because you prepaid it with your tax dollars, and getting that into the hands of educators is so important. And we're kind of, I feel like we're coming full circle now to get all of everything in the mix, which is very exciting. Yeah, it sounds like an upward spiral, too. Like we're gaining more knowledge and resources and context within which to apply it. So there's a lot to look forward to,

Stacy Hurst: 57:29

exciting, and thank you so much for your time today, literally, like your expertise and not just your knowledge, but the way that you share it is so insightful. And I know our listeners got a lot out of it. They probably took as many or more notes than I did, but Thank heavens, we can re listen if we need to. Well, thank you for having me, yeah, and thank you for really, I think you. I don't want to say this is your default, but it's probably based on your expertise. You do bridge that research and practice so nicely. I have so many ideas I'm excited to apply them in my own teaching. So thank you and to our listeners, we know that you got as much insights and tools out of this episode as we did. So we hope you will join us for future episodes of literacy talks.

Narrator: 58:21

Thanks for joining us today. Literacy talks comes to you from Reading Horizons, where literacy momentum begins. Visit readinghorizons.com/literacytalks to access episodes and resources to support your journey in the science of reading.