Episode 112: Comprehension Starts at the Sentence Level

We’ve spent years strengthening decoding instruction—but what if the next literacy shift begins at the sentence level? If we want true comprehension, we have to look beyond words and into syntax.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why syntax is the missing link in reading comprehension
• How Cascade Reading uses linguistically-driven text formatting to support understanding

For decades, reading research and classroom instruction have focused heavily on decoding. But comprehension doesn’t happen after we finish reading a sentence—it happens word by word, as the brain processes syntax in real time. Dr. Julie Van Dyke explains why sentence structure plays a critical role in comprehension, how language networks in the brain differ from cognitive knowledge systems like background knowledge, and why strong decoding skills alone are not enough.

We also explore how Cascade Reading makes syntactic structure visible using artificial intelligence, helping students better understand phrasing, fluency, and meaning. Julie shares research findings, practical classroom implications, and why teachers should feel empowered—not intimidated—when bringing syntax into instruction. This conversation challenges us to rethink what comprehension truly requires and how we can better support all readers, especially those with language-based learning differences.

Guest: Dr. Julie Van Dyke, cognitive scientist, linguist, former senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories, and co-developer of Cascade Reading

Resources mentioned:
Cascade Reading – https://www.cascadereading.com
International Dyslexia Association Perspectives (Syntax Comes First series) – https://dyslexiaida.org

https://www.onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=843724&p=1&view=issueViewer

https://www.onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=847535&p=1&view=issueViewer

Syntax: Knowledge to Practice by Nancy Eberhardt & Margie Gillis – https://literacyhow.org
Speech to Print by Louisa Moats – https://products.brookespublishing.com/Speech-to-Print-P1167.aspx

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Transcript

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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 well.

Donell Pons: 0:47

Thank you for joining us for another episode of Literacy Talks. And we're doing conversations with changemakers in the literacy space. And today, we're really excited with our guests, Lindsay Kemeny and Stacy Hurst joining me as my co hosts, we're all really excited, and we've talked about this before, because we've attended sessions by this particular individual that you'll meet here in a minute, and it has always been great conversation, and really is conversation kind of leading the way on a certain topic. And so we're really excited today to have our guest, Julie Van Dyke and her work, not only in the field in general, but with something called cascade reader, which we'll have an opportunity to talk about too today. And it's really educating the community about the importance of syntax, and it encapsulates this conversation, is going to encapsulate a lot of what means to be a change maker. Because, Julie, quite frankly, you've done a lot of work in this space, and it's always fun to hear from you. So before we dive into cascade reader and that the science of syntax, could you take us back a bit. How did you get started in this? You've got a background in linguistics, cognitive science, reading, research, teaching. Give us a little bit of your background.

Unknown: 1:59

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. First of all, it's very exciting to have an opportunity to talk to you, ladies, and I want to say that I haven't listened to every single one of your podcasts, but I have listened to a few of them. I do a lot of driving, and so it's been podcast. You know, spend the time doing podcasts, and I always appreciate your conversations. They're always really excellent questions. And I do even your conversations, I think are change making. So congratulations on that. And I love this whole framing as change making so very exciting. I don't even know how I got into this, right? I mean, I was, I was a high school student in the 90s, and I was thrilled when my father bought me the very first Mac s e that had a screen that was about the size of your phone right now. I mean, it's not so bad, because we do everything on our phone, but that was the screen. And I was fascinated by this new field of computers, and especially artificial intelligence. So I went to college, not knowing anything about what linguistics is, but being very excited about computer science, and I went as a computer science major, and quite frankly, I was a little bit frightened by my first semester because it was crazy technical. And mostly what frightened me it was that there were no room. There were no women in the room. Now interestingly, there were, I was, I was at the University of Delaware, and there were two women faculty there in the computer science department, which were really like trailblazers, but in my classes, there were no women that I could connect to, and so that already made me feel like this isn't really the place for me, but I still loved this computational way of thinking about how, like, how the mechanisms of the brain work, and at that time, that was really the founding of artificial intelligence. It's not what we think of today is AI, which is just, let's make things look intelligent, but we're not really doing it the way brains do it. But at that time, what we were interested in is really modeling cognitive processes with computers and doing it the way that brains do it, so that you can learn about that. So I sort of wanted to stay in that space, and I got connected to the AI researchers. Those were the two women, the two the only two women in the program were the AI researchers. And I took a linguistics course as a, you know, they had, like, a winter session thing, where you had like, one, one or two classes, and then basically, everybody just kind of hangs out and has fun, you know. So I took a winter session class in linguistics. Now I had had six years of Latin in high school, so I learned tons about the English language and about language in general from learning Latin, because it has all kinds of morphology and declensions and conjugation. That English doesn't have. So I had that appreciation for the structure of language, but I took this linguistics course, and I was so thrilled and excited, because I started to learn about the systematicity of language in general, not just a language, but all languages. And it was extremely exciting. And I just want to share this, because I share this all the time, just to give people some some encouragement. I love the class. I got so excited, and the midterm came and I overslept. First time I ever overslept, and it's the kind of thing that you can't like walk in late to, because they were telling us, these are the phone memes transcribe it like. So I had missed that whole oral heart of the Met of the test. So I know I completely bombed this, but I went to the professor and I said, Hey, I really love this. Help me know how to study this more. And that Professor turned into being one of the main influencers in my career, and helped me to put together a cognitive science major at the time when there really wasn't a ready made cognitive science major. So in my undergraduate career, I combined graduate level linguistics work because I didn't have an undergraduate major. So graduate level linguistics, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, psychology and intellectual history and philosophy, like all of these, like sort of areas that tell us, how do we think, how do we process things? How do we how are we smart? You know, what all of that cognition and and the effects of ideas and thinking on our society development. So that was my undergraduate work, and then I went to graduate school to study cognitive computational linguistics, and that program ended up morphing into something else. So I switched to cognitive psychology and did my PhD with Chuck perfetti. And he, of course, is a big reading person. And so really, in his lab, I went from really hardcore artificial intelligence and language processing more into reading. And then I did my postdoc at Haskins laboratories, which is, think, you know, one of the leading institutions that developed the science of reading on the decoding side, both the neuroscience and the teaching. I'll call it the teaching science and and then I ended up staying at Haskins for 23 years, so that could take a long, more, long time to, you know, fill in all those gaps. But I don't even know how I got here. That's, that's sort of my long, my long, winding road. And I was in this field about 14 years. And then I had a daughter who, herself, has dyslexia, developmental language disability, ADHD, autism and what else I don't know, dyscalculia, you name it. She's got it. And so I had, now this lived experience of trying to make sure my daughter gets what she needs. The frustration of a mom who really has a lot of knowledge in this space and still not able to get my daughter what she needs, and knowing all the time that I am privileged because of my knowledge, knowing what to ask, knowing what to push for, I actually had to bully a CHILD Study person into doing a phonological awareness assessment for My daughter when she was too. And so I really walk around with this knowledge that this is really not an easy road to walk when you're a parent with a kid like this. And I love to support parents and basically provide ways of being a change maker in this space and get some more information out there. So I'll stop talking on that point.

Donell Pons: 8:42

Yeah, so Julie, really appreciate that past history, and now let's get our listeners an idea of how you came to develop cascade reading. And I'm going to be careful with that cascade cascade reading and say the title correctly. But my students call it cascade reader, and we've kind of adopted calling it that amongst ourselves, my students and I, because they feel like it's such a help that I thought, thought it was interesting. That's the way they refer to it. So we kind of giggle when they do that. But so cascade reading and Julie, you've presented on this many times, and I saw you first present on it at the triple SR conference in Newport, and right away, I could tell, because I've seen a lot of presentations, some very good presentations, but I tell you, this was different when you did your presentation. So let's give our and I know this is asking a lot, because you're going to give some background for our listeners. You're also going to help them understand how they can access it. So we're going to give you some room here to kind of develop how you take us through this journey of Cascade reading.

Unknown: 9:41

Yeah, thanks for that. So I think it's really interesting that your students like to call it cascade reader. If you go on to the website, cascade reading.com, it, you can make a free account and use that. And we have a number of products on there. One of them is called the reader. So maybe that's where that comes from. Yeah. Is it's just simply it will you can cascade. You can we made this into a verb. Now you can cascade any text. You can paste it in, and it will transform it into a certain format that displays the syntactic structure. And if you just want that, that's what we call the reader view. There's also the Explorer that will allow you to sort of peek inside to the artificial intelligence that's behind this and look for the syntactic properties of the sentence. So it will tell you, it will name, label, all of the nouns and verbs, all of the prepositional phrases, the subject, the predicate, all of that. You can highlight it. That's a great tool for teachers. So that's meant to be an interactive thing that's called the Explorer. And then there's also a a Chrome extension in there. So there's a lot of different ways that somebody can use cascade. So I was just trying to, you know, we don't have a video picture of it here, but I was trying to just give people an idea of what it is. So we use artificial intelligence to analyze every sentence individually, and we have a sentence parse. You could think of it as like diagramming the sentence, but we use AI technology to do that, and so we have that information, and then we display each sentence in a certain format that makes it easy to identify what goes with what. So subjects and verbs are always aligned, so you can very quickly see what goes with what. In that respect, predicates and things that are dependent are indented in from the thing that they're connected to, and conjunctions are aligned, so the things that are conjoined are also aligned. So this very specific format is meant to provide visual cues as people are reading in like in real time. It's not that you sort of read the sentence and then you go off and think about it, or have to do some other kind of task to understand it as you're reading, you're exposed to these cues, and these cues can help you to develop your understanding as it goes along. This is a project that was developed over about five years by myself and a number of other team members. We have some people who have provided the funding for it, who are themselves, very experienced in the world of technology and bringing it to to market. We also have some research people who are expert in research, and it's a great team of people who have helped bring this thing together and bring it, bring it to fruition. So there's that's, that's sort of the background. The main thing is just sort of comes out of my experience with understanding the role that syntax plays in comprehension and the opportunity opportunity that we can use this technology to really bring this and make this into a tool where people can use it in real time.

Donell Pons: 13:09

Yeah, and Julie, you're being modest, because it has had a lot of positive feedback. So tell us a little bit about what you're learning and take us along that journey of because I'm just fascinated by how you developed it over time too, as you saw how students were using it as well.

Unknown: 13:29

Yeah, well, we so we did a study. This was a study we did in the classroom, really just coming off of covid. I think this was back in 2020, we were in a school in in Minnesota, and they were just so excited to bring something new to their that the principal was so excited to bring something new. And she just, she, she expressed that she was just tired of doing things that just don't work. You know, she wanted to really get people excited about learning again and and try to bring them something that they can get excited about so we did a study in fourth and fifth graders in this public school in Minnesota, and we found that after about a 13 week period of using cascade, the students comprehension improved after reading in cascade and we didn't do what's exciting about it is that we did not do any kind of explicit instruction on syntax in that study. It was just exposure to the cascade. And this makes sense psychologically, because we know that we learn implicitly, implicitly, and those visual cues are giving you the implicit cues to what the structure is. And so repeated exposure to that helps to we believe it helps to train the reader to understand more about like, for example, what their oral reading fluency should look, should sound like, and where those pauses are and what things go with what and so we did get some data out of that study that really does support. That conclusion, some of those fourth and fifth graders told us that this, the format helps them to hear how the sentence should sound. And so we had both the objective data where, you know, we saw improvement in their comprehension scores, but also just their subjective data of how they really enjoyed using it they would choose to use it. And the the result that, to me, is the most exciting, was a result that was not significant, but nevertheless, it's when I tell you, I think you'll appreciate its fact really significant is that. So we did this study with groups. We wanted to make sure that people weren't reading things that were beyond their capability. So we split up the groups according to their Lexile level and gave them the actual tab, you know, the Lexile texts that were where they were. So our lowest group did not show improvement in their comprehension scores, but they overwhelmingly reported that they felt more confident about their answers and about their reading. And you know, I believe that, no, this is just speculation. We don't know this, but I think that the reason we didn't find benefit is that they need more exposure to it. But the fact that you can get below grade level readers to feel confident about reading anything, to me, is a huge win. And so we are continuing to find ways of leveraging the cascade for folks who are really not on grade level, but who are struggling readers. And we've done some studies that show us that people with dyslexia really do like reading in this format. They prefer reading it those that adult readers. We also have done. We have a published study with second language learners, or sorry English language learners, whose native language is both. We have Mandarin Korean, and we saw improvements, quite dramatic improvements, after really only one practice session. So it does, it seems that it doesn't take a long time to see the benefit, so long as people use it. So this is a way of trying to get people to read more. I mean, that's really what we need. That's part of what we need is to get them reading. You know, I know there's a lot of discussion about how to spend classroom time, and one of the things we really need to do is to just get them reading, but this is unique in the sense that they can be reading, but also simultaneously getting the benefit of these cues to help them to understand what the syntactic structure is.

Donell Pons: 17:32

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. You should talk about that, Julie, because that's one of the things. And most of the students that I work with are older students, so middle school to high school, college and adult and so for one thing, it's interesting. What they're drawn to. First off is this novelty. It's different. It looks different. What is this doing? Then once it's explained, you get some practice time with it, then they do start to fall into a rhythm, because what it's doing, as you say, is going to the syntactic structure that's new for them, to just have that presented to them in a way, because they're used to that underlying this, you know, to put underlying double under the verb, and then that doesn't really transfer when you're in the real world reading that information that you might do in a sentence diagram, so to speak. But here it's offered in a visual format, just as you're reading. So as you say, you're not really consciously aware, but the in the comprehension questions, when you're done, so much more aware of what was the subject of the sentence, what was the action in the sentence? What were some of the outcomes? And they are, they're actually taking it in as they're reading. I think they're very surprised by that, because in the past, everything has to be very difficult, and it's hard to make a transfer, usually, so to have that happening, I think, is unusual, yeah, yeah,

Unknown: 18:47

this study that we did in that with the fourth and fifth graders, you know, I had such a great time there, because after the study was over, we went and we had, we had turned it into a big, you know, you are a junior scientist, because we wanted to do the study, but we also wanted the feedback, because this was the first time that we had implemented cascade reading in an actual classroom, you know, situation. So we wanted, you know, the data, but we also just wanted to know how they like to use it, and, you know, information that we could use to implement it further. So after the study was over, I went and did an interview, which each of the an interview with each of the classes individually, and the students were just able to talk to me about what they liked and what they didn't like, you know. And these students were very articulate, and they loved the fact that it wasn't just a page of text. Almost every classroom, I heard multiple students, you know, and heads nodding, you know. We love that it's broken up, that we're not just like, you know, faced with this wall of text, and what do we do? They love that it's a little bit at a time, and it helps them just feel like it's more manageable. We had one special ed student, sorry, special ed teacher, who. Spoke to us very much also about how Hurst student, who previously didn't see himself as a reader at all, just was so energized by this feeling that, hey, I could do this. So that's, I think that's really part of the magic of it, is that we are breaking it up in manageable ways, but we're not doing it randomly. We're doing it so that it fits completely with the underlying syntactic structure. And that's one of the really defining points of Cascade reading, is that it is we the other, the other sort of technical term of Cascade reading is linguistically driven text formatting, meaning it's all of the line breaks and the indentations you see are there because of the linguistic structure? There's no other type of principle about, like, how many words on the line, or anything like that. We're not concerned about that at all. We're completely concerned with how do we mark the linguistic constituents in this sentence? And those are the cues that students can use as they're processing that sentence.

Donell Pons: 21:04

Gosh, surely it got me really thinking about a lot of things, particularly with my students. What is the future for you with Cascade reading? Because you've added as you've as you've talked at the beginning, you've added a lot of pieces, like we have the reader, we have Explorer. And what do you see happening with Cascade reading in the future, right?

Unknown: 21:23

So, well, there's a number, there's a number of things. One thing is that we want to make this available everywhere. We think of it very much like a reader view, you know, like I'm a, I'm a, I'm an iPhone user or a Mac user. So, you know, I have Reader View. I don't know what other platforms are. I guess they have something similar, where you just clean it up, you know, make it look nice, right? Well, that's what we're doing. We're cleaning this up. We're giving support to the student who needs extra help on with the linguistic structure. So we want it to be ubiquitous. We want it to be available anywhere, on any platform. So that's one top goal. We're also, you know, speaking to various different publishers and things like that, about ways of making cascade available as part of published offerings, that kind of thing. We really would like to see this just ubiquitous. The other thing you asked me sort of about the future, I'm very invested in making sure that we don't lose momentum on the message that syntax is the crucial next step to reading instruction. And that's not specific to cascade. That's specific to, you know, just what we do as educators. And really what the you know, so called Science of reading is talking about we have to, I think it's just very time for us to move beyond decoding and to try to have some really well thought out strategies for how to support comprehension and cascade is one part of that, but I think the broader message is to get teachers to be more comfortable with syntax in their classroom, to know how to bring it into the classroom, and to know that it's important and worth spending time on, even from the earliest, you know, earliest ages,

Donell Pons: 23:14

and you know Julie, you've brought us naturally to the fact that you've had two you've been a part of two series in the perspectives publication for the International Dyslexia Association that speaks directly about syntax, and that was exciting to see. So talk to us a little bit about how that came to be and what you're hoping folks get out of it.

Unknown: 23:32

Yes, well, we're, you know, everything just hatches over a warm cup of tea with colleagues. So I have to give a shout out to Nancy Eberhardt, who was the CO editor in chief for those issues, and who sits on the board, the editorial board at at Ida, and my longtime colleague from Haskins, Margie Gillis, who she's from literacy how, and she's done a lot of the really sort of groundbreaking work in developing syntax, syntax tools for early, early instruction. So I have expressed to Margie for many years, my, you know, sort of disappointment that there has not been more attention to syntax in all of these years of developing the science of reading. You know, I spent many years at Haskins, listening to strategic planning and discussions where, you know Mark Seidenberg was there, and Ken Pugh and Hollis Scarborough and and and Sue Brady and all of these leaders, and the discussion had always mostly been around decoding. And I'm raising my hand and saying, But wait, what about comprehension? Isn't really the goal of reading to comprehend, and now, as a field, we're ready to hear it. And so that was really the main goal, is to bring some of the science of language that has been going on for 50 years into the conversation of. The Science of reading, as I should put it in quotes, right? So I have, you know, I have a whole community of colleagues that study language comprehension, but they don't talk about reading. They don't think about reading. It's just not part of that. They're not, they're not, that's not part of what they're interested in. Well, there are scientists that study language language processing, we have very well articulated and mathematically complex models of how the brain processes language, and none of that is even at all part of the literacy conversation. But the main thing that is notable is that at the core of all those models is syntax. So what I really wanted to do is to allow me is to bring some of my colleagues from those communities into the literacy conversation. And I was very excited. So we ended up having six articles in the two idea perspectives, journals written by language scientists who you wouldn't ordinarily hear from. And I also did an interview with Nancy Eberhard, with ev federenko, who is an MIT scientist who studies the language networks of the brain, language processing networks of the brain. And also she studies not just language, but also the cognitive networks. And her research really has, I think, a huge application as we try to understand the comprehension side of Hollis Scarborough's rope, because EV Fedorenko has really shown that those are different networks. The Language network is completely different from the so called thought networks. And so that one, we did an interview that is, and then I summarized it inside the IDA, but you can find that interview, we actually posted it on the cascade reading website. So if you search for, I think, my name and EV Fedorenko, that's a great interview that you can, you know, learn about the brain mechanisms that underlie language processing, not just decoding, but language processing. Yeah.

Donell Pons: 27:07

And, you know, Julie, is it too much to say that I think you're in the forefront of unpacking this for people, there always has to be a space where it's uncomfortable until we get comfortable. And I think you're pushing on the uncomfortable till we get comfortable. What do you think?

Unknown: 27:21

Yeah, no, well, I mean, I think that makes sense. I mean, anything new is uncomfortable. So, you know, I think the main message is for people to understand that it doesn't end with decoding, you know. And I think as a field, We rightfully so, have reached a point where we feel like we know what to do. The issue is, implementation, right? The issue is, let's, let's get the infrastructure and the administrators and the systems in place so that we can do that thing. But we know what that thing is, we understand it, right? But on comprehension, I see people still kind of flailing around, to be honest, we don't have a very clear model of what the brain is doing. We don't have a clear model of what type of information should be in that small, little, you know, block that you have of instruction time. We don't know how to assess it well. And I think that, you know, though, I can't tell you that I have answers to every one of those questions, but I suspect I've probably thought about it a little bit more than most people, because there's a whole field out there who's been thinking about it for 50

Donell Pons: 28:27

years. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stacy Hurst: 28:29

I personally am looking forward to that translation right to the classroom, to and Lindsay and I are both early childhood educators. That's how I started. I'm actually teaching pre service teachers now, so higher ed, but that was the area I well, I went to school in a time. We didn't learn about phonics, either, to be fair, but we also, when we talked about comprehension, we talked a lot about background knowledge and vocabulary. I don't recall any instruction on syntax or even any mention of its importance

Narrator: 29:03

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Lindsay Kemeny: 29:52

What would you recommend to a teacher who's like, okay, syntax is important. What do I do now? Now what do I do first? How do I get started?

Unknown: 30:02

Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, I will say that that's one of the reasons that we made this explorer view as part of the Cascade reading offering. Because I'm embracing the idea that teachers are uncomfortable with syntax, not for no thought fault, for no fault of their own. They're just not instructed in it and it, see it feels technical. People just, you know, I think that part of why we don't do it is you don't do things that you're not comfortable with. And I would invite people to think about what it was like before you embraced phonics, right? Like there's a learning curve there too, but now you know what you're doing. So in syntax, there's that explorer view, but there are a lot of things, if you understand what syntax is, I think there's a lot of things that you can be doing that are, you know, extremely low tech. So one thing is that there's a very close relationship between oral reading fluency and phrasing and syntactic structure. So the child who doesn't understand syntactic structure is not going to be able to put the phrases and the pauses and the intonation changes in the right place they it's almost like, you know, it's almost like barking at print, right? You're just sort of reading those words. You might be able to decode them super fast and accurate, but if you're not able to to add that expression to the reading, that should be a signal that there is some language level deficit that needs attention. And so that's sort of the very first level you know. And even you know from the very early instruction. Like I said, Nancy and Margie Gillis have a textbook called syntax that's targeted for, you know, up until second like K through second grade. And they talk about introducing ways of just identifying the function, like, where's the who, where's the do and understand those pieces in that very simple language, so that students can start to really kind of take apart a sentence. So that would be my suggestions. There's a lot of other things that you could do. There's this notion of scooping. A lot of people might have heard about that. I have, in my experience, seen, though, that a lot of times the scoops are not put in the right place, and cascade can help with that, because cascade will help you to know where the scoops are. But that's the kind of thing again, you're trying to get your students to be able to feel the rhythm in the language, feel that natural rhythm that we as skilled speakers, you know that's there. You perceive that, and that rhythm is completely tied to the syntactic structure of the sentence.

Stacy Hurst: 32:45

Yeah, as you were talking about the use of AI and cascade reading, I was thinking that is a brilliant use of it, because you're not replacing a teacher, you're augmenting their knowledge and actually guiding it and probably improving it too. So I also have a little bit of a selfish question for you. It as you think about pre service teachers just getting ready to enter the field, what do you think they should come out of college knowing about syntax at a minimum? Yeah.

Unknown: 33:16

So I think a lot about this actually, because I'm also, I mean, I'm teaching at an undergraduate level, but I'm not teaching pre service teachers. But any any university that has a psychology program typically has a psychology of language class that's one of the in my university. It's a 300 level class. It's, it's, it's ordered after the cognitive psychology class. Cognitive Psychology is an important class because it helps students to understand the mechanisms of the brain and even think about mechanisms like we don't, you know, I like to tell my students, you know, a lot of people that go into psychology because they want to learn, you know, therapies and how everybody's unique and different and all of that, but cognitive psychology is about how we're the same. How does the brain work? Right? So that's a precursor. But then on top of that is psychology of language. And I spend a lot of time in my psychology of language class talking about language fundamentals. In fact, I use Louisa Moats book in that class with these are not teachers, these are psychology majors, but all of that information that's in a standard psychology of language class, I think it's crucial for teachers to know that. I think it should be required. I really do either a version of it in an education department that could be focused for teachers, or have them just take that class that's on their campus, likely, and I just all of that it's and what it does is it teaches you fundamental like I have the if you look in the in the perspectives, I have a picture that it shows you the levels of language. It starts phonology and then morphology syntax all the way up to discourse. I use that in my class. So that class we talked. About the levels of language. We talk about the processes that happen at each level, in the parsing level, in the syntax level, we talk about how the brain can make mistakes and then fix them automatically or not, all of those kind of process things. I think that's just really crucial background for a teacher to know.

Stacy Hurst: 35:20

Yeah, I love that. Thank you for taking the time to answer. I also noticed that in the issues, and we did an interview with Tiffany Hogan as well, where we were able to talk about those domains of language, that was something else I don't remember being made explicit for me and so and you're referring to Dr moat's speech to print book. Is that correct? Is that the book? Yeah, and

Unknown: 35:47

I use that together with a standard psychology of language textbook, because the psychology of language textbook, it does include that. But what's great about Louisa Moats his book is that it has exercises that I can get them to do. You know?

Stacy Hurst: 35:59

Yeah, that workbook is great. And so I've just wanted to make that clear for our listeners, and mentioned that that is where I learned, that's how I learned this stuff. It's a great book.

Unknown: 36:11

It's a great introduction. I mean, there's a lot more there, you know, a lot more to be, to be, you know, discussed, and she doesn't, she does not, because it's not the point of the book. But she doesn't go into any of this process stuff like she doesn't talk about the models of language. She doesn't talk about some of the things that I talk about when you you've heard me speak at Big Sky and other various things. I try to really go step by step, word by word. This is the process the brain is undergoing when we're comprehending, and, you know, it's with certain kind of senses. You can make a mistake, and then you can go back and fix it, you know. And so she that kind of stuff is not in that book, and but I think that that's also important. That's the kind of thing that I wrote about in the perspectives articles. So my my article that was called something like reading comprehension, word by word I can't remember exactly the title that talks about incrementality, that that word by word processing. I really want people to understand that comprehension happens at a word by word level. It's not that we read the whole sentence and then we wait and then we comprehend it. Right? It's like comprehension is evolving, not even at the word by word level, at the at the really the phoneme by phoneme level. It just our brain is taking it in, and we're not waiting. We are making commitments and making, you know, decisions and predictions about what's happening as you go so. So my my article in the issue, one of perspectives, and then the article by buggy and and Dylan talks about the idea of prediction in language, and this is a crucial idea. I took pains in that article to make sure people understood I was not talking about three cueing. It's completely different, but we do have a lot of prediction in the way we use language. So those are process level ideas that I think it's important for people to understand, not that they're going to teach it, but I think it's important teacher knowledge, because then you can kind of understand more about, you know, a particular error that might come up, like, oh, they probably did it this way. Now I understand and I can show them

Stacy Hurst: 38:21

and put it in the context that is aligned with science, because we did, I learned so much about three cueing, and we did learn to attend to what the student had said or read up to that point. But then when you're putting it in the misaligned context of three cueing, you're not going to get the outcomes for that student that you need to so that's an important clarification, and I appreciate that, because you can almost see what a kid is thinking if you're attending to those kind of things.

Donell Pons: 38:53

And Julie, you have taken us on a fantastic, far reaching kind of helping us get a taste of each of these aspects. And there's just so much here. I'm going to ask that really tough question. I'm going to ask you, going forward, maybe you can think about where you'd like to see things go if things turn out well, where we might head with syntax, some of the future maybes and maybe also list some of the things you think teachers ought to be aware of. Like, we've talked a little bit about these things you can do, but maybe name some of those important things.

Unknown: 39:27

Well, this is like a huge question. Here forward, we all have the same goal, right? We want to make sure that we move the needle on how many kids are reading, you know, at above Proficient level, right? Like we agree it's not enough to just get kids to be able to decode, and we know that, you know, you can have really super superstar decoders to get the fourth grade, and then suddenly they struggle. And that's the language part and the and the syntax part that they're missing very often. So. So there's a lot of different, you know, this is a tough, this is a, you know, a new, a new, a new direction. A lot of things to pay attention to. One I think the very, the very first step is to understand language ability from the very earliest ages. And I am not at all convinced that we have the right assessments for language ability. At this point, any assessment that asks a kid to choose between four options is not an assessment that's really tapping their language ability. It could have the language ability involved with it, but it's also tapping their problem solving, and they're, you know, just all of that, you know, kind of stuff that is meta, right? That isn't really about their language ability. So I think we're still working on good assessments. I have some ideas about that. Stay tuned. We're hoping that that will, that will, that will come out, but assessing early, and even without like the standardized assessments, like I said, teachers can pay attention to phrasing, to how kids are using their language, and recognize that if there are those early language deficits, they're going to come back to haunt the child later, once They're trying to read complex text. So that's there also an understanding of how differences between the home language and the language of instruction can impact people's comprehension. So very often, a child you know, who, let's say he's a he's a he or she is a Spanish native speaker, their brain is wired to process language in a certain way. For example, adjectives don't go in the same place in Spanish as they do in English, right? So their brain is processing there's a certain way of making meaning that that brain is trained to do that reflects their expectation that that's what the syntax is, right? So then, when they come into reading English, their brain isn't used to processing it that way. So for them, there's an extra level of learning involved just by getting used to the difference in that syntax and that the distance between the way that a Spanish native speaking brain is programmed, and English is one distance. So there's this. And this is a, again, this is a something that's well developed in fields that study second language learning and and language comparisons. You know that different languages are closer or further apart, but it's not just descriptive. It has to do with the way the brain processes those languages. So there's a lot of work in order to prepare teachers to understand that. What else I don't know? There's a lot, there's a lot more to do. I think also the main, the main thing is to help teachers to be comfortable bringing syntax into their classroom. And you know, we don't need high tech. We can be fine at the beginning with low tech. You know, listening to listening for problems at the sentence level, listening for fluent phrasing. Not just focus so much on speed and accuracy, but looking for that fluid phrasing, yeah, I'm sorry, I sort of, I've been talking a lot, I kind of lost my track. But there's so much that we could do, but I think that we have the tools to get there. We there is a lot of knowledge, a lot of strong evidence based scientific knowledge. We just need to bring it into this domain.

Donell Pons: 43:41

Yeah, yeah. And Julie, I really appreciate it. And you have, you've given us a lot of tools. And just to recap, for the listener, because we have provided a lot of things, there is the IDA two parter. So the International Dyslexia Association, perspectives publication that has the two parter on syntax, highly recommend it. And it'll be something you'll want to have access to, because it'll be a lot of maybe new information you'll want to come back and look at again.

Stacy Hurst: 44:04

It's titled syntax comes first, so that does help put everything in perspective.

Unknown: 44:09

And I want to say that if it so happens that you're not a member of the IDA, this is an organization that is worth your support, for sure, but I believe they have a six month free membership for teachers. So I know that teachers are asked to spend a lot of their own money. I believe that that that used to be there when we that's we pushed for that. So I think it's still available. So you could, you know, sign up for six months for free and get access to these if you want

Donell Pons: 44:38

to do it. Yeah, you bet I highly recommend it and then cascade reading. If you haven't checked it out, please do free as you've mentioned before, and there are many things there that so make sure you explore while you're there to look at not just the reader, where you can put text in and cascade, but also the Explorer. And there are many tools that are on. There that will help someone. If this is new for you, and I have to say, I've used them all, and Julie, they're fantastic. And my students have I even sat and used some of them together that are the teacher is getting some information and kind of looking at things together. So it's very accessible, very supportive. So there's some tools out there that are available,

Unknown: 45:20

yeah, let me just mention we have a library of already cascaded texts there. You do that is aligned with the ckla topics. So good, yeah, it's aimed. It follows the there's a lot of these kind of, let me try to use my language. It's extremely carefully. It's the fourth and fifth grade, C, Kla, C, K, L, A, topics. But for each of the topic, we have second through eighth grade levels. Of those texts, flesh, Kate levels. So each of there's the same content. It's just that it's written either for a second grade level or an eighth grade level. Those are already cascaded, and there are comprehension questions available for them. So that's already there. I mean, you could take your your curriculum, whatever your district has bought for you, you could take certain passages and sentences and copy and paste that into the cascade generator. Also, if you wanted to do it that way. So it's, you know, there's a lot of different ways to use the materials you already have. But we also do have that library out there, and then we have some initial lessons that were were developed together with Margie Gillis and literacy, how that are around helping people to understand why the cascade looks the way it does. So it's not like a whole curriculum that goes on for, you know, along, you know, the whole semester, but there's five or six, I forget, lessons that focus on, for example, the subject and the verb. Cascade aligns the subject and the verb. So we talk about what that is, and then we talk about how to find that in the cascade. We do dependencies, we do coordination, and, you know, a lot of different those are the sort of the main topics that relate to why the cascade looks the way it does. All of that is free.

Lindsay Kemeny: 47:11

And one more resource that Julie you had mentioned was the literacy, how the book syntax knowledge to practice, by Nancy Eberhardt and Margie Gillis, which is great, and they have on literacy, how's website, I think they have a free webinar to go along with that book. But then there's also this one's not free, but there is a paid course just on syntax to go along with the book, too, that I did, and it was excellent, so it kind of really helped to break it down. Look, there's just this many grammatical building blocks in a sentence. And, you know, there's just this many type, like four types of sentences. And it was really helpful for me, for my knowledge.

Unknown: 47:51

And then I am, I was hoping to have this live, you know, by the end of the year last year, but I didn't end up finishing it, but sort of continuing so in the second volume of the perspectives, we have six pages at the end of resources. That's two I can't remember how, how it lays out, but four pages of things like what teachers should know, and then another two pages maybe, yeah, I can't remember exactly. I think it's two pages of just resources, like books, things online, that you can find all that kind of stuff. So I'm continuing to collect resources, and I want, I will put that as a augmentation of my website, so that people can find more resources. So if anybody has your own resources and wants to send them to me, please send them. I'm really collecting things, and I'm hoping to make more of a sort of a, you know, a place for people to go to find things for

Donell Pons: 48:51

syntax, yeah, fantastic. And then there was, you're out soon, great. And your interview with EV is also on the website right?

Unknown: 49:00

Cascade. That's on the cascade YouTube channel. I don't know exactly where that is, other than that, so you can just search it. We can, you guys have show notes. We can put it in show notes, yeah, yeah. And then that has the written version of that, which is me sort of summarizing, and you know, all of that in the actual perspectives. But what's really important is in the perspectives, there are two beautiful figures, one in which I took the Scarborough rope and I mapped it on to the different brain networks. And what's fascinating to see is that the items that you are used to thinking of in the comprehension side of the rope are not all language many of them are cognition, right? So, if you, if you're worried about, you know, comprehension as a language skill, and you're not really focusing on those language pieces, you're not going to end up with good comprehension background, you know, outcomes. Mm. So anyway, I think it's really instructive to see which things are language and which things are cognition. Like we talk about background knowledge a lot, that's a that's something in cognition that's not part of your language ability. So if you have all the background and knowledge in the world, but you still don't have strong language ability, you're not going to comprehend it. So the copper the background knowledge is not a substitute for solid language skills,

Stacy Hurst: 50:24

which I think is a really important point to emphasize. So I'll just add to that, because we literally, we are taught that vocabulary and background knowledge have the biggest impact on reading comprehension. But then in your in your additions here, all the research is there that says that syntax is the best predictor of that too.

Unknown: 50:46

So I think you're taught those things, because there just hasn't been a lot of research on syntax. Because, like I said, people are afraid of it and they're not doing it. But ailin Deacon, who wrote an article in the first I think it was the first of those perspectives. She's done a lot of this research, and she has data that shows that syntax, syntax knowledge is even better than word decoding knowledge when you're measuring comprehension. And that to me, as someone who sort of has, in my mind, a process model of how we do these tasks. Like you know, if you think that teaching decoding is going to affect your comprehension outcomes, you don't have a great model and a great understanding of what how that process actually works. Decoding, once you, once you lift that word off the page, it's not helping you anymore. Now you're in the realm of language skills and cognitive ability. Yeah, with comprehension, your outcome, your comprehension outcome. I love that,

Stacy Hurst: 51:51

and the fact that you can pay attention as early as you know, in toddlerhood to anybody who's struggling with syntax and then predict that they might have struggles with reading and language, and reading and intervening early would make a massive,

Unknown: 52:08

big this is the big connection to DLD that Tiffany Hogan has been talking about, right like and I think that as a whole, we don't appreciate how extensive DLD is in our classrooms because it can be hidden. It can be hidden by kids who, you know, are smart enough to, you know, fake it. It can be hidden, you know, a lot of times it just, you know, gets masked by other things like ADHD or autism or whatever. But these are language deficits, which we have, we know how to help with language deficits. The other thing I will say, just as a theme of like, what to do early is, and this is thing. This is something that Tim Shanahan has been talking a lot about, you know, is just exposing kids to language above their level, because we want to exercise their linguistic muscles, to learn how to process those complex syntactic structures. So if we just keep them all at the same kind of you know level that they're on, they're not going to learn that you know what they need in order to read the texts that are continuing to get more complicated. So yeah.

Stacy Hurst: 53:21

And sometimes we underestimate young children's ability to really understand that complex language, but they can. And sometimes it, it requires us to scaffold it a bit, but they really are able. Yeah.

Unknown: 53:34

I mean, one of the structures that is just, you know, sort of like the classic structure, is the object relative clause, which is where you you're changing the sentence structure so that, like in English, we expect, we expect to see Subject, Verb, Object, right, SVO, right. But for an object relative clause, what you're doing is you're putting two subjects in the beginning. So it's like the boy that the girl chased Right? Like, that's weird for our brains. And you can see you can feel it like I was talking about how your brain is wired to process things a certain way. Well, you're not wired to have two nouns there. Now, if you were a Japanese speaking brain, you would, because in Japan, all the verbs come at the end of the sentence, right? So, but we have this object relative clause, so you're like, the boy, that's the girl. So what am I doing with that? Like, just like what, you know, and but we, there's tons of evidence that show that even very young children will make those they will speak that way. They typically don't use nouns, like I did. They'll use, I, you know, pronouns, which it makes it a little easier, but they know about those structures at a very early age. And so just to complete, continue exercising brains on those complex structures for as long, you know, all the way through school, I think, is really the great way to develop language, language muscles, language ability. Yeah.

Donell Pons: 55:02

Well, okay, Julie, this has been a fantastic conversation. We have given our listeners a lot. So I'm thinking to myself, when you listen to this episode, you'll probably want to grab something, a little beverage, sit down, be sure to take your time with it. And then remember the resources will be listed because you've been given plenty. And what a generous interview this has been, Julie, thank you so much, because taking us on a journey, you've also given us a lot of resources. So thank you so much.

Unknown: 55:31

And I just invite your listeners to you know they can be in touch with me. Like I said, if you have resources that you want to share, let me know. I mean, I think we're all together in this. You know, we're learning something new, and we need to embrace it and not be afraid and figure out the right implementation. Now. That's what we're that's where we where we are. So happy, happy to

Donell Pons: 55:52

talk more Absolutely. Thank you so much. And when you, when you visit cascade reading, which I'm sure you're apt to do after this, you will be, as I was pleasantly, pleasantly surprised that not only is this a terrific resource that is free, that's not that's not something that happens to us typically, but also how well it's set out, it really is very user friendly. So I encourage you, if you've in the past been hesitant, please extend yourself and go out there and check it out, because it is fantastic. And Julie again, thank you so much for the conversation and our listeners. You have been given a lot, and we had a great episode of literacy talks, and we'll be sure to have another one prepared for you. Thanks so much.

Narrator: 56:33

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.