Oral Language and Reading Skills

Narrator:

Welcome to EDVIEW360.

Dr. Pamela Snow:

I don't pretend that this is easy, but I think it is something that we know enough about with respect to high-quality, explicit instruction and, of course, structured explicit literacy teaching is not, as you and I and your listeners know, is not just about helping children to decode text. It's also helping them to acquire a rich vocabulary, have access to more literate language, to be learning vocabulary in the context of different topics in the curriculum and also, of course, to be understanding increasingly complex sentence structures. So, this can be rectified, but it needs a very purposeful approach at school.

Narrator:

You've just heard from Dr. Pamela Snow, speech and language therapist and professor at La Trobe University in Australia. Dr. Snow is our guest today on EDVIEW360.

Pam Austin:

Hello, this is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. We're so excited to have you with us today. I'm conducting today's podcast for my native New Orleans, LA. Today, we're excited to welcome an educator, researcher, and author who is globally respected for her contribution to education and especially literacy.

As a trained psychologist and speech-language pathologist, Dr. Pamela Snow has dedicated her career to reading success for every child in a variety of ways. Let me tell you a bit more about Dr. Snow before we get started with our conversation today. She is a professor of cognitive psychology in the school of education at La Trobe University in Australia. The disciplines of psychology and speech-language pathology have always informed her research and teaching. She also relies upon her experience working in public health research in the time she spent coordinating a post-graduate program for primary and secondary teachers concerning the high prevalence of mental health problems. During our talk today, we'll learn more about Dr. Snow's passions, communication, competence, vulnerability in early life, and a language-to-literacy transition and what educators can learn for better early classroom instruction. You can see there's a lot to talk about today when it comes to oral language and reading. So, let's get started. Welcome, Dr. Snow. I'm so glad to be talking with you today.

PS:

Thank you, Pam. It's an honor to be here with you.

PA:

This is going to be a very interesting conversation, I feel. You're well known for the work you've done over the years, especially when it comes to oral language in early childhood and across the school years. Before we talk about why it's important in learning to read, tell us a bit about how that became your passion.

PS: 

Thanks, Pam. There's always a bit of a back story, isn't there, when people answer these questions? I'll try to condense it down so it's not too long winded. But after I completed my Ph.D. in the mid-1990s, which was on acquired brain injury and I will just park on the side the fact that I was always interested in reading, but that's not what my Ph.D. was on, it was on acquired brain injury and communication and psychosocial difficulties in predominantly young people after acquired brain injury. After that, I deliberately and quite consciously wanted to broaden my skill set and I was fortunate to be offered a position as a research fellow in a role that involved both public health and, I guess, broadly health psychology research. Looking at drug education in schools and drug education, it turns out, is an equally contentious space as reading instruction. But working in that field got me really interested in the notion of risk and protective factors, one of the things that stack up and we know that there's a cumulative on both sides of the ledger. one of the things that stack up in a positive way for children and later, when they're adolescents, and one of the things that stack up in a negative way and one of the key things that kept recurring in the literature, when I was looking through the lens of adolescent mental health and substance misuse, was academic achievement.

Now, of course, I couldn't take off my speech language pathology hat that I'd been wearing for a long time and that got me thinking: “Well, what are the things that contribute to academic achievement?” Well, language proficiency is very important for academic achievement and, of course, making the transition to literacy in the first three years of school is very important for academic achievement. So, it really struck me that academic achievement was prominent on the list of protective factors and lack of academic achievement was prominent on the list of risk factors. So, that got me metaphorically peeling the onion, I suppose, even though I was still working in that space, very much in a sort of public health, health/psychology domain and my mind went to the group of young people who are probably the most vulnerable, who embody risk most comprehensively, and that's young people in the youth justice system. Many of whom have come into the youth justice system via the child protection doorway, a very significant number. In fact, somewhere up around 40 percent to 50 percent in Australia, and it's probably similar in your country, in the United States. And, so, that led then to two decades of research on the predominantly the oral language skills of young people in the youth justice system and in the child protection system. In more recent times we also included literacy.

Interestingly, I deliberately didn't want to look at reading, writing, and spelling in the early days of that research because there was already a lot of research to tell us that those young people have academic. They've had academic struggles. Not everybody likes the idea of the conceptual school-to-prison pipeline but there is literature on a school-to-prison pipeline and academic struggles and early school departure are a big part of that. So, I wanted our focus to be on language skills because that really had very little attention. It hadn't had no attention but it had very little attention. So, that research really highlighted the high rates of disordered language, poor language skills in this very vulnerable population, and we've spent a lot of time in our dissemination over the years talking about the implications of hidden language impairments for how young people respond behaviorally and interpersonally in the classroom, the poor self-regulation, the sometimes impulsive responses in interpersonal situations, how they respond when they're being interviewed by the police, how they deal with the whole passage through the justice system having to go to court.

In our country, we make a lot of use of restorative justice conferencing. So, we under certain circumstances, a youth offender who has pleaded guilty, you might say plead guilty, I think the jury's out on whether it's pleaded or pleaded, but we use a bit of both. But whether it's a guilty plea, there are opportunities for a young person to sit down and be part of a facilitated conference with a trained facilitator with their victim so that there can be some reparation, at least emotionally, and a conversation. But, of course, anything that involves conversation is very language based. So, one of the concerns out of our research was the extent to which we're taxing a very weak skill in a high-stakes way by asking young people to take part in those restorative justice conferences.

Inevitably, of course, I got to thinking more and more, wearing my public health hat, about the importance of ensuring that all children, regardless of their starting point, regardless of their level of disadvantage, at a community, family, individual level, the importance of them being taught to read and being proficient readers after three years of school, not that it's going to “Teflon,” them against later adversity, but it's an enormous protective factor.

If you can succeed academically, that's something that the education system can do to hopefully change your trajectory and give you a better future by helping you to feel a sense of self-efficacy as a learner, a sense of belonging at school. Ensure that you're, or make it less likely that you're, acting out in class and being inattentive because you can't do what you're being asked to do, you don't understand instructions, or you avoid things like reading aloud because you can't read, and, of course, what we see is a widening gulf. You know it's sometimes referred to as the Matthew Effect, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And, so, by the time these very often children from disadvantaged and minority group backgrounds are in secondary school, their antipathy to school is enormous, their shame and embarrassment about poor academic achievement are enormous, and we've got ourselves a very messy, complicated space in which to try and intervene with very limited resources. So, that's the long, short story about how I came to be so focused on high-quality early reading instruction for all.

PA:

Honestly, I think it's just an amazing pathway that you've gone through, Pam. When I think about students' first level of success, it is in school, right? That's where they first began to be successful. And I do want to ask you this question when we're thinking about the challenges, thinking about language proficiency, wouldn't you say that is the precursor to success in reading and writing and spelling, as well as maybe even considering that, the precursor for being able to communicate in a positive way before the reading.

PS:

Absolutely. So, I often say that oral language gets up earlier in the morning than reading, writing, and spelling.

And it gets up earlier in the morning in two ways. Firstly, for us in an evolutionary sense, as humans, that we have had oral language systems for, we think, probably a couple of hundred thousand years. So, this is something that our brains have evolved a very highly specialized facility for. But it also gets up earlier in the morning for us as individuals, developmentally. Because really, from the moment an infant is born they're working on developing their communication. Now, initially that's crying, because crying serves the very important biological function of alerting your caregivers to the fact that you need to be kept alive. But by 6 or 8 months that's become a very sociable serve-and-return, interactive playing with sounds, consonant/vowel combinations, and by the first birthday we're usually starting to see the emergence of the first word. So, oral language is profoundly important and in every way it proceeds reading, writing, and spelling. And we have to accept, unfortunately, that there is a social gradient that children and families sit on with respect to the quantity and quality of early oral language experiences that children have in the preschool years. It's difficult, if not impossible, for us to modify what goes on in families, in family homes, with respect to the kind of oral language experiences that children have. Language skills sit on a distribution. Some parents have very well-developed language skills, oral language skills themselves. others less so. Some parents have lots of social and human capital at their disposal, regardless of where they sit economically, and so can invest more in those interactions. We do know that those early interactions are profoundly important, both for language development but also for early emotional self-regulation, for empathy, for attunement. But these things wrap around each other in the preschool years, so that children who have a strong, active primary caregivers are likely to also have stronger language skills, be better at using words for emotions, identifying their emotional states, identifying and understanding the emotional states of others.

Early language development isn't occurring in a silo. It's occurring in that social-emotional context of serve-and-return interactions and unfortunately some children arrive at school with a much patchier experience, both in the serve-and-return, social-emotional context and also with respect to the nature, the quantity and quality of language that they've been exposed to. Now that might be an invitation for us to say, “Oh well, what can we do?” This is just how some children are and that's not where I'm going with this. Where I'm going with this is that in education we need to recognize that there is that gradient and we need to be purposefully thinking about ways that we can accelerate the progress of children who arrive at school perhaps further behind.

So, that might involve some screening, for example, of children on entry to elementary school, primary school, but very purposeful teaching of vocabulary, sentence structure, figurative, idiomatic language and, of course, background knowledge. Because the children who are starting ahead, again we go back to the idea of the Matthew Principle, their progress is going to be accelerated and we don't want a big, wide gap to open up between the haves and the have-nots. And I don't pretend that this is easy, but I think it is something that we know enough about with respect to high-quality, explicit instruction and, of course, structured, explicit literacy teaching is not, as you and I and your listeners know, is not just about helping children to decode text. It's also helping them to acquire a rich vocabulary, have access to more literate language, to be learning vocabulary in the context of different topics in the curriculum and also, of course, to be understanding increasingly complex sentence structures. So, this can be rectified, but it needs a very purposeful approach at school.

PA:

Definitely. You have given us a lot to think about, a lot to chew on. You have described the benefit or the use of oral language in developing reading skills as the engine. Can you expound on that? What do you mean by the engine?

PS:

Yep. So, what I'm thinking about here is that learning to read is fundamentally a linguistic task. There may have been times in the past where people have mistakenly thought that it was a visual memory task and, of course, using banks of sight words as teaching inputs and asking children to remember those as visual holes is a way of, I think, inappropriately taxing the visual memory system rather than developing and repurposing language pathways in the brain, a la the work of Stanislas Dehaene, who's been very eloquent in helping us to understand this repurposing of language pathways that needs to go on in the brain. So, we need to be thinking about the linguistic basis of reading, the fact that it involves understanding how speech and print map to each other, understanding that the squiggles on the page are a code, albeit in English, not a 100 percent transparent code, but they're a code and as a code that can be learned, it can be deciphered by the novice, and that's obviously a big focus of the first couple of years of school. But we want to also be ensuring that process of reading is taking part in a positive feedback loop and further enhancing children's oral language abilities, because by the time children are in about grade three, they need to be adding to their oral language skills, their store of vocabulary, for example, and their grasp of sentence structure in ways that go way beyond what can be offered through everyday interactions. I'm sure your listeners will be familiar with the work of Isabel Beck and colleagues, the wonderful book Bringing Words to Life and the idea of tiers of vocabulary.

Typically, children arrive at school with a good store of Tier 1 words in their vocabulary. The everyday are often quite short words, often Anglo-Saxon words in their origin, words that have been part of English for 1,000-plus years, albeit that there may have been some changes in their spelling and pronunciation, but these are words that we have a long relationship with as English speakers. In order to succeed academically though students need to cross what researcher David Corson referred to as the Lexical Bar. So, they need to move on from Tier 1 words and master Tier 2, more literate, complex words that often have a Greco-Latin derivation. Many of those words came into English, of course, via French after the Norman invasion in 1066. That's very important historical context for teachers in terms of understanding how we came to have the spoken language that we have and also the writing system that we have. And, of course, words have come in from other languages, Arabic, Hindu, Urdu as well.

So, I think we need to be thinking about, I often in my presentations have two circles, oral languages on the left and reading proficiency is on the right, and there's an arrow on the top that points from the left to the right and an arrow on the bottom that points from the right to the left. So, initially we know that oral language has to give a big boost to reading so that children can shift from the biologically natural process of oral language to the biologically unnatural process of reading, writing, and spelling. But if we get that right in the first three years of school, then that proficiency in the written domain is then paying back to oral language by further developing children's language skills and giving them higher-order vocabulary, those multimorphemic words that become so important as they move up the year levels and particularly then as they move into the secondary school years. Then, it's easy to think and I think a fallacy to think of decoding as something that's only important in the early years of school, because when older students are exposed to a multimorphemic word they are still decoding, albeit maybe the chunks are a little bit bigger.

I know one author, I think the name is Hegland. Susan Hegland refers to Linguistic LEGOS and I love that idea of understanding how words, word parts, click together and can be added and removed to change meaning. And of course this is all language based but the complexity increases as the students move up through the year levels.

PA:

And what you're really saying is from what I understand, it is those first three years of developing and becoming good readers and students who use that language is so important for the foundation, but it relies on the first three years of life to really develop that language and then, as students move beyond those first three years, it actually is the foundation for extending that use of language as students gained more and more knowledge, so that language development it's not just related to those first three years of the first three years of life, the first three years of school. It goes beyond and can extend to those opportunities to be lifelong learners. You know that's a phrase we like to say often.

PS:

Absolutely and language acquisition is something that extends right across the lifespan. If we were to graph language acquisition across a lifespan, we would see a huge spike, of course, in the first five years of life, because, remarkably, children go from undifferentiated crying at birth to all kinds of connected discourse by about age 4. Now, that is really extraordinary, what's achieved under typical circumstances. So, your average 4 year old can hold a conversation, can talk about things that are immediately present, things that happened in the past, things that are going to happen in the future, things that are entirely imaginary. It's amazing conceptual work. They can use language to tell a story, to give an account of something that happened that they've experienced to somebody who wasn't there. They can use language to produce procedural discourse. To explain to their grandmother how to use an app on an iPad. Yes, I'm talking about myself. My 8-year-old grandson uses procedural discourse to help me understand how to use an app that I've never used before. Children also use procedural discourse when they are explaining the rules of a game, and then at school, of course, expository discourse becomes really important being able to stand up in front of the class and give a little talk about a topic you know often it's dinosaurs in the early years, but a whole range of topics. So, it is quite extraordinary what under typical circumstances children achieve. But it's not enough and that's important that school needs to continue to develop children's language skills, to give them more elaborate vocabulary, the ability to work their way through different sentence structures.

Nancy Hennessy talks about sentence-level troublemakers in her wonderful book, The Reading Comprehension Blueprint. So, she talks about active vs. passive voice, the length of sentences, whether there's subordinate clauses. These are things that come up more in written text than they do in spoken language and the children who are not proficient readers by grade three are just not having the opportunities and not getting that same exposure as the children who are the proficient readers and this becomes harder and harder to backfill over time.

PA:

Yes, definitely. You use some phrases like developing oral pathways and the feedback loop, and all of these phrases bring to mind interaction, right? The interaction between teacher and student, and maybe student and student.

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PA:

What are some practical ways that we can help children to develop those language skills? What can teachers do so that all students learn to read?

PS:

Well, I would refer listeners to the wonderful new book by Sonia Cabell and her co-author (Tricia Zucker). The book's sitting on my floor and I can't see it and I can't remember the co-author. But the book is Strive for Five and it's about striving. It's a guidebook, I suppose, for teachers in particular about how to strive for five more elaborate conversational turns.

We can all be guilty of getting into stereotypical kind of grooves when we interact with children and as parents, if we're a bit distracted we might find ourselves saying huh or and, as they point out in the book, you know, a real conversation killer is saying something like good job, because that inadvertently shuts the conversation down. So, thinking about more purposeful ways of engaging children in longer, more interactive interactions and using open-ended questions. A common trap when we're talking to children is to inadvertently ask two questions: “So, did you have a good day at school today?” “What did you do?” That's two questions and we often as adults ask children questions that we intend to be open-ended, but can, in fact, be answered yes or no. So, we might be hoping for something more elaborate when we say did you have a good day at school today, but that actually invites a yes-no response, and so then we've kind of closed that conversational door. So, using more open-ended invitations like, “Tell me all about ….” “What happened next?”

Or, “I wonder why that happened?” is inviting more elaborate responses and allowing children time to think and formulate. I think as adults we can be a little bit guilty of asking a question, a second's gone by and jumping in and often going on to the next question, and children's information processing is still under construction and they need a little bit longer. And if we keep doing that, we're telling them that their job is just to sit and wait for the next question, that we're not asking them to really share the heavy lifting in the conversation and do a little bit more. The easiest response for all of us is, “I don't know,” or “Yep,” or “Maybe,” but as adults we can get more from children if we use some clever tools, the way that Sonia Cabell and her colleague have outlined in their little book. That doesn't mean it’s at all in a trivial way, but it's a nice, neat, accessible book called Strive for Five.

PA:

So, what we're looking for is elaboration from our students. Tell me more, yeah, what do you think those types of things and offered the idea of a 30-second conversation and how much you can get from students within that time frame, selecting a particular child and say I'm going to have that 30-second conversation with this child today and that child in the afternoon and this child, and that would be wonderful ways for both administrators and teachers of early learners to get that opportunity for that conversation. It's going to help build those reading skills. Thank you so much for that. What are some ways to incorporate explicit teaching and morphology? You mentioned morphology. I want to think about etymology and give a quick definition of what that word means, just to make sure that everyone in our audience understands. In those early stages when we think about systematic phonics instruction.

PS:

Yep. Well, I think etymology, the study of word origins, not entomology, the study of insects, but etymology is profoundly important for teachers in classrooms. Well, certainly in English-speaking countries, where English is the dominant language and the language of instruction. I think it's really unfortunate that this knowledge has not been privileged in teacher-preservice education. It certainly hasn't been privileged in Australian universities and I don't think it has in your country either. But what I see in the work that my colleague, Tanya Serry, and I do in the La Trobe SOLAR Lab, the Science of Language and Reading Lab, in the short courses, for example, that we run, is that the information about the history of English, how we came to have the words in our language that we have because of those historical influences of wars and trade, intermarrying of family houses, even the Black Death, the plague that had a profound impact on the history of the English language. So, I think understanding word origins is a very big step forward for teachers in moving away from this idea, the mistaken idea that English is a random language. And, unfortunately, teachers have been burdened with that rhetoric by the fact that most of our teachers are themselves now products of whole-language classrooms. So, they weren't explicitly taught conventions of spelling and grammar, for example, and then they weren't given that information in their teacher-preservice preparation. So, what becomes clearer for teachers when they start to read and learn in this space is that English is a rule-governed language. The rules and patterns and conventions reflect the languages from which we have borrowed. English has rich borrowings. They're really not borrowings, they're appropriations from other languages. And, of course, when we took those words from other languages, in many cases, we took the spelling and historically we probably maintained the pronunciation for a while. So, I often use the example of the word Knight k-n-i-g-h-t, an Anglo-Saxon word that would have been pronounced something like k-n-e-et. Historically, now the spelling has remained very stable but the pronunciation has shifted and I think that's a big light bulb moment for teachers when they understand.

Probably one of the biggest influences on spelling in relatively recent times was the work done in the United States by Noah Webster in overhauling U.S. spelling. So, as you would be aware, you spell many words differently from how we spell them in Australia. We've stuck more with British spelling conventions. So, removing the U from words like colour and honour, using IZE in words like realize, where we would have ISE, I'm not sure that's necessarily helped students with learning difficulties a lot, I don't know, but that was, I think, for cultural reasons as much as anything else, that Noah Webster wanted to have an American English dictionary to differentiate it after the War of Independence from British English.

But in the main, spelling stays very stable and pronunciation moves around a lot. You know, even within one family some people talk about and this is maybe less so in America, but you'll have examples too. Some people will talk about a shopping mall and others will talk about a shopping mall and in America you would say, I believe, advertisement. We say advertisement. So, same word, but we're putting the stress in different places.

PA:

You say tomato. I say tomatow.

PS:

That's right. We say renaissance, you say renaissance, so pronunciation plays loose. But spelling is much more stable and I think that's a helpful thing for teachers to understand. Even with a simple high-frequency word like said s-a-i-d. If we talk about the fact that the past tense was say and was once pronounced say, suddenly that makes sense. So, we've kept the spelling but the pronunciation has changed and, of course, that leads us then when we're moving into more Tier 2 words.

Although morphology obviously is part of everyday language in the form of plurals and past tense and inflectional endings, I and G endings. Very young children in their oral language are displaying morphological awareness and sensitivity and often we see a lot of confusion with irregular verbs where children will initially use them correctly. They'll say, “I went to the park” and then they learn the ED rule and then they over apply that and they'll say for a little while, “I goed to the park” or “I wented to the park.” So, it takes a little while for children to sort morphology out in their oral language but they have morphological awareness from quite an early age.

PA:

But when they're developing that oral skill it does help support reading.

PS:

Absolutely, absolutely, and we should be pointing those things out in their early text exposure. Once children are proficient with reading, teaching about word basis and affixes, the prefixes, and suffixes and the common, the meanings of common prefixes. So, prefixes do a lot of work in changing meaning. So, “re” means again, you know it actually has its own semantic meaning, “sub” means under. We can go through a long list of prefixes and talk about the actual meanings. In many cases, suffixes work to maintain the grammaticality of a word. So, you know, for changing tense, for example, but it's it helps children enormously if they see the word “submarine” for the first time to know that “sub” means below, and then we can talk about the fact that the word “marine” refers to the ocean and then we can find other ways that that word comes up.

So, morphology and etymology working very closely together, I think, particularly from about grade three onwards. Obviously, we're going to be talking about morphological endings, the common morphological endings, the plural “s,” the present, progressive s, the “ed,” the “ings,” in beginning readers. But the role of morphology in conveying meaning really kicks in, I think, as word length increases and we need to ensure that children can work their way through longer words because that becomes increasingly important. So, many Tier 3 subject-specific words have a number of morphemes.

PA:

Pam, you spoke of both etymology and morphology being a light bulb going off for teachers, but I think it'll be a light bulb going off for students as well. And think about the opportunity for oral engagement with your students as you have these conversations about the history of the word, of the parts of the word, how we increase that oral language for our students.

PS:

Yeah, children love this. They absolutely love discovering what bases mean and then talking about what other words they know that have that same base. So, if we take a base like “tract” and we explain that it means pull, then we've immediately got “tractor.” We've got “retract,” “protract,” “detract,” “contract.” So, there's all kinds of vocabulary work being done around that base. We can be putting those different words in sentences, knitting together the spelling, the pronunciation and the meaning. That's really bringing together the idea of orthographic mapping, how we get these words stored in long-term memory.

Not through teaching this, by talking about the meaning and finding word families and giving students opportunities to be writing sentences that contain these words. And, of course, there's lots of wonderful resources that teachers can use. There's all we've got our wonderful Lyn Stone in Australia and her Language for Life website, Deb Glaser, Marcia Henry. There's lots of wonderful resources. Louisa Moats’ book Speech to Print has quite a lot on morphology and etymology as well. So, there's no shortage of terrific classroom resources that teachers can access. And the fantastic work of the late William Van Cleave, of course, too, comes in here very strongly.

PA:

Definitely. You know it's all about slowing down to explicitly make those valuable connections for students. 

PS:

Absolutely. And, Pam, I'm reminded, too, of a point that William Van Cleave made in a presentation that I attended online, and I think this is a really important point to acknowledge.

He said to teachers don't be anxious about this, you don't have to be a classics scholar to teach etymology and morphology well. You just have to be curious about words and prepared to share your curiosity and model that curiosity with your students. When teachers haven't learned about the history of English, and most teachers haven't studied Latin, for example, then it can seem a bit daunting at first to understand what all of these bases mean and which words are part of which word families and so forth. But there's so many good resources, including the etym online website. So, showing students how to find that information to say, “I don't know what this base means, let's find out.” And, “Oh, OK, that's what it means, oh, that's why it's related to this word.” So, I would really encourage teachers to take themselves on this journey of learning for themselves about words and not feeling, while I didn't learn that myself. So, that's all too hard for me, you know, because this opens doors for everybody. 

PA:

I love the idea of being curious about words and also being very word conscious. You develop that skill as well. 

PS: 

Absolutely. Absolutely. 

PA:

Let's shift a little bit to the social gradient you mentioned a little bit earlier today. Let's think about the early language exposures. Tell us the difference between that receptive skill and the expressive skill that's so important when we're thinking about those interactions.

PS:

It is really important. I'm usually at pains in presentations that I give, to emphasize that oral language is a true channel process. It's easy for us to fall into the trap, when we start to think about a child's language skills, to be only thinking about what that child is producing, what they're saying, what's coming out of their mouths, which, of course, is very important. But we need to be equally curious and concerned about what they're processing and the extent to which they're able to take in and understand and work with different kinds of vocabulary, different sentence structure, figurative and idiomatic language. So, if a child, “Hears come on, shake a leg,” are they going to understand? That's an idiomatic way of saying hurry up. It doesn't mean that we're literally asking them to shake one of their lower limbs. So, we need to get beyond just thinking about expressive language and remembering too that all of us have been socialized to say we understand something. When we don't understand it. We've been socialized to not our head. Sometimes teachers will explain something in a classroom and we've all been guilty of doing this, I'm sure myself included and saying, “OK, does everyone understand?” Well, it's very hard to be the child who puts up their hand and says, “No, I don't understand” and university students don't put up their hand and say, “No, I don't understand.” That would be very unusual.

So, we need to have ways of screening and identifying children whose processing skills may be behind those of their peers. In typically developing children, we expect to see receptive language outstripping expressive language. So, you know, our 9 to 10 months-old babies will, if we say, “Where's mama?” they might turn around and point, but they can't necessarily say the word mama. Or if there's a dog, we might say, “Where's the dog?” and they'll point to the dog, but they're not saying dog. So, receptive language typically outstrips expressive language, but not always. We need to be particularly concerned about children who have receptive language difficulties. That's an early marker of risk in the preschool years too, when children are not even as babies, when they're not following those simple instructions. Then, that's a red flag that we need to be doing something about.

PA:

Children come to us with varying experiences in life. Just thinking about the ability to express themselves and that difference between expressive and receptive language here, those kids who are able to express themselves. We talked about the fact that they will master reading early and have that edge. What do we do for our students? What can educators do to make a lasting impact so that kids have that good start in those first three years that you spoke about?

PS:

Really important question. I wouldn't necessarily assume that children who come to school with well-developed oral language skills will seamlessly make the transition. I often talk metaphorically about getting across the breach. Having well-developed oral language skills is an enormous boost. It's an enormous advantage and a head start.

But there are, unfortunately, children who have well-developed language skills and haven't been exposed to high-quality instruction and so they've got stuck on the breach. They haven't got to the other side. So, this breach has oral language, talking, listening, song, rhyme on the near bank and it has reading, writing, and spelling and access to the academic curriculum on the far bank. Now, there are some children who set out to cross that bridge with well-developed oral language skills. But if they're not exposed in that first three years of school to high-quality instruction that helps them understand how the writing code works, then they're not necessarily going to become proficient readers or they might underperform as readers even though there's nothing wrong with their language skills. So, if we think of the Simple View of Reading, they would score well on a measure of language comprehension, but they're still not doing as well as they need to on getting words off the page.

PA:

So, there's no replacement for that explicit, direct instruction?

PS:

No. Not if we want all children to succeed and I think we all want all children to succeed, so that's like a safety net to me. And if we think in public health terms, there are lots of aspects of our lives where we create safety nets. We build safer cars, we wear seat belts, we have airbags, we have side impact systems, we have proximity detection systems. We do all that we can to prevent collisions from happening and also to lessen the impact of those collisions. That's what it means to think in public health terms. 

I often use the expression, “It's about building better fences at the top of the cliff, not parking ambulances at the bottom of the cliff.” And if we really apply public health thinking to reading, we need to say what are the fences at the top of the cliff? We know that there are many, if you like, disadvantaged children who are likely to fall off the cliff, but there are lots of children from quite affluent middle class families who fall off the cliff too. A cliff is a cliff and we've got limited ambulances. They're very expensive to resource and we can't always get all children back on track very efficiently because of the resourcing issues. So, we need to invest. Yes, it costs money to build those fences at the top of the cliff. We need to invest in those fences.

PA:

Start off with that explicit, direct instruction. We want to get kids off at a good start those first three years. Thank you so much, Dr. Snow, for this enlightening conversation. I really enjoyed this time together with you. Can you tell our listeners about the house diagram that's available to them on our podcast page?

PS:

Sure. So, this is The Language House, which is another metaphor, I suppose a visual metaphor. It's a way of thinking about the role of oral language, where oral language comes from in a developmental sense, and the fact that if we're going to build a house, we have to have secure, strong walls before we can have a roof on the house. So, the solid ground that the house was built on has a social-and-emotional context for early parent/child or caregiver/child interactions and strong, secure attachment, which is not just about attachment, it's not just about infancy, it's about empathy and attunement and self-regulation, and all of those things are very verbal, very language based. Then, we've got the foundations, being the first five years of oral language development in the preschool years, and then we've got the walls. The wall on one side is the ongoing development of oral language and pro-social skills. The wall on the other side is the transition to literacy. So, very sort of broadly, the wall on one side is the ongoing development of those biologically natural skills that need to be further developed at school to get children across Corson's Lexical Bar. And the wall on the left hand side is those biologically secondary or unnatural skills reading, writing, and spelling that children are only really going to learn in most cases if they're explicitly taught and taught well. Then, we've got a big structural beam across the top. That social, emotional regulation, social attunement, social cognition, very important for our ability to fit in, to read the play in everyday interactions, to not cause offense, to not be inadvertently offended. Skills that are often described by employers as soft skills, but of course, they're not soft at all because they're very difficult to teach and they cause a lot of difficulties when they're absent or poorly developed. And then the roof on the house is students' ability to stay connected to school, to achieve academically and to exit school with the opportunity for post-secondary vocational training, higher education, and opportunities to be part of the social and economic mainstream.

And, I always make the point that jobs for unskilled workers are rapidly disappearing. So, we can't afford in our country, you can't afford in your country, to have 15 year olds exiting school with low literacy and, in many cases, numeracy skills as well. We talk about the school-to-prison pipeline. I think there's a hidden form of imprisonment, which is long-term social and economic marginalization. That's not a physical prison with barbed wire around it, but it certainly has metaphorical barbed wire around it, because you're kept out of the mainstream. You're forever dependent on public funds, on welfare services, employment services, public housing. You're more likely to have mental health problems across the lifespan. So, we need to prevent this. Again, it goes back to public health thinking. Really, we need to be preventing this so that we're creating opportunities for full social, economic, and civic engagement.

PA:

Yes, yes, this all sounds like a holistic understanding of our interaction in life and in the world. Dr. Snow, thank you. You can just go to our podcast page and you'll find a link to this free download within the description of Dr. Snow's podcast. It's been an amazing discussion and we appreciate you joining us today. Please tell our listeners where they can learn more about your work.

PS:

Well, thank you Pam. Well, I have a blog called The Snow Report. So, if you google my name and Snow Report, you'll, hopefully, not be directed to a weather report about where you can go skiing. If you google my name in La Trobe University, you'll go to my La Trobe University homepage and the SOLAR lab, the Science of Language and Reading Lab that my colleague, professor Tanya Serry, and I established at La Trobe in 2020. It also has its own website, so, which we're working on further developing, so So, those are probably the three main ways. 

PA:

Wonderful. This is Pam Austin, bringing the best thought leaders in education directly to you.

Narrator:

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