When kids can’t parse the words on the page, they can’t read.
It’s a simple idea, but one that’s sparked a nationwide movement to bring the “science of reading” to United States classrooms, where for decades many students weren’t getting the instruction they needed to decode words.
But as schools reshape reading to put more emphasis on cracking the code of written text, some experts warn it’s important they don’t neglect its counterpart—spoken language.
At the annual conference of the Reading League here this week, researchers in early reading instruction emphasized the predictive power of children’s oral-language ability on their future literacy achievement, and outlined structured approaches teachers can use to support its development in the classroom.
As the science of reading movement has spread, some in the field have started referring to oral language as the “6th pillar” of reading, adding it to the five essential components of reading instruction identified in the 2000 report of the National Reading Panel, said Pamela Snow, a professor of cognitive psychology at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia, during a virtual presentation at the conference. (Per the report, the five components include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.)
It’s a welcome acknowledgement of oral language’s importance, but also a “category error,” Snow said. Oral-language development underpins, and happens alongside, all the other processes of reading, she said—it’s essential to becoming a strong reader and writer.
Students need to practice using language in class, but developing kids’ skills in this area requires intentional prompts, questions, and conversational moves from teachers, too, said Jill Pentimonti, the director of the Early Learning Foundations Lab at the University of Notre Dame, during a session at the conference.
“Being really thoughtful about the language you’re using in classrooms can be a superpower,” she said.
Why oral language is crucial
Oral language is a broad umbrella, one that encompasses foundational skills that begin in the first years of life—like pronouncing syllables and sounds—and more complex conversational abilities, like telling a story with several events in a coherent narrative or knowing and using academic vocabulary.
All of these skills support children’s ability to comprehend written text, from decoding words to understanding the structure of a text, said Lucy Hart Paulson, a literacy specialist and co-author on the professional development program LETRS for Early Childhood Educators, during a presentation.
The talk children engage in during their early years could have long-lasting ripple effects on their later literacy skills, she said, citing research that found children who took more conversational turns with adults at home had more gray matter in the area of the brain associated with language comprehension than children who engaged in shorter conversational back-and-forths.
“It takes time for language to grow,” said Sonia Cabell, a professor of reading education at Florida State University, during a keynote presentation on Friday.
Teachers should be intentionally building students’ language, specifically their academic language, starting in the earliest grades, she said.
These conversations should maintain one topic over multiple turns between the teacher and the student, elicit student talk through open-ended questions, and expand on what kids are saying, Cabell said.
When teachers use more detailed language, students do, too. Cabell referenced a 2013 study, from her and her colleagues, that found preschool teachers who used complex syntax were more likely to have their students respond to them with similarly complex syntax.
How teachers can develop students’ oral language skills
Presenters highlighted a few specific routines teachers can use to integrate this language-development work into their lesson.
Cabell discussed “Strive for 5,” a framework that asks teachers to extend students’ responses with comments and questions for a total of at least five conversational turns.
Fostering these deeper conversations can also grow students’ content knowledge, Cabell said. She gave an example of a classroom learning about plants.
Elementary schoolers might learn about how the stem, roots, and seeds of a plant work together to keep the plant alive. When children are asked open-ended questions about the topic (such as: What do the parts of a plant do? What do sunflowers need to grow?) they have the opportunity to recall and use new knowledge and vocabulary.
Pentimonti presented a research-validated framework to assess the quality of teacher talk during read-alouds, and a program based on the framework that she developed with colleagues, called TeacherRead.
The program’s lesson guides include prompts that teachers can use to elicit students’ thinking, respond to their ideas and questions, and extend their answers.
An initial evaluation of the approach in New York City’s pre-K program found that students randomly assigned to classrooms where teachers used the method had stronger early language and literacy skills than students assigned to business-as-usual classrooms.
In developing TeacherRead, Pentimonti wanted to create something teachers could use to tweak what they were already doing, rather than overhauling their lessons, she said.
The aim, she added, was to say, “You’re doing shared book reading, it’s great! Here’s a scope and sequence, and a couple of suggestions.”
