S1-19. The simple view of reading: Laurence Holt

Laurence Holt, language acquisition expert and author of the Learning to Read primers, joins host Susan Lambert to discuss the simple view of reading, how the brain rewires itself to learn how to read, and the importance of background knowledge in language comprehension.

Quotes: 

“Learning how to read is such a pivotal moment in all of K-12.”

“Decoding and language comprehension need to come together in order to become an expert reader.”

Resources:

Learning to Read: Primer Part One

Learning to Read Primer: Part Two

Podcast discussion guide

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Transcript

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Susan Lambert: Hey, listeners. Double up on your professional learning by subscribing to our sister podcast, Beyond My Years. On the new season, host Ana Torres is talking to leading researchers and thinkers like Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of the bestseller Grit, about phone policies and leveraging the science of self-control in the classroom.

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Susan Lambert: These are challenging times and we respect your unwavering commitment to your students. At Amplify, we are working especially hard to support you. And as we all grapple with what it means to focus on the Science of Reading in a new world of remote learning, we're committed to walking with you through the unknown.

Susan Lambert: Welcome to Science of Reading the podcast. I'm your host Susan Lambert. Join us as we talk with experts to explore what it takes to develop joyful, confident, and capable readers.

Today I talk with Laurence Holt, who's the primary author of Learning to Read: A Primer, both Part One and Part Two. These are really handy guides that outline the Science of Reading in ways that make the research really accessible. They include helpful metaphors and supporting illustrations that explain the Science of Reading so clearly. Since these primers have recently gone viral on social media, we thought it would be great to have a conversation with him to hear about the process and get his take on reading science. If you haven't seen these primers, check out the show notes for links. You're going to enjoy them as much as you're going to enjoy this podcast. 

Well, hi, Laurence. Thank you so much for joining us on today's episode.

Laurence Holt: Great to be here.

Susan Lambert: You know, I always like to start out by asking our guests to explain how they got interested in early literacy, which clearly you are, but maybe you can explain what motivated you to author the “prim-ers,” or the “prime-rs.” I don't know if we've ever landed on what they're really called. [Chuckles.]

Laurence Holt: I think it's po-tay-to po-ta-to, and we're going to be saying both of them the whole podcast. Sure, yeah. It’s a funny story, actually. One of the first things I got asked to do when I got interested in K–12 education was [to] transport Catherine Snow, who's a professor at Harvard and one of the world's leading experts on early reading, from a conference where she was a keynote presenter to a meeting. So I was sort of sitting in a yellow cab in Manhattan with Catherine Snow and I said, “You just said at this conference that we have solved the question of how kids learn to read.” And she said, “Yes.” And I said, “I could be wrong. But the data appears to say that there's still a very large number of kids who don't read on time.” And she said, “Oh yes, that's true. What I mean is, we've figured out the research. Exactly how you put that into practice, that’s, isn’t that your problem, Laurence?” I think that’s what she said to me. So, I started reading around this and I was lucky enough to be able to talk to lots of amazing researchers, some of which you've had on the podcast, and just kind of got hooked.

Laurence Holt: And so fast forward, you asked me about the primers, too. A long time after that, I think we realized that there's a lot of new and exciting science in reading—as you've been covering on the podcast. And a lot of it has very practical applications. It's not esoteric. And yet, there are very few places that teachers can go. They obviously don't have time to read all of the research. It's voluminous. Where do they go to get that up-to-date insight and be able to put it in practice in inaccessible terms? And there are some really great books—you've had some of the authors on—but we couldn't find something that was just quick and accessible. And so I started to work on that with a cast of thousands…researchers and designers and you contributed to it, Susan. Thank you. And that's how we wound up with trying to distill all of this into two really short books.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, they're really brilliant actually. They're so accessible and finding their way around the social media world, both for teachers and administrators, and for parents, in some pretty exciting ways.

Laurence Holt: Exactly. That, that was the audience. Obviously teachers, but, as you say, parents and you know, superintendents, maybe secretaries of education I think. We come across a lot of people who, since learning to read is such a pivotal moment in all of K–12, really feels like everybody should have the basics. And so that's what we hope they get when they look at these primers.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, they really provide the basics and they're beautiful too. I mean, not only do they provide a great overview, but you've presented them in a really beautiful way. I must say though, that I think this is the first time I've heard anybody getting interested in early literacy because they helped transport a reading science guru in a yellow cab. So, you win that one. [Laughs] The podcast is really about the Science of Reading, just like the primers. They're all about the Science of Reading. And so I wonder if you can help us to understand what the Science of Reading is. Where did it come from? What's the high level or overview? And then maybe we'll dig in a little deeper.

Laurence Holt: Wow. Don’t know where to start with that one. Should we go, I mean, is the Simple View of Reading something you've covered on the podcast?

Susan Lambert: We actually have not, and so it would be great if you could talk a little bit about that, just in terms of structure.

Laurence Holt: Yeah. This is such a great way in, I find, for people who are starting to come to grips with the whole topic. Something called the “Simple View of Reading.” It's an actual research paper that was published back in the day and it attempts to, I think it does a really good job of, just making the basic idea of what happens when you are reading something clear. And basically it says there are two things that happen: One is you have to take these arbitrary symbols that are on the page and convert them into sound: speech, basically. And then the second thing that happens is you take that speech, the language, and you make sense of it. And so you can think of those two. Now, when you are reading, both of those are going on so quickly and so seamlessly, you don't really stop to think about what's happening. But if you are five years old, your language is strong, right? You can talk; you can understand; but you don't actually have the first part, which is translating these symbols into speech. So that's where you are going to get a lot of progress if you focus on that. And so just to sort of give an example about how these two parts are different…So I have something in front of me here I'm going to read. Here we go: “Factum fieri infectum non potus.” So I did, I think, a reasonable job of getting the symbols off the page into speech there. Have you any idea? I don't know what I'm talking about.

Susan Lambert: I have no idea.

Laurence Holt: Despite several years of Mr. Grasby trying to teach me Latin, I actually don’t know what that says. So in other words, I have the first part of the Simple View of Reading. I have the decoding part, but I don't have the language. If you are five years old, very often, it's the other way around. You have the language, but you don't have the decoding. And so the Simple View of Reading says let's think about these two separate pieces and what it takes to become a strong reader. Now it's obviously a very, very simplified model and people, and indeed, in the primer, we go from there and we put much more flesh on those bones. But it's just an easy way to kind of grasp the big idea.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. And made many people know Scarborough and that representation of it.

Laurence Holt: Yeah, huge fan of Scarborough—which, just for people who haven't heard it, and again, it's in the primer—is it takes those two aspects: the decoding and then the language, and [it] breaks them down into a total of like eight strands. And then, you know, those are the strands that you have to weave together to be an expert reader. And it's really amazing, but when you think about it, the kind of reading that you can now do is an amazing virtuoso performance. And from the point of view of a little kiddo, it's actually the biggest chunk of learning that they're going to do for you that they've never been faced with. It takes multiple years and it's a big undertaking. So they're going to, you know, they're going to need time; they're going to need a lot of support, and it's no wonder that it takes a while.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, for sure. And with that, maybe we can just start to dive into the word recognition part or that decoding part of Scarborough, and just talk about what has to happen in learning the English code. I mean, it seems like it's a rather complicated process, and it seems like English can be a little bit overwhelming. So what's that all about?

Laurence Holt: Yes, I blame the English for this. [Chuckles] Definitely. The language. So written English, English spelling, is just what we call “not transparent.” And so to explain that, a “transparent language” is one in which as you are decoding, the sounds of each letter are almost always the same. So Italian for instance, or Spanish, or Finnish, as soon as you've figured out that the letter “a” makes that “aaaa” sound, you're good to go. In English, that is not the case. It doesn't always make the same sound. And my favorite example of this actually is “o-u-g-h.” So “o-u-g-h” in “cough” makes the sound “off.” In “though” it makes a completely different sound, exactly the same spelling. And there are actually six different—in English—six different sounds that those four letters can make. Maybe we'll leave it as an exercise for listeners to figure out the others.

Susan Lambert: Scavenger hunt!

Laurence Holt: Yep! But, if you are first encountering that—and of course none of us remember when we were first encountering that—but if you spend time with kids who are doing it, it's kind of annoying, right? Like, how many different ways have you guys come up with to make these four letters have different sounds? And you just, there's nothing for it, you just have to learn them. And so someone has to tell you. You’re not going to get it from a picture. Fortunately it's not as bad as that; that's a particularly egregious example, but actually it's not, you know, most of English, if you know the most common sounds for letters and digraphs, like “sh,” you're in pretty good shape. But there are a lot of oddities that don't appear in other languages. So we just have to work harder in English.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. And that's a really interesting example that you described, “cough” and “though.” I've never quite thought about it like that until right now. About if we just introduced one of those, like the “off” and kids went to apply it, it just, well, it would kind of put them in really bad places in terms of reading comprehension. Much less the code.

Laurence Holt: Exactly. One of the things you start to see is, kids realize that, “Okay, there may be multiple ways to pronounce this.” And they'll try—what you hope they do—is they try each of them and then realize, “Oh yeah, ‘cough.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a word. Whereas, ‘co-oh,’ that's not a word.” And so this is a link and we will maybe come back to this too, do they have the vocabulary?

Susan Lambert: That makes sense and yes, we will come back to that. So I know that the explicit nature of this instruction is really important for kids when they're young. There's some really important work that's going on inside of the brain when this happens. Can you tell us a little bit about that, about the rewiring and what's going on? 

Laurence Holt: Yeah, this is really fascinating and there's a whole sequence in the first primer where we actually show the brain images that have really only [become] available in the last couple decades that actually show what's going on in real time. And here's a way to think about it. So we talked before about the Simple View of Reading and these two aspects: one, understanding language; the other decoding—getting this script off the page. Understanding language, just about everybody figures out how to talk and understand. That is, you're pre-wired for that. Your brain has that at birth. You've obviously got to learn whichever particular language it is that you are surrounded by, but you get it. Decoding though, is artificial; humans invented it, and not that long ago, only about five, 6,000 years ago. So back on the Savannah plain a hundred thousand years ago, nobody was reading. There was nothing to read. There were no signs and there were no books. So we've had to learn that in a more artificial way. And specifically what we do is we are trying to connect the visual part of the brain, which happens to be right at the back, to the auditory—or the fancy word is “phonological”—part of the brain, which is on the left hand side and further forward. But you can actually see if you scan brains, a non-reader will look at symbols on a page and the back of the brain, the visual part, is lighting up, but the speech part doesn't light up. Whereas [in] a reader, the connection will flow through from the visual at the back to the speech part. And there's one little area of the brain that's been identified that is really doing the lifting. And you can see as readers get stronger, you can actually see it activate more. So we know now exactly what's going on. You're essentially rewiring part of your brain to be able to do this unnatural act of reading, and that's why it takes a while.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, it's so fascinating, well, to think about, number one, how amazing our brains are that we can actually make that connection happen, but also that we need to make that connection happen. We need to. And I think that part of the brain is the visual word form area. Do I have that right? 

Laurence Holt: That is exactly it. You do.

Susan Lambert: And the primer does a really good job of walking through that and describing what has to happen with that. Maybe there's an easy way. Can you explain an easy way without using the images?

Laurence Holt: Yes. Podcasts are perfectly designed for this kind of situation, aren't they? [Laughing.] Well, you mean in terms of actually what's going on with the activation in the brain?

Susan Lambert: Yeah. Actually, what is going on with that activation?

Laurence Holt: So I think the best way to sort of visualize it is when you are talking or listening to, not reading. Then, if I took a photo, not a photo, an image of your brain, and on the left hand side about the middle of your temple, you would see that area activate. That's the speech area. It's incredibly sophisticated and complicated and it's evolved over gazillions of years.

Susan Lambert: And that's the part that's there all the time. That's the part that's the natural development of language?

Laurence Holt: Correct. Yeah. You should know, full disclosure: I'm not a neuroscientist. You've had neuroscientists on before, though, haven’t you?

Susan Lambert: Yes! Bruce. Bruce McCandliss will help us with that.

Laurence Holt: He is an amazing neuroscientist at Stanford and he helped us get this right in the primer. So I'm doing the lay person's version, but it's kind of enough to understand what's going on. So there's that area that is the speech area. And that's separate from the visual area of the brain, which is one of the most studied areas of the brain, which is right at the back. A bit weird, it's like a long way from your eyes, but that's just how the whole thing got connected together. And so when you are reading, it obviously starts with the visual recognition and that is then triggering sounds. So if you read “a-t” you are automatically triggering the sounds “a” “t.” In fact, if you've seen that word before, it triggers the word straight away, “at,” and then triggers all of the speech parts of the brain that make sense of that word and, indeed, the sentence. And, in fact, it happens so fast that you can now read at a very fast rate, whereas when you were four or five, it was sort of painfully slow. And this is, of course, how anything becomes automatic, like riding a bike, or juggling, or any skill like that. You start off very slow and clunky and you gradually get faster and faster until you have read these words so many times that it just happens in a split second. And in fact, it's interesting, you can't stop yourself. If I showed you the word elephant, you actually can't stop thinking…and there's no way to look at that and not think “elephant.” So it just happens. It's magical. But it actually took a lot of hard work to make those connections, so, flowing through from that visual area at the back to the visual word form area that you mentioned, which is kind of the switchboard that then connects out to speech. And so right there are the two areas of the Simple View of Reading. The first one being the visual decoding and the second one, all that you already know about language and speech and understanding.

Susan Lambert: And then all of a sudden it makes a connection after some hard work. And just to give a plug for the Bruce McCandliss episode of the podcast, he actually does go into some detail about why our brains do better with sort of starting from the discreet sounds or phonemes and then going to the whole word, rather than starting with the whole word. That actually the connection needs to come from the sound first rather than at the word level.

Laurence Holt: Ah, that's great. I can't wait to hear that. The simple version of that that he's told me is if you think about, if you had to recognize each word separately, which in some languages—Chinese is, this is an oversimplification—but Chinese is one of them where you essentially have to learn each word separately. You've got 50,000 words to learn. If you are instead just recognizing the letters and translating them into sounds, then you've got far, far fewer. So it's just a much more efficient system once you've learned it.

Susan Lambert: It makes total sense. And again, you know that, well, this is just really interesting to me. Once you become a proficient reader and you can see the word “elephant” and you have a strong vocabulary, it's really difficult to go back and unweave those threads. Sort of go backwards to understand what's actually happening in your brain. So this neuroscience, that really makes it come alive. It's so fascinating.

Laurence Holt: I think that's a really great point, that it's so long since we were, you know, slow at reading any of that. It's tough to remember just how much effort it took, but we all did really work hard to get there. So, well done.

Susan Lambert: Thank you. Well, hey, how about if we make a switch now to talk about the other side, this sort of language comprehension idea. And maybe we can start with a little bit about the importance of background knowledge as it relates to language comprehension.

Laurence Holt: Yeah. This is really fascinating and again, something that sort of wasn't known until fairly recently. So obviously, language: There's a big part of it that is vocabulary and syntax. But I'm going to take us, if you'll allow me to, to Norway, Wisconsin, back in the late 80s. Maybe not that far from where you are now, I'm not sure, where there's a really fascinating experiment that took place that changed our view of what it really means to comprehend when reading. What happened was two researchers got a set of middle school kids and they read them a passage. Or no, they didn't read it. The kids themselves read a passage on baseball, a sort of baseball. Now, I should say I don't know a lot about baseball. Let me…so for instance: “Churniak swings and hits a slow bouncing ball toward the shortstop. Haley comes in, fields it, and throws to first, but too late.” So, okay. So they would read a whole passage like that and then they were asked to reenact that scene with a little baseball toy set up. And the researchers would then score how good of a job did they do in reenacting what they just read.

In other words, it's a measure of comprehension, and what they were looking to answer was, “Who does best?” Is it kids who are strong readers who have a general ability to read anything? Or so they thought. Or is it kids who know a lot about baseball? Or does it not make a difference? So you're reading this baseball passage; you're reenacting it. Who do you think is going to do better? And people should feel free to pause the podcast and think. What do you think's going to happen there? And I'll tell you. What it turned out was that the kids who were best at basic reading comprehension for these passages were actually the kids with good baseball knowledge. Kids who were strong readers, if they didn't know enough about baseball, were not very good. So it turned out, really, that they are strong readers, but it depends what they're reading. And I would say I think I'm a strong reader, but I'm not a strong reader of quantum mechanics papers. Right? It depends on what you're reading. And, specifically what they found was, there's some background knowledge. Well, what do we mean by that? Well, there's concepts. There's just having been exposed to the space, there's obviously vocabulary. There's connections between the words and the ideas. And there's just a level of comfort and confidence in a particular topic. And if you have that, you will be a stronger reader than if not. Now, that was kind of new. And maybe we'll go on, I'll pause, but you know, there are some pretty big implications. I know you've done a lot of work and thinking in this space.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. And what's interesting is not only are the primers making it around social media, this baseball study is making it around again, too, just as a reminder of the importance of background knowledge. And what's so interesting is when you use an example, like when you used your own personal example, right? So if I was trying to engage in a text on string theory, I'd be a horrible reader, but if I'm reading about early reading, for example, I'm much better. And I think as adults we get that, but we've forgotten to apply that or maybe we just haven't thought to apply that to students.

Laurence Holt: Exactly. We once did a fun experiment with teachers where we asked them to read. So it wasn't quantum mechanics, but it was something like that. And then [we] asked them what the main idea was. And of course they all struggled to come out with what the main idea was. So we said, “Ah, obviously we need more training on main idea.” And they said, “No. No, we don't. We just didn't know what that passage was about.” Aha. It's background knowledge.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. And it's amazing. It makes a difference, doesn't it? When you know something. It's the idea that knowledge builds on knowledge. And, I know things have happened, like kids don't have access to that kind of content now. So how in the world do we help them build their background knowledge when it comes to that?

Laurence Holt: Yeah. I mean, I think the classroom implications for this are enormous. So if you think about what's going to happen on the test, on a state test or an SAT passage, or just in real life if you are reading…if you're faced with a passage on animal ecosystems, which by the way, we did a survey and that's the number one topic that occurs in ELA state [testing].

Susan Lambert: Interesting. 

Laurence Holt: Yeah. So if you don't know much about that, then just like the strong readers who didn't know about baseball, you're disadvantaged. Where similarly, if there's a passage on Greek myths and you just have never been exposed to that, then it's harder. So the question arises, how can we build that kind of knowledge in students? Now it turns out, back in the day that kind of thing did actually used to get taught in elementary schools [in] science and social studies. Now, a recent survey said that the amount of science that's taught in elementary classrooms is about 20 minutes a day or less. And so, that is putting kids at a disadvantage. And it's an equity issue because there are many kids who maybe are going to museums or their parents are reading nonfiction books to them, or they just sort of got interested in it. And so they now have a real advantage over other kids who just didn't get to hear about that. So the short answer is we have to put that knowledge instruction back into the classroom. And there are even some curricula that teach reading that do it simultaneously with teaching that background knowledge, the leading one being Core Knowledge Language Arts, which I know you know a lot about, Susan. How many kids in the U.S. now are learning from that curriculum? Do you know?

Susan Lambert: Oh! Oh man, maybe a million students? We’re really close to a million students, yeah.

Laurence Holt: So it's becoming real, it's a real thing. And I think the results, you could talk about this or point people to it, but it really translates into more success. In fact, Dan Willingham, who's a professor at the University of Virginia, puts it this way. He said, “Reading tests are knowledge tests in disguise.”

Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, Natalie Wexler has, as you know, recently highlighted this in her book. And, well, she was on the very first episode of our podcast, but she actually went in and did some classroom observations and watched what happened in classrooms that were building background knowledge versus classrooms that were doing some sort of strategy kind of instruction. And it's like, really similar to what you said. If you don't have the background knowledge to actually be able to know what the text is about, you're really hard pressed to find the main idea.

Laurence Holt: Right. All the strategy training that you want is not going to make a difference if you actually don’t know what the topic is.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. So that has implications for the way we instruct students in the classroom as it relates to ELA and how we think about comprehension, I think. So, you know, when we talk about that language side of the house too, and when we know that we have the language of a topic, you also have vocabulary about a topic. So how is it then that our brains actually handle this idea of vocabulary? Because as I'm learning more and more about it, or… learning about baseball, let's say, I'm learning the vocabulary words that are related to baseball. And so, how do we sort of categorize that in our brains?

Laurence Holt: Yeah, so vocabulary is another huge and fascinating topic. And again, what we were trying to do in the thinking about this for the primer was, what are the big takeaways? And one of the big takeaways we discovered for thinking about how kids learn vocabulary and we learn vocabulary is, you might think it's a bit like a list, like a dictionary, and you're just kind of slotting the next word in as you learn it. But actually, that's not how it works at all. It’s, in fact, a web; it's a network. Which makes sense because that's actually how the brain is architected. So when you learn a new word, you will learn it far better if the other words that it's related to are already known to you. Because then you're fitting it into a preexisting web and it has very strong connections and you'll be able to make sense of it. And so that tells us we want to teach words that are, if possible, in clusters, and make sure when we teach them, we relate them to synonyms, but also antonyms, and any other concepts. So an example would be words like “need,” “want,” “desire,” “yearn,” “hanker,” “aspire.” Those are related. So if…we come across “hanker” in a book, I need to be mindful that what I'm trying to do is put that into this preexisting web you have. And the better network you already have, the easier it is for you to learn. So there's this kind of “rich get richer” thing going on with the vocabulary. There's no shortcut. It's just, there's just a lot of it. And…one of the best ways to be building those webs is to read. And to discuss the reading with people. And to stop when you don't understand the word and either figure it out or do something crazy, like actually look it up and find out what it means. And that's going to be a much stronger way for you then to kind of gradually build out all of these networks.

Susan Lambert: So it's a different kind of vocabulary instruction, different than, “Hey, here's the six words that we're going to look up in the dictionary before we start to read.” Rather, it's expanding your knowledge and making deeper connections, then, between words.

Laurence Holt: Exactly. Yeah. The word of the day, and I'm going to post it up here, obviously there's value to that, but it's much more powerful, according to the research, if you can teach a network of related words. Now of course that comes right back to knowledge. If we're talking about animal ecosystems, there's a vocabulary right there and it all fits together and makes sense. That's the time to be teaching it.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, that makes sense. And when we're talking about words and vocabulary words—but maybe words just in general, there's this idea. So right now, we have this idea, I think, that comprehension is only what you do after you're done reading. So, “Think about what the author said. Summarize this idea. Respond to some question after your reading.” But there's also a part of comprehension that's really at the sentence level—that you actually have to understand how words and sentences make sense. Is that right?

Laurence Holt: That's exactly right. And that’s really new, our understanding of exactly what's going on—not what's going on when we understand the sentence level, but how you learn that. And what it is that beginning readers struggle with, which, again, is tough for us to remember. Now, I, and I think you've had, there's a lot in the primer on this and, I think you've had a podcast dedicated to this topic. Is that right?

Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, in our episode with Anne Lucas, she talks a lot about that. But maybe you can give us an example of what this might look like for the learner.

Laurence Holt: Sure. Well, so one big part of it is inference. So, to give an example, “Carla forgot her umbrella and got very wet today.” Now, you and I know the connection; there's two separate statements there. “She forgot her umbrella.” “She got wet.” You and I know very straightforwardly that when you forget your umbrella and it rains, you're going to get wet. So the piece that got alighted over, in fact got basically left out of the sentence, was that it rained. And you have to infer that. That's a really simple example. And most kids would get that too. But writers do this all the time. In fact, if they didn't leave things like that, you'd have to say, “Carla forgot her umbrella. And then it rained. And then she got wet today.” And it's horrible and boring. So they leave things out, they make assumptions about what you're going to be able to infer. And beginning readers—who are still, remember, spending a lot of cycles connecting the symbols to the sounds and sort of piecing together the sentence—they don't have a lot of processing left over to fill in these inference gaps. And so they may just not make the inference, in which case they've missed the whole point of what's going on.

Susan Lambert: Right, right. Yeah.

Laurence Holt: So this is trainable. You can, we found, and there are studies that show, that again, it comes down to practice. Firstly, the better, the stronger you are at decoding, the more processing power you have left over to start making gap-filling inferences. But also just getting practice and having someone point out and stop and say, “Hey, what happened there? How did she get wet?” so that you're building the habit of making that inference.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. Well, this has been a really great overview of the Simple View of Reading, or what it takes to become a proficient reader. I think I've heard before that it's sort of like a lockbox that needs two keys. I think maybe that's in the primer as well? So, Laurence, again, I just really want to thank you for being here, for walking us through this. And of course, I'm wondering if you could leave us with something that you think is really important for folks to take away from today's episode.

Laurence Holt: Yeah, thank you so much for giving me this chance as well, Susan. I think of coming to this topic originally myself and it is huge. There's probably more research on early reading than anything else in education. In fact, I'm sure that's the case. So as a practitioner or as a parent, it can look overwhelming. And my message would be, like a lot of things in life that look overwhelming, there are some elements you can learn very quickly that actually are very accessible, and they're ideas that make intuitive sense and that are immediately practical and that you can start putting to use. And so I would say do not worry about the size at the top. You have to find a way in, and the primer and these podcasts are great ways to just start getting to grips of background knowledge, the big ideas like background knowledge that we talked about, and the oddities of English spelling. And so dive in and you'll find it fascinating. And it’s going to be life changing for lots of people.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. And we just want to thank you again for offering these great primers that help people actually get into it without feeling too overwhelmed. So thanks again for being here. We really appreciate it. And we will link our listeners to these primers in our show notes.

Laurence Holt: Thank you so much. I had a blast.

Susan Lambert: We are so grateful to our amazing guest today, and to all of you making a difference in the lives of students every single day. Be sure to check the show notes for resource links from today's podcast, and we want to hear your stories and successes. Follow us on Facebook at Science of Reading: The Community, or if you're looking to help implement the Science of Reading, send an email to SoRmatters@amplify.com. Tell us what guests you think we should book or tell us about the research that really excites you. And be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, I'm Susan Lambert.

Susan Lambert: Hey listeners, we've got a lot more resources to help you support students when it comes to dyslexia. Get your free Dyslexia Support Power Pack now at our accompanying professional learning page, amplify.com/SoRessentials. This bundle includes our dyslexia toolkit, Dyslexia Fact Versus Fiction ebook, and dyslexia infographic, all designed to empower you with the knowledge and tools to truly make a difference. Again, you can get that and other free resources at amplify.com/SoRessentials.