Science of Reading: The Podcast

S9 E13: Empowering instruction through mental models, with Young-Suk Grace Kim, Ed.D.

• Amplify Education • Season 9 • Episode 13

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by Young-Suk Grace Kim, a professor at University of California at Irvine's School of Education. Dr. Kim begins by defining a theoretical model, outlining its value to teachers as it pertains to literacy instruction. She describes her own interactive dynamic literacy (IDL) model, which seeks to more fully explain reading and writing connections. Dr. Kim emphasizes how reading and writing function as a powerful and closely related system, and examines how this system interacts with developmental phases, linguistic grain size, and reading and writing difficulties, including dyslexia. After navigating the complexities of this conversation, Susan ends the episode by sharing her unique insights and takeaways from her time with Dr. Kim.

Show notes:

Quotes:

“Lower order skills are necessary for higher order skills; that means skills and knowledge have a series of causal effects. So if you flip it the other way, any challenges or weaknesses in lower order skills, it's going to have a series of impacts on higher order skills.” —Young-Suk Grace Kim, Ed.D.

“Theory is an explanation about how things work. …It's a structured framework, a mental framework, that helps us explain, and predict, and understand phenomena.” —Young-Suk Grace Kim, Ed.D.

“If an educator goes to a professional development and learns about something like phoneme awareness…but you don't have a framework in which to attach it, you can sort of go down a rabbit trail on one thing instead of thinking about how it relates to the whole.” —Susan Lambert

Episode timestamps*
03:00 Introduction: Who is Young-Suk Grace Kim?
05:00: Defining a theoretical model
07:00 Origins of Young-Suk’s model
08:00 Interactive Dynamic Literacy Model Overview
14:00 Why interactive and why dynamic
15:00 Hierarchical relations between low order skills and high order skills
18:00 Breaking down “Interactive”
19:00 Young-Suk’s ideal classroom
20:00 Breaking down “Dynamic”
21:00 Linguistic grain size
22:00 Why linguistic grain size matters for teachers
26:00 Why word reading and spelling are more strongly related than reading comprehension and writing composition
29:00 Dynamic relationship of developmental phases
30:00 Measuring reading and writing
33:00 Interactive Dynamic Literacy Model summarized
35:00 Understanding reading and writing difficulty, including dyslexia
42:00 Dr. Kim’s Final Thoughts
44:00 Susan’s takeaways from the conversation
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

A lot of educators understand that reading and writing are related, but I think as educators, we need to have really precise understanding about it. So we need to have a good mental model about how they're related and why they're related.

Susan Lambert:

This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. What is a theoretical model and how can a theoretical model be useful to practitioners? That's at the heart of today's conversation with Dr. Young-Suk Grace Kim, a former classroom teacher who's now a professor at the School of Education at the University of California at Irvine. Dr. Kim has developed the interactive dynamic literacy model, all about how and why reading and writing are related. Throughout this three-part writing miniseries, we've been building to this episode and we're now ready to unpack Dr. Kim's model for explaining the connection between reading and writing. A heads up. Dr. Kim is going to use the analogy of a house to describe the reading-writing relationship. As she'll mention, there's actually a great visual of this in one of her papers, which we've linked in the show notes. It's called Enhancing Reading and Writing Skills through Systematically Integrated Instruction. Consider checking that out before or while listening to this conversation. Also, we're trying out a brand new segment. After I hang up with Dr. Kim, I'm going to briefly share some of my biggest learnings and takeaways from the conversation. Stick around until the end to hear that. Now let's get to the conversation. Well, I am so excited to have you join us on today's episode. So I have here Dr. Young-Suk Grace Kim. Thank you so much for joining us, Young.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Well, thank you so much for having me, <laugh>,

Susan Lambert:

And we would love, before we dive into our topic, which is going to be really exciting and I think our listeners are really going to love it, I would love if you could tell us a little bit about your journey into literacy and how you actually made it to be starting to think about, you know, reading and writing connections.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Sure. I was a classroom teacher in a bilingual program in San Francisco back in the '90s, and I noticed differences in children's language and reading skills. And I got very curious about the different patterns that I was noticing among students. So I decided to study this in a doctoral program with a focus on language and literacy development. In terms of specifically reading and writing connections, I worked on a reading development piece and I also, concurrently was looking at writing development and it was very clear that they were related, so I decided to think deeply about it.

Susan Lambert:

Hmm , that's awesome. What grade did you teach when you were in the classroom?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

So I taught in high school and I also taught , that was not a bilingual program, but in the bilingual program I taught in second grade.

Susan Lambert:

Oh, wow. That's great. <laugh> . So really aware of how this thing called literacy developed in second grade.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Absolutely. I mean, I taught also in kindergarten as well, it was actually during the summertime, but definitely , in terms of my elementary school teaching, it was really primary grade levels.

Susan Lambert:

Mm- hmm <affirmative> . That's awesome. It's really great to hear those kinds of stories because we don't always know, and our listeners don't always know sort of your path to getting to this research place. But knowing that you've sat in that seat of a classroom teacher, particularly in the early grades , that's really exciting. So thank you for sharing that. So you have developed a really important model representing reading and writing connections. I love this model. I have learned so much from the work that you've done with this. But before we really talk about that model, I would love if you could help our listeners understand what a theoretical model is, 'cause that's what you have as a theoretical model. Help us understand what that means and why these models are important.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Yeah, that's a really good question. And I say this because you know, many people do not see the relevance of theory into, I guess, day-to-day life. Simply put, theory is an explanation about how things work. If I say it a little bit more formally, it's a structured framework, a mental framework, that helps us explain and predict and understand phenomena. And in our case, it's phenomena at the phenomena or how students learn to read, how they learn to write.

Susan Lambert:

Okay . And so these models are important. How can teachers think about using these models then, or think about these models?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Sure. So theories or theoretical models matter because they offer insights into the processes operating in the writing and the development, as well as the factors that contribute to the development of reading and writing skills, and/or difficulties in development. And teachers' understanding of this will empower them to make decisions about instructional approaches, and that includes assessment and instruction. So always, when I think about theory, I think of a triangle of theory, assessment, and instruction, because theory informs about what to assess, what to teach, and how to teach, and how to assess.

Susan Lambert:

Hmm . And then do they have a feedback loop in there too? So I'm assuming ...there's a ...

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Absolutely. Exactly. It's always two-way direction. So theory informs teaching and you know, teaching practice also informs theory as well. And also teaching and assessment informs each other as well.

Susan Lambert:

So I'm gonna take this back to your early experiences. So, you said that you were noticing things about reading and writing, you were learning things about the connection between reading and writing. How does one actually, or maybe how did you think about, "Oh, this is a theory that I'm gonna put into a model and put on paper." How did that happen for you?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Going back to my early experience of teaching in a bilingual program, one thing that I noticed was students' performance in L2, which was English, right? For many of them , it was not for all, but for many it was English. And it seemed that their L2 reading and writing seemed to really rely on or as a function of their L1 literacy skills. So I thought, hmm, it seems that they're related, but exactly how are they related and why are they related? I was very curious when it comes to reading and writing relations. I think we have to, actually, this will be really helpful if I actually unpack the model a little bit.

Susan Lambert:

Perfect. So let's talk about this model. And for our listeners, when you were talking about L1 and L2, that's first language and second language. Just to be clear about that.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

That's correct. Thank you, <laugh> .

Susan Lambert:

You're welcome. And so your theoretical model is called the dynamic interactive model, is that right?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

It's actually interactive dynamic literacy model.

Susan Lambert:

<laugh> , I got it backwards. Okay.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

You got both components. <Laugh>

Susan Lambert:

So we'll talk about the interactive dynamic model. So, tell us all about this model. How did you develop it? Anything you wanna unpack with this that you think is important for us to understand?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Sure. So this is my effort to explain reading and writing connections. And , reading and writing connections have been recognized before, and I think it's also intuitive. People kind of know that, oh, they're related, but exactly how are they related has not been examined systematically or comprehensively. So this is my attempt to explain why reading and writing are related and how they're related. Right? So in terms of why, reading and writing are related because they draw on shared component skills and knowledge. Essentially what that means is that they draw on the same skills. There's exception, but I'll go over that. So allow me to go over skills and knowledge that are shared across reading and writing. And when I do that, instead of listing them, I'm kind of borrowing the analogy of building a house. Think about a house.

Susan Lambert:

Okay.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

And I published this, and I'll share the publication, and so listeners can feel free to download it as they listen to this. So, imagine a house figure, a house with two pillars supporting, right? The roof is reading comprehension and written composition. Right underneath the roof, there's a beam, and the beam is text reading fluency and text writing fluency. And the beam and the roof are supported by two pillars. One pillar is lexical literacy. What I mean by lexical literacy, lexical means word size, right? So that includes the ability to read words. So that's word reading and the ability to spell words, that's spelling, as well as handwriting and keyboarding. That's one pillar. And the other pillar is oral discourse. By oral discourse, I mean listening comprehension and oral composition. It is our ability to listen. Right now, listeners are listening, right? The ability you listen to listen and comprehend it, as well as produce oral text, right? So there are two pillars supporting text reading fluency, text writing fluency, and reading comprehension and written composition. Now, let's think about what skills support the lexical literacy pillar. So the foundational stone , right underneath lexical literacy pillar is what I call code-related emerging literacy skills. That includes knowledge and awareness of orthography, phonology and morphology. So orthography includes our knowledge and awareness of letter names, letter sounds, patterns that are allowed in a particular writing system, right? And phonology is phonological awareness, and morphology is morphological awareness. So those are the supporting skills for lexical literacy skills. Now let's turn to supporting skills for all discourse, right? There's variation in people's ability to comprehend oral text as well as produce. So what explains that, essentially? So one chunk of skills is called higher-order cognition and regulation. So by higher-order cognition, that means our ability to make inferences, understand multiple perspectives—that's perspective-taking and our ability to reason, our ability to set goals, monitor ourselves, and self-reinforce our behaviors to achieve goals. And then right underneath it is what I call foundational language skills. And they include our knowledge of vocabulary words, so grammatical knowledge, right? So those support oral discourse. Now at the very bottom there's more. <Laugh.

Susan Lambert:

Oh, there's more. < Laugh.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Yes. The very bottom, if you wanna think about a basement or something, <laugh> , the very bottom of the foundation of this house is domain-general cognitive skills, or some people call it executive functions. And they include working memory, inhibitory and attentional control, and shifting. And the house figure has two windows. <laugh>.

Susan Lambert:

Wow.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

I know. So reading and writing are complex, so there's more, right? <laugh> So between the two pillars, imagine one window that's close to the lexical literacy pillar. And that's social-emotional aspects, and that includes our motivation, our attitude, interest, and self-concepts of efficacy towards reading and writing. And another window that's close to all discourse side is what I call background knowledge. And that includes our knowledge about content, world knowledge, cultural knowledge, and discourse knowledge. So there's a bunch <laugh>. All these are shared for reading and writing.

Susan Lambert:

It's really interesting because, well, first of all listeners, we will link in the show notes a link to this, so you can actually unpack this, and probably re-listen to this segment with the image in front of you. The words that you chose for your literacy model, why interactive and why dynamic?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Yeah. So in this model, things are related to each other in a very specific way or systematically, right? They're not just random. These pieces that I just talked about and reading and writing are not just randomly related, right? There's a very systematic way they're related. And the first one is, I call it hierarchical relations. That means lower order, some skills are lower order skills. And other skills are higher order skills and lower order skills are necessary. And they are the foundations for higher order skills.

Susan Lambert:

Can you give us an example of some of those lower?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Absolutely. So word reading and spelling are lower order literacy skills, and they're necessary for higher order literacy skills such as reading comprehension and written composition. They're necessary and essential. hierarchical relations apply to other skills, right? Knowledge that is important for reading and writing. For example, think about phonological awareness, autographic awareness, morphological awareness. These are lower order skills that are necessary for word reading and spelling. Another example is vocabulary or a language skill that's lower order language skill and that's necessary for higher order language skill such as listening comprehension and oral composition. So that's hierarchical relations, right? Things build on each other.

Susan Lambert:

Mm-hmm <affirmative>.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

This is important because one consequence of hierarchy correlations is that, you know, because lower order skills are necessary for higher order skills, that means skills and knowledge have a series of kind of causal effects. So if you flip it the other way, any challenges or weaknesses in lower order skills, is gonna have a series of impacts on higher order skills. So let me give you a very specific example. So say for some reason a student has challenges or difficulties with the phonological processing. That means that student is likely to have difficulties in word reading and spelling. If the student experiences difficulties in word reading and spelling, that's gonna impact their text reading fluency and text writing fluency, and it's gonna influence their reading comprehension and written composition.

Susan Lambert:

Mm. Yes.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

So you can think about like from the top to bottom, difficulties and lower at the bottom, eventually it's gonna trickle down to, I guess up, to the reading comprehension and written composition.

Susan Lambert:

And that's why they call foundational skills foundational, right? Because you can't build on a weak foundation, you have to have that strong.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Absolutely. So foundational skills are necessary for higher order operations. So a lot of times, you know, people love talking about higher order operations because we want students to get there. But we should not forget, without the foundations, we cannot operate on at the high level.

Susan Lambert:

Mm-hmm <affirmative> . Mm-hmm <affirmative> . That's a great point. I love that. Any other ways that you wanna talk about how they're related?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Absolutely. So now let's go back to the name, where the name ... <Laugh> .

Susan Lambert:

Maybe you'll help me get it in the right order. <laugh>.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

<laugh> So we'll start with the interactive and we'll go to the dynamic. So interactive here means bidirectional, essentially. So reading and writing develop interactively or bidirectionally or reciprocally mediated by learning experiences. So, that means reading development supports writing development; writing development supports reading development. So that's kind of where the name interactive comes in.

Susan Lambert:

Mm . I like that. You also said it's mediated by classroom experience. Did you say that?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Learning experiences.

Susan Lambert:

Learning experience. Okay. What do you mean by that?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

So as we develop reading skills, we go through a reading process, right? And then we develop reading skills. And that influences writing development and also, as you engage in writing activities, writing experiences that supports reading development.

Susan Lambert:

Okay. That makes sense. And I'm gonna just, you know, make a little bit of a connection here. So I would say for the classroom, we should be saying, "Gone are the days when we have a reading block and then a writing block, because we should be teaching these two things in tandem." Is that correct?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Absolutely. So in my ideal classroom, right , we can talk more about this, but in my ideal classroom we'll have reading and writing systematically integrated. And there'll be a portion of instruction that's primarily focused on reading--the reading process and skills that are necessary for reading. And there'll be a portion of time that will be really primarily focused on the writing process. But really the majority of the time we'll be integrating reading experience and writing experience. Again, systematically, not just haphazardly.

Susan Lambert:

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Okay. I interrupted you. I think I did. You're probably gonna tell us a little bit about dynamic.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Yes. Let's go to dynamic <laugh> . So , dynamic here means the relation. So reading, as I said, reading and writing are related, but the relation is not fixed or does not look the same. It does not look the same or constant as a function of several factors. And let me go over those factors. One is called the linguistic grain size.

Susan Lambert:

Oh my gosh, that's in a paper that you wrote that I was just talking to an audience about. So this is really exciting. <laugh> .

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Yeah. Oh, good, good. So linguistic grain size is really the chunk of a unit, right? So if you think about some units like vocabulary or word reading and spelling, we're talking about word size, right? For students to get there, they need to actually have knowledge about chunks that are smaller than word size. So for example, phonological awareness, right? Working with syllables , rhymes, or phoneme. Those are units that are smaller than word, right? Also letters, right? Individual letters that are chunks smaller than word, right? So that's grain size. There are chunks , linguistic units or chunks that are larger than word that's called the discourse or text, right Understanding sentences and then a connected text, right? So that's what I mean by linguistic grain size. When it comes to its relevance to the dynamic relations is that , according to the interactive dynamic literacy model, the relation between word reading and spelling is stronger than the relation between reading comprehension and written composition. So both are reading and writing skills; word reading, spelling, reading comprehension, and written composition are all reading and writing skills, but the chunk is different. So then, when we think about reading and writing relations, we have to think about, okay, does the relation look the same for what I call lexical literacy skills, words, reading and spelling, or text level reading skill and writing skill, that's reading, comprehension, everything, composition. Again, according to this model, the relation is stronger for the word size, the word reading and spelling.

Susan Lambert:

Why would that be important for a classroom teacher to understand that that connection is closer at the word reading level?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

That's a really good question. So let me just share a little bit about empirical evidence for it, so that I'm not just arguing <laugh> , I'm not just claiming. So we have conducted a meta-analysis, a meta-analysis is a study of studies. So we've looked at the literature, published studies, unpublished studies thoroughly, and we found across all the studies, all the literature, we found about 395 studies. And that included over 220 , 000 participants. And we looked at the relations between word and reading and writing. They were indeed related, right? As the theory says here. And they were actually strongly related. But then when we looked at the relation between word reading versus spelling and, and the reading comprehension and the written composition, the relation was stronger for word reading and spelling. It was 0.82. I don't know if listeners are familiar with the correlations. This is correlations. So let me briefly explain correlations. If you imagine a graph, right? There's X and there's Y and there are dots scattered across, right? So 0.82 correlation between word reading and spelling means students who did well in spelling, they're very likely to have high score in word reading. Students who have low performance in spelling, they're very likely that they have a low performance in word reading.

Susan Lambert:

Hmm. Okay.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Now, when we looked at reading comprehension and written composition, the relation was 0.44. That's called moderate. It's not strong relation, but it's moderate relation. What that means is, in general, students who are strong in reading comprehension, they also tend to be strong in written composition. But there are students whose performance in reading comprehension is strong, but low in written composition and vice versa. So there's that difference, right?

Susan Lambert:

Mm-hmm <affirmative>.Mm-hmm <affirmative>.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Now your question about why we should care, why educators should care about the difference in the relation between word reading and spelling versus reading comprehension and read composition, is that when you teach—for example, we just talked about integrated instruction, and when you teach word reading and spelling, teaching them together helps support their reading and word reading and spelling, reading comprehension, and written composition. Their integrated instruction would help both reading comprehension and written composition, but the divergence will be larger in reading comprehension and written composition. Another way of thinking about it is that when you teach reading and writing in an integrated manner, it's really important for teachers to make the connections between reading and writing very visible and explicit, especially for reading comprehension and written composition, because they don't see the connections as well for word reading versus spelling.

Susan Lambert:

Hmm . Okay.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Does that make sense?

Susan Lambert:

It does make sense. And right now I don't know if my brain is working correctly here, but it makes me think of the hierarchical nature of these things too. That the smaller we get in the hierarchy—so down to the sound level, the word level—the more these two things are related and that the reciprocal nature of them or how they go back and forth, the dynamic nature of them, the smaller the unit, the more important it is to have those things secure in a student.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

This is great. The last part, let me revise a little bit, refine a little bit. So words reading and spelling are more strongly related because the foundational skills for them are essentially the same, right? It's , phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic awareness. In terms of the process, they also look very similar.

Susan Lambert:

Okay.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Reading comprehension and written composition, they draw on essentially the same skills, but the starting point for the reading comprehension process and written composition process is a little different. So in reading comprehension, the starting point is that the text is given to you.

Susan Lambert:

Right.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Right? The language and information is given to you. So the reader's task is decode, right? The word is there and then try to get at the message that's already given there, the text, right? That's the task. Whereas a written composition, the starting point is you actually have to create content, right? Right. <laugh> . So although you draw on the same skills, for example, for reading comprehension, you definitely need content knowledge, right? To understand the given text, you also need understanding of vocabulary words for writing, you need the same thing, right? We need content knowledge to start generating content. You also need vocabulary knowledge to translate the ideas that we have in mind into our language so that we can actually write it down, right? So although we draw on the same skills, the extent to which we use these skills are slightly different for reading comprehension versus written composition because the primary goal is different.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah, that makes sense. Very interesting. Okay, well we've covered a lot of ideas here. Before we kind of go on, I wanna check to see if there're any key concepts or any of these ideas that you really hope listeners take away from your entire explanation so far.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

There's actually more <laugh> for the dynamic relationship. <laugh>

Susan Lambert:

We didn't finish it all. Oh my goodness.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

No. So we, you know, we were talking about linguistic grain size, and then that led to a conversation on a very related concept. So another one, just briefly, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time <laugh> .

Susan Lambert:

No, it's okay. Thank you for bringing me back <laugh> .

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

So we're now still talking about dynamic relations, right? The reading-writing relations look different. They differ as a function of first linguistic grain size, which we just talked about. Another one is development or developmental phase. The reading-writing relations are stronger in the beginning phase of development compared to later phase. And that's what we found. For example, word reading and spelling relation is stronger for those in elementary grade compared to adults.

Susan Lambert:

That's interesting.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

And the reading and writing relations also differ as a function of how we measure reading and writing. So let's think about reading comprehension measurement. So reading comprehension skill is measured by using multiple tasks, right? Most widely , multiple choice task. Also open-ended chat task. Also , retell task, where ask kids to read and then tell me about what you read, or close task, right? And for the closed task, kids read something and then there's kind of blanks and they have to fill in. So that's reading comprehension measurement. When it comes to written composition, usually it's kind of a performance-based task, right? Kids are given a prompt, they're asked to write about it, but what we have to think about in terms of written composition is how we evaluate written composition. There are multiple, multiple ways.

Susan Lambert:

mm-hmm <affirmative> .

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Right? So most widely used approach is looking at overall quality. So Johnny wrote this, let me think about how I'm gonna evaluate. I'm gonna look at the ideal coherence of ideas, how organized the ideas are, what kind of languages used, the voice, presence, or not writing conventions. I look at them all and assign single score, right? That's called holistic scoring, right? So that's overall quality. And then sometimes people look at each of them separately in assign scores, right? So coherence of ideas, a score of three, four, or five, organization score, and also sometimes people look at text length, right? How much they have written, because how much they have written matters for the quality, because you cannot say about something very well without saying enough, right? There's also other approaches to measure, like looking at the written composition called curriculum-based measurement, etc. But the point is that when you look at reading comprehension and written composition, I said the overall correlation is 0.44. But if you look at reading comprehension as measured by multiple choice versus written or closed, the relation is different. So reading comprehension is more strongly related to writing quality when it's measured by multiple choice or open-ended compared to when it's measured by a closed task. Right? So measurement matters. I guess the implications for this for educators is when you look at how kids do, you have to really think about how you measure the reading comprehension or writing.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna go back and make some connections and tell me if this seems right based on all you told me about interactive and dynamic related to your model. So your model expresses that the reading-writing relationship is really reciprocal or back and forth in nature, right? So that's the interactive part of it, is that it's reciprocal in nature. And the dynamic element of it is actually related to the linguistic grain size we're talking about, the developmental trajectory or where we are in the learning process, and then how those things either reading or writing are actually measured. Does that feel like a good summary?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

That was a perfect summary.

Susan Lambert:

That was hard. <laugh>,

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

You're amazing <laugh> .

Susan Lambert:

So maybe that's the big idea we want people to take away, is that reading and writing is reciprocal in nature, and there's elements to that that we need to consider based on the dynamic nature of reading and writing.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Absolutely. So one of the things that I want listeners to take away from this session is that, you know, a lot of educators understand the reading and writing are related, but I think educators need to have a really precise understanding about it. So we need to have a good mental model about how they're related and why they're related so we can use that knowledge to inform our instruction and assessment.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. And what I like about theoretic models or models that you've developed—so the little house model is great, I can't wait for our listeners to see that—is because sometimes I wonder if an educator goes to a professional development and learns about something like phoneme awareness or something about spelling or something about syntactical awareness or writing sentences or text structures. If you don't have a framework in which to attach it, you can sort of kind of go down a rabbit trail on one thing instead of thinking about how it relates to the whole. Does that resonate?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Absolutely. I mean, that's exactly the whole point about the model specifying the nature relations, how things are related instead of talking about just, you know, what pieces contributed. Right? So things are related in a very systematic way, and that does have implications, right? So sometimes I see a classroom that just focuses on phonological awareness, right? Or a word reading, but without considering spelling. Without benefiting or leveraging the power of spelling for development of word reading and spelling. The same thing goes for other pieces.

Susan Lambert:

Hmm . Yeah, that makes sense. When we first talked, you said that one of the things that was unique about your approach that you took was actually linking it to this idea of reading and writing difficulty. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Sure. Let me actually start off by saying that I've read some articles and I also heard from some people stating that, you know, a theoretical model is for a specific population, like, for example, only a skilled reading population or phase, right? For skilled reading, less skilled reading, or typically developing kids or, you know , monolingual children, bilingual children only. A theoretical model should explain phenomena for all these different populations, right? And different phases of development. And that's where the reading-writing difficulty comes in for this interactive dynamic literacy model. Because the interactive dynamic literacy model explains what is required to develop reading and writing skills, but also difficulties associated with it, right?

Susan Lambert:

Mm-hmm <affirmative> . Mm-hmm <affirmative> . So let me unpack this in a few pieces because I've thought about it and written about it. One is that difficulties in word reading, spelling, and handwriting tend to occur together, instead of in isolation. That's because again, going back to the house figure, they rely on shared skill, right? So if some students have weaknesses in phonological processing, it's gonna show it as difficulty in not only word reading but also spelling. So if you think about dyslexia literature, right? Students with dyslexia, their difficulty is not just in word reading, their difficulties consistently is in spelling as well, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> . Yep. The same thing occurs with handwriting fluency or keyboarding because , handwriting and keyboarding, some people might think that it's just primarily motor skills or hand-eye coordination. That is part of it. But also , handwriting fluency or keyboarding also relies on orthographic awareness as well, right? So if a student's word reading and spelling difficulties are due to orthographic awareness, then they're also likely to experience handwriting difficulties as well. Oh, okay. Mm-hmm

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Students with dyslexia will also experience difficulty with the written composition, for many of them. People think about dyslexia as a reading difficulty.

Susan Lambert:

Mm-hmm <affirmative> .

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

But spelling and word reading are so closely related. So those dyslexia experience difficulties with word reading and spelling, and spelling is required. It's absolutely necessary for a written composition. And therefore those who have dyslexia will also experience written composition difficulties. And studies have shown that those written compositions by students with dyslexia tend to have some quality issues. The writing quality tends to be lower, sentences tend to be choppy, and there's some other difficulties as well.

Susan Lambert:

Mm-hmm <affirmative> . Mm-hmm <affirmative> . That makes sense. Are there other connections to reading and writing difficulty that you wanna highlight outside of just that?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Sure, there's more. And let me briefly go over that. So because reading comprehension and written composition are related, that means difficulties in reading comprehension, right? There'll be co-occurrence between difficulties in reading comprehension and written composition. Also, in the house figure, oral language is foundational for both reading comprehension and written composition. And therefore those with weak oral language skills will also tend to have weak reading comprehension and written composition. And literature consistently has shown that students with language impairment have weakness in both reading comprehension and written composition. There are a couple more. One is reading difficulties, writing difficulties, and language difficulties co-occur with weak domain-general cognition. So because in the figure, at the very bottom is domain-general cognition, right? That's foundational for everything. So if one has difficulties, so for example, those with the intentional, you know, deficit, right?

Susan Lambert:

Mm-hmm <affirmative> . They will experience difficulties in language reading and writing most likely, but not all, of course, because it's foundational for all learning. And lastly, there are multiple pathways for reading difficulties and writing difficulties. So if you think about, again, the chain effects, right? There's no single pathway. You could experience reading difficulties if you have weaknesses in phonological processing or orthographic processing or morphological processing, or if you have a weak vocabulary knowledge or if you have a weak , higher-order cognition, such as making inferences, understanding multiple perspectives, etc. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So essentially the way we can think about this is that any relationship that is working together to build us as strong and literate humans can also work against each other. And we should be watching for that as well. I don't know if I said that right, but you understand what I'm trying to say in summary here.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Yes. I think of reading and writing as a system. A very strong and very related system. So we should not think of them as independent systems.

Susan Lambert:

Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yeah. That's great. There's a lot here. And I think our listeners are going to again, benefit from seeing the visual and then thinking through it alongside your explanation of it. That's one of the weaknesses of a podcast is we don't have a visual to be able to show it. As we sort of like make a transition to start wrapping up though, I hear you're working on a new project, like maybe writing a book. Is that true?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Yes, absolutely. So finally, <laugh>, I'm working on the book. I say finally because I've been meaning to, but you know, there are a lot of other things also. Finally , I'm working on a book where I talk about reading, writing, and reading and writing connections, and implications for assessment and teaching.

Susan Lambert:

So that is exciting. Our listeners should look forward to that. Do you have any idea of the release date on that or are you not that close?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

W e are hoping for an early fall release.

Susan Lambert:

Oh, yay! That's exciting. So listeners, here's some suggestions, get the image of the house that Young described, listen to this podcast, and they'll be all set up then to buy your book and learn even more. So that'll be a great professional learning opportunity for them. Any final thoughts or advice you might have?

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Well, first off, having been a classroom teacher, and also someone who works with teachers all the time, I wanna recognize and thank all the educators for their dedication and important work because, you know, their work has direct impact on children's development. So I wanna recognize that. And then the second piece is really , you know, you don't have to remember the name, interactive dynamic literacy model, <laugh> , but I want you to really remember this house figure, right? And have that as a mental model and really think about what that means for teaching and assessment.

Susan Lambert:

That's great advice, and I really appreciate you taking time to sort of unpack through this environment, unpack something that's really important. I wanna thank you for your work because like I said, it was really eye-opening to me to help me bring all these elements of literacy, not just a reading model, not just a writing model, but a way to think of both of them together. So thank you so much for joining us.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

Thank you so much for having me and for the opportunity.

Susan Lambert:

This is really exciting because we're trying something new after we say goodbye to our guests, to just do a bit of a summary about things that I heard, bring it to you, our listeners, in a little bit different way. First time we've ever tried this, so we're gonna see if you like it. If you do like it, please let us know. And I am so excited about this conversation with Young. I took away three really big things that I think are important. And one of them is, she talks through the scientific process beautifully. Like it's sort of a meta understanding of how you employ the scientific process. When she was in the classroom, she observed something and she really got curious about it, right? Like this reading-writing relationship. And she decided to do some investigation or some research about what this was. And she formed this hypothesis. And it was so interesting to her that she decided that we don't all have to do this, but she decided that she was gonna go back and get more training. And so she started doing this experimenting and analyzing data, and she created this model of literacy, of reading and writing. She put some experiments next to it to see what was true and what wasn't true, and now she's disseminating that information. So that was one thing that I thought was really important. The second thing I thought was important is just this literacy model itself. As we were talking about this model, I got more and more excited. I got it wrong. The title of it wrong, it is really the interactive dynamic literacy model. And that's kind of important, so if you listen to the episode, this interactive or reciprocal relationship between reading and writing is really important. But the dynamic part is really important too. How this changes in different ways, both over time as kids learn, but also the different elements of literacy. So she talked about sub-lexical, which we just heard an episode with Jane Ashby about what that means in terms of phonology. She talked about lexical level here. That's that word level that's really important. And you can't think about these things in isolation, right? You have to think about them together because they work together and they impact each other. And what I love about theoretical models is they give you a place to sort of hang information on. And so if you think about what's happening in the classroom, you can look at that model and say, "Wow, am I doing this? And why am I doing this? And how I am, am I doing this?" And that's the third thing that I think is really cool, is she made the connection to why it matters to educators in the classroom. Why this model can help them think through what they're doing in terms of teaching and learning, and also what's happening in the world of assessment. You know, I just think it's really important that we're not doing random activities or random instruction, or we don't have literacy blocks that are, "I'm doing a little bit of reading here and a little bit of writing over here." They all have to be integrated. And so this episode is so powerful to explain the "why" behind that integrated literacy instruction. This one's gonna be an episode y'all are gonna listen to you over and over again. I know I've already gone back and listened to it three times, and I really encourage you to get into the show notes and follow the resources there. Print out that house and go back and re-listen then to how she explains this model and how it works together. Look at your instruction in your classroom, what's happening in your school, right? Make sure that those things make sense with each other. It's just a great model to dig into a little bit more. Today's guest was Dr. Young Suk-Grace Kim, professor at the School of Education, University of California at Irvine. She is an American Educational Research Association fellow. She also serves as the editor-in-chief for the Journal Scientific Studies of Reading and the chair of the California Reading Difficulties Risk Screener Selection Panel, appointed by the California State Board of Education. In two weeks, we're closing out this Season nine reading reboot by tackling as many questions as we can from the listener mailbag. I'll be joined by friend of the show, Dr. Claude Goldenberg, to answer your literacy questions on everything from pendulum swings to screening in both English and Spanish, to supporting older students who are multiple grade levels behind.

Claude Goldenberg:

It becomes much more challenging to get them to read and sit through lessons that might seem kind of babyish. That's where the art of teaching really comes in, and being able to motivate kids. But you need to have the science also. You need to know what needs to be in place to help these kids catch up and accelerate.

Susan Lambert:

That's next time. Catch that episode and all of our past episodes by subscribing to Science of Reading: The Podcast on the app of your choice. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.