Science of Reading: The Podcast

A guide to integrating knowledge building into your classroom, with Jackie Relyea, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education

Share episode

In this special episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by Jackie Relyea, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Literacy Education at North Carolina State University, who’ll give you a comprehensive guide to integrating background knowledge into your teaching as, you create a content-rich classroom. Jackie offers insights on why time-tested classroom staples such as read-alouds and word walls are effective tools for building background knowledge … and how to make them even better. She also digs into why vocabulary is just one facet of conceptual knowledge and what the research says about background knowledge for multilingual learners.

Show notes:

Quotes:

“Literacy for my students meant more than just reading and writing;  it was about access, access to the world, and access to knowledge and opportunities, and even independence—finding their voices.” –Jackie Eunjung Relyea, Ph.D.

“You can think of a schema like… mental maps or the frameworks that help us store and organize new information and knowledge. The richer and the more detailed your schema about a particular topic, the easier it is to understand and remember new information about it.” –Jackie Eunjung Relyea, Ph.D.

“Vocabulary oftentimes is the tip of the iceberg of the whole: the conceptual knowledge. It's not a simple definition of the single word; it's really conceptual knowledge and understanding that is represented by the word.” –Jackie Eunjung Relyea, Ph.D.

Episode timestamps*
02:00 Introduction: Who is Dr. Jackie Relyea?
10:00 Importance of knowledge building
14:00 Reciprocal relationship between reading and knowledge building
18:00 Reading comprehension strategies as scaffolding
21:00 Using interactive read-alouds
24:00 Concept mapping and word walls
26:00 Vocabulary is the tip of the iceberg
28:00 Multilingual learners
37:00 Research on knowledge building
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute



Jackie Relyea: (00:00)
What we found is that when students learn new vocabulary in connected networks, their comprehension grows much faster.

Susan Lambert: (00:12)
This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Today we have a fantastic episode queued up that's all about knowledge building. We're going to talk about why knowledge building is so key. We'll discuss evidence-based strategies for knowledge building. We'll talk about the connections between knowledge building and vocabulary building, and we'll explore knowledge building as it pertains to supporting multilingual and English learners. And today's guest has done some fascinating work and research in these areas. Her name is Dr. Jackie Relyea, and she's assistant professor of elementary literacy education in the College of Education at North Carolina State University. She's also the director of the CLICK Lab, which stands for cultivating, literacy, inquiry and content knowledge. In other words, we couldn't ask for a better guest for a conversation about knowledge building. And finally, at the end of this episode, I'm going to give you a sneak peek into a new project from Science of Reading: The Podcast that's launching very soon. But now let's bring on Dr. Relyea.

Susan Lambert: (01:32)
Well hello, Dr. Jackie Relyea. Thank you so much for joining us on today's episode.

Jackie Relyea: (01:37)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Susan Lambert: (01:41)
We're excited too. And I know our listeners are gonna be really excited about the content that we're going to talk about. Before we jump into that, we would love if you could introduce yourself and talk a little bit maybe about how you ended up in the world of literacy.

Jackie Relyea: (01:55)
Yeah, absolutely. I'm an assistant professor of elementary literacy education at North Carolina State University. My background might be a little different from many of the educators and researchers you have on your podcast before. I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and originally studied applied linguistics in college. And applied linguistics is basically about understanding how people learn the language and how it works in our mind and how we can create better ways to teach and support learning. And I've been always kind of fascinated and curious about language and the cognitive and instruction aspects of it, and how people learn to read and write in a language they're learning, and what makes those processes work. But one experience that really shaped how I think about reading actually came right after college when I started working at a school for students who are blind or visually impaired.

Jackie Relyea: (03:02)
And I was teaching these amazing students how to read and write braille, both in Korean and also English as a foreign language. So, you know, we usually think about reading, we imagine it as the visual process, seeing letters and our eyes are moving across words and sentences across the page. But for my students, the whole process was completely through the touch. They read by feeling the tiny, raised dots with their fingertips and holding those patterns in a working memory and constantly checking their understanding without any visual cues. So watching them read, I realized how cognitively demanding reading actually is. It takes an enormous amount of working memory, energy, attention, and continuous effort to make sense of each word and sentence and the whole idea. But there was just something even deeper that stood out to me throughout my teaching career--the literacy for my students meant more than just reading and writing, but it was about access, access to the world and access to the knowledge and opportunities and even independence in finding their voices.

Jackie Relyea: (04:22)
So, seeing literacy as a powerful tool for them completely changed my understanding about what it means to teach reading. So a few years later, I moved to the United States to start my Ph.D. program at UNC Chapel Hill, and I had the privilege of studying under my advisor and lifelong mentor Jill Fitzgerald. My research, there focused on how children learn to read in their first and second language. And I was especially interested in multilingual children who were developing literacy skills in a new language. So I worked with the multilingual learners here in United States as a teacher and also a researcher. But the more I worked with the multilingual learners here in United States as a teacher and researcher, the more I've seen how similar their experiences are to those my former students back in Korea. So both groups of kids bring very incredible strengths into learning and have a very rich life experience to share.

Jackie Relyea: (05:28)
But they also face challenges when it comes to accessing learning opportunities, especially the knowledge- building opportunities. So, for my students who were blind and visually impaired, one major challenge was the limited amount of books and other materials in braille or accessible formats. And they simply didn't have enough resources available. And the multilingual learners in United States experience was related, but different. The challenge here in United States, they have to navigate good complex academic content and on building knowledge in a language they're still in the process of developing. On top of that, they're often pulled out of their regular content area blocks like science and social studies to receive ESL or language development support instruction, which is absolutely critical. But there is a possibility that these students are missing out on rich content instruction and it limits their opportunities to engage and build content knowledge in a classroom.

Susan Lambert: (06:40)
Hmm.

Jackie Relyea: (06:40)
So just like my students who needed accessible materials, multilingual learners need access to the instruction that emphasized building strong content knowledge and still supporting their language development. So after finishing my Ph.D., I had an opportunity to do postdoc fellowships, first at the University of Houston, and then Harvard Graduate School of Education. And these fellowships were really an exciting time for me because I got to dive into a project focused on integrating literacy with content areas like science and social studies, and what we call content integrated literacy instruction. So instead of teaching reading as a separate skill or teaching content subjects in isolated silos, the idea was to help teachers integrate them together. Then I became very fascinated with this approach because there's just so much research showing that the students' comprehension depends on what they already know and experience students already have.

Jackie Relyea: (07:50)
And then also when students build knowledge through the reading, they are strengthening and enhancing their foundation for understanding new concepts in reading a new novel text. So that's what my research focused on. And now with my colleagues at NC State and the Lab a Harvard Graduate School of Education, and we are exploring how educators and researchers can work together to design and implement content-rich literacy instructional experiences that can break down those silos cross and between subjects. And the goal is to help all students engage with the meaningful and content-rich text and build interconnected knowledge over time and ultimately become the stronger and more confident readers.

Susan Lambert: (08:42)
Wow, that was a great, like long arc overview . But how interesting was that that you went from teaching visually impaired to multilingual learners here and sort of that overarching connection. So probably I'd like to dig in and to unpack some of those, so we can make some of this information a little more explicit for our listeners. So first of all, I would love if you could tell our listeners what do you think is most important to know about this idea of knowledge building?

Jackie Relyea: (09:13)
Yeah, absolutely. So knowledge building has gotten a lot of attention in recent years.

Susan Lambert: (09:20)
It has! .

Jackie Relyea: (09:21)
Yes. Especially in discussions around reading comprehension. Typically when we talk about reading instruction, we often reference the five core pillars identified in the National Reading Panel: the phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. But interestingly, the knowledge building wasn't explicitly named as one of those original five pillars. But what we've seen from many recent studies, including a lot of my collaborated work with Jimmy Kim at the READS Lab and my colleagues at Harvard University, show how critical the knowledge building really is for reading comprehension. So, to understand why from a cognitive perspective about what's happening when someone reads a text, when we pick up something to read, our brains naturally try to connect this new information we encounter with what we already know. So psychologists and cognitive scientists often talk about this using the term the schema.

Jackie Relyea: (10:29)
So, you can think of a schema like a mental map or the framework that helps us store and organize new information and knowledge. So, the richer and more detailed your schema about a particular topic, the easier it is to understand and remember new information about it. So for example, imagine the students who already knows quite a bit about ecosystems. When they read a new text on related topics like climate change or pollution or the biodiversity, they naturally understand and remember the information more easily. And that's because their existing schema helps them quickly integrate new ideas into what they already know. But without the kind of a foundation comprehension becomes more challenging and superficial and sometimes very fragmented. But in a reading and literacy instruction, we typically talked about two main approaches to teaching literacy. The first is code-based instruction, which involves phonics and decoding and affluency, essentially teaching kids how to accurately read a word.

Jackie Relyea: (11:49)
And the other approach is meaning-based instruction, focusing on comprehension like summarizing text. predicting and making inferences, and monitoring understanding. And these are very important, but in current research, the reading research more broadly, I believe there is a third piece that's getting really increasing attention. I believe that's a knowledge-based literacy instruction. So, the knowledge-based literacy instruction means intentionally designing the reading experiences around meaningful and interconnected topics, so the topics students explore deeply and repeatedly through the content-driven and content-rich text that help students build the deep background knowledge across various text over a long period of time. So instead of jumping from topic to topic without the connections, the teachers give students opportunities to read multiple texts that revolve around the main concepts and gradually exploring and building up the web of knowledge or strong kind of interconnected schema that support the comprehension at the deeper level.

Susan Lambert: (13:10)
Hmm. Yeah. And one question I have for you, what you're not saying is, you're not saying that's not important for us to teach kids to access that text. So still teaching the code is really, really important in order for us to get the kids access to that text. But this, this idea of building knowledge or I guess intentionally building knowledge, so then you can use that knowledge as background knowledge to access it.

Jackie Relyea: (13:38)
Exactly. Yeah. And this kind of reciprocal relationship between reading and then building knowledge, it takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. So to give you a concrete example from one of our research project, recently my team at the READS lab published a study in developmental psychology, and it was a randomized controlled trial called, MORE Content Literacy Intervention, which stands for model of reading engagement. So, Jimmy Kim is the principal investigator leading that project. And for this study the teachers provided the sustained content-rich literacy instruction from first through the third grade. The students are starting the learning of broad concepts like animal survival and habitats and basic ecosystems. And over time they gradually move towards more specific and complex topics. So, for example, after understanding animals and their survival, the students explore the work of the paleontologist, how scientists study dinosaurs using fossils and evidence and hypothesis.

Jackie Relyea: (14:53)
And eventually when students reach third grade, they engage with even more soft skate topics like a human body systems. So, the whole idea was to build knowledge in a systematic and inspiring way, giving students multiple opportunities to revisit the concepts and deepen their understanding, and then also strengthen their schemas over time. So what we found was quite interesting. The students didn't just become better at understanding the science topic that the teachers explicitly taught. They significantly improved their overall reading comprehension, we call domain general reading comprehension, basically kind of standardized assessment in a reading. So, when reading text about a completely unrelated topic they hadn't encountered before, we saw basically kind of standardized assessment in reading. So when reading text about a completely unrelated topic they hadn't encountered before, we saw improved reading achievement among the students who received this MORE intervention. So, this is what we call, or cognitive scientists call, far transfer. So, it's really exciting because it shows the students are not just memorizing the isolated fact, they're building the powerful foundation of interconnected in the knowledge, and this broader than general schema allows them to understand new and challenging text more deeply. So even better, these benefits have lasted. So the students can maintain these gains over time and the positive effects persist into even later the grades.

Susan Lambert: (16:38)
Wow. That's exciting. So you mentioned it before, but it's true that people in the Science of Reading community are more aware of the importance of knowledge building, but it's also become sort of a conversation too.

Jackie Relyea: (16:52)
Mm-hmm .

Susan Lambert: (16:52)
About, okay, let's talk about how to develop better reading comprehension. Is it just knowledge or what is the role of reading comprehension strategies? Right? Can't we just apply strategies to what we're reading to help us, you know, gain that knowledge and be better readers? What's the interplay of these two things, both knowledge development and then applying some of these strategies?

Jackie Relyea: (17:15)
Yeah, that's a great question because the strategies...I see strategy as a scaffolding, and you are not needing the scaffolding forever. I think it's a kind of temporary need in order to gain more competence in reading comprehension. And I think building knowledge is also kind of part of the reading comprehension strategy as well. So, you know, I think the knowledge is really important in reading complex text, but also in how to integrate new information and then kind of construct a new meaning through the text and in the process.

Susan Lambert: (18:05)
I've never thought about comprehension strategies as a scaffold. That's a really interesting way to look at them, that they're useful to help you engage with a text, but sometimes you need to employ them and sometimes you don't need to employ them. Because if I'm reading something that is something I know about, like it's a text I understand, it's something that is pretty easy for me to read through. I actually probably don't need to employ any reading comprehension strategies to understand that text. Is that a little bit about what you're saying?

Jackie Relyea: (18:42)
Exactly. So, the reading comprehension strategy, for example--summarizing, and making predictions, and making inferences--and that's how we can help students engage with the text, and then kind of really dive it into the text, and kind of interact with the text, and then build the meaning of the text and the content. But if you become a more proficient reader, you're not kind of thinking about the strategy all the time. You're very focused on the content and interacting with the message that the authors, you know, convey in a book. And then if you are really focusing on the strategies, and I think it's you cognitive load, kind of reduce the enjoyment and the engagement with the text. And so, strategy, I think about it as a scaffolding, the way you get access to the text and engage with the text. And then it's really important that sometimes you teach the comprehension strategies, but it's not something that you have to teach all the time or they apply the strategy all the time.

Susan Lambert: (20:02)
Mm-hmm. Super helpful. That's a really interesting way to think about it and it helped me sort of put things in context in terms of how we help students engage with that. It also makes me wonder about this connection to vocabulary and we know, you know, knowledge and vocabulary work hand-in-hand. So how does the building of knowledge and the building of vocabulary work together and, you know, just interested to hear what you think about that.

Jackie Relyea: (20:30)
Yeah, definitely. So let me just go back to the MORE intervention, how we help the students build knowledge. And I'll talk about the main components of the MORE intervention. So, in terms of building students' conceptual knowledge, and then also vocabulary knowledge as well. So, one is interactive read aloud. So, this is really one of the powerful ways to build knowledge, especially for young children. When we think about the reading aloud, this isn't just a teacher reading a book aloud and kids passively listening, it's actually much more intentional and engaging. So before even starting the read aloud it's important to set clear goals and purposes. The students understand what they're reading and what they should pay attention to and what they will discuss afterward. So this kind of a goal-setting step is important because it helps students to focus on important vocabulary and also key concepts through the text.

Jackie Relyea: (21:38)
So for example, if you are reading a science text about how animals adapt to different habitats, and you might say something like, "We are going to read about animal survival today, and I want you to pay close attention to how these animals survive in challenging environments. And notice the physical features and adaptation they have." And this kind of goal setting helps students actively listen some of the keywords and process the information more closely and deeply. And then after reading aloud, you pause regularly to check for students' understanding and ask them questions and give students plenty of opportunities to talk about the ideas they are hearing either with their partner in small groups or as a whole class. And this kind of a structured discussion helps students elaborate on what they're learning and immediately use new words and concepts they just heard and learned.

Jackie Relyea: (22:44)
So that helped them solidify their understanding. And that's fascinating because the students often naturally pick up the vocabulary and a concept that the teacher didn't even explicitly teach. It's simply because they're engaging deeply with a meaningful text and they start to build this interconnected network of the ideas in their minds using the words. So after reading aloud, students engage in the concept mapping. So, this is a quite powerful tool, teaching the vocabulary and then also kind of building knowledge and building schema. So, concept mapping, as you can imagine, is basically creating visual representation of a student's understanding. So kind of, you can see sometimes a word wall on the back of the classroom--there's word cards, like kind of just linearly organized, but this constant mapping, you can think about it as kind of building the semantic network.

Jackie Relyea: (23:48)
So students start by placing important concepts or words in the center or nose of the map, and then they branch out and then draw the lines and connect those ideas with the related words and phrases. So it's very helpful because it shows the students visually see how all these concepts are connected in their minds. So it's not just memorizing the definitions or the facts on the word cards, but it's about the creating the clear, the mental, the roadmap. So our research shows clearly that when students use concept mapping, they're able to build deeper and a richer understanding and remember information better over time. So for example, after the interactive reading aloud about animal adaptations, students might create a concept map that visually connects concepts like the habitats and survival strategies and camouflage and adaptation, and this helps them organize their new knowledge into interconnected schema and makes it easier to understand a new text later on.

Susan Lambert: (25:05)
That's great. And your explanation of not just a read aloud, but an interactive read aloud was amazing and thank you for taking time to walk through that because I think sometimes early elementary teachers know the power of reading aloud, but don't often connect the interactivity with the important sort of underlying concept that should go with that read aloud.

Susan Lambert: (25:35)
So that was great. Thank you. And the other thing that I wanna highlight is what you said about words. It's not just a vocabulary word to know a meaning of or a piece of fact or a small piece of information, but this idea that the vocabulary that we have is really a representation of the knowledge that we have or the things that we know, right? And I think I talk with educators about the importance of vocabulary being: we need breadth of vocabulary, we need depth in those vocabulary words, so those sort of the concepts. But that also gives us flexibility then in terms of usage, both when we speak or when we write or when we understand what we're reading. And so connecting that vocabulary to that knowledge is really important. Did I get that right?

Jackie Relyea: (26:24)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's, that's correct. So the vocabulary knowledge grew through the exposure to the related words and very meaningful context. So, in the process of building knowledge in content-rich text, students can kind of build this kind vocabulary networks and how words are connected to one another and how they function within the content, in certain areas, the thematic areas. So what we found is that when students learn new vocabulary in connected networks, their comprehension grows much faster than when they learn words in isolation.

Susan Lambert: (27:05)
So, that's a visual representation of what you were talking about in terms of schema, right?

Jackie Relyea: (27:10)
Yeah.

Susan Lambert: (27:10)
So they can see these concept maps or they can see how these vocabulary words are connected to each other in this big web, a big and growing web. But that's really in some ways maybe representative of what's happening inside of our brain in terms of the schema that we're building.

Jackie Relyea: (27:27)
Exactly. Yeah.

Susan Lambert: (27:29)
That's interesting. Okay, so I wanna make a connection now to that knowledge building and how it impacts multilingual learners. So we've talked about it in general, sort of how that happens for learners, but how about multilingual learners and what's the connection there?

Jackie Relyea: (27:46)
Yeah, that's a great question. So, we've been really interested in understanding how knowledge building means for multilingual learners. So there was a concern in certain schools and school districts where the multilingual learners are sometimes pulled out of their classrooms for the ESL and the ELD instruction. So, they're missing some time to build the content knowledge and also kind of belong in a community where the students can build the knowledge together. So, we were kind of looking into the impact of the MORE intervention, content literacy intervention, that's kind of the Tier 1 intervention. So, we actually have the students, the English learners or multilingual learners, stay on the Teir 1 classroom versus the control group where they can do business as a usual. Sometimes the students are kind of pulled out or they participate in SL, the instruction. So, we look at the first- and second-grade classrooms across Alban schools in providing this content literacy intervention.

Jackie Relyea: (28:58)
And then we look at the results after 10 and then 20 lessons, 10 is the science unit and 10 another social study lesson. So, then what really stood out was the multilingual learners benefited significantly when they integrated rich vocabulary instruction and oral language support into the content-base of literacy teaching. So, after 20 lessons, when we compare the vocabulary knowledge in science, social studies, and then also even writing, the argumentative writing outcomes. And the students in the treatment group had significantly higher scores compared to the students in the control group. So, we saw that in this really short period of time, that we were really fascinated about the fact that, you know, English learners and multilingual learners, they can benefit from the content-rich instruction and through the interactive reading aloud and in concept mapping. And I think we found it very interesting, especially the multilingual learners.

Jackie Relyea: (30:08)
They built a strong vocabulary and then improved their oral language through content-rich text and discussion. And I think they became more confident and they became more effective writers and readers overall. So, this is very critical because sometimes the educators and researchers think that language and knowledge, sometimes they are kind of different entities, so the language should come first and then building knowledge and then learning new content come later. But sometimes if you just let them explore the new knowledge and new content in linguistically diverse classrooms, I think language development is a byproduct of all they're doing in the content-rich classrooms through discussions and also the language-rich environment and so forth.

Susan Lambert: (31:04)
Yeah. So, in other words, you're saying that through this knowledge-rich curriculum, that was really the access point to developing language for the multilingual learners. Which makes sense because being immersed in a language, whether it's academic language or whatever language it is, that's how we learn language, right? Is the immersion the discussion, right? Like the learning. Would you say that this knowledge-rich curriculum for those multilingual learners is an acceleration mechanism for their language? Could you go so far as to say that?

Jackie Relyea: (31:42)
Yeah, I would say that. So, during the knowledge-building process, the teachers and the students are exposed to academic vocabulary and academic language through the high-quality text. So, with the incidental exposure and also the kind of explicit teaching and concept mapping activities, and then also the discussion with their peers, they get exposed to the diverse language of phrases and structures and discourse and content, and kind of this language really helped them develop the content and topic knowledge gradually over time.

Susan Lambert: (32:28)
Hmm. Yeah, it's really interesting and it makes me think about, well first it makes me think about when I was a classroom teacher and  and how that happened in my classroom. And I think I didn't always understand as a classroom teacher what language really was and how you really developed language. And that can be a whole other topic, but just setting kids up for, we're talking about early elementary kids and as they're starting to gain that language, that academic language, how that really sets them up for success in their later schooling. And they can feel like then they're part of that school community in ways that maybe they couldn't if they didn't have access to that language.

Jackie Relyea: (33:09)
Exactly. And then another recent study, speaking of the language, so for the recent study, my colleague, Ju-Ping Huang at the University of Minnesota, and I published in developmental psychology--we were looking at the multilingual learners from kindergarten all the way up through the fifth grade. And we saw something very interesting because we were focusing on the multilingual learners who received any instruction in school in their native language early on, versus multilingual learners who received instruction only in English. And we kind of compared to those two groups of kids. And the multilingual students who received instruction in their native language early on were able to use the initial science and math knowledge as a strong foundation for developing English reading proficiency later. So, what's so powerful here is their foundation in domain-specific knowledge, which is science and math, actually supported and accelerated their reading proficiency development. But the multilingual students who only had the instruction in English had some initial benefits, but that advantage of being exposed to the English instruction didn't translate into sustained growth over time. So that really kind of underscores how important it is to consider the language of instruction for multilingual learners. Probably learning through their native language helped them build a strong foundation knowledge and is making it more accessible to support their ongoing reading growth over time.

Susan Lambert: (34:58)
Hmm. Mm-hmm . Well, and I think that helps us come full circle to where we started in the conversation is that, how important getting kids access to knowledge and vocabulary is to their overall literacy development, no matter what language that we're getting them that knowledge and vocabulary in, because--just like foundational skills serve as a foundation for access to print, knowledge and vocabulary serve as a foundation for access to new knowledge and concepts.

Jackie Relyea: (35:32)
Yeah, exactly. So, the vocabulary sometimes, more oftentimes, is the tip of the iceberg of the whole conceptual knowledge. So if kids know about the ecosystems, the kids are understanding the whole process and then the scientific understanding around the ecosystems. So, it's not a really simple definition of the single word. It's kind of conceptual knowledge and understanding represented by the word.

Susan Lambert: (36:05)
Mm-hmm . I like that image that I got in my head of the tip of the iceberg. And I often talk to educators about that, that when you have knowledge about a topic, you have knowledge of the words associated with that topic. Essentially, that's vocabulary knowledge.

Jackie Relyea: (36:20)
Exactly.

Susan Lambert: (36:21)
That's so interesting. Alright, I'd like to talk a little bit about the CLICK lab. So, the CLICK lab stands for cultivating, literacy, inquiry and content knowledge. You have some association with that CLICK lab. Would you tell us a little bit about what it is ?

Jackie Relyea: (36:38)
Yes. So, when I have this name of the CLICK, that's exactly what we are doing and what I like to continue to do. So, this is a space for my graduate students and my colleagues at NC State. So, this is where we kind of share the commonalities in terms of their research interest, and then we kind of dive deep into reading and discussing and then working on some research projects around the content knowledge, and then also the literacy instruction and development, and then also the, the linguistically diverse students and the content-knowledge development, also literacy development. So in the CLICK lab, we ask big questions about literacy and multilingual learners, and then we always thinking about how to make real differences in the classroom. So we, my colleague Dennis Davis at NC State, we had the IS-funded design based-implementation research project.

Jackie Relyea: (37:43)
This intervention project is specifically focused on developing and advising and implementing and evaluating the small group reading intervention and is specifically designed for multilingual learners in third through fifth grade. So, what's been really rewarding is to see how much more effective reading instruction can be when bringing together both knowledge building and language-focused support for multilingual learners. So, in the READS lab, we kind of stay on the kind of topic around the knowledge building and in literacy and in language. So, it's where we can discuss and learn from each other and then we grow together.

Susan Lambert: (38:29)
That's really, that's really interesting. You know, the, the whole idea of research around knowledge building is kind of new, isn't it?

Jackie Relyea: (38:37)
Yes, exactly.

Susan Lambert: (38:39)
And what are you most excited about in terms of the direction that it's going to go?

Jackie Relyea: (38:45)
Yes. So I really like to see more practical strategies and practices around how to build knowledge and then also gonna build the students' language and literacy and reading comprehension at the same time. So, you know, through the Science of Reading movement and then also through Susan, your, podcast, amazing podcast episode, and teachers and researchers start thinking about the importance of the knowledge building and integration in their literacy instruction, but also kind of continue to think through what is the effective way to do that in the classrooms on a daily basis. And what is the kind of evidence-based, the knowledge-building practices that are really happening in the classrooms and how students can benefit from that in terms of not just for the outcomes in reading comprehension, but also the joy and engagement and the motivation through the process.

Susan Lambert: (39:48)
I'm so glad that you brought us back to the joy and the motivation of that because in my experience, kids love to learn new things. And they really get motivated by doing that. Some topics, they're more interested in others, but in general, they like to learn new things.

Jackie Relyea: (40:05)
Exactly. They're really fascinated about...it's not about the language, it's sometimes their, you know, the eyes up and they just really engage in learning something new in science and social studies. So that's why interactive read alouds are very powerful. Even though they cannot read fluently at this time--the first grader and second graders--but kind of having the moment that they're learning something new through the books and the discussions and the teachers, the modeling, the language, and the stories. And that's how the students' engagement started.

Susan Lambert: (40:45)
This was just a really great discussion, Jackie, I really appreciate it. Thank you for the work that you're doing and the research that you're doing. We will be sure to link our listeners in the show notes to the CLICK lab so they can get in and see what's happening. And maybe we'll motivate some folks out there to go back and get a doctoral degree and do some around knowledge building.

Jackie Relyea: (41:08)
Oh my God, that would be awesome.

Susan Lambert: (41:10)
It sure would be. Well, thank you again for joining. We really appreciate it.

Jackie Relyea: (41:14)
Thank you so much, Susan.

Susan Lambert: (41:19)
Today's guest was Dr. Jackie Relyea, assistant professor of elementary literacy education in the College of Education at North Carolina State University. Please visit the show notes for a link to learn more about the CLICK lab, as well as links to a couple of research papers she and I discussed. Next time on Science of Reading: The Podcast, we're sharing a project that's been months in the making. We'll be releasing our first-ever SOR Essentials episode, an episode that pulls together some of the best information from several different experts on a single topic. We'll be revisiting some of the best information collected during our five plus years of interviews, and I'll be adding some brand new analysis, pulling everything together. And this first SOR Essentials episode will be all about writing,

Speaker 3: (42:12)
Reading, and writing need to be much better connected than they currently are.

Speaker 4: (42:16)
If you teach kids how to use complex sentence structure in their own writing, subordinating conjunctions, whatever, they're in a much better position to understand it in their reading. It also makes their oral language sort of richer and more sophisticated.

Susan Lambert: (42:28)
That's coming up right in this feed in two weeks. Be sure you're subscribed to this podcast so that you can get that episode as soon as it releases. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.