Science of Reading: The Podcast

S10 E10: How language skills shape reading success, with Charles Hulme, D.Phil., and MaryKate DeSantis

• Amplify Education • Season 10 • Episode 10

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Susan Lambert is joined by emeritus professor of psychology and education and the University of Oxford, Charles Hulme, D.Phil., and founder of Left Side Strong LLC, MaryKate DeSantis. They dive into the critial connection between oral language development and reading comprehension. They also explore exactly what oral language development is, how to screen children for deficits in oral language abilities, and the most effective strategies educators can use for intervention.

Show notes: 

Quotes:

"Language comprehension is really what leads us to reading comprehension." —MaryKate DeSantis

"We talk about learning to read, but we also need to talk about reading to learn. A lot of what we learn in our lives is through reading, and reading is certainly a powerful drive of vocabulary and language development." —Charles Hulme, D.Phil.

"Language skills are unconstrained, meaning the sky's the limit. As long as you continue to engage in any sort of way, your language skills can continue to develop throughout your lifetime." —Susan Lambert

Timestamps*:
00:00 How language skills shape reading success
06:00 Defining reading comprehension
08:00 Reading is language. Without language, there would be no reading.
12:00 Importance of language skills for comprehension
16:00 Our main purpose in life is to communicate with others
21:00 Development of language skills
23:00 Moving the needle on literacy achievement
28:00 How students can help develop students' language capacity
31:00 Screening to assess oral language skills
35:00 Why early language instruction is effective and sustainable
39:00 Key takeaways
41:00 Focusing on language is worth the time
43:00 Closing thoughts
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute


[00:00:00] MaryKate DeSantis: The research is just so clear that language is not optional for literacy. When we treat it as foundational, that's when we will give more students access to success.

[00:00:14] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast, from Amplify. If you're like me, this Season 10 deep-dive into comprehension has been eye-opening as far as all the complexities contributing to comprehension. We've looked at word recognition, orthographic mapping, fluency, syntax, and today we're focusing on another piece that's absolutely critical: oral language.

Today we'll unpack the data showing the connections between oral language abilities and student outcomes. We'll talk about screening for oral language deficiencies and share strategies for educators to intervene effectively. My guests are MaryKate DeSantis, educator and reading specialist and founder of Left Side Strong LLC, and Dr. Charles Hulme, emeritus professor of psychology and education at the University of Oxford.

Let's get right to it.

Well, I'm very excited for today's episode. We have two amazing guests to come talk to us a little bit about language development. I have with me Dr. Charles Hulme and MaryKate DeSantis.

Couldn't be more excited to have both of you. Before we jump in, I would love if you could share a little bit about who you are and maybe how you came to be interested in literacy development. Charles, maybe we'll start with you.

[00:01:41] Charles Hulme: Sure. Thanks, Susan. Very nice to be here. My name's Charles Hulme. I am emeritus professor of psychology and education at the University of Oxford, and I'm also the founder of a University of Oxford spinout company, called OxEd and Assessment.

I guess I've been studying children's reading development and reading difficulties for about 50 years now, and I first became interested in this probably really when I was an undergraduate in Oxford. We have this system called tutorials, where you write an essay and read a lot of material to go with the essay.

And I read about children learning to read, and came across this idea that some kids with dyslexia struggle to learn to read, and, maybe slightly arrogantly, as a young man who had been trained in cognitive psychology, I thought, well, it ought to be easy enough to figure out why those kids can't learn to read. So I started my PhD in that area.

[00:02:53] Susan Lambert: Can't be that hard, huh?

[00:02:57] Charles Hulme: I think we've made a huge amount of progress, actually. I think I wasn't all together wrong. It's maybe not that easy, but I think we've made a huge amount of progress.

[00:03:07] Susan Lambert: I agree with that, and we'll talk a little bit more about that too.

MaryKate, what about you?

[00:03:13] MaryKate DeSantis: Yeah. My name's MaryKate DeSantis. I am first and foremost an educator and a reading specialist, so the focus of my career has really been supporting students with reading difficulties.

Quite honestly, my journey into research has really been because I felt like I was missing something when I was in practice. I just was noticing, and I was really fortunate to work in a large urban district with some beautifully diverse children and amazing colleagues. And what I realized is that my students that were struggling with reading, they also struggled to understand instructions, explain their thinking, recall basic information, all these difficulties with language. But as a reading specialist, I was so focused on the code that I wasn't paying enough attention to that.

And so, that really led me. I had a great opportunity to work under Dr. Tiffany Hogan, and she was also a professor of mine. That really led me to the work of Charles and so many other amazing language and literacy researchers. And so, studying language actually really led me to understand my students more.

After that I started my own company, Left Side Strong, LLC, an effort to work with teachers based off of some of my mistakes. But in teaching reading, we're really teaching language.

[00:04:36] Susan Lambert: Oh, thanks for that, both of you. I'm really excited to dig in a little bit more, to talk more about language.

For our listeners, just a reminder that Tiffany Hogan, Dr. Tiffany Hogan, was a guest in a previous season. So we'll link in the show notes to that episode.

But we really haven't done a lot of digging into language, so I'm really excited about doing that. This season, we're all about reading comprehension, and I know we're going to make a connection between language development and reading comprehension at some point.

But before we jump into that, I would love it if, really quickly, both of you could define how you define reading comprehension. Charles, maybe we'll ping it back to you.

[00:05:17] Charles Hulme: Sure. Well, reading comprehension is the process of taking the meaning from printed symbols on a page and translating them into a linguistic and cognitive code that's, that underlies, really, it's making contact with the processes of language comprehension, I would say.

[00:05:41] Susan Lambert: MaryKate.

[00:05:43] MaryKate DeSantis: Mine's a little less fancy. I don't know how to follow that one up. Plus he has the British accent, so it just makes everything sound better. You know, when I think about reading comprehension, I really think about it as understanding, really, the written word around you, not just in texts, but in all environments. [That] is really what language comprehension is.

I have this a new understanding now that the language comprehension is really what leads us to the reading comprehension. I guess that's really how I see it, as more just understanding language, whether written form, internal thoughts...

[00:06:24] Susan Lambert: Great. Thanks for that. I love the two different perspectives. And definitely, MaryKate, a very practitioner-focused [definition], and I think our listeners will appreciate that, for sure.

Charles, before I ask you this next question, I understand, and, MaryKate, help me get this right, I understand you recently received an award from the International Dyslexia Association? Maybe MaryKate, can you tell us what that award was? Because I don't want to put Charles on the spot to embarrass him, but here we go.

[00:06:52] MaryKate DeSantis: I'm happy to. Yeah, the Samuel [Torrey] Orton Award, which is a huge honor in the fields. It was awarded earlier this year. Unfortunately, I wasn't there to hear the brilliant speech and presentation, but it is certainly a well-known award in the field.

[00:07:13] Susan Lambert: Absolutely. Congratulations, Charles. It just speaks to the work that you've done over the years and really establishes your expertise as a scientist who's digging in to figure out how kids learn how to read.

[00:07:26] Charles Hulme: Thanks, Susan. Thank you.

[00:07:27] Susan Lambert: Very cool honor.

[00:07:28] Charles Hulme: Thank you.

[00:07:29] Susan Lambert: So with that, you're really the expert here. So, can you really help us understand how it is we learn how to read?

[00:07:37] Charles Hulme: Yes, I hope I can. To link back to something that MaryKate said just a moment ago, we've got to start from the premise that reading is language. Without language, there would be no reading. Reading is a process that's involved in taking language in its written form and translating it back into its original form, which is spoken language.

When we talk about kids learning to read, I think we need to distinguish between two aspects of reading, and this is something you mentioned at the beginning, Susan. Reading in the sense of being able to decode print, or translate printed words into speech, and we usually call that decoding or reading aloud.

And then there's reading in the sense of reading comprehension, which builds off the ability to decode print. So, if a child has problems decoding print, they will have problems in understanding because they're not decoding properly, but also, some children can decode adequately but still have problems with understanding what has been decoded.

[00:08:56] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Thank you for that. We talk a lot about representing that in what we call the Simple View of Reading model.

I wonder if you would like to take just a moment to talk through that and how that represents, then, reading comprehension.

[00:09:10] Charles Hulme: Sure. The Simple View of Reading, as its name suggests, tries to be very simple. It says that the process of understanding a text depends upon two different sets of skills. The first set is the ability to transcode, or decode the print on the page, to turn print into speech. And the second process is the ability to understand spoken language.

And those two things, in the Simple View, I think, are seen as largely separate and independent. I think the Simple View of Reading is a great model, but, to quote a great British statistician, George Box, "All models are wrong, but some models are useful."

I think the Simple View of Reading is an immensely useful model, and there are hundreds or thousands of journal articles that many people, including myself, have written, providing support for the model. I think this is a very good model, but I think it's at least incomplete.

[00:10:23] Susan Lambert: That's a great explanation and sort of supports the conversation we had with Dr. Wes Hoover earlier in this season about the Simple View. He talks about it being a static model. He talks a little bit about the two areas involved in the Simple View, but I love what he said in that episode. The Simple View of Reading, the simple part of it is it takes the complexities of reading and puts it or organizes it into two areas. Each of those areas is complex in different ways.

We know a lot about decoding, or we've had a lot of guests on to talk about decoding and the important area there, the absolutely table stakes for getting to that reading comprehension.

But you mentioned something about that language side. That language side involves a little bit of oral reading or oral language. We're really talking about some pretty complex processes when we talk about that language comprehension bucket, I think.

Does that feel right to you?

[00:11:26] Charles Hulme: I think that's right, and I think, going back to what you've just said about what Wes Hoover said, he's absolutely right. Wes was one of the key people involved in the development of the Simple View after Phil Gough and Bill Tunmer. He's right in pointing out that the Simple View is essentially a static model. It was really designed as a model to explain variations in reading comprehension amongst adults.

[00:11:56] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:11:56] Charles Hulme: I think the big change in our understanding is that recent research by my group has really shown very clearly that if we go back in development, language skills appear to form the foundation for the ability to decode print, as well as the foundation for the ability to understand what is decoded. So in other words, those two independent dimensions in the Simple View aren't really independent developmentally. They both grow out of underlying language skills.

[00:12:38] Susan Lambert: Hmm. And those underlying language skills are oral language skills. Am I getting that connection right?

[00:12:46] Charles Hulme: That's absolutely correct. Yeah.

[00:12:49] Susan Lambert: Can you talk a little bit about oral language? Again, we've mentioned it, but never had a really good comprehensive sort of explanation about what it is and how does it fit in with reading and reading comprehension.

[00:13:01] Charles Hulme: Sure. So language, it's a simple idea. Oral language really refers to children's ability to understand what's said to them, their comprehension or sometimes what's referred to as their listening or comprehension skills, and their ability to express ideas in spoken language, their expressive language skills.

Both of those two things are very closely linked in development, but they are partially separable. I mean, basically, to a first approximation, children differ in how good these language skills are early in development, and, indeed, people differ in how good their language skills are throughout their life, and these basic skills of speaking and listening are fundamental, really, I think, to everything about the development of reading.

But more broadly, they're fundamental to pretty well everything that happens in education. What's happening now? I'm speaking. You and the audience will be listening. You are understanding what I'm saying. I'm transferring information from my head into your head. And that of course is what happens in school and college and university.

So, language really, I think, is the bedrock of pretty well the whole of education and most of the transmission of knowledge in society.

[00:14:40] Susan Lambert: MaryKate, do you have anything to add to that?

[00:14:43] MaryKate DeSantis: Yeah. Just in thinking about children in schools, children that might have difficulty with language or that there's some risk in their language skills, that impacts their entire day, and how they are able to communicate their inner dialogue, their metacognitive strategies, to be able to kind of think through, problem-solve. I think our main purpose, really, in life is to be able to communicate with others. Thinking about kids that have difficulty with that communication, again, that's their purview all day long.

And so, it just really raises the importance and highlights everything that Charles said around language. [It] is the foundation of learning and [there are] social emotional components to that, socio, psycho components. It really encompasses the ability to learn.

[00:15:40] Susan Lambert: I'm thinking back to my time in the classroom and, it's dating me a little bit, the standards movement, MaryKate, and everything. When they came out with the main domains of ELA, it was speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

I remember in those early days not really understanding what in the world as a third grade teacher do I do with speaking and listening standards, because it seems like, well, I don't know what to do with it. I don't know if we've always appreciated that sort of element or that sort of slice of ELA as classroom teachers.

Maybe I'm speaking for myself, but it seems to me they're quite important.

[00:16:21] MaryKate DeSantis: Yeah. Charles was just giving the example of it, in terms of we're listening and he's speaking.

[00:16:25] Susan Lambert: Yep, that's right.

[00:16:26] MaryKate DeSantis: I was a student of the wonderful Charlie Haynes, and he really always placed that emphasis on those language competencies. They're so reciprocal and interconnected: listening, speaking, reading, writing.

I think, unfortunately, when we think about ELA, sometimes we just think of reading and writing. And when we do that, it's very siloed if we're not thinking about the listening and speaking component. I think, especially now, the importance around teaching and incorporating how to listen and how to speak and communicate is just the most important thing.

[00:17:04] Susan Lambert: Yeah. We're going to jump back into this in a few minutes, MaryKate, with you, but it does raise some interesting ideas of when kids come to us in school and, Charles, in their developmental process, speaking and listening start to develop before we even see them, before teachers even get them in pre-K or in kindergarten.

And when you said that the Simple View of Reading was this static model, as opposed to this developmental model, I think that you have taken and created a model called Reading Is Language Model, and extended that Simple View of Reading model into something a little more developmental.

I would love if you could explain that to our listeners.

[00:17:46] Charles Hulme: Sure. So we've just published a paper that describes the Reading Is Language Model. According to the Reading Is Language Model, we start with language competence in preschool. Language in preschool is the forerunner of the development of what we call code-related skills when children enter school.

By code-related skills, we mean the ability to learn letter sound relationships, the ability to identify phonemes in spoken words, and children's naming abilities. And we know that those code-related skills are the foundations for children to be able to go on to learn to decode print. So, that view that language earlier is the foundation for code-related skills at school entry, which in turn are the foundations of the development of decoding, is a kind of change of emphasis, or really a change altogether from the Simple View, because it's saying this decoding thing, which is very, very important, really grows out of earlier language skills.

And then in the Reading Is Language Model, early language skills in preschool also form the foundation of later language skills, which continue to develop across a wide range of developmental time throughout the primary school, early school years, and well into secondary education. And those language skills are really the second dimension in the Simple View of Reading model.

But the point of the Reading Is Language Model is to say both of those dimensions of the Simple View arise from earlier language skills. And so, for example, we've shown in some of our research that if you measure early language skills prior to children entering formal schooling, they're highly predictive of who will become dyslexic, i.e., who will have problems in learning to decode print, and they're also very highly predictive of later reading comprehension abilities.

So again, they're predictive of both dimensions in the Simple View of Reading.

[00:20:27] Susan Lambert: Hmm. So interesting. And I've often heard and talk about those decoding skills as constrained skills. Once you learn them and have them automatic, you're good to go with both reading and spelling. But these language skills are unconstrained, meaning the sky's the limit.

[00:20:47] Charles Hulme: Yep.

[00:20:48] Susan Lambert: And I think I have this right, that as long as you continue to learn or even engage in any sort of way, your language skills can continue to develop throughout your lifetime. Is that right?

[00:21:02] Charles Hulme: Oh, absolutely. I'm still learning new words. Most of the words I learn, I learn through reading. But occasionally, somebody will say a word to me that I don't understand, but I more often... Book language is different to spoken language. When we speak, we tend to use more frequent or common words and we tend to make things simple. Whereas often when people write, they're writing more complex language and they're using less common words.

So, we talk about learning to read, but we also need to talk about reading to learn. A lot of what we learn in our lives is through reading. And reading is certainly a powerful driver of vocabulary and language development.

[00:21:58] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that makes sense. And again, going back to my third grade teacher life, understanding that pivotal shift, in that we put some pretty complex texts in front of students, very academic text, and our whole goal for education or for schooling is to start to get them to learn more and know more and maybe be interested in more and have things they can talk about and write about. And so this idea of building on that base is really, really, really critical.

MaryKate, let's relate this to the classroom and the impact on students. So, in the pre-call, we were talking a little bit about moving the needle on literacy achievement, particularly here in the United States as the context we were talking about, but obviously this is a global issue. How does language fit into that overall goal of moving the needle?

[00:22:53] MaryKate DeSantis: First, I think it's just so important to recognize that teachers right now cannot work any harder. I mean there's, it's...

[00:23:02] Susan Lambert: Cheers to that.

[00:23:02] MaryKate DeSantis: Yes, teachers are just working so, so hard. But the good news is that we can work smarter. And I think science has shown that direct language instruction, as well as embedded instruction across a child's day is what will move the needle.

The longitudinal studies from Dr. Hulme and Dr. Snowling and colleagues show that children with early language weaknesses are much more likely to develop those word-reading difficulties and difficulty with math over time. And so, that means that language isn't just about comprehension at the end.

I mean, that's obviously what we're working towards. It shapes an entire learning trajectory, and we really have the science to prove that. And if the goal is to move the needle, then language is the highest leverage place to focus. I think, obviously, we've had this huge shift in focus on phonics instruction, and absolutely it's necessary, but it's not sufficient.

So, when we intentionally build language, and you had just mentioned, Susan, too, about the type of text that we put in front of kids, well, if kids can't get there yet in their decoding skills, they certainly can through rich language discussion and exposure to grade-level texts, even if they're not reading at that level.

That is just so important that we're not limiting our children in the type of texts that we're reading to them and exposing them to because they might not be there yet in print. We know that receptive language, those skills are developing much quicker than our reading comprehension.

And so, the millions of things that are going on in schools and all the expectations we put on teachers, the one consistent thing, really, is the research and those oral language skills.

[00:24:47] Susan Lambert: So, I have a question for you here in that. I remember when the Science of Reading movement was just taking hold here in the United States, we talked a lot about how language skills develop naturally, but decoding skills, like learning to read, learning that print, must be explicitly taught.

I fear sometimes that we've planted a misconception that you don't have to worry about language skills at all because they are naturally developing. I had to shift my language a little bit to say, well, maybe they do naturally develop, but you still have to leverage those, and there's still some explicit instruction that needs to happen around language skills.

Would the both of you agree with that? Both in the, we don't want to plant misconceptions that language, you don't have to pay attention to, because it's naturally developing. Do you feel that sense too?

[00:25:46] Charles Hulme: I agree with what you've just said a hundred percent, Susan. There is a sense in which everybody is expected to learn language naturally through exposure in the environment, but there are huge variations in language development, and those variations are very strongly related to differences in socioeconomic circumstances, and children from poorer homes typically come to school with much less well-developed language than children from more affluent homes. That's a very important thing for teachers to be aware of. And actually there is a lot that can be done in school to directly teach language skills and to try to create more of a level playing field for children.

So, the idea that language is some biological capacity, well, it partly is that, but it's a real trap for educators to think that means that we don't need to do anything about it all. We shouldn't do anything about it. In fact, there's a lot that can be done in school to help with children's language development

[00:27:05] Susan Lambert: MaryKate, I know that you have dedicated your life to help teachers understand what those things are that they can do.

Can you give us a few examples of things that teachers can do to help develop those language capacities?

[00:27:18] MaryKate DeSantis: Yeah. I think one thing to really think about is language is really, you're processing your understanding of your surroundings. Molly Ness, who is a fantastic literacy researcher and advocate and talks a lot about when it comes to a read aloud, you're almost cracking open your own thoughts and sharing them as you process the information.

And so, when we think about inferential skills, those are not things that come naturally. Kids are not able to directly infer information just because it's being read to them or they're reading it. And so, that's one thing that we really need to model and explicitly teach. Well, what is an inference? How do we arrive at one? And being really explicit about that.

For example, I read this line from the text, and then I think about what my background knowledge tells me, and so now I can infer. Really making those, connecting the dots, that's something that I think early in my career, I just assumed.

[00:28:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:28:26] MaryKate DeSantis: Like, we're doing a read aloud and I'm understanding it, so they must be understanding it and making those inferences. But it's not, and it's the same with explicit vocabulary and coming back to review vocabulary, not as a siloed activity, but it's explicit. It's direct.

The work of Isabel Beck, and there's so many amazing vocabulary researchers that have come up with these amazing routines. But also thinking about, how are we getting kids to practice with the language? Is there opportunity that children are actually talking?

And I always, I love, love, love working in classrooms with multilingual learners because they're doing like linguistic gymnastics, which is just totally fascinating. A lot of what they're learning is what we also need to be teaching to our monolingual students: the structure of language, the syntax, how we're understanding the vocabulary in context and out of context. Those skills really are very similar.

[00:29:28] Susan Lambert: Hmm. And it's interesting to me because for a typically developing student, one that doesn't come with language deficits, that is a challenging activity in grade-level texts and content and vocabulary in and of itself. But [for] students that do come with deficits in language, it's even more difficult.

So that leads me to wonder, how would a teacher know if a student comes with a language deficit that would impact their overall academic development?

[00:30:04] MaryKate DeSantis: I think it's important to note that [when] we talk about language difficulty, teachers aren't responsible for diagnosing, let's say, developmental language disorder. Right?

[00:30:15] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:30:15] MaryKate DeSantis: We have speech language pathologists, we have experts that are able to do that. But to notice when language is getting in the way of learning, that's really crucial, and teachers are always going to be the first line of defense in healthcare. Without a preventative model, identifying a condition is just left up to chance.

And so, without a preventative model in schools identifying difficulties, if we're really going to do that at scale, we really need to be screening for language. We screen for those early alphabet skills, but even before that, based off of everything that Charles has shared, we really, really need to be looking at screening for these early language difficulties. And it should be really the first thing that we investigate, not the last and not the aftermath of difficulty in reading.

[00:31:07] Susan Lambert: Right, right, right.

[00:31:08] Charles Hulme: It's very difficult for teachers to be aware of language difficulties in their classroom. Imagine the child who sits at the back of the class. They're quiet. They're well-behaved. They don't speak very much. They may be understanding almost nothing about what's going on in the classroom day to day, and there's no way of the teacher really knowing that very easily.

[00:31:36] Susan Lambert: When you talked about that quiet child in the back, it made me think of how sometimes those children may be seen as very compliant and kind, and they're good in the classroom, and seems to me they could slip through the cracks very easily in terms of needing support.

[00:31:58] Charles Hulme: Totally. Totally. Yeah.

[00:32:01] MaryKate DeSantis: I think, too, the reality is that we miss that language piece, because we rely so heavily on those reading scores alone. And that same child that is shy, that doesn't converse with peers or with teachers, could look okay on an early reading screen.

Maybe they're able to decode, but if they're decoding and not understanding what it is that they're reading, that's going to continue. And so, I think when we're putting all of our efforts into the explicit and systematic teaching of reading, which again is just so important, when that reading instruction isn't working, it's often language. It's often language where those issues are really there, in plain sight. And so, back to your question around what can we do: We have to be able to know what it is to look for, and having a screener that is realistic and feasible for educators is gold, truly.

[00:33:02] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And talking about that loop of, okay, we have the screener. We know this student might be at risk. We can't just leave it at, oh, this kid's in the at-risk category. What in the world can teachers do then to intervene for that next step in that process?

[00:33:21] Charles Hulme: I think that's a question for you, MaryKate.

[00:33:23] MaryKate DeSantis: Yeah, I've been really fortunate. I'm here standing on the shoulders of a literacy giant here.

And so, so much of what I have learned I've been really fortunate to give interventions that Charles and his team have done this incredible work in these longitudinal, randomized control trials. Going back to working smarter, right, is following the evidence and what has proven to work.

I think that really is what we need to be after as educators and critical consumers of programs and curriculum. And so, teaching vocabulary really deeply again, and not just defining words and modeling and practicing complete complex sentences and using really structured routines for practice and supporting narrative skills and asking students to retell, summarize, explain in a very structured way. We have the intervention; we have the tools to be able to do that. And so, that's the exciting part, for teachers anyways. We know what works.

[00:34:33] Susan Lambert: And we say that a lot. We've had a history of doing that, especially in the United States, of, it's okay, teacher, just trust that this works. But what kind of evidence do we have that providing this early language instruction is both effective and then sustainable over time? Do we have evidence?

[00:34:53] Charles Hulme: Yeah, we have a lot of evidence.

We've done a whole series of randomized control trials, including now we're starting to do them in different countries and in different languages. We have now got very strong evidence that the language pullout program produces meaningful improvements in children's language abilities. It also improves children's word-reading abilities, and it also improves children's reading-comprehension abilities.

And finally, there's good evidence that that program also, again, from evidence from a randomized control trial, improves children's behavior in school. So, children who have this program appear to be better at concentrating, better behaved, less disruptive in the classroom than children who haven't had it.

And then, finally, just this year, we published a study, which was a two-year follow-up of children from the last randomized control trial that we'd done. And in that follow-up, we found that the children who had had the program two years later still had better language abilities, still had better word-reading abilities, and still had better reading-comprehension abilities than children that hadn't had it.

And that's pretty remarkable, because it's two years after the program had been finished, and those two years actually were two years during the COVID pandemic, where schools were highly disrupted, frequently closed, and these effects of the program lasted for at least two years. So I think we've got, this isn't just anecdotal evidence, we've got lots of anecdotal evidence from schools, saying, "This is fantastic. The kids love it, the teachers love it, and the kids are doing better."

But we're actually talking about statistical evidence here from very large-scale randomized trials. In the trial we published in 2021, we screened 6,000 children in 200 schools. We assigned half of those schools to receive the program and half to wait. We had 500 children treated and 500 children not treated. And these effects come through in these very large-scale, rigorous trials that are actually conducted by independent researchers. So, we've got very strong evidence for effectiveness.

[00:37:46] Susan Lambert: Hmm. And for our listeners, when we talk about the scientific process and evidence for intervention, this is exactly what we're talking about. So, that's really exciting. MaryKate, anything to add to that?

[00:38:02] MaryKate DeSantis: I would just say, as I had mentioned, I was in an urban district for a really long time. And so, one thing I always looked at when I was looking at studies or [what] my students represented, this was such a large sample. It wasn't just some small suburban school that they looked [at].

So you have the representation within the data and I think that that's something that's really important. And I know Charles has seen a lot of, they've seen a lot of progress with multilingual learners as well, and I think that that's just really important to recognize.

[00:38:33] Susan Lambert: Yeah, for sure. Well, I wonder for both of you, what do you hope listeners come away from this conversation with? What do you hope they remember and think more about or try to implement?

[00:38:47] Charles Hulme: Three things. Language, language, and language.

[00:38:56] MaryKate DeSantis: Ditto. Ditto. Ditto.

[00:39:01] Susan Lambert: It's interesting because on a previous episode, I think it was with Dr. Julie Van Dyke, who talked about how teachers get nervous about what they should be doing when it comes to language in the classroom, and she was specifically talking about syntax, of course, but I think there's something to that.

She reminded our listeners and me that we were a little bit nervous too when we first started to talk about word recognition skills, like, what's phonemic awareness and how does that relate to the process of phonics and acquiring the code? And now that we've been talking more about it and more and more teachers have been implementing this in the classroom, they feel less nervous about it.

But now that we're talking about  language, language development, what all that means, there still is a sense that teachers are a little skeptical or nervous or scared about what this might mean. Is it extra time in the classroom? MaryKate, I wonder how you would respond to that.

[00:40:01] MaryKate DeSantis: Yeah, I think this is one of those things where as teachers, we want to see our students improving, and seeing language develop and strengthen is not as obvious as, let's say, a kiddo being able to read a list of words more automatically. It's not something that is as obvious.

And so, back to your question on what is it that I would want teachers to really to know, and I think school administrators, policy, things like that, focusing on language isn't a quick fix. Focusing on language is worth the time and strengthening how students understand, use, and talk about language every day. We're not just focusing on language. We're focusing on reading comprehension, on social-emotional learning, supporting across content areas.

The research is just so clear and our hardworking teachers really deserve to know that, that language is not optional for literacy. When we treat it as foundational, that's when we will give more students access to success.

[00:41:14] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Beautifully said.

Charles, MaryKate, any final thoughts for our listeners before we wrap up?

[00:41:22] Charles Hulme: I agree with what MaryKate's just said. I think the other thing I would say is, we need to encourage teachers to think about [the idea that] language is something that children go on learning over long periods of time. It's all about having good quality interactions with children, providing them with rich language inputs, and also giving kids time and space to speak.

A critical part of learning language is producing language. We don't want classrooms where everybody's shouting and screaming at the same time, but we do want classrooms where kids are often given opportunities to talk and giving feedback on the way they speak and the language that they produce, 'cause that's a very rich way of children learning language: having opportunities to produce it.

[00:42:18] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Great points. MaryKate, anything else to add?

[00:42:22] MaryKate DeSantis: No. I'm still learning. It's what Charles just said. I think what you're really trying to say is, if we want better readers, we have to grow better language users.

[00:42:33] Charles Hulme: Absolutely. Absolutely. And if you look at the NAEP scores for kids at the bottom, they're going down year on year. Yeah. And I have little doubt that the decline in the NAEP scores is to do with a decline in language skills, which can easily be addressed.

[00:42:53] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Well, this has been a really interesting and important conversation.

I can't tell you, Charles, how honored I am to have you on this podcast and talk about language. Thank you for the work that you've been doing throughout the years and, MaryKate, thanks so much for the connection and being here with us as well. It's been a pleasure.

[00:43:13] Charles Hulme: Been great to talk to you. Thank you, Susan.

[00:43:15] MaryKate DeSantis: Thank you so much.

[00:43:18] Susan Lambert: That was MaryKate DeSantis, educator, reading specialist, and founder of Left Side Strong LLC. She's worked with Dr. Tiffany Hogan at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in the Speech and Language Literacy Lab. She is also an ongoing research collaborator with Harvard University in the BRIDGES Lab.

And you also heard from Dr. Charles Hulme, emeritus professor of psychology and education at the University of Oxford. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo and is a member of Academia Europaea, and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2017. You'll find links to learn much more about their work and research right in the show notes.

In just two weeks, we're welcoming back Dr. Tim Shanahan to discuss his piece "Don't Confuse Reading Comprehension and Learning to Read, and to Reread."

[00:44:16] Tim Shanahan: A text that is immediately comprehensible leaves you very little to learn. There's not much that you have to do to figure it out.

[00:44:26] Susan Lambert: Make sure you're subscribed to Science of Reading: The Podcast to get that episode in two weeks.

Meantime, on the latest edition of Beyond My Years, host Ana Torres gets some strategies for discovering and rediscovering passion and purpose in education. She's joined by Daniela Anello, CEO of DC Bilingual Public Charter School.

[00:44:49] Daniela Anello: One of the things that became really, really clear for me was that I needed to be in a place where I could be my full self, like demonstrating all of the identities that make me who I am.

[00:44:59] Susan Lambert: Listen today on Beyond My Years, available wherever you're listening to this show. We'll also have a link in the show notes. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.