S4 Ep1 - Harnessing Oral Language for Reading and Spelling Success

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Hi there. I'm so pleased you've been able to join me for this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn and I want to begin our episode by letting you know that you're doing a great job.

Are you perfect? Nope.

Do you have every duck in a row? I guarantee that is not the case.

But you're here listening to this podcast and that means that you are looking for ways to help your students succeed. What am I doing here? Well, I'm here to help you do that. Whether you engage with us through a Resource Room membership, a Professional Learning course, by using one of our classroom programs, or you simply meet me here in the podcast every week, I have one goal and that's to help you do the work that you do to build student success.

In this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, we're going to have a chat about the importance of oral language, not just for the little people in Foundation to Year 2, but right across the school.

We'll discuss the connection between language and reading and spelling, and I'll share some practical information for how you can maximise the language capacity of your students to help them grow both reading and writing.

Let's begin with a bit of a definition of what oral language is. When I was writing my book Reading Success in the Early Primary Years a few years ago, it took quite a while to land on a definition of oral language that felt right. The reason was there are just so many parts to it, and here's where I landed.

What is Oral Language?

I'm reading from page 10 of my book, if you happen to have your copy handy.

Oral language is the ability to speak and to listen. As vocabulary and phonological and phonemic awareness are dealt with in their own categories in the Big Six, we will talk about other elements of language here such as semantics (or meaning), syntax (sentence structure and parts of speech - teachers often call this grammar), and morphology (the study of the smallest units of meaning in words). We can also add phonology (the sounds in words), the ability to say them (articulation), and pragmatics (knowing which language is appropriate in different social settings), to the mix. We can see from this list that oral language is a complex mix of interdependent skills.

Now, as teachers, it can be difficult to pin down exactly what we're talking about when we discuss oral language and even more difficult to be targeted in our teaching around this. To get a sense of how oral language impacts literacy right across the school, let's have a look at our frameworks of literacy and how oral language interacts with them. This will help us see why prioritising oral language in our classrooms is so important and will lead us into the how of instruction.

Linnea Ehri

Let's start with Linnea Ehri's Phases of Sight Word Reading. Professor Ehri isn't talking about a sight word program here; she's talking about the ability to effortlessly lift words from the page.

If you've heard of orthographic mapping, you've heard of Professor Ehri's work. Part of the progression in these phases is moving from the full alphabetic phase, where we sound out words sound-by-sound, to the consolidated phase, where we lift words from the page without conscious thought.

There's a secret sauce that Linnea Ehri calls the superglue to make words stick in our brains for effortless reading.

That super glue is knowing what a word looks like, what it sounds like and what it means. In this super glue, oral language features heavily as a factor for success.

First

We firstly need to make sure that students can say the words. They need it in their spoken vocabulary.

If I can't say it, I can't read it or write it.

Second

We then have to ensure that students have strong vocabulary knowledge.

That means that I have to use the words in context.

Yes, you can explicitly introduce words in your text-based unit and across the curriculum, and that's really important. But you can't teach all the words a student will need to know in this way. The simplest way to get students using words in context, to learn how to say them and what they mean is to support them to engage with beautiful, rich texts and then provide structures for them to use the words to speak and write.

This doesn't just happen in the English block, though. It needs to happen right across the curriculum and right across the day.

Third

The final element here is how a word looks and how it's structured.

The really handy thing here is that in these three elements, what it sounds like, looks like and means, all have a positive effect on each other. So when you show a written word during vocabulary instruction, it makes it easier for the student to retain the word in long-term memory. That's more research from Linnea Ehri.

When you teach the students to spell the word, it makes it easier for them to read it.

When you have them use the word in context for both reading and writing, you strengthen the superglue that holds the word in long-term memory. But the important implication here is that one exposure is not enough for the kind of superglue building that we're talking about.

A Success Story

A few weeks ago I was talking with an instructional leader in a school that's using our text-based units from The Resource Room. This teacher has taught one of the units to her Year Two class in a previous year, and saw a positive influence on the student's ability to use the target vocabulary in their own writing after explicit instruction and some practice within the literacy block.

The next year that this teacher taught the same unit, she saw even more impressive learning in her students. This was the same unit taught with the same lesson steps.

So what's the difference the second time around? Well, the second time she taught the unit, the teacher was conscious of making connections to the target vocabulary across the school day in a variety of contexts. Every time there was an opportunity to draw students' attention to a logical connection, no matter the subject area she was teaching, she grabbed onto the teachable moment.

There was no complicated planning, no PowerPoint making, no spending hours making stuff. She was just aware. What she saw was that her students were able to use words like uninviting in a way that didn't just copy how the word was used in the stimulus text of the unit. They had truly built the word into their spoken vocabulary and could use it independently. And they weren't just hearing her use the words, they were using them themselves across the day.

The thing about oral language instruction is that every lesson has to be a language lesson. There's no oral language time in the day where we focus on it and then leave it behind.

Dr Scarborough

The next framework we can view to explore the importance of oral language is Scarborough's Reading Rope. I'm going to head back to my book now.

At the top of page 8,

Dr Hollis Scarborough produced the infographic 'The Many Strands that Make Up Skilled Reading' as a workshop handout. It has since become one of the most recognisable infographics in the structured literacy world. Dr Scarborough used the strands of the rope to indicate the many skills and areas of knowledge that need to be developed in order for skilled reading to occur. The top of the rope relates to the linguistic components that teachers must focus on and the bottom of the rope to the decoding components.

There's a copy of the infographic on the bottom of page 8, but you can find it everywhere.

The top strands of the rope are background knowledge, vocabulary, and also listed with vocabularies is breath, precision, links, etc., language structures, such as semantics and syntax, verbal reasoning, including inference and metaphor, and literacy knowledge. Three out of these five strands relate directly to oral language.

I watched a webinar with Dr Scarborough and she said that if she had to place morphology directly into the rope, she'd put inflectional morphemes such as past tense -ed, the -ing plural, s, etc. into the bottom of the rope with decoding, and she would place the derivational morphology, which is everything else where we're making new words with prefixes and suffixes and bases, into the top of the rope. I'll talk about morphology a bit more in a moment.

Here's the thing about what the research and subsequent frameworks that are commonly cited as part of the science of reading tell us. They tell us that those people who want to discredit the science of reading or dismiss the foundations of structured literacy by claiming that it is nothing but barking at print and does not focus on meaning are simply wrong.

The science tells us that meaning and oral language are not just good to have, but are vital if students are going to be strong in literacy. So the next time you hear someone making spurious claims about recent shifts in instruction, you can confidently tell them that explicit, structured teaching of literacy is very concerned with language and meaning. There are many other elements of research and frameworks that we could look at, but that would make this podcast episode many hours long and I know that you simply don't have that kind of time. So let's move on and discuss the practical aspects of instruction that can help us make every lesson a language lesson.

Harnessing the Power

Here I have five of my top tips for harnessing the power of oral language to build your students capacity in reading and writing.

1. 

The first one, the most important one, I think, is to make sure that you have language-rich texts in use right across the curriculum and, when they can, that your students are actually doing the reading.

We can't teach students all the words that they'll need or will encounter, but what we can do is help them to engage with rich texts. Vocabulary development is enhanced by explicit instruction, but students build a great deal of vocabulary knowledge when they lift words from the page in their independent and supported reading. There are also enormous benefits from having texts read to you, so in the early years, particularly, read loads of texts of all types to students. In Years Three to Six, when you want to stretch students, don't be scared to choose texts to study that are a bit more difficult than they could manage on their own. It's in this stretch that learning happens. Just make sure you're providing scaffolding and support. If you're a Resource Room member, you have access to short story units with gorgeous archaic texts for this purpose.

2.

My top tip number two is about getting students talking.

Teachers are top talkers. We talk way too much. Guilty as charged, Your Honour. We also assume that because we have said something, that students heard it and can take it away and use it. The reality is that students have to think about and use language to learn it.

Across the day and across the curriculum, give the students the chance to repeat you as you say key words, phrases and sentences. This is particularly important for students who have English as an additional language or a language difficulty. Get them to use these words, phrases and sentences with a partner. Give them the opportunity to build on your words, phrases and sentences with their own and get them to write them when they can remember. We focus a lot on what we are saying, but we don't always give as much thought to what the students are saying or how to improve the quality of their spoken interactions.

3.

Point number three, I mentioned morphology earlier in the episode and I'm swinging back to it now. If you want to help students improve phonemic awareness, vocabulary, spelling, reading comprehension and written expression, then don't scrimp on the morphology.

When it comes to the evidence base for teaching students about the smallest units of meaning in our language, there is oodles of it. Most of the evidence does come from intervention trials, with some from regular classroom instructional research, but the great news about that is that you know that when you teach morphology to your whole class, you're supporting your most vulnerable students as well as your high flyers.

Not only is it recommended to teach morphology, linking it to spelling, research also indicates that connecting the meanings and spellings of morphemes to parts of speech and providing opportunities for contextualised application yields greater outcomes across a range of areas.

I have a caution for you, though: please don't go down the analytical road or the inquiry road. I have a podcast episode all about how to make sure that your spelling instruction is explicit, and we'll link to that in the show notes. In our program Spelling Success in Action, or the Simple Start version that you have access to if you're a Resource Room member, we work up from morphemes to words, to sentences and texts.

If you want to make every lesson a language lesson and improve spelling, teaching morphology in a rigorous way, with loads of word breaking and building, and then helping students apply that learning in context is a great way to go. So many teachers tell me that not only are their students improving their spelling through morphology instruction, but that their vocabularies are expanding, and this is positively impacting reading fluency, comprehension and writing, as well as spelling.

4.

The fourth tip I have for you to make every lesson a language lesson relates to syntax. Syntax is all about the arrangement of words and phrases in sentences. The way that we speak and the way that we write are different.

Students usually don't need to be taught to construct sentences for everyday speech. If they do, they'll be receiving support from a professional in that space. However, written language requires us to focus on sentence structures and teach them explicitly. Part of this relates to my second tip about getting students talking. Many teachers in schools are including explicit syntax instruction in their literacy blocks. This is brilliant, because sentences are the building blocks of written texts.

However, I want to bring you back to the start of the episode, when I said that if you can't say it, you can't read it or write it; if you have a pen handy, write that down. Let me say it again:

If you can't say it, you can't read it or write it.

Teaching students to write sentences is fantastic. It supports comprehension as well as writing. An inclusion that will make this even more powerful is to make sure that students have the opportunity to rehearse different types of sentences orally and to experience them in oral reading. So when you're thinking about syntax instruction, remember to have students orally produce sentences with a partner. Let them get a feel for the words in their mouth more than once.

Get them to read aloud, attending to punctuation and practicing phrasing. All of this helps them to build language.

5.

The final tip I have for you is about questioning. I have previously recorded a whole episode about questioning and how we use questioning in the classroom. It's Season 3, Episode 7, Getting Questions Right From the Start. This episode focused on using questioning for a variety of purposes in the classroom and some of the pitfalls that we can fall into. Another aspect of questioning is about their role in getting students to think. What is language comprehension? It's understanding what is being said, part of that is also the capacity to connect with incoming messages and integrate them with what we already know.

Great questions push us and prompt us to think deeply, and that's at the heart of learning. We're very used to being the asker of questions, but there is also value in having students write questions on their own, and let's remember that questioning is an evidence-based comprehension strategy.

You can support students to write questions, and write better questions yourself, with a Questioning Matrix. This matrix has the 'WH' questions down the left hand side and across the top it has other question starters, such as is and does, has, was, did, can, should, would, could, will and might. Using this grid gives you more than 50 question stems that you can provide for students to ask questions. Now, the further down and right you get in the grid, the more deeply the answerer will have to think about the question. So it works from simple to complex as you move across the matrix. You can also use this to formulate great questions yourself. I've popped a copy of the matrix in the show notes on our website at jocelynseamereducation.com for you to download.

Conclusion

Oral language is at the heart of all literacy development. We aren't looking to add a spot into our literacy block called Oral Language. We're looking to make every lesson a language lesson right across the curriculum.

When we build structures into our existing practices to level up our oral language game, we equip students with the foundations that they need to build increasingly strong reading and writing.

If you've enjoyed this episode of the podcast, you might like to have a listen to a chat that I had with Anna Geiger, also known as The Measured Mom, on her podcast Triple R Teaching. We talked about different aspects of oral language, including its importance in early years instruction, and I shared even more practical tips for strengthening this in the classroom. It'll be out later in 2024, so don't miss it.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. I'll be here next week, take care. Bye.

Other Useful Things

Reading Success in the Early Primary Years Book

S3 E7 - Getting Questions Right From the Start

The Measured Mom: Triple R Teaching podcast