You've hit on something that I think has been a bit confusing, when we think about the innateness of language, but yet it does benefit from explicit systematic teaching.
This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Today we're continuing our season-long reading reboot, reexamining and building on foundational literacy concepts. This time we're focusing on language. What are the key components of language? What is developmental language disorder, and why are many unfamiliar with it, even though there's a robust literature about the disorder?
How can educators support students with oral language deficits? Our guide for these questions is Dr. Tiffany Hogan. She's a professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston, among many other important roles. She also hosts the SeeHearSpeak Podcast.
Listeners will come away from this episode with a comprehensive understanding of language, DLD, and strategies for supporting students. I'm now thrilled to welcome Dr. Tiffany Hogan. Tiffany Hogan, welcome to today's episode. I am so excited to have you on.
I'm so excited to be here.
For our listeners, we've been tag teaming and trying to do this for a while. So I'm so excited we could make it happen. I'm not sure if all of our listeners know who you are, so I would love it if you could introduce yourself. And give us just a little lens into how you became interested in language.
Fantastic. What do they say? I'm a long-time listener, first-time caller. So that's me. Love your podcast! So glad to be here. I'm Tiffany Hogan. I am a professor at MGH Institute of Health Professions, and a research associate at Harvard Medical School in Boston. My training is as a clinical speech language pathologist. And I'm currently a researcher.
I study the connection between speech and language and literacy across time in children.
That's really cool. And did you know when you were a young child, "I'm going to be a speech language pathologist"?
It's kind of a funny story. I've always been interested in human behavior. So I was always kind of a psychology nerd. I thought I would be a psychology major. But when I got going, I became most interested in the language aspect of psychology. And my mother is a speech language pathologist, so it was in the family. So I kind of knew about it.
I thought I was gonna go psychology, but knowing about the field I was drawn to speech language pathology. And I've always loved children.
That's great. That's really cool that it was in the family. So you sort of knew what you were getting yourself into. Very, very cool. So for our listeners, I'd love if you could help us to understand, and this sounds like such a basic question, but it's so complicated. What is language? And why does it matter for literacy?
Like I said, it sounds like a silly question, but when I ask people this question, "Well, what is language?" The definition is hard to sort of grab and wrap your arms around.
Yes. Language is a complex construct. The key aspect of language is we use it to communicate. And it is something that it's innate to humans. We wanna communicate with each other. So we use language as the vehicle for communication. When we think about language, it's multifaceted. So in the mid 70s, Bloom and Lahey classified the complexity of language in three primary components.
And I think it's helpful today to think about these three components as they relate to language. It also helps us to understand why it's hard to define language, because it is so complex. So Bloom and Lahey laid out three components: form, use, and content. So the form of language, that's like the sounds. It's the form in which we convey meaning.
If I'm talking about spoken language, like we are speaking to each other today, it's sounds. If I was thinking about sign language, the form would be the movements of the hands. Or the hands and fingers in space. But for spoken language, it's sounds. And then you have the content of language, and that's the meaning that we're conveying through our words and our grammar.
And then we have the use of language, and that's the social use of language. What's often unspoken, or is carried in the intonation of our words.
And so all three of those then have an impact on reading and writing. Can you talk a little bit about how they do that?
Yes. So all three of those components of language are developing from birth. And actually, we know even in utero that children are picking up on the patterns of the language that they're hearing outside of the womb. So it's really developing very early on. And that's setting the foundation. And that's because when we think about a child learning to read words, they have to connect letters and sounds.
And those letters are representing the sounds of language. And that sounds, that's the form that we talked about, they're developing sound representations often unconsciously from birth on. When we think about comprehension, we're thinking about the content of language, and the words, and the vocabulary, and the meaning, and the sentences. And then the use is really about pulling it all together.
So, at the discourse level, multiple sentences. How are those sentences coming together? That's setting the foundation. The content and the use is setting the foundation for the language comprehension for reading. And we know that reading is comprised of word reading and language comprehension.
That sounds a little bit like you're describing the Simple View of Reading.
Exactly.
That's really cool. And, I do have to ask you one more question, because spoken language is just sort of a part of the language that we have in our head. Now, I've been working with kindergartners, so I'm gonna give you a little bit of an example of this. So if I talk to kindergartners, and ask 'em a question, sometimes they don't always have the words to give to the thoughts that are in their head.
That makes it a little complex, doesn't it?
Absolutely! And language is complex. Because we have this idea of concepts, what we want to say. And then we have to then use language to say that. And like you said with kindergartners, they might be thinking, "I have this idea in my head, but what's the word to represent this?" Or, "I have lots of ideas. How do I connect sentences to convey this broader concept?"
Yeah. I have the same problem actually. I take my dog for a walk, and I think of all these great things in my head. And I think I can come home and write them down, or tell somebody. And it's not that easy to do, actually. So, it's not just for our young learners. It really is across the board, isn't it?
It is. And that's why we often hear that writing is thinking. And thinking is writing. Because when you're trying to write or speak out a concept, you have to know it at a deeper level. So, when I'm thinking out something complex, I'll wanna write it out. So that I can see where the holes are in my thinking.
It's really this reciprocal relationship between the concepts, or the knowledge we have, and the language we have to convey that knowledge.
And one more push on this too. So, we often hear that language is innate. Or our brains have evolved to be able to respond to this language. But I can't remember who said this. There's a quote, "Nobody is a native speaker of academic English." I wish I knew who to attribute that to.
But there are some things that we have to do during the learning and development process to really uncover and expose some of this academic language for our students.
Absolutely. And you've hit on something that I think has been a bit confusing, when we think about the innateness of language, but yet it does benefit from explicit systematic teaching. And also, the more we read, the more words we learn. Because we're learning different words that are used in academic language. So it really is bidirectional.
Yeah, I love how you said that. We're gonna come back to that in a few minutes, but I wanna go back to this idea of language learning. With most everything, there's variability there. So not everybody learns at the same pace, or the same way. So when we're thinking about that variability in language learning, what should we be thinking about? Or how should we be thinking about that?
Language learning has variability that you see in all skills. We know that we have neurodiversity that exists in the human condition in the brain. That neurodiversity means that we have lots of different ways to think, and we each come to the table with different brain structures. Those structures make it easier for some to learn languages, and it makes it harder for others to learn languages.
It also engenders us with strengths that might be unrelated to language. So what we see is that when we study language development in children, in any language, what we find is variability. And how easily children can learn vocabulary and grammar, in particular. And sounds. So, some children are really quick at learning a vocabulary word.
This means that they might hear it one time, regardless of the language, they might hear it and go, "Oh, yep , that's what it is." They store it in their mental lexicon, or their mental dictionary. Other children take many more repetitions to learn a specific word. This is the case with grammar. This is the case with sounds. And so that variation occurs.
And in that variation, some are at the low end of the variation, and they have a neurodiversity that we would characterize as a disorder, a disability. Because it makes it so difficult for them to learn vocabulary and grammar.
So, let's talk about dyslexia first. So that disability is on the word recognition side. Like really hearing the sounds, and being able to put the sounds together with the letters. But there's another concept too that I think is now being called developmental learning disorder or language disorder? Sorry.
No, it's okay. Great. It's developmental language disorder.
Is it a new concept?
Well, that's what I was just gonna say. It is not a new concept. As long as we've been studying language, we found that there's variation, and it's been studied for over a hundred years. So, you have this variation that occurs in language, and you have some children who struggle to learn language. Whether it's their native language, their second language, third language.
It's difficult for them to learn vocabulary words and grammar. And this is similar to the concept of neurodiversity we see in dyslexia. Because in dyslexia, children have a brain structure that makes it difficult for them to connect letters and sounds to read words. So, if we tie this back to that simple view, we know those are the two primary components. Word reading and language comprehension.
Just like we know that if a child has severe difficulties in learning to connect letters and sounds, we would characterize that as dyslexia. If they have, on the other hand, on the other side I will say, of that Simple View of Reading, if they have difficulty in learning language, then we see they have that difficulty called developmental language disorder, that's associated with language comprehension.
And importantly, there's a high overlap between these two, but there's not a one-to-one correlation. So it's about a 50% to 80% overlap. Meaning that if a child has dyslexia, there's a 50% to 80% chance they will likely have a co-occurring developmental language disorder. And vice versa. But it's not one-to-one. We definitely have children who have dyslexia, who have good vocabulary and grammar.
And we have children who have developmental language disorder, who can read words accurately and fluently.
That makes me think of a couple things. So first of all, DLD is sort of a new title for this. What did we use to call it? And why are we switching to DLD?
This is a great question. I think it's actually why many of your listeners may have not heard of DLD in the past, even though it's been around. We've studied it. We have a large literature characterizing children with DLD. And that's for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is, because it's been referred to as so many different labels. And it really has to do with who's using the label.
So in schools, for instance, children with developmental language disorder may be identified for an individualized education plan as having a specific learning disability in comprehension. They might be identified as having a speech and language impairment, which is a broader umbrella term. And they might be identified as having a communication disorder, another broader umbrella term. Or a developmental delay.
Those are labels that are used to qualify children with DLD for support services based on I.D.E.A. So, we have to use those labels to qualify children for services. Now, if you were to go into the ICD-10 codes you would see for billing purposes, if you go get a neuro evaluation, there's a code for expressive language disorder, or a receptive expressive language disorder.
That's the same thing as DLD, but a different type of code. If you look in the research literature, these children have been called children with specific language impairment, or primary learning language learning disability, and DLD. So in 2017-ish, 16 or 17-ish, there was an international consensus put together by Dr. Dorothy Bishop in the United Kingdom, who has studied multiple neurodiversities.
And she realized that, you know, this is really frustrating. People haven't heard of this, because across countries, across silos, you see that this same group of children is called so many different labels. So in 2018, the international consensus came out and decided, through a process of elimination and discussion, that we're going to call this developmental language disorder across the world.
Now, in many contexts, it was a little easier too enact this change. In the US, it is very hard to enact a change like that, because we have a complicated system that involves the federal system. We have multiple associations of people that have labels and definitions. And then we have the state system. So I've been working with this group, dldandme
.org , and we have an informational website, and we've been systematically trying to tackle in the US these different areas to get the same label. And it's exciting to say that now in the DSM, which we didn't even mention, that's used by psychologists, the DSM-5 now has developmental language disorder included. The ICD -11 codes now include developmental language disorder. And we lobbied the federal education system.
And so they now put out guidance that DLD is not precluded as a qualifying category in I.D.E.A.
Oh , there was a lot there .
So much to say about it .
First of all, thanks for helping us understand that. And what came to my mind is actually Scarborough's Reading Rope. And so when you think about the word recognition, and our listeners are all familiar with it, or the bottom part of that rope, there's much less strands involved than there is at the top part of the rope. And not to oversimplify dyslexia, but dyslexia by definition is one thing.
And it sounds to me like DLD, just like language, is quite complicated. And can manifest itself in very different ways. Is my understanding right there?
Absolutely. We've characterized DLD as more of a spectrum disorder, like autism. So it's on a spectrum. And that also means that you can have these different, varied strengths and weaknesses within a difficulty in language. And DLD is typically measured by a comprehensive language evaluation, that has multiple subtests. And then we look at the overall score to see that they have difficulty.
But there are strengths and weaknesses even within those subtests. So, you definitely have variability in persons with DLD.
So that makes it a little more complicated for the teacher, because I'm thinking about dyslexia. There's really not a test for dyslexia. During the course of instruction, we can sort of infer or see these kids are really struggling with this alphabetic principle and getting automaticity there. How can a teacher sort of think about DLD, or how to handle that process?
It's really tricky. You mentioned that with dyslexia, you really can tell who has dyslexia based on their response to the curriculum. And so it's this dynamic approach where you kind of measure through progress monitoring. Teach word reading. And then you say, "Oh, you're not learning it."
We actually wanna apply the same principles to language, because we want to see is the child having difficulty picking up on language concepts? But to do that, you first have to have a really good measure you're using. You have to have a comprehensive measure. And that's very tricky.
What research tells us consistently for the past 30 years is that unless we actually measure language, we are not going to be able to see who has difficulty in everyday conversation. We have a policy paper, my colleague and I, that we say, "If you don't look, you won't see."
Because we have to actually start to get into the process of systematically testing language ability and language learning in the classroom to see who has difficulty. And research tells us that if we rely on teachers and parents to report that they're concerned, we miss about 75% of children who have difficulties. Because, in the classroom, what we see is that they look like they're shy.
They could be hesitant to communicate. They might be a child who looks around when instructions are given. They're kind of seeing, "This was complicated. What's everyone else doing?" So they're looking to their peers to see what to do. They might start out telling you a sentence, and the sentence just drops off. They tell you stories, but they're really confusing to understand. There's pieces missing.
They might be disorganized. They might be learning vocabulary. You're teaching them, you as a teacher are teaching them some new vocabulary and they don't seem to be getting it. It takes multiple repetitions to get the vocabulary. These are some of the signs. They also use immature grammar. But immature could be one to two years behind.
And to know what immature grammar looks like, you have to know what grammar looks like across the spectrum, which is very, very difficult to do. And so, ultimately, we have to measure language to really understand who has difficulty. A good example is vision screening. We used to not screen for vision. We thought we would be able to tell who had a vision difficulty. They'll be squinting.
They'll be sitting close to the screen, or the tv, 'cause this was in the, the 70s and 80s. But once we started screening for vision routinely in schools, lo and behold we found a lot of children who had vision difficulties. But you could not tell because, one, the child didn't know they have difficulty with vision, and there was not a way to really uncover it in the day-to-day interactions.
And the same thing can be said for DLD.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We have universal screeners now that we employ in schools. But they're typically identifying kids at risk more related to word recognition or dyslexia. Right?
Yes, yes.
Is there such a thing as a universal screener for DLD?
So, there is a lot of progress in that area. We recently published a paper reviewing 15 currently available screeners in North America to screen for DLD. And one of the #1 questions I get asked is, which one should I use? But it really just depends on the age of the children you wanna screen, and your system. There's more and more coming out since we published that review paper last year.
What I will say is, ideally your screener will be embedded into your language comprehension instruction in the school system. So for instance, you mentioned dyslexia. The best way to determine dyslexia is to actually measure what you're teaching. So yes, we need universal screeners for DLD, but what we also need is to incorporate progress monitoring of language across time within the curriculum.
So there is room to grow in that area, is what I hear you saying.
Absolutely. Really, we know what we need to do, but the tools aren't really there yet. But there are emerging. Really every single day.
Yep . Yep . That's, that's really exciting. It reminds me, I was having a conversation with a colleague, that I'm really excited, because the field has moved towards a better understanding of word recognition. Its importance. How to get kids where they need to be. When you need to give kids more practice. But we don't have as much understanding of the upper part of the rope, or the language side of it.
And just really paying a lot more attention to that will be really important all the way around, for researchers, practitioners, and everyone.
Absolutely. But I'm also excited, because I see that educators are recognizing that children have gaps in their background knowledge. And I think the focus on background knowledge is exactly the focus we need for language, because language and background knowledge are intimately tied.
So when we're thinking about building background knowledge, we do so by teaching vocabulary and language to actually strengthen the conceptual knowledge we have. And by strengthening language, we're strengthening the way that children can convey their knowledge. So when we're talking about language and knowledge, it's really part and parcel that we're doing both.
As we focus on knowledge and reducing a knowledge gap, we're also focusing on language. And we can start to build in these measures to see who's learning the knowledge that we're teaching. And if they're not, why are they having difficulty learning?
Yeah. We're gonna dig into that a little bit more, but I would love if we could get you to answer a question from our listener mailbag. We've gotten so many great questions from around the country, actually around the world.
This one comes from Michael K., a teacher in Hawaii, and he asks, for a 4-year-old student, so we're going way back to before school, right, for a 4-year-old student with developmental delays who has deficits in oral language, a slow processing speed, and hasn't learned very many letters, what would be effective activities for helping?
And Michael asked about phonemic awareness, but it might be a broader answer too, in terms of development and preparation for literacy. What would your advice be?
Absolutely. First, it's important and to be commended that this child is identified as having difficulty in these areas. As I mentioned, it's hard to do that at times. And so this child has been identified. So, first and foremost, we don't see difficulty in oral language as a red flag for difficulties and comprehension. We think of that as a crystal ball.
This child will have difficulties, and those difficulties can be mitigated by strengthening oral language instruction. The way we do that is, one, providing multiple opportunities to learn words. What does that look like? We wanna provide child-friendly definitions. We wanna provide the child the opportunity to use the word in multiple sentences. And hear the word in multiple sentences.
We want to be explicit about vocabulary learning. Like, hey, this is a new word. What's this like? Well, there's some sounds we can think about in this word, which kind of addresses the phonemic awareness issue. We could talk about what the word means. How it's connected to other words that the child would know. And also, I wouldn't hesitate, even very early on, to write the word down.
We know that writing of a word actually helps the child to be able to pronounce it and recall it, in terms of oral language. That's thinking about the vocabulary. What you're gonna see consistently is that across language structures, whether it's vocabulary, grammar, social use of language, or sounds, like we say for word reading, we need systematic explicit instruction. And that explicit part is very important as well.
Really leaning into telling the child, "I know this might be difficult for you, but we're gonna work on it together. And we're gonna give you lots of opportunities for practice." And so being mindful that this is going to be a support that the child will need across time. How you get that support depends on the child's situation. They could be seen by a speech language pathologist within an early childhood setting.
They could be seen by a team of educators that are knowledgeable in language. There's also a role the parent can play in really trying to highlight and facilitate language difficulties, and ensuring that the child doesn't let that language difficulty get in the way of their learning. And that they see the strengths they have.
That's great. I'm gonna follow up on something you said, "Oral language difficulties are a crystal ball into reading comprehension." Can you say a little bit more about that?
Well, as a scientist, I don't say that lightly. We have several studies that show that there is a very high correlation. I've had the honor of working with families and studying children across time. And we have one study in particular where we tested children once a year from pre-K to grade three.
And what we found is that in pre-K, their oral language ability was so highly predictive of their third grade reading that it had very little error.
Wow.
I think that's what's important in understanding these longitudinal study results, is it doesn't mean that we can't change the trajectory of individual children. What it tells us is that we should really pay attention when children are struggling early on, and we should support them over time.
That's great. I love that. Great question, Michael. Brought up some great things, so thank you for that. So let's go back now to this connection between background knowledge and language. And, I'm just gonna say it. There's a tiny bit of tension in the field about background knowledge. Do you activate it? Do you develop it? How do you think about that connection?
Yeah, I think a lot of it actually comes down to the language we use to describe background knowledge vs. language. It's very meta that way. I think that we are trying, as fields, to come together. Because we oftentimes have people who study background knowledge, and we have people who study language, and they need to come together. And I think there's a lot of that happening now. I'm excited to see it!
I think the tricky part is that when we think about language, we're conveying concepts or feelings that we have. So we have these ideas that we want to convey, and we have to find the right words to convey them. I'm doing that right now myself . And I know we all do that every day as we're trying to find the words to convey our concepts.
And that tension I think is what we see in the field when we think about background knowledge vs. language. And there's a few studies that are, I think, quite fascinating to think about this. So, for instance, there's a famous study of how Inuits in Canada will represent snow, the idea of snow they represent, with 30 different words.
Wow!
And because of that, the studies have shown they actually have more knowledge about snow. Because they're attending to the different variations of snow. Because of the language they have, the words they have for snow, they've specified their snow knowledge. The reverse is also true. We have conceptual knowledge, whether we get that through lived experiences or what we've been interested in, our interests.
As we develop that conceptual knowledge, we will often search for words to represent that conceptual knowledge. As our conceptual knowledge builds, our language ability will build. There's really a bidirectionality that occurs between background knowledge and language. And having said that, we do know that with this reciprocity, language is the conduit to background knowledge.
When we want to convey our background knowledge, and we want to teach background knowledge, we often do it through language.
And it occurs to me that it's very difficult to separate your knowledge from vocabulary, because vocabulary is the thing that represents the knowledge in which you have.
100%! And the way that even these studies of background knowledge use language, like, tell me what you know about this, or do you know this vocabulary word, to represent the background knowledge. And actually, tying this back to DLD, when you talk to persons who live with DLD, they will often say how frustrating it is, because they have a concept, but they can't convey it through language. It's a limitation in that way.
That they're like, "Oh, I just want to convey my feelings! I wanna convey what I want. I wanna convey this story. But I'm struggling for the language." And that's another example of a bit of a disconnect between concepts and language.
Yeah. You may have heard this story. So, last year at this time, my dad actually had a major stroke, and it left him with severe expressive aphasia. But he can understand everything we say to him. And that frustration, it's still really hard for him, but you can see it, that frustration. The ideas are in the head, right.
The intellect is still there, but the inability to get those words out is a very frustrating thing for people.
Yes. And we call that aphasia. And DLD used to be called developmental aphasia.
Oh really?!
Yeah, actually it did. But what's been found is that it's a little tricky, because with your father, he had developed language and then he had difficulty in a certain area. So he has a system that was very diffuse that became very specified. And when it's specified, you can have a difficulty in one and not the other. It's trickier with children with DLD, because they're starting out with neurodiversity in the brain.
And so we see that the tie between receptive and expressive is actually pretty tight through the years for them. It starts to separate a little, but we see that it's pretty tight. It's kind of interesting that way. I'm so sorry to hear that, but it sounds like he's doing great so far.
Yep . Well, he's doing better. And he has found out that he can actually sing all the songs that he knows, so.
Wow.
So he does a lot of singing, which is really fun .
Oh wow, that's great! And is he seeing a speech language pathologist?
He is. He's also seeing a music therapist. And so yeah, he's leveraging all the rhythm of language and really loves that .
That's really fantastic! Well, speech language pathology just spans a wide range. Our scope of practice is huge. We work with adults and children. And we work with lots of different communication difficulties.
I say that linking to your father, but also making an important point about DLD, and that is that when you want to learn more about DLD, you may approach a speech language pathologist who might not know as much about DLD. And that's because the caseload is very high in schools. And because also they may have different knowledge. They may be working with someone who has a tracheotomy.
They may be working with someone who has swallowing difficulties. Or someone who has aphasia. So we're trying to get the word out not only to educators about DLD, but even within our own field is this name change. And what this is and what it means.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And thank you for explaining that a little bit, because I would imagine that we have listeners that are pre-service teachers, thinking about what's next in their career. And I think when I was a teacher, I had no idea what a speech language pathologist did. I had no idea. I'm sorry to say that, but no encounters with it. Didn't understand the range, and the breadth, of what it takes.
And for anybody interested in language, it's a really interesting field.
Oh, thank you for saying that! I think that in general, allied health is not something that is known, like occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech language pathology. Unless you have a certain life situation or a family member that requires these services, they're not known. So yes, big shoutout. I love the field of speech language pathology.
Shoutout to all of our SLPs. So, as you're thinking about language, and in any context that we've been talking about, what is a really urgent and or important message that you have for our educators?
So my message to educators who are listening is that you can make a difference in the life of a child with DLD, and you can make a difference in how your school system or what you're doing to actually approach language and to really figure out who has difficulty in language, what you can do for them. When I give talks on DLD, I challenge my audience to talk about DLD five times the next week.
'Cause then you can get the word out. And learn more about it. Because there are approximately two children in every classroom that have DLD. Because it's 10% of the population.
Wow.
And these children are often hidden. We say they're hidden in plain sight. And you, as an educator, can be the one that really makes a difference for that child. It only takes one person to make a huge difference in the life of a child, as you know.
Yes. That's a great message. What about you? What's next for you? Or what's next for you in your research? What are you thinking about these days?
Yeah, so what I spend a lot of time thinking about are two things. One, how do we get the word out about DLD .
We're trying.
All over, and you're trying , that's why I'm so grateful for this opportunity. Oh, it just hits right at what I'm trying to do! And with many others who are dedicated to DLD. The second thing I often think about is how to create systems in schools, or how to better implement the evidence base that we have.
So implementation science is the process of really reducing the gap between what we know to do and what we do every day . And that really involves systems . So creating systems that allow for evidence-based practice, and using the science that we know about reading and about language.
So that's been very exciting, because I get to work with teachers, and speech language pathologists, and administrators every day thinking about how to improve systems.
That's a great reminder. Thank you for that. We often forget about the knowing-doing gap. How do you make it happen in a school? To know the stuff isn't enough. You gotta do it too. Exactly. Any final thoughts for our listeners?
I just wanna thank you for taking the time out of your day to learn more about language and DLD, because I know your time is precious, so thank you. And thank you for really applying your prodigious skills to educate children, and to make a difference in this world, because you are making a difference one child at a time.
Yeah. It's a great message. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We are so glad to have you here. And we'll be linking some stuff in the show notes so our listeners can learn more. So thanks again for joining.
Thank you for having me.
That was Dr. Tiffany Hogan, professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston. She's also the director of the Speech and Language (SAiL) Literacy Lab and the Center for Translational Research: Implementation science and Dissemination for Equity (cTIDE) and research associate at Harvard Medical School.
We have links in the show notes to several incredible resources that we discussed, including the DLD website that Dr. Hogan co-founded, dldandme .org . We'll also have a link to her podcast, SeeHearSpeak. And also to the recent review of screeners, as well as for a fascinating conversation about phonemic awareness. the policy paper that Dr. Hogan referenced.
Next up in our reading reboot, we will be joined by Dr. Jane Ashby for a fascinating conversation about phonemic awareness.
If there's a problem with the phonological system, it's gonna percolate all the way up. Through learning how to read, learning how to spell, learning how to write.
That conversation will be right here in two weeks. Also, the latest episode of Beyond My Years is a great listen for fans of this show. Host Ana Torres speaks with Simone McQuaige about the transformational literacy work that she's done in her district.
Just like many districts across the nation, we were a district that was a balanced literacy district. And we have been a balanced literacy district for 20+ years.
Wow!
And so we needed to shift some of our practices. And so, how do you take a district with 140 elementary schools, where you have been working to make sure that everyone understands the curriculum, so everybody's on one page, and then you say , " Uh , we're gonna do something different."
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I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.