Oral Language and Phonological Awareness: Foundations for Reading Development

Hello, everyone. Welcome and thank you for joining us this evening. My name is Karine Hartounian-Koukian, and I will be your moderator and one of your co-presenters this evening. I'm a bilingual SLP with a passion for telepractice across the lifespan, as well as a professional development enthusiast. As a current CE content consultant here at Parallel, I'm especially excited to present the first session in our fall series in partnership with Sprout Labs, Reaching Every Learner Strengthening Language and Literacy for Students with Reading Difficulties. Next slide. So tonight we will be talking about oral language and phonological awareness foundations for reading development. Thank you for spending the next hour with us. At Parallel, we take pride in nurturing our professional community as well as the broader community by offering innovative, high-quality programming for clinicians and educators alike. Here's a few housekeeping items to highlight before we begin our presentation. This course is being offered for 0.1 ASHA CEUs and 1 NASP-approved CPD credit. If you wish to have us report CEUs to ASHA and/or receive a certificate of completion to obtain a record of your NASP CPD, please be sure to do the following. Attend the entire live webinar. Your attendance will be tracked through Zoom reports and no partial credit will be awarded. Be sure to— that you have joined with the email address attached to your registration. Complete and submit a self-assessment evaluation within 3 business days of today's presentation. That will be Wednesday, September 16th. You will receive an email with the survey and resources By tomorrow end of day. However, if you haven't received an email by Monday, then you can feel free to reach out to us. So do please wait until Monday before reaching out. For ASHA CEUs, be sure to indicate that you want to receive ASHA CEUs to provide your ASHA ID number in the post-webinar survey in addition to your name and email address. We love and encourage questions from our participants. If you have any questions, Please feel free to drop them in the Q&A. Our chat is closed, but you can feel free to comment in the Q&A. We accept— we expect our educational content this evening to last the full hour and would love for you to stay for the optional Q&A afterwards. All right, next slide, please. And now it's my pleasure to introduce to you Eileen Catanzoni. Who is a reading curriculum and instructional professional. She's also trained in Orton-Gillingham certified. She's an IDA practitioner. She's a curator, curator of curriculum instruction and professional development. She services hundreds of struggling readers, and she is currently the Sprout Labs literacy lead. It's been my pleasure to work with her to develop this content and align with her today.

Next slide.

And a little bit about myself. So I have been an SLP for over 25 years. I've been in telepractice since 2010, and I happen to be bilingual in Armenian and English. And I have a very big passion for connecting communication and literacy. I don't consider myself a literacy specialist, but I've been using a lot of literacy in my therapy and really seeing the significance of it. And Looking forward to sharing that wisdom tonight. All right, next slide. So our learning objectives this evening, we're going to explain the relationship between oral language development, phonological deficits, and their impact on reading acquisition and long-term literacy outcomes, analyze the relationship among developmental language disorder, speech sound disorders, and reading difficulties, to inform early identification and intervention. Next slide. And of course, apply evidence-based practices that speech-language pathologists can use to strengthen phonological and phonemic awareness skills that support reading development. Next slide. We're hoping to cover tonight the oral language phonological development and reading acquisition alongside getting more wisdom and information on developmental language disorders, speech sound disorders, disorders and their connection with reading difficulties, seeing that overlap. And then we are looking forward to sharing evidence-based strategies to support phonological and phonemic awareness. And we know that you will walk away with things that you could probably use in your therapy sessions tomorrow. All right, and it is my pleasure to hand it over to Eileen.

Thank you so much, Corinne. It's a pleasure to be here. And Today's session is actually so important and true to our mission because as a reading specialist, I can see the overlap between reading deficits and speech and language work that you do and the students that we service. So I'm also a practitioner. I have a caseload in a school setting and use some of these practices and theories every day. So I'm really happy to share this with you. And provide some of that overlap in the work that we do. So before we start, a lot of the terminology you're probably very familiar with, like phonology. What is phonology? So my lens is gonna be from a reading specialist lens, maybe even an educator lens. And phonology is the study of patterns and sounds in language without print, right? If we took the letters away, we would still have a basis of the English language. It includes things like what are the sounds in words, whether cat and hat rhyme. It's talking about the bigger picture of oral language. A phoneme. A phoneme is one individual unit of sound. Even without the print, it can be one or more letters together, but it's one utterance of a sound. And you'll notice that these both come from the Greek and Latin root of phone, which means to speak. And then we come over to graphemes. So this you may not have as much experience with, and this is where really that reading comes in. A grapheme is a written expression of one phoneme. So a grapheme might be one letter, like the letter C says /k/ or A says /æ/, but it's also more than that. It could be SH makes the one phoneme /sh/ or IGH makes the one phoneme /i/. So you can imagine that where limited in the number of phonemes. I think depending on who you're speaking with, which curriculum, which part of the country, there's about 44 phonemes, but there are about 250 graphemes. So when we think, why is it so hard to learn how to read and write? Well, 250 combinations of letters together to make 44 sounds can get pretty complicated. And I think that's where that knowledge of how do we teach teach that and in what scope and sequence really comes into play. So let's talk a little bit about phonological awareness because I really feel like this is the overlap, that big place where we can both make a difference in our students, whether you're a reading specialist or an SLP. We're both working on this together. So phonological awareness is that overarching term about spoken language and someone's ability to Combine sounds or syllables or even individual sounds. So let's look at it from an educational standpoint. So when we talk about phonological awareness, where and when does that change throughout education? So let's start with preschool, right? And I know that lots of you are probably already servicing students through early intervention or maybe in your private practice. Mm-hmm. With phonological sensitivity. Now, how is that different? Phonological sensitivity, when you're anywhere from 3, maybe even 2, 3, 4 years old, is unconscious. It's that unconscious chanting rhymes or singing songs or clapping the rhythm to songs. It has a lot to do with language play, and you know as SLPs how important that language play is. So we're not actually directly teaching, it's more of an exposure. It's an exposure in the home, it's an exposure in the work that we do, making it fun, making it playful, but really starting to build those skills that later map on reading. So they eventually get a little older and now they're in either a preschool program or kindergarten and it switches a bit to that overarching view, phonological awareness. And why is that? Different because it's conscious thinking. We're actually doing some explicit instruction so that students are learning about the sounds in the language, not just like singing the songs, but really some direct teaching, some either a workshop model or some guided practice. And we're doing things like clapping syllables, how many syllables are in a word. We're giving them the opportunity to rhyme. And I always say that Rhyming, we don't give rhyming enough credit, and you SLPs will probably agree with me. If you've got a student that can't access the end of a word, those sounds in the middle or ending positions, chances are they're not gonna be able to rhyme, not because they don't understand, but they can't access those sounds. So rhyming is very complicated and very deliberate, especially when they start kindergarten. We actually— We use that as an assessment, whether students are rhyming or not, as an indicator of a risk for dyslexia. So that's something good to know. And we're also teaching students, even in kindergarten, how to manipulate words, sounds, and syllables. So manipulating syllables might be changing pancake to cupcake or snowman to snowflake, right? We're doing that elision work, but we're doing it with larger chunks of sound. And then finally, we need to get to the phoneme level. So this is where that reading really starts. So the phoneme level is very deliberate. It is isolating sounds, blending sounds, and manipulating one at a time. And I have to tell you that this is how we're going to wind up today's session, is giving you a really great activity that will speak to that phoneme level and help build those neural pathways to manipulating sounds that Yes, they promote good reading skills, but they are also things that SLPs might want to do in their practice depending on what sound you're working on or how you're working on students. This will absolutely meet the needs of both of us, so I'm happy to share that with you later. So if we group all of those thinkings together around phonology and sensitivity, what are we really talking about? We're talking about phonological proficiency. It's a little bit of a catch-all educational term, but it means that I have developed those phonemic awareness skills, and in order to be proficient, I have to be fluent and I have to have automaticity, meaning I have to have practiced it enough that it becomes automatic and I don't have to think deeply about it. So whether I'm figuring out if 2 words rhyme or producing a rhyme, or maybe I'm changing the beginning sound of a word or breaking apart a consonant blend. Those are all tasks that have to be automatic. Think about decoding and encoding, and when we talk about those specifically, we're talking about reading and spelling, right? They go hand in hand even though they might be Independent of each other. There's absolutely overlap in that, but I need to be proficient in my work around phonemes to master those skills. Phonological sensitivity actually starts in utero, 10 weeks before birth. Now, there's lots of social media, read to your baby while you're pregnant, but you know what? Research to back that up. So there's a great piece of research that came from Shiver in 2001 that really speaks to how much, um, before birth that child will learn about language before they're even born and how they're responding to patterns of language even in utero. So you can imagine if they heard language, their native language, at birth, that infant can respond to prosody. So prosody, we're thinking about typical Miss Rachel, right? The influx of her voice. We see babies respond to that kind of high-pitched voice. There's a reason that that's so successful because babies naturally want to listen to that, right? Their attention is drawn to that. Great work from Souza. There's— he published a book in 2017 that talks It's all about infants responding to language at birth. And then what happens after that? Well, by 6 months, believe it or not, a child can actually distinguish sounds of their native language, which is hugely interesting. If you have ever listened to the work of Dr. Nadine Gaab, you would have heard her say that in order to sound like a native speaker, you have to have been exposed to that language, both listening and speaking, before the age of 4. Because guess what? After age 4, that connection to that, those, um, those, the influx of that language, those clusters of sounds, actually has to occur before that, or you will never sound like a native speaker. Not that you can't learn the language, certainly not by any means, but you will never have that actual kind of native accent that most native speakers have. So interesting work, and that again is from that Shaver article. So put that on your list. You'll notice that at the end of our slide deck, which you'll get, there is a list of citations, and you can find all of these research articles listed there. So here's our first question. At what age does the greatest amount of brain development occur? And I think this is really important, whether you're an SLP or a reading specialist or you're doing something in education working with students. There's a sweet spot for brain development. So would you say that that occurs 0 to 3 years? 3 to 6 years, 6 to 10, or greater than 10. So we have launched a poll. We'd like to get your feedback. What are you thinking? What do you think is the age range where the greatest amount of brain development— now we know that our brains can develop over our lifetime, but the greatest trajectory of that gray and white matter, when does that happen? So take a minute and think about that, and we'll share the results. Oh, we've got some, some great results. So I can see that 71% of you said 0 to 3 and 28% 3 to 6, which is great. The answer is 0 to 3. So that might be a surprise to some of you, and you might be thinking, how does that happen? But let's look at a really great piece of research. That shows this. And the reason why I like this so much is it really speaks to what we're all doing, whether you're working on oral language or sound development. You can do it at a very early age because that's that great window of opportunity for language. So when I look at this chart, I can see here I've got birth kind of the 3rd data point in. I can see from the moment of That 20 weeks, that brain starts to take off and develop, but look what happens at birth. I can see that trajectory going from any of these data points to almost the highest point as a human by age 3. All of that brain development happens, whether it's gray matter, white matter, the thickness of the The surface or the area, how many folds there are. I look at this and I think, wow, how important is their environment to brain development before we even see them? Whether you're an SLP and you're working on speech sounds or a reading specialist, there's something to be said for that at-home experience or early childcare experience in those first few years. And you'll see that, yes, brain development does continue. We do do a little bit of trimming the excess. There's research to show that if we don't use those neurons, that our brain actually gets rid of them, but it doesn't mean that we can't keep learning and keep growing. But this really speaks to me, especially in the work that we're all doing. So this is really talking about the intersection of oral language and reading. This is a very old piece of research from Hollis Scarborough. It's probably— it's almost 25 years old now, but it's one of those pieces of research that really hits home, especially to tonight's session. This is called the Reading Rope, and I want to explain this model because we each play a part in this, whether you're working with students in language or reading. You can clearly see the overlap and the intertwining of the strands of the work that we do. So Hollis Scarborough came up with this model and said, we need to think about these 2 aspects of reading in order to have successful comprehension: language comprehension and reading comprehension. So that's what the goal is. So I need to have both of these in order to be a successful reader. So let's look at word recognition, right? In order to be a good reader, I have to lift the words off the page. So the National Reading Panel back in 2000, under the direction of No Child Left Behind Act, was given this task of going out there, looking at all the science of reading for the past 50 or more years, and putting together some good solid research. I really think this is when that lens of phonemic awareness came to be, and that knowledge of having to explicitly teach letter-sound correspondences to students at a very young age is really going to matter. So in the 2 strands of the intersection of oral language and reading, word recognition is made up of these 3 smaller threads. Phonological awareness, which we just looked at, was, you know, the sounds of language, individual phonemes, doing all that manipulation of sounds, and then decoding. So there was a period of time, I would say maybe not the past 5 years but before that, where we were looking at things like balanced literacy and whole language, and we all know those conversations that we were having about why that was wasn't working for students with dyslexia, with developmental language delay, like what was missing, and it was the decoding piece. The decoding piece is systematic phonics instruction, and it's designed to increase a student's ability to decode words that they're not familiar with. So when you think about that and you're a first grader, you're looking at almost all the words you're looking at you're not familiar, familiar with. You're a new reader, so you have to be able to learn the code in order to read successfully. So decoding is that really kind of mechanical looking at a word, sounding it out, putting it together, and then reading it fluently. And as you do that, You are building your sight word library, which is called your lexicon. So every time we look at a word and it's unfamiliar and we have to sound it out, we are mapping that into our brain and we're putting it in our long-term memory where we call that our sight word library. So right now you and I are both looking at all of these words on the page, and I'm pretty sure we don't have to decode any of these words because we have already done that, and that's a product of the National Reading Panel's really honing in on the 5 components of reading and what do students really need to know in order to be successful. And then the last thing, obviously, in word recognition is fluency, right? If I was sounding out all of these words independently, I would not be a very fluent reader. I probably wouldn't understand anything because most of my brainpower would be used to decode. So I need to build that orthographic mapping or looking at those words. Remember, the grapheme is the letter. Looking at those words, mapping it into my long-term memory so I can be increasingly more accurate and more automatic with each of those words. And that takes 2 things, certainly a lot of skill and practice, But a nice scope and sequence. If you're diving into that world of teaching your students not only the sounds in your SLP time, but some of those reading structures or pattern— orthographic patterns, you need to know that there's a scope and sequence. We can't just teach everything at the same time, and it has to be in a sequence that makes sense from easier skills to increasingly more difficult skills. So Scarborough, on the other hand, also had this great language comprehension background and realized that, okay, you can have somebody that is a great reader, right? They can lift those words off the page, they can decode them, but what if they don't know what those words mean? They will still not be a good comprehender, right? They're going to be able to read the words, but they won't understand what they're reading. They need to have all of these threads in language comprehension as well. So what are those threads? We need to know about text structure. We need to know concepts of print, right? What is a sentence? How do we know it's a sentence? What about a paragraph? Even a little bit deeper, how do we know if it's narrative text? Is it informational text? Text structure is really important for a student when they look at some text to identify what is it that they're going to be reading, right? It kind of opens that file cabinet for where they're going to store this information when they read or lift those words off the page. You also have to have inferencing. Now inferencing really builds over time, and we know that we've got to have some comprehension development for inferencing to happen, but inferencing can start as early as kindergarten. There's no reason why we can't start to teach that, and inferencing really is going to help us pull out information from a text, whether it's the theme of a text or what's making a prediction, what's going to happen, author's purpose. There's so many reasons why we need to be able to inference when we read. And this really highlights that. I would also say we need semantics. We need to know what words go together, what words naturally will come after another, what's a prepositional phrase. A lot of these things we take for granted as readers, but have to stop and think about it when we're teaching reading, or even if you're just teaching oral language. You know, why is semantics important? Vocabulary. Clearly, we see when there are deficits with our students who are English language learners and English isn't their native language and they're struggling with reading comprehension because they don't have the vocabulary of English yet they're trying to read English. We know that we've got to do work in vocabulary and also background knowledge, right? I can tell you if I'm reading a story about soccer, which is, I'm sorry to say, not my sport, but if I'm reading a story about that and I don't understand the game or the terminology, I'm probably not going to be as fluent and I'm not going to have as good comprehension as if I was reading about basketball, which I happen to know more about. So they sound really trivial, but it really does play a huge part in the students that we are servicing. So trying to find a book that's the right background knowledge with vocabulary that they understand, good semantics, or pre-teaching those skills before we give them something to read really will help them own that piece of reading. So all of this comes together in one place where we are developing good reading comprehension. Here is one other model of reading comprehension that I would love you to take a look at. This is called the Simple View of Reading. So it was developed around the same time as Scarborough Rope. It took many different looks, but the whole reason for this is for SLPs, teachers, reading specialists to understand that there are 2 sides To this formula. Now, they use the mathematical model of 0 times anything is 0. So think of word reading as 0. If I am a poor decoder, I'm a 0 at word reading. I hate to use that expression, but if I'm not able to decode for whatever reason, I could have really good language comprehension and still not be— Good at reading. Great at reading comprehension. I have to be able to pull the words off no matter how great I am at oral language. Likewise, if I am a really great decoder, but I don't have a lot of language comprehension, and you, this audience, probably sees a lot of these struggles. If I'm a good decoder, but don't understand those words, again, I'm not going to have great reading comprehension. So word reading is similar to the Scarborough Rope. Again, this is called the Simple View of Reading, and it is looking at that skilled phonological awareness or even proficiency, right? Can they blend sounds together? If I have a student that can't co-articulate sounds, it is very unlikely that that student is going to be able to read words. And that alone is a skill. Whether I am teaching blending onset and rhyme or body coda, right, the first 2 sounds and the last sound, I've got to find a spot for that student to be able to co-articulate all of those sounds together to read the word. A lot of that comes from decoding, right? What are the sounds of the letters, and can I string them together when I see an unfamiliar word. It also includes the rules of language, the rules of phonics, right? If there is an E at the end, how does that influence the sound of the vowel? Or even as simple as there are 2 S's at the end of the word, how do I pronounce that? So word reading includes all of those structures, orthographic patterns, And then word recognition, which is not only can I look at that word and map it into my sight word vocabulary, but what about those words that don't follow the rules? We might call them rule breakers or trick words. I would say you could say sight words, but they're not always They're not always sight words. They are words that I need to learn those unexpected patterns. So in other words, if I'm teaching a child how to read the word said, I actually have to explicitly teach, ai is saying eh in that word, so that they can map that grapheme into where they're going to store that orthographic pattern. So that becomes really important when we are teaching those words that don't follow the rules. And you can find lots of those words in lists that are public out there or easy to access on the internet, like dolch and fry, lots of words. I would suggest if you're teaching your student reading, like, go and look at those words so that you know exactly what to do when you come to them. And then if I am proficient in wording, I'm going to then take a look at language comprehension. I'm going to turn this over to Corrine and have her talk a little bit about that.

Thank you, Eileen. Um, so yeah, a lot of what Eileen has said, um, I will, I will be overlapping, as we mentioned, because we do a lot of similar things when it comes to reading background knowledge. Refers to what does the student come already with. Have they already experienced certain things? They're always going to be connecting new information to what they already know. So for example, if they're going to read a story about camping, have they already gone camping? So can they anticipate words or concepts like the tent, setting up a campfire, the campsite? I recently worked with a student who was supposed to read a passage. His homework was reading a passage on Waking up early with an alarm because he was so excited to spend the day with his friend. However, this student, come to find out after speaking to his parent, had never been woken up by an alarm because he's an early riser, so he didn't really have that experience. So, you know, it was just kind of like stepping a couple of steps back to know, like, what do I need to teach for him to really understand this passage? This is where I think as SLPs, a lot of cultural Well, as all kinds of practitioners, I'm speaking with the SLP lens, you would want to come forward with a culturally sensitive, culturally humble perspective and just kind of keep in mind not everybody's experienced these things, but it's also an opportunity. It's an opportunity to expose and teach. And so as SLPs, as practitioners, as clinicians, we can build on the background knowledge through conversation, books, experiences, visuals, discussion. So that will all lend itself to language comprehension. Next slide. So with vocabulary, this seems kind of obvious. However, that being said, we want to not just tell a student what a word means, but maybe like draw the associations that go with those words. For example, if they come upon a word such as enormous and they're not sure what that means, instead of just saying enormous means very big, we can go a little bit more into detail. What else could be enormous? What have you seen that's enormous? What's the opposite of enormous? So kind of connecting it more with an experience they've had so that it really hits home with them. Next slide. So language structures have to do with I believe there was a question in the Q&A regarding where does syntax fit in. I would say syntax fits in with language structure. So I'm going to give you an example of a complex language structure that has to do with some conjunctions and semantic relationships. We all know our friendly self-test that we all use for language. For example, a sentence such as, although Maya was tired, she finished her homework because she wanted to play outside. That is a very complex sentence, and it has a lot of semantic relationships, and if a student is not sure about those nuances, it could result in some language comprehension issues. So we can break it apart a little bit for that student. Who did what? Why did they do it? When? What happened first? What happened because of that? I also wanted to add again from my own experience experience having worked with students that have issues with speech sound disorders such as S blends or S, they will frequently leave off plurals or apostrophe S possessives. So we can see how not being able to produce certain sounds results in grammatical and then structural issues and understanding. Next slide. Verbal reasoning, of course, has to do with talking about the story, and this is where predicting, drawing conclusions, inferencing, as was mentioned previously by Eileen, comes into play. I love to start off before we start a story, what do you think this story is about? What makes you think that? Show me some of the clues in the story. And of course, this completely aligns with what their teachers are going to want them to do eventually when they start writing and using examples from their reading. Later on, of course, we'll talk— well, literacy knowledge— sorry, let me just go into this and I'll give you my example because it ties in here really well. Literacy knowledge, as mentioned before, has to do with how things are organized and how things work. And so having the student understand what is a sentence— and it always surprises me how you can't assume that they automatically understand that. Even when I'm doing this through teletherapy, I'm not actually looking necessarily at the text they're reading, but I'll tell them, go ahead and stop at the next sentence so we can continue next time. And sometimes they're really puzzled. They're not sure what a sentence is. Oh, is this the beginning of the chapter or the end of the chapter? They're not sure. So I have to back up And kind of explain and teach that. I also like to use, if there are titles of chapters, as a way to have them predict the story. So that's kind of a fun way to get them excited about what they're going to read. So again, the literacy knowledge has to do also with the genre, whether it's nonfiction or fiction, and even reading from left to right. I work with a little girl who when she places her cards for different games that we're doing, and we do read the words that she's working on learning how to pronounce, she said, I'll pick the first one, and she's picking the card that was the furthest to the right. So I had to go back and say, oh, that's interesting that you consider that the first, because don't we read from left to right? So these are little nuances that I think we don't really think about as SLPs, But as I've started to kind of explore, I definitely see where it connects, and it definitely— we overlap a lot. And without these, they really can't be successful in what they're doing.

Corrina, I love—

I'm going to turn it back over to you.

I love exactly what you just said because it is the same thing for literacy specialists. So you can clearly see that we're doing the same thing, working for the same cause, and overlapping where we can to give that student the best instruction to help guide their reading journey. So I'm glad to hear that. So finally, what is reading comprehension? So reading comprehension is the fluent execution, right? It has to be fluent. It has to be automatic and with prosody so that students can understand word recognition and make language comprehension from that. So it's nice to see how all of these come together. So that students will have a successful reading journey. So here's an interesting quote from this research, again almost 25 years ago: Children who have well-developed language abilities are at a considerable advantage in learning to read. And I love this because it's exactly what we're doing, talking about their home environment, what's their So access to learning language, hearing sounds, being exposed to text, right, their ability to speak and have conversation really does impact their learning to read. And here's one more. What is the strongest predictor of successful reading? Came from the National Reading Council before the National Reading Panel, and they identified phonemic awareness. So let's Let's think about that. We've got oral language and phonemic awareness, that being the single determinant of success to which children learn to read, and here we are now finally overlapping those services, giving that best instruction really is a good place to be. So here are some other studies done, like what is important to reach grade-level reading? And you might have some students that are in early elementary now, so still thinking about phonological awareness, right, developing that gameplay, language play down to the phoneme level has to be at mastery. Oral language skills, appropriate vocabulary, grammar, narrative ability comes from Hugh Katz, and I know that this group probably is very familiar with his work. And then how do I provide all that, right? That's a pretty big list of things to do to reach mastery, and we've seen that structured literacy or structured instruction— so it's evidence-based reading instruction beginning in kindergarten and first grade— is really when we have to start and when we have to start overlapping. There's another piece of research on here that says if students If students don't get this by first grade, students that maybe have a dyslexia or DLD diagnosis, if they don't get the instruction that they need through this explicit evidence base, then they will unlikely reach grade-level reading ever. So that's a pretty powerful statement. So next poll question: What should we consider in determining a student's reading profile? Should it be phonological awareness, oral language, vocabulary, comprehension, or all of the above? And after all of these slides, I'm going to guess that you'll all pretty much nail this, this poll question. And there you go, all of the above. It is, granted, phonemic awareness is something that is important, but we're now seeing that overlap between oral language and phonological awareness, which is important. I have some really good slides to actually show you how we can use that information to determine a student's reading profile. So this is a model that we use frequently in, in school systems when we're looking at assessment information. So walk through this model with me. It's a 4-square model. So we are going to sort students based on first oral language, right? That's where you come in. Do they have high oral language or low oral language? So that's one way to look at a student, right, without reading, without reading comprehension. I do have to say, if you don't have good reading, you can't use reading comprehension as an indicator for oral language comprehension, right? Those are 2 different things. So looking at their oral language, is it high or low, and then looking at their ability to sequence sounds, decode words, co-articulate those sounds together, Is that low or high, right? And that's going to come probably from your reading assessments, or maybe you're doing the CTOPP. Any of those will give you these scores. So when I'm done, I have a 4-square model where I can start to map students, right? If I was in a classroom, or maybe I'm a practitioner and maybe I'm doing small group in my practice, I can start to group students together based on their profile. So if I had a group of students that had high language and high phonological awareness and phonics, it's unlikely that they need my services, right? They're going to be students— let's talk about the classroom for a minute— students in the classroom, they're my high flyers and I don't have to worry about them. But now let's talk about students that have deficits in what kind of reading or language profile they may have. So if I have someone that has high language, right, maybe the CELF or whatever you're using in your practice to determine oral language is pretty high, but the reading specialist is saying, oh no, they are not decoding, they've got poor phonics, they're low in the CTOPP, right, they can't segment sounds, those students are going to fall into this box, which is typically students with dyslexia. So these are students that have low reading comprehension because they cannot pull the words off the page, but yet they trick us sometimes because when I ask a question about a story that I may have read to them, they're the ones where their hands are up first, right? They understood it. They've got good comprehension. Especially when a story is read. Sometimes those students are overlooked or their deficit in phonics and phonological awareness is kind of sidestepped because they look like they're so much better than they really are. These are kids' typical dyslexia profile and students that we want to make sure that we're hitting all of those areas in that PA in phonics. Contrast to that, I might have someone that is very low in language, but yet they look like they can read anything. I can give them a text and they can lift those words off the page. They can rhyme. They can sequence, but they don't understand. And I think of students that I had in my classroom when I was a classroom teacher that needed more wait time or needed me to repeat the instructions, right? Had processing language issues. They were good at reading, but their reading comprehension was low mostly because their oral comprehension, their language comprehension was low. So that's also something to consider. These students would be kind of the opposite of dyslexia. These might be your students that have developmental language delays or maybe a speech sound disorder. And then there are going to be the students in this box. They're low in language and they're low in PA and phonics. These are those students that have comorbidities. They might also have attention deficit, executive function issues, maybe low RAN because they are not able to pull things out of long-term memory quick enough. And these students are really low across the board, and these are the The highest needs students of all. So you might be surprised to learn that anyone on this side of low PA in phonics actually would fall under that dyslexia diagnosis, especially with the new IDEA definition, right? There's lots of reasons why a student might be on the continuum of dyslexia. We know that it's multifactorial. Even though research shows us that phonological awareness is one of the most occurring causes of dyslexia, but it's not the single cause, right? And I can also have low PA and maybe not have dyslexia, so I don't want you to get that confused. But if they're on this side of this four-square box, it is likely they have dyslexia or Or are at risk for dyslexia. Then if I look at students that are going to fall into these blocks at the bottom, so these are my students that probably have DLD, right? They are struggling with language for many reasons. We're going to hear Corinne talk about that, but what you probably don't know is this area right here. And we've We have seen research in the past maybe 3 to 5 years that show 50% of the students that we are both servicing together have dyslexia and DLD, right? There is an overlap, comorbidities of dyslexia and DLD that is prevalent in 50% of those students, and that's pretty high. I don't know about you, but when I learned this— I thought, wow, I thought as a reading specialist, I need to know a little bit more about those language issues. And conversely, as oral— as SLPs, you might want to know a little bit about dyslexia and, and how to navigate a student that has low phonics issues. So I think this is a really good chart to walk away with and to think about in your practice, like where would you put your student on this chart. It might even be a good activity for you to do. So I'm going to turn it over now to Corinne to talk a little bit about those disorders.

Thank you, Eileen. So I wanted to just briefly revisit what the definitions are for a couple of the communication disorders that we as SLPs work with. So first, speech sound disorders, the what, the so what, and then the now what. And so basically speech sound disorders are any kind of difficulties with perception, motor production, phonological representation of speech sounds. So we've got your articulation disorders, we've got phonological processing, we've got the developmental apraxia, Dyspraxia of speech. All of those things fall under this umbrella. And so now the so what? How are these connected? They certainly are. I think by now if you haven't gotten the connection of the overlap, we are seeing tons of connection between these 2. There is a reading risk that can persist. It does not mean that everyone that has a speech sound disorder will automatically develop a reading disorder, but there is a risk that we need to keep an eye on. And what we need to do is start looking beyond just speech accuracy. So once they master those speech sounds, we may not be completely done with our job. So we need to kind of be looking at other, other issues that might be there. And of course, phonological awareness matters. And so now what? So we want to integrate, start integrating literacy into our SLP practice. Some of the activities that were mentioned previously, and we will have again activities and strategies that are going to be shared, doing phonological awareness activities, making sure that students can hear the differences between these sounds, asking how well does the child represent, recognize recognize, manipulate, and use the sound. And I know when I first read the word manipulate, it was a little bit unsure what that means. So that's anywhere from like those rhyming words where you're asking them to replace, making a game out of it, replacing the M for an H, and now what is this word? But it also involves the vowels. So a student that might read the word tell as tall and not really understand. And of course you can see, you know, the student that will read it and it doesn't make sense. Are they like pausing and trying to think about what did they just read? Does this make sense? Is it tall? Is it tell? I do see that with my students that have some apraxia and those vowel distortions. This is something that I need to watch out for. So there is a research article in the citation that talks a little bit more about this, and you'll have that in your handouts. So I just continue— I would want to encourage everybody to start thinking in terms of those things and not just looking at, oh, they mastered their sound, we're done. Let's, let's look and see what else we can do for our students to help them be successful. I do have one more communication disorder, the big one, the Developmental Language disorder. There's tons and tons of research coming out that supports that this does impact and overlaps with reading. I do have one citation again that actually is a general article that overviews a lot of articles, so I hope you find that useful. The definition of DLD, it's that it is a persistent difficulty in the acquisition and use of listening and speaking speaking skills across all the different areas: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics. What's key in this is it has no medical or environmental cause, so this would be in the absence of autism or any other, like, traumatic head injury or brain injury. So we want to kind of keep that in mind as we're moving forward. Children with DLD are at increased risk for literacy, including all of the areas as we talked about, decoding, reading fluency, spelling, writing difficulties. Letter knowledge is a foundational literacy skill. The article I shared does talk about that. Again, it doesn't mean that everyone with DLD will have reading difficulties, but it is definitely something that we should be looking out for. And so now what? So we know that letter knowledge is multidimensional. It's not just about can you name the letters. We wanna see if they can recognize, Identify, are they connecting the sounds? Are they able to produce the sounds? And then eventually, are they able to write them? We want to start thinking about looking at these things intentionally and then providing explicit repeated instructions, which Eileen will talk more about. Thank you.

Thank you, Corrine. So, according to the National Reading Panel, what is the strongest predictor of reading success S and K in first. So here's where we want to tap into what we've learned so far. So phonemic awareness, concepts of print, or alphabetic knowledge? Perfect. So phonemic awareness. So even though it's all important, and in the last poll we said we wanted a nice balance of oral language and understanding comprehension, phonemic awareness is a good predictor, especially in K and 1st, and I think that's That's the key. So go back to the start of our presentation when we saw that we move from phonological to phonemic awareness, and it usually happens in kindergarten or first grade. Those specific sounds, vowel sounds, always a place where students need help. So thank you, Corinne, for calling that out. It's really super important. I want to walk through these steps. Now, these steps don't have to be in this specific order. However, when we think about brain development and students' reading meaning proficiency from the start of, you know, learning one language, 6 months to 9 years old, we can see that they kind of form a pattern, right? So the first steps to phonemic proficiency would be around working at the, certainly the language level, but sentence structure, right? Listening to a sentence, can you repeat a sentence? You know what it is. Compound words, can you blend compound words together? This all speaks to knowing what is a good scope and sequence, not only for reading— this does sort of follow reading, the phonics lens— but also just for phonemes, for learning phonemic awareness and phonology. After these initial steps are completed, we can start to do that deletion and manipulation. I'm calling it swapping here. So it is. It's the switching of sounds, but we can start that at the compound word level. You might want to really hone in on it when you're talking about speech sounds later on in K and 1st, but you can do this work pretty early. How many syllables are in a word? What are the rhymes that you can not only identify but produce? And soon after that, you're going to work at the independent or individual phoneme level. Starting with initial sounds, right? Onset and rhyme, that's the easiest sound to hear because it's the first sound in the word. Knowing that there are different types of sounds. Whoops, I'm sorry, I jumped too fast that step. There are different types of sounds, and I know you're doing this in your work. Is your voice on or off? Should you hold that sound? And I know that SLPs, they have their own terminology. We, try to do the best we can in reading with speaking to that, but voice on, voice off, students need to know that in order to differentiate between some sounds. Mapping sounds onto letters, making sure they can switch sounds, and then making sure they can isolate sounds, right? What is the last sound in the word? Again, thinking back to rhyming, if I can't get the right sequence, And keep that in order to get to the last sound, I probably can't rhyme. So doing all of this work takes many years, and hopefully by age 9, students are reaching this phonemic proficiency. I think what is important is to know that you don't have to stop at one level to reach mastery before moving on to another step, and that's really been a hot topic These days. If my student can't manipulate at the compound word level, I am not going to stay there and keep them from learning independent individual sounds. I need to keep going, and I can start to circle back and reteach, but you don't want to stay in one step if a student isn't getting it. You can just continue on, and that's where that continuum comes into play. I want to show you before we hop off a nice activity talking about the manipulation of sounds that you can do in your speech and language practice. We do it in reading. We try to support you as much as we can. This is called, excuse me, a phoneme chain, and it's done without letters specifically because if I put letters on those sound tiles, that student then has an anchor, and maybe it might be needed to teach the skill, but I wanna take those away so my student can actually develop that connection to where a sound is in a word. It's super helpful with decoding and encoding for a student to be able to keep a sound or sounds in sequential order in a word. That is almost like the baseline of reading. So I want you to take this activity away with you today, and here's how it goes. I give my students 3 sound tiles for a word with 3 phonemes, and I am going to say a word and then say a new word and have them identify where the switch happened. So if this was my board set up for my student, I would say, here's the word fill. So my sounds are /f/, /i/, /l/. Change fill to fit. And my student has to identify where that change happened and switch the tile. So I can easily see without them having to read or do anything that they are building the capacity to keep those sounds in sequential order. This is a hugely beneficial activity to both the work that you're doing as an SLP and the work we're doing as reading specialists. So change fit to fat. Where did that change occur? My student switches that middle sound for the vowel sound is what changed. Change fat to sat. They hear that it's that initial phoneme. They make that switch. And then change sat to sad. So you can see that I'm mixing up the position. I probably wouldn't do it in this nice order of first, second, third. Mix it up. But having the ability to identify where that sound change happened is called a phoneme chain. And that's your takeaway activity for today. So this is what it looks like. These are the steps, exactly what I told you. You're going to have 3 phonemes, you're going to change one, and your student will make the change and mark it correct or incorrect. A first grader should be able to make 18 to 20 sound switches in 1 minute. Now you're going to get this in your email. You'll get a link to this and the slide deck. And this is our last slide, but before we head off into Q&A, I want to give you a quick sneak peek of something that we're doing at Sprout Labs. So hang on to this, and I hope that you stick around for the Q&A because it's going to be hugely popular. Here's what we're doing at Sprout Labs. Our mission is to obviously help students read, but to also help you as SLPs help reading specialists with that carryover between visits. I know from a reading perspective, I can see a student in my practice one day for 45 minutes, and best intentions of them doing some practice when they get home with their parent or doing some reading, practicing those phonics rules, doesn't always happen. So this is a kind of gamified app. It's an application that works on a tablet where that student is getting that carryover practice between visits. They are looking at word reading, all the words that they read, all the phonics patterns that they have learned up until this point. They are reviewing that new reading phonics pattern, that orthographic pattern that you may have just taught them. They are doing it at the word level, the sentence level, and the paragraph or story level. What we've also done is we've embedded that oral language, so they are learning vocabulary, they are providing comprehension after they read, and guess what? It's all done through AI. So while they're doing this, AI is listening to make sure that they are reading correctly. It's doing it at the phoneme level, so you can imagine how helpful that is as an SLP. If my student read the word save as maybe fave because they have trouble producing the sound S, I want to know about that, right? So it's giving me all that information with this really cool dashboard designed either for parents— so parents can do this at home with the guidance of an SLP, with the guidance of a reading specialist, but it really helps bring all of that information into a practice session that we can then listen to. I can go in and listen to some of these recordings of my student. I can see their progress. I can see how their accuracy rate when they read the passage. Really huge, huge tools to help support support both the work that we're doing as a reading specialist or an SLP. Here is a QR code. You can scan this. It will also be provided in your email that you'll get at the end of the session, or maybe in another day or two. Kareem can speak to that, but hop onto our website and just see all the resources. We've got videos, we've got things that will really speak to the work that you're doing in your private practice. We've got a whole area just for SLPs that you'll probably find some good resources, some helpful hints, and then reach out to us. My email is on there, but certainly you can reach out if you scan the QR code. Keep working hard and we'll keep overlapping and making sure that all of our students will be successful readers. I'm going to pass it back to Corinne. And thank you so much.

Yeah, so if you'd like to keep in touch with me, here's my contact information. Again, you'll get information in the post-webinar survey, um, at the latest on Monday morning, so you'll have ample time to complete your post-webinar survey and turn it in for your ASHA CEUs and certificate of completion for NASP CPDs by Wednesday. I thank you so much, Eileen. It was really a pleasure to present with you and to come together on this topic that is so important. And I think hopefully everybody has gained some knowledge from this, and then they could start using tomorrow. I did want to share before we go on to the Q&A, we have one more announcement.

Next slide.

So I do have a link that I just shared, as well as there's a QR code in this slide. We wanted to share that Parallel is still hiring for the 2026-27 school year. Parallel is always looking for talented providers, and if you're interested in exploring virtual teletherapy positions at Parallel, we'd love to meet with you. We have Pathway Parallel's platform makes it easy and efficient for providers to deliver engaging services, write reports more efficiently, and track student outcomes. Parallel also offers flexibility to work remotely, ASHA and NASP certified CEUs and professional development opportunities like today, a clinical provider support team with industry experts to support your work along the way. We encourage you to scan the QR code or click the link in the chat to learn more about what it's like to be a Parallel provider. And even if you may not be interested in a position right now, if you know of someone who is, please share the link with a friend or have them visit Parallel's website. And now, without further ado, we'd like to open up the Q&A. And so I know we had several questions come up here in the chat. Let's see here. So there was a question here that I think probably is running in several people's minds here. How do providers, specifically SLPs, differentiate between reading intervention versus tutoring for reading? Do you want to start with that one?

Yeah, that's a great question. I know SLPs are under fire now for providing reading, and I am not so sure there's a difference. If you're providing reading instruction, you're providing reading instruction, right? I think that it's assumed that you'll cover some of those areas in your practice, but Corinne, I'm going to let you speak deeper to that since you're doing that now.

Sure. Yeah, and again, I I want to be fully transparent. I'm not a reading— I don't identify myself as a reading specialist. I use literacy to support my students in my therapy sessions. And so that would be one of the comments that I would want to lead with is we don't necessarily have to be teaching reading. We're doing activities that are supporting our students to help them in that area. Also, I know that ASHA does support in our scope of practice supporting reading and writing for across the lifespan, not just for children and for students, but also for adults. So we know that we have support as SLPs. There are some SLPs that choose, and I think we have some in our lineup coming up, some exciting speakers that are gonna speak to that, that have chosen to get the certifications and they are reading specialists, and those individuals have the training so they can identify themselves as reading specialists. So those are just some thoughts. All right, let's see what else we have here. So there was a comment here regarding English language learner students. Will there be any discussion? There was no specific, there was just a couple of comments that were made regarding English language learner students and experience or suggestions, but do you have any suggestions, Eileen, for students that are English language learners regarding this process?

Yeah, I would say anything that we do is probably the same thing that you're doing, is providing, um, providing pictures, lots of explanations, teaching vocabulary, talking about background knowledge and experiences all lend to that. I think depending on where you are and what state you are in, I know Massachusetts, we've got a certification that all teachers have to go through on how do you teach English language learners, but certainly providing visuals, right, to help them think about the vocabulary especially is something that we do in reading.

What about in Yeah, so, um, my student happens to speak the language that I am bilingual in, and so I have noted that there are a lot of, um, gaps because she hasn't completely mastered English. So, um, I think vocabulary is a big part of it, and also the experience that we talked about, like the, the background knowledge, just not having experience, maybe because of cultural issues— not issues, excuse me, cultural differences. The differences— that doesn't mean they can't learn about it, but I think it's just being aware and like teaching to that and maybe bringing some books and such that would be something that they would be able to connect with a little bit better. So those are just some thoughts there. But I do think that, you know, the minimal pairs, the phonological awareness is a huge part of it, that regardless, we need to teach that when we're teaching our speech sounds. And so if they can't hear differences between sounds, then they're not going to be able to produce sounds. That's just some comments that I have there. There is a comment here regarding Regarding a specific technique that was mentioned regarding the phoneme chain activity, I was under the impression that the current consensus from research is to teach phonological awareness activities with letters versus without them, even from the start. I'm wondering if you can share research that supports doing PA activities without letters. Any comments?

I love that question. I'm so happy you asked that. So yes, I agree. If I've got a student that does not have phonological issues or phoneme processing issues, that I, as soon as they can hear the sound, put the letter on there, right? Speech to print, that's the whole basis of structured literacy. The problem becomes when my student can't keep those sounds in sequential order. So if I said to a student with 3 tiles, What's the second sound in dog? Right? And they don't have the scaffold of seeing the O there. They have to use a different part of their brain to go back and retrieve that /aw/, right? And then make that connection, /aw/ is the letter O. There's something very different that happens when you're doing the phoneme chain without the letters. Now, if my student did not need that kind of you know, skill development, then I probably would just do as you're saying. I would sound it out, put the letters on there, and move on. But there is going to be a subset of students, probably in that lower quadrant, that have speech sound issues, maybe low RAN, some phonological processing issues, that will need to have that. And I would say that if it's even too difficult for them to do it without letters, I would do it with letters first, right? Teach the process because what you want them to be able to do is to do that processing without the letters because think of what is spelling. Spelling is keeping those sounds of the word in sequential order without knowing what the letters are. So that's a really good activity for not only just developing phonological sequencing, but to really support encoding later on in elementary school. So great question. I think David Kilpatrick has always been a big researcher around doing this speech-to-print, doing speech sounds first. I would look at his research, but happy to share anything else that I come across that I can share with Corinne that would support this thinking.

Thank you so much, Eileen.

I saw a couple of head nods. Were you kind of thinking the same thing in your mind?

Yeah, absolutely. No, that's awesome. I just want to be mindful of our time too. I think we're at the end of most of the questions that came in. Let me just quickly check real quick. Oh, okay. So somebody was asking regarding age. I think this is a This is a good one just to kind of keep in mind. This person works with grades 9th through 12th and is asking, are these activities appropriate for them? Many of them have a 2nd or 3rd grade reading level, if that.

Yeah, I don't have the research with me or in the citations, but I can tell you that there was a study done of that exact kind of sound tile work, Elkonin boxes, Doing that at the high school level actually showed improvement in decoding strategies in those high schoolers. So absolutely, there's no age limit. Try it.

I love that. All right, I think that that concludes our Q&A. Thank you so much, um, to Sprout Labs and you, Eileen, and thank you for everybody joining us this evening. Have a good one.

Thank you.