S3-13. Deconstructing the Rope: A look back at Season 3

Hi listeners, it's Susan. I'll cut right to the chase. I'm launching a sub-stack. I'll be sharing more insights and takeaways from my conversations with leading literacy researchers and also some behind-the-scenes looks from my own travels through the world of literacy. My first post is up now, featuring some thoughts I shared during my session at the Plane Talk about literacy and learning conference as well as a wrap-up of our recent comprehension season. Check it out today and subscribe at scienceofreading.substack.com How do we help students become confident readers and what do all our students need so they can enjoy reading success, especially during this unprecedented time? Welcome to season three of Science of Reading the Podcast. I'm your host Susan Lambert. This season we're celebrating the 20th anniversary of Scarborough's Reading Robe, a model that helps us understand the complexities of learning to read and helps us focus on evidence-based practices. Each episode will cover elements of the model, what it means and how it should impact classroom instruction. We've lined up a dream team of science of reading experts we think you'll really love. The Science of Reading movement continues to grow and at a time that is more important than ever. It's vital we focus on research-based practices to deliver classroom instruction that allows students to learn. If they aren't learning, we need to examine our practices. We may not know what changes are coming next, but we do know we need to stay connected and learning from each other will get us through it. The more we learn and listen, the more we'll be prepared to lead. Our students are counting on us. What a rollercoaster ride the first half of 2021 has been and here at Science of Reading the Podcast as we prep for back to school, we're feeling energized by all of the knowledge we've acquired these past six months. If you've been with us all along, we made it. If you just joined us, we're so glad to have you. We've spent this season deconstructing Scarborough's Reading Robe, what each element means, how they interact and how they come together to create successful readers. I can't resist sharing a few favorite quotes that bring the rope to life. Dr. Jane O'Kill, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex, walked us through why the simple view of reading continues to be relevant and proven by an increasing body of research, almost 40 years after its creation. So the points Gough and Tunmers simple view, I think the first paper was published in 1986. And their idea was that variation in reading, which I mean reading comprehension, understanding text can be captured simply in two main components, which they turned decoding and linguistic comprehension, which others have labeled language understanding. Now that it's important to understand that the name simple view is not meant to imply that reading or learning to read is a simple process. What they were trying to capture is that this is a simple way to conceptualize the complexity of reading. And one thing that was new about their conceptualization was that they argued that these two components, the decoding and linguistic comprehension, depend on really quite different skills and processes. So another thing that simple view emphasizes under wrote model is that the importance of teaching these strands regarding these strands as both important and teaching those from the outset of teaching reading. The idea is reading or reading comprehension is the product, not the sum of those two components. So that if one of them is zero, then overall reading ability is going to be zero, because anything multiplied by zero is zero, of course. Now things are not usually that extreme, right? So it's not typical to find, well it's typical to find children who have said, yeah, I mean at the outset a child would have zero word decoding a skill but some language reading ability. But once children start learning to read, they tend to have some ability in each of the strands, but that might be quite unbalanced. There's one nice example of how these strands can be completely differentiated there. And that comes from a story about John Milton and his strategy for reading text in Greek after he became blind. And what he did was he got his daughters to learn to decode the ancient Greek alphabet. They didn't understand a word of spoken Greek. They beautifully learnt to decode Greek. So they could read the Greek texts aloud and Milton could understand them even though he couldn't read the words. So they were each different strands in the simple view. So Milton's daughters provided the decoding skills and Milton provided the language comprehension skills. And together they got, he got to reading comprehension. With that context, Dr. O'Kill talked us through Scarborough's rope and how the elements intertwine to develop skilled readers. Apparently Scarborough's rope model was conceived entirely independently of the simple view. Yeah, I didn't realise that until very recently. She had been in her mind for many years prior to the initial publication of it in 2001. And she initially conceptualised it as a graphic for a talk hand out as a sort of visual metaphor. And she wanted it to simply conceptualise in a simple and straightforward way the findings that fed into the two different strands of reading. So you could almost regard it like a sort of framework for a literature review. What's important to reading in these two different aspects? So unlike the simple view which is really as a testable theory, the rope model is more of a framework for understanding reading. And so her, so another difference is that Scarborough 's rope model provides much more detail of the processes and skills that contribute to the two strands. The basis of the two strands is pretty much the same, the word reading and the language comprehension strands. But the rope model emphasises the more of the details of the processes that contribute to effective reading. So again, it's emphasising that reading is in fact quite complicated. And it also represents the idea that these strands are mutually interdependent. So the language comprehension strands and the word reading strands are intertwined within those two strands to start with. And then gradually through developments, and that's an aspect of Scarborough's rope model that isn't in the simple view, it's a developmental model. So across time, everything becomes more and more integrated, more automatic, so that reading in time kind of flows together into this integrated hole that just happens when we read the comprehension. Well, that really sums it up, doesn't it? Everything science tells us about how successful readers develop in just three minutes. Well, maybe not everything. But if I had a colleague asking to know what the science of reading means, I'd start them right there. So as we've just heard, the first half of Scarborough's rope is all about language comprehension. And of course, language comprehension starts with background knowledge, right? If you don't know anything about baseball, the best play-by-play commentary in the world is going to be pretty tough to parse. Susan Newman, professor of childhood and literacy education at the Steinhart School at New York University, came to us to explain the link between background knowledge and reading comprehension in the science of reading. She shared her five research-based principles for building knowledge networks during your instruction. The great deal of my training and of what people were saying is that children really need to activate their background knowledge. That when you read the first process that I teach you, what you would do is to give them a sense of purpose and say, "Activate your background knowledge." But then I realized a very valuable lesson. What if they didn't have it? What if they didn't have the background knowledge in order to activate? You could say to them, "Activate your background knowledge to the Kingdom come." But if they don't have it, they can't activate it. So it became a real challenge for me to try and understand, "Well, what do you do when there isn't any?" And that's why content knowledge became so quickly important to me. That's interesting because I do remember, "Oh, this was a long time ago. I'm surprised I still remember, but I do remember in my undergraduate program learning about activating prior knowledge." I'm not sure they call it background knowledge at that point. So what do you do? First of all, that impacts reading comprehension. We all know that. What about comprehension? What is the connection there between background knowledge and comprehension? Well, in my view, let me first say that I do not see comprehension as a generic skill. Some people think so, but I don't. So for example, if I would read a sixth grade text in science, which is not my forte, I would probably have a little bit of a problem in trying to understand some of the concepts and some of the terms. I would probably not be able to connect and to activate any background knowledge. And so what I began to realize is that side of Scarborough's rope, language comprehension, to a great extent, it's two critical things. It's vocabulary and it's knowledge. It's content knowledge. And if you don't have content knowledge, you're likely not to be able to comprehend text. Now, this has an enormous implication because what it means is that we have been spending our time on comprehension strategies instead of teaching content knowledge. Nancy Hennessy, past president of the International Dislexia Association, built on this by defining the role of vocabulary and how to explicitly teach vocabulary through her research back four pronged approach. Yeah, well, I did think a lot about this because I think oftentimes when we now or even in the past have thought about vocabulary, we immediately connect it to a definition. And so it's so much more than that. It really is, as I described in the book, it's our lexicon. It's our knowledge of word meaning, whether we know words in what I would consider a surface way or a deep way, but it's our knowledge of word meaning that we can use with varied purposes. So I talk about our lexicon or mental dictionary as being used for both receptive and expressive purposes. I think that's really critical for us to be thinking about. Receptive in terms of listening and reading, and then expressive certainly in terms of speaking and writing. So how we go about defining vocabulary then is going to really direct and inform, not so much direct, but inform the way we think about our instruction. So the other aspect of defining or describing vocabulary that I think is important is that we recognize that there's a difference between breath and depth. And I can remember reading an article by, I believe it was Rick Wagner, Tana Bomb Wagner, and another colleague a number of years ago in which they addressed breath versus depth. Then I had never thought about vocabulary in this way. So breath having to do with all the words that we more or less recognize the size of our vocabulary. And more often than not, when we think about breath, we think about recognizing those words because they're within a context that helps to support the recognition. Depth has everything to do with how many words we actually own or our richness of knowledge, those words that we can use not only receptively but also expressively. And the more interaction we have with word, the deeper our knowledge base. So when we think about this ability to express understanding, to use precise language, and I love that in the reading rope, Scarborough, talks a bit or in the descriptor of the strand for vocabulary. She indicates the importance of breath. And depth and precision. In order to use words precisely, we really have to have a depth of knowledge. And then the other aspect that when I talked about what vocabulary is is thinking about, well, how do you require vocabulary? How does this happen for us? And again, this has implication for instructional design. And we know that we acquire the meaning of words over time bit by bit. It's incremental. And so I think I talked a little bit about young children. Think about those little ones that we know who seem to pick up on every word that they hear. And we call that slow fast mapping. But unless they continue to have experiences with those words so that they can slow map them into their lexicon, they kind of go away. But anyway, it's bit by bit. And so continued exposure and use to word. The other thing, recognizing a definition alone is not sufficient because words are interrelated. And this has everything to do with background knowledge, doesn't it? So we're storing words in networks of meaning. And so when we hear a word now, like comprehension, what comes to mind? What's within that network? What's related to that particular meaning? Our focus on language comprehension continued with Kate Kane talking us through the role of language structure in the simple view of reading. And why reading aloud to children from a very young age is so important for many, many reasons. So if we think about the right model, the language structures are referred to there. We think of semantics and we think of syntax. So we'll start with semantics and think about its relation to both the vocabulary and comprehension, I think, would be useful and then move on to thinking about syntax. And I think it's important to note to listeners that researchers are not always precise. We can be a little bit sloppy in the language we use. And I think there can be a lot of confusion because sometimes vocabulary and semantics are used somewhat interchangeably. But what we're really talking about with vocabulary, we're referring to the words that child has gotten in their lexicon. What words do they know? With semantics skills, we're referring to the ability to understand these words and use them appropriately. You know, in a good example that's often used, like there's a world of difference between saying, I robbed a bank and a bank robbed me. So it's actually sort of like that appropriate use. But when we're thinking about the study of semantics, we're often also talking about semantic relations. So we have some words are associated because they often occur together in text because they actually kind of like occur together in place. So collocations, thinking of like sound castle and beach. And we have other words that might be associated because they share features. You can think of different shades of meaning if you like. So cry, sob, whale, all to do with sort of like expressing that emotion. And then other words can be have related but also distinct meaning. So think of wave. If you can wave hello, you can have a wave in the ocean. You can have a sound wave. And I think it can get a little bit confusing when we're thinking about the relation with comprehension because we often talk about vocabulary breadth, how many words does a child know the meaning of and also vocabulary depth. What does a child know about these words? And often then we're really talking about semantics. And this idea that sort of one of the things I think is important to get across is that comprehension of text is really enriched by access to having a lexicon of word meanings that we can use precisely but also flexibly. We often we have a lot of words in our language that have multiple meanings. And it's also enriched by having these rich semantic networks where we have links between these related words as I was sort of explaining before. And if you think about specifically in relation to comprehension and why this is so important, it's some of the work that I've conducted for Jane actually. We've looked at this relation between the vocabulary breadth and depth to inference making deal, ddyn nhw yillych awrygod i mych am Wagner ну dwi'r ei sau eu wedi sy avail oorau� yged wrth gwyph anắn. 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A'r ddydd yn ddysymplewodd i'r ddydd yn ymwch ddydd yn ffodd i'r ddydd yn ffodd i'r ddydd yn ffodd i'r ddydd. diwyrion o paru'r daldig yr cre characters o hawd yn pwратol'i wneud (ap Glaeddoedd ymlaír Opisydd y wideglawerichnu, o chw�� unis. No synii ni fyddwch pyhdig yr chwil gwneud—wt powerl,uy'r sambodraedd yr ablefodig gan alwynau ygy dy Un 사람� progress. Mae'r cyfyrdyn, ac yn ymlaid, ac yn ymlaid, ac yn ymlaid, ac yn ymlaid, ac yn ymlaid. Mae'r cyfyrdyn, ac yn ymlaid, ac yn ymlaid i'r cyfyrdyn, ac yn ymlaid ymlaid. Mae'r cyfyrdyn, ac yn ymlaid. I know you've discussed before. I think about that analogy. And I also think about what that visual-- it's such a beautiful visual for talking about this stuff. But what that visual doesn't show you that I just want to remind listeners is that each of those strands is reciprocal with reading in one way or another. And I'll go in a little bit more detail in just a minute. But I want to finish the other part of the analogy is that each of those strands is obviously stronger together than it is on its own. And when those strands are sort of interwoven or braided as they appear or twisted as they appear in the rope, they're even more strong. And what I mean by that is that when a student develops that phonological and awareness and begins to be able to apply the alphabetic principle to decode words, then they can begin reading. And when they read, it strengthens their decoding. And the more they decode, the more they can read. And the more they read, the more they begin to recognize spelling patterns and the beginning of word recognition. They might begin to recognize shorter words. And the more words they recognize, the better they read. And the more they can read. And all of these strands are reciprocal in that way. They begin to recognize patterns. And they begin to recognize vocabulary. And the more vocabulary they have, the better they read. And the better they read, the deeper their vocabulary understanding becomes. And then the deeper their understanding, the more they can read, the more knowledge they build, the more they can read, the more language structures they're exposed to, the better they can read, the more language structures they get exposed to. And even right through motivation. So all of the strands and also two things that are not on the left side of the strands is motivation and fluency. And those are also reciprocal. Like the more we read, the better we get at those things, the more of a motivated we are to read, because we're having success, the more we read, the more fluent we become. I just love that visual of strands twisting together, making the student a more and more successful reader. And to round out the word recognition portion of Scarborough's rope, Dr. Bruce McCandless, Professor of neuroscience at the Graduate School of Education of Stanford University, stop by to unpack site recognition from the perspective of brain science. What happens in the brain as word recognition becomes increasingly automatic? How is today's increasingly technological learning environment shaping the brains of young readers? Let's hear from Bruce. Well, I think of cognitive science is really the study of how the mind carries out its central functions, like recalling our memories or interpreting the feelings in somebody's expression, understanding the words we hear, and seeing all the objects in the world, the guide, our thoughts and actions. All of this cognitive science has been studied primarily by really looking in a scientific way at human behavior, very, very carefully, and very analytically. And we've been able to develop great theories about how function works. And these theories have come to really help explain how the human mind works. But at the same time, advances in neuroimaging, so just brain scanning have really allowed us to take all of these functions and study them in a whole new way by understanding how different networks in the brain contribute to specific functions. It opens up a whole bunch of new questions that really sort of work hand in glove with cognitive science. So we can kind of ask, how does this network, if you can measure it, you can ask, how does one network differ from one learner to another in ways that really matter? And how do networks change over the course of a really successful learning engagement or tutoring experience or something like this? And what is the typical path from novice to expert and then where are places that kids really get stuck along the way? And how can we help them? By studying cognitive science together with the methods of neuroimaging, we developed this new kind of hybrid way of looking at things, which is much more powerful than just looking at behavior alone. Every time I speak to Bruce, it seems cutting edge research continues to reinforce the simple view of reading. And that's the second strand of Scarborough's rope all wrapped up. We've put a lot together this season, thanks to these thoughtful leaders in the science of reading. We hope you've enjoyed these episodes, and we can't wait to kick off a new learning adventure together. Stay tuned for season four of Science of Reading the Podcast, dropping this July. Thanks for listening and keep your feedback coming. Do you want to learn more? Be sure to stay connected by subscribing on your favorite podcast app and join our Facebook discussion group, Science of Reading the Community. Visit amplify.com to check out all our free literacy events and upcoming Science of Reading symposium. Until next time, keep the hope, take the action, and stay in touch. Hey literacy educators, I want to tell you about a new professional learning resource featuring bite-sized actionable tips you can implement in your classroom right away. Check out Amplify's brand new YouTube channel, Advice for the Literacy Classroom. I'm going to share three tips you can use to make your read all out interactive and engaging. I just wanted to take you on a quick tour of my classroom and show you how I lay things out. You give you a second tip. Ask students about their language. Start learning now at amplify.com/literacyclassroomadvice.