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DSF conference – Day 3

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Here’s a sample of interesting things from the last day of the DSF Language Learning & Literacy conference.

Oral language from preschool to adolescence

Pam Snow and Tanya Serry from the SOLAR Lab gave an overview of oral language development for teachers. Most of it was familiar content to any speech pathologist, but I hadn’t seen the 2005 Snowling and Hulme Reading Is Language (RIL) model:

or their interesting article about language and literacy as connected and interdependent, concluding that “language and reading interventions need to be seen as inextricably linked”. I couldn’t agree more.

Analysing children’s narratives with AI

I missed Jenny Baker from Freo Speech Pathology‘s session on analysing narrative samples using AI, but reading her overheads (available to all conference attendees) I wish I hadn’t. She trained Claude AI to analyse productivity, comprehension, macrostructure and microstructure in 3-5 year old children’s narratives, from a total of 518 children, and 43,000 words. This makes large-scale language sample analysis feasible, and opens the door to norm-referenced narrative assessment tools based on large samples. Speech Pathologists who have done LARSPs will all want to give Jenny a GOLD MEDAL.

Early years school readiness

Simmone Pogorzelski and colleagues are researching the impact of the Y WA School ReadY program, which targets pre-literacy and language, social and emotional wellbeing and numeracy in 3-5 year olds. The program focusses on morning mat time and storytime, and uses dialogic book reading. Results suggest the program has a positive impact, despite subject age and teacher qualification differences between the WA experimental groups and the Victorian control group. School ReadY is also in Nepal (yay Simmone!).

Reading Doctor software

Emma Grace and colleagues from Flinders University got a Channel 7 Children’s Research Foundation grant to study 390 children aged 4-7 using the Reading Doctor online letter-sound activities at home or school. They found using the software significantly improved children’s letter-sound knowledge. So far the only online information I can find about this study is on the Reading Doctor website, but it was an independent study.

Learning morphology

In her keynote, Prof Kathy Rastle (whose slides are here) said that the language of books is much richer than the language of everyday conversations, and morphemes (meaningful word parts) are more obvious in print than speech. Understanding morphology vastly increases vocabulary (by 7x). It is the main way we develop and understand new words. Skilled readers rapidly analyse words’ morphological structure.

As the classic Wug Test showed, four-year-olds can apply inflectional suffixes, but few 7-year-olds can manipulate derivational morphemes. The Cyp-Lex Corpus is a large-scale database of the language of popular children’s books in the UK. This shows that there are many complex words in children’s books, few used repeatedly. However, few prefixes/suffixes are used with many different stems, few are easy to detect, and many have inconsistent meanings.

It’s clear that phonics must come first. There is evidence that morphology instruction improves reading and spelling, but the quality of this evidence is generally low. Teaching varies greatly, many poor-quality materials are available, and it’s not yet clear what the key ingredients of good morphology teaching are, or whether it warrants much instructional time.

Vocabulary in phonics lessons

Dr Holly Lane from UFLI said the process of storing words in long-term memory involves fusing words’ pronunciations, spellings and meanings, so phonics lessons need to consider all three aspects. UFLI teachers must check the lesson plan for words children might not know, homophones, polysemy (e.g. ‘bark’ might mean trees, or dogs) and consider which words might need picture support.

Student-friendly definitions should be provided, giving the most common meaning of the word in plain language. The Collins dictionary gives such explanations (e.g. at right), with blue dots indicating the relative frequency of the word.

Definitions and picture support need to be made locally relevant e.g. a ‘rig’ might mean a big rig (truck) in some places and an oil rig in others. The UFLI toolbox now has a Foundations Vocabulary Resource. Discussion of vocabulary during phonics lessons should enhance the lesson, not slow its pace, so teachers need to be well-prepared.

Measuring outcomes in DLD

Australian researchers including Prof Suze Leitão of Curtin Uni are involved in an international study to develop and adopt consistent terminology in research about language intervention. They have done a systematic review of the literature, and are now consulting with people with language disorder and their families, teachers, speech-language pathologists and other researchers. More details are here.

Free webinar for teachers on DLD

1 in 14 students have DLD but few teachers have been trained to support them. Shaun Ziegenfusz and colleagues at the DLD Project thus developed a free, 90-minute online webinar for teachers, and studied its impact on 198 participating teachers’ knowledge, attitudes and educational practices, as well as whether it was considered socially valid. Results were positive, though more research is needed into its impact on classroom practice and student achievement. The webinar is still free online.

Motivation to read

I couldn’t attend her session but Speech Pathologist Dr Katrina Kelso discussed the Motivation to Read Profile, which gathers information on motivation to read, reading self-concept and perceptions of the value of reading. Understanding these factors can boost the quality of intervention.

Speech Pathologist-Teacher collaboration

Harriet Naylor of James Cook University reported on use of Dr Julia Starling’s Link-Up program in which teachers and speech pathologists collaborate to make classroom language more accessible to students with language difficulties. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. Here’s a nice poster summarising useful strategies from this research.

And that’s a wrap!

Sorry it took me two weeks to write this, I was exhausted. If you also attended, please feel free to add other highlights in the comments below. Thanks to my colleague Elle for her hard work on our games and workshop, to Gloria, Megha and Wanyima for lugging stuff to Perth and back, and Jo for being head chef at our Freo sharehouse. Also huge thanks to Mandy Nayton, Gemma Boyle, Renée Pole, Genevieve McArthur and all the DSFers for organising an excellent conference.

Alison Clarke