From talk to text: How language skills shape reading success, with Charles Hulme, D.Phil., and MaryKate DeSantis
Transcripts and additional resources:
Meet Our Guest(s):
Charles Hulme, D.Phil.
Charles Hulme is emeritus professor of psychology and education at the University of Oxford. He has broad research interests in reading, language, and memory processes and their development; and is an expert on randomized controlled trials in education. He has published widely and is in the top 2% for citations of all researchers in the field of education. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo (2014) and is a member of Academia Europea and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2017.
MaryKate DeSantis
MaryKate DeSantis is the founder of Left Side Strong LLC. Her experience working in a large urban school district as a special education teacher, reading specialist, and district-wide literacy coach has fueled her passion for translational research to ensure that all children receive evidence-based instruction. Her background in teaching reading sparked an interest in researching language, literacy, and developmental trajectories. She is a full-time faculty member in the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at MGH Institute of Health Professions, and is also an ongoing-research collaborator with the BRIDGES Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
She has also served as a clinician in the Neurology Department at Boston Children’s Hospital, is an adjunct professor at the Boston College Lynch School of Human Development, and is a Ph.D. student in educational psychology at the University of Connecticut.
Meet our host, Susan Lambert
Susan Lambert is chief academic officer of literacy at Amplify and host of Science of Reading: The Podcast. Throughout her career, she has focused on creating high-quality learning environments using evidence-based practices. Lambert is a mom of four, a grandma of four, a world traveler, and a collector of stories.
As the host of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Lambert explores the increasing body of scientific research around how reading is best taught. A former classroom teacher, administrator, and curriculum developer, she’s dedicated to turning theory into best practices that educators can put right to use in the classroom, and to showcasing national models of reading instruction excellence.
Quotes
“Reading comprehension is the process of taking the meaning from printed symbols on a page and translating them into a linguistic and cognitive code. It's making contact with the processes of language comprehension.”
“Language comprehension is really what leads us to reading comprehension.”
“We've got to start from the premise that reading is language. Without language, there would be no reading. Reading is a process that involves taking language in its written form and translating it back into its original form, which is spoken language.”
“If we go back in development, language skills appear to form the foundation for the ability to decode print, as well as the foundation for the ability to understand what is decoded.”
“Language skills are unconstrained, meaning the sky's the limit. As long as you continue to engage in any sort of way, your language skills can continue to develop throughout your lifetime.”
“We talk about learning to read, but we also need to talk about reading to learn. A lot of what we learn in our lives is through reading, and reading is certainly a powerful driver of vocabulary and language development.”
“Focusing on language is worth the time. … When we treat it as foundational, that's when we will give more students access to success.”
“If we want better readers, we have to grow better language users.”