S8 E12: Language and literacy, with Catherine Snow

Catherine Snow, Ph.D., Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, joins Susan Lambert on this episode to reflect on the state of language and literacy instruction in the U.S. They begin their conversation by discussing linguistics in young children and the relationship between language and literacy, before diving into Dr. Snow’s biggest takeaways from her work on the National Research Council report, “Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children." Susan and Dr. Snow talk about building vocabulary, growing student curiosity in reading, and exposing students to academic language. Dr. Snow talks about the specific tools educators should be given for meaningful help in the classroom, shares her hopes—and fears—for the future of reading instruction in this country, and explains why she encourages teachers to let their classrooms be noisier.

Show notes:

• Read: National Research Council Report: Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children
• Read: Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension

Quotes:
“Part of preventing reading difficulties means focusing on programs to ensure that all children have access to books from birth and that they have access to adults who will read those books with them and discuss them.” —Catherine Snow, Ph.D.

“I see academic language and exposure to academic language as an expansion of children's language skills that both contributes to successful literacy—successful reading comprehension—and gets built through encounters with texts, but also encounters with oral activities.” —Catherine Snow, Ph.D.

“Let your classroom be noisier. Let the kids be more engaged and more socially engaged, because that is actually a contribution to their language development and to their motivation to keep working.” —Catherine Snow, Ph.D.

Episode timestamps*
2:00 Introduction: Who is Catherine Snow?
3:00 Linguistics in young children
6:00 What is language? 
8:00 Language and its impact on literacy
14:00 National Research Council Report: Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children
22:00 Building vocabulary and a love for reading
26:00 Academic language
28:00 “Science of Reading” movement and the reading wars
33:00 Scientific research in the hands of educators in the field
36:00 Tools teachers need in their toolbox
38:00 Hopes and fears for the future of the “Science of Reading movement”
41:00 Final advice
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

Transcript

Catherine Snow: 0:31

The vocabulary and language skills that a child takes into kindergarten are highly predictive, and one could even argue determinative of subsequent progress in learning to read.

Susan Lambert: 0:48

This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify, where the Science of Reading lives. We're wrapping up our season focused on the critical role of knowledge. And if there's been one takeaway, it's that knowledge building cannot be overlooked for literacy development and beyond. So, while Season Eight is coming to an end, we will certainly continue coming back to knowledge building in our future episodes. To close out this season, we've got a fascinating conversation in store with Dr. Catherine Snow, the John and Elizabeth Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. On this episode, Dr. Snow looks back at the "Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children Report" and shares some of the most critical takeaways for educators today. She also weighs in on the state of the current Science of Reading movement and shares what's on the top of her mind in this moment. Please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Katherine Snow. It's so nice to have you here. Dr. Snow, could you tell our listeners just a little bit more about the work that you do and maybe your initial interest in language development?

Catherine Snow: 2:07

My initial interest in language development started actually when I was a graduate student, and I was reading, of course, the work of Noam Chomsky , who was the expert of that era in language analysis and language acquisition. And I was struck, first of all, by the brilliance of the linguistic analysis, but also by a bit of incredulity when I read his descriptions of linguistic input to children as being garbled and ungrammatical. And it seemed to me that this was actually an empirical claim that could be tested. And so that's where I started by collecting interactions between mothers and children and analyzing them to discover that they were of course not as garbled and ungrammatical as the language that Noam Chomsky had evidently been listening to at linguistic conferences among his colleagues.

Susan Lambert: 3:09

Hmm . Did anything really surprise you about what you were learning at that time related to mothers and children?

Catherine Snow: 3:16

Well, it's the sort of finding that, when you go home and tell your grandmother, she says, "Well, didn't you know that?" Of course, people talk in a way that's simpler and more repetitive and more concrete and more here and now with young children. But it was important to document it because linguists were proceeding from the assumption that the linguistic input was very, very difficult to parse, very difficult to make sense of, very difficult to connect to meaning, and thus, that there needed to be an extremely powerful innate language acquisition device. So it was important just to moderate, I think, that claim about the strength, the size, the power of the innate language acquisition device.

Susan Lambert: 4:11

Hmm . And so I , I think I have this right, but I hear a lot of conversation about how language in children, you know, children are sort of born to be communicators and language is something that actually starts to develop before babies are born, but actually has an impact later on. So do I have that right about sort of this natural bent towards language development?

Catherine Snow: 4:37

You certainly have it right about a natural desire for connection and communication that's very much there from very early on. We know that even what babies hear prenatally has some influence. So they're evidently sort of processing language, making distinctions , learning what's familiar, and thus by implication what's not familiar. But that's quite a different claim from the claim that language is innate. So communication, communicative desires and understanding social meaning is certainly very early. Babies look at moving mouths. They look at eyes, they're quite young when they start to engage in proto conversations, sort of back and forth babbling. But the adult or the older speaker who's interacting with the child can make a lot of those initial communicative efforts or can ignore them and suppress them .

Susan Lambert: 5:47

Hmm.

Catherine Snow: 5:47

And the value of the environment in exploiting those social and communicative tendencies is huge.

Susan Lambert: 5:55

Hmm. And so you said there's sort of a difference between communication and language. I think one of the things that I've noticed is that I really believe that many of us as educators and practitioners, and I'm gonna put myself in that camp, too, because I'm not sure that I completely understood language, what is, then, language? Could you define it? Is that too much to ask?

Catherine Snow: 6:21

Probably! But certainly language is an extremely multi-layered communicative system that operates with rules, rules that many of which in most natural languages are somewhat arbitrary. So language requires learning, being sensitive to picking up on, and learning a lot of things that aren't really necessary for communication. I mean, if you think about gender, three genders in German, are those necessary for communication? Well, evidently not because we don't have those three genders in English. But they are necessary to become a good speaker of German. So the complexities, the additional rules that actually constitute natural languages a nd which children pick up on, children don't have any particular problem learning three genders in German or two in Spanish, and learning how they operate, suggests that children are very sensitive to certain kinds of regularities and certain kinds of feedback from the environment about how to communicate most effectively. That goes well beyond the kind of communication that you see in a 14-month-old, which consists of pointing or offering objects, saying things like "hi" and "bye-bye" and "thank you," and "all gone," which are not yet really well structured linguistic forms, but are very powerful communicative forms.

Susan Lambert: 8:08

Hmm . And so then the link between language and its impact on literacy. So we know there's a connection there, and we know that kids come to school with more or less language experiences, and those experiences actually impact literacy. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Catherine Snow: 8:26

Sure. So the dimension of language that has been shown to have the strongest impact on literacy is vocabulary, the size of a child's vocabulary. And this is remarkably variable among normally developing children. Normally developing children might arrive at kindergarten knowing a thousand words in English, or knowing 5,000 words in English . And that difference has been shown to make a huge difference, a difference that predicts ease of word reading during the first phase of teaching children decoding. And you might think, well, why? What difference does it make? Well, English is an alphabetic language, but it is what we refer to as a , it has what we call a deep orthography . That is to say there's not a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds as there is in languages that were first written down much more recently. And so that means that kids have to learn not just to decode, in other words, to look at a letter and make the sound, but to think, is that really a word?

Susan Lambert: 9:44

Mm-hmm.

Catherine Snow: 9:45

So, for example, a child reading the word "get," "he gets hungry in the afternoon," would, if he or she were thinking about the rule that "g" before "e" typically makes the "j" sound, would say "he jets hungry in the afternoon." And only if you then think, "Does that make sense," are you likely to correct that error of decoding and really be able to use the decoding process, the word reading process, to contribute to the meaning-making process, which is the point of reading.

Susan Lambert: 10:26

Hmm . Very interesting. And, you know, sort of developing new vocabulary and growth over time, that's one thing that continues through our lifetime, as long as we're learning new things, as opposed to the decoding process, right, which once you have it secure, you're pretty much done with it.

Catherine Snow: 10:43

That's right. The decoding is typically , in languages with much more shallow orthographies than English, languages like Spanish, let's say, where there are only a few variations on that phoneme-grapheme linkage , takes a few months. Now it takes more time to get it really automatized, to get it really fluent. But the basic system is mastered in a few months. In English, it often takes two or three years to kind of learn all of the rules that make you not just a good decoder, but also a good speller. But on the other hand, during that time, consulting, the meaning-making system helps because it helps you correct the mistaken readings that you otherwise are very subject to in a deep orthography, like English.

Susan Lambert: 11:39

I think that's a really good point to maybe put an exclamation point on, in that in the early grades when we're teaching kids to decode, we should not be giving up on their language development. That should also be a really important part of what's happening in the classroom. Do you agree with that?

Catherine Snow: 11:56

I absolutely agree with that, and particularly agree with that for the kids who arrive in first grade with fewer vocabulary words, because they are now going to be dependent on teachers and literate input in order to expand their vocabulary. So they have a better chance later on of comprehending the texts. They'll be expected to read in social studies in fifth grade or in science in sixth grade. And some of that can start pretty early and with easily decoded words. I mean, if you think about the way many kids get into the alphabetic principle is with lists of words like hog, log, fog, nog, pog . But do they know, is that a real word? Well, some teaching methods will say it doesn't matter if they read it and sound it out correctly, then that's good instruction, and that's even good assessment to know if they can do that. But I would argue that we should be thinking about sets of words like all the -og rhymes , as an opportunity to teach children new word meanings while they're practicing these patterns. So they might not know what fog means, for example. Well, that's a perfect chance to teach a new meaning and to talk about fog and what it is, and not just stick to, make sure you pronounce it correctly.

Susan Lambert: 13:27

Hmm . That makes sense. Well, we're gonna come back to this little bit of language in a few minutes, but many, many people may not know about a report that you were quite instrumental in developing. I love your story here, too, of how you ended up doing this, but can you talk a little bit about this National Research Council report called "Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children ," and how you ended up doing it and what this report was about?

Catherine Snow: 13:57

Sure. In 1995, the National Research Council, which is the operating arm of the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine, decided that the research had accumulated to a point where it should be possible to end the reading wars, which had of course been going on since, for 150 years, actually, but quite viciously since the Second World War. But there was, by 1995, a very large and pretty coherent body of research about reading development and reading instruction and the predictors of good reading outcomes. So they decided to put together a study, which means basically a committee to review this evidence and write a report. And the problem was that the reading wars were still pretty hot in 1995. And so it's possible in one of these committees, of course, to balance the membership, to bring in some people who were sort of more on the decoding phonics side and people who are more on the meaning-making, read-for-pleasure side. But the person who chairs the committee sends an important political signal, and it was decided that everybody who had ever published in the field of reading and reading instruction was thus disqualified because they would already be identified as one side or the other. So there I was, I had not ever published in the field of reading instruction, certainly reading education. I published a couple of papers about very early literacy and how it relates to language. So they tapped me to chair this committee, and I was reluctant. But anyway, I ended up chairing the committee, which turned out to be a actually extremely instructive experience for me. And also remarkably free I think, of aggression or severe disagreements. We ended up producing a report that everybody on the committee signed off on. And these were people who came from the full wide range of positions on how to teach reading, but we agreed on some some very important principles. And so that became the report "Preventing Reading Difficulties," which came out in 1998.

Susan Lambert: 16:37

1998. And I actually have a copy of this report sitting right here on my desk. So isn't that pretty impressive that I have it here, and some of the people, I just wanna read some of the names on the committee. Marilyn Jager Adams, Barbara Foorman, Claude Goldenberg, some of the names that we continue to hear. Charles Perfetti, Hollis Scarborough, Sally Shaywitz. So you worked with some really important and influential researchers on this committee.

Catherine Snow: 17:08

That's right. And they all signed off on it.

Susan Lambert: 17:13

That's quite amazing. So this report actually came out before the National Reading Panel report, which came out not that much after, is that correct?

Catherine Snow: 17:24

That's right. And you might be wondering why, why we needed two reports, and I wondered that, too, at the time. I'll have to say, and I think, I know that people who sat on the National Reading Report Committee wondered that, several of them called me up and said, "You've really done all the work with the 'Preventing Reading Difficulties' report. I'm not quite sure what we're doing." But they did, they did undertake a different approach by looking primarily at instructional research. And primarily at or exclusively at research that was quasi experimental or experimental. And so in, ideally, the National Reading Panel report would've been the perfect complement to "Preventing Reading Difficulties," because the conclusions were quite consistent. But the "Preventing Reading Difficulties" report was broader. It started from early childhood before there was instructional research to be reported. It took a developmental perspective rather than an instructional perspective. And it took a, sort of a public health perspective, one that was, that anticipated the notion of a three-tiered system, you know, what's good enough to ensure reading development for everybody? What do you do when some kids are struggling a little bit? What do you do when kids are struggling a lot? But in effect, I'll have to say the National Reading Panel report, which should have been taken as a complement to "Preventing Reading Difficulties," was instead presented as an improvement upon the "Preventing Reading Difficulties" report. And that was really unfortunate because I think it then sort of eclipsed "Preventing Reading Difficulties" after a couple of years and has limited what we think of as literacy instruction. Because it limited it to those five domains in which there was a sufficient quantity of work that met their criteria. And that means that it says nothing about writing, which is a very valuable route to learning to read and learning to comprehend. It says nothing about sustained silent reading. I mean, it says basically, we can't say anything about it , because there's not enough data supporting its value. But that was taken by many educators as meaning we shouldn't do it rather than as meaning it's, we're neutral on whether we should do it. And I think those omissions have limited, have constrained reading instruction in the last 25 years.

Susan Lambert: 20:26

We'll be right back with more from Dr. Catherine Snow. Throughout this knowledge-focused season, we've shared short messages from educators across the country with their advice on building knowledge. For this season finale, we're going to hear directly from a couple of students. We ask young people to tell us about their favorite classroom topics, and here are a couple of their lovely messages.

Julian: 20:53

Hi, my name is Julian. I am in third grade. I am eight years old. My favorite topic in CKLA is the human body. I love learning about joints and muscles and skeletons because they're all interesting and they all have different parts, and they all have different jobs to work for your body.

Joy: 21:19

Hi, my name is Joy and I'm 10 . I go to French Public School and I love reports in French class because I learn so much throughout the research. Recently I did a report on Moby Dick with a friend, in French of course! I also love reading because it inspires me to write my own stories. Bye.

Susan Lambert: 21:38

Thank you so much Julian and Joy for sharing that with us, and please keep us posted on your next scientific discoveries and your next reports. And now back to our conversation with Dr. Catherine Snow. So what I hear you say is you really see the "Preventing Reading Difficulties," the National Reading Panel report, as complementary. What would you hope that folks would, well, I think you would hope that folks would go back and, and look at the "Preventing Reading Difficulties" report. What do you, what would you hope that some of the takeaways for them would be as they go back and look at that?

Catherine Snow: 22:21

One takeaway is certainly that we need to start early for precisely the reason you mentioned, that the vocabulary and language skills that a child takes into kindergarten are highly predictive, and one could even argue determinative of subsequent progress in learning to read. And that what that means is that part of preventing reading difficulties means focusing on programs to ensure that all children have access to books from the age of, from birth, from in early childhood, that they have access to adults who will read those books with them and discuss them, because that is a very powerful source of learning vocabulary. And I'm taking vocabulary here, not as so much an end in itself, but as the marker for knowledge. Kids who have larger vocabularies have clearly learned more about the world. If you know the word "gravity" or you know the word "volcano" or you know the word "tidal pool," that probably means you know about three domains of knowledge that that might come up in books later on, or that might give you an opportunity to ask questions of adults and further enrich your knowledge. So the access to knowledge, as well as the access to imagination, of course, to fantasy, to creativity. The other domain that is very much emphasized in "Preventing Reading Difficulties" and that was not accessible to the methods of the National Reading Panel report, was motivation, love, enjoyment. I mean, kids, kids don't learn to read so that they can pronounce words correctly. They learn to read so that they can have fun reading good stories, so they can learn about topics that are of interest to them so they can pursue their own curiosity. And that early looking at books, talking about books with an affectionate adult sets the stage for sort of a positive attitude toward learning to read. The opportunity to read books that children select themselves reinforces the sense that this is an authentic, valuable activity. It isn't an exercise in demonstrating skills. And that, I think is a crucial piece of creating a good learning environment for literacy that we've maybe started to neglect a little bit. Recent NAEP scores have shown, for example, that American children have, a very large proportion of them rarely read for pleasure. And that the frequency with which they read for pleasure is, of course, unsurprisingly, closely related to their skill, their performance on the NAEP test. So reading for pleasure makes you a better reader, but being a reader for many children means reading for pleasure, not reading to get this worksheet done or reading to get this piece of homework done.

Susan Lambert: 25:41

Yeah, yeah. You also write a lot about , you know, more recently than the "Preventing Reading Difficulties," you've written about academic language and why that's important. Can you talk a little bit about what academic language is and why it's important for us to develop that for students?

Catherine Snow: 25:59

Sure. So academic language has become a slightly fraught term. But if we just assume that what we mean by it is the kind of language skills that are displayed by literate people, by people who read a lot and who talk about ideas and theories and generalizations, and the kind of language that's much more frequent in texts than in oral language, I think that's a neutral definition of academic language. It is clearly not language that we want to teach children to use all the time.

: 26:47

Right, right. Yeah. I mean, none of us should walk around sounding like Harvard professors all the time. Only when we need to sound like Harvard professors. And in that case, it's so useful to know , to know words like "mitigate" and "proportionately" and "putatively." But you know, when you're playing ball in the backyard, those words aren't , don't do you much good. There are a lot of other words that are more helpful. But I see academic language and exposure to academic language as an expansion of children's language skills that both contributes to successful literacy, successful reading comprehension, and gets built through encounters with texts, but also encounters with oral activities like engaging in debates or engaging in discussions of big ideas and important questions.

Susan Lambert: 27:45

Hmm . That's great. And yes, nobody wants to walk around sounding like a Harvard professor all the time. That is a really great comment. So you have, you talked a little bit about the, the context for the "Preventing Reading Difficulties," the reading wars , chuckle about that a little bit because they maybe should have been ended back in the two thousands, who knows? But we're still in the middle of it. And now, instead of the reading wars, I think we're calling it the Science of Reading movement. This is Science of Reading: The Podcast. So I'd just love to hear your thoughts on both the Science of Reading movement, but also, you know, why haven't the reading wars ended? Why are we still debating years later about what's best for developing literacy in children?

Speaker 1: 28:37

That's a very good question. I am not the right person to analyze what the incentives are for keeping the reading wars going. Although of course I could speculate about that. I think there are very good and moral reasons to worry about reading in American society . There are still huge inequities in reading success. There are schools and neighborhoods where children have a much harder time learning to read. There is, however, as far as I can tell, no basis for assuming there's a crisis. Reading scores are, on average, pretty much where they were 20 years ago. I mean, a very small increment in the NAEP over those 20 years, in the NAEP reading scores, except for the dip associated with COVID, which you can attribute to not poor reading instruction, but to the absence of reading instruction. Right ?

Catherine Snow: 29:42

Mm-Hmm .

Susan Lambert: 29:42

Suggesting that when kids are in school, they are actually learning from whatever is going on. Now, one of the questions is, what is going on in classrooms? We really don't know. There's not a good database for the nature of reading instruction. I mean, we could, you can track what curricula are being purchased, but we do not track whether they're taken out of the box. We do not track whether the professional development that allowed teachers to use those curricula was completed or was embraced by the teachers. So attributing lack of progress in the NAEP to insufficient attention to the ""Science of Reading, which I always have to put into air quotes , for reasons I can explain, or to over-reliance on any particular method, is, I think, an imaginative interpretation unmarred by data. The Science of Reading, I think, is not really a movement, I mean, it's a political movement. It's not a scientific movement. And the Science of Reading has become a slogan that means whatever you want it to mean in your school district or your corner of the reading world. There is a lot of science about reading now. There's lots more than we had access to in 1998 when we published "Preventing Reading Difficulties" or that Reading Panel report writers had access to in 2000. There's lots more, but is there a science of reading? No, there's a lot of science about reading and there's a lot of science about reading predictors, predictors of good reading and science about reading instructional methods. There's not so much science about the implementation of those methods or variation in the implementation of those methods. Mm - hmm.

Catherine Snow: 31:38

So, I don't like the term "the Science of Reading." I've looked at various websites and on different districts' websites, and they, and it gets interpreted very differently in different places depending on what people think is the most important missing ingredient. I don't think it's, as a term, promoting our effective communication.

Susan Lambert: 32:01

Mm - hmm.

: 32:01

But it's there. And so, if it's there, let's try to think of it as science about reading and not science of reading.

Susan Lambert: 32:10

Hmm . I like that because what you said is, this is kind of a, we're gonna unpack this a little bit, it's, you feel like this is a little bit of a political movement and not a scientific movement. And so I'm wondering, so I've heard this from reading researchers before. We've known this, we've been studying this for a long time. This isn't new information to us, but what about it getting into the teachers that are teaching in the classroom, their understanding of language development or their understanding of word-reading development. Do you think that we've done a good job of translating that scientific research to those that are actually working in the field?

Catherine Snow: 32:52

No, I don't. And I don't, I actually don't think "translate" is the right metaphor there. I think , " translate" suggests, you know, if you can just put this into simpler language, then teachers will get it. And the basic nature of what reading researchers want to do and what teachers want to do is convergent at a very far point in the distant future. But in the daily activity, it's quite different. Reading researchers wanna make generalizations.

Susan Lambert: 33:26

Mm - hmm.

Catherine Snow: 33:27

First-grade teachers wanna help Kenny, who's in the last row and doesn't know the alphabet yet, right? So the focus is quite different. Keith Stanovich has written a wonderful paper about this, in which he lays out these differences between researchers needs and individual teachers' needs. But as a result, I think what teachers need is not a translation of our research findings. And I think, certainly not a lot of reproaches about what they're doing wrong, which tends to be how much of the research is translated into messages for teachers. "Oh, no, that's a bad technique." "Oh no, don't do that." "Oh, no, that's very stupid." I think what they need is tools, things that they can use that are available to help them figure out, "What does Kenny need and what does Malika need, and what does Sylvia need? And how do I provide that," even though it might be three somewhat different things. And those tools are complicated, particularly in a give , you know, a first-grade classroom where you've got kids ranging in level from barely emergent readers to highly fluent readers who really just want you to go away and not try to teach them anything 'cause they'd rather be reading Harry Potter. But that isn't how the curricular packages, the instructional techniques that we give, are usually packaged, right? They're less personalized. They're less usable for every kid in the class. So I would argue that teachers need some tools, which are also forms of knowledge, but the forms of knowledge have to be connected very directly to the kids that they are facing right now, this year, every year.

Susan Lambert: 35:29

Hmm. And can you give us maybe some examples of what those tools might be that a teacher could have to use in her toolbox?

Catherine Snow: 35:38

Sure. Well, one set of tools would be quick diagnostics of, for first graders, let's say quick diagnostics of what phoneme-grapheme linkages a child is struggling with. And then a game or a computer program or an interactive activity that's targeted directly at that problem, right? So kids often have trouble with "ch"/"sh." Okay. So in five 15-minute sessions of the right game, you can get kids to reliably notice and pronounce correctly the difference between "chip" and "ship" and "cheat" and "sheet" and so forth. But, out of 30 kids, 15 might not need that at all.

Susan Lambert: 36:33

Right.

Catherine Snow: 36:34

For five, it might be way too early 'cause they're still struggling with single consonants. For another 10, it might be completely unnecessary. They figured it out on their own. So it's this problem of identifying what does each child, what would help each child at this point in time? And that means good targeted diagnostics, not words per minute, not number of phonemes that you can segment, but specific diagnostics. What is this child struggling with. That, in the old days, was what you got from sitting next to a kid and listening to him read for 10 minutes. Teachers don't typically have the chance to do that nowadays.

Susan Lambert: 37:18

That makes sense. So in thinking about this , where we are right now with, we'll put it in quotes, our listeners can't see this, but I'm putting in quotes, the "Science of Reading movement," I think I wanna know two things from you. What are your hopes for the future in terms of supporting teachers and helping them in the classroom? And what are some of your fears about what's happening in the movement right now?

Catherine Snow: 37:43

Well, my hopes would be that we can think better in relationship with teachers, in partnership with teachers about what they need, about what would help them, with this recognition that the components of good reading instruction involve not just personalization, sort of targeted little, targeted sort of interventions, let's say like the " ch"/"sh" intervention, but also supports to teachers to create the classroom conditions that we know are good for all students. Rich language environment, interesting topics, lots of opportunity for students to contribute, to talk to, to work on projects or on problems in pairs or in small groups so that they get more air time than they normally get in a classroom where they're meant to be silently working on worksheets. So if there were a message that I think teachers have not heard that they would probably be happy to hear, it's let your classroom be noisier. Let the kids be more engaged and more socially engaged, because that is actually a contribution to their language development and to their motivation to keep working. The bigger, I guess, umbrella point is that so much of what kids do in school is done from their point of view, because we tell them to do it rather than because they understand why they should be doing it. And moving toward learning specific skills. Because the larger learning task in which those specific skills are embedded is actually something that motivates children's interest. You can learn letter-sound correspondence , or practice letter- sound correspondence, from writing a classroom newsletter, as well as from filling in a worksheet. My worst fears? Well, they're of course that we're just gonna keep swinging this pendulum back and forth, that will push first- and second-grade classrooms so far toward time investment in phonics, in the programs that teach phonics in a relatively disembodied, decontextualized way, that kids are losing motivation, that they're not very, they don't get a chance to read stuff, to understand what this phonics teaching is helping them do, that they wanna do, and that the scores won't go up. And then we'll say, "Well, gee, that didn't work. Let's drop that and go back to teaching using literature and self-expression and creativity." And that's not gonna work either. I mean, both of these components are crucial, but they've got to be put together in a way that makes sense from the child's point of view and from the teacher's point of view.

Susan Lambert: 40:51

Hmm. Well, do you have any final words of advice or wisdom for those practitioners that are trying to make this work every single day in districts across the country, or actually across the world?

Catherine Snow: 41:05

Around the world, that's true. Well, I think one of the positive effects of COVID, was that parents came to appreciate how hard their job is. And so that's good that, that we know how hard teachers work. And you know, when you walk into a first-grade classroom with 25 kids all working, working busily on useful tasks, it's breathtaking, but unfortunately the classroom next door is probably not that breathtaking. So that's one of the challenges we have. I would say to those teachers, if you're doing this and making progress and learning how to do it better, please hang in there for a while .

Susan Lambert: 41:53

Yeah. Yes. It is very hard work, and we do appreciate all that our educators are doing. And Dr. Snow, we appreciate you coming on and just sharing some of your wisdom with us, sharing the legacy of how you came to be interested in language development. And thanks for your contributions. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Dr. Catherine Snow, John and Elizabeth Hobbes Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Don't forget to check out the show notes for links to some of the resources we discussed. If you missed any of the 12 episodes in Season Eight, please scroll back in your podcast feed or visit our website to check them out. There's so much good stuff on read alouds, vocabulary building, and so much more that you don't want to miss. Or maybe you wanna listen again! While this is the end of Season Eight, we will certainly continue focusing on knowledge and knowledge building in episodes to come. We've already got a special series in the works on a brand new topic. I can't wait to tell you more. Stay tuned to this podcast feed for more information on that, as well as a few timely episodes from our archives. The best way to stay up to date with the show is to subscribe to the podcast on any and all podcasting apps. Also, make sure to join our Facebook discussion group, Science of Reading: The Community. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. For more information on how Amplify leverages the Science of Reading, go to amplify.com/ckla. Lastly, if you liked Season Eight, please consider rating us and leaving us a review. It will help more people find the show. Thank you again for listening.