Science of Reading: The Podcast

S10 E8: Beyond decoding: The power of syntax, with Nancy Chapel Eberhardt

• Amplify Education • Season 10 • Episode 8

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by educational consultant Nancy Chapel Eberhardt, who explains why focusing on syntax at the sentence level is just as important for comprehension as word-level decoding. Together, Nancy and Susan also discuss how syntax helps students process meaning while reading, why we should start early and teach syntax to students from the beginning, and a more functional approach to syntax.

Show notes:

Quotes:

"Syntax is somewhere between the individual words and the meaning of the text. It's the processing piece that's going on there." —Nancy Chapel Eberhardt

"Syntax isn't just for older kids anymore. Syntax is really something that we can start promoting, developing, encouraging, embracing from the beginning." —Nancy Chapel Eberhardt

"I actually think that as teachers embrace this idea of syntax, they're going to have a lot of fun with it. It's way more fun to talk about the meanings of words than to just decode them." —Nancy Chapel Eberhardt

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction: Diving deeper into syntax, with Nancy Chapel Eberhardt
08:00 Comprehension is lifting the meaning out of text
11:00 Sentence-level abilities make as large a contribution as word reading for comprehension
14:00 The difference between syntax and grammar
20:00 Why syntactical knowledge is so helpful in the  comprehension process
24:00 Prosody helps us with our fluency with reading
30:00 Syntax is somewhere between the individual words and the meaning of the text
33:00 We've gone through several generations of students who aren't being taught syntax
37:00 It's  more fun to talk about the meanings of words
39:00 Start teaching syntax by thinking about the most essential build block
45:00 Connecting words are meaningless in the absence of other words
53:00 By spending more time instructing on syntax, we will reach more of our students.
56:00 Closing: Syntax is something we can start promoting, developing, encouraging, and embracing from the beginning.
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

[00:00:00] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: It's hard to get excited about this when you don't understand it. So I think our goal, our job now is to help raise awareness.

[00:00:13] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. We hope you caught the syntax bug last time around as we welcomed Dr. Julie Van Dyke who explained; if you want to increase comprehension, you need to be explicit in syntax. Well, today we're diving deeper into syntax, this time with Nancy Chapel Eberhardt, educational consultant with extensive experience as a resource teacher, special education administrator, and professional development provider.

Among other roles she serves as the co-editor-in-chief of IDA's Perspectives on Language and Literacy, whose recent two-parter on syntax is something we explored on our last episode. Today, Nancy and I will discuss how syntax helps students process meaning while reading, why we should start early and teach syntax to students from the beginning, and a more functional approach to teaching syntax.

And please remember to continue submitting your questions on comprehension at amplify.com/sormailbag. Now let's get to today's episode.

I am so excited to have Nancy Chapel Eberhardt on the podcast today. Nancy, welcome and thank you for joining me.

[00:01:33] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Thank you for having me.

[00:01:35] Susan Lambert: I'm so excited to talk to you about syntax, and we'll get into that in a little bit. But before we do that, I would love if you could tell us a bit about who you are and how you became interested in literacy and maybe even syntax specifically.

[00:01:52] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Well, truthfully, I'm an unlikely literacy person. Um. I started out thinking I was going to get my degree in music, performing, then ended up remarkably getting my bachelor's as an economics major, both of which didn't pan out.

But in the last moments of my experience, undergraduate, I made a connection in Connecticut. I was coming from college to a new home in Connecticut—my parents were transferred during my senior year—and the connection was to attend a three-week seminar with Margaret Rosson from the Orton Dyslexia Society, on what is dyslexia? And for some reason I was curious about this topic, which was part of the earlier story, which is not relevant here. But I decided to take the course. I thought, why not learn about this? And Margaret Rosson is the Margaret Mead of literacy. I mean, she was just a remarkable force, uh, for dyslexia and literacy in general.

And so from that experience, I met Isabelle Liberman, who was the head of the master's program at the University of Connecticut. She encouraged me to become a student, which I reluctantly did because I loved Isabelle. And then one thing led to another. I got my master's, um, and started teaching kids in a resource room program and kind of teaching myself as I went along.

[00:03:31] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:03:31] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Time passed and I found myself having the very amazing fortune, and this really does transition us to syntax, of going for more training in Minnesota with Tori Greene, Victoria Greene, who at that time the program was called Project Read. And specifically I was taking the course on framing your thoughts. And in this course, Tori was explaining how our language is organized at the sentence level and how words are functioning.

It was as if a light bulb literally went off in my head that for all these years of schooling that I had had, now we're up through master's degree, I never really understood what grammar and syntax and all of that was about.

[00:04:23] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:04:25] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: It was really truthfully life changing because suddenly I realized that what I was doing with the students I was working with was really insufficient because I was still very focused on the code breaking part, because that's what we were all focused on, but that wasn't solving all of the problems for all of the kids.

So from there, everything I touched seemed to have a syntactic component to it. I got to work with Jane Fell Greene on the language, uh, comprehensive literacy intervention curriculum, and every lesson had a grammar and usage component to it. When that project finished, I reunited with my colleague here in Connecticut, Margie Gillis, and she invited me to work on the Literacy How Professional Learning Series and one of our books was on, uh, syntax.

My information on this influenced the rework that Sheryl Ferlito and I just completed. And the most recent iteration is that I'm now having the absolute pleasure of working, uh, with Carla Stanford of the Reading Universe, and we're building out the language comprehension side of the taxonomy. And guess what our first modules are about, or our first cells are about, is our grammar and syntax, because that's where we're starting.

So there is a kind of through line. Um, I jokingly refer to myself now as a syntax snowball. I just feel like I'm rolling down a hill gathering up more syntax.

[00:06:01] Susan Lambert: Well, to take a step back, this season, we are really focused on comprehension. And we've been asking our guests if they could give their definition of comprehension.

And so I would love, in your own words, if you could define comprehension for us.

[00:06:20] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: It's a pretty simple definition. I think of comprehension as meaning-making, as we're referring to reading now. Um, and it's being able to understand individual and words that are arranged into some level of text, to be able to extract meaning or create meaning.

That probably is pretty simplistic, but that's how I look at it. And I would contrast that with comprehension being, answering questions or writing about something after reading, because that checks that you actually did understand. I think comprehension is lifting the meaning out of the text, then you can answer questions or write about it or think about it.

But it is that process. It's a language processing that I think of as comprehension.

[00:07:19] Susan Lambert: Yeah, I think that we've heard from several of our guests this season, and maybe we have prior seasons too, about the distinction between the process of comprehension, so what's happening while you're reading, as opposed to what you, what mental model you've built or what happens after you've finished that text. And I think historically, and I've mentioned it before on the podcast, is as a teacher, I always thought about comprehension as the product of, is like, let's ask those questions, let's do these activities after we've actually made it through the text. But when it comes particularly to something like syntactical processes, that happens when you're in the moment of actually doing the reading, right?

[00:08:07] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: That's right. That, yes, the word that I was going to say is I would contrast it with product, process versus product.

[00:08:14] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

And so we know, congratulations that syntax is having its day, right?

There's been more and more attention lately to syntax in ways that I've, you know, not actually thought about before. Why do you think that's true? And, and how are you feeling about that more and more attention to syntax?

[00:08:37] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Euphoric.

[00:08:39] Susan Lambert: I love that.

[00:08:40] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Yeah. I, I'm really thrilled, um, because I, I think there are a lot, it, it explains a lot of things, but first of all, I'm excited about this because number one, we're looking at syntax, not just as it relates to writing.

I think that was pretty much when you said syntax, you thought about how are you going to write something.

[00:09:02] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:09:02] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Um. And I think what's really relatively new in the conversation now is we're looking at how syntax is impacting reading comprehension. So I think, um, and how can, how do we do that? Another reason that I'm, I'm euphoric about this is when we did hear more recently about syntax as it relates to reading, it was usually so that we could unpack complex text. And what I'm liking about what we're hearing now is we can't do that on complex texts when we're in third, fourth, fifth grade, and beyond, if we haven't begun to lay this syntactic knowledge and awareness earlier on. So I'm loving the idea that we are bringing down our need to pay attention to syntax, to our younger readers.

And in fact, I would even go so far as to say, based on what Charles Hulme said at IDA when he accepted the Orton Award at the conference this year is, reading is language. And he is now trying to have us think about the development of language from the very early preschool time and how that is going to influence how well kids are reading eventually.

And I think that there's, in fact, I, there's a quote that really captured my attention about this and why I'm excited, in the issues of Perspectives on syntax that just came out in the winter and spring of this year. And the quote that I wanted to bring up here is that sentence level abilities made just as large a contribution as their word reading in gains in reading comprehension. That would be sentence-level abilities, which is what syntax is all about. And why that is so important, I think, is that we got very excited about understanding how to teach word recognition, the insight about phonemic awareness and how it relates to phonics and we're building the reading circuit.

All of that's important. And it is important to read accurately and automatically the individual words, but the fact that sentence-level ability is also going to have a comparable impact, I think is something that should make us all sit up and take notice. And I think that's what's happening. We are sitting up and taking notice.

And what I do think is the other reason we're getting excited about this is that I think teachers have known that there's more than just working on the code, especially with younger readers, and they're now being given an opportunity to learn more about how to actually teach syntax. So for those reasons, and probably more, I'm, as I say, I'm euphoric about this.

[00:12:04] Susan Lambert: That's amazing. And for listeners who didn't listen to the episode with Dr. Julie Van Dyke, she sort of echoed some of that sentiment too about, now it's time we're ready for this. That it's, it's more than just word level that we need to put those words together in sentences. And, and so I'm just doing a callback, listeners, to go back and listen to that episode if you haven't already listened to it because, um, she sort of bookends that with you too. That's pretty cool. And one more thing. I am glad that you mentioned Charles Hulme's name because breaking news, we're actually going to feature him on an upcoming episode this season as well.

[00:12:45] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Wow.

[00:12:45] Susan Lambert: So we hear more about this idea of oral language and reading and language are, are synonymous.

[00:12:52] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: That's fantastic. I'm, I'm excited about that. I'm very excited about it.

[00:12:56] Susan Lambert: Okay. Let's get back to the topic at hand though. I would love if you could give us a, a little bit of a brief overview of syntax and, and during that, if you could help us understand sort of this differences between syntax and grammar.

Because I remember when I was a teacher, I always conflated those two things. And I better understand now that they're not exactly the same thing.

[00:13:20] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Well, I hope that I don't confuse things more for you, Susan.

[00:13:25] Susan Lambert: Well, I'm sure you won't.

[00:13:27] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Well, I think that these are terms that get interchanged and confused and perhaps neither is totally understood. So grammar is actually the, the umbrella term. It's the overarching term for how a language, any language, organizes its rules for production.

[00:13:49] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:49] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Within that, and English is one of them, and every language has a syntax, meaning it's a subset of rules within this language that has to do with how we develop thought units. And a sentence is a thought unit.

So if we think about syntax as being sentence-level structures in our language, I think that's one helpful way to think about it. Now where things get muddy, I think, is we also use the term grammar or grammatical to refer to the parts that build up our sentences. So the grammatical building blocks like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, those are not the overarching structure, but are basically components that we manipulate. And I've been using an analogy that maybe would be helpful here.

[00:14:48] Susan Lambert: Great. Yeah.

[00:14:48] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And that is that the grammatical building blocks are to sentences what the sound/spelling correspondences are to words. So they're the parts we can manipulate to create the unit, whether it's a word in the case of sound/spelling, or the building blocks in the case of sentences.

And then carrying this one step further, then we take and can arrange sentences. To create text.

[00:15:18] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:18] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And so there is a progression. Nancy Hennessy has a wonderful graphic that she uses in her blueprint for comprehension. I know that's not the accurate title, but she shows that progression from word to phrase to clause to sentence to text.

And I think that that is the, um. That hopefully is a bit of a distinction between grammar and syntax.

[00:15:44] Susan Lambert: Yeah. I think that was beautifully described. It didn't confuse me at all. And it was a, uh, also a good reminder of the Nancy Hennessy Blueprint for Reading Comprehension, I think that is the title of that book. And not to call back to another podcast episode, but, uh, we did an episode with Nancy Hennessy on that book because that book is absolutely brilliant. So.

[00:16:06] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Yeah, it, it's the Reading Comprehension Blueprint.

[00:16:10] Susan Lambert: Thanks. We'll be crisp about that and link listeners in show notes to that because It is a great reminder of a section of that book that's helpful.

Okay. Um, but that was a really, really good definition and, and explanation. And I can't remember if I learned it from Nancy or someplace else, but also just thinking about the units of building blocks of words versus the units of building blocks of versus sentences, and then sentences are the building blocks for overall text.

It's just a really clean way to think about how all of these things interrelate with one another.

[00:16:44] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Yes, and I, and piggybacking on that point, I think I'm describing them, we're describing them as being sort of separate systems. But one of the other compelling parts and why I'm so excited that we're spending more time on word meaning or syntax as it contributes to word meaning is, we can't even decode accurately sometimes if we don't understand the context of that word, and we can get into it some examples of that later if you want.

[00:17:12] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:17:12] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: But I think that these are not separate systems. So yes, we talk about decoding as in the simple view, for example, word reading times this language comprehension of which syntax is a big part. But they really are bootstrapping each other to some extent.

[00:17:30] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's a good reminder. I wanted to ask you, so understanding syntax in oral communication is also different than syntactical in, in written. Can you talk a little bit about the differences there?

[00:17:45] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Yes, and I think the way that, um, actually there was a wonderful article in this, the recent issue of Perspectives by Maryellen MacDonald on the difference between oral language and book language, and that a misnomer is to think that when we are reading, we're just reading our oral language written down.

When we are talking with each other in normal circumstances, we use words differently, we don't talk in complex sentences, typically, we have a focal point that we're often sharing in common. So our oral language has very different structures to it.

When we start to put our language into print and put it on the page, we start doing things to add detail that's missing from the live interaction that oral language often gives us. And so we start adding appositives, you know, we explain who the person is and then we add more clauses that give more detail. And in that expansion of information, it gets more complicated.

So book language is not the same as oral language, or putting that a different way, reading is not just speaking written down.

[00:19:09] Susan Lambert: Yeah. It's a great reminder and also leads us into this next idea that I would love for you to unpack. Why is syntactical knowledge so helpful in the reading comprehension process? How does the reader sort of process then that language of the text?

[00:19:29] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: To answer that, I'd like to sidestep for one second.

[00:19:34] Susan Lambert: Please.

[00:19:34] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And talk about an approach to teaching syntax that I think gets to why it can be helpful.

[00:19:41] Susan Lambert: Great.

[00:19:41] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Typically, at least in my generation, we learned about syntax by talking about subjects and predicates and nouns and verbs and so on.

And those abstract terms didn't contribute very much to understanding the text or understanding even what I wanted to write. But what that experience for me with Tori Greene back many decades ago, was that she introduced an idea that I didn't, had never grasped before, which is, what those words are doing functionally. What are they doing?

And that what they are doing has come in my mind to be best addressed by a saying, what question does it answer? So nouns, for example, answer "who" or "what."

[00:20:33] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:34] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Verbs answer, "did what." When I want to add more information about the verb, which we know conventionally as an adverb, they're answering the questions, "where," "when," or "how."

So if I start to think about an individual word or a group of words by what questions they're answering, this unpacks our access to meaning in our text. So, getting back now to your question with that idea in mind, if I am reading until I answer, if you will, a question in my mind. I might be reading until I can answer who or what did it? And then did what? And then keep reading.

And that allows us to begin to parse the language in the sentence, in the text, into comprehensible chunks or what would be called a phrase, or we're looking for phrasal boundaries. There are several different ways that we talk about this, but the idea that we're moving away from reading word by word to reading in these meaningful groups is significant.

I think that one of the things that Julie Van Dyke mentioned in her session, and I've heard her speak several times, so it may have been in another situation, but what she was trying to inform us about in terms of the neuroscience of this syntactic processing is that we are wired to anticipate, based on predictable patterns that our brain is picking up about our language, what's coming next. And if I've read a "who" or "what," I'm anticipating a "did what." I mean, that's what our brain is looking for.

And so we want to leverage that natural tendency that we have to help us pay attention to what the words on the page are saying. A large part of what I'm describing is to really have children, even when they're reading decodable text, be thinking about what those words mean, not just to say them accurately and automatically.

[00:23:00] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:01] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: So this then, you know, that concept that Julie was describing to us about anticipating is not the same as like, let's read and guess what's coming next.

[00:23:12] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:23:12] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: We're still relying on accurate decoding of the words, but part of what's going to help us understand what these words are meaning is how these words group together.

So I think one of the biggest ways that syntactic knowledge can help us with our reading comprehension is through this parsing of the language, which is basically helping us with prosody. And we know that prosody will help us with our fluency with reading.

[00:23:43] Susan Lambert: I was just going to ask you about that because as you're describing that interaction between word level and phrase level, it had me thinking about, well, of course, this is going to be related to fluency. And we know sort of that reciprocal effect between the more fluent you are, the better you're going to comprehend and the better you comprehend, the more fluent you're going to be, and sort of this interplay between the two.

[00:24:08] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And another example, if I might...

[00:24:10] Susan Lambert: Please.

[00:24:10] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: ...is, one of my favorite things with kids when we were, when I was working with them in the schools was they would read and then they'd look up like a deer in the headlight. And when I would ask, "what was that about?" And they had no idea. It was like, you know, as I say, the deer in the headlights. And where I think that our knowledge of grammar and syntax, the grammatical building blocks, and the syntactic structures is if students are reading with a question always in their mind, who or what is this about?

[00:24:43] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:43] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Then what they're looking for when they're reading is not only a word that names a who or what. And it might be something simple like the dog, or it might be some a, a concept like photosynthesis, or it might be an abstract idea like love, it doesn't have to be only these very tangible things, but we're looking for those words that identify the subject, the topic.

And then what our language is, especially when we're writing, we're we—and this is again, a distinction between oral language and written language—we are not comfortable when we are writing, repeating things over and over so we don't say, "photosynthesis. Photosynthesis, photosynthesis, photosynthesis."

[00:25:28] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:28] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: We do a couple things that relate to cohesion, which is this linking across text. So not only do I have the who or what are we talking about, but I come up with a couple of ways to say it, but not say the same word over and over. And so I can either come up with a synonym for photosynthesis, which would be a plant processing mechanism, or I might refer to it with a pronoun, "it."

And so one of the other things that knowledge and ability to talk about what's happening this way in text is it helps us to know what we're paying attention to in terms of comprehension. A brilliant example or image of this is, um, in Charlie Haynes and Jennings book, From Talking to Writing, I think I have that title right, and they have what they call a cohesion circle.

It's a mnemonic that shows going from the original naming word to a, a substitute or a synonym to a pronoun to another synonym, and that he, they presented that for writing purposes. I think it's equally applicable for reading comprehension, that we can draw students' attention to how the writer connects from sentence to sentence. Because in fact, reading text is not just reading sentence by sentence, it's building this understanding across sentences. And this cohesion idea—which in the Coh-Metrix text analyzer tool is called referential cohesion—is what, it lets us answer the question at the end of reading like, what were we just reading about? And that is really what we want kids to be able to do or anybody to do.

[00:27:27] Susan Lambert: Right. Right. And if you lose that connection between all of the synonyms and pronoun, like your comprehension breaks, right? At that point, if you can't follow that sort of that circle.

[00:27:38] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And I think also that informs for teachers, or I would like to think it should, is when we're helping prepare students to read something that may be new in terms of a topic, is it probably should give us some insight into which words we should be introducing. Giving them a little running start before they get into the text, um, and tell them the term and maybe talk about some of the other ways we talk about that term before we get into it. I think that is a more useful way of selecting vocabulary for instruction than thinking, "is it an academic word or not?"

That's my bias.

[00:28:17] Susan Lambert: That makes sense. Well, you've been thinking about this for a while because back in 2013, you contributed an amazing article to Perspectives, called "Syntax: Somewhere Between Words and Text." I love the title, by the way. Love that title. Can you elaborate a little bit what you meant by that?

[00:28:40] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: I can, and I have to first of all comment on the title. At the time that I chose that title, I did that because I thought it was catchy. You know, everyone tells you you should have a catchy title when you write. But since then, and this is really bringing us back up to the influence that Julie Van Dyke has had in my life in the last year and a half or so, in fact, there's a lot of truth to this. Syntax is somewhere between the individual words and the text, that it's the processing piece that's going on there. So in answer to your question, what was I getting at? I was trying to understand and actually put into words for myself this process that Tori Greene had taught me.

[00:29:30] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:30] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Nowhere had I ever read any explanation of these questions that drive the parts that build the meaning. And so syntax is somewhere between the individual words and the text, the meaning of the text. I go back to that idea that the sentence is the unit of building of text. It's the unit of language that builds the text.

[00:30:03] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. You know what it reminds me of? I cannot remember who told me this or where I heard it, or where I was introduced to it, but somebody at one point said, "you know when you're an author," and so let's go over to the writing side of it.

[00:30:18] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:19] Susan Lambert: "When you're actually writing text, the places that you sweat are the sentence level." "How do I as a writer construct this sentence in such a way that I'm not just choosing the right words, but putting those words in in an appropriate order, or making the sentence either not too complex or simple enough to convey just the meaning that I want to convey." And so that makes sense to me that if writers sweat, if you will, over syntax...

[00:30:54] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: mm-hmm.

[00:30:54] Susan Lambert: ...that we should be helping our students pay attention to, or maybe we should start paying attention to as readers, how those sentences then were constructed so that we can then extract meaning. So sentences are really important.

[00:31:10] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: They are. And the more one understands the role that different words are playing and how they can be arranged helps you do, do better writing or look at what you've written and go, "Wait, that doesn't make as much sense as it might."

Um, so yes, I think it's, it is honestly an even more elegant system than the code. You know, I, I always thought it was pretty neat that there were 26 letters, you know, if you double that for capitals in lowercase, to represent 44 speech sounds, and look, we get all these words.

[00:31:44] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:31:45] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: I mean, the reality is we have eight grammatical building blocks to make up maybe four basic sentence structures.

That's it. But think of how that changes depending on the words we're using, um, and how we combine the sentences to the point you're making, which is to really communicate something that ultimately we want to communicate.

[00:32:11] Susan Lambert: Yeah. It's interesting that you mention, you know, the difference in, in quantity of, you know, phonemic parts versus the syntactical parts. But you know, last time when we talked with Dr. Van Dyke, she talked a lot about nervousness from teachers.

[00:32:26] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:26] Susan Lambert: Teachers are nervous about sentences and syntax and how to teach it and it feels so complicated. What do you think about that?

[00:32:36] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: I think they're reflecting that they don't know it. And probably they don't know it because they didn't learn it.

[00:32:41] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:32:41] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: They weren't taught it. We've gone through now several generations of students who aren't being taught about this. And certainly aren't being taught about it from what I would call a functional point of view.

[00:32:56] Susan Lambert: Mm mm-hmm.

[00:32:57] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: When we talk about subjects and predicates and, you know, even the conventional terms for the parts of speech, that doesn't really help you understand it.

And so I'm a much, much bigger advocate to help teachers get over their anxiety about this, to go at this from a, a functional level, which means, "let's go from those questions." And I don't know if this would be a good place to throw in an example of that.

[00:33:23] Susan Lambert: Please. Oh, please do.

[00:33:25] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: I use this example a lot when I talk about syntax, but I'm going to say a sentence and if those listeners could even write it down, if I wrote the sentence: Yesterday the cactus cast a shadow on the desert. Okay, so the first word is yesterday.

[00:33:43] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:43] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Now let's take that same sentence, but change it and say: At dusk, the cactus cast a shadow on the desert. And then we could also change it again and say: As the sunlight faded, the cactus cast a shadow on the desert.

Now, in each of those three sentences, yesterday; at dusk; and as the sunlight faded, those are answering the same question, aren't they? They're telling us what answer or what question rather.

[00:34:18] Susan Lambert: When.

[00:34:19] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: When.

[00:34:19] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:34:20] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Now if I can get that, if I am processing that this is "when" information in this sentence, then eventually I can say to you, "Well, you know the word yesterday, because it tells us when is an adverb; and at dusk because it tells us 'when' is an adverbial phrase; or as the sunlight faded is an adverbial clause because they're all doing what? They're all answering the question, when."

[00:34:51] Susan Lambert: When.

[00:34:52] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And I think that if teachers, and I do think teachers can get over some of their anxiety about this, if they can begin to think about this as a meaning-generating operation; a thinking process about the words on the page.

So I do think one part of the anxiety is that we just don't even know what this means. I think the second is, " Oh my gosh, when am I going to teach this? Something new? Something more. Yeah. I've already added phonemic awareness practice, and I'm learning how to do all these things with the words. When am I going to do this?"

And I think that's a legitimate question. I don't see this as a separate part of many lessons. This can be built. In to, um, let's talk about the words that we're decoding in terms of are they a name or, or an action? Are they a noun or a verb? In other words, we can begin to have kids thinking about the role that words are playing as they are decoding them. And we're actually building in some of that language processing that we need to get to with our students. So when do we teach it? We can build it into our phonics lessons. We can certainly do it when we're reading aloud to children. We can say, you know, "who was that about? Where did this happen?"

You know, the answers to those questions really force us to think about meaning. And the repetition of that then kind of goes back to an earlier point we were making, you get more and more fluent with thinking that way. You get more and more automatic thinking that way. So I think that anxiety is probably born out of a lack of understanding.

I actually think that, as teachers embrace this idea of syntax, they're going to have a lot of fun with it because it's way more fun to talk about the meanings of words than, than to just decode them, honestly.

[00:36:55] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.

[00:36:57] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Yeah.

[00:36:58] Susan Lambert: I'm just putting myself in the place of a teacher right now.

[00:37:00] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:37:01] Susan Lambert: And thinking, "Okay, if Susan went back in the classroom to try to integrate this into something I'm teaching already, is there a checklist of ways that I could do this?" Is there a scope and sequence that would be appropriate to teach it? It gives me a little bit of anxiety thinking about, oh, just incorporate it into what you're doing. Is there ways that teachers can learn how to do that?

[00:37:31] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Definitely. And I think that in contrast to the phonics scope and sequence, which is somewhat in an ordered fashion, but once we get through it, we have, we're done with it, and then we just, quote, "just keep applying it." I think what makes. The syntactic side of this seem more challenging is it isn't a constrained skill, it, it, it's iterative, it keeps expanding. So the short answer to this is I would encourage teachers to start teaching this by thinking about the most essential building block. To build a sentence, I need two parts; I need a "who" or "what," and I need a "did what." Or I need a noun and I need a verb.

[00:38:16] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:17] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: We're not going to, right now, parse out the difference between action verbs and linking verbs. We just need those two parts.

[00:38:24] Susan Lambert: Two. Yep.

[00:38:25] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: So no matter what I'm doing, no matter whether I'm reading to kids or they're reading something themselves— and now I'm really talking about this from a reading point of view, not a writing point of view.

[00:38:37] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:38:38] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: We can always be pulling out of the text, the "who" and the "did whats." Let's make a list of the people or places and things that we, we just read about or you read about or heard about, and then let's list some actions. And now once we do that. We can build some sentences. Now, let's put those together and review what we read or listened to by building a sentence.

And it's really as simple as that. If we are aware that we need to have kids paying attention to and learning about these building blocks, and that these building blocks can be put together to create a sentence, then they're on their way to learning about syntax.

[00:39:24] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:25] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Eventually, one of the techniques that's very helpful and has evidence of effectiveness is working on sentence combining.

So once I've written: The dog ran. The cat ran. Could I put those together by combining the, the subject parts?

[00:39:45] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:39:45] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: But first I have to understand what the subject is. Combining sentences without knowing how to talk about the parts.

[00:39:51] Susan Lambert: Oh, that makes sense.

[00:39:52] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: You can't do it. So now I could say, "oh, the cat and the dog ran." And I'm, I'm using a very simple sentence just for the sake of holding it in our heads as we're talking here. So I think that the scope and sequence can start by going to the, the basic building blocks to build a sentence, and then the next step is expanding the sentence. And sentence expansion is really, again, another elegant part. We can expand the action by answering three questions: where, when and how.

And it could be with a single word as we demonstrated, or it could be with a phrase or it could be with a clause.

[00:40:31] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:40:31] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And whether kids use a word, phrase, or clause is not the critical part, but that they're answering the question with accurate information that conveys meaning. And then we can do the same thing on the subject side.

We can expand, tell more. As Margie and I use that language in our Syntax Knowledge to Practice books, tell us more about the namer. And so we can do that by saying how many, what kind, which one? Those are the questions we ask to expand the subject or the, the namer or the noun. So if we keep using this over and over again, we can help children to organize their language to draw upon their language. One of the activities that I think can be fun, even in like the Mac and Tab books that are one of the early decodables. Now I'm really dating myself, I'm sure, because there are so many more wonderful decodable books. But you know: Mac sat. Okay, where did he sit? Okay. I might say, on the mat. You might say, "in the grass."

[00:41:39] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:41:39] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Someone else might say, "on my lap." And that idea that we could each be adding information, but it still is meaningful. And it's a meaningful sentence is part of this fluency that we want to get at, even with oral language.

[00:41:56] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And that's a great reminder of ways that we can sort of combine. I love your example of using decodable text.

[00:42:03] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:04] Susan Lambert: And then orally building on that sentence from the decodable, you know, to start to see how a sentence expansion might work, right? In the oral environment before we sort of look at it in the, in the written word.

[00:42:16] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Right. I have a personal Isabelle Liberman story that I can share here about just that very point. And that is, as I said, I was in her master's program and part of the program was doing student teaching and part of that was that she came to observe— you know, heart stopping moments for, you know, for sure. But I was working with a little girl who was reading Mac and Tab. And, and my goal was that she read the words accurately and she did.

But before I turned the page and we went on to the next page to read the words accurately, I said to this little girl, "Who did something there? And point to the word." So she did. I said, "And what did he do?" And she pointed to the word. "Where did he do it?" And she then read the words that answered that question.

And in that process I was checking to see, was this making any sense to her? So lesson ended, child left, and now Dr. Liberman is talking to me about this.

[00:43:19] Susan Lambert: Yikes!

[00:43:19] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And she said, "That was a really good lesson. And what made you ask her those questions?" And I don't, honestly, I don't know what made me ask her those questions, except that it struck me that I wanted to know, did this make any sense to her?

[00:43:36] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:43:37] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: What was she taking away from the meaning of those words on the page? And that on the mat, which is where he was sitting, it was working together.

[00:43:46] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Yeah. A unit. Yep.

[00:43:47] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And this leads to, um, my hair is on fire about something that we do that I think is not good instructional practice, which is to teach a lot of the little connective words like prepositions, conjunctions, in isolation, because in fact, those little connecting words are meaningless in the absence of other words.

[00:44:13] Susan Lambert: Mm. Right.

[00:44:13] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: So I would advocate teaching those on flashcards to read them accurately from the high-frequency list is not a particularly good use of time. But teaching them as part of phrases is way more useful.

[00:44:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned your book. What was the title of it again?

[00:44:31] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Syntax Knowledge to Practice.

[00:44:33] Susan Lambert: We will link listeners in the show notes to that because it is, it's on my shelf downstairs. I'll tell you what, it's in my resource library. It's fantastic.

[00:44:41] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Ah, thank you.

[00:44:42] Susan Lambert: When we were talking about like, what does a teacher do, it's a really great resource to help to understand ways that you can leverage the instruction you're already delivering to extend it a tiny bit to help with this idea of syntax.

[00:44:57] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Well, and, and when Margie and I wrote the whole series, we were trying to write it as if you will, program agnostic, meaning, you don't have to go buy another curriculum necessarily to add this in.

And it's why I use the example of, you can read something and pull out the naming words and the nouns and then pull out verbs and then build some sentences. And you don't need a sentence-building program. You have one. Um, you can just quote, unquote, "just use the words that are in the text."

[00:45:33] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah. It's exciting.

And I also want to go back to something you said earlier, that it's, it's much more engaging for students to talk about the things that the sentences represent by asking those kind of questions than it is to over, I don't want to say overfocus, but overfocus on the decoding part. That's important too, but it's, it's engaging, like these activities are really engaging for kids.

[00:45:58] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Right. And I think the other part of this that becomes really fascinating and you know, again, depending on whether we have time for another example, but I think that a lot of the words in our language have multiple meanings. And this is where that idea lines up with some of what Julie Van Dyke is telling us, that when we are reading, we read and then when we get to the next word, we actually adjust what we think about the word that came before. So do we have time for another example?

[00:46:36] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Oh please. Always time for more examples.

[00:46:39] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Okay. Well, I wrote a sentence here that I want to do in chunks and, and illustrate this point because, again, it becomes kind of fun to think about, "oh, I was going down the a rabbit hole of meaning here until I got to the next part."

So the sentence starts: The boy.

[00:46:58] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:46:58] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Okay. Okay. So the boy, we know, that's what we're talking about. That's the who or what our sentence is about. And then: in the cast. In the cast, now that's telling me something about the boy.

[00:47:13] Susan Lambert: The boy in the cast. Okay.

[00:47:16] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: So now what are you picturing? What are you conjuring up? Just based on that much text.

[00:47:21] Susan Lambert: I've got two things in my head, right?

[00:47:23] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Okay, good.

[00:47:24] Susan Lambert: So I have a boy with a broken leg in a cast.

[00:47:27] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:27] Susan Lambert: And I also have a theater production, right? So the boy is the leading. Yeah, the lead in this, in this play.

[00:47:36] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Oh man, you are good. You're way advanced, Susan, I must say. But, so, but let's go with that because that's exactly what should happen is like I, how would I know which cast you're talking about here?

So: was excited. Now that's my "did what," the action was excited.

[00:47:54] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:47:54] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Okay. Well now that I have "was excited," which of your meanings that came to mind makes more sense?

[00:48:02] Susan Lambert: Well, probably the one in the theater, unless you have a really dramatic kid who's like, "I'm really excited because all these kids are signing my cast."

[00:48:11] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Well, there you go.

[00:48:11] Susan Lambert: Right?

[00:48:11] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Yeah. I love your scenarios. This is brilliant. Okay, so now we have: The boy in the cast was excited, and let me just wrap up this sentence, to get the lead role in the play.

[00:48:24] Susan Lambert: Did I, and I had him as the lead role. But we didn't even talk about this ahead of time, did we? Just for our listeners, this was not a setup.

[00:48:32] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: This was totally, that's why my jaw dropped when you said that, because I'm thinking, "Did she see my paper?" Um, but, but what was going on here is, is exactly the point. And what Julie is telling us is that the way the brain and the neuroscience is demonstrating it, is it, it does go back and make corrections on what we are understanding. So this idea that we should never go back and reread, we should never, that it's, it's just an additive process is wrong.

[00:49:03] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:49:03] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And so if I go back and "let's, let's read that again and see what makes sense now that we know the rest of the sentence," is a very important skill. That we are correcting our understanding of the meaning. And cast is a little decodable word we do very early in a scope and sequence.

[00:49:22] Susan Lambert: Right, yeah.

[00:49:23] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: There are any number of words from, you know, "bat" and "bug" and you know, just you name it, that this is the case, that we have multiple meanings and we need to embrace the fact that the context of a sentence is what is going to help us know which meaning we are intending. And we also know from increasing science that, and research that's going on, that by knowing the meaning of the words or having them in our listening lexicon, which speaks to reading to kids and talking with them about the meaning of words, that actually improves the speed with which they decode the word and the accuracy of that.

So these are not separate train tracks, you know, going in differing directions. These are really train tracks that are going with the same goal. And we need to work on embracing that, I think.

[00:50:21] Susan Lambert: Yeah, I think so too. And you know, the more that I learn about syntax, the more that I'm reflective about it as I read myself. And I found myself bringing into my, you know, personal reading for enjoyment and entertainment, these ideas of, "wow, that was really important for me to understand that sentence." I've now become a little reflective, and this is awful, but you'd be so proud of me. I've become a little reflective about, why did that sentence slow me down or trip me up? And you know, this sort of, this meta awareness that I have about syntactical knowledge in ways that I never had.

[00:51:00] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Oh, that sounds sad.

Well, no. Well, it doesn't sound sad to me because I do the same thing. So if it's pitiful, we're both pitiful.

[00:51:09] Susan Lambert: We're in there together.

[00:51:10] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: We're in there together. But no, I agree. And I, it reminds me, back in my music days, now going back to full circle, people would say, "Oh, you know, you shouldn't learn the theory of music because it kind of destroys the creative communication, all of that."

I found it to be just the opposite. The more you understood the theory of and what was going on, the better it was. So I think I feel the same way about this. The important part, which you made reference to with Julie saying teachers are anxious is, it's hard to get excited about this when you don't understand it.

So I think our goal, our job now is to help raise awareness that this is important, and I want to make two more important connections on this. One is really being championed by Tiffany Hogan about how many kids have DLD, developmental language disorders, and that it's the same number as with dyslexia.

Therefore, we have a lot of kids where we need to help them understand how the language is working, just as we have the same number of kids who really need more help understanding how we decode the words. So I, I think it's important that we realize, by spending more time instructing and things syntactical, that we are probably going to reach more of our students. And then the other related track is the multi-language learners. Kids who are coming to us with a, a first language other than English, are coming to us with a syntactic structure of their first language.

[00:52:51] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:52:52] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And what we have to appreciate is part of their learning is understanding what's different. It's not that their syntactic knowledge is wrong, but that it's different. Now I heard you mentioning in one of the podcasts that you're learning Spanish.

[00:53:10] Susan Lambert: I Am.

[00:53:11] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And that you know the word order is different.

[00:53:16] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:53:16] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: You know, in English we have subject, verb, object. Okay? And another language is subject, object, verb. That's not wrong, it's just different.

[00:53:25] Susan Lambert: Different, yeah.

[00:53:26] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: But in trying to understand the language and to produce it, we have to help kids understand that what's different here is that order.

[00:53:35] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:53:35] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: So there are just so many reasons why pivoting to syntax at this point, or at least including it, is really timely and important.

[00:53:47] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

Well if listeners leave this episode not getting excited about syntax, we didn't do our job. Because, um, this has been a very exciting conversation and so fun to talk about it. I wonder, in closing, if there's anything else that you'd like to share, anything we didn't get to, anything top of mind for you?

[00:54:10] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: I think, I think just a couple things. Maybe they're more summary than, than new.

[00:54:16] Susan Lambert: Sure.

[00:54:16] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: One is function first, label later. I think that we'll get a lot more accomplished by helping kids understand their thinking and answering questions about what they're reading word by word, phrase by phrase. I also think that syntax isn't just for writing anymore. I think we're really...

[00:54:38] Susan Lambert: That's a great tagline.

[00:54:39] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: ...really want to see its value in terms of reading comprehension. And I would also say syntax isn't just for older kids anymore.

[00:54:49] Susan Lambert: Right, right.

[00:54:49] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Syntax is really something that we can start promoting, developing, encouraging, embracing, from the beginning. And we should.

And if we are—and I know we are concerned as a country at our performance, by the time children get to third grade—think about what we're testing by third grade. We are not testing decoding.

[00:55:15] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:55:15] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: We are testing comprehension.

[00:55:17] Susan Lambert: That's right.

[00:55:18] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: And it does not surprise me one bit that with such a heavy emphasis on decoding in the primary grades, that kids are not equipped to deal with comprehension when they get to third grade and beyond. So if we hope to correct that problem, and I hope we are interested in doing that, we've got to start talking syntax sooner.

[00:55:43] Susan Lambert: So great. Well, it's been a pleasure, Nancy, to have you on, and for our listeners, we'll link you to resources to make sure that you can follow up and learn even more.

But thank you again for joining us and giving your expertise about syntax. Most importantly, thank you for the work you've been doing on syntax for many years until it became popular. So thank you again for joining us.

[00:56:09] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Thank you for having me.

[00:56:12] Susan Lambert: That was Nancy Chapel Eberhardt, an educational consultant with extensive experience as a resource teacher, special education administrator, and professional development provider.

She is currently a consultant with 95 Percent Group and the Reading Universe Taxonomy Project. She serves as co-editor-in-chief for IDA's Perspectives on Language and Literacy. We have links to many of the articles and podcast episodes we discussed right in the show notes.

Next time I'll be joined by Dr. Phil Capin, author of a fascinating meta-analysis that explored gaps between recommended practice and what's really happening in classrooms. He'll share some specific findings related to developing students' comprehension.

[00:56:59] Phil Capin: I do check for literal understanding. I mean, I think students need to have that right? And I actually think that practice of retrieving that knowledge is important, right?

[00:57:08] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:08] Phil Capin: That's based in, in learning science. But it can't just end there.

[00:57:11] Susan Lambert: That's next time.

Also, one exciting note, Margaret Rosson, who Nancy Chapel Everhart referenced a few times, will be the subject of an upcoming episode in the new year. Stay tuned for more on that. Meanwhile, on the latest episode of The Beyond My Years podcast, leading math thinker, Fawn Nguyen shared some tips for educators for the new year.

[00:57:35] Fawn Nguyen: As we head into the second half of the school year, here's a gentle reminder. Do less, but do it better. Your students don't need more activities. They need more time to think, more time to talk, and more time to make sense of the math.

[00:57:48] Susan Lambert: Listen today, wherever you get your podcasts. We'll also have a link in the show notes. And don't forget to submit your own questions about comprehension at amplify.com/SORmailbag. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.