Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg) and Speaker 2 (Jane Farrall)
Episode 45: Comprehensive Literacy
[Introductory note]
Hey, it’s Meg. Did you know we have a free training on AAC, or Augmentative and Alternative Communication, at Learn, Play, Thrive? If you’re an OT or a speech language pathologist or a teacher working with autistic kids and you’ve never taken a course with Kate McLaughlin, you are going to want to check this out. The free masterclass is called ‘Moving Beyond Compliance-Based Strategies for AAC: Why and How to Support Autonomous Communication’. Autonomous communication means we support a child to say what they want to say, when they want to say it. And to tell you the truth, this is different from how therapists usually approach AAC learning. The training is about an hour long and it’s full of both big picture shifts and practical strategies that will truly change how you work with your emergent communicators, whether or not you’re the one teaching them to use a communication device. Check it out and start learning right away at learnplaythrive.com/aacmasterclass. That’s learnplaythrive.com/aacmasterclass.
[Introductory music]
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum Podcast. A place where we explore research, amplify autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life, and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Proctor from learnplaythrive.com.
Meg:
Before we get started, a quick note on language. On this podcast, you’ll hear me and many of my guests use identity-affirming language. That means we say, ‘autistic person’, rather than, ‘person with autism’. What we’re hearing from the majority of autistic adults is that autism is a part of their identity that they don’t need to be separated from. Autism is not a disease, it’s a different way of thinking and learning. Join me in embracing the word ‘autistic’ to help reduce the stigma.
Welcome to Episode 45 with Jane Farrall. Today’s episode is all about comprehensive literacy, which is deeply impactful to OT and speech therapy practice in ways that many of us don’t yet realize. So, this interview is honestly one I wish I had heard before I ever worked in the schools, before I wrote a writing goal, or picked up a piece of paper and told the child to make a mark. It helps us situate our literacy goals, be they writing or reading comprehension, into the larger context of literacy, which is what matters. It turns out our handwriting goals, our reading comprehension goals might not just be frustrating for us and our clients, they might actually be harming their overall literacy development. So, let me tell you about today’s guest.
Jane Farrall is a speech pathologist and a special educator who’s passionate about literacy, AAC, and assistive technology. She’s worked in the Disability and Assistive Technology field for 30 years. She currently works as an independent consultant running workshops in Australia and internationally, and consulting with schools around Australia. Her consultancy work focuses around implementing AAC and comprehensive literacy for all students. She shares so many transformative resources on her blog, her two websites through her online continuing education trainings. You can read more at janefarrall — that’s F-A-R-R-A-L-L — .com, and find literacy resources at comprehensiveliteracy.com. I am so excited to share this interview with you. Here it is.
Hi, Jane! Welcome to the podcast.
Jane:
Thank you. It’s lovely to be here, Meg.
Meg:
I’m so glad to have you here from halfway across the world.
Jane:
[Laughs]
Meg:
You know, you said, “Good morning,” and I said, “Good afternoon,” and here we are.
Jane:
And I’m complaining about how hot it is, and you’re probably in the cold.
Meg:
I bit my tongue when you said you’re hot. That sounds kind of nice to me right now. And, you know, North Carolina, COVID winter. [Laughs] I want to dive right in. You and I were talking a little bit before we started recording about how much we OTs and SLPs in the United States need this content that you have to share, and I am really excited to start that conversation today. And I want to jump right in to comprehensive literacy. Can you orient us to that concept and what it means for reading and writing?
Jane:
Okay. So, comprehensive literacy is sometimes also called balanced literacy, although that’s not always a friendly term because there are some programs that say they are balanced literacy. But comprehensive or balanced literacy comes from the idea that in every classroom, or even for every student, there are a range of skills that they need to learn. So, I guess it’s very different to when a school says, “We’re going to use a phonics approach,” or, “We’re going to use a language approach.” It actually recognizes that all kids need both. And to read and write with comprehension, which is the outcome that we want, we need to make sure that we are tackling all of the different areas of literacy and language development that every student needs.
Meg:
Can you just define for me real quick what a phonics approach is and what a language approach is?
Jane:
Okay, so, I guess a phonics approach would be one that approaches literacy from a concept of spelling. So, America went through a phonics approach. I think you’ve now moved out of that. But the literacy field is, to me, like a pendulum. And it swings between the phonics approach is winning and the language approach is winning. And comprehensive literacy or balanced literacy really believes we just need both. And some of the biggest literature reviews that have been done around literacy, including your own National Reading Panel — which was published in 2000, so it’s getting old now — but it was the last major review that you guys had, I believe. They continually come back with there is no one approach. There’s no one size fits all. And for comprehensive literacy to occur, we need to teach everything. So, I guess if you think of a classroom, and there’s a group of kids when language is the thing that’s holding them back from reading with comprehension at one level higher, and for another group of kids, it’s decoding what’s holding them back from reading with comprehension at one level higher.
And there are different skills in there as well. Fluency might be an issue. If you pick a literacy approach that heavily targets fluency, for example — so, there was a literacy approach that was quite common here a while ago. I’ve been a speech pathologist for 31 years. So, when I first graduated in the early 90s, there was an approach here where kids listened to an audio recording of a book 10 times and then they had a go at reading it. And its sole focus was improving fluency. And it didn’t teach them the language or the decoding parts. You didn’t have a conversation about that book and what the meaning was, and you didn’t teach them how to tackle words that they didn’t just know. So, a comprehensive literacy approach is saying, we’re going to try and address all of those skills at the same time so that every student gets what they need.
I guess one of the things we see with boxed literacy, or some of those approaches that really address one area is that when a school introduces them, they have two or three years of progress because the kids who needed that skill finally get the instruction they need and they progress. And then things start to plateau. And another few years later, the school’s going, “Well, we need to change approach, because it’s not working any longer.” And it’s not that it’s not working, it’s that the other groups of kids didn’t get what they needed to help them move forward. Does that make sense?
Meg:
It does. It does. And it sounds like comprehensive literacy is sort of the answer to this trend to use prescriptive approaches or component-based approaches. And I’m sure this sounds a little bit vague, right. I know I haven’t worked in the schools in a few years, but I was definitely seeing sort of a phonics-based approach when I was there. And I don’t know if the school system I was in was behind the times, potentially, or tracking with the rest of the country. But I worked with a lot of kids who had no idea what was going on in their classes. So, like, how would that look different for those kids who are at a very different place than their peers in terms of readiness for reading and writing?
Jane:
Yeah, I guess some of that is probably about differentiation. You know, recognizing that some students need to be working at a completely different level. But in comprehensive literacy instruction, we differentiate depending on whether a student is what’s called ’emergent’ or ‘conventional’. If a student is emergent, they’re still learning the set of skills that they need to learn to move on to read and write with comprehension. And I guess for most of us, that’s the years before school. So, in the years before school, we learn the alphabet, you know, we’d come to school knowing most of the letters most of the time. And this list of skills, by the way, is from Professor Karen Erickson at the Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies, also in North Carolina. So, most kids come to school knowing most of the letters most of the time, and that’s a skill they pick up in their emergent literacy years. They come to school understanding that print is made up of letters and words. And they learn that through their scribbling, they learn that through all the books they have read to them. They come to school with a communication system, they know about language, they have learned some of the functions of print — that print has meaning and text is a code for speech.
And the fourth one is, do they engage with books in shared reading? So, shared reading is when you can have a chat about the book. So, I guess what I see as the differentiator there is engagement with books in shared reading, as opposed to students who may just pick up a book and read it from cover to cover and don’t understand that you can stop and have a conversation about that, and that there’s meaning, and that you can link it to your life, et cetera. So, they’re kind of the four skills that kids learn in their emergent literacy years. So, we have a whole heap of kids who are at school age who still need to learn those four skills. And so, we do emergent literacy intervention with them. And then, if students have learned those four skills, we go up to conventional literacy intervention. And then, we are teaching them sight words, yes, but also phonics. We’re teaching them comprehension really strategically, and comprehension that teaches them the skills they need for everyday life, which is, I have a question, arranged to extract the information to answer the question, and then I do what I need to do with it. We do writing daily at their writing level. And we do self-selected or independent writing where they build their fluency. So, we’re doing all of those different components.
Meg:
Yeah, I wonder if we’re often skipping the skills that an emergent reader needs and moving right towards what their peers are working on. I read something that you wrote, I think, or that you said on a podcast, about assessing where a child is in that. And I have a two and a four-year-old. And I took your suggestion, and I picked up a book. And I said, I think it’s, “Where’s the story? Show me where the story is.” And my four-year-old pointed to the words and said, “You’re reading these words, that’s the story.” And separately, I asked my two-year-old and she pointed to the pictures. And within about three weeks, she started pointing to the words and saying — I didn’t ever ask her again — she started saying like, “You know, Mommy, what does this say? Is this what you’re reading? Are you reading these words?” and I could identify that change happening. But I could also identify all the times that I’ve tried to help a child in a classroom with writing or with following along with what’s happening in their reading class, when they didn’t really have those foundational skills. So, it was — we weren’t working at the right level for them.
Jane:
And I think for autistic students, they often have splinter skills that are very confusing for us. So, I was at a new school this week. And I met a lot of students who had a lot of reading and writing behaviors, who could pick a book up and read it fluently from cover to cover, who didn’t know that print had meaning.
Meg:
That is so interesting. It runs parallel to AAC users who I just had an interview a couple of weeks ago with somebody who said, “I could talk very early on, but I couldn’t communicate until I had AAC.” It’s so similar to what you’re saying. Reading isn’t the same as making naming from what you’re reading.
Jane:
Yeah. Which is why I use the word comprehension all the time. Reading and writing with comprehension at one level higher, because it’s that comprehension. There’s a term called ‘hyperlexia’, and if you Google it, you’ll find that it’s commonly associated with autism. There’s a lot of people with autism with hyperlexia. And it literally means that you’re reading above your language level. But I think for some of the people I’ve worked with, it’s, yes, it’s because they’re missing those pieces. They’ve never learned that print has meaning. Because when they started to read, everyone celebrated that this individual who was struggling with a whole heap of other things could now read and forgot to do that check in that there was meaning behind what they were doing. So, sometimes we just need to join the pieces together.
Meg:
That makes a lot of sense with the real attunement to pattern recognition, and maybe that being such a strength for some kids. But we can’t really look outside of our own perspective that when we read the words, we make meaning from them, so we’re missing all the pieces. I want to talk about this as it applies to writing too. So, Janet Sturm and her colleagues developed the Developmental Writing Scale, which, in my experience, isn’t very familiar to a lot of therapists working on writing. Can you tell us about the Developmental Writing Scale?
Jane:
Yeah, so, it’s the first scale that goes from emergent writing through to conventional writing. In Australia, it goes through to a Grade Three level of conventional writing. And we have similar grade levels, so that would be similar for you. The scale is also the first scale that lists a column of accommodations for children who aren’t handwriting or for individuals who aren’t handwriting. And I guess that’s where it’s the first. It’s not the first scale to cover that age range or that skill range, but it’s the first scale with that extra column of accommodations. And for a lot of the people I work with, that’s an incredibly important column. Because previously, many of the other scales imply that to become better at writing, you also have to control handwriting. And that’s a furphy. I don’t know if you know furphy? That’s a —
Meg:
No.
Jane:
A myth. A myth.
Meg:
Okay. [Laughs] I’m gonna use that. That’s a furphy.
Jane:
Yeah. It’s a myth. You know, every day, what do you write with?
Meg:
My thumbs on my phone.
Jane:
Absolutely. If we think about writing in the current era, writing is about all sorts of writing tools. And I virtually never handwrite. I can travel or I work, I have a couple of pens in my handbag, the only — or purse, sorry — the only reason I pull a pen out is the occasional signature and to cross something off a piece of paper someone’s given me. Pretty much my whole life is digital. And I know I’m probably extreme with that, you know, not everybody’s as digital as I am. But I think all of us are doing digital writing every day now. We send text messages, social media, and the bottom line is keyboarding is actually the more important skill, a hundred percent, if you are a fluent keyboarder. And so, it’s taken writing away from the concept that writing is about handwriting, and recognizing that writing is about using a writing tool, whether that tool is a pen, a keyboard, or a pencil. And then, for the children I work with, it’s about recognizing that if we make writing about handwriting, their writing progress frequently stalls or is incredibly slow because having motor planning difficulties means that you are adding another component to writing that is making it really hard. Because writing is one of the hardest literacy things kids have to learn. They have to juggle so many different skills.
Meg:
I can imagine the feelings that a lot of OTs are feeling now because we get pigeonholed in the United States in the schools into being sort of the handwriting tutor so often. And I think, deep down, we know that this is often a really outdated barrier for these kids to actually be able to communicate in writing. It’s like if you told me I had to spell correctly, I don’t. I’m terrible at spelling. I’ll never be good at spelling, and I would just be stuck and not be able to write a blog post if I had to spell correctly. I don’t have to be able to spell correctly. Like, I can let technology correct all of that for me and it’s such an unnecessary barrier that we’re putting up at this point. But practice is really, really behind here.
Jane:
I would say that handwriting is — I wouldn’t say it’s really behind. I go into schools all the time where people still think handwriting is the most important tool. And I just have that discussion again and again. When the current range of students leave school, what will they write? And people will often say forms. Or do you know what? I don’t know what it’s like in the US but here in Australia, every Government form is now pretty much electronic. And if you can’t keyboard, you can’t fill out forms. If you can’t, you know, so, we just have that discussion. In our curriculum, our National Australian Curriculum, the terms used in writing are things like create a text, produce a text. That is very deliberate to remove the emphasis on handwriting. We used to have a guideline that students should be doing half-half handwriting and ICT writing. They’ve got rid of that guideline now and schools are really encouraged to just get kids creating texts with the easiest pencil or writing tool for them. That doesn’t mean everyone’s doing it big, but it’s right for us to have that guideline, because it gives us that strong reason for discussion.
Handwriting is a motor task. If motor tasks are difficult for a student, let’s give them an easier writing tool. Because as it is, every time we write, we deal with so many different things. Gretchen Hansen, who’s a fabulous OT in the US, has this lovely graphic of juggling as you write. And you juggle your concept of yourself as a writer. Having gone to a new school this week, I walked into classrooms where as soon as I mentioned writing, some kids said, “I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that,” or some of the kids with complex communication needs just got very heightened and angry. Their experiences with writing are very negative, often. And so, if you approach a task and you believe you can’t do it, it becomes self-actuating, often. And so, every time we write, if you think about Gretchen Hansen’s juggling analogy, one of the balls you’re juggling is your view of yourself as a writer. Because if you approach that believing you can’t do it, you’re going to drop that ball. And if you drop that one, that’s the hardest ball to drop. Then you’re also juggling language. You’re thinking, “What do I have to write next? What do I need to say?” You’re juggling, yes, spelling. You’re juggling, as we call them, the functions of print that kids develop quite early. One is that text is a code for speech, and the other is that print has meaning. That ball is a ball that some of our kids we work with haven’t yet got into play, because they’re too busy focusing on the one about spelling. So, there’s all these different rules you’ve got to juggle. And for some kids, if you add handwriting into that juggle, you’re putting a bowling ball in. And of course, they’re going to drop her, and then the whole thing just falls down.
Meg:
I really appreciate this framing of it. Because when we as therapists look at a situation and go, “Well. I mean, I guess maybe writing will be an important skill. I should keep working on it. Maybe I can help them learn it,” we’re missing that big picture of how does this play into their literacy journey? Because we have this, sometimes the smaller lens of, “Well, writing might be important,” but actually, literacy is important here and being able to produce — how did you say it, produce written language using whatever pencil works for them?
Jane:
Writing tool?
Meg:
Whatever writing tool works for them. And I think that lens can really guide us more effectively in our choices that we’re making. I love this language of ‘alternative pencils’ is something that I’ve seen you say and I hadn’t seen that before. Can you talk about what that means?
Jane:
So, ‘alternative pencils’ is a phrase that’s been around for a long time. So, as I said, I’ve been around for a long time too. And in the late — or mid to late 90s, I worked as an assistive technology assessor at a large therapy center. And I would get heaps of students coming through wanting technology. And we talked a lot about alternative pencils, and we absolutely said a keyboard is an alternative pencil. I don’t know where the phrase ‘alternative pencil’ developed. I have heard people say it comes from the Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies, but I’m not sure about that. But it’s certainly been around for most of my 30 odd years in this area. I really like it. So, I’m actually working on my own writing scale at the moment. And at the moment, its tentative title is the Alternative Pencil Writing Scale. Alternative pencils is a great phrase. I also, just use writing tools a lot. But alternative pencils really come from that recognition that a traditional pencil is not for everybody, and let’s think of an alternative. So, yeah, it’s a great phrase. I guess the thing is, since that phrase was developed, we have moved so much as a society that we all use alternative pencils every day. And so, I’m often just saying writing tools now. So, I just use them both interchangeably.
Meg:
And what are you hoping to accomplish with your writing scale that you’re working on?
Jane:
Okay, so, there are some scales out there that have really informed my writing practice. So, I guess, my journey, I started life as a speech language pathologist in the early 90s. I was working with students in schools, both in mainstream schools and in special schools. And my mother was a primary teacher. And I really noticed very quickly that what the students were getting was very different to what I saw in special schools, or even the students I was supporting in mainstream schools was very different to what I saw the mainstream students getting as literacy instruction. There’s a guy called Katims, he published a review in 2000 of literacy and special education, and he called it reductionist interventions. So, we were trying to reduce literacy to a series of tasks. And the problem is that literacy is a living, breathing thing and kids need experiences in real life literacy situations to learn how it all works. It’s really hard to take it out and make it a series of tasks, just like communication. Really hard. So, basically, we didn’t do a good job by making it reductionist. And I kept asking the teachers I was working with what more could we do for the kids to help them learn to be literate, and it was mostly children with cerebral palsy that I was working with. And I just kept getting told that because they didn’t speak, they couldn’t learn to read and write. And that was really confusing for me, because at the same time, I was going to our national AAC conferences and there were all these adults who couldn’t speak who could read and write.
Meg:
Something about presuming competence here, right.
Jane:
Absolutely. So, I went back and studied teaching, and I didn’t learn a lot about teaching literacy in my teaching degree, basically. And in 2000, I went to Minnesota and I learned from Professors Karen Erickson, and David Koppenhaver, who’ve written the seminal text on comprehensive literacy instruction for the kids we work with. They published a new version of it in 2019, if anyone’s interested; it’s brilliant. And I learned so much from them. I learned about balanced literacy, comprehensive literacy, I learned about understanding that every kid needed to be taught where they were at. You know, that course that week was mind blowing. And at that point, I was working as a teacher in a mainstream school. I had mostly students who were struggling readers and writers in my classroom. And I went back home, and I applied what I had learned, and oh, my goodness, the progress. But a number of the kids in my classroom couldn’t use a pen or a pencil. And I decided writing was too hard, and I didn’t do it to start with. I just worked on the reading side. There’s a lovely quote, I forgot the name of the lady who said it, it says, “Reading is like breathing in, and writing is like breathing out.” And I completely believe that. The kids’ reading development stalled because they weren’t practicing writing, and I had to figure out writing.
And at that point, yeah, alternative pencils were expensive, and they were hard to come by, and classrooms still didn’t necessarily here have computers in them. And, you know, or there was one computer for the whole classroom. And of course, we were well away from iPads and stuff. So, yeah, that writing journey then became a real passion for me. And I guess it’s odd to have someone with my background who’s so passionate about writing, but with my scale, I want to encapsulate all those years of helping people go from not even knowing they’re a writer, to being able to write multiple paragraphs fluently. And I really want to break it down. There’s a small scale from the Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies called Stages of Flip Chart Writing. And flip charts are one of the alternative pencils that we often use, developed by the Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies and Gretchen Hansen. Those Stages of Flip Chart Writing, we see them come up again and again, but they all fall under one block on most writing scales.
And what I want to do with my scale is separate some of those skills into smaller pieces so that we can track our students’ development. I guess, for example, in the Developmental Writing Scale, which I love, that level one, the first thing kids — or the first thing kids are developing a range of skills at level one. At level one, they’re learning they’re a writer. At level one, they’re learning that print has meaning and that text is a code for speech. And then, they’re starting to learn that we use letters for writing. And once they understand that writing is different to pictures, they go up to level two. That is a huge number of skills for one level. And so, at some of the schools I work with, we can have kids who are stuck at level one for two or three years. With my scale and breaking those skills down, I’ve got years of writing moderation with multiple, multiple schools and multiple students; I’m working with some of those schools and I’ve had great support from Karen Erickson as well to break those skills down into smaller pieces so that the scale is going to be a lot bigger, but we’re going to be able to measure the smaller parts of progress or the smaller pieces of progress.
Meg:
That is really exciting and sounds so useful. I’m thinking about OTs, again, who are really thrown into teaching handwriting with no context without any experience with comprehensive literacy, with assessing where a child is in that process, no access or knowledge of developmental writing scales or other skills. And I actually see these conversations happen from sort of insightful, intuitive therapists every so often in my Facebook group, where they say, “I’m really tired of trying to teach pre-writing lines to my autistic clients, because I don’t think they’re meaningful to them and they’re not ready to write letters yet. And so, I don’t know what to do.” How could this sort of writing scale guide us in those moments?
Jane:
So, if you think about a typical child’s writing development, So, some of the scales that are out there are called the Earliest Stage of Writing because it’s a stage where kids make marks on paper. So, 10 months old, 12 months, or 15 months old, they make marks on paper, and adults around them attribute meaning to those marks. And I call them interchangeably writing and drawing. So, you might be hanging out with a 12-month-old, and they’re making marks on paper, and you say to them, “Are you drawing a picture of our dog? Wow!” and then you might say, “Oh, let’s write, ‘Woof, woof, woof'”, and the kid makes a few more marks, and, “Oh, you wrote ‘Woof’! Oh, you’re so clever.” At that point, we’re teaching them that very first skill — you’re a writer. I work with So, many kids who don’t even know that but who can have a go at producing lashes. We need to go right back, we let them scribble with a writing tool. And we tell them we attribute meaning to their writing if they need us to. If they don’t yet understand that print has meaning and that text is a code for speech, then we need to teach them that by attributing meaning to their writing.
And because pens and pencils are a challenge for so many of the kids I work with, I get them to scribble with the wonderful flip charts. They’re on the Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies website for download or they’re on my website for download, you can print them off and use them. They’re the alphabet arranged with a few letters per page, and we scribble. So, again, this week just gone, I worked with a few students who didn’t yet know they were writers, some of whom when you tried to put a pen or a pencil in their hand, were not very happy that you were doing that. And so, teachers had said to me, “I’ve been trying that and it’s not working. I don’t know how we’re gonna go with writing.” So, with one student, I put letters from a Alphabet Puzzle into a bag. And the student was playing with some sensory toys, and I put the letters in the mix. And any letter that he paused and looked at for longer — and he did it beautifully with three letters — I wrote them down and I said, “Oh, you’ve chosen an A to write about your toys!” Next letter he really looked at was a Q. I said, “Oh, you’ve chosen a Q to write about playing with your toys.” And we’re literally writing about a thing he’s just doing.
And then he tossed some letters aside, and he played with some other toys and he threw another couple of letters. And I forget the third letter he chose. But he was getting quite heightened, because it was nearly lunchtime and he really wanted his lunch. And so, in the end, I attributed meaning to the A and the Q. And I said, “I think you’re saying you want this to be quick. You want your lunch. That’s why you chose the Q for quick.” So, just the same as the parent says, “Oh, you’ve written the ‘Woof’!” I’m going with, “Oh, you’re telling us you want this to be quick.” Yeah, he was done playing with those toys, he wanted to move on to lunch. So, let’s attribute the meaning to it. It wasn’t his intention; it wasn’t his meaning. But by attributing meaning, I’m starting to teach him first and most important that he’s a writer and secondly, that print has meaning.
Meg:
I love that. That feels so much better in my core, so much more meaningful, and more useful use of my time and this child’s time, than drilling horizontal and vertical lines on paper to a child to making meaning from that.
Jane:
And the reason I went with — I call it a sensory pencil. So, a pencil where kids can really get their hands in and manipulate it with him, was because he doesn’t sit at a table at this stage, he really only engages with stuff that he gets sensory feedback from. My gut was that if I put one more traditional flip chart in front of him — which is where I would start with a lot of kids, that would be my preference — was that we would get nothing except push away. And while I can take that push away as a letter choice, you could be, “Oh, you touched the P as you pushed it away,” I decided I’d go in with a pencil that I felt was going to better suit his needs. For most kids, I would start with a flip chart. And so, there were other kids at the same school where yeah, I pulled out a flip chart and we had a good chat. And I’d say, “Oh, the book we just read,” or, you know, “This photo of you,” some of the teachers had photos of the kids ready for them to write about, “Oh, let’s have a think about this.” Some of the students in the school had access to AAC already. Some of them were verbal, some of them were not yet communicating in a formal way with AAC or speech. And so, then my strategies vary depending on those factors.
And some of the kids knew they were writers, and some of them knew print has meaning. I met several kids who were already writing sentences. So, then we’re talking about how to go to the next level. So, there were two students I met who were writing sentences, but they’re what I call sentences as lists. So, we read a book about shapes and then I asked them if they could write one good sentence about the book. And two of the students in the group wrote, “We read a book about shapes. It had a rectangle and square and hexagon and —” So, yeah, and I’d modelled a sentence first. And my sentence was, “We read a book about shapes,” and I rubbed it off, but that’s how they started. So, in many ways, they were just replicating what I’d already written and then they wrote a list. Those students need to learn that when we write, we can cover factors such as who, what, when, where, and why. I read the book, why did we read it? When did we read it if that was important? Where did we read it? You know, so they need to learn to write more in a way that actually imparts information. So, a good writing scale, and there are a number of them out there, there’s even several called the Developmental Writing Scale. So, the one that we use by Janet Sturm and colleagues is not the only one called the Developmental Writing Scale. A good writing scale helps us pinpoint where every student is at and then the skills that they need to go to the next level. And that’s where we teach.
Meg:
I love that. And I want to point out that you are saying we’re teaching the skills that they need. So, we’re not saying there’s never a role for teaching an efficient and useful way to write letters, right.
Jane:
Absolutely.
Meg:
There is a place for that. We just want to be thoughtful about where that fits in the child’s literacy journey. Is that right?
Jane:
Absolutely. Yeah. And so, if they don’t even know they’re a writer, we’re going back. We’re just letting them have fun scribbling with a suitable writing tool, and we’re teaching them they’re a writer, and we’re attributing meaning and teaching them that print has meaning. And then once they know they were a writer, and they know the difference between writing and drawing, and they know print has meaning, we’re looking at what’s the next developmental stage. So, then, kids are scribbling with letters. Well, the kids that we work with are already scribbling with letters because of the writing tools we’re using. So, then, the next level is letters and spaces. So, kids frequently move into a stage with their letter scribbling, and you might have seen this with your four-year-old daughter, where there’s now strings of letters with gaps.
Meg:
No, not yet.
Jane:
Not yet? It’s a four- to five-year-old thing that happens. So, you might see at some point.
Meg:
My almost five-year-old will do that with the alternative pencil of the keyboard for sure, but not writing on paper.
Jane:
Yeah, okay. Yep. So, yeah, so then kids seem to develop an understanding, not just that we write with letters, but that we write with letters and gaps, and that starts to come across in their writing. And then the next thing that often comes is a sight word that’s of high interest to them, or that has occurred frequently in their environment. So, it might be a word like ‘but’. For a lot of the kids I work with, it’s a word like ‘motorbikes’ or ‘dinosaurs’. And it’s not spelt perfectly, but it’s recognizable, because now they’ve learned that we’re not just write with letters, that that there’s specific letters we need to use. So, it’s constantly teaching to the next skill level.
Meg:
I love this. And I see the parallels between how you’re describing emergent literacy and how we talk about folks who are learning AAC use, that they’re babbling on their device, right? It’s not — like people say, “Oh, they’ll just play with it. You can’t give them technology,” as if children aren’t playing with language when they’re first learning to make sounds, and we attribute meaning and it becomes meaningful. It’s the same process. Do you have an age range — I know this is a burning question on people’s minds — for introducing technology to folks who aren’t AAC users? We’ve already talked to some podcasts about two, three-year-olds using robust technological AAC. But what about for writing?
Jane:
Oh, no, I don’t think, yeah, there’s no. And at the other end, I’ve in the past had jobs where I see all ages, literally through to 60, 70 years of age. And we have started with emergent literacy with people in their 20s and had fabulous success. I will always remember I started working with a guy when he was 21. And I wasn’t still working with him when he was 30. But when he became conventional at 30 and he contacted me on Facebook with a message and it wasn’t brilliantly spelled, but I could understand it.
Meg:
Oh, wonderful.
Jane:
And how exciting was that?
Meg:
So, are you introducing technology-based alternative pencils from a pretty young age for some kids?
Jane:
It honestly depends on the student. Yeah. It’s thinking about what they need. And the low-tech flip charts, it’s a bit like low-tech AAC. I think everybody needs both low-tech and high-tech AAC. I think everybody needs low-tech and high-tech writing solutions as well. Just as we, you know, I still travel with a pen. I think everybody — I use high-tech writing most of the time, but I still have my low-tech backup. I think it’s the same. So, yeah, but the flip charts, I have now made them up in some of the high-tech solutions. So, in product quite a while ago, I have the flip chart pages ready to go. I have them in clicker, you know, yeah. It’s figuring out the best solution for the situation and the student. And I guess it’s going back to your SETT Framework.
Meg:
That’s great. Yeah, I love that. What about speech language pathologists who are working on reading comprehension? How could the emergent literacy process better guide them in their work?
Jane:
All right. So, if you are working with a student who doesn’t yet understand print has meaning but they’re reading fluently, I would go back to shared reading, and have those rich interactions around a text. It’s really hard to do the construct of teaching someone to read comprehension to the next level when they don’t even get that print meaning. And so, going back and doing emergent reading, is that shared reading, is one of the best ways to teach that. So, instead of saying, “Right, you’re going to read this book, and from this book, you’re going to extract three facts,” or, “You’re going to read this book and you’re going to generate an alternative title for it,” which is our comprehension instruction stuff that we do. I’ve been in classrooms where a teacher has said to the whole class, “Okay, we’re going to read this book and I want you to come up with an alternative title,” and she’s covered the title with post it notes.
And then she holds up the book and on the front cover of the book is a dinosaur in a digger, digging a hole — construction work with a dinosaur. And she says to the class, “What do you think this book is going to be about?” and a student says, “Mario Kart,” if he doesn’t understand that you can get information from the pictures. She then uncovered the title and the title said ‘Dinosaur Digs’. So, the other kids guessed stuff that was much more on target, although some of them struggled with it as well. She then uncovered the title, and it said ‘Dinosaur Digs’, and she asked that student again. And he was dead set it was going to be about Mario Kart. So, if you don’t — and he, yeah, he could read the words ‘Dinosaur Digs’ like that. So, for him, rather than going with that construct of ‘You’re going to read a book and you’re going to extract X number of pieces of information’, let’s go back and read a book and talk about it. “Oh, look. I know you love Mario Kart. The dinosaurs are in digging machines. They’re driving like people doing Mario Kart. Look at the dinosaurs driving! Oh, I wonder what you’d like to drive?” Bring it back to meaning.
Meg:
I love this, Jane. And I hear in your example, using declarative language. You’re not asking this child a lot of questions. You’re making observations and wondering what he thinks.
Jane:
Yeah. So, we know that when people do that, they often use three parts. So, ‘Comment, Ask, Respond’ is an acronym that’s used quite frequently for shared reading. I have my own acronym, which is AIR. ‘Comment’ means you make a comment. So, “Oh!” And then ‘Ask’ is ask a question, and R is ‘Respond’. And if the child doesn’t respond, you model a response for them. I prefer to call it AIR. So, A is ‘Attention getter’. So, your comment is your attention getter. “Oh,” is my attention getter. Because for some of the kids I work with, I am active every minute I’m reading the book. I am putting on a big show. And my attention getter is bringing them to the book for that period of time, because many of the kids I work with do not attend for a whole book. So, I’m aiming to increase the period they attend and I’m using my attention getters to, “Oh, wow! Look at this!” And then I ‘Invite participation’ — “He’s in a digger! Would you like to be in a digger?” That’s my invite participation. And I prefer invite participation. I actually got that hint from Karen Erickson, too. It’s not about asking a question. As soon as we call it asking a question, some people are like, “What’s this called? What’s that?”
Meg:
Yeah, it’s a quiz.
Jane:
Yeah, it’s literally inviting participation. We’re going to have an exchange about this book. And then the ‘Response’ — if the child doesn’t give us the response, we model a response. Parents do this with babies at two months of age. So, they invite that participation. It’s often with a question that can have a like or a dislike, or a yes or a no response. And then that baby maybe smiles. And maybe that was a fluke, because they just burped. Let’s face it, at two months of age, it was a burp. Does the parent call it a burp? No, the parent goes, “You’re smiling! You’re saying, yes, you like diggers!” Yeah, so, attributing meaning all the way and we are teaching that baby at that point, or the person that we’re working with who doesn’t yet understand print has meaning, so many things in that shared reading framework. We’re teaching them that there’s parts to an interaction that when I invite participation, you can give me something and you can be successful in this. Yeah, we’re teaching them so many things.
Meg:
This is lovely and so simple too. Tie this in for me — why do these types of shifts that we’re talking about, why does this matter in the lives of our clients?
Jane:
So, we know, I guess, there’s the overall thing of literacy is the most important life skill. And communication is a huge part of literacy. So, there’s that. That’s why that’s important. But it’s also because we’re teaching literacy in a way where people can learn it. We’re teaching it where they’re at, not where we think they should be at. And we’re recognizing that literacy is a complicated construct that needs to happen in real life situations for it to be learned properly. To learn what you do with print, you need to see print in action. To learn why print matters, you need to see print in action. To learn that we can have a conversation about a book, you need to have repeated conversations about books. And at the same time, you need a good AAC system and to be developing language so you can have those conversations. It all just ties in together. And literacy, as Katims found in his review, isn’t something we can reduce to skills. It’s not, “You now sit at this table, and for 10 minutes you trace letters.” I have met so many people — my favorite example was a kid called Sam I met about 12 years ago. He had spent six years learning to trace his name. He still couldn’t write it independently. Independently, he could write the S and the A; he still hadn’t mastered the M.
Meg:
What a use of the minutes of his life.
Jane:
I know. So, he had been tracing that repeatedly every day. And his teacher and I, when he was in his first year at a new school, we decided that instead of doing that, he would sign in every day. We didn’t get him to trace it, we just let him have a go. And then after he’d had a go, the teacher would say, “Now let me show you how I would write it. Love the way you’ve signed in, Sam, now let me show you how I would write it.” And she’d write his name. And if he wanted to borrow an iPad, he signed it out. If he wanted to borrow a book, he signed it out. When he’d done a piece of artwork, he’d write his name on it. When he’d done a piece of writing with a flip chart, he’d also write his name on it. And by the end of the year, he could write his name independently.
Meg:
Oh, my gosh. Jane, I love the story. And it’s exactly the conversation we’re having around AAC, right? You model without expectation. You don’t move the child’s hand, you don’t do a series of meaningless drills, you make it —
Jane:
Yeah, it’s real reasons. Yeah. We are writing your name for real reasons. Why do you need to know to write your name, Sam? It’s so that you can find which hook is yours to put your bag on. It’s so that you can borrow an iPad. It’s so that we know you’re here today. Do it for real reasons, and they learn it so much faster because there’s a reason for learning it.
Meg:
Yeah, that makes so much sense and ties into our core values as professionals, right, that we want to build from a child’s strengths and interest and do things that add meaning and value to their life, not rote exercises. So, I love how you’re asking us to zoom out, to zoom out a lot and look at what we’re doing in a larger context of literacy. Of everything we’ve talked about today, if therapists listening have just one big takeaway, what do you hope that would be?
Jane:
Oh, gosh, teach where the student is at. Yeah. You know, all of literacy is a developmental sequence, just like languages, really. And you cannot work on skills at a conventional level if a child doesn’t have their emergent literacy understandings. Yeah, so, teach where they’re at.
Meg:
I love that lesson. And it is different than what we would have heard, I think, at the beginning of this episode. If you said, “Teach where they’re at,” I might think, okay, pre-writing lines versus forming letters. And you’re saying, teach where they’re at, but using this comprehensive literacy framework.
Jane:
Yeah. Yeah. And I will say, I don’t think there’s any evidence that pre-writing lines actually help.
Meg:
Thank you for throwing that in there. I’ve been hearing people ask this question. And it’s hard for us to buck conventional wisdom when we don’t know what else to do. So, it’s nice to just lay that on the table and say, “And also, how about working on emergent literacy skills in truly meaningful contexts?”
Jane:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Meg:
That’s more fun anyway.
Jane:
Oh, I can’t agree more. I feel like I’m the luckiest person in the world. I get to have fun every day, and do what I love.
Meg:
Jane, tell us what you’re working on now and where we can find you online.
Jane:
Oh, gosh. I am just constantly working with schools and teachers to help every kid become a better communicator and better at literacy generally. So, I have a blog that’s at my website, janefarrall.com, and I blog there quite frequently. I also have a dedicated literacy website called comprehensiveliteracy.com and then I’ve put together a lot of information that we’ve talked about today, “What is comprehensive literacy?”, I’ve linked to blog posts I’ve written in the past and I’ve pulled it together with some introductory information as well. And then I have some online training too that people can sign up for.
Meg:
Yes, I’m going to say that in a bigger way. You have online continuing education courses that are great for speech therapists, OTs, educators who want to really bring to life these things that you’re talking about in their practice.
Jane:
Yup.
Meg:
Yeah, I’m excited about that.
Jane:
Me too. It’s funny because COVID really made me do that. And they have been so successful. I’m completely convinced that that’s a way forward for all of us to share more information and learn more. Before COVID, I really believed that face to face — I still believe the classroom consultations I do are probably a really important part. There’s no substitute for seeing it in action. But people always say they love all the videos in my courses and training. And yeah, I think the online training has just been fabulous for reaching so many people.
Meg:
Well, I hope these ideas spread like wildfire. Thank you so much for your time and your expertise.
Jane:
My pleasure. Thank you, Meg. It’s been delightful to join you.
[Ending music]
Thanks for listening to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast. Visit learnplaythrive.com/podcast for show notes, a transcript of the episode, and more. And if you learned something today, please share the episode with a friend or post it on your social media pages. Join me next time, where we will keep diving deep into autism.
