The Language Connection: How Early Development Shapes Lifelong Reading Success

During this episode of EDVIEW360, we welcome Dr. Ann P. Kaiser, renowned professor at Vanderbilt University and one of the nation’s leading experts on early language development. With decades of groundbreaking research, Dr. Kaiser has illuminated how the earliest years of language learning—long before children enter school—lay the foundation for reading and academic success. Her work bridges developmental psychology, linguistics, and education, offering educators and administrators a holistic framework for understanding how language, cognition, and environment interact to shape learning outcomes.

Listeners will gain practical insights into how responsive adult-child interactions, linguistically rich environments, and intentional teaching strategies can transform early language development and, ultimately, reading proficiency. Dr. Kaiser’s contributions have not only advanced the science of reading but also provided educators with actionable tools to support diverse learners from the start.

Listeners will learn:

• Why language development in the first three years is a powerful predictor of later reading success
• How biology and environment interact to influence children’s language growth
• The role of responsive, linguistically rich adult-child interactions in accelerating development
• Practical strategies for supporting oral language skills in preschool and early elementary classrooms
• How early language differences can signal later reading challenges such as dyslexia or developmental language disorders
• Ways educators can strengthen oral vocabulary, syntax, and phonological awareness to support struggling readers
• How social-emotional and cognitive development are intertwined with language learning
• Why intentional teaching of language foundations is essential for equity and long-term student achievement

Transcript

Hope For Kids And Teachers

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to Edview 360. Every time I see a kid, it gives me hope. Let me be really clear. Every time we train a teacher, every time I have these beautiful master students who are want to be teachers and want to be speech pathologists, they're so excited about this. Always. But I also just feel like the awareness of reading and language is changing exponentially. I was part of this group that focused on bridging the word gap for all young children and talking about language as nutrition. And they were able to do some community-level things about raising awareness, making libraries more accessible, putting books in laundromats, all kinds of things that just say, oh, we can do this. When we care for each other as a community, we can do this. We can do this one kid at a time, or we can do this. In our town, we can do this. In our classroom, we can do this. You know, that's probably the thing that gives me the most hope.

Narrator 1:09

You just heard from renowned literacy expert Dr. Ann Kaiser of Vanderbilt University. Dr. Kaiser is our podcast guest today on FU360.

Pam Austin 1:23

Today on FU360, we are honored to welcome Dr. Ann P. Kaiser, the Susan W. Gray Professor of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, and one of the nation's most influential researchers in early language development. Dr. Kaiser is a developmental psychologist and early childhood educator whose work has transformed our understanding of how young children learn to communicate and how those earliest language experiences shape lifelong reading success. Across decades of groundbreaking federal-funded research, Dr. Kaiser has focused on young children with language disabilities, especially those at high risk for later reading difficulties. She is deeply committed to the early identification of developmental language disorder, knowing that children with DLD face significantly higher risk for reading academic and social challenges. Her work asks a critical question. Can early language intervention prevent later reading problems? While definitive research is still emerging, Dr. Kaiser's theoretical and correlational findings strongly suggests that beginning intervention as early as age 2.5 or 2.5 may mean meaningfully change a child's reading trajectory. Dr. Kaiser's work bridges developmental psychology, linguistics, and education, offering educators a holistic, deeply human framework for understanding how language, cognition, and environment interact. Today, he will help us to explore early language development that connects to literacy, how responsive adult child interactions accelerate that growth, and what educators can do starting right now to support our young learners and to identify those who may be at risk. Dr. Kaiser, welcome.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

Thank you. It's good to be here. Thank you, Pam.

A Family Story That Shaped Work

Pam Austin 3:28

We're going to get right into it. We're going to go ahead and start. You know, we want to know your literacy why. Was there a moment or child that you encountered or parent that you support that helped to pull you into studying early language in DLD?

SPEAKER_02 3:44

Well, really, I think I've been interested in language since the day I was born. And my mom would probably say that's true because I was an early talker. But two things really influenced that. One is that I had a brother who was 18 months younger than I am who had autism and was non-speaking. And what I knew about my brother was that he was smart and that he knew things and that he could read signs and that he could get around really well. And other people saw him as a child with a severe disability that couldn't easily learn. And I knew, because I knew him, that wasn't true. So that probably shaped my career more than anything else, which is how to help children who we know are intelligent and capable, but can't use language well. How can we help them learn language? And how can we help their partners, their parents, their siblings, their teachers see the child that's there and scaffold communication so that we can make the most of their abilities to learn and use language? And that's guided my career forever. But my link to reading was I was a really early reader. At three, I basically taught myself to read, not out of any great academic ability, but just because I knew people were reading stuff and I wanted to know what they knew and how they knew it. And I just pestered my mom about explaining reading to me, which is crazy, of course. And I grew up in this really small town, and there weren't a lot of things to do, but one of them was to go to the city library, which was in the basement of the bank. So you know this is not a big library. And every Saturday, my cousin Bonnie and I would go on our bikes, get as many books as they would let us check out, which was seven, and we would take books home and we would read. And I read every book that wasn't on the pay shelf or on the adults only shelf in the library as a kid. And that was, I mean, it's like I could fall into a book and have a life that I didn't have. I could know about forests. I lived in Kansas. There were four trees in my town. It I could learn about everything. And that just triggered a lifelong interest in reading and writing, and eventually led to a path of being a developmental psychologist who studies how kids develop language and how language turns into reading.

Pam Austin 6:25

Well, you know, I just think about your love of language and your understanding of how smart your brother was at the time and just could not communicate and the idea of scaffolding down to ways for him to communicate. And you wanted him to experience that love. Is that what I'm hearing there, Anne?

SPEAKER_02 6:44

Well, that's what you heard. I mean, I did understand him. I did, you know, I did know who he was. And I didn't know that because he told me, but because I knew him. But I also knew that not having language was a real problem for kids. You know, when I was an adult and I didn't live in Kansas anymore, I would call my brother every week, and we would have these really crazy, limited conversations on the phone. And one of the most amazing things that happened to him was when he was around 40, he moved to living in an apartment with a young man who was a really good language user, had other developmental concerns. But and my brother's language expanded in that time. And he started to talk about things like wearing jeans and t-shirts and about things that he liked and where he liked to go. And it made me realize that, first of all, even though we think early intervention is important, and it is, the capacity for language learning is lifelong. And when you have things that are important in your life to communicate, you're motivated to use language. So having a friend who talked about cool stuff, even when you're 40, is was a real pathway for him learning how to use language when he was older. And so there's, you know, I have this optimism about language learning and about reading, that even though we know there are developmentally optimal times for everything, there's no time which is impossible.

The Responsive Magic Of Ages 0–3

Pam Austin 8:21

No time which is impossible. I absolutely love it. But let's take a step back here. You focused on reflecting on expanding language when you gave this example for your brother. Let's take that step back to zero to three, those first three years of life and think about what stands out as most important. What's the most powerful ways that we can get that early language development in that's going to shape reading in the future?

SPEAKER_02 8:53

Parents. And, you know, in a nutshell, you know, first of all, language is communication. Communication requires a partner. And so, you know, everything about human biology prepares us to be partners in relationship in early development. Those are the years of attachment, those are the years of real dependence, moving to real independence. Those are the years of face-to-face kinds of interactions. We hold our babies, we get down on the floor, we change the register and the pacing and the content of what we say. Those are all pretty biologically driven behaviors that all help us respond to kids in ways that hold their attention and bond communicatively with each other and tailor language so that it's optimal for language learning. That's it's really an important time. And most parents do that naturally. There are obviously cultural differences, there are linguistic differences, there are regional differences, but basically we talk a lot to kids in a way that is about what the kids are interested in. So it's responsive to what the kids start watching, playing with, eating, doing. And it's contingent. We talk to kids more when they talk to us or they communicate with us, and it's meaningful. And those are the ideal conditions for learning language. It's contingent, it's meaningful, it's about what's happening in the here and now, and it's for the most part affectively positive. And we do that best with little bitty kids. Who can hold a baby and not make baby talks? She can't do it. So when kids are typically development developing, they have this window, this bubble in the first 12 to 18 months of life where all of our biology kicks in and we do the things that help kids learn language for the most part. As kids get older, obviously they become more outwardly oriented. They have life experiences that their parents don't participate in, they go to child care, all of those things. So there's less of that responsive interaction. For typically developing kids, that is fine. Kids are changing, developing independence at a rate that matches the changes in the environment. For kids who are having language learning difficulties, they need more of that responsive interaction with careful modeling, longer, more frequent, more embedded in their lives. And that's essentially, it's kind of like kids outgrow the ideal environment for learning language. And if you have a language to learn, you might outgrow that environment. You have now have the little body of an independent three-year-old, but you still need that scaffolding to help you learn. And so we teach parents how to be more responsive partners in developmentally appropriate things like book reading, right? So we're doing the thing that helps kids learn language, but we're thinking about what does that look like for a three-year-old or in a classroom for a four-year-old, because it would be weird to hold your four-year-old and do face to face with it. Yeah.

Pam Austin 12:28

You know, you use this phrase, the things that we do. It's how we do. And I was thinking about the interconnectedness of it all, the systems. And what you seem to describe was the cognition, the motor skills, the social development. And what you're saying is really, really important to target that in the middle years. And it grows and changes as students get older.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

It does, you know, but this is what's so tricky because when we think of classrooms, I don't know what pops up in your head. You're an experienced educator, it's probably fourth grade. What pops up for me is childcare that we need, and it needs to be high quality. And I totally support kids going to child care. But suddenly this little person who's two is now in a room with 10 kids and one or two adults, and nobody is directly connected to that child, even among good teachers, you have a group of kids. And so the skills for learning language are really different. You have to initiate to those adults and maybe to your friends who are also two and who may not be all that interesting or very language capable. You have to find language opportunities for learning. And that is hard for some kids. That's really hard for some kids. In childcare, we have a curriculum structure and framework, and there are designated learning times, but language is learned in the context of living your life for the most part. And so a lot of the day is coming in, going on the playground, having a snack, getting ready for nap, playing in free play. And then there's some, you know, there's some shared book reading in large group, and there's some instruction in a small group. But really the language learning in those years is constructed by the child. It's initiated by the child. And so the interaction, the way that adults respond to kids, and the way that adults understand that different kids need different kinds of input in those across the day opportunities are really important. And for typical kids, it's often no problem. For kids who are shy, withdrawn, reluctant, learning a second language that might have a developmental uh disability that could be a hearing loss, it could be a motor development problem, it could be a language delay, then all of that child-initiated learning is going to be slowed down because they're going to be lower rate initiators. So then the adult needs to compensate for that. That's a hard job for teachers. That's a really hard job. And if, you know, a typical classroom of 12 kids will have three kids that have some kind of language learning issue. And it can be learning a second language, which means the kid's language learning capacity is completely intact, but he needs a bunch of input to learn that second language. It can be having a mild language delay, or it can be a child who has who presents with a sensory impairment, doesn't see or hear or move as well as other children. To have three of those kids in your classroom is a lot of kids. It can just be a kid who hasn't had a lot of language experience before he got there, or a child who hasn't been in childcare, or a child who has some potentially disruptive behavior that gets in the middle of those good language interactions. So we ask teachers to help kids make that transition into being independent learners. And literally they have their hands full of both typical kids who need day-to-day support and kids who might have extra needs for support. And so every one of those little humans is moving from one-on-one or lots of one-on-one time with mom or dad or grandma or auntie or the nanny or who the babysitter to an environment where one-on-one is less frequent and child initiated. And that challenges language learners. For every kid that has any of those 12 things I just said that could disrupt language learning, moving into those group care environments can be really challenging. And that's when we start to notice differences. And that's good that we notice them. That's when we start asking for extra support from a speech language pathologist or a special educator. And that's a good thing. But it also really puts a lot of responsibility on teachers who are already doing way too much every day, all the time. But it's the nature of early language learning that we need that one-on-one responsive interaction with language that's tailored to where we are as learners.

Pam Austin 17:43

And that goes back to the word scaffolding that you used a number of times when I just think about all of these varied languages, these various language challenges that you all you described just now. And teachers are used to the idea of scaffolding, but I love how you phrase it, these language opportunities. You're living your life and thinking about those opportunities to have the conversation and to respond to the students. It's something that if I think educators know about and know that they should do these things, they will move more toward dealing that for sure. Thank you so much for sharing that.

SPEAKER_02 18:24

Let me say how hard that is. So we've yesterday I was teaching this in my class that we were talking about the toddler talk model. And the toddler talk model begins with what we call classroom essentials, which is how to get your schedule together and your people together so that there might be a minute to talk to a kid, because that is the biggest challenge in child care is how do we manage all of this and find those moments that we're talking about that are so important for teaching language as a lived experience. Well, we got to have a minute when we can sit down and talk to kids. And sometimes classrooms are chaos, as you know. And so the base thing we teach teachers is how to organize your life in your classroom so you got a minute for a kid.

Pam Austin 19:12

Right. And I have heard other literacy experts talk about having the 30-second conversation, the 60-second conversation. It could be when the kids are lining up and there's this one child you decide to have a conversation with, and the child may initiate, or you may even initiate, or it might be based on something you've just done from circle time or moving back into the classroom. So I can see where those are opportunities that we could help develop it for, but it's being intentional and thinking about it. Would you say that, Ann?

SPEAKER_02 19:43

Oh, yeah. But you know, I was a preschool teacher once for a few years. I get it. It's exhausting and it takes a lot. You know, one of the things that I say to my students is you don't have to be perfect. You just have to be present. And so learning to be able to be present with kids so you can have that 30-second conversation. You'll know what to say. If you can get yourself and your body and your proximal to a kid and really zone in on that kid, really tune in and be present, for the most part, you will know what to say that makes sense, that's responsive to the kid and that's at his language level. And I can teach you all kinds of rules about doing that, but mostly teachers do know what to do if we can help them make time to do it.

Vocabulary And Syntax Power Reading

Pam Austin 20:37

Right. Making the time, that's a big difference. You know, there may be people who are thinking, you know what, all this talking, what does that have to do with reading? What's the connection? How does this help students learn to read? Can you give us some just some highlights on that?

SPEAKER_02 20:53

Sure. Well, you know, reading is language. Obviously, written language, but it is language. And so if you don't have vocabulary, right, then you're learning what words mean when you read them for the first time. And that's a heavy lift. You can know how to decode a word and say it by the phonological rules, but if you don't know what that word means, it doesn't mean anything to you in reading. So most of vocabulary, early vocabulary that we have in reading, kids already know from their language experience. The other thing that we really underestimate. So learning how to make sentences, grammar or syntax, it starts when kids are 24 months old. That's when they start combining words. Reading depends on being able to understand the structure of a sentence. It's, you know, that you don't read single words for very long, very early. Reading, you might read some single words, but pretty soon you're reading Jane is jumping into the water. Well, that's a basic kind of sentence. You need to be able to know what the subject is, what the verb is, what the prepositional phrase is. You may not have those labels for it, but you understand and can predict from the structure of the sentence what the meaning is likely to be. So those are two kind of essential things that are language foundations for, first of all, decoding and secondly, understanding or comprehension of written material. And really quickly, academic reading gets pretty complicated in terms of structure and in terms of vocabulary. So if you don't come with those things by the time you're four, it's going to be really hard to read. Can you learn from reading? Absolutely. We learn from reading all the time. We learn new vocabulary, we learn new structure, we learn new arguments, all of that. But reading itself will be easier if you already have that foundation in oral language. You can use it, you can understand it, you're comfortable with the language. Then reading adds a new mode, but you're not learning a core representational skill in the same way.

Pam Austin 23:30

So you're saying the ability to speak, to understand incomplete sentences, even though we don't know what a noun or verb is or any of that. We just can represent the language and understand the language. We just said that's prepping the brain for learning to read.

SPEAKER_02 23:47

That is exactly you said it, Pam. That's exactly right. So we have these neural networks, they're really malleable. We make them language specific by our early experience representing things with individual words, categories of words, building a semantic network, and syntax gives us that sort of core linguistic structure, which helps us organize the incoming or written information so that we comprehend by predicting what's probably going to happen in this sentence. So those are two really huge skills, right? Yeah.

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SPEAKER_02 25:06

And it's also not communicative. It's not scaffolded like those interactions that we were talking about with kids. So you're reading, and maybe you're reading out loud, and that feels like a performance, not about it like a communication. It's not like saying, wow, I am so excited that the daffodils are blooming. It's like you're reading, the daffodils are blooming. But you're not, you don't have that motivation of communication. You don't have that partner support of, oh, I'm really interested in what you're saying. Even if you have a reading partner who's interested in what you're reading, that's really shifted in an important way. So reading can feel kind of lonely. It can feel like I don't have that partner who's reflecting back to me and cueing me and supporting me. And also someone's judging me. Did I say that word right? Am I fluent? Do I understand this? And it's it's reading is a school-based thing. Communication is a life-based thing. And even though we're teaching reading for life, let's be clear about that. And it's got great applications in everyday life. When you're first learning it, it just feels like a pretty hard abstract task for lots of kids. And if you're not good at language, it's a very hard task. Honestly, it's not an easy task.

Pam Austin 26:36

It is a learned skill. And I love the way you termed that life base for communication and speaking, which includes the semantics, meaning. I want to go back and highlight those terms again that you use, and syntax, word order. And we learn it by hearing, listening, speaking, doing. Whereas that shift is this whole other skill with reading. And I love the way you describe it. It is something that's challenging for many students. But through scaffolding and support, we could help our students get there. Am I saying that correctly, Ann?

SPEAKER_02 27:10

Yeah, absolutely. But we might have to make the precursors to reading fun and social, right? Which we can do in preschools. We do a good job of that. We might need to make shared reading a communicative activity. You know, we forget that, oh, we could read a book together, the four of us, and we could take turns reading in a way that it's kind of like reading a play. That would be fun. Or we can read directions that other kids do, or there are ways, in addition to doing good science-based instruction. Let me say this is not a replacement for the science of reading. This is a way to make reading a communicative and fun activity for adults and children. So, you know, if you read to your three-year-old, if you've read books to three-year-olds, which I think there's nothing better than reading a book with a three-year-old, you use the funny voices and you make the stories louder and crazier and funner, and you fill in the blank and you engage the child in that. So that is a really important pre-reading experience. Oh, books can be fun. Books are something I can do with somebody. And guess what? It can be a really fun exchange that we laugh about, that we remember. And I can tell the story too, even before I can read it. You know, kids are really great at learning what the story says and then telling you, no, no, you didn't read all of that, mom. You did not, that's not how it ends. You didn't read that right, which tells us how tuned in they are to language and reading and that process, even before they're readers. So the more experience kids have with books and text and reading that's communicative, that's fun, that's functional in their environment with people that they care about, the more the idea of learning to read will feel like a good thing.

Pam Austin 29:22

So it's a joy.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

Yep. And then they figure out you can know stuff from reading. That's the most exciting part. Oh my gosh, what did you figure out from reading that? And not, you know, I really we work a lot on shared book reading in in my projects. And really the authentic question, what did you learn from that book? What did you learn from reading that? What do you know now you didn't know? Queuing kids, that reading is like this treasure chest that you can know stuff grown-ups don't know. Other kids don't know. It's magic. That kind of excitement about reading, about writing, which is another one of my passions, can really motivate kids to do the parts that are hard. And I think what's challenging for kids that are having reading problems is that you know, you get extra instruction, all good, all important, systematic, direct instruction, totally support it. But it can be just a really hard slog. And so that helps technically, but when we can bring joy and excitement and fun and make it not punitive and not stigmatizing, we are really doing something so important for motivating kids to hang with us while they learn to decode and to put sentences and paragraphs and narrative together.

Early Flags For DLD Risk

Pam Austin 30:57

And a little bit of fun and joy to that interaction. I love the idea of cueing kids because we want them thinking while they're reading. And this is a perfect way because I want to know what you're thinking. What did you learn? I love those ideas. Uh, you know, I do want to ask you something. You know, a lot of kids maybe they're just thinking, you know, child is a little bit behind. They may be underrecognized for developmental language disorders. What should teachers know for early identification?

SPEAKER_02 31:27

Yeah. So there are kind of two flags for little kids. One is a kid whose vocabulary is really low, who, you know, and who at age, say at 30 months, kids should have around a couple hundred words. And if you have a kid that has like 20 words or 30 words, even though he's talking, he's in big trouble because he has a very low, slow grow for building word knowledge. And that's a kid who needs early intervention that focuses on developing vocabulary. We're really good at that. There's a ton of data to support how to do that in all kinds of positive ways. Those kids are pretty easy to detect. We think of them as late talkers. They're kids that we anticipate will have language problems, kids with Down syndrome, sometimes kids with autism, and sometimes just kids who haven't had a lot of language exposure and we don't know what their developmental status is, but we know they're coming in at three and they have a hundred words, and they should have six or seven hundred words at least. And they should be putting words together. So the average age to start putting words together is 24 months. If you have a kid who isn't putting words together or only says, bye-bye, mom, and want that, you should be worried about that kid if he's three. You should be worried about that kid if he's 30 months old. That 30 months is kind of a really important marker for us. That's the point at which you can usually tell late talkers who are going to recover from kids who are going to need extra support to learn language. And you can tell two ways: very small for age vocabulary, and very slow to combine words. So that's one trajectory that's pretty clear. There are also kids who are doing okay-ish for vocabulary at 30 months. They're we have less than we'd expect, but they're not terrible and they're clearly talking. But what's not emerging are those sentences. So they might have some two-word combinations, but they're not very many of them, and they're probably wrote. And what you should be seeing by 30 months is a pretty good three to four-word sentence that's novel, that really describes something, and kids understand sentences, not just instructions that are super supported by I'm pointing to get your coat, but also understand when you say about another kid, oh Bobby's eating his lunch first, and then he's going to have his drink. That the kid can tell you, you can tell the kid understands what you said to him. So comprehension is a clue, but we're not, there are measures, tests for receptive language, but we're just not as good as detecting when kids aren't comprehenders. But low comprehension that can look like not following instructions, but might be not understanding. Inattention, which can also be not understanding what's being said in an activity, and low production of two, three, four-word sentences that mark things like past tense and plurals. Those are kids that, even though they are smart, so let's not confuse any of this with being smart and having verbal capacity, those are kids that are at risk for dyslexia. The kids that are low vocabulary users, those are kids that because dyslexia is a word-level, I don't want to say problem, but a word-level difficulty, if they're having difficulty learning vocabulary, they're probably going to have difficulty with word-level reading. The kids who are doing okay for vocabulary, but are having trouble with sentences might not flag for dyslexia or might, but they will show up in third grade with reading comprehension problems because they're not understanding the syntactic structure, the morphosyntactic structure of language. So they might get through that vocabulary stage. They might have phonological awareness, they might be able to decode words pretty well, but they're going to show up again later when they're having trouble with passage comprehension and learning from written text because they're not understanding the grammar. Vocabulary and grammar dance with each other the whole time. If you're good at one, you're probably good at the other. If you're not good at one of them, you're going to struggle with the other. But one path leads with vocabulary-level problems, word-level problems, and the other path kind of leads with sentence-level problems. So understanding those things about your kid, how's he doing for vocabulary, both receptive and expressive, understanding and using, and how's he doing with combining words? Those are the things that preschool teachers should be paying attention to, parents should be paying attention to. And sometimes kids can be real chatty, and so you don't notice it, you don't notice how few different words the kid has because he's got a lot of talking, or that he's still really using single words when you'd expect him to use a little sentence, or that he doesn't understand sentences out of context in particular. And those two things are pretty important predictors for reading problems.

Pam Austin 37:22

So then we could change the trajectory of how students develop and grow as early as two and a half, you mentioned before.

unknown 37:31

Yeah. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 37:32

We just finished a study where kids started at two and a half, and we saw them for 18 months with their parents, you know, at first two times a week, then once a week, then once a month. And there's some really interesting outcomes, but the most important one is that we got differential rates of diagnosis of DLD in the group that had early language intervention. There were many fewer kids that met the criteria at age four for emergent developmental language disorders in the treatment group than in the control group. And then this is very exciting. We got that same finding with low-income Spanish-speaking kids. Different intervention, also parent-centered, but with bilingual with a therapist and a parent, shorter term, about three and a half months of intervention, three to four months of intervention. But we got a differential diagnosis rate that was significantly lower for the treatment group than the control group. So we haven't yet followed those kids up. So I don't know what they're going to look like as early readers. Most of them were not readers at the end at when they turned four, but that's really promising. So we know we can impact both vocabulary development. That's kind of old news, but those two studies are important because we were able to impact syntax development. And that's a new thing, starting at 30 months, 36 months, and going up through age four. If we can do that, maybe we can change their trajectories as readers.

Home And Classroom Routines That Help

Pam Austin 39:16

Wonderful. You know, you just mentioned your studies. And I'd like to kind of shift to thinking about environment, right? And well-being. How can a student's environment how can this influence that child's language development, their language and learning? And how does it show up in the classrooms and homes? And how can we help? Because you talked a little bit about the study. What is help? We talked about what teachers can do, and you talked about what you can do as parents, some specific focuses on the environment and self and how that makes a difference.

SPEAKER_02 39:54

So the simple answers talk to your kids. Listen to your kids and and then talk to them. Listen as much as you talk. Don't talk at them, talk with them, play with them, join them, join them in tasks, you know, talk to them when they unload the dishwasher with you, talk to them in the bath. We have done so much water play with children in bathrooms that we do not publicly display, but actually, bath time is a wonderful time because it can be a lot of fun. And that those are the things we teach parents a set of strategies that are research-based, and then we help them do that across the day in routines, but we also teach it in book reading, and we really support a lot of shared book reading with parents, a lot of play-based activities. We have done that same thing with teachers in toddler classrooms, very same approach. Challenging for teachers for the reasons we were talking about at the beginning, but shared book reading one-on-one or with a small group of kids, where you do all the things. You let kids initiate what they're interested in in the book, and you model language and you ask questions that give them a chance to respond. And sometimes you just wait for them to tell you what they're interested in. And you change over time. You read progressively. You know, the same things that we know are important for older kids, repeated reading can be really important for little kids because it reduces the cognitive load and it gives kids a space to initiate, and then you can give them information in response to them. So that whole idea of teaching in response to the kid is like a magic window. It's like the kid opens the window and you can pour in language. And it's very different than when you just narrate or you're standing above the kid talking about what's going on or giving a whole bunch of directions. Not that that doesn't have a role and a place, but those things that you say after the kid told you what he was interested in have magic powers. That's where an expansion of what the child said, or an explanation of something, or a new word that's more complicated can sneak in through the window and make it easy for the child to learn that. And so that's what we teach parents to do. That's what we teach teachers to do. We have some nice outcomes from a toddler study that we just finished that says class, you can do this in classrooms. It makes a difference in kids' vocabulary, it makes a kid difference in kids' sentences. So we can do this, humans can do this. We got to just make space and time and energy. We're doing it.

Pam Austin 42:56

Yep, sneaking it in through the window. I just love that. You know, you've provided lots and lots of valuable information for the importance of oral language and the impact on reading. And we know it starts early, but it doesn't stop there, right? We continue to use oral language to learn. You talked about your brother at the age of 40 and how his oral language development increases, but starting early and never stopping. Would you agree with that, Anne?

SPEAKER_02 43:26

Life's the conversation. You know, who are the people we love most? The people who talk to us, who do we get most frustrated with? The people we live with that don't talk to us. You know, that's the deal. That's why these blogs are so much fun. That's why podcasts are fun because two people who share passion about something are talking to each other about it.

Community Literacy Hope And Farewell

Pam Austin 43:46

Excellent. You know, I've got one question for you. This is our last one. What gives you hope right now about the future of early language and literacy research and practice?

SPEAKER_02 44:00

That's a great impressive. So every time I see a kid, it gives me hope. Let me be really clear. Every time we train a teacher, every time I have these beautiful master students who are want to be teachers and want to be speech pathologists, and they're so excited about this. I'm always hopeful. But I also just feel like the awareness of reading and language is changing exponentially. I was part of this group that focused on bridging the word gap for all young children and talking about language as nutrition. And they were able to do some community level things about raising awareness, making libraries more accessible, putting books in laundromats, all kinds of things that just say, oh, we can do this. When we care for each other as a community, we can do this. We can do this one kid at a time, or we can do this in our town, we can do this in our classroom. We can do this. You know, that's probably the thing that gives me the most hope.

Pam Austin 45:06

We can do this. We really thank you for sharing your knowledge and expertise with our audience today. That's it for another great EdView360 podcast. Please join us again next month and visit VoyagerSolpers.com slash Edview to learn about our webinars, blogs, and other podcasts. This has been Pam Austin. We hope to see you all again soon.

Narrator 45:36

This has been an Edview360 podcast. For additional thought-provoking discussions, sign up for our blog, webinar, and podcast series at Voyager Sopras.com slash Edview360. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love a five star review wherever you listen to podcasts and to help other people like you find our show. Thank you.