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Putting the Fun Back Into Fluency Instruction

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Putting the Fun Back Into Fluency Instruction

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Copy of Debate Read Aloud 3-5-Ada's Violin

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April 24, 2023

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Dr. Wright. Welcome. I'm always interested in how researchers choose their research interests and focus, and you've written many scholarly articles, parent facing books, and teacher-friendly professional books about vocabulary development and knowledge building. So I'm curious what interests you about that topic?

Tanya Wright:

The more I learn about it, the more I really understand vocabulary in particular to be almost a gateway to comprehension of text. So if you have a text that you're trying to read, and it has too many words that you don't know the meaning of them, you really cannot comprehend the text and you really can't decode your way through that. Right? Being more fluent and being able to say the words more fluently, it doesn't help. And you can't comprehension strategy your way through that either. Rereading, it doesn't help if you really don't know what those words mean. And so the more I learned about reading development, the more I've understood this to be important for kids as readers and writers and speakers and listeners and learners for doing the work we want kids to do. And I think very, very under-addressed in school. So if we look at elementary teachers, in the most cases, we know the job in elementary school is to get kids reading fluently. We know the job is to work on comprehension strategies and supporting kids' comprehension of text, but sometimes we wait on that vocabulary development until kids can read fluently. And that's unfortunate because you could read really fluently and have all those comprehension strategies in place and still find text challenging because you don't know the words and you don't have a sense of the knowledge or information related to that text.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about that connection between vocabulary development, word knowledge, and comprehension. An example you just gave, the text is filled with words, I don't know, so I can't comprehend the text. Is it always that direction? Is it always about coming to the text with that knowledge background and then being able to comprehend? Or is it sometimes bidirectional? So I have some words, I read the text, and then in reading the text I can start to learn new words that can help me to comprehend further? What's the relationship there.

Tanya Wright:

So in the best case scenario, it's bidirectional. We know enough words to comprehend the text, which allows us to spend some of our cognitive resources figuring out the meaning or adding some meaning information about new words that might be in the text. So that's the best case scenario. The challenge becomes if we cannot comprehend the text or if we're working so hard to comprehend the text, there's so many vocabulary words we don't understand or otherwise the text is conceptually challenging then it's going to be much more challenging to pick up words incidentally through reading the text.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

So in the research and in your own opinion, what does it mean to know a word?

Tanya Wright:

So there are a few things we know about that. One is that there's a lot of evidence that a dictionary definition is not enough. So if we're having kids memorize a word with a dictionary definition on a flashcard or match the definition to the word, that's probably not enough information for a child or an adult really to make use of that word, to support comprehending texts, and certainly not as a writer or speaker. So we typically think of really knowing a word is actually having a lot of information about that word and that information can develop over time. So it's unlikely that one interaction with the word and its meaning is really going to help. So some of the things that people may not think of as knowing the meaning of a word might include an informal explanation of the word. That's what mostly we can do. If I ask you what a word means, you probably won't tell me the dictionary definition. You'll kind of say it in your own words synonyms or antonyms for that word. Categorical information like strawberries and bananas and peaches are all types of fruit. Multiple meanings of the word, particularly in different contexts. So bark on a tree compared to a dog barks. Morphological knowledge, so word parts. Slight differences between the word and the meaning of similar words. What's the difference between happy and exuberant? Are they exactly the same? Are they a little different? Formal and informal meanings. What's a cow versus don't have a cow? So there's just discipline specific meanings. That's a big one. Spelling of the word, of course. How we use it grammatically. The phonological knowledge about the word, how it sounds. We've all had the experience where we've read a word a lot of times, we don't actually know how to pronounce it.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

I've used it in conversation and someone's like, "what are you trying to say?" And then you realize you've been mispronouncing the word.

Tanya Wright:

For sure. So all of this is about word knowledge, and it's definitely not just a dictionary definition as being enough information to really use that word as a reader, writer, speaker, listener, or learner.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

And I think about as a teacher, what that means in terms of when I'm selecting vocabulary and teaching kids and supporting their knowledge, all those different ways that they have to understand. It's not just enough, like you said, to just give a dictionary definition. And I'm thinking it's not just enough to read it in a read aloud, give a quick on the run definition and move on. That's not going to help kids learn that word.

Tanya Wright:

It's not going to help them learn that word, but it's still important. Yeah. And let me say why it's important just for a moment. When we give those little child-friendly explanations during a read aloud, that helps kids to comprehend that text. Right there. And we don't want to be doing an interactive read aloud where some kids can't participate because they don't understand what a word means. So it's still super important to do those child-friendly explanations in the moment that said, we shouldn't think that that's going to create sort of long, a long-term situation where kids hold that word and can use it in ways they might want to. So we've got to differentiate kind of two purposes. One purpose of supporting vocabulary is to support the "right there" task. And another is that more long-term, I think this is a word, kids are really going to need to understand texts or to participate in the content area learning in our classroom. And that's going to take a little bit more work to learn much more information about the word.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

That's really helpful. And while we're talking about read aloud, are there any other tips you can give for teachers to help them teach word meetings and support comprehension during the read aloud? What are some best practices maybe before reading a text, during reading a text, after reading a text?

Tanya Wright:

So I think for sure during reading the text, we want to give those brief child-friendly explanations and they really need to be planned ahead of time. It's really rough to do it if you don't plan for it. You're kind of fumbling around, figuring out how to explain things.

We also want to take time to go back and revisit words that we think are important or we want kids to learn in more long term. And for those words, we want to engage kids in what's called in the research active processing. So active processing is really an opportunity to think about what the word means in sort of a deeper way. So we want them actively thinking about the words, actively discussing the words. So that might be discussing an image that represents the word, acting it out, using movement, thinking about examples, multiple meanings of the words, many of the things that I already described as the different kinds of word meanings, but really an opportunity to use it, think about the meaning, and pay a little bit of attention actively to that word.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

That's super helpful. And I'm thinking too, another thing that is important is text selection. How are we choosing which texts we're reading aloud and what series of texts that we're reading to them? There's a study that I read of yours from 2018 with Cervetti and Wang where you tested the idea of a conceptually coherent text set to support comprehension and knowledge building and you compare it against topic or theme driven text sets.

What are some key differences between conceptually coherent topic and theme based text sets?

Tanya Wright:

If I'm going to go read a bunch of texts about a particular to find out information, it's because I'm trying to figure something out and I might read five or six different texts to figure out whatever it is I'm interested in learning. That's really different than on Monday we read about the sun, and on Tuesday we read about volcanoes. And on Thursday birds, they're not connected and you're not building knowledge in a purposeful way. So we were interested in what we called conceptually coherent texts, and that was the idea that kids were going to read a set of texts where key concepts that we wanted them to learn reoccurred in different ways across those texts. So we really started with what are the concepts or ideas we want kids to learn? How can we structure the texts to make sure that kids encounter those concepts in different ways across different texts?

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

So what's the example of a concept versus a topic?

Tanya Wright:

So a topic might be we're studying fall.

A concept might be an idea we want kids to learn about the fall. So in fall the trees lose their leaves and this is part of the cycle of growth for trees or something like that. So be more, much more specific, something specific that we want kids to learn. Or maybe it would be the difference between we're studying the weather and I'm just going to grab all the books about the weather versus I'm really interested in how meteorologists predict the weather, and I'm going to look for specific things we can look for that might predict other things happening. So we're just a little more specific about the concepts or ideas we want kids to learn, and we're looking for those to repeat in different ways across books. So I think we often do broader topics or themes it's the fall or community helpers, but we don't necessarily think about what are the concepts inside that we want kids to learn in this particular unit, and how can I make sure that I'm providing texts that are going to develop those carefully for kids? So anyway, in our study, what we found not surprisingly, is that when we pay attention to having texts that are conceptually related kids are more likely to learn the concepts in their texts and they're also more likely to pick up associated vocabulary with those concepts and even learn some incidental vocabulary that's unrelated to the concepts. And we think that's because having more knowledge about the text really sets them up to have a little bit of cognitive resources left over to focus on some of these words that they might not know, which is what you mentioned before.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

And I'm thinking this has implications for the texts teachers are choosing to read aloud to kids, but also texts they might be using a guided practice in small groups or in conferences and maybe even the texts that they're directing kids toward for independent reading. I didn't plan to ask you this, but some say we should actually remove it all together, spend more time on teacher-directed activities. So I'm just wondering in your opinion, if there's ways to make independent reading more supportive, more worth the time, by steering kids and maybe the teachers having a heavier hand in supporting kids with text selection and steering them more toward conceptually coherent text sets or supporting them with texts that relate in some way to the text being studied as a class. I don't know. Are you aware of any research on that topic? Is it something you've looked at?

Tanya Wright:

So I think this is a big open question. I think if we are going to have kids read in the classroom I always say scaffolded independent reading, right?

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Yeah.

Tanya Wright:

I mean, just sending kids off to pick any book and read it that's kind of rough because a lot of kids are not spending that time reading especially if it's very challenging for them and they might need some support. But we do have some things we can do to support kids when they're independent reading. So text sets is one of them. Again, that's a scaffold we can give kids. There are things like ramp up texts that people have studied. So maybe if kids want to read about a particular topic, we might give them an easier text first and then more and more challenging texts until they get to the one that they really want to read. Other things like partnering kids up to read together can help them to stay focused on what they're trying to do, which is read the text. So there are a lot of different kinds of scaffolds that people have looked at and our work on text sets is one of those.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Thanks. So backing up to 2017, you did a systematic review of some studies that looked at brief pre-teaching, direct instruction of words before a teacher reads a text aloud or students engage with a text and then measured the impact on comprehension. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the trends and takeaways from that collection of studies and the idea of pre-teaching. Like how much time should they spend pre-teaching? How many words, how big of an impact, what methods should they use when pre-teaching?

Tanya Wright:

Yeah, so I wish I could answer those questions, but the studies did those things a lot of different ways. So there weren't enough studies for us to say this method of pre-teaching is better than that method of pre-teaching. What we did find out is that if kids are going to read independently in almost all cases and I think there are about 19 studies on this, some sort of brief teaching of word meanings before kids went off to read the text independently helped with their comprehension of that text. So it's like if you explain some of the meanings of words in a particular text that's going to help more often than not kids to read sense, that particular text, which makes a lot of good sense.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Makes a lot of sense.

Tanya Wright:

I would say that interactive read aloud are different. We may not need to do it because we're right there and we can teach it in the moment it comes up. We can give those child-friendly explanations right there, but we're not right there if kids are sent off to do some reading and so it's going to really help them to have seen a word that might be challenging. I would definitely show them the spelling know how to pronounce that word and know something about what it means so that when they encounter it in the text there's just that little scaffold to help with comprehension of the text at that point where the word comes up.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

And then you looked at studies where students were both taught the words directly and where they learned strategies for figuring out the meanings on their own, and what did you find there?

Tanya Wright:

So for direct teaching of word meanings, it definitely helps kids again to comprehend the text with those words in it. So when we teach kids a bunch of words, if they read a text with those words in it it helps them with their comprehension of that text. It does not necessarily, there's not a lot of evidence that it helps broadly with their comprehension. That sort of makes sense to me because why would learning a word help in a text that doesn't have that word, right?

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Right, right. Makes sense.

Tanya Wright:

But sometimes we think if we just teach enough vocabulary, it'll help kids broadly with their comprehension and there's less evidence for that. But I think something that we can know as teachers, if we help kids with the words in a text we're going to be using in school in any part of our day, that's going to help them to comprehend that text and be able to interact around it. So that's a really good thing. The research on vocabulary strategies for elementary is much more limited so it's harder for us to say exactly how that's working. So for example, we know that if we teach kids how to use context clues, they get better at using context clues, but we don't have a lot of information about how that transfers broadly to comprehension. That might just be because the studies tend to be short term and we don't know this. Being strategic is a much more long term endeavor and we'd really need to understand how that works. It might also be because the studies often look at just one strategy at a time. So they look at context clues or they look at helping kids to use word parts, morphology, to figure out word meanings. But one of the things we know from decoding strategies and comprehension strategies is that it's not a strategy. It's being strategic that what we want of kids. So we want them to have a bunch of things to try when they get stuck. So another thing we don't have a lot of studies on is teaching kids a number of vocabulary strategies, a number of ways to help themselves when they get stuck on the meaning of a word and seeing whether kids become more strategic and more able to apply to support their own comprehension by applying a number of strategies depending on what makes sense. If you think about things that we commonly teach kids like context clues, not all contexts really give good clues about word meaning, and sometimes they're even misleading, so that might not be helpful. Sometimes word parts might be helpful, but they're not helpful always. So what I usually say is we want kids to know a lot about words and how they work so that they can be strategic.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

That makes a lot of sense for, based on what you're saying, different strategies will work in different situations. So you need a little toolbox, a little repertoire to be able to, and then probably practice applying when to use which one. Or direction to try one. If it doesn't work, try another. Try another, like you're saying, to be strategic more general.

Tanya Wright:

And that's that conditional knowledge that is really part of all strategy instruction. I always joke that if we say it's visualizing day for comprehension, <laugh>, right? That doesn't really help because what if it's a text where visualizing is not going to assist your comprehension? It's not the case that every text that's going to help. So again, that's part of that conditional knowledge. When is this going to help me? When is it not? Is part of supporting kids and becoming strategic readers.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

So for teachers listening who are hearing it helps to pre-teach words sometimes or to give definitions on the run when I'm reading aloud. And it can also help to teach strategies as long as there's a repertoire of strategies and practice with the conditional knowledge, I need to know when to apply them. They might be wondering, well, what's the balance? How much time do I spend on them? When time's short, what do I prioritize? Is there any evidence around how much time to spend on each or how much to include? What's the right amount of teaching?

Tanya Wright:

I wish there was but there's not. And the time question is always so tricky in education because you could have five good minutes where so much learning happens or 20 minutes where it's really hard to get any learning to happen. So amount of time, number of words, those are really hard questions because there's never going to be a right answer for every child in every classroom. So I tend to think about it like this: How important is this word for kids to understand the text? How important is this word for kids to engage in the content area learning that we're doing to be able to express their ideas, to be able to share what they're thinking, to be able to write what they want to say? There's no right word or wrong word to teach. All the words are important words. So the best we can do in school is think, "Do kids need this for doing school? for learning, for participating in the text, we're using for learning the content that we're trying to work on together to read, write, speak, listen, and learn?" I think if we're on a regular basis doing that work over time, that accumulates a lot of words. I think it's also hard because each time we add words, we need to do some planning. So even those little child friendly explanations require planning. If we're going to pre-teach or revisit a word for active processing, it requires some planning. If we want to think about vocabulary during content area learning, it requires some planning. So what I always suggest to start somewhere plan something, right? Plan an interactive read aloud, plan one unit in content area unit get with your grade level team and each of you pick one book and plan the vocabulary around that book and then share what you've share what you've figured out. Then you have four books maybe so get started. But we really vocabulary everything that we do and most importantly, we want everybody to participate. We don't want anyone excluded because they don't know what some words mean. So the more we can include this across the day, the better it's going to be for kids.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

You know what I was curious about, and I didn't see this in the studies that I read, you may have written about it that, and I just didn't see it, but I think one of the moments in my life where my vocabulary grew the most was I had this teacher in high school who just used the biggest words all the time. She always was trying to find ways to weave more sophisticated vocabulary into speech, into oral language. And it encouraged us to use it in our writing. And it just was like this culture, this particular classroom, this culture of just speaking with more sophisticated vocabulary. I just wonder about that. I think sometimes, especially teachers maybe have younger children simplify language to make sure that the kids are understanding what they're saying or simplify to try to help them understand their directions. But I wonder if we're doing kids a disservice by not using richer vocabulary from the start.

Tanya Wright:

Well, let me answer that a couple ways. So there's really three well-documented ways that we learn words. We learn words with texts. We learn words when we learn new things. So if I take up gardening, I'm going to have to learn the name for the tools like shearers or hydrangeas are a type of plant. And we learn words, most of our words through oral language interactions. So if we think about babies and how they learn words, it's from people talking with them and around them. So we definitely learn the words that are in our environment. So if folks are saying more challenging or more sophisticated or what may seem like words for older kids in the environment, those are the words that kids are going to use because that's just what's around them. And one of our science units we were learning about clouds as part of a unit on predicting the weather. And the principal came to tell us afterwards that there were a couple of kids who were waiting for the bus and they were discussing whether there were cumulonimbus, clouds in the sky. These were kindergartners because they weren't sure if there was going to be a storm and if they'd have baseball practice. And they were just having a big debate about what kind of clouds were in the sky. And that's not because we drilled them on that word, that word was just part of the learning. And of course they could say it and use it if they wanted to. So there's no word that kids can't say. There's some words we don't want them to say, but they learn what's in their environment.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

So should kindergarten and first grade teachers use be intentional about using words that are more sophisticated, Even If it means sometimes you have to stop and explain what you're talking about?

Tanya Wright:

I would love to see that. So I would say once kids have conceptually figured out that something's there and have explored it, we can definitely supply them with the appropriate vocabulary word and they're just going to use it. What we don't want to see is vocabulary rate replacing opportunities for kids to explore or figure things out. And that's that. Let me put all the words for the unit on a board and make you memorize them before we've even done any of the learning of the unit. That's not a meaningful context for vocabulary learning, and it sort of makes it all about the words and not about the figuring out. So we have to think a little carefully about when we supply words, but I am definitely one who would say the more interesting words we use around kids, the more they're going to pick them up and use them themselves.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

I think that's a great place to stop. Thank you so much, Dr. Wright. This is really helpful conversation, and I'm sure a lot of teachers will find practical ideas to take to their classroom. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Tanya Wright:

Thank you.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

I'm now welcome my colleague Macie Kerbs for a conversation about practical takeaways. Macie, what did you think?

MACIE KERBS:

I like how she talks about vocabulary beyond just the ELA classroom. And what she talked about of oral language development, what kids are hearing and learning from their environment within the school, from science class to social studies to math. And I appreciate that because I feel like we've gotten so segmented and siloed within our specific subject areas. And vocabulary really spans across every domain and it impacts our knowledge in each of those domains. So I think the more we know vocabulary leads to comprehension, but comprehension is just not just for reading in ELA class, it's also for reading those really complex academic those texts with academic vocabulary within our science classroom. So I like her take and her perspective and it feels doable as a teacher.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

I think if I were in a classroom, which I'm not right now, but I think I would be thinking every day -- it could be really small within my reading lesson -- within my science lesson, or if I'm integrating my content with literacy instruction within this block of time, what are the specific either vocabulary strategies or specific words that I'm teaching? I think it could be so rich across the entire year, how many words and how many strategies for approaching new words your kids would have in their tool belt. Especially important, it's important for all kids, but think about the number of students who are learning English in addition to learning to read and write and learn science and social studies. It's just critical.

MACIE KERBS:

I was thinking actually about a school I was at last week when majority of their population are English learners and their students are working in independent reading time, trying to tackle these texts that they're super interested in. And one student I conferred with was getting into Egyptian history, but he was reading these graphic novels that were a fictional take on some common Egyptian tales, but he was getting stuck on some of the words and he kept saying, "I can't figure it out." One of the words was offering, and you really had to think about Egyptian culture and what they might be doing. And he kept saying, "They're giving wheat to his dad, but his dad's dead and I don't understand." And it was that point where his comprehension was breaking down, he understood he could recognize it but it wasn't the moment at that time where we had to necessarily teach the word as much as relying on multiple strategies to be able to solve it and actually a plug for your 2.0 book because I was able to pull a couple strategies from there to work with him.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Well, that particular example you give about "offerings" is, she didn't mention this, but it's in her article that I read the other thing she talked about to make sure kids understand is what's called "semantic ambiguity," which basically means there's multiple meanings. And I wonder if partly why that student was getting confused is because offer, offer, give, offering, giving, but it doesn't make sense here. And just being able to be flexible and like you said in that context, apply knowledge outside of what's happening right there in that text. And understanding Egyptian culture. I have to say, if I could go back and do independent reading over again, I definitely just let kids go and pick books from the classroom library and I under the thinking, okay, well they're choosing what's most interesting to them. They're going to be automatically engaged, they'll learn from the text. No problem. I definitely gave scaffolds for independent reading around conferring and setting goals and giving clear strategies to support those goals and regularly met with kids. So that scaffolding, yes. But having conceptually coherent texts, as a even more narrow even more focused than topic, it makes me think about, well first I'd have to order different books because I don't think I even would be able to create conceptually coherent text sets. Topic? Yes, maybe, but conceptually coherent? No, I don't have the books for that first of all. But second of all, how I would support kids during their independent reading time so that they're set up to be successful. I don't know. What did you say? Yeah, it struck me.

MACIE KERBS:

I thought about it too, especially as an upper elementary teacher where the content gets so sophisticated the deeper you go into it. And so I did a lot of text sets, but they were more topic based

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Topic

MACIE KERBS:

And I did book clubs which were more thematic based. So it made me think about how I would revise some of that work.

MACIE KERBS:

And I think you brought up a really good point about you didn't say dumbing down our language, but that's what I was thinking about is how much we dumb down for students and it's a disservice to them.

But when you think about access to texts, some of the texts don't have the complexity that they can read independently and how we can plant the vocabulary. So maybe even, I was reading a decodeable with my son last night and the girl was excited in the book. And so we talked about one of the prompts that the teacher's guide had was to plant the word enthusiastic. And so we talked about what does it mean to be enthusiastic? That word was not something he was decoding in the text, but he could pull from the storyline of the text and just little moments like that. It kind of made me think back of, man, I need to do better about even those emotions characters are feeling, not settling for the happy, the sad, but planting some of this more. Sometimes these emotions are really complex and kids, when they have those words, it helps them even be more introspective. So I'll have to do some more thinking about what this looks like in K-1 classrooms and how we can lift the level of our language to meet our students who are so emergent.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

I love that idea of just thinking through, and maybe this is part of pre-planning too, the not what's in-the-text vocabulary do I need to figure out, but when I'm talking about the text, and this is fiction, end informational texts, what are the words that we're using to describe the character, to describe motivations, those kinds of things. I'm also thinking what other opportunities are there to be more precise? So for example, if I'm going to have kids turn and talk and I say every time "turn and talk, turn and talk, turn and talk," what if I switch it up sometimes and say, turn and explain, turn into fine turn and describe turn and visualize turn and I'm adding in vocabulary into the regular flow of our classroom practice. But we're kind of planting this vocabulary now so that they understand it, like she said, first in oral language and then later in reading and writing.

MACIE KERBS:

I think that's beautiful. It also makes me think about how much I miss opportunities to play in the classroom in primary classrooms. Just the idea of inquiry and creating and just having that, even when we had the kitchen center and we were maybe targeted towards a specific theme of whatever the week was. Maybe it was Target that week and we set it up like a supermarket, something like that. But the vocabulary students were using

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Oh yeah.

MACIE KERBS:

At the supermarket differed than what they were going to use when they're shopping at a coffee shop. And some of that vocabulary was developed through those oral language moments that most classrooms don't have that.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Yeah, definitely put play back. There's so much research around the importance of play and thinking specifically about vocabulary learning, which is just one of many benefits to play. Absolutely. Well, Macie, thank you so much for joining me today.

MACIE KERBS:

Yes, thanks for having me.

April 24, 2023
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Dr. Wright. Welcome. I'm always interested in how researchers choose their research interests and focus, and you've written many scholarly articles, parent facing books, and teacher-friendly professional books about vocabulary development and knowledge building. So I'm curious what interests you about that topic?

Tanya Wright:

The more I learn about it, the more I really understand vocabulary in particular to be almost a gateway to comprehension of text. So if you have a text that you're trying to read, and it has too many words that you don't know the meaning of them, you really cannot comprehend the text and you really can't decode your way through that. Right? Being more fluent and being able to say the words more fluently, it doesn't help. And you can't comprehension strategy your way through that either. Rereading, it doesn't help if you really don't know what those words mean. And so the more I learned about reading development, the more I've understood this to be important for kids as readers and writers and speakers and listeners and learners for doing the work we want kids to do. And I think very, very under-addressed in school. So if we look at elementary teachers, in the most cases, we know the job in elementary school is to get kids reading fluently. We know the job is to work on comprehension strategies and supporting kids' comprehension of text, but sometimes we wait on that vocabulary development until kids can read fluently. And that's unfortunate because you could read really fluently and have all those comprehension strategies in place and still find text challenging because you don't know the words and you don't have a sense of the knowledge or information related to that text.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about that connection between vocabulary development, word knowledge, and comprehension. An example you just gave, the text is filled with words, I don't know, so I can't comprehend the text. Is it always that direction? Is it always about coming to the text with that knowledge background and then being able to comprehend? Or is it sometimes bidirectional? So I have some words, I read the text, and then in reading the text I can start to learn new words that can help me to comprehend further? What's the relationship there.

Tanya Wright:

So in the best case scenario, it's bidirectional. We know enough words to comprehend the text, which allows us to spend some of our cognitive resources figuring out the meaning or adding some meaning information about new words that might be in the text. So that's the best case scenario. The challenge becomes if we cannot comprehend the text or if we're working so hard to comprehend the text, there's so many vocabulary words we don't understand or otherwise the text is conceptually challenging then it's going to be much more challenging to pick up words incidentally through reading the text.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

So in the research and in your own opinion, what does it mean to know a word?

Tanya Wright:

So there are a few things we know about that. One is that there's a lot of evidence that a dictionary definition is not enough. So if we're having kids memorize a word with a dictionary definition on a flashcard or match the definition to the word, that's probably not enough information for a child or an adult really to make use of that word, to support comprehending texts, and certainly not as a writer or speaker. So we typically think of really knowing a word is actually having a lot of information about that word and that information can develop over time. So it's unlikely that one interaction with the word and its meaning is really going to help. So some of the things that people may not think of as knowing the meaning of a word might include an informal explanation of the word. That's what mostly we can do. If I ask you what a word means, you probably won't tell me the dictionary definition. You'll kind of say it in your own words synonyms or antonyms for that word. Categorical information like strawberries and bananas and peaches are all types of fruit. Multiple meanings of the word, particularly in different contexts. So bark on a tree compared to a dog barks. Morphological knowledge, so word parts. Slight differences between the word and the meaning of similar words. What's the difference between happy and exuberant? Are they exactly the same? Are they a little different? Formal and informal meanings. What's a cow versus don't have a cow? So there's just discipline specific meanings. That's a big one. Spelling of the word, of course. How we use it grammatically. The phonological knowledge about the word, how it sounds. We've all had the experience where we've read a word a lot of times, we don't actually know how to pronounce it.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

I've used it in conversation and someone's like, "what are you trying to say?" And then you realize you've been mispronouncing the word.

Tanya Wright:

For sure. So all of this is about word knowledge, and it's definitely not just a dictionary definition as being enough information to really use that word as a reader, writer, speaker, listener, or learner.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

And I think about as a teacher, what that means in terms of when I'm selecting vocabulary and teaching kids and supporting their knowledge, all those different ways that they have to understand. It's not just enough, like you said, to just give a dictionary definition. And I'm thinking it's not just enough to read it in a read aloud, give a quick on the run definition and move on. That's not going to help kids learn that word.

Tanya Wright:

It's not going to help them learn that word, but it's still important. Yeah. And let me say why it's important just for a moment. When we give those little child-friendly explanations during a read aloud, that helps kids to comprehend that text. Right there. And we don't want to be doing an interactive read aloud where some kids can't participate because they don't understand what a word means. So it's still super important to do those child-friendly explanations in the moment that said, we shouldn't think that that's going to create sort of long, a long-term situation where kids hold that word and can use it in ways they might want to. So we've got to differentiate kind of two purposes. One purpose of supporting vocabulary is to support the "right there" task. And another is that more long-term, I think this is a word, kids are really going to need to understand texts or to participate in the content area learning in our classroom. And that's going to take a little bit more work to learn much more information about the word.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

That's really helpful. And while we're talking about read aloud, are there any other tips you can give for teachers to help them teach word meetings and support comprehension during the read aloud? What are some best practices maybe before reading a text, during reading a text, after reading a text?

Tanya Wright:

So I think for sure during reading the text, we want to give those brief child-friendly explanations and they really need to be planned ahead of time. It's really rough to do it if you don't plan for it. You're kind of fumbling around, figuring out how to explain things.

We also want to take time to go back and revisit words that we think are important or we want kids to learn in more long term. And for those words, we want to engage kids in what's called in the research active processing. So active processing is really an opportunity to think about what the word means in sort of a deeper way. So we want them actively thinking about the words, actively discussing the words. So that might be discussing an image that represents the word, acting it out, using movement, thinking about examples, multiple meanings of the words, many of the things that I already described as the different kinds of word meanings, but really an opportunity to use it, think about the meaning, and pay a little bit of attention actively to that word.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

That's super helpful. And I'm thinking too, another thing that is important is text selection. How are we choosing which texts we're reading aloud and what series of texts that we're reading to them? There's a study that I read of yours from 2018 with Cervetti and Wang where you tested the idea of a conceptually coherent text set to support comprehension and knowledge building and you compare it against topic or theme driven text sets.

What are some key differences between conceptually coherent topic and theme based text sets?

Tanya Wright:

If I'm going to go read a bunch of texts about a particular to find out information, it's because I'm trying to figure something out and I might read five or six different texts to figure out whatever it is I'm interested in learning. That's really different than on Monday we read about the sun, and on Tuesday we read about volcanoes. And on Thursday birds, they're not connected and you're not building knowledge in a purposeful way. So we were interested in what we called conceptually coherent texts, and that was the idea that kids were going to read a set of texts where key concepts that we wanted them to learn reoccurred in different ways across those texts. So we really started with what are the concepts or ideas we want kids to learn? How can we structure the texts to make sure that kids encounter those concepts in different ways across different texts?

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

So what's the example of a concept versus a topic?

Tanya Wright:

So a topic might be we're studying fall.

A concept might be an idea we want kids to learn about the fall. So in fall the trees lose their leaves and this is part of the cycle of growth for trees or something like that. So be more, much more specific, something specific that we want kids to learn. Or maybe it would be the difference between we're studying the weather and I'm just going to grab all the books about the weather versus I'm really interested in how meteorologists predict the weather, and I'm going to look for specific things we can look for that might predict other things happening. So we're just a little more specific about the concepts or ideas we want kids to learn, and we're looking for those to repeat in different ways across books. So I think we often do broader topics or themes it's the fall or community helpers, but we don't necessarily think about what are the concepts inside that we want kids to learn in this particular unit, and how can I make sure that I'm providing texts that are going to develop those carefully for kids? So anyway, in our study, what we found not surprisingly, is that when we pay attention to having texts that are conceptually related kids are more likely to learn the concepts in their texts and they're also more likely to pick up associated vocabulary with those concepts and even learn some incidental vocabulary that's unrelated to the concepts. And we think that's because having more knowledge about the text really sets them up to have a little bit of cognitive resources left over to focus on some of these words that they might not know, which is what you mentioned before.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

And I'm thinking this has implications for the texts teachers are choosing to read aloud to kids, but also texts they might be using a guided practice in small groups or in conferences and maybe even the texts that they're directing kids toward for independent reading. I didn't plan to ask you this, but some say we should actually remove it all together, spend more time on teacher-directed activities. So I'm just wondering in your opinion, if there's ways to make independent reading more supportive, more worth the time, by steering kids and maybe the teachers having a heavier hand in supporting kids with text selection and steering them more toward conceptually coherent text sets or supporting them with texts that relate in some way to the text being studied as a class. I don't know. Are you aware of any research on that topic? Is it something you've looked at?

Tanya Wright:

So I think this is a big open question. I think if we are going to have kids read in the classroom I always say scaffolded independent reading, right?

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Yeah.

Tanya Wright:

I mean, just sending kids off to pick any book and read it that's kind of rough because a lot of kids are not spending that time reading especially if it's very challenging for them and they might need some support. But we do have some things we can do to support kids when they're independent reading. So text sets is one of them. Again, that's a scaffold we can give kids. There are things like ramp up texts that people have studied. So maybe if kids want to read about a particular topic, we might give them an easier text first and then more and more challenging texts until they get to the one that they really want to read. Other things like partnering kids up to read together can help them to stay focused on what they're trying to do, which is read the text. So there are a lot of different kinds of scaffolds that people have looked at and our work on text sets is one of those.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Thanks. So backing up to 2017, you did a systematic review of some studies that looked at brief pre-teaching, direct instruction of words before a teacher reads a text aloud or students engage with a text and then measured the impact on comprehension. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the trends and takeaways from that collection of studies and the idea of pre-teaching. Like how much time should they spend pre-teaching? How many words, how big of an impact, what methods should they use when pre-teaching?

Tanya Wright:

Yeah, so I wish I could answer those questions, but the studies did those things a lot of different ways. So there weren't enough studies for us to say this method of pre-teaching is better than that method of pre-teaching. What we did find out is that if kids are going to read independently in almost all cases and I think there are about 19 studies on this, some sort of brief teaching of word meanings before kids went off to read the text independently helped with their comprehension of that text. So it's like if you explain some of the meanings of words in a particular text that's going to help more often than not kids to read sense, that particular text, which makes a lot of good sense.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Makes a lot of sense.

Tanya Wright:

I would say that interactive read aloud are different. We may not need to do it because we're right there and we can teach it in the moment it comes up. We can give those child-friendly explanations right there, but we're not right there if kids are sent off to do some reading and so it's going to really help them to have seen a word that might be challenging. I would definitely show them the spelling know how to pronounce that word and know something about what it means so that when they encounter it in the text there's just that little scaffold to help with comprehension of the text at that point where the word comes up.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

And then you looked at studies where students were both taught the words directly and where they learned strategies for figuring out the meanings on their own, and what did you find there?

Tanya Wright:

So for direct teaching of word meanings, it definitely helps kids again to comprehend the text with those words in it. So when we teach kids a bunch of words, if they read a text with those words in it it helps them with their comprehension of that text. It does not necessarily, there's not a lot of evidence that it helps broadly with their comprehension. That sort of makes sense to me because why would learning a word help in a text that doesn't have that word, right?

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Right, right. Makes sense.

Tanya Wright:

But sometimes we think if we just teach enough vocabulary, it'll help kids broadly with their comprehension and there's less evidence for that. But I think something that we can know as teachers, if we help kids with the words in a text we're going to be using in school in any part of our day, that's going to help them to comprehend that text and be able to interact around it. So that's a really good thing. The research on vocabulary strategies for elementary is much more limited so it's harder for us to say exactly how that's working. So for example, we know that if we teach kids how to use context clues, they get better at using context clues, but we don't have a lot of information about how that transfers broadly to comprehension. That might just be because the studies tend to be short term and we don't know this. Being strategic is a much more long term endeavor and we'd really need to understand how that works. It might also be because the studies often look at just one strategy at a time. So they look at context clues or they look at helping kids to use word parts, morphology, to figure out word meanings. But one of the things we know from decoding strategies and comprehension strategies is that it's not a strategy. It's being strategic that what we want of kids. So we want them to have a bunch of things to try when they get stuck. So another thing we don't have a lot of studies on is teaching kids a number of vocabulary strategies, a number of ways to help themselves when they get stuck on the meaning of a word and seeing whether kids become more strategic and more able to apply to support their own comprehension by applying a number of strategies depending on what makes sense. If you think about things that we commonly teach kids like context clues, not all contexts really give good clues about word meaning, and sometimes they're even misleading, so that might not be helpful. Sometimes word parts might be helpful, but they're not helpful always. So what I usually say is we want kids to know a lot about words and how they work so that they can be strategic.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

That makes a lot of sense for, based on what you're saying, different strategies will work in different situations. So you need a little toolbox, a little repertoire to be able to, and then probably practice applying when to use which one. Or direction to try one. If it doesn't work, try another. Try another, like you're saying, to be strategic more general.

Tanya Wright:

And that's that conditional knowledge that is really part of all strategy instruction. I always joke that if we say it's visualizing day for comprehension, <laugh>, right? That doesn't really help because what if it's a text where visualizing is not going to assist your comprehension? It's not the case that every text that's going to help. So again, that's part of that conditional knowledge. When is this going to help me? When is it not? Is part of supporting kids and becoming strategic readers.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

So for teachers listening who are hearing it helps to pre-teach words sometimes or to give definitions on the run when I'm reading aloud. And it can also help to teach strategies as long as there's a repertoire of strategies and practice with the conditional knowledge, I need to know when to apply them. They might be wondering, well, what's the balance? How much time do I spend on them? When time's short, what do I prioritize? Is there any evidence around how much time to spend on each or how much to include? What's the right amount of teaching?

Tanya Wright:

I wish there was but there's not. And the time question is always so tricky in education because you could have five good minutes where so much learning happens or 20 minutes where it's really hard to get any learning to happen. So amount of time, number of words, those are really hard questions because there's never going to be a right answer for every child in every classroom. So I tend to think about it like this: How important is this word for kids to understand the text? How important is this word for kids to engage in the content area learning that we're doing to be able to express their ideas, to be able to share what they're thinking, to be able to write what they want to say? There's no right word or wrong word to teach. All the words are important words. So the best we can do in school is think, "Do kids need this for doing school? for learning, for participating in the text, we're using for learning the content that we're trying to work on together to read, write, speak, listen, and learn?" I think if we're on a regular basis doing that work over time, that accumulates a lot of words. I think it's also hard because each time we add words, we need to do some planning. So even those little child friendly explanations require planning. If we're going to pre-teach or revisit a word for active processing, it requires some planning. If we want to think about vocabulary during content area learning, it requires some planning. So what I always suggest to start somewhere plan something, right? Plan an interactive read aloud, plan one unit in content area unit get with your grade level team and each of you pick one book and plan the vocabulary around that book and then share what you've share what you've figured out. Then you have four books maybe so get started. But we really vocabulary everything that we do and most importantly, we want everybody to participate. We don't want anyone excluded because they don't know what some words mean. So the more we can include this across the day, the better it's going to be for kids.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

You know what I was curious about, and I didn't see this in the studies that I read, you may have written about it that, and I just didn't see it, but I think one of the moments in my life where my vocabulary grew the most was I had this teacher in high school who just used the biggest words all the time. She always was trying to find ways to weave more sophisticated vocabulary into speech, into oral language. And it encouraged us to use it in our writing. And it just was like this culture, this particular classroom, this culture of just speaking with more sophisticated vocabulary. I just wonder about that. I think sometimes, especially teachers maybe have younger children simplify language to make sure that the kids are understanding what they're saying or simplify to try to help them understand their directions. But I wonder if we're doing kids a disservice by not using richer vocabulary from the start.

Tanya Wright:

Well, let me answer that a couple ways. So there's really three well-documented ways that we learn words. We learn words with texts. We learn words when we learn new things. So if I take up gardening, I'm going to have to learn the name for the tools like shearers or hydrangeas are a type of plant. And we learn words, most of our words through oral language interactions. So if we think about babies and how they learn words, it's from people talking with them and around them. So we definitely learn the words that are in our environment. So if folks are saying more challenging or more sophisticated or what may seem like words for older kids in the environment, those are the words that kids are going to use because that's just what's around them. And one of our science units we were learning about clouds as part of a unit on predicting the weather. And the principal came to tell us afterwards that there were a couple of kids who were waiting for the bus and they were discussing whether there were cumulonimbus, clouds in the sky. These were kindergartners because they weren't sure if there was going to be a storm and if they'd have baseball practice. And they were just having a big debate about what kind of clouds were in the sky. And that's not because we drilled them on that word, that word was just part of the learning. And of course they could say it and use it if they wanted to. So there's no word that kids can't say. There's some words we don't want them to say, but they learn what's in their environment.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

So should kindergarten and first grade teachers use be intentional about using words that are more sophisticated, Even If it means sometimes you have to stop and explain what you're talking about?

Tanya Wright:

I would love to see that. So I would say once kids have conceptually figured out that something's there and have explored it, we can definitely supply them with the appropriate vocabulary word and they're just going to use it. What we don't want to see is vocabulary rate replacing opportunities for kids to explore or figure things out. And that's that. Let me put all the words for the unit on a board and make you memorize them before we've even done any of the learning of the unit. That's not a meaningful context for vocabulary learning, and it sort of makes it all about the words and not about the figuring out. So we have to think a little carefully about when we supply words, but I am definitely one who would say the more interesting words we use around kids, the more they're going to pick them up and use them themselves.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

I think that's a great place to stop. Thank you so much, Dr. Wright. This is really helpful conversation, and I'm sure a lot of teachers will find practical ideas to take to their classroom. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Tanya Wright:

Thank you.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

I'm now welcome my colleague Macie Kerbs for a conversation about practical takeaways. Macie, what did you think?

MACIE KERBS:

I like how she talks about vocabulary beyond just the ELA classroom. And what she talked about of oral language development, what kids are hearing and learning from their environment within the school, from science class to social studies to math. And I appreciate that because I feel like we've gotten so segmented and siloed within our specific subject areas. And vocabulary really spans across every domain and it impacts our knowledge in each of those domains. So I think the more we know vocabulary leads to comprehension, but comprehension is just not just for reading in ELA class, it's also for reading those really complex academic those texts with academic vocabulary within our science classroom. So I like her take and her perspective and it feels doable as a teacher.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

I think if I were in a classroom, which I'm not right now, but I think I would be thinking every day -- it could be really small within my reading lesson -- within my science lesson, or if I'm integrating my content with literacy instruction within this block of time, what are the specific either vocabulary strategies or specific words that I'm teaching? I think it could be so rich across the entire year, how many words and how many strategies for approaching new words your kids would have in their tool belt. Especially important, it's important for all kids, but think about the number of students who are learning English in addition to learning to read and write and learn science and social studies. It's just critical.

MACIE KERBS:

I was thinking actually about a school I was at last week when majority of their population are English learners and their students are working in independent reading time, trying to tackle these texts that they're super interested in. And one student I conferred with was getting into Egyptian history, but he was reading these graphic novels that were a fictional take on some common Egyptian tales, but he was getting stuck on some of the words and he kept saying, "I can't figure it out." One of the words was offering, and you really had to think about Egyptian culture and what they might be doing. And he kept saying, "They're giving wheat to his dad, but his dad's dead and I don't understand." And it was that point where his comprehension was breaking down, he understood he could recognize it but it wasn't the moment at that time where we had to necessarily teach the word as much as relying on multiple strategies to be able to solve it and actually a plug for your 2.0 book because I was able to pull a couple strategies from there to work with him.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Well, that particular example you give about "offerings" is, she didn't mention this, but it's in her article that I read the other thing she talked about to make sure kids understand is what's called "semantic ambiguity," which basically means there's multiple meanings. And I wonder if partly why that student was getting confused is because offer, offer, give, offering, giving, but it doesn't make sense here. And just being able to be flexible and like you said in that context, apply knowledge outside of what's happening right there in that text. And understanding Egyptian culture. I have to say, if I could go back and do independent reading over again, I definitely just let kids go and pick books from the classroom library and I under the thinking, okay, well they're choosing what's most interesting to them. They're going to be automatically engaged, they'll learn from the text. No problem. I definitely gave scaffolds for independent reading around conferring and setting goals and giving clear strategies to support those goals and regularly met with kids. So that scaffolding, yes. But having conceptually coherent texts, as a even more narrow even more focused than topic, it makes me think about, well first I'd have to order different books because I don't think I even would be able to create conceptually coherent text sets. Topic? Yes, maybe, but conceptually coherent? No, I don't have the books for that first of all. But second of all, how I would support kids during their independent reading time so that they're set up to be successful. I don't know. What did you say? Yeah, it struck me.

MACIE KERBS:

I thought about it too, especially as an upper elementary teacher where the content gets so sophisticated the deeper you go into it. And so I did a lot of text sets, but they were more topic based

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Topic

MACIE KERBS:

And I did book clubs which were more thematic based. So it made me think about how I would revise some of that work.

MACIE KERBS:

And I think you brought up a really good point about you didn't say dumbing down our language, but that's what I was thinking about is how much we dumb down for students and it's a disservice to them.

But when you think about access to texts, some of the texts don't have the complexity that they can read independently and how we can plant the vocabulary. So maybe even, I was reading a decodeable with my son last night and the girl was excited in the book. And so we talked about one of the prompts that the teacher's guide had was to plant the word enthusiastic. And so we talked about what does it mean to be enthusiastic? That word was not something he was decoding in the text, but he could pull from the storyline of the text and just little moments like that. It kind of made me think back of, man, I need to do better about even those emotions characters are feeling, not settling for the happy, the sad, but planting some of this more. Sometimes these emotions are really complex and kids, when they have those words, it helps them even be more introspective. So I'll have to do some more thinking about what this looks like in K-1 classrooms and how we can lift the level of our language to meet our students who are so emergent.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

I love that idea of just thinking through, and maybe this is part of pre-planning too, the not what's in-the-text vocabulary do I need to figure out, but when I'm talking about the text, and this is fiction, end informational texts, what are the words that we're using to describe the character, to describe motivations, those kinds of things. I'm also thinking what other opportunities are there to be more precise? So for example, if I'm going to have kids turn and talk and I say every time "turn and talk, turn and talk, turn and talk," what if I switch it up sometimes and say, turn and explain, turn into fine turn and describe turn and visualize turn and I'm adding in vocabulary into the regular flow of our classroom practice. But we're kind of planting this vocabulary now so that they understand it, like she said, first in oral language and then later in reading and writing.

MACIE KERBS:

I think that's beautiful. It also makes me think about how much I miss opportunities to play in the classroom in primary classrooms. Just the idea of inquiry and creating and just having that, even when we had the kitchen center and we were maybe targeted towards a specific theme of whatever the week was. Maybe it was Target that week and we set it up like a supermarket, something like that. But the vocabulary students were using

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Oh yeah.

MACIE KERBS:

At the supermarket differed than what they were going to use when they're shopping at a coffee shop. And some of that vocabulary was developed through those oral language moments that most classrooms don't have that.

JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:

Yeah, definitely put play back. There's so much research around the importance of play and thinking specifically about vocabulary learning, which is just one of many benefits to play. Absolutely. Well, Macie, thank you so much for joining me today.

MACIE KERBS:

Yes, thanks for having me.

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To the Classroom Episode 10: Tanya Wright - Jennifer Serravallo Author & Consulting

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Jennifer Serravallo, host of To the Classroom, interviews Dr. Tanya Wright, about her research focused on knowledge building and vocabulary, and comprehension. After the discussion about research, Jen is joined by college Macie Kerbs for a conversation about practical takeaways.

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Tim Rasinski: To the Classroom Episode 20 - Jennifer Serravallo Author & Consulting

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Jennifer Serravallo interviews Dr. Tim Rasinski about fluency instruction, and using both artful and science-based approaches to instruction.

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You can find every episode of Melissa & Lori Love Literacy right here on this page starting with the most recent episodes. You can even search below for any guests or topics you are interested in to find all the episodes you want to listen to!

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Melissa and Lori Love Literacy is a podcast for educators interested in learning more about the science of reading, knowledge building, and high-quality curriculum! Join Melissa and Lori as they tackle new ways of thinking about how to teach reading and writing. Guests include literacy researchers and experts, teachers and leaders, parents and advocates.

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You can find every episode of Melissa & Lori Love Literacy right here on this page starting with the most recent episodes. You can even search below for any guests or topics you are interested in to find all the episodes you want to listen to!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Melissa and Lori Love Literacy is a podcast for educators interested in learning more about the science of reading, knowledge building, and high-quality curriculum! Join Melissa and Lori as they tackle new ways of thinking about how to teach reading and writing. Guests include literacy researchers and experts, teachers and leaders, parents and advocates.

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Year of the Dog vocabulary words introduction

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Read Write Mike is the best Educational Consultation for Your Children. Improve your child writing and reading skills. Contact Us.

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Literary Strategies for Determining Importance and Inferring

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Aimsweb Comprehension Small Group Planner