Speaking, Reading, and Writing in Children With Language Learning Disabilities

New Paradigms in Research and Practice

Katharine G. Butler, Elaine R. Silliman

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN:
  9780805833652
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135665920
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

The ability to use language in more literate ways has always been a central outcome of education. Today, however, "being literate" requires more than functional literacy, the recognition of printed words as meaningful. It requires the knowledge of how to use language as a tool for analyzing, synthesizing, and integrating what is heard or read in order to arrive at new interpretations.

Specialists in education, cognitive psychology, learning disabilities, communication sciences and disorders, and other fields have studied the language learning problems of school age children from their own perspectives. All have tended to emphasize either the oral language component or phonemic awareness. The major influence of phonemic awareness on learning to read and spell is well-researched, but it is not the only relevant focus for efforts in intervention and instruction. An issue is that applications are usually the products of a single discipline or profession, and few integrate an understanding of phonemic awareness with an understanding of the ways in which oral language comprehension and expression support reading, writing, and spelling. Thus, what we have learned about language remains disconnected from what we have learned about literacy; interrelationships between language and literacy are not appreciated; and educational services for students with language and learning disabilities are fragmented as a result.

This unique book, a multidisciplinary collaboration, bridges research, practice, and the development of new technologies. It offers the first comprehensive and integrated overview of the multiple factors involved in language learning from late preschool through post high school that must be considered if problems are to be effectively addressed. Practitioners, researchers, and students professionally concerned with these problems will find the book an invaluable resource.

Part I

Perspectives On Language, Literacy,
and Diversity

1
The Time Has Come to Talk
of Many Things

Elaine R. Silliman
University of South Florida
Katharine G. Butler
San Jose State University
Geraldine P. Wallach
California State University at Long Beach

“The Time Has Come to Talk of Many Things”

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—
Of cabbages—and—kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings

—Lewis Carroll, 1832-1898 (1976, p. 186, stanza 11)

As Carroll figured out well over 100 years ago, and as readers of this volume will discover, time is of the essence. This is especially true when it comes to teaching all of America’s children to be literate in the technological world of the 21st century, because all children, including those with disabilities, must now participate in the high-stakes assessment that states and school districts use to authenticate educational achievement. Standards-based educational reform efforts require that states and local school systems be held accountable for the learning of all children.

Federal legislation, including Goals 2000 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the 1997 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA; see Osborne, chap. 13, this volume)

require that all students participate in large-scale state and local assessment programs. The provision is that testing accommodations must be provided to those students with special needs who require such accommodations, including children with disabilities and those with limited English proficiency. For those children who are unable to take part in the general assessment, alternate assessments are proscribed (Thurlow, House, Scott, & Ysseldyke, 2000). Further, the performance of students on state and district assessments who receive special education and related services must now be separated from the scores of other students and reported publicly, as are the scores of students in general education. At the end of 1999, preliminary data from 12 states indicated that the majority of students in special education required accommodations for reading, writing, and math assessments (Thompson & Thurlow, 1999).

Also, during the 1990s, in combination with federal and state requirement for large-scale assessments, substantial amounts of state and federal dollars were invested to raise the academic achievement of children chronically struggling with literacy. In addition, the National Institutes of Health funded major research projects, as described in this volume, to achieve two purposes: One was directed to the identification of the cognitive and linguistic underpinnings of learning to read, and the other concerned in-depth study of evidence-based instructional practices that either prevented or ameliorated reading failure (Report of the National Reading Panel, 2000; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). As the new millenium begins, an important question is whether these efforts, grounded in standards-based educational reforms, resulted in positive changes in reading abilities across the diverse populations of American school children in general and special education.

OVER THE BRINK OF THE MILLENIUM:
THE STATE OF LITERACY LEARNING

Despite the concerted fiscal, research, and reform efforts of the 1990s, the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2001) continues to paint a distressing portrait for grade 4 reading achievement for the children who are the primary focus of this volume. For example:

• 37% of all grade 4 students are reading below the basic level when a proficient level of achievement is the expected standard. Reading below a basic level means that not even partial mastery had been attained of the knowledge and skills essential for comprehending narrative and informational texts. Importantly, proficiency in reading comprehension is defined as students’ ability to “demonstrate an overall understanding of the text, providing inferential as well as literal information … drawing conclusions, and making connections to their own experience” (NCES, 2001, p. 14).
• 71% of Caucasian students and 78% of Asian American students read at or above the basic level, whereas 35% and 46% of these two groups, respectively, read at the proficient level.
• The reading performance for 63% of African American students and 58% of Hispanic students in grade 4 fell below the basic level. Moreover, 60% of those from poverty level homes and 47% of children attending inner city schools were reading below the basic level.
• Finally, 39% of students who required accommodations to take the NAEP (e.g., one-on-one testing, small group testing, extended time, or the oral reading of directions) performed below the basic level. Only 30% demonstrated basic knowledge and skills for reading comprehension.

Two cautions are warranted in interpreting these data (NCES, 2001). First, population comparisons found to be statistically significant, such as the selected comparisons for race, ethnicity, or both, cannot be interpreted as statements about the absolute practical significance, or educational relevance, of the differences among these subgroups. Instead, the NCES urges that findings on subgroup differences should be used to inform and extend meaningful dialogue among the many members of the educational constituency, from policy makers to educators and the public, about the scope of the problem and its possible solutions. Second, causal inferences cannot be made to how reading is taught in public schools because of the host of sociocultural and socioeconomic (SES) factors that are outside of teachers’ control. These external factors also influence all aspects of learning to be literate. However, in regard to SES variables, recent longitudinal findings on home-school links between language and literacy development (Tabors, Snow, & Dickinson, 2001) showed that excellent pre-school experiences in language and literacy learning can counteract home experiences that “offer well below average access to language and literacy support” (p. 326).

Given these two qualifications, the 2000 report card shows a widening of the gap in reading abilities. Good readers improved their scores, whereas poor readers fell further behind. But there are other gaps that contribute in significant ways to the failure to meet adequately the literacy needs of all children. Among these gaps are the disciplinary and professional schisms that continue to exist among researchers and professionals, who, by virtue of their diverse training and interests, hold different views on, or have different levels of understanding about, the central role of language in learning. One outcome is the translation of these divergent views into practices that are often incompatible with conceptual frameworks and evidence about relationships between the multiple dimensions of language and literacy learning. As Lewis Carroll voiced through the Walrus, the time has come to talk across disciplines and professions, as this volume seeks to do, about the overarching importance of language in the educational lives of children. The central thesis of this text is that human communication underlies the ability to benefit from spoken and written discourse.

THE CENTRAL ROLE OF LANGUAGE
IN LITERACY LEARNING

Language is a tool for analyzing, synthesizing, and integrating what is heard or read in order to construct and express new interpretations. Early on, Halliday (1987) noted the absence of attention to spoken language processes in children’s literacy:

[Educational] investigators of the fifties and early sixties were not concerned with the particular place of spoken language in the learning process. It was assumed that students learnt by listening, but the expository aspects of teacher’s language were given little attention, while the notion that a student might be using his own talk as a means of learning was nowhere part of the picture. (Halliday, 1987, pp. 55-56)

Unlike the picture that Halliday painted of earlier decades, a significant number of disciplines are now engaged in the study of language. These disciplines include, among others, education, developmental psychology, the neurosciences, bilingual language learning, linguistics (including psycholinguistics), language science (specifically, speech-language pathology), and special education (particularly learning disabilities). Each discipline or specialty approaches the study of language from its own perspective, which makes for enlivening commentary and, occasionally, valuable new insights.

One of the critical insights that emerged from the research conducted during the late 1980s and the 1990s, is the crucial role of phonological sensitivity and phonological processing in children’s ability to master the alphabetic principle and develop automatic and fluent word recognition and spelling skills. Phonological sensitivity generally refers to the ability to consider the units of phonological structure at increasingly deeper levels of analysis, from the syllable level to the segmental (phonemic) level (Gottardo, Stanovich, & Siegel, 1996). Phonological processing pertains to those information processing capacities that are recruited by various tasks and require some level of more explicit analysis, such as segmentation, blending, or sound deletion (phonological awareness), the repetition of nonwords (phonological memory), or rapid naming (phonological retrieval). Letter name knowledge, knowledge of letter-sound names, and well-integrated phonemic awareness (sound-letter correspondences) are now well documented as the strongest kindergarten predictors of how adequately children will learn to read and spell in grade 1 (Report of the National Reading Panel, 2000; Snow et al., 1998). Phonological retrieval, as assessed by rapid naming tasks, may contribute more to individual differences in reading fluency at grade 4 rather than index the speed of accessing the segmental level in earlier grades (Torgesen et al., 2001).¹

As shown in Fig. 1.1, contemporary models of reading disability from both the neuroscience and psychoeducational literature share the unitary view that a phonological core deficit is a primary cause of reading failure (e.g., Lyon, 1999; Scanlon & Vellutino, 1996, 1997; Shaywitz et al., 1996; Stanovich, 2000; Torgesen et al., 2001; Torgesen & Wagner, 1998; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994; see Keogh, chap. 2, this volume, for a summary of these studies).

This view has also been described as a causal chain model (Scarborough, in press). Because the phonological route to recognize word meaning is not utilized efficiently, children do not have access to the meaning of print words, a situation that also affects their memory for spellings (Ehri, 2000). Subsequent problems with text comprehension and related consequences, such as the development of more literate vocabulary and syntactic constructions that are facilitated through reading, are then attributed to breakdowns at the level of phonological processing (Gottardo et al., 1996). Because of the strength and stability of this scientific evidence, new avenues have opened for the early identification of risk factors and the prevention, or reduction in the severity, of reading failure. Moreover, the current cross-disciplinary consensus is that the phonological core deficit represents a language-related impairment.

In spite of this basic consensus, a significant disparity exists among disciplines and their associated professions in the scope and meaning of “language-related.” This discrepancy has enormous significance for the conduct of research, as well as for the implementation of instructional programs for struggling readers as a group, regardless of whether these readers receive general education, special education, or related services. Two perplexing questions are unresolved. One concerns whether the spoken language basis of the “critical component skills” (Lyon & Moats, 1997, p. 579) that comprise word recognition skills and that have been implicated in the failure to read and spell as the phonological core deficit is a first-order cause, or do other language subsystems make significant contributions to the picture of a phonological core deficit? The second question pertains to the “fuzzy boundary” issue (Rumsey, 1996). Are a language disability and a learning (reading) disability two sides of the same coin? Or do they represent separate and distinct conditions, which may co-occur, but are not identical (Lyon, 1996)? The fuzzy boundary issue is not trivial because the recognition of a boundary has been codified in IDEA for over 25 years.

FIG. 1.1. Unitary perspective: Unidirectional causality and related consequences.

A language impairment and a learning disability are defined as two separate categories of disabilities. At the school level, this separation has resulted in the fragmentation of services for the very children who most need instructional and related services that are coherent, integrated, and coordinated (Snow, Scarborough, & Burns, 1999). At the research level, dissimilar disciplinary interests in the domains that influence literacy development, such as “cognition, culture, socialization, instruction, and language” (Snow et al., 1999, p. 49), have motivated a diverse set of research questions on the causes and consequences of reading disabilities. An outcome of this extensive gap in research foci is a disconnection between what is known about aspects of spoken language development, including atypical language development, and how these same aspects may support or interfere with learning to read, write, and spell proficiently.

Bridging the Fuzzy Boundary Gap

On the surface, the notion that spoken and written language development and disabilities form a reciprocal relationship seems less a matter of speculation today than it was 10 years ago. To say that reading and writing are language-related skills (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association [ASHA], 2001a; Kamhi & Catts, 1999; van Kleeck, 1998) or that early language disorders become school-age learning and reading disabilities, as Bashir and colleagues (Bashir, Kuban, Kleinman, & Scavuzzo, 1984) speculated earlier, is to express concepts that drive aspects of current thinking in speech-language pathology. However, although it may seem obvious in practice to state that children with language disabilities, reading disabilities, and learning disabilities may not be children from distinct populations (Wallach & Butler, 1994), the evidence to date suggests caution in drawing this conclusion for two reasons.

First, apart from the extensive neu...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• PART I: PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE, LITERACY, AND DIVERSITY
• PART II: THE CLASSROOM AS CONTEXT—NEW INSTRUCTIONAL DIRECTIONS
• PART III: LEGAL AND POLICY ISSUES IN SPECIAL EDUCATION AND POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION