The Riches of ASHA
A follow-on for anyone coming to the science of reading: ASHA’s publications have far more open-access research to offer us than most educators realise. Here is where I would start.
In another post, I wrote about the riches of Speech-Language Pathology and what this domain of research and practice has to offer for all educators.
I'd also like to highlight that relatedly, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and it's publications has a lot to offer to those of us getting into the Science of Reading.
Let me just give you a recent example: the "JSLHR Research Symposium Forum: Advances in Specific Language Impairment Research and Intervention" offers some really interesting and useful open access research. Here's some tidbits:
- There's a useful overview of dyslexia and DLD/SLI from Suzanne Adlof that stresses the need to screen and diagnose language for students who have demonstrated word reading problems because DLD and dyslexia often co-occur
"Considering the frequent comorbidity of dyslexia and SLI, all school-aged children who are identified with word reading problems should receive a thorough language evaluation." --Suzanne Adlof
- Spaced retrieval practice has gotten a lot of attention from ResearchEd type folks over the last few years (as it should), and so this piece on its benefits to word learning for students with SLI will be further reaffirming.
- I found this one by Pamela Hadley on "Exploring Sentence Diversity at the Boundary of Typical and Impaired Language Abilities" especially useful, as while I am fully invested in explicit sentence-level instruction, I sometimes struggle to know exactly what to investigate and unpack in a sentence beyond the basics. In this paper, Hadley provides a neat way to think of linguistic development at the sentence-level:
"...as a series of four developmental steps: words, verbs, childlike sentences, and adult sentences."
What she also highlights is how important verbs are as a developmental stage, given the complexity of the function of verbs in a sentence:
"Verbs carry information about the number of participants in an event and the semantic roles of those participants."
And much more in there to think about!