Mondays are a great day for learning something new. I started my day with a one hour webinar by Dr. Jan Wasowicz on her Language Literacy Network. Let’s break down the features of this amazing tool, and how it can be used to enhance literacy outcomes for students.

The Roots: The Reading Rope Legacy

The Language Literacy Network is an infographic that Dr. Jan Wasowicz took a year to create. Her goal was to build on the well-known infographic that Dr. Scarborough published in 1992, The Reading Rope. The cool thing is that nearly all of what The Reading Rope taught us has stood the test of 30 years of research and practice. Cheers to Dr. Scarborough!

Four Quadrants of Literacy Skills

Dr. Wasowicz breaks down the skills needed to successfully read and write into four quadrants:

1. Language Comprehension Skills

2. Language Expression Skills

3. Written Word Production (Encoding)

4. Written Word Recognition (Decoding)

Written word production (encoding) and recognition (decoding) are considered foundational reading and writing skills. Language comprehension (understanding what you read) and expression (oral and written expression) are considered higher-level reading and writing skills.

Integrated Approach to Instruction

Does this mean that you teach the foundational skills first, and then once students are comfortable with those skills, move on to the higher-level thinking skills? While the answer you expect may be yes, which is the mindset I functioned under for many years as a dyslexia practitioner, the answer is actually NO. Dr. Wasowicz’s work is supported by hundreds of research studies that all conclude that the more integrated the approach to teaching foundational and higher-level thinking literacy skills from the beginning of instruction (think as early as possible), the more automated and robust these skills become for our students. Which is a win for everyone.

Importance of Foundational Skills

It’s also a relief as an educator because oftentimes, the foundational skills can take many students years to build. If they feel stuck there year after year and miss out on higher-level thinking opportunities they have the cognitive ability to access, they are at risk of falling behind and losing motivation for their own learning.

Accessing Each Quadrant With Intentional Instruction

Let’s take a really simple example. Think about teaching a student of any age to read and spell a CVC word such as map. They need to be able to recognize map by knowing what sounds the symbols m-a-p spell when they are put together in that order. They can access and practice this knowledge through orthographic mapping. They can dig into the meaning of the word by understanding what different sorts of maps there are and the various uses of the word map (noun vs. a verb, etc.). They can express what they think about maps or what they are learning about maps through their own writing. Don’t even get me started on how much fun the tool Google Earth would be in this particular literacy lesson. Do you see how every quadrant from the Language Literacy Network is addressed in the above example? Even when working with a single word in isolation, we can access each quadrant through intentional instruction.

Automated Sight Recognition

If you are a huge fan of The Reading Rope, you may notice that Dr. Wasowicz took out sight recognition from the word recognition side of the rope. I found this so interesting. Her rationale is that automated sight recognition of words is an outcome of instruction, not something you teach explicitly. This resonates with what research tells us and what I’ve observed in my own practice over the years. You can’t explicitly teach reading fluency, but you can help a student improve their reading fluency through direct instruction in decoding, orthographic mapping, morphology, prosody, background knowledge, vocabulary acquisition, and pragmatics.

The Role of Morphology

She also talks about how vital increasing morphology instruction is to improving reading and writing skills for our kids. One concrete idea I recently witnessed a teacher at Redwood Literacy using was swapping out nonsense word activities in her Wilson Reading System® lesson with morphemes. Since most students are unfamiliar with English morphemes without explicit instruction, you still get the benefit of the unfamiliar word pushing students to truly decode and encode, while also getting the opportunity to explicitly teach the language comprehension and language expression pieces.

A Glimpse into the Language Literacy Network

There is so much more to the Language Literacy Network and I’m excited to see how this new tool supports instructional best practices and student outcomes over the coming years. Thanks for all your work on this, Dr. Wasowicz. Hearing you talk through it, it is evident that it has been a labor of love.

Additional Resources

PS: I highly recommend you take this one hour webinar yourself if you find The Language Literacy Network intriguing or are curious about the speech-to-print method of teaching reading and writing skills. You can find it on the Learning By Design website for purchase ($79).

PSS: If you find yourself resonating with this article, google “dyslexia tutoring near me” to find support. Connecting with a knowledgeable professional can be transformative in empowering you with what you need to support your child with dyslexia. Also, reach out to other parents. You can google “dyslexia parent groups near me”, ask around at your child’s school, or attend a local event with dyslexia as its theme. Redwood Literacy and Redwood Schools are also here to help if we can. Reach out anytime.