Literacy Mini Series: Part 1 - Managing the Impact of Technology with Core Tenets of Effective Literacy Instruction
As an SLP, I spend a fair amount of time doing research on strategies for building language and literacy skills.
Back when I was in elementary school, I didn’t catch on to reading right away.
Thankfully, the odds were in my favor. I not only had a good education, but I also had an environment that gave me lots of opportunities to practice literacy skills.
My mom perpetually had a massive library of books in the house (and still does to this day). My parents wouldn’t let us get a Nintendo, so when we got bored we were encouraged to pick up a book.
Socializing was different too. When I wanted to send one of my friends a message sometimes I’d write them an actual paper note in class.
Communication, reading, writing, and entertainment were all different then. Free time now is spent on social media and gaming where you can send instant messages to other people. And when you want to socialize, you can simply send your friends a text.
Based on current social rules, those texts often don’t have to be written in a complete sentence with correct grammar and spelling.
With all this technology and texting, it makes me wonder if kids are getting enough opportunities to learn solid reading and writing skills.
As a speech-language pathologist, I am especially interested in this topic because most of the kids I’ve worked with already struggle with reading and writing. For those kids, having opportunities to develop literacy is especially important. That’s why I’m always on high-alert, paying attention to how technology is affecting kids (for better or for worse).
At this point, it’s hard to tell exactly what the impact is going to be long term when it comes to texting. So far, the evidence has been inconclusive (Chang, 2009; Mittal, 2015; Plester, Wood & Bell, 2008). When you look at reading scores from the National Center of Education Statistics, the 2020 survey only shows a slight decline from 2017 to 2019, but still an improvement compared to the 90s when I was growing up (NCEA, 2020).
There are certainly some benefits to technology, especially for people with disabilities who need certain accessibility features. In some instances, there’s a chance that it could be helping.
Kids with diagnoses like dyslexia or developmental language delays (among others) are at-risk for struggling to read and write, so they need all the “good” practice they can get. Texting definitely gives them practice at “something”. Whether it’s “good” practice-I’m not so sure.
How can we make sure our kids have opportunities to develop good reading and spelling skills?
If you’re supporting kids with diagnoses that impact their ability to develop literacy skills, the amount of practice they get is crucial to their development.
However, the digital world may make it difficult for kids to get as much practice as they need.
So the question becomes, what do we do about it?
The simple answer: We do the same thing we did before texting was a thing.
And we need to be more diligent about it than ever given all the distractions kids have these days.
The next question: How do we do that?
We use the tenets of successful literacy intervention.
There are a handful of skills students need in order to become successful readers, spellers, and writers as I explain here.
When we’re thinking about how to support struggling readers/spellers living in a “txt-spk” world, we want to consider these things:
- Structured Intervention
- Active and Generative Use
- Integration of Skills
Structured intervention for reading needs to focus on many different skills that support literacy; such as vocabulary and background knowledge, the structural components of language such as syntax, higher-lever cognitive processes and executive functioning, and foundational skills that support spelling and decoding. For purposes of this article series I’ll focus on decoding (Henbest & Apel, 2021; Kucan, 2012).
Active and generative use refers to the way we learn linguistic units and use them flexibility across different contexts. For example, we learn that phonemes are sound units that can be used in different ways to form words. We also learn that words are linguistic units that can be used generatively to form sentences (Walsh & Blewitt, 2006).
Integration of skills refers to our ability to apply skills we’ve learned from one context to another, build automaticity with skills through practice, and learn skills implicitly based on our prior knowledge.
I’ll be covering all three of these tenets in the following articles.
In Part 2 of this series, I’ll elaborate on the first one: Structured Intervention.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan is the founder and owner/operator of Dr. Karen, LLC, a company focused on empowering therapists and educators to design interventions that support language, literacy, and executive functioning. She has a doctorate in Special Education and Director of Special Education and Assistive Technology credentials from Illinois State University, as well as a master’s and bachelor’s from Illinois State University in speech-language pathology. She spent 14 years in the school systems and has held various roles in leadership and higher education teaching and mentoring clinicians. She is the host of the De Facto Leaders podcast, where she shares evidence-based practices, her own experiences, and guest interviews on topics relating to education and healthcare reform. She currently holds a management role with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
You can connect with Dr. Karen on LinkedIn here.
Sign up for her “How to Be Evidence-Based and Neurodiversity-Affirming by Supporting Executive Functioning” training here.
Download her “Executive Functioning Implementation Guide for School Teams” here.
Listen to the De Facto Leaders podcast here.
References
National Center for Education Statistics (2020). The condition of education 2020.
