Topic #3 Oral language and reading

Comments on the relationship between oral language and the reading process:

Oral language development is crucial to literacy acquisition in a variety of ways:

• understanding the phonology of language enables students to decode words in reading and encode them in spelling
• mastery of the syntax of a language enables students to understand at the sentence level and to convey their ideas accurately in writing
• having a strong oral vocabulary is essential for good text comprehension and for composition in writing
• there is even a connection between the pragmatic use of language, as in oral conversation and the use of language for a variety of purposes in written text

The brain is hard-wired to learn to speak, as mentioned in the Freeman text on the work of Noam Chomsky and others supporting the "innatist" view of language and in the fascinating recent work being done in neuroscience with brain imaging. 

Unlike oral language acquisition, however, the brain has to adapt areas designed for other purposes in order to learn to read. 

In my teaching experience, I've found that students identified with early language deficits in preschool and kindergarten often develop difficulties in learning to read in first grade and beyond.  It's also somewhat predictive in nature: young children with articulation problems often have difficulties acquiring word level skills (decoding words, reading fluency, and spelling), while children with broader language deficits (e.g. vocabulary, sentence construction) may struggle in comprehension as they move through into the intermediate grades.

English Language Learners may do very well in reading in the initial stages of decoding and fluency, but for a very different reason (i.e. English as a second language), also struggle in 4th grade and beyond with comprehension and content area reading.