Science of Reading: The Podcast

S9 E12: Explicit instruction of academic language, with Adrea Truckenmiller, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education • Season 9 • Episode 12

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by Adrea Truckenmiller, Ph.D., associate professor of special education and school psychology at Michigan State University. Their conversation starts with defining academic language and breaking it down on the level of the word, the sentence, and full text. Adrea then touches on topics such as informational vs. narrative text structure, morphological complexity, and effective writing assessment. She also gives advice on how to implement explicit instruction on informational text and academic language, and details a few examples of what it can look like in the classroom. Adrea ends by discussing her passion for special education and encouraging educators to get involved.

Show notes:

Quotes:

“ Academic language is really a new language for everyone to learn.” —Adrea Truckenmiller, Ph.D.

"When we're thinking about teaching academic vocabulary, it's not just one time around. Sometimes we have to layer that instruction for deeper and deeper and deeper meaning.” —Susan Lambert

Episode timestamps*
02:00 Introduction: Who is Adrea Truckenmiller?
07:00 Defining academic language
11:00 Differences in academic language at different levels: word, sentence, text.
12:00 Word level: morphological complexity
17:00 Sentence level
18:00 Connectives
21:00 Text level: Informational text structure vs narrative text structure
24:00 Reading research for middle schoolers
26:00 Writing assessment structure for middle school
32:00 What does this type of instruction look like in the classroom?
34:00 Importance of grades 4 & 5 to the development of informational reading and writing skills
35:00 Advice for teachers on teaching information reading and writing
39:00 Get involved in special education
*Timestamps are approximate



Adrea Truckenmiller:

We found that this particular structure, when kids used it in their text, predicted their writing achievement.

Susan Lambert:

This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. This is episode 12 in our reading reboot, reexamining and building on foundational literacy concepts. Throughout this reading reboot, we've been paying particular attention to writing. And now we're in the midst of a special miniseries devoted to the key reciprocal relationship between reading and writing. Last time, Dr. Judith Hochman kicked off our deep dive into writing research, also sharing some of her practices from The Writing Revolution. This time we're exploring writing, assessment, informational text, academic language, and more. Our guest is Dr. Adrea Truckenmiller, associate professor of Special Education and School Psychology at Michigan State University. Stay tuned to learn more about morphological complexity, text structure, explicit instruction in academic language, and so much more. Here's our conversation. Well, I am so excited, Adrea Truckenmiller, to have you on today's episode. Thank you so much for offering to be a guest.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

I am really thrilled to be here. I've listened for a long time, and excited to get to chat with you today.

Susan Lambert:

So awesome. I always learn so much from these episodes, so I can't wait to learn from you. Before we get started, it would be great if you could introduce yourself to our listeners. Tell us a little bit about who you are? And how did you actually come into this place of literacy?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yeah, currently I'm an associate professor of Special Education and School Psychology at Michigan State University.

Susan Lambert:

Go green! Gotta say it.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Go white! Oh yeah, Michiganders <laugh>! It's wonderful to get to talk to another Michigander. So, yeah, how did I get into literacy? There's a lot of circuitous routes of how I got into it. But there's two events that really stick out to me in thinking about this. One is growing up with my brother, who really struggled in reading in school, and my parents. Watching them try to do absolutely everything they could to help him learn how to read. And they evaluated him for reading difficulties, and he was diagnosed with ADHD. But the reading problems didn't get to the point of a reading disability. But, he still had tutoring. My parents did everything they could. And we had a great tutor, who did teach him how to read, but it was later on in elementary school. It continued, this frustration, for a really long time. And it really frustrates me, looking back on it, that a lot of it was blamed on motivation. 'Cause clearly it wasn't 100% motivation, 'cause he kept going to school despite it being so hard and so frustrating. He showed up every day, and kept with it. And that stick-to-it-iveness really got him through, even though it was so frustrating. And so, I went to grad school. Looking at emotional behavior disorders was something that I was really interested in. Thinking that if we solve this behavioral, motivation issue, that that's really what's going to help kids succeed. So, all through grad school, that's what I studied. In my dissertation, I did a very small, randomized control trial where we gave kids feedback in writing and on the amount of writing that they produced. And we found that kids who got this feedback were made more progress in their writing production than kids who just practiced. And, actually, that just practicing writing without that feedback, those kids did worse than kids who didn't even practice writing. So, I was thinking about this whole motivation thing. And then, at my dissertation defense, I was very lucky to have Dr. Benita Blachman on my dissertation committee. They passed me <laugh>, of course, and everything was hunky-dory. But, she said something to me that really motivated my change in direction going forward. She said to me, "But what did you teach them to do?"

Susan Lambert:

Oh wow, that's powerful.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Really powerful. So I was like, "Oh, shoot! I didn't teach them anything about writing." So, that really stuck with me. And I was moving to Florida, right after I graduated from my PhD. I was like, "What do I do in Florida?" And Benita said, "Oh, go chat with Dr. Barbara Foorman at Florida Center for Reading Research." And so I went and talked to her, and she had several IES grants going on at that time, and she hired me to be a project coordinator on a big assessment project that she had under the Reading for Understanding initiative. One of the projects that I was working on with Barbara was to create a new reading assessment. We'd already created that with the IES funding. And so I got two state-level grants to run around the state and teach everybody how to use the new reading assessment, to drive better reading instruction across the state. That's really where I learned a ton about how to actually teach reading and writing. And changed my direction. It's not just motivation. It's not 50% motivation. It's a really big part of we need to teach reading. And we need to teach it really intensively to some students. And we need to get the tools in place for schools and teachers to be able to provide that instruction. That's really what drives most of my research now.

Susan Lambert:

Really interesting, that you started with writing and motivation. You can't go work with Dr. Barbara Foorman and not learn something about reading. So that's really cool. And you're starting to put these two pieces together then, in terms of your research now, aren't you?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yes.

Susan Lambert:

That's very cool. And one of the things that you've been thinking a lot about is academic language. And I would love if you could define it, and talk a little bit about why it's important.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yeah. So, academic language is usually thought of in its differentiation from colloquial oral language, like the way that we would talk to our friends. Academic language is really a new language for everyone to learn, and it's quite discipline specific. So if you want to be a lawyer, you have to learn the academic language of law. If you wanna go into medicine, you have to learn the academic language of medicine. If you want to be a scientist, you have to learn the language of science. And this type of language is differentiated, a little bit, from our oral language, because it has a much higher density of information-bearing words. We have lots of big vocabulary words, stuffed close together, all in one sentence. It also has greater precision. We use words that are more precise. And differentiate from words that are similar to it, but not having the exact same meaning. Getting exposure to this academic language takes a lot of intentionality. We might get incidental exposure to academic language from our families, depending on what they do. So, for example, I grew up on a dairy farm. The academic language that I was incidentally exposed to were things like the somatic cell count of milk, and ways to reduce that somatic cell count, so that milk was healthier for everybody. Those were the types of things that I was learning, and that I knew. But I wanted to learn stuff like statistics. We didn't have a statistics class in my high school. I asked my 11th grade math teacher, I'm like, "Can you teach us probabilities? Because I feel like I need those, that academic language set, for when I go into my psychology degree when I go to college. And this would be really helpful." So we have to intentionally teach those things, because it just doesn't happen naturally without that intention.

Susan Lambert:

Great. So I'm gonna try to summarize that I heard really three big things, is that academic language is different than what we normally talk, right? So I don't sit at the dinner table and talk to my husband in academic language. It's really a more of a language of schooling, if you will, right? I heard the density of vocabulary. And I think we're gonna dig into that a little bit. But I love how you said that, "Lots of big words stacked together." So at the sentence level, that can be a little bit overwhelming. And then I heard this thing about vocabulary, that it's precision in vocabulary. What that makes me think of is, I like the idea of knowing vocabulary words at different levels. So that you can use them in the exact right way that you want to represent what you're thinking. And that's an important concept in language development too. So I heard three things. Do those three things sound right to you?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yes, absolutely. What a great summary.

Susan Lambert:

So you also look at academic language at just the word level, which we talked about, you know, the precision and vocabulary, the sentence level, and the text level. Can you talk a little bit about the differences in those levels, as we think about text?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yeah. This was something that really opened up my mind, and helped me to organize things at that word level, at the sentence level, and at the text level. And that we need to teach at each of those three levels as ways to promote academic language. So, at the vocabulary level, we talked a lot about that because academic vocabulary has been studied quite a bit. And it's the thing that really drives a lot of learning at that word level. And so, we've been diving into what can we teach at that academic word level? And I have a really amazing doctoral student, who graduated, is now an assistant professor at Utah State University. Her name is Dr. Cherish Sarmiento. And she did this really great study, that was just published in the "British Journal of Educational Psychology," just in 2024, where we looked at academic vocabulary in particular, and we looked at the aspects of academic vocabulary that are important. We found two pieces that are helpful for teachers to think about. The first piece is the morphological complexity of words. We think about a word like photosynthesis, which is this one very precise word, but it represents a large concept. People who know photosynthesis really well will have a whole diagram in their brain of the sun shining on leaves, which then causes a chemical reaction, and a whole process. She's a biologist, so she'll tell you even more in depth. She has an even more complete representation of that whole process. So when you think of that one word, it's not just one. If you think of the word dog, you see a picture of a dog in your head, and now it's a whole process that you think of. But then, also, there's this morphological complexity to the word. And you can break down the word photosynthesis into its morphemes. Morphemes being the smallest unit of meaning. So you get photo, which means light. And if you know whenever you see that morpheme photo that it means light, you are more likely to have more generative vocabulary instead of just that entire word photosynthesis. You can now see photograph, or photographer, and know that photo means light every time that you see that word. So, we have these two aspects of vocabulary, the morphological complexity and then this content side that it's a big process, all in one word. And so, we found a better way to capture those aspects in assessment. Because we want to alert teachers to students' development in picking up academic vocabulary. In our writing measures, we used all of the typical vocabulary measures, like word complexity, the frequency that those words show up in text. And we actually found that the best way to measure vocabulary was number of long words that the students wrote, and that's words that had seven letters or more. It just so happens that a lot of our content words are seven letters or more, and it's a typical way of morphological complexity. Many of our words with seven or more letters have multiple morphemes within them. And so, that was a really useful finding that's kind of spurring our research along in the vocabulary side. So that's at the word level.

Susan Lambert:

That's cool.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

I'll take less time on the sentence and text level.

Susan Lambert:

That's OK. Can I make one comment, before you go to the sentence?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yeah.

Susan Lambert:

I think you said something that's really interesting, and really important, when it comes to vocabulary, which is, and the interplay between vocabulary and morphology. So like you said, if I have the word dog, or even the word photo, it's a singular thing. But where it gets much more complex is, even if I say the word love, it's almost Valentine's Day when we're recording this, right? So if I say that, that is not a concrete object in which I can look at. But then we do the word photosynthesis, and it's a process. So you have to have a whole mental model sitting behind you. And the deeper your understanding, like you said, of biology, the more you really know that word. There's, "Oh, I know that word." And there's, "I KNOW that word." You know what I mean?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yeah.

Susan Lambert:

So I think that's really important to say that when we're thinking about teaching academic vocabulary, of course in the context of content, that it's not just a one-time around. That, sometimes, we have to layer that instruction for deeper and deeper and deeper meaning. Does that seem right to you?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yes. I really like that extension that you just applied there. And there's some really cool interventions out there that do that. One of them being word generation, where they embed the vocabulary. They take the same set of words each week, and they teach them in English language arts. And then the next day they teach them in math class. And then the next day they teach them in social studies content. And then the next day they teach it in science content. To really build that context around it. And, I find that really helpful. One of the directions we're going is working with science teachers, especially, to teach them these vocabulary routines that will help them use what we know from vocabulary development to enhance their science instruction.

Susan Lambert:

Love that. Love it. OK. Sentences.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yes!

Susan Lambert:

And you can say all you want about sentences, because they're kind of important <laugh>.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

They are! Sentences have been a tricky thing to study. I think one of the things that I've found in our research is that it's been tricky to study because instead of bucketing off words, sentences, and discourse or text level into three distinct buckets. I don't think it's a distinct bucket. I think it's, rather, a continuum from word to sentence to text .

Susan Lambert:

Oh, I love that.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

So, for example, from word to sentence, the morphological use of a word depends on where that word is in the sentence. That blends that word to sentence level. For example, photograph, and photographer, or photography. You would change it depending on where it is in the sentence, and how you're using it. There's the blend there from word to sentence level. And then it gets even more fuzzy. We've debated in our lab how to distinguish between sentence level and text level. And we're still ... I just don't think there's a natural cutoff line. I'll say more about what I mean about that at the sentence level. We've been focusing a lot on these words called connectives. Some people have called them transition words. Some people call them conjunctions. There's a list of 50 or more words that count as connectives. These are words that mark temporal relationships. Things like first, second, last, subsequently. There's words that mark relationships between ideas. Although, however, because, therefore. And so, these words you can think of them at the sentence level, because you have maybe in one sentence one idea, and then another idea. And then you use the connective to mark the relationship between those two ideas within a sentence. But then, you also have these at the text level, to signal organization of the text. Like I said with those temporal ones, I have three reasons why this is important. First, second, and last, right? And then, at the end, you usually have in conclusion. There's another connective that we use to signal organization of the full text level. And so, these we've found to be really powerful. So with Dr. Foorman, we created a sentence-level assessment in grades 3–10 as part of the Reading for Understanding initiative. In this sentence-level measure, we used a lot of connectives. Students would read a sentence, and they would have to choose the connective that best worked in that sentence. And so, we were really testing those connectives. We did find that when we coded those items and looked at student's ability from grades 3–10, that those connectives were really important. So, that's been one of our targets for future research in how can we continue teaching these. The writing research people have included transition words and taught, kind of tangentially, those transition words, but we think that that might be a powerful place to do that. Also, the sentence-combining research, where there's been several studies that show that when you have students practice combining sentences together, and, naturally, if you're gonna combine sentences together, it's this whole idea of what's the relationship between these ideas and these sentences. And then, how do you mark that? Explicitly with a connective? Or how do you just put those ideas together? Into a full sentence? There's other things to think about at the sentence level, but, again, in our studies of typical measures, like complexity of sentences, those types of measures haven't done as well as these thinking about the connectives. But there's still a lot of research to be done.

Susan Lambert:

Is there anything more that you wanna say about the text level then, as we're continuing the continuum <laugh>?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yes. Yeah, definitely. The text level, particularly when thinking about academic language, is that informational text structure is different than narrative text structure. Our oral language tends to follow a narrative text structure in that we're usually talking about. Who, what, where, why, when, and how. Or we do a narrative arc, where there's setting up the setting, and then there's rising action, to the plot. And there's characters. And then different pieces happen there. But informational text structure is very different in that usually we're doing something like compare-and-contrast. We're doing something like description in science, because that's the type of informational text that I write about the most, and I like to think about the most. We have a structure called claim-evidence-reasoning. And so, most good writers in their science will make a claim. And then they'll provide the evidence that supports that claim. And then provide some conditions, or some reasoning, about how that evidence totally supports that claim. Or maybe there's some conditions on it, or other pieces of that. One of the things that I see is missing, and I'm sure we're gonna talk a lot about this moving forward, is explicit instruction in that structure of text. There's been some really cool folks who have been doing research teaching the structure of informational text, and teaching that explicitly. And that's something that we're doing, in my research too, is diving into that structure.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. Let's go there, because we can actually then give some educators potentially some helpful advice based on what you're finding. These investigations that you're doing with informational text is mostly with middle school. Is that right?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

I started out with grades 3–8. And then, looking at that, I was trying to figure out what was the best grade level to start with. And we found that grades 4–5 were where we were getting the biggest bang for our buck. And so, my research in the last four years has focused then on grades 4–5.

Susan Lambert:

Let's take a step back, and talk a little bit about what you found with middle school students, mostly. Well, for two reasons. Number one, it'd be interesting to see where you started, and why that led you to grades four and five. But our listeners also ask all the time about middle school, and what does this thing called the Science of Reading and Writing mean to middle school students? So, can we start with your early investigations in middle school and hear what you found? And then what led you to land in fourth and fifth grade?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yeah. Let me start with the assessment side of things. I was really interested in this informational text writing, because we didn't even have a measure of a well-established measure of informational writing. And by informational writing I mean students read an informational passage about a topic, and then they have to write about it. This is one of the Common Core State Standards. Probably one of the hardest to teach. And, I think it's the hardest to teach 'cause it's so complex. And we also don't have a lot of materials for it.

Susan Lambert:

Right. And what does it really mean? So, anyway. Yes.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yes <laugh> . So we created a measure of informational writing, which was really, really hard to do. I kind of figured out why people aren't doing this <laugh>. 'cause it was hard, because when you have multiple texts to read, you have to equate them across the texts. And a lot of people have been using text complexity measures, like lexiles and other things, to equate text. But really what we had been finding in the reading literature is that it's more important to measure how students read that text and equate based on students' performance on the text, not necessarily about the text aspects itself. And so, I had to run a whole study just to find passages that were equivalent, and see how students performed in response to that. That was the study where it was third grade through eighth grade. And, what makes it tricky in middle school, to your point, is that all of the constructs that we think about in reading, so the code part, the language comprehension part, they start to come together and become this unidimensional construct. And so it's almost impossible to figure out where to start, because kids are either uniformly high in everything, uniformly average in everything, or uniformly low on everything. That makes it really tricky, because you teach differently depending on if it's a vocabulary or word-level focus. If it's a spelling focus, a decoding focus, or if it's this text level focus, it's different. It makes it tricky at the middle school level, 'cause it just all comes together. And so, I created the Writing Architect, which is the name of my writing assessment, and we dove deeper into these different aspects of writing at the word, sentence, and text level. Can we measure them in ways that are different than the holistic way that we typically measure writing? A typical writing rubric will be a holistic scale, one to six. It has some details in that writing rubric that can kind of guide you towards instruction. Like, does the student have an introduction? Is their writing cohesive? But it's not super concrete for teachers.

Susan Lambert:

And it's very complicated to try to assess all of the students based on rubric. Right?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yes, absolutely. It was taking us forever. And then we still wouldn't get that reliable, right? Most kids' scores would be a three, right in the middle of that writing rubric. And then you spend all this time differentiating between three and four. Well , is this one really a three or four? And it wasn't very helpful for moving instruction forward. And so we wanted to look for those aspects that would be more concrete, that students could see a goal to shoot towards. And so, we started with just spelling and sentence accuracy, things like punctuation and verb-tense agreement, because that's what had been studied previously. And then we were like, "OK, this is not capturing all of the language comprehension, academic language side of things." And so we added two pieces. This is where we added those counting of the long words. We would have kids write, for 15 minutes, this informational response. And we found that the kids that had 13 or more long words were most likely to be proficient on the state test at the end of the year.

Susan Lambert:

Interesting.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yeah, they had some good vocabulary. They were learning the words. And so that makes a nice concrete goal. OK, how many long words does this kid have in here? Let's shoot for more. And we can do that by teaching the morphological complexity. We can teach the content words that are in that informational text . The bigger thing that we found was at the text level. We were trying to figure out where to start with the informational organization of text. Because there's just so many ways to do that. There's so many different genres, like I mentioned before, there's compare-and-contrast, descriptive structure, this claim-evidence-reasoning structure. There's so many others if you go deep into genre study. And it gets overwhelming for teachers, <laugh>. We can't teach them all. And so, we went to the Self-Regulated Strategy Development research by Karen Harris, who has a long history of really excellent, really effective instruction that combines this text structure instruction with how to regulate the significant self-regulation it takes to persist through a writing task. And so, I wanted to find the informational structure in there. They have a lot of studies on their narrative structure and on persuasive structure, but there were fewer on the informational. And we picked out this one structure called T. I.D.E., T-I-D-E. T, standing for topic sentence, I standing for ideas, D standing for details or detailed examination, and E standing for ending or conclusion. And we found that this particular structure, when kids used it in their text, predicted their writing achievement, on both nationally normed assessments and the state assessment. So this was our big Aha! of the goal setting. It should really be, and the measurement should really be, does the student have a topic sentence <laugh> ? How many ideas do they have in there supporting that topic sentence? Do they have the details in there? Do they have an ending? And we found that the kids who had a score of eight, which meant they had one topic sentence, one ending, and then three ideas, and three details, those students were most likely to be proficient in their informational writing. We think this is a really useful place to start. And it's really nice, gives a lot more information for instruction, and it gives some individual goal setting. Where you can assess your whole class and you might have, you know , five students who really need to work on that topic sentence. You might have 10 students who already got the topic sentence down, but they need to set some goals for ideas and details. So, that was one of our really exciting directions that we're going in.

Susan Lambert:

That's really cool. And that has instructional implications then. So if you're finding that that is important in assessment, teachers can actually then start to teach topic sentence ideas and details. And I know you've been in the classroom. How well do you see teachers teaching concepts like that?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yes. Last year was such an eye-opener. I got to be in 50 classrooms all across the state. I saw some just incredible instruction. One teacher took the morphology piece of things and did super cool stuff with that. She had her students make up animals based on putting together different morphemes and had them draw what that might look like. Super fun activity! We talked to them about this text structure piece of things. Another teacher did a really neat activity where they cut apart a story and asked the students to put it in order, and talk about why it goes in order that way, and which sentence would be a topic sentence and why. So we saw lots of really great things. The biggest frustration was that I felt for these teachers, because of the materials that they had available to them. I knew that they didn't have assessment, but what I didn't anticipate is that they wouldn't have explicit instructional materials as well. One example of this was a teacher was teaching topic sentence and giving an example up on the board. And a student said, "What is a topic sentence?"

Susan Lambert:

<laugh> Great question!

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Great question <laugh>. This sent me on a search. I went through all of the curriculum that they had, and all of the materials. There's no definition of a topic sentence.

Susan Lambert:

Wow!

Adrea Truckenmiller:

How are we supposed to teach that if we don't have these definitions readily available, or this basic structure?

Susan Lambert:

Let's go back to how you landed on fourth and fifth grade being really important in this process of development.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yeah. Thanks for asking about that. What we found in third grade was that the metrics that we were using didn't predict to the state test results as well as the informational units that we were measuring. And I hypothesized that that's because there's still this learning to read process that's occurring for many students in third grade. We don't have that expectation of students having to read a passage and then write about it until about fourth grade. So, almost all state tests require that starting in fourth grade. So, it seemed to be this developmental shift that seems to happen in fourth and fifth grade. And so, we wanted to get a really strong foundation for informational writing within that fourth and fifth grade, when they're expected to start doing that. So that we can set them up with a good foundation then for later, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, where you can start focusing maybe more on the more specific genres within informational writing. But we needed a foundation first on, "Hey, text has a structure <laugh>."

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. That makes sense. So, for teachers that are listening to this right now, what would be your best advice for them as they're trying to implement this in the classroom? Knowing that maybe the curriculum that they're using in their classroom doesn't have all the things, and we don't want them to go out and have to spend a whole bunch of time creating their own. Do you have any advice for them?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yes, there's some great free materials out there. I highly recommend Karen Harris' book on Self-Regulated Strategy Development. There's also some websites that make it easier to implement the Self-Regulated Strategy Development pieces. I think that book is a little overwhelming too, I'm looking up because I see it on my shelf, 'cause there's a lot of strategies in there. And so that's where I think we often get overwhelmed by, "Oh my gosh, we have to teach ALL of the things!" And I really wanna encourage teachers to just start in one spot.

Susan Lambert:

Great advice.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

The place I think to hone in and start in there is that T.I.D.E. organizational strategy. Start there. There's a lot of really great things about how to do self-talk in there, and other pieces of self-regulation. But just starting with there's a structure to text. The informational structure T.I.D.E. is a great place to start. And then layer in the self-talk pieces after you've gotten comfortable with it. And layer in some of the other parts. Then layer in the revising. Because revising is a HUGE piece of writing to learn <laugh>. So start simple. Don't feel like you need to do it all. And I think that's a little bit easier.

Susan Lambert:

That's great advice. And then I would also suspect that you would give the advice of using that T.I.D.E. along with whatever is happening in your ELA program already. So it doesn't feel like it's very disconnected for the students.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yeah. Yeah. I tried to do that in our project. That was our goal, to completely integrate into whatever their ELA curriculum was, and we had schools with different ELA curricula. But kind of across the board what we found is they only had one unit in informational writing. So it was really hard for them to layer this in, because there was only one. What we're thinking about now, and we're working on projects for this, is to integrate into the science content. Because there's always informational content in science.

Susan Lambert:

That's right .

Adrea Truckenmiller:

It is all informational content there. So, we're trying to layer in there. Because we found in fourth and fifth grade they usually spend the first six weeks on personal narrative. They do some persuasive. And usually the persuasive stuff they just kind of make up what the topic is. It's not really about informational text. So that was another struggle.

Susan Lambert:

That makes sense. So many connections between literacy and science, actually, between ELA and science, and what it does for literacy development. But that could be a whole other topic.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yes.

Susan Lambert:

Alright. We're kind of nearing the end here, so I wonder if you have any final thoughts or advice for our listeners?

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Yeah. This is gonna be unrelated to <laugh> everything we've talked about. I just saw in a Forbes article that special education is the number two most employable field right now.

Susan Lambert:

There you go.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

So, I encourage anybody listening to please consider special education. I was trained as a school psychologist, and totally fell in love with special ed as a field. It's a great home for me. And it's not just special education teaching, but also special education research. As you've seen throughout this whole episode, there's so much research that we need to do. And we need more people doing that research. I know people listening to this are all curious people. And continuing that curiosity, and contributing to that research and that teaching. It's a good partnership.

Susan Lambert:

I love how you bookended this whole episode by beginning with that and then encouraging others to go out and make that a field of exploration. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been really delightful. Thank you for helping us understand more about writing, and the reading-writing connection. For our listeners, we'll link some things in the show notes to help them understand more. Thank you again for joining us.

Adrea Truckenmiller:

Thank you.

Susan Lambert:

That was Dr. Adrea Truckenmiller, associate professor of Special Education and School Psychology at Michigan State University. She's the lead author of the Writing Architect, and she's published more than 40 articles. We'll have a link to a few of them in the show notes. You can also learn much more about Dr. Truckenmiller's work at her website atruck.msu.domains. Also, have you got a question for Dr. Truckenmiller? If so, you are in luck. Going to be answering a few listener questions in our Facebook group, Science of Reading: The Community. Find out more information, and submit your questions, by visiting our Facebook group, Science of Reading: The Community. Next up in this writing miniseries, I'll be joined by another expert who has devoted countless hours of research to writing and literacy, Dr. Young-Suk Grace Kim from University of California, Irvine. On this episode, we're going to talk about theoretical models. We'll talk about why theoretical models are useful for educators. We'll unpack her interactive dynamic literacy model, which details why and how reading and writing are interconnected. And we'll explore the implications of that framework for classroom instruction. Here's a quick preview.

Young-Suk Grace Kim:

A lot of educators understand that reading and writing are related, but I think we need to have really precise understanding about it. So, we need to have a good mental model about how they're related, and why they're related.

Susan Lambert:

That's next time. You can hear that conversation as soon as it drops, as well as access all of our episodes by subscribing to Science of Reading: The Podcast. You can find us on the podcast app of your choice. And while you're there, we'd love if you'd leave us a rating and review. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.