The Science of Language and Reading - Intermediate

Topics covered include:  

• Oral language: a deeper dive. Vocabulary across the tiers, discourse genres, inferencing and metalanguage
• Cognitive Load Theory, explicit instruction, and leveraging neuroscience research in the classroom.
• Progress monitoring in reading: Making the most of Multi-Tiered Systems of Support.
• Developmental Language Disorder: The most common disorder you've never heard of.
• Learning Difficulties: Early identification and intervention to close the achievement gap.

This course is delivered by La Trobe University SOLAR Lab Directors; Professor Pamela Snow and Associate Professor Tanya Serry. 

About the La Trobe SOLAR Lab 
The SOLAR Lab was established in the School of Education at La Trobe University in 2020 to promote the scientific study of the role of oral language skills in the emergence and consolidation of reading skills across the school years (pre-school to secondary). We use the term “reading” to specifically identify core skills in text decoding and language comprehension that also promote success in writing and spelling. 
 
Research carried out in the SOLAR Lab emphasises interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers, teachers and allied health professionals such as speech-language pathologists and psychologists, with a view to promoting efficient translation of new knowledge into classroom practice and encouraging the cessation of practices for which the empirical evidence-base is weak or non-existent.

After completing this course, you will be able to:

• Apply the concept of vocabulary tiers to their teaching and will understand how literal and non-literal language differ from each other
• Design explicit teaching tasks and learning activities that take account of limited working memory capacity, to maximise long-term memory gains
• Apply Response to Intervention tiers to teaching in their school and appropriately place this within a context-specific MTSS framework
• Define and describe language disorder and developmental language disorder and consider the implications  and practical solutions for students with these diagnoses in the classroom.  
• Define and describe learning difficulty and learning disability and examine the implications for students. We use a Response to Intervention framework alongside regular progress monitoring, to contextualise this topic.