March 12, 2025 • 43 mins
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:
- Resources
- Read: “Academic language use in middle school informational writing”
- Read: “Academic language and the challenge of reading for learning about science”
- Read: “Writing to read: Parallel and independent contributions of writing research to the Science of Reading”
- Read: “What is important to measure in sentence-level language comprehension?
- Read: Making the Writing Process Work: Strategies for Composition and Self-Regulation
- Join our Facebook community group: www.facebook.com/groups/scienceofreading.
- Connect with Susan Lambert: www.linkedin.com/in/susan-lambert-b1512761/.
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
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Adrea Truckenmiller (00:00):
We found that this particular structure,
when kids used it in theirtext, predicted their writing
achievement.
Susan Lambert (00:11):
This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science
of Reading (00:13):
The Podcast from Amplify. This is episode 12 in
our reading reboot, reexaminingand building on foundational
literacy concepts. Throughoutthis reading reboot, we've been
paying particular attention towriting. And now we're in the
midst of a special miniseriesdevoted to the key reciprocal
(00:34):
relationship between readingand writing. Last time, Dr.
Judith Hochman kicked off ourdeep dive into writing
research, also sharing some ofher practices from The Writing
Revolution. This time we'reexploring writing, assessment,
informational text, academiclanguage, and more. Our guest
(00:54):
is Dr. Adrea Truckenmiller,associate professor of Special
Education and School Psychologyat Michigan State University.
Stay tuned to learn more aboutmorphological complexity, text
structure, explicit instructionin academic language, and so
much more. Here's ourconversation. Well, I am so
(01:19):
excited, Adrea Truckenmiller,to have you on today's episode.
Thank you so much for offeringto be a guest.
Adrea Truckenmiller (01:26):
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 (01:31):
So awesome. I always learn so much from these
episodes, so I can't wait tolearn from you. Before we get
started, it would be great ifyou could introduce yourself to
our listeners. Tell us a littlebit about who you are? And how
did you actually come into thisplace of literacy?
Adrea Truckenmiller (01:48):
Yeah, currently I'm an associate
professor of Special Educationand School Psychology at
Michigan State University.
Susan Lambert (01:55):
Go green! Gotta say it.
Adrea Truckenmiller (01:57):
Go white! Oh yeah, Michiganders!
It's wonderful to get to talkto another Michigander. So,
yeah, how did I get intoliteracy? There's a lot of
circuitous routes of how I gotinto it. But there's two events
that really stick out to me inthinking about this. One is
growing up with my brother, whoreally struggled in reading in
(02:20):
school, and my parents.
Watching them try to doabsolutely everything they
could to help him learn how toread. And they evaluated him
for reading difficulties, andhe was diagnosed with ADHD. But
the reading problems didn't getto the point of a reading
disability. But, he still hadtutoring. My parents did
(02:43):
everything they could. And wehad a great tutor, who did
teach him how to read, but itwas later on in elementary
school. It continued, thisfrustration, for a really long
time. And it really frustratesme, looking back on it, that a
lot of it was blamed onmotivation. 'Cause clearly it
wasn't 100% motivation, 'causehe kept going to school despite
(03:07):
it being so hard and sofrustrating. He showed up every
day, and kept with it. And thatstick-to-it-iveness really got
him through, even though it wasso frustrating. And so, I went
to grad school. Looking atemotional behavior disorders
was something that I was reallyinterested in. Thinking that if
(03:30):
we solve this behavioral,motivation issue, that that's
really what's going to helpkids succeed. So, all through
grad school, that's what Istudied. In my dissertation, I
did a very small, randomizedcontrol trial where we gave
kids feedback in writing and onthe amount of writing that they
(03:54):
produced. And we found thatkids who got this feedback were
made more progress in theirwriting 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 practicewriting. So, I was thinking
(04:15):
about this whole motivationthing. And then, at my
dissertation defense, I wasvery lucky to have Dr. Benita
Blachman on my dissertationcommittee. They passed me
, of course, andeverything was hunky-dory. But,
she said something to me thatreally motivated my change in
(04:37):
direction going forward. Shesaid to me, "But what did you
teach them to do?"
Susan Lambert (04:43):
Oh wow, that's powerful.
Adrea Truckenmiller (04:45):
Really powerful. So I was like, "Oh,
shoot! I didn't teach themanything about writing." So,
that really stuck with me. AndI was moving to Florida, right
after I graduated from my PhD.
I was like, "What do I do inFlorida?" And Benita said, "Oh,
go chat with Dr. BarbaraFoorman at Florida Center for
(05:08):
Reading Research." And so Iwent and talked to her, and she
had several IES grants going onat that time, and she hired me
to be a project coordinator ona big assessment project that
she had under the Reading forUnderstanding initiative. One
of the projects that I wasworking on with Barbara was to
(05:29):
create a new readingassessment. We'd already
created that with the IESfunding. And so I got two
state-level grants to runaround the state and teach
everybody how to use the newreading assessment, to drive
better reading instructionacross the state. That's really
where I learned a ton about howto actually teach reading and
(05:52):
writing. And changed mydirection. It's not just
motivation. It's not 50%motivation. It's a really big
part of we need to teachreading. And we need to teach
it really intensively to somestudents. And we need to get
the tools in place for schoolsand teachers to be able to
(06:14):
provide that instruction.
That's really what drives mostof my research now.
Susan Lambert (06:19):
Really interesting, that you started
with writing and motivation.
You can't go work with Dr.
Barbara Foorman and not learnsomething about reading. So
that's really cool. And you'restarting to put these two
pieces together then, in termsof your research now, aren't
you?
Adrea Truckenmiller (06:35):
Yes.
Susan Lambert (06:35):
That's very cool. And one of the things
that you've been thinking a lotabout is academic language. And
I would love if you coulddefine it, and talk a little
bit about why it's important.
Adrea Truckenmiller (06:46):
Yeah. So, academic language is usually
thought of in itsdifferentiation from colloquial
oral language, like the waythat we would talk to our
friends. Academic language isreally a new language for
everyone to learn, and it'squite discipline specific. So
(07:09):
if you want to be a lawyer, youhave to learn the academic
language of law. If you wannago into medicine, you have to
learn the academic language ofmedicine. If you want to be a
scientist, you have to learnthe language of science. And
this type of language isdifferentiated, a little bit,
(07:31):
from our oral language, becauseit has a much higher density of
information-bearing words. Wehave lots of big vocabulary
words, stuffed close together,all in one sentence. It also
has greater precision. We usewords that are more precise.
(07:51):
And differentiate from wordsthat are similar to it, but not
having the exact same meaning.
Getting exposure to thisacademic language takes a lot
of intentionality. We might getincidental exposure to academic
language from our families,depending on what they do. So,
(08:13):
for example, I grew up on adairy farm. The academic
language that I wasincidentally exposed to were
things like the somatic cellcount of milk, and ways to
reduce that somatic cell count,so that milk was healthier for
everybody. Those were the typesof things that I was learning,
(08:35):
and that I knew. But I wantedto learn stuff like statistics.
We didn't have a statisticsclass in my high school. I
asked my 11th grade mathteacher, I'm like, "Can you
teach us probabilities? BecauseI feel like I need those, that
academic language set, for whenI go into my psychology degree
when I go to college. And thiswould be really helpful." So we
(08:58):
have to intentionally teachthose things, because it just
doesn't happen naturallywithout that intention.
Susan Lambert (09:06):
Great. So I'm gonna try to summarize that I
heard really three big things,is that academic language is
different than what we normallytalk, right? So I don't sit at
the dinner table and talk to myhusband in academic language.
It's really a more of alanguage of schooling, if you
will, right? I heard thedensity of vocabulary. And I
think we're gonna dig into thata little bit. But I love how
(09:27):
you said that, "Lots of bigwords stacked together." So at
the sentence level, that can bea little bit overwhelming. And
then I heard this thing aboutvocabulary, that it's precision
in vocabulary. What that makesme think of is, I like the idea
of knowing vocabulary words atdifferent levels. So that you
(09:48):
can use them in the exact rightway that you want to represent
what you're thinking. Andthat's an important concept in
language development too. So Iheard three things. Do those
three things sound right toyou?
Adrea Truckenmiller (10:00):
Yes, absolutely. What a great
summary.
Susan Lambert (10:02):
So you also look at academic language at just
the word level, which we talkedabout, you know, the precision
and vocabulary, the sentencelevel, and the text level. Can
you talk a little bit about thedifferences in those levels, as
we think about text?
Adrea Truckenmiller (10:17):
Yeah. This was something that really
opened up my mind, and helpedme to organize things at that
word level, at the sentencelevel, and at the text level.
And that we need to teach ateach of those three levels as
ways to promote academiclanguage. So, at the vocabulary
(10:39):
level, we talked a lot aboutthat because academic
vocabulary has been studiedquite a bit. And it's the thing
that really drives a lot oflearning at that word level.
And so, we've been diving intowhat can we teach at that
academic word level? And I havea really amazing doctoral
(11:01):
student, who graduated, is nowan assistant professor at Utah
State University. Her name isDr. Cherish Sarmiento. And she
did this really great study,that was just published in the
"British Journal of EducationalPsychology," just in 2024,
where we looked at academicvocabulary in particular, and
(11:22):
we looked at the aspects ofacademic vocabulary that are
important. We found two piecesthat are helpful for teachers
to think about. The first pieceis the morphological complexity
of words. We think about a wordlike photosynthesis, which is
(11:45):
this one very precise word, butit represents a large concept.
People who know photosynthesisreally well will have a whole
diagram in their brain of thesun shining on leaves, which
then causes a chemicalreaction, and a whole process.
(12:07):
She's a biologist, so she'lltell you even more in depth.
She has an even more completerepresentation of that whole
process. So when you think ofthat one word, it's not just
one. If you think of the worddog, you see a picture of a dog
in your head, and now it's awhole process that you think
of. But then, also, there'sthis morphological complexity
to the word. And you can breakdown the word photosynthesis
(12:31):
into its morphemes. Morphemesbeing the smallest unit of
meaning. So you get photo,which means light. And if you
know whenever you see thatmorpheme photo that it means
light, you are more likely tohave more generative vocabulary
instead of just that entireword photosynthesis. You can
(12:55):
now see photograph, orphotographer, and know that
photo means light every timethat you see that word. So, we
have these two aspects ofvocabulary, the morphological
complexity and then thiscontent side that it's a big
process, all in one word. Andso, we found a better way to
(13:21):
capture those aspects inassessment. Because we want to
alert teachers to students'development in picking up
academic vocabulary. In ourwriting measures, we used all
of the typical vocabularymeasures, like word complexity,
the frequency that those wordsshow up in text. And we
(13:41):
actually found that the bestway to measure vocabulary was
number of long words that thestudents wrote, and that's
words that had seven letters ormore. It just so happens that a
lot of our content words areseven letters or more, and it's
a typical way of morphologicalcomplexity. Many of our words
(14:03):
with seven or more letters havemultiple morphemes within them.
And so, that was a reallyuseful finding that's kind of
spurring our research along inthe vocabulary side. So that's
at the word level.
Susan Lambert (14:14):
That's cool.
Adrea Truckenmiller (14:15):
I'll take less time on the sentence and
text level.
Susan Lambert (14:18):
That's OK. Can I make one comment, before you go
to the sentence?
Adrea Truckenmiller (14:20):
Yeah.
Susan Lambert (14:21):
I think you said something that's really
interesting, and reallyimportant, when it comes to
vocabulary, which is, and theinterplay between vocabulary
and morphology. So like yousaid, if I have the word dog,
or even the word photo, it's asingular thing. But where it
gets much more complex is, evenif I say the word love, it's
(14:45):
almost Valentine's Day whenwe're recording this, right? So
if I say that, that is not aconcrete object in which I can
look at. But then we do theword photosynthesis, and it's a
process. So you have to have awhole mental model sitting
behind you. And the deeper yourunderstanding, like you said,
of biology, the more you reallyknow that word. There's, "Oh, I
(15:09):
know that word." And there's,"I KNOW that word." You know
what I mean?
Adrea Truckenmiller (15:13):
Yeah.
Susan Lambert (15:13):
So I think that's really important to say
that when we're thinking aboutteaching academic vocabulary,
of course in the context ofcontent, that it's not just a
one-time around. That,sometimes, we have to layer
that instruction for deeper anddeeper and deeper meaning. Does
that seem right to you?
Adrea Truckenmiller (15:35):
Yes. I really like that extension that
you just applied there. Andthere's some really cool
interventions out there that dothat. One of them being word
generation, where they embedthe vocabulary. They take the
same set of words each week,and they teach them in English
(15:58):
language arts. And then thenext day they teach them in
math class. And then the nextday they teach them in social
studies content. And then thenext day they teach it in
science content. To reallybuild that context around it.
And, I find that reallyhelpful. One of the directions
we're going is working withscience teachers, especially,
(16:19):
to teach them these vocabularyroutines that will help them
use what we know fromvocabulary development to
enhance their scienceinstruction.
Susan Lambert (16:30):
Love that. Love it. OK. Sentences.
Adrea Truckenmiller (16:34):
Yes!
Susan Lambert (16:34):
And you can say all you want about sentences,
because they're kind ofimportant.
Adrea Truckenmiller (16:38):
They are! Sentences have been a tricky
thing to study. I think one ofthe things that I've found in
our research is that it's beentricky to study because instead
of bucketing off words,sentences, and discourse or
text level into three distinctbuckets. I don't think it's a
(17:02):
distinct bucket. I think it's,rather, a continuum from word
to sentence to text .
Susan Lambert (17:08):
Oh, I love that.
Adrea Truckenmiller (17:09):
So, for example, from word to sentence,
the morphological use of a worddepends on where that word is
in the sentence. That blendsthat word to sentence level.
For example, photograph, andphotographer, or photography.
You would change it dependingon where it is in the sentence,
(17:31):
and how you're using it.
There's the blend there fromword to sentence level. And
then it gets even more fuzzy.
We've debated in our lab how todistinguish between sentence
level and text level. And we'restill ... I just don't think
there's a natural cutoff line.
I'll say more about what I meanabout that at the sentence
(17:51):
level. We've been focusing alot on these words called
connectives. Some people havecalled them transition words.
Some people call themconjunctions. There's a list of
50 or more words that count asconnectives. These are words
that mark temporalrelationships. Things like
(18:12):
first, second, last,subsequently. There's words
that mark relationships betweenideas. Although, however,
because, therefore. And so,these words you can think of
them at the sentence level,because you have maybe in one
(18:35):
sentence one idea, and thenanother idea. And then you use
the connective to mark therelationship between those two
ideas within a sentence. Butthen, you also have these at
the text level, to signalorganization of the text. Like
I said with those temporalones, I have three reasons why
this is important. First,second, and last, right? And
(18:57):
then, at the end, you usuallyhave in conclusion. There's
another connective that we useto signal organization of the
full text level. And so, thesewe've found to be really
powerful. So with Dr. Foorman,we created a sentence-level
assessment in grades 3–10 aspart of the Reading for
(19:18):
Understanding initiative. Inthis sentence-level measure, we
used a lot of connectives.
Students would read a sentence,and they would have to choose
the connective that best workedin that sentence. And so, we
were really testing thoseconnectives. We did find that
when we coded those items andlooked at student's ability
(19:40):
from grades 3–10, that thoseconnectives were really
important. So, that's been oneof our targets for future
research in how can we continueteaching these. The writing
research people have includedtransition words and taught,
kind of tangentially, thosetransition words, but we think
(20:02):
that that might be a powerfulplace to do that. Also, the
sentence-combining research,where there's been several
studies that show that when youhave 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 theseideas and these sentences. And
(20:24):
then, how do you mark that?
Explicitly with a connective?
Or how do you just put thoseideas together? Into a full
sentence? There's other thingsto think about at the sentence
level, but, again, in ourstudies of typical measures,
like complexity of sentences,those types of measures haven't
done as well as these thinkingabout the connectives. But
(20:46):
there's still a lot of researchto be done.
Susan Lambert (20:48):
Is there anything more that you wanna
say about the text level then,as we're continuing the
continuum?
Adrea Truckenmiller (20:57):
Yes. Yeah, definitely. The text level,
particularly when thinkingabout academic language, is
that informational textstructure is different than
narrative text structure. Ouroral language tends to follow a
narrative text structure inthat we're usually talking
(21:18):
about. Who, what, where, why,when, and how. Or we do a
narrative arc, where there'ssetting up the setting, and
then there's rising action, tothe plot. And there's
characters. And then differentpieces happen there. But
informational text structure isvery different in that usually
(21:40):
we're doing something likecompare-and-contrast. We're
doing something likedescription in science, because
that's the type ofinformational text that I write
about the most, and I like tothink about the most. We have a
structure calledclaim-evidence-reasoning. And
so, most good writers in theirscience will make a claim. And
(22:04):
then they'll provide theevidence that supports that
claim. And then provide someconditions, or some reasoning,
about how that evidence totallysupports that claim. Or maybe
there's some conditions on it,or other pieces of that. One of
the things that I see ismissing, and I'm sure we're
gonna talk a lot about thismoving forward, is explicit
(22:26):
instruction in that structureof text. There's been some
really cool folks who have beendoing research teaching the
structure of informationaltext, and teaching that
explicitly. And that'ssomething that we're doing, in
my research too, is diving intothat structure.
Susan Lambert (22:43):
Yeah. Let's go there, because we can actually
then give some educatorspotentially some helpful advice
based on what you're finding.
These investigations thatyou're doing with informational
text is mostly with middleschool. Is that right?
Adrea Truckenmiller (22:58):
I started out with grades 3–8. And then,
looking at that, I was tryingto figure out what was the best
grade level to start with. Andwe found that grades 4–5 were
where we were getting thebiggest bang for our buck. And
so, my research in the lastfour years has focused then on
grades 4–5.
Susan Lambert (23:17):
Let's take a step back, and talk a little
bit about what you found withmiddle school students, mostly.
Well, for two reasons. Numberone, it'd be interesting to see
where you started, and why thatled you to grades four and
five. But our listeners alsoask all the time about middle
school, and what does thisthing called the Science of
Reading and Writing mean tomiddle school students? So, can
(23:37):
we start with your earlyinvestigations in middle school
and hear what you found? Andthen what led you to land in
fourth and fifth grade?
Adrea Truckenmiller (23:46):
Yeah. Let me start with the assessment
side of things. I was reallyinterested in this
informational text writing,because we didn't even have a
measure of a well-establishedmeasure of informational
writing. And by informationalwriting I mean students read an
(24:10):
informational passage about atopic, and then they have to
write about it. This is one ofthe Common Core State
Standards. Probably one of thehardest to teach. And, I think
it's the hardest to teach'cause it's so complex. And we
also don't have a lot ofmaterials for it.
Susan Lambert (24:25):
Right. And what does it really mean? So,
anyway. Yes.
Adrea Truckenmiller (24:28):
Yes . So we created a
measure of informationalwriting, which was really,
really hard to do. I kind offigured out why people aren't
doing this. 'cause itwas hard, because when you have
multiple texts to read, youhave to equate them across the
texts. And a lot of people havebeen using text complexity
(24:51):
measures, like lexiles andother things, to equate text.
But really what we had beenfinding in the reading
literature is that it's moreimportant to measure how
students read that text andequate based on students'
performance on the text, notnecessarily about the text
aspects itself. And so, I hadto run a whole study just to
(25:16):
find passages that wereequivalent, and see how
students performed in responseto that. That was the study
where it was third gradethrough eighth grade. And, what
makes it tricky in middleschool, to your point, is that
all of the constructs that wethink about in reading, so the
code part, the languagecomprehension part, they start
(25:39):
to come together and becomethis unidimensional construct.
And so it's almost impossibleto figure out where to start,
because kids are eitheruniformly high in everything,
uniformly average ineverything, or uniformly low on
everything. That makes itreally tricky, because you
(26:00):
teach differently depending onif it's a vocabulary or
word-level focus. If it's aspelling focus, a decoding
focus, or if it's this textlevel focus, it's different. It
makes it tricky at the middleschool level, 'cause it just
all comes together. And so, Icreated the Writing Architect,
which is the name of my writingassessment, and we dove deeper
(26:23):
into these different aspects ofwriting at the word, sentence,
and text level. Can we measurethem in ways that are different
than the holistic way that wetypically measure writing? A
typical writing rubric will bea holistic scale, one to six.
It has some details in thatwriting rubric that can kind of
(26:45):
guide you towards instruction.
Like, does the student have anintroduction? Is their writing
cohesive? But it's not superconcrete for teachers.
Susan Lambert (26:55):
And it's very complicated to try to assess
all of the students based onrubric. Right?
Adrea Truckenmiller (27:01):
Yes, absolutely. It was taking us
forever. And then we stillwouldn't get that reliable,
right? Most kids' scores wouldbe a three, right in the middle
of that writing rubric. Andthen you spend all this time
differentiating between threeand four. Well , is this one
really a three or four? And itwasn't very helpful for moving
(27:22):
instruction forward. And so wewanted to look for those
aspects that would be moreconcrete, that students could
see a goal to shoot towards.
And so, we started with justspelling and sentence accuracy,
things like punctuation andverb-tense agreement, because
that's what had been studiedpreviously. And then we were
(27:45):
like, "OK, this is notcapturing all of the language
comprehension, academiclanguage side of things." And
so we added two pieces. This iswhere we added those counting
of the long words. We wouldhave kids write, for 15
minutes, this informationalresponse. And we found that the
(28:06):
kids that had 13 or more longwords were most likely to be
proficient on the state test atthe end of the year.
Susan Lambert (28:15):
Interesting.
Adrea Truckenmiller (28:15):
Yeah, they had some good vocabulary. They
were learning the words. And sothat makes a nice concrete
goal. OK, how many long wordsdoes this kid have in here?
Let's shoot for more. And wecan do that by teaching the
morphological complexity. Wecan teach the content words
that are in that informationaltext . The bigger thing that we
(28:36):
found was at the text level. Wewere trying to figure out where
to start with the informationalorganization of text. Because
there's just so many ways to dothat. There's so many different
genres, like I mentionedbefore, there's
compare-and-contrast,descriptive structure, this
claim-evidence-reasoningstructure. There's so many
(28:57):
others if you go deep intogenre study. And it gets
overwhelming for teachers,. We can't teach them
all. And so, we went to theSelf-Regulated Strategy
Development research by KarenHarris, who has a long history
of really excellent, reallyeffective instruction that
combines this text structureinstruction with how to
(29:22):
regulate the significantself-regulation it takes to
persist through a writing task.
And so, I wanted to find theinformational structure in
there. They have a lot ofstudies on their narrative
structure and on persuasivestructure, but there were fewer
on the informational. And wepicked out this one structure
(29:45):
called T. I.D.E., T-I-D-E. T,standing for topic sentence, I
standing for ideas, D standingfor details or detailed
examination, and E standing forending or conclusion. And we
found that this particularstructure, when kids used it in
their text, predicted theirwriting achievement, on both
(30:09):
nationally normed assessmentsand the state assessment. So
this was our big Aha! of thegoal setting. It should really
be, and the measurement shouldreally be, does the student
have a topic sentence ?
How many ideas do they have inthere supporting that topic
sentence? Do they have thedetails in there? Do they have
(30:30):
an ending? And we found thatthe kids who had a score of
eight, which meant they had onetopic sentence, one ending, and
then three ideas, and threedetails, those students were
most likely to be proficient intheir informational writing. We
think this is a really usefulplace to start. And it's really
nice, gives a lot moreinformation for instruction,
(30:52):
and it gives some individualgoal setting. Where you can
assess your whole class and youmight have, you know , five
students who really need towork on that topic sentence.
You might have 10 students whoalready got the topic sentence
down, but they need to set somegoals for ideas and details.
So, that was one of our reallyexciting directions that we're
(31:15):
going in.
Susan Lambert (31:16):
That's really cool. And that has
instructional implicationsthen. So if you're finding that
that is important inassessment, teachers can
actually then start to teachtopic sentence ideas and
details. And I know you've beenin the classroom. How well do
you see teachers teachingconcepts like that?
Adrea Truckenmiller (31:35):
Yes. Last year was such an eye-opener. I
got to be in 50 classrooms allacross the state. I saw some
just incredible instruction.
One teacher took the morphologypiece of things and did super
cool stuff with that. She hadher students make up animals
(31:59):
based on putting togetherdifferent morphemes and had
them draw what that might looklike. Super fun activity! We
talked to them about this textstructure piece of things.
Another teacher did a reallyneat activity where they cut
apart a story and asked thestudents to put it in order,
and talk about why it goes inorder that way, and which
(32:20):
sentence would be a topicsentence and why. So we saw
lots of really great things.
The biggest frustration wasthat I felt for these teachers,
because of the materials thatthey had available to them. I
knew that they didn't haveassessment, but what I didn't
(32:40):
anticipate is that theywouldn't have explicit
instructional materials aswell. One example of this was a
teacher was teaching topicsentence and giving an example
up on the board. And a studentsaid, "What is a topic
sentence?"
Susan Lambert (32:59):
Great
question!
Adrea Truckenmiller (33:02):
Great question. This sent me
on a search. I went through allof the curriculum that they
had, and all of the materials.
There's no definition of atopic sentence.
Susan Lambert (33:15):
Wow!
Adrea Truckenmiller (33:16):
How are we supposed to teach that if we
don't have these definitionsreadily available, or this
basic structure?
Susan Lambert (33:24):
Let's go back to how you landed on fourth and
fifth grade being reallyimportant in this process of
development.
Adrea Truckenmiller (33:32):
Yeah.
Thanks for asking about that.
What we found in third gradewas that the metrics that we
were using didn't predict tothe state test results as well
as the informational units thatwe were measuring. And I
hypothesized that that'sbecause there's still this
(33:55):
learning to read process that'soccurring for many students in
third grade. We don't have thatexpectation of students having
to read a passage and thenwrite about it until about
fourth grade. So, almost allstate tests require that
starting in fourth grade. So,it seemed to be this
(34:17):
developmental shift that seemsto happen in fourth and fifth
grade. And so, we wanted to geta really strong foundation for
informational writing withinthat fourth and fifth grade,
when they're expected to startdoing that. So that we can set
them up with a good foundationthen for later, sixth, seventh,
and eighth grade, where you canstart focusing maybe more on
(34:40):
the more specific genres withininformational writing. But we
needed a foundation first on,"Hey, text has a structure
."
Susan Lambert (34:48):
Yeah. That makes sense. So, for teachers that
are listening to this rightnow, what would be your best
advice for them as they'retrying to implement this in the
classroom? Knowing that maybethe curriculum that they're
using in their classroomdoesn't have all the things,
and we don't want them to goout and have to spend a whole
(35:10):
bunch of time creating theirown. Do you have any advice for
them?
Adrea Truckenmiller (35:16):
Yes, there's some great free
materials out there. I highlyrecommend Karen Harris' book on
Self-Regulated StrategyDevelopment. There's also some
websites that make it easier toimplement the Self-Regulated
Strategy Development pieces. Ithink that book is a little
(35:39):
overwhelming too, I'm lookingup because I see it on my
shelf, 'cause there's a lot ofstrategies in there. And so
that's where I think we oftenget overwhelmed by, "Oh my
gosh, we have to teach ALL ofthe things!" And I really wanna
encourage teachers to juststart in one spot.
Susan Lambert (35:59):
Great advice.
Adrea Truckenmiller (36:00):
The place I think to hone in and start in
there is that T.I.D.E.
organizational strategy. Startthere. There's a lot of really
great things about how to doself-talk in there, and other
pieces of self-regulation. Butjust starting with there's a
(36:20):
structure to text. Theinformational structure
T.I.D.E. is a great place tostart. And then layer in the
self-talk pieces after you'vegotten comfortable with it. And
layer in some of the otherparts. Then layer in the
revising. Because revising is aHUGE piece of writing to learn
(36:40):
. So start simple. Don'tfeel like you need to do it
all. And I think that's alittle bit easier.
Susan Lambert (36:47):
That's great advice. And then I would also
suspect that you would give theadvice of using that T.I.D.E.
along with whatever ishappening in your ELA program
already. So it doesn't feellike it's very disconnected for
the students.
Adrea Truckenmiller (37:03):
Yeah.
Yeah. I tried to do that in ourproject. That was our goal, to
completely integrate intowhatever their ELA curriculum
was, and we had schools withdifferent ELA curricula. But
kind of across the board whatwe found is they only had one
unit in informational writing.
(37:26):
So it was really hard for themto layer this in, because there
was only one. What we'rethinking about now, and we're
working on projects for this,is to integrate into the
science content. Becausethere's always informational
(37:48):
content in science.
Susan Lambert (37:50):
That's right .
Adrea Truckenmiller (37:50):
It is all informational content there.
So, we're trying to layer inthere. Because we found in
fourth and fifth grade theyusually spend the first six
weeks on personal narrative.
They do some persuasive. Andusually the persuasive stuff
they just kind of make up whatthe topic is. It's not really
about informational text. Sothat was another struggle.
Susan Lambert (38:13):
That makes sense. So many connections
between literacy and science,actually, between ELA and
science, and what it does forliteracy development. But that
could be a whole other topic.
Adrea Truckenmiller (38:25):
Yes.
Susan Lambert (38:26):
Alright. We're kind of nearing the end here,
so I wonder if you have anyfinal thoughts or advice for
our listeners?
Adrea Truckenmiller (38:35):
Yeah. This is gonna be unrelated to
everything we've talkedabout. I just saw in a Forbes
article that special educationis the number two most
employable field right now.
Susan Lambert (38:50):
There you go.
Adrea Truckenmiller (38:52):
So, I encourage anybody listening to
please consider specialeducation. I was trained as a
school psychologist, andtotally fell in love with
special ed as a field. It's agreat home for me. And it's not
just special educationteaching, but also special
(39:13):
education research. As you'veseen throughout this whole
episode, there's so muchresearch that we need to do.
And we need more people doingthat research. I know people
listening to this are allcurious people. And continuing
that curiosity, andcontributing to that research
(39:35):
and that teaching. It's a goodpartnership.
Susan Lambert (39:38):
I love how you bookended this whole episode by
beginning with that and thenencouraging others to go out
and make that a field ofexploration. Thank you so much
for joining us. It's beenreally delightful. Thank you
for helping us understand moreabout writing, and the
reading-writing connection. Forour listeners, we'll link some
(39:59):
things in the show notes tohelp them understand more.
Thank you again for joining us.
Adrea Truckenmiller (40:04):
Thank you.
Susan Lambert (40:08):
That was Dr.
Adrea Truckenmiller, associateprofessor of Special Education
and School Psychology atMichigan State University.
She's the lead author of theWriting Architect, and she's
published more than 40articles. We'll have a link to
a few of them in the shownotes. You can also learn much
(40:29):
more about Dr. Truckenmiller'swork at her website
atruck.msu.domains. Also, haveyou got a question for Dr.
Truckenmiller? If so, you arein luck. Going to be answering
a few listener questions in ourFacebook group, Science of
Reading (40:46):
The Community. Find out more information, and
submit your questions, byvisiting our Facebook group,
Science of Reading (40:53):
The Community. Next up in this
writing miniseries, I'll bejoined by another expert who
has devoted countless hours ofresearch to writing and
literacy, Dr. Young-Suk GraceKim from University of
California, Irvine. On thisepisode, we're going to talk
about theoretical models. We'lltalk about why theoretical
(41:16):
models are useful foreducators. We'll unpack her
interactive dynamic literacymodel, which details why and
how reading and writing areinterconnected. And we'll
explore the implications ofthat framework for classroom
instruction. Here's a quickpreview.
Young-Suk Grace Kim (41:34):
A lot of educators understand that
reading and writing arerelated, but I think we need to
have really preciseunderstanding about it. So, we
need to have a good mentalmodel about how they're
related, and why they'rerelated.
Susan Lambert (41:50):
That's next time. You can hear that
conversation as soon as itdrops, as well as access all of
our episodes by subscribing toScience of Reading: The
Podcast. You can find us on thepodcast app of your choice. And
while you're there, we'd loveif you'd leave us a rating and
review. Science of Reading (42:08):
The Podcast is brought to you by
Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert.
Thank you so much forlistening.
We found that this particular structure,
when kids used it in theirtext, predicted their writing
achievement.
Susan Lambert (00:11):
This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science
of Reading (00:13):
The Podcast from Amplify. This is episode 12 in
our reading reboot, reexaminingand building on foundational
literacy concepts. Throughoutthis reading reboot, we've been
paying particular attention towriting. And now we're in the
midst of a special miniseriesdevoted to the key reciprocal
(00:34):
relationship between readingand writing. Last time, Dr.
Judith Hochman kicked off ourdeep dive into writing
research, also sharing some ofher practices from The Writing
Revolution. This time we'reexploring writing, assessment,
informational text, academiclanguage, and more. Our guest
(00:54):
is Dr. Adrea Truckenmiller,associate professor of Special
Education and School Psychologyat Michigan State University.
Stay tuned to learn more aboutmorphological complexity, text
structure, explicit instructionin academic language, and so
much more. Here's ourconversation. Well, I am so
(01:19):
excited, Adrea Truckenmiller,to have you on today's episode.
Thank you so much for offeringto be a guest.
Adrea Truckenmiller (01:26):
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 (01:31):
So awesome. I always learn so much from these
episodes, so I can't wait tolearn from you. Before we get
started, it would be great ifyou could introduce yourself to
our listeners. Tell us a littlebit about who you are? And how
did you actually come into thisplace of literacy?
Adrea Truckenmiller (01:48):
Yeah, currently I'm an associate
professor of Special Educationand School Psychology at
Michigan State University.
Susan Lambert (01:55):
Go green! Gotta say it.
Adrea Truckenmiller (01:57):
Go white! Oh yeah, Michiganders
It's wonderful to get to talkto another Michigander. So,
yeah, how did I get intoliteracy? There's a lot of
circuitous routes of how I gotinto it. But there's two events
that really stick out to me inthinking about this. One is
growing up with my brother, whoreally struggled in reading in
(02:20):
school, and my parents.
Watching them try to doabsolutely everything they
could to help him learn how toread. And they evaluated him
for reading difficulties, andhe was diagnosed with ADHD. But
the reading problems didn't getto the point of a reading
disability. But, he still hadtutoring. My parents did
(02:43):
everything they could. And wehad a great tutor, who did
teach him how to read, but itwas later on in elementary
school. It continued, thisfrustration, for a really long
time. And it really frustratesme, looking back on it, that a
lot of it was blamed onmotivation. 'Cause clearly it
wasn't 100% motivation, 'causehe kept going to school despite
(03:07):
it being so hard and sofrustrating. He showed up every
day, and kept with it. And thatstick-to-it-iveness really got
him through, even though it wasso frustrating. And so, I went
to grad school. Looking atemotional behavior disorders
was something that I was reallyinterested in. Thinking that if
(03:30):
we solve this behavioral,motivation issue, that that's
really what's going to helpkids succeed. So, all through
grad school, that's what Istudied. In my dissertation, I
did a very small, randomizedcontrol trial where we gave
kids feedback in writing and onthe amount of writing that they
(03:54):
produced. And we found thatkids who got this feedback were
made more progress in theirwriting 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 practicewriting. So, I was thinking
(04:15):
about this whole motivationthing. And then, at my
dissertation defense, I wasvery lucky to have Dr. Benita
Blachman on my dissertationcommittee. They passed me
she said something to me thatreally motivated my change in
(04:37):
direction going forward. Shesaid to me, "But what did you
teach them to do?"
Susan Lambert (04:43):
Oh wow, that's powerful.
Adrea Truckenmiller (04:45):
Really powerful. So I was like, "Oh,
shoot! I didn't teach themanything about writing." So,
that really stuck with me. AndI was moving to Florida, right
after I graduated from my PhD.
I was like, "What do I do inFlorida?" And Benita said, "Oh,
go chat with Dr. BarbaraFoorman at Florida Center for
(05:08):
Reading Research." And so Iwent and talked to her, and she
had several IES grants going onat that time, and she hired me
to be a project coordinator ona big assessment project that
she had under the Reading forUnderstanding initiative. One
of the projects that I wasworking on with Barbara was to
(05:29):
create a new readingassessment. We'd already
created that with the IESfunding. And so I got two
state-level grants to runaround the state and teach
everybody how to use the newreading assessment, to drive
better reading instructionacross the state. That's really
where I learned a ton about howto actually teach reading and
(05:52):
writing. And changed mydirection. It's not just
motivation. It's not 50%motivation. It's a really big
part of we need to teachreading. And we need to teach
it really intensively to somestudents. And we need to get
the tools in place for schoolsand teachers to be able to
(06:14):
provide that instruction.
That's really what drives mostof my research now.
Susan Lambert (06:19):
Really interesting, that you started
with writing and motivation.
You can't go work with Dr.
Barbara Foorman and not learnsomething about reading. So
that's really cool. And you'restarting to put these two
pieces together then, in termsof your research now, aren't
you?
Adrea Truckenmiller (06:35):
Yes.
Susan Lambert (06:35):
That's very cool. And one of the things
that you've been thinking a lotabout is academic language. And
I would love if you coulddefine it, and talk a little
bit about why it's important.
Adrea Truckenmiller (06:46):
Yeah. So, academic language is usually
thought of in itsdifferentiation from colloquial
oral language, like the waythat we would talk to our
friends. Academic language isreally a new language for
everyone to learn, and it'squite discipline specific. So
(07:09):
if you want to be a lawyer, youhave to learn the academic
language of law. If you wannago into medicine, you have to
learn the academic language ofmedicine. If you want to be a
scientist, you have to learnthe language of science. And
this type of language isdifferentiated, a little bit,
(07:31):
from our oral language, becauseit has a much higher density of
information-bearing words. Wehave lots of big vocabulary
words, stuffed close together,all in one sentence. It also
has greater precision. We usewords that are more precise.
(07:51):
And differentiate from wordsthat are similar to it, but not
having the exact same meaning.
Getting exposure to thisacademic language takes a lot
of intentionality. We might getincidental exposure to academic
language from our families,depending on what they do. So,
(08:13):
for example, I grew up on adairy farm. The academic
language that I wasincidentally exposed to were
things like the somatic cellcount of milk, and ways to
reduce that somatic cell count,so that milk was healthier for
everybody. Those were the typesof things that I was learning,
(08:35):
and that I knew. But I wantedto learn stuff like statistics.
We didn't have a statisticsclass in my high school. I
asked my 11th grade mathteacher, I'm like, "Can you
teach us probabilities? BecauseI feel like I need those, that
academic language set, for whenI go into my psychology degree
when I go to college. And thiswould be really helpful." So we
(08:58):
have to intentionally teachthose things, because it just
doesn't happen naturallywithout that intention.
Susan Lambert (09:06):
Great. So I'm gonna try to summarize that I
heard really three big things,is that academic language is
different than what we normallytalk, right? So I don't sit at
the dinner table and talk to myhusband in academic language.
It's really a more of alanguage of schooling, if you
will, right? I heard thedensity of vocabulary. And I
think we're gonna dig into thata little bit. But I love how
(09:27):
you said that, "Lots of bigwords stacked together." So at
the sentence level, that can bea little bit overwhelming. And
then I heard this thing aboutvocabulary, that it's precision
in vocabulary. What that makesme think of is, I like the idea
of knowing vocabulary words atdifferent levels. So that you
(09:48):
can use them in the exact rightway that you want to represent
what you're thinking. Andthat's an important concept in
language development too. So Iheard three things. Do those
three things sound right toyou?
Adrea Truckenmiller (10:00):
Yes, absolutely. What a great
summary.
Susan Lambert (10:02):
So you also look at academic language at just
the word level, which we talkedabout, you know, the precision
and vocabulary, the sentencelevel, and the text level. Can
you talk a little bit about thedifferences in those levels, as
we think about text?
Adrea Truckenmiller (10:17):
Yeah. This was something that really
opened up my mind, and helpedme to organize things at that
word level, at the sentencelevel, and at the text level.
And that we need to teach ateach of those three levels as
ways to promote academiclanguage. So, at the vocabulary
(10:39):
level, we talked a lot aboutthat because academic
vocabulary has been studiedquite a bit. And it's the thing
that really drives a lot oflearning at that word level.
And so, we've been diving intowhat can we teach at that
academic word level? And I havea really amazing doctoral
(11:01):
student, who graduated, is nowan assistant professor at Utah
State University. Her name isDr. Cherish Sarmiento. And she
did this really great study,that was just published in the
"British Journal of EducationalPsychology," just in 2024,
where we looked at academicvocabulary in particular, and
(11:22):
we looked at the aspects ofacademic vocabulary that are
important. We found two piecesthat are helpful for teachers
to think about. The first pieceis the morphological complexity
of words. We think about a wordlike photosynthesis, which is
(11:45):
this one very precise word, butit represents a large concept.
People who know photosynthesisreally well will have a whole
diagram in their brain of thesun shining on leaves, which
then causes a chemicalreaction, and a whole process.
(12:07):
She's a biologist, so she'lltell you even more in depth.
She has an even more completerepresentation of that whole
process. So when you think ofthat one word, it's not just
one. If you think of the worddog, you see a picture of a dog
in your head, and now it's awhole process that you think
of. But then, also, there'sthis morphological complexity
to the word. And you can breakdown the word photosynthesis
(12:31):
into its morphemes. Morphemesbeing the smallest unit of
meaning. So you get photo,which means light. And if you
know whenever you see thatmorpheme photo that it means
light, you are more likely tohave more generative vocabulary
instead of just that entireword photosynthesis. You can
(12:55):
now see photograph, orphotographer, and know that
photo means light every timethat you see that word. So, we
have these two aspects ofvocabulary, the morphological
complexity and then thiscontent side that it's a big
process, all in one word. Andso, we found a better way to
(13:21):
capture those aspects inassessment. Because we want to
alert teachers to students'development in picking up
academic vocabulary. In ourwriting measures, we used all
of the typical vocabularymeasures, like word complexity,
the frequency that those wordsshow up in text. And we
(13:41):
actually found that the bestway to measure vocabulary was
number of long words that thestudents wrote, and that's
words that had seven letters ormore. It just so happens that a
lot of our content words areseven letters or more, and it's
a typical way of morphologicalcomplexity. Many of our words
(14:03):
with seven or more letters havemultiple morphemes within them.
And so, that was a reallyuseful finding that's kind of
spurring our research along inthe vocabulary side. So that's
at the word level.
Susan Lambert (14:14):
That's cool.
Adrea Truckenmiller (14:15):
I'll take less time on the sentence and
text level.
Susan Lambert (14:18):
That's OK. Can I make one comment, before you go
to the sentence?
Adrea Truckenmiller (14:20):
Yeah.
Susan Lambert (14:21):
I think you said something that's really
interesting, and reallyimportant, when it comes to
vocabulary, which is, and theinterplay between vocabulary
and morphology. So like yousaid, if I have the word dog,
or even the word photo, it's asingular thing. But where it
gets much more complex is, evenif I say the word love, it's
(14:45):
almost Valentine's Day whenwe're recording this, right? So
if I say that, that is not aconcrete object in which I can
look at. But then we do theword photosynthesis, and it's a
process. So you have to have awhole mental model sitting
behind you. And the deeper yourunderstanding, like you said,
of biology, the more you reallyknow that word. There's, "Oh, I
(15:09):
know that word." And there's,"I KNOW that word." You know
what I mean?
Adrea Truckenmiller (15:13):
Yeah.
Susan Lambert (15:13):
So I think that's really important to say
that when we're thinking aboutteaching academic vocabulary,
of course in the context ofcontent, that it's not just a
one-time around. That,sometimes, we have to layer
that instruction for deeper anddeeper and deeper meaning. Does
that seem right to you?
Adrea Truckenmiller (15:35):
Yes. I really like that extension that
you just applied there. Andthere's some really cool
interventions out there that dothat. One of them being word
generation, where they embedthe vocabulary. They take the
same set of words each week,and they teach them in English
(15:58):
language arts. And then thenext day they teach them in
math class. And then the nextday they teach them in social
studies content. And then thenext day they teach it in
science content. To reallybuild that context around it.
And, I find that reallyhelpful. One of the directions
we're going is working withscience teachers, especially,
(16:19):
to teach them these vocabularyroutines that will help them
use what we know fromvocabulary development to
enhance their scienceinstruction.
Susan Lambert (16:30):
Love that. Love it. OK. Sentences.
Adrea Truckenmiller (16:34):
Yes!
Susan Lambert (16:34):
And you can say all you want about sentences,
because they're kind ofimportant
Adrea Truckenmiller (16:38):
They are! Sentences have been a tricky
thing to study. I think one ofthe things that I've found in
our research is that it's beentricky to study because instead
of bucketing off words,sentences, and discourse or
text level into three distinctbuckets. I don't think it's a
(17:02):
distinct bucket. I think it's,rather, a continuum from word
to sentence to text .
Susan Lambert (17:08):
Oh, I love that.
Adrea Truckenmiller (17:09):
So, for example, from word to sentence,
the morphological use of a worddepends on where that word is
in the sentence. That blendsthat word to sentence level.
For example, photograph, andphotographer, or photography.
You would change it dependingon where it is in the sentence,
(17:31):
and how you're using it.
There's the blend there fromword to sentence level. And
then it gets even more fuzzy.
We've debated in our lab how todistinguish between sentence
level and text level. And we'restill ... I just don't think
there's a natural cutoff line.
I'll say more about what I meanabout that at the sentence
(17:51):
level. We've been focusing alot on these words called
connectives. Some people havecalled them transition words.
Some people call themconjunctions. There's a list of
50 or more words that count asconnectives. These are words
that mark temporalrelationships. Things like
(18:12):
first, second, last,subsequently. There's words
that mark relationships betweenideas. Although, however,
because, therefore. And so,these words you can think of
them at the sentence level,because you have maybe in one
(18:35):
sentence one idea, and thenanother idea. And then you use
the connective to mark therelationship between those two
ideas within a sentence. Butthen, you also have these at
the text level, to signalorganization of the text. Like
I said with those temporalones, I have three reasons why
this is important. First,second, and last, right? And
(18:57):
then, at the end, you usuallyhave in conclusion. There's
another connective that we useto signal organization of the
full text level. And so, thesewe've found to be really
powerful. So with Dr. Foorman,we created a sentence-level
assessment in grades 3–10 aspart of the Reading for
(19:18):
Understanding initiative. Inthis sentence-level measure, we
used a lot of connectives.
Students would read a sentence,and they would have to choose
the connective that best workedin that sentence. And so, we
were really testing thoseconnectives. We did find that
when we coded those items andlooked at student's ability
(19:40):
from grades 3–10, that thoseconnectives were really
important. So, that's been oneof our targets for future
research in how can we continueteaching these. The writing
research people have includedtransition words and taught,
kind of tangentially, thosetransition words, but we think
(20:02):
that that might be a powerfulplace to do that. Also, the
sentence-combining research,where there's been several
studies that show that when youhave 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 theseideas and these sentences. And
(20:24):
then, how do you mark that?
Explicitly with a connective?
Or how do you just put thoseideas together? Into a full
sentence? There's other thingsto think about at the sentence
level, but, again, in ourstudies of typical measures,
like complexity of sentences,those types of measures haven't
done as well as these thinkingabout the connectives. But
(20:46):
there's still a lot of researchto be done.
Susan Lambert (20:48):
Is there anything more that you wanna
say about the text level then,as we're continuing the
continuum
Adrea Truckenmiller (20:57):
Yes. Yeah, definitely. The text level,
particularly when thinkingabout academic language, is
that informational textstructure is different than
narrative text structure. Ouroral language tends to follow a
narrative text structure inthat we're usually talking
(21:18):
about. Who, what, where, why,when, and how. Or we do a
narrative arc, where there'ssetting up the setting, and
then there's rising action, tothe plot. And there's
characters. And then differentpieces happen there. But
informational text structure isvery different in that usually
(21:40):
we're doing something likecompare-and-contrast. We're
doing something likedescription in science, because
that's the type ofinformational text that I write
about the most, and I like tothink about the most. We have a
structure calledclaim-evidence-reasoning. And
so, most good writers in theirscience will make a claim. And
(22:04):
then they'll provide theevidence that supports that
claim. And then provide someconditions, or some reasoning,
about how that evidence totallysupports that claim. Or maybe
there's some conditions on it,or other pieces of that. One of
the things that I see ismissing, and I'm sure we're
gonna talk a lot about thismoving forward, is explicit
(22:26):
instruction in that structureof text. There's been some
really cool folks who have beendoing research teaching the
structure of informationaltext, and teaching that
explicitly. And that'ssomething that we're doing, in
my research too, is diving intothat structure.
Susan Lambert (22:43):
Yeah. Let's go there, because we can actually
then give some educatorspotentially some helpful advice
based on what you're finding.
These investigations thatyou're doing with informational
text is mostly with middleschool. Is that right?
Adrea Truckenmiller (22:58):
I started out with grades 3–8. And then,
looking at that, I was tryingto figure out what was the best
grade level to start with. Andwe found that grades 4–5 were
where we were getting thebiggest bang for our buck. And
so, my research in the lastfour years has focused then on
grades 4–5.
Susan Lambert (23:17):
Let's take a step back, and talk a little
bit about what you found withmiddle school students, mostly.
Well, for two reasons. Numberone, it'd be interesting to see
where you started, and why thatled you to grades four and
five. But our listeners alsoask all the time about middle
school, and what does thisthing called the Science of
Reading and Writing mean tomiddle school students? So, can
(23:37):
we start with your earlyinvestigations in middle school
and hear what you found? Andthen what led you to land in
fourth and fifth grade?
Adrea Truckenmiller (23:46):
Yeah. Let me start with the assessment
side of things. I was reallyinterested in this
informational text writing,because we didn't even have a
measure of a well-establishedmeasure of informational
writing. And by informationalwriting I mean students read an
(24:10):
informational passage about atopic, and then they have to
write about it. This is one ofthe Common Core State
Standards. Probably one of thehardest to teach. And, I think
it's the hardest to teach'cause it's so complex. And we
also don't have a lot ofmaterials for it.
Susan Lambert (24:25):
Right. And what does it really mean? So,
anyway. Yes.
Adrea Truckenmiller (24:28):
Yes
measure of informationalwriting, which was really,
really hard to do. I kind offigured out why people aren't
doing this
multiple texts to read, youhave to equate them across the
texts. And a lot of people havebeen using text complexity
(24:51):
measures, like lexiles andother things, to equate text.
But really what we had beenfinding in the reading
literature is that it's moreimportant to measure how
students read that text andequate based on students'
performance on the text, notnecessarily about the text
aspects itself. And so, I hadto run a whole study just to
(25:16):
find passages that wereequivalent, and see how
students performed in responseto that. That was the study
where it was third gradethrough eighth grade. And, what
makes it tricky in middleschool, to your point, is that
all of the constructs that wethink about in reading, so the
code part, the languagecomprehension part, they start
(25:39):
to come together and becomethis unidimensional construct.
And so it's almost impossibleto figure out where to start,
because kids are eitheruniformly high in everything,
uniformly average ineverything, or uniformly low on
everything. That makes itreally tricky, because you
(26:00):
teach differently depending onif it's a vocabulary or
word-level focus. If it's aspelling focus, a decoding
focus, or if it's this textlevel focus, it's different. It
makes it tricky at the middleschool level, 'cause it just
all comes together. And so, Icreated the Writing Architect,
which is the name of my writingassessment, and we dove deeper
(26:23):
into these different aspects ofwriting at the word, sentence,
and text level. Can we measurethem in ways that are different
than the holistic way that wetypically measure writing? A
typical writing rubric will bea holistic scale, one to six.
It has some details in thatwriting rubric that can kind of
(26:45):
guide you towards instruction.
Like, does the student have anintroduction? Is their writing
cohesive? But it's not superconcrete for teachers.
Susan Lambert (26:55):
And it's very complicated to try to assess
all of the students based onrubric. Right?
Adrea Truckenmiller (27:01):
Yes, absolutely. It was taking us
forever. And then we stillwouldn't get that reliable,
right? Most kids' scores wouldbe a three, right in the middle
of that writing rubric. Andthen you spend all this time
differentiating between threeand four. Well , is this one
really a three or four? And itwasn't very helpful for moving
(27:22):
instruction forward. And so wewanted to look for those
aspects that would be moreconcrete, that students could
see a goal to shoot towards.
And so, we started with justspelling and sentence accuracy,
things like punctuation andverb-tense agreement, because
that's what had been studiedpreviously. And then we were
(27:45):
like, "OK, this is notcapturing all of the language
comprehension, academiclanguage side of things." And
so we added two pieces. This iswhere we added those counting
of the long words. We wouldhave kids write, for 15
minutes, this informationalresponse. And we found that the
(28:06):
kids that had 13 or more longwords were most likely to be
proficient on the state test atthe end of the year.
Susan Lambert (28:15):
Interesting.
Adrea Truckenmiller (28:15):
Yeah, they had some good vocabulary. They
were learning the words. And sothat makes a nice concrete
goal. OK, how many long wordsdoes this kid have in here?
Let's shoot for more. And wecan do that by teaching the
morphological complexity. Wecan teach the content words
that are in that informationaltext . The bigger thing that we
(28:36):
found was at the text level. Wewere trying to figure out where
to start with the informationalorganization of text. Because
there's just so many ways to dothat. There's so many different
genres, like I mentionedbefore, there's
compare-and-contrast,descriptive structure, this
claim-evidence-reasoningstructure. There's so many
(28:57):
others if you go deep intogenre study. And it gets
overwhelming for teachers,
all. And so, we went to theSelf-Regulated Strategy
Development research by KarenHarris, who has a long history
of really excellent, reallyeffective instruction that
combines this text structureinstruction with how to
(29:22):
regulate the significantself-regulation it takes to
persist through a writing task.
And so, I wanted to find theinformational structure in
there. They have a lot ofstudies on their narrative
structure and on persuasivestructure, but there were fewer
on the informational. And wepicked out this one structure
(29:45):
called T. I.D.E., T-I-D-E. T,standing for topic sentence, I
standing for ideas, D standingfor details or detailed
examination, and E standing forending or conclusion. And we
found that this particularstructure, when kids used it in
their text, predicted theirwriting achievement, on both
(30:09):
nationally normed assessmentsand the state assessment. So
this was our big Aha! of thegoal setting. It should really
be, and the measurement shouldreally be, does the student
have a topic sentence
How many ideas do they have inthere supporting that topic
sentence? Do they have thedetails in there? Do they have
(30:30):
an ending? And we found thatthe kids who had a score of
eight, which meant they had onetopic sentence, one ending, and
then three ideas, and threedetails, those students were
most likely to be proficient intheir informational writing. We
think this is a really usefulplace to start. And it's really
nice, gives a lot moreinformation for instruction,
(30:52):
and it gives some individualgoal setting. Where you can
assess your whole class and youmight have, you know , five
students who really need towork on that topic sentence.
You might have 10 students whoalready got the topic sentence
down, but they need to set somegoals for ideas and details.
So, that was one of our reallyexciting directions that we're
(31:15):
going in.
Susan Lambert (31:16):
That's really cool. And that has
instructional implicationsthen. So if you're finding that
that is important inassessment, teachers can
actually then start to teachtopic sentence ideas and
details. And I know you've beenin the classroom. How well do
you see teachers teachingconcepts like that?
Adrea Truckenmiller (31:35):
Yes. Last year was such an eye-opener. I
got to be in 50 classrooms allacross the state. I saw some
just incredible instruction.
One teacher took the morphologypiece of things and did super
cool stuff with that. She hadher students make up animals
(31:59):
based on putting togetherdifferent morphemes and had
them draw what that might looklike. Super fun activity! We
talked to them about this textstructure piece of things.
Another teacher did a reallyneat activity where they cut
apart a story and asked thestudents to put it in order,
and talk about why it goes inorder that way, and which
(32:20):
sentence would be a topicsentence and why. So we saw
lots of really great things.
The biggest frustration wasthat I felt for these teachers,
because of the materials thatthey had available to them. I
knew that they didn't haveassessment, but what I didn't
(32:40):
anticipate is that theywouldn't have explicit
instructional materials aswell. One example of this was a
teacher was teaching topicsentence and giving an example
up on the board. And a studentsaid, "What is a topic
sentence?"
Susan Lambert (32:59):
Adrea Truckenmiller (33:02):
Great question
on a search. I went through allof the curriculum that they
had, and all of the materials.
There's no definition of atopic sentence.
Susan Lambert (33:15):
Wow!
Adrea Truckenmiller (33:16):
How are we supposed to teach that if we
don't have these definitionsreadily available, or this
basic structure?
Susan Lambert (33:24):
Let's go back to how you landed on fourth and
fifth grade being reallyimportant in this process of
development.
Adrea Truckenmiller (33:32):
Yeah.
Thanks for asking about that.
What we found in third gradewas that the metrics that we
were using didn't predict tothe state test results as well
as the informational units thatwe were measuring. And I
hypothesized that that'sbecause there's still this
(33:55):
learning to read process that'soccurring for many students in
third grade. We don't have thatexpectation of students having
to read a passage and thenwrite about it until about
fourth grade. So, almost allstate tests require that
starting in fourth grade. So,it seemed to be this
(34:17):
developmental shift that seemsto happen in fourth and fifth
grade. And so, we wanted to geta really strong foundation for
informational writing withinthat fourth and fifth grade,
when they're expected to startdoing that. So that we can set
them up with a good foundationthen for later, sixth, seventh,
and eighth grade, where you canstart focusing maybe more on
(34:40):
the more specific genres withininformational writing. But we
needed a foundation first on,"Hey, text has a structure
Susan Lambert (34:48):
Yeah. That makes sense. So, for teachers that
are listening to this rightnow, what would be your best
advice for them as they'retrying to implement this in the
classroom? Knowing that maybethe curriculum that they're
using in their classroomdoesn't have all the things,
and we don't want them to goout and have to spend a whole
(35:10):
bunch of time creating theirown. Do you have any advice for
them?
Adrea Truckenmiller (35:16):
Yes, there's some great free
materials out there. I highlyrecommend Karen Harris' book on
Self-Regulated StrategyDevelopment. There's also some
websites that make it easier toimplement the Self-Regulated
Strategy Development pieces. Ithink that book is a little
(35:39):
overwhelming too, I'm lookingup because I see it on my
shelf, 'cause there's a lot ofstrategies in there. And so
that's where I think we oftenget overwhelmed by, "Oh my
gosh, we have to teach ALL ofthe things!" And I really wanna
encourage teachers to juststart in one spot.
Susan Lambert (35:59):
Great advice.
Adrea Truckenmiller (36:00):
The place I think to hone in and start in
there is that T.I.D.E.
organizational strategy. Startthere. There's a lot of really
great things about how to doself-talk in there, and other
pieces of self-regulation. Butjust starting with there's a
(36:20):
structure to text. Theinformational structure
T.I.D.E. is a great place tostart. And then layer in the
self-talk pieces after you'vegotten comfortable with it. And
layer in some of the otherparts. Then layer in the
revising. Because revising is aHUGE piece of writing to learn
(36:40):
all. And I think that's alittle bit easier.
Susan Lambert (36:47):
That's great advice. And then I would also
suspect that you would give theadvice of using that T.I.D.E.
along with whatever ishappening in your ELA program
already. So it doesn't feellike it's very disconnected for
the students.
Adrea Truckenmiller (37:03):
Yeah.
Yeah. I tried to do that in ourproject. That was our goal, to
completely integrate intowhatever their ELA curriculum
was, and we had schools withdifferent ELA curricula. But
kind of across the board whatwe found is they only had one
unit in informational writing.
(37:26):
So it was really hard for themto layer this in, because there
was only one. What we'rethinking about now, and we're
working on projects for this,is to integrate into the
science content. Becausethere's always informational
(37:48):
content in science.
Susan Lambert (37:50):
That's right .
Adrea Truckenmiller (37:50):
It is all informational content there.
So, we're trying to layer inthere. Because we found in
fourth and fifth grade theyusually spend the first six
weeks on personal narrative.
They do some persuasive. Andusually the persuasive stuff
they just kind of make up whatthe topic is. It's not really
about informational text. Sothat was another struggle.
Susan Lambert (38:13):
That makes sense. So many connections
between literacy and science,actually, between ELA and
science, and what it does forliteracy development. But that
could be a whole other topic.
Adrea Truckenmiller (38:25):
Yes.
Susan Lambert (38:26):
Alright. We're kind of nearing the end here,
so I wonder if you have anyfinal thoughts or advice for
our listeners?
Adrea Truckenmiller (38:35):
Yeah. This is gonna be unrelated to
article that special educationis the number two most
employable field right now.
Susan Lambert (38:50):
There you go.
Adrea Truckenmiller (38:52):
So, I encourage anybody listening to
please consider specialeducation. I was trained as a
school psychologist, andtotally fell in love with
special ed as a field. It's agreat home for me. And it's not
just special educationteaching, but also special
(39:13):
education research. As you'veseen throughout this whole
episode, there's so muchresearch that we need to do.
And we need more people doingthat research. I know people
listening to this are allcurious people. And continuing
that curiosity, andcontributing to that research
(39:35):
and that teaching. It's a goodpartnership.
Susan Lambert (39:38):
I love how you bookended this whole episode by
beginning with that and thenencouraging others to go out
and make that a field ofexploration. Thank you so much
for joining us. It's beenreally delightful. Thank you
for helping us understand moreabout writing, and the
reading-writing connection. Forour listeners, we'll link some
(39:59):
things in the show notes tohelp them understand more.
Thank you again for joining us.
Adrea Truckenmiller (40:04):
Thank you.
Susan Lambert (40:08):
That was Dr.
Adrea Truckenmiller, associateprofessor of Special Education
and School Psychology atMichigan State University.
She's the lead author of theWriting Architect, and she's
published more than 40articles. We'll have a link to
a few of them in the shownotes. You can also learn much
(40:29):
more about Dr. Truckenmiller'swork at her website
atruck.msu.domains. Also, haveyou got a question for Dr.
Truckenmiller? If so, you arein luck. Going to be answering
a few listener questions in ourFacebook group, Science of
Reading (40:46):
The Community. Find out more information, and
submit your questions, byvisiting our Facebook group,
Science of Reading (40:53):
The Community. Next up in this
writing miniseries, I'll bejoined by another expert who
has devoted countless hours ofresearch to writing and
literacy, Dr. Young-Suk GraceKim from University of
California, Irvine. On thisepisode, we're going to talk
about theoretical models. We'lltalk about why theoretical
(41:16):
models are useful foreducators. We'll unpack her
interactive dynamic literacymodel, which details why and
how reading and writing areinterconnected. And we'll
explore the implications ofthat framework for classroom
instruction. Here's a quickpreview.
Young-Suk Grace Kim (41:34):
A lot of educators understand that
reading and writing arerelated, but I think we need to
have really preciseunderstanding about it. So, we
need to have a good mentalmodel about how they're
related, and why they'rerelated.
Susan Lambert (41:50):
That's next time. You can hear that
conversation as soon as itdrops, as well as access all of
our episodes by subscribing toScience of Reading: The
Podcast. You can find us on thepodcast app of your choice. And
while you're there, we'd loveif you'd leave us a rating and
review. Science of Reading (42:08):
The Podcast is brought to you by
Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert.
Thank you so much forlistening.
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