Getting To The "Core" of The Common Core

7/30/2019 Getting To The "Core" of The Common Core

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GETTING TO THE CORE OF THE COMMON CORE

By Maryellen Rooney Moreau M.Ed. CCC-SLP

The shit to Common Core State standards (CCSS) is a hot topic that impacts everyone

involved in delivering the curriculum, including speech-language pathologists. The new

standards emphasize college and career readiness while ensuring consistency and quality

rom state to state. Students are expected to acquire skills at each grade level so that by

the time they nish high school, they are ready to succeed. The CCSS stress the students

communication competence, which is at the heart o the SLPs work.

It is important to understand how the unique contributions o SLPs to the implementation

o CCSS relate to their expertise in language and communication. SLPs can ocus on the

language underpinnings o the new standards during direct intervention with students and

when working with teachers. I want to expand on this in this sections that ollow.

First, Ill introduce the common core in the context o speech and language therapy. Then

I will ocus some attention on language, particularly syntax and discourse in the common

core. Finally, Ill suggest an expanding role or the SLP in meeting curriculum demands o

the CCSS.

The CCSS speciy what students are expected to learn to prepare or their college career

and the workplace. But there is a problem that we as administrators and practitioners

know. Guidance is intentionally missing as to how we should help students with disabilities

and learning challenges and what we should do to support those who are at risk or are not

making progress. One solution is to provide SLP services or oral language development,

supporting what the Common Core calls the interrelated language processes o reading,

writing, speaking and listening.

What do researchers say about SLPs and the Common Core? In an article in the April 3rd

ASHA Leader titled The Core Commitment, by Barbara J. Ehren et al, there are two words

that are very important --prime position. Ehren points out that the Common Core standards

place speech pathologists in prime position to assist students. Likewise, based on their o-

cused expertise in language, ASHA says SLPs oer special assistance in addressing the lan-

guage oundations o the curriculum. Specically, ASHA suggests that SLPs can strengthen

the linguistic and metalinguistic oundations o learning or students with disabilities, or

learners who are at risk or school ailure, and those who struggle in school settings.

SLPs have oten been called speech teachers. But speech and language pathology goes

ar beyond the articulation o sounds. It gets into the concept o oral language

INTRODUCTION: THE COMMON CORE AND THE SLP


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development as it relates to literacy. I literacy levels are to improve, the aims o the Englishlanguage arts classroom, especially in the earliest grades, must include oral language in apurposeul, systematic way. Thats because mastery o oral language helps students masterthe written word. Oral language development precedes and is the oundation or written

language development. Oral language is primary and written language builds on it. To sumit up, oral language is really at the core o the core. And or that reason, there is a powerulnew role or SLPs in making the goals o CCSS a reality.

Language, syntax and discourse are levels o oral language development that go beyond

phonemic awareness and basic vocabulary building. This is a ocus or the changing role o

the SLP with the shit to CCSS and its goal o communicative competence. CCSS denes

communicative competence as the ability to express onesel using all kinds o words and

text -- but the oundation is in oral language development. But you may ask, what is lan-

guage?

There are many ormal denitions o language. For SLPs, language is any accepted struc-

tured symbolic system or interpersonal communication used to express thoughts, inten-

tions, experiences, and eelings. (Nicolosi, et al.) These are important words to emphasize,

because it is the language o the text or the expression that we are really ocusing on with

the Common Core. In act, within the Common Core there is a diagram that talks about re-

ceptive and expressive language. There are oral language processes o listening and speak-

ing and the written language processes o reading and writing. They are all related because

to communicate what you comprehend rom a reading you must be able to speak or write.

Heres more about the denition o language. Oral language is denitely not just talking.

Heres an example. As I was doing a consultation one day with a teacher about a childs

comprehension in writing, I asked her about his oral language. She said that we did not have

to discuss oral language because he talks all the time. I asked her, What does he say? She

said, He can answer questions i I ask him questions, but I dont know beyond that. That

was my way o introducing this teacher to the act that or oral language, what we say is the

key to whether or not we will be literate.

Literate oral language is the basis or academic language which is a specialized language.Academic language, both oral and written, relates to disciplinary content.

Recently there have been several research articles devoted to topics o language develop-

ment disorders and the journey o adolescent and adult literacy. How can SLPs help children

develop what we call literate oral language?

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE IN THE COMMON CORE:

LANGUAGE, SYNTAX AND DISCOURSE


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Literate oral language progresses along a continuum. Carol Westby is well known or her un-derstanding o the oral literate continuum. Children begin developing oral literacy, as inants,

with personal and inormal language guided by conversation with adults. They progress tobe able to tell a story to someone i that someone isnt present, and progress urther to talk

about a historical event or something that they have learned about by reading a book. Weare talking about the development over time o oral language competence in order to assistchildren who participate in curriculum guided by the Common Core. Specically, Im talkingabout the requirement to prepare students with academic language or college and career.

The CCSS were developed by back-mapping them rom the workplace to the classroom.Those who developed these new standards looked at what people do in college and in theworkplace and then decided what skills children need to acquire in order to be successul

when they graduate rom high school. One o the things that they need to be able to do isto communicate using academic and literate oral language.

As an example, i a student wants to speak to a proessor, or a coworker wants to speak tohis manager, he knocks on the door and he might say Hey-- got a sec? But what is themore ormal way o saying that in this situation? It would be, Excuse me, can I interruptyou or a moment to discuss a concern? There are many students who are not able to getto the more ormal way o using language, even though these skills can be taught rom the

beginnings o lie.

As children come into the world they are born into an environment and people start to

interact with them by making eye contact and gestures. This is the pragmatic element --the social realm o language. As the child develops, he makes known his words (the area osemantics) and puts those words into sentences about a situation that is going on. Over theyears the child has to develop a more complex type o sentence structure in order to suc-

ceed in school and ultimately in lie.

Sentences get turned into what SLPs call the discourse language o oral language develop-ment. Syntax and discourse prepare students or the more advanced communications they

need to develop in middle and high school. The building blocks o oral language orm thebasis or the language processes o reading, writing, listening, and speaking. I add three oth-ers: gesturing, viewing (because we can view things and interpret them), and thinking.

The development o the sentence is extremely important as ar as text. Syntax rom simplesentences to complex sentences depends on word order, and o course children coming tous with other languages and speaking other languages as their rst language oten have a

problem with the word order o English. Cohesive ties are the conjunctions that almost haveto be directly taught to students to ormulate their complex sentences.

Oten we see students who mix up their verb tenses. The term morphology is used or

things like plurals and verb tenses that children add to their basic sentence structure tomake it more complex. We oten assist children in this area o syntax development by usingsentence combining. This is oten an area that the SLP can assist because he or she can

instruct using the basic conjunctions that are used to enable syntax development.


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Lexile measures o text complexity are a way to measure reading competence. The SLP iswell poised to look at measures o text and syntax complexity and also the discourse to en-

able a child to move orward. I just read an article called Going Beyond the Fab Five: Help-ing Students Cope with Unique Linguistic Challenges o Expository Reading in Intermediate

Grades. Its about the molecule o lie-- DNA. I wanted to take it a part to look at the com-plexity o the sentences that our students ace as they read the disciplinary texts o science

or history. In this text we read that DNA is the molecule o which genes are made when twoyoung scientists took on the challenge o guring out its structure. I we look at that text,it begins with the passive voice. There are subordinate clauses and there is an embedded

clause that a student would have to read and understand.

There are so many thoughts in that one sentence that it is extremely complex to take itapart. In a later text rom 1953, they constructed a model that showed that each DNA mol-

ecule consisted o two long chains. In this example, we have an embedded clause and wehave subordinate clauses. There are so many things that our students need to really be ex-

plicitly taught relative to syntax complexity that really should be addressed early on as theybecome developmentally ready.

The Common Core has a ocus on the discourse level o language. In other words, it is aocus on text complexity. Its about helping students develop communicative competence.

I always add the word condence to that goal because the more students are communica-tively condent, they more they will eel competent in expressing themselves. But what isdiscourse?

Discourse is putting together words and phrases and sentences to create conversations,speeches, emails, newspaper articles, and books. It goes rom person to person talk, to per-sonal experience narratives, using a story grammar structure that is very common in social

communication. At the ormal end o discourse development, there is exposition throughacademic vocabulary and academic language.

Those o you who have read a lot about narratives have read that narratives orm a bridge

as a guide rom the more simple conversations to the more complex expository text. With-out discourse there is a developmental gap. It is oten said that children can answer whquestions, and I always start my workshops by giving an example o how my students whenI rst began my career could answer the wh questions, particularly who, what, when,

where -- and sometimes why. With my guidance they could answer why, but when I askedthem to tell me the whole story or to tell me all the inormation, they were unable to do it ontheir own because they were missing the area o the discourse development.

It was in 1991 that I developed the Story Grammar Marker because I elt that my studentswith language impairment needed direct instruction beyond just beginning, middle, andend. I researched story grammar and I capitalized on that because I ound that it made such

a dierence. Additionally, in 1998, I wrote a book about expository text because o prob-lems my students were beginning to have in their academic experiences.


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CCSS IN ACTION:

HOW SLPS CAN HELP MEET YOUR CURRICULUM DEMANDS

Many students do not have enough practice communicating at home. In order to have abroader ocus on discourse, we have to really intervene on narrative and expository text.

One wake-up call I had as I studied the CCSS was that narrative and inormation text, or aswe call it, expository text, is going to be 50-50 in grades K-5. Not so long ago the standardwas strictly narrative. Under CCSS, middle school expository text will be 70% o the cur-

riculum, so students must be able to tell and retell stories, and develop progressively morecomplex expository text. SLPs can help meet this demand.

As I look at it, and i you look into the research, narrative development orms a oundation

and its a bridge. Narrative development can help a child converse. When a child cant thinko a topic or think o a story to tell, we can help him in narrative development and we canhelp him to converse. Consequently, i we look at narrative development and we teach per-

spective taking and theory o mind through narratives --how characters eel, how they think,and what their plans are-- we are better able to see that Paul Revere and King George IIIhad very dierent perspectives as we read the expository text.

Lets look at an example o the Common Core in action in the elementary curriculum andwhere the SLP can be a valuable resource. There is a popular childrens book called CliordsPals. You could pick just two pages o the book and have the student talk about it and get apretty good idea as to where the students are in their story.

For instance, on a couple pages o the book it says Susie, Lenny, and Nero jumped downinto a big pit. The work crew didnt see the dogs. They started to pour cement on them. Cli-

ord knocked the cement chute aside. I we take that as our happenings in the story thereare narrative development stages that are tied into the Common Core standards or reading.

We will see that each o the stages has more elements related to the Common Core. For

example, narrative development stage 1 is called the descriptive sequence and the im-portant parts o it are the character, the setting and two setting in general. What does theCommon Core kindergarten reading standard detail #3 say? It says, With prompting andsupport, identiy characters, settings, and major events in a story. Well, what i the child

cant do that? The teacher can turn collaboratively to the SLP who can help the child meetthat standard. As we progress, we are going up to ourth grade with this and I just took thestandards all the way through 4th grade. We will see narrative development stage 2 is where

the actions become specic. It is the character, the setting and two major events. The major

events are when the work crew starts to pour cement and when Cliord pushes the cementchute aside. What does the common core standard looking or? In rst grade it is describedcharacters, and major events in a story using key details.

What i a ourth grader is at narrative stage two and the reading standard or grade our isthat the student will be able to describe in depth a character, a setting, or event in a specicstory drawing on specic details in the text. What are the details that they have put out


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out in parentheses? The details are the characters thoughts, the characters words, and the

characters actions. This goes way beyond what the child in ourth grade is able to do i he

or she is unctioning at a stage two o narrative development. In this case, the SLP can work

in the zone o proximal development and assist the teacher in bringing the child to stage

three, where it is describing how characters in a story respond to major events. The major

event here was that Cliord sees the work crew start to pour cement. So what does he do?

He pushes the cement chute aside. This example rom the Cliord book shows the direct

relationship between the Common Core standards and narrative development that speech

and language pathologists are very well schooled in.

Now lets consider a couple o other standards. The Boston tea party is the topic. Obvious-

ly it is not a story per se, its acts and expository text, and certainly was a problem! Heres

an example o how a SLP and a teacher collaborated to turn a eld trip into a learning ex-

perience. Our students were headed to the Freedom Trail in Boston and they were much

more excited about the doughnuts they were going to have on the bus than what they had

read about in their social studies book and what they were about to see. So we thought we

would use this collaboration between a teacher and a SLP to talk about the reading stan-

dards and literature.

Look at the Common Core standards or grades 6-12. What do the students have to do?

They have to analyze how complex characters develop over the course o a text, interact

with other characters and advance the plot. What is the reading standard or inormation

text? Students have to analyze how the author unolds an analysis or series o ideas or

events, including the order in which the points are made, how they are introduced and de-

veloped, and the connections that are drawn between them.

Lets use an example o a textbook lesson about the Boston Tea Party to illustrate how

expository text can be a collaborative opportunity between a SLP and a teacher. The rst

paragraph in the social studies book is about King George and Sam Adams o the Massa-

chusetts colonists. King George lived in England and he had a problem. His government

didnt have any money. The reason they had the problem was that there was a war called

the French and Indian War. The king was desperate and needed to get some money, so what

did he do? He decided to tax the colonists. When he taxed them he thought the he would

solve the problem, but did he?

Here Im taking the expository text structure o problem/solution in the rst paragraph and

am talking through the perspective o King George, as opposed to the second paragraph,which was the perspective o the colonists. King Georges actions are what made the colo-

nists angry. Sam Adams was one o the colonists who were angry. What did that anger over

the actions o King George cause the colonists to do? They made a decision to protest and

throw tea into Boston Harbor. When they did this, they thought they solved their problem,

but did they?


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We could progress all the way through the confict, but I want to look at just a ew short

paragraphs to illustrate my point. This brings us back to the king. So what are we doing? We

are showing how the Common Core standards can be addressed with an SLP and teach-

er collaborating on how to connect and make the connections. Here, the king was urious

about the Boston Tea Party. So what did he do? He decided to do three things to get back

at the colonists, and o course it didnt solve his problem. With discourse-level interventions,

we have oral language and communicative competence. We have them through conversa-

tion, narratives, and expository text. That is what I have been described using the Cliord

book. The book, or the passage, is not the issue, it is the thought process through language

comprehension and expression that makes the dierence.

Next, lets consider an example o a tornado that came to Massachusetts last year on June

1st and actually eected my granddaughter, Lauren. There is an expository news article

about this on the CNN web site. It is written in a very impersonal way. It has just the acts.

The title, Massachusetts Tornadoes Kill at Least Four, sums up the problem. Now lets look

at how you might have a conversation about this with Lauren. She had one o the scariest

days o her lie last June at her house. An SLP or a teacher working with an SLP could ask

her to structure a story or structure a narrative out o her experience which would bring the

story and the acts together.

Heres how the conversation might go. What happened to you? My neighborhood was hit

by a tornado. How did you eel when that happened? We were devastated and rightened.

It was horriying to see the damage. How did you recover (in other words, what was your

plan)? The community worked together. What kinds o things did you do? And then that is a

listing o the kinds o things that were done, the consequences. Did it work and did this have

any aect on your lie and how did this aect you?

Here we had a strictly expository text piece rom CNN. Ater the conversation about the

event with the teacher and SLP, my granddaughter wrote about the tornado experience.

What she wrote is not the same acts in the CNN article, but what she experienced hersel.

She wrote in her own voice. So what do the Common Core standards expect o children

when they are in third grade? We are trying to have them have voice in their narratives. To

have students write about a personal experience -- how they elt, who said what, what they

did, is just wonderul. So this is a personal narrative, but what did it do? It incorporated the

acts as well as how the characters eelings changed rom the beginning to the end o the

story.

A common question on high stakes tests involves the ability to communicate the critical ele-

ments o initiating events --what happened, the thoughts, eelings, intents and plans o char-

acters. I did this with Lauren ater the tornado to help her think about how she elt beore

the storm and how she elt ater everything was over. But also to help her think about the

events and acts that made up the day: the alarm on TV, the debris passing by the windows,

and all o that type o thing and how that aected her with her own eelings.


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There are so many times that children get a question like this in their high stakes test andthey do not know how to trace their eelings. With narrative development, when youre

talking about experiences, you are able to do that.

By ocusing on syntax and discourse within oral language development weve looked at thecore o the core. Critical to the Common Core standards is the discourse level o interven-tion. The speech and language pathologist is able to deliver that intervention collaborativelyor in small groups or in therapeutic sessions. For every student -- or those who are at riskand or all o children who have dierent challenges -- the SLP can help meet the goals or

communicative competence, academic and social success, and prepare them or collegeand career.

About The Authors

Maryellen Rooney Moreau, M.Ed. CCC-SLP is internationally recognized or special educa-tion proessional development and is president o MindWing Concepts, creator o popularspeech language program, Story Grammar Marker

Maryellen Rooney Moreau, M.Ed. CCC-SLP


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Getting To The "Core" of The Common Core

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