Elizabeth Sulzby
To the classroom Episode 23
October 23, 2023
My guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Sulzby whose research focus is on early language and literacy development in Pre-Kindergarten. She talks about research studies she did with preschoolers in NYC years ago where teachers do repeated readings of storybooks—even those with complex language and story structure—and study children’s rereading and retellings. These studies formed the basis for her emergent reading classification scheme. We also talk a bit about emergent writing development in prekindergarten and its parallels to reading development. Later, I’m joined by my colleagues Gina Dignon and bilingual educator Clarisa Leal for a conversation about practical takeaways for young children and multilingual learners.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Welcome, Dr. Sulzby. It's so nice to have you with me today.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Just call me Elizabeth, Jen.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I sure will. All right. So you're well known for your research into young children's literacy beginnings, both reading and writing. And I'd love to start by talking about reading. Can you begin our conversation by describing some of the research that you did with preschoolers in New York City many years ago?
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Oh, to the Bronx. And that was with Pre-K? What we did with emergent reading is what I call KLP, our Kindergarten Literature Program. And we took books that children that age find to be very engaging. They loved to have them read over and over again, but they also had to have characteristics of written language, so things like dialogue. So, somebody, the little boy planted a carrot seed and his father said, it won't come up. So, you know, who's talking to who? But you do that because you get the prosody changes from storytelling. And it also has to have something that is developmentally important for that aged kid.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So you selected text carefully. You've selected that had great storyline, dialogue, narration. What are some other characteristics of the texts?
Elizabeth Sulzby:
When I work with the district, I work with the teachers so that the teachers select the bulk of the books. So for example, a book that I think of as a second grade book is A Chair for My Mother. And in the Bronx, the pre-K kids loved that long, complicated book about a fire and overcoming the fire because they had fires.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So I think what that says is that you're making sure that the texts are also relevant to them.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Exactly. Exactly. Yes.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Okay. So you've chosen these books and you go in and you read the stories to the children and you read them over and over and over again.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Yeah. The way I developed KLP was to sort of use some rituals. So the teacher tells the children they're going to read this book today, and it's the first time, and they're going to read that book four times over the next two weeks. And when you've read it the fourth time, you'll put it in the KLP box for the kids to "read" at their free time. And so after we've gotten four books read, that's 20 books. So that usually covers all of a pre-K. Then we'll have KLP time for kids, and that's when they get to go and browse through the books. And then they take their books to the rug and read either by themselves or read sometimes pairs. Sometimes three or four will get together. And what they're doing then is reading emergently either silently or usually out loud. And the teacher is down on the rug with them then too. The teacher tends to come around and visit every group.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I was wondering about whether we call this reading or not because they're really not attending to the words, right?
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Well, I call it reading to the kids.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Do you? Yeah.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
That's all I say. I use "reading emergently" so that I'm indicating to teachers or professional development people that they're not reading from print.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And what you're doing there is developing a sense of concepts of print, sense of story, and enjoyment with books, comprehension. There's so much development that happens there. So for people who are unfamiliar with that classification scheme, can you give a sense of how it develops generally from the beginning to the point of looking at print?
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Okay. It's interesting because if you start at the very beginning, it's very much like the rest of language development. So if you go back to some of those early people like Eve Clark looking at how children begin to use language, some kids will focus on naming things around them, and other kids will focus on verbs. And the very first two levels are labeling and commenting. And so in labeling, the child is either usually pointing at the picture in the book and saying, cat, dog. Or saying a comment about what's happening, running, found it, that kind of thing. So very disjointed, but it's very much like language without books. And then the next level are, at the next two levels are storytelling-like. And the next levels are, they begin to sound like they're reading. And this is a point where a lot of parents will say, oh, my child just memorized that book. And I'll say, no, actually, if you really listen carefully, you'll see that they've changed it a bit. And at first, they sound like they've got the whole thing quote "memorized" because they don't interrupt themselves. The next level up, they'll self-correct, and if they say something, they'll go back and say it the way they wanted to say it, or that's my interpretation of it. But it's showing that what you were talking about, about comprehension of realizing that the words in the book count and matter and how they are put together counts and matters. And so that gets us ready for when we see kids reading from print and they misidentify a word and they go back and correct it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Let's talk about writing. What does emergent writing look like? When they're writing their stories, are they using print? Are they using pictures? Are they working across pages in a book?
Elizabeth Sulzby:
A piece of printer paper, no lines. And for some, the very lowest level of writing, the child will do sort of circular scribbles, and we call it the blob. And the blob may have a very well-developed story to go to it, but that visual representation is just strikingly odd. It's a blob. The other thing they do, which is higher level, is just a scribble-like. And it's funny because all around the world, the kids tend to use the word scribble scrabble or the equivalent in their language.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
And then there are drawings so that if they're deciding to write a story about their family, you'll have the stick figures or the block-like house with the point. But the story that goes along with it may not be, "There's me, my mama, and my daddy, and we live in a house." It may be something very complicated about an event that happened to that child or something he's just making up, which is make-believe. To see other things that they're learning in other endeavors with books and also with television, all of that is feeding into their idea of what it means to write a story. And so you may have a story about a dragon, or you may of course have a big red dog as part of the story.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
So, we've got scribble, we've got drawing, and then we have letters. But the first letters are not letters representing sounds in words. They're repeated letters that the child has learned to write, and I call them non phonetic letter strengths. And because eventually, we'll get to invented spelling, and they will be representing the sounds in the words that they're intending to write. But the first letter strings are so that the vowels and the consonants are not varied in any kind of systematic way. So, it's what you're beginning to see is that now where you wanted to go is they're really attending more to the relationship between the print that they see and what they're using to represent their story. And then eventually you get to the point where you see them using invented spelling. And what you'll see first is the first letter of the syllable represented. And then you may see, you'll see partial representations of the syllable, but not the full syllable. And then eventually there's the full syllable of each word. And what you should be seeing is as soon as you get to that point of invented spelling, you should be seeing that child in reading start to show that they are noticing the print on the page and are trying to capture the print itself and not just their own version of the story.
Jennifer Serravallo:
There's some people that say, we should just be teaching three-year-olds the code. We should just start with phonics right out of the gate, teach them letter-sound correspondences, and just get them reading A S A P.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Yep.
Jennifer Serravallo:
But your approach really has kids spending time more with engaging with books around reading and developing that oral language and then trusting and knowing that we'll get to the point where they're attending to the print, and we can teach them the code and more explicitly teach phonics.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
You can't be a teacher if you don't understand language development. You can't teach young children without really understanding child development and specifically child language development and language development doesn't start at sounding out words.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I was thinking about students who speak more than one language or where English isn't their first language. I'm sure many children that you worked with in the South Bronx, that was the case.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Oh yeah.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I wonder if these kinds of classroom procedures of rereading texts and encouraging them to read, really using the pictures in a more emergent kind of way, would support older children who are working to learn English.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Well, yeah, it does. And I have had one graduate student at Northwestern who really looked at teaching young adults who had come to the United States and were working in a factory where the factory owner supported them learning language and gave them time to do that work with her, with my grad student, and she found herself using these methods. Well, one of the things is that if you're reading a book over and over again, they're getting the language of that particular book, and they're using those words, but she would hear them then using those words, and I did too, using those words in other situations that show that they really internalized the word rather than just doing mimicking.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And probably the sentence structure too, and the syntax of
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Yes.
Jennifer Serravallo:
--sort of how that book sounds. And I know there have been studies that looked at even linguistic complexity of spoken language versus picture books and
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Exactly
Jennifer Serravallo:
--show that picture book language is more sophisticated in many ways than spoken language. And it's a great reason why you would want to do this with young children, but also those learning English.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
I'm doing a book on KLP right now. I just did a section on story grammar. I had gone to graduate school with Alyssa McCabe, and we both did our dissertation with the same guy who was the head of psychology, Jim Deese, and Alyssa was using story grammar to look at stories that kids composed orally. And I took story grammar to look at Carrot Seed and Are You My Mother? And some other stories. So I could illustrate to teachers what I was talking about. And it's amazing how complicated The Carrot Seed is when you start to look at it from a story grammar point of view. It has all the parts of a story, but it's more than a simple story. It has multiple problems and embedded oppositions. Well, I don't know, that's maybe not too relevant to what you were getting at, but–
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, I do think it's a support to be able to have those stories read and reread and then practice reading them yourself, embeds in a child, a sense of story grammar, that then when they go to read and when young children are focusing on the print, it takes a lot of cognitive energy to focus on the print, right? When they're first starting out. And so I would imagine having that support, that background of "I know how stories go, that's going to help me with the meaning-making I need to be doing alongside the decoding work" Which, at the start, is quite laborious and it would be helpful. And the syntax, the language, the sophistication of the vocabulary, it's just such a strong support for young children and people learning English. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I think that's a wonderful place to stop for today. You've been so generous with your time, and I've just loved talking with you so much about your work.
Elizabeth Sulzby:
Well, thank you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome my colleagues, Gina Dignon and Clarisa Leal. Thank you so much for joining me for our conversation about my interview with Dr. Sulzby.
Clarisa Leal:
Thank you.
Gina Dignon:
Thanks for having us.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, so I'm most excited about thinking about language development. We know we need to support their oral language development throughout school, help them build vocabulary, understandings of increasingly complex sentence structure. And I'm also interested from the perspective of children who might be learning a second language and how this kind of scaffold of book reading and repeated readings can help them in those regards as well. That's what I'm most excited about from that conversation. What do you both think?
Clarisa Leal:
I think that that's so important when I'm supporting students of with language development when they're learning English. I think it's so important that we give them those opportunities where they're exposed to these books, they are listening to the language, to the vocabulary, and we give them opportunities to use it orally with a partner, with the teacher, and a small group. Having those conversations with those familiar books around those familiar books. And then they're going to slowly start making those connections with the language. Something that I sometimes do is also if you have the same storybook or familiar book in the two languages for instance I do it a lot with students in English and Spanish, and making the connections between the different vocabulary, and going back and forth and saying, "oh, this word means___this is how you say it in English." And then let them use it in that context. So, I think that's very powerful.
Gina Dignon:
Yeah, just building off of what you're saying, Clarisa, I'm kind of taking a look at all the skills in the emergent section of the 2.0 reading strategies book and how all these skills, talking about books, determining importance, building language through this kind of language development in and of itself is knowledge building. It doesn't have to be about some topics. It's knowledge building and skill building in a really authentic way for what Dr. Sulzby was saying, pre-K and kindergarten kids.
Clarisa Leal:
And she mentioned that there was a part, I think that she said that listening attentively as a teacher, I think that's so important just to pay attention and understand what they can do and use the skill progression from the Reading Strategies Book and see where they're at and then when where they're at, trying to find some specific strategies that would help them continue that language development. The 11 stages of her scheme of reading and how is that's completely connected to the skill. The first strategies are focused on labeling, commenting, then storytelling, sounding like a reader, then connecting it to print. So just looking at, that's part of understanding that language development. So as teachers, if you don't feel that you have that much knowledge on language development, just tap into the skill progression from Chapter one in that book. And you basically have it right there.
Gina Dignon:
And I don't know if it was you, Clarisa, or it may have been Cristy, one of our other colleagues, she was talking to me about this idea of wordless picture books. And I just feel like that that is such a multiple pathways into language development. You don't really have to have this common language even right to be sharing a wordless picture book.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, those wordless picture books I think could be super valuable to support kids in really attending to how does a story sound? How does a story go? Making sure I'm using dialogue and I'm using narration and I'm describing the setting. And one page connects to the next page, connects to the next page, and you have the pictures there to kind of guide you. But the thing that you don't get with wordless picture books is the repetition of the identical language on every page if you were to read it to kids over and over and over again. So, it's just something interesting to think about I think is what materials match which purpose, when, and why would I use them? So, the wordless picture books could be a great point there to talk to them about storytelling and especially if you’re, again, connecting it to writing. So then maybe you give them a booklet with multiple pages, and you teach them to write a story across pages with pictures just like you saw in the wordless picture book The Wave. And now we're going to tell that story just like you told the story from the wordless picture book The Wave. And then eventually now we're going to label the pictures or we're going to write a sentence on the bottom of the page. So, it is so wise to be thinking about these two-- reading and writing develop over time --and keep an eye on both and make those connections for kids really clearly between the two.
Gina Dignon:
And that even though there's a progression, and even though her 11 stages, I don't think it happens as linear.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And these goals, these goals are not at all in conflict with conventional reading. Because if you think about whether you're looking at the model of Scarborough's Rope or you're looking at the Active View of Reading, kids need both a development of story structure, genre, story language, oral language development to help with all those things...vocabulary. And that's what this develops. And that can be happening along the same time as learning more conventional reading from print. Or it could happen when kids are a little bit younger in pre-kindergarten, that feels like a really appropriate place for it. They're absolutely complements to each other and it's all part of the suite of strategies and skills that kids need to know to be proficient readers who not only read the words but also to comprehend.
Gina Dignon:
Yeah, and Jen, you were just making me think, I was looking back at the different reader models that are in the Reading Strategies Book. And when you look at the Simple View, you look at the Rope, you look at the Active View of Reading, language comprehension's a huge part of it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's right.
Gina Dignon:
And so, it's like the ability to understand spoken language mean so we can't skip it. And then even when kids are reading conventionally and writing conventionally to it's even you don't forget about it. You have to keep building that because everything gets more complex as kids grow and develop.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, it's absolutely important. If you're not reading out loud and you're not giving kids experience with the vocabulary and syntax and language structures, there's going to be some catching up to do when they get into books where they have to encounter more complex and sophisticated language. So, I think it's exciting to think about how kids are so capable even at a very young age to be doing this kind of storybook "reading" that Dr. Sulzby talked about. Well, maybe that's a good place to stop for today. Thank you both so much for joining me.
Gina Dignon:
Thank you.
Clarisa Leal:
Thank you, Jen.