In the final episode of Summer Reading with UENLitFlix, Matt and Jenn are joined by Dr. Claire Son, associate professor at the University of Utah's educational psychology department. Listen to learn about the science behind early childhood language development and get expert insight on how parents and educators can support young learners.
In the final episode of Summer Reading with UENLitFlix, Matt and Jenn are joined by Dr. Claire Son, associate professor at the University of Utah's educational psychology department. Listen to learn about the science behind early childhood language development and get expert insight on how parents and educators can support young learners.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] Matt, I'm really looking forward to talking to today's guest, Dr. Claire Son.
Could not agree more. She does some amazing research with early childhood interventions with reading and focusing on some really interesting things that will help children as young as they can start reading, so like two, three years old, start to develop those skills early with their parents, whether it be through-- and she talks a little bit about this with rhyming games or with reading alouds, goodnight stories, those sorts of things so that the kids start to understand that there's a world of literature that's really interesting and engaging that they can get into, which I just as a former early high school ninth, 10th grade teacher but also a college educator, the more we can get people excited about reading, children excited about reading earlier, the easier it makes our jobs in the future as writing teachers and as reading coaches and things like that.
Good point. And early ed and literacy skills are so fundamental. That's always been my understanding. I'm really looking forward to hearing what our expert has to say about that.
Absolutely. Let's jump into our interview with Claire Son. It is so great to have such a prestigious guest today on the podcast. Claire, can you start us off by telling us a little bit about your background, who you are, and how you came to study what you study?
So my name is Claire Son. I'm an Associate Professor in Education Psychology Department at the University of Utah. And I was an early childhood [INAUDIBLE] teaching kindergartener and preschoolers and my doctoral degree in education. But all of my experience with young children, I just became interested in their language development and how those early language skills relate to later skills in their school years, their school achievement, and reading. So that's where my whole interest and research unfolds.
That's amazing. And I absolutely love that you're digging into early childhood development and reading and how those two interact. Most people listening to the podcast know or at least have heard that reading is good for our brains. But your research can help us understand just how valuable opportunities to build language skills can be for very young children. Can you step us through some of the highlights of your finding and what you found specifically about young children and the connection between reading?
I think we have heard so many times about how the early vocabulary, early language skills predict later reading skills and all different kinds of life achievement, including school drop outs and high school graduation, the job prospect. And we're kind of sometimes bored by that. But it's really striking when I collected data. I actually test young children and try to track their development in language skills and how those skills and growth over time, particularly ongoing learning and development. It's really shocking to see the strong correlation between their early language skills, their ongoing development, their school achievements.
It's not just their math or reading scores in school children, but their social emotional skills, their functioning skills, or self regulation. These skills are all correlated really in a complex way. And in some ways, it's well, if they have a good start in early language skills and early skills, that make a path to your success pathway or throughout your childhood and maybe later in your life. Versus if you don't have an early foundation or skills or opportunity to develop those skills, it may mean some difficulties and struggles throughout your life. So it is sad. At the same time, it can be encouraging. If you focus in early education development, then maybe we are building and pave the way for their life success for all our children.
That's really cool, Claire. And so you mentioned self regulation. And just in case there's somebody listening that isn't familiar with that term, can you explain what that means?
So self regulation is something basic like control. But it's controlling your mind, it's your skills, your temperament. But not just the social way but the cognitive way. That means if you need to focus right on, then it means you're controlling yourself or your brain and your work and cognition attention to focus on things and execute the task. For example, if you're in preschool, your teacher said, hey, sit down. It's time to sit down and listen to the story.
Some children never hear about it and just wandering the classroom. Other kids just swiftly move from their own seat and come to the big area and ready to listen to the story. The latter kinds of children have self regulation skill. They can listen to the instruction. Follow the directions. They probably in their mind try to calculate what should I do and why do I need to do that. So that's called their behavioral, cognitive, attentional control and functioning regulation. We call it self regulation.
Wow. So that's really foundational too. I can see how that would be incredibly important for being able to succeed in a school environment or kind of any place where you need to participate in a group.
Right. Yeah. And there has been recent interest in self regulation is more behavioral sense or some more neurological people call it executive functioning. It relate to brain functions. And this seems like the most striking like predictors for early skills, including the language skills and reading skills. So some people call it just a new IQ measure that can predict anything for our children. So it has been greatest interest in the field that recognize the importance of self regulation skills.
One of your current projects involves measuring reading engagement and interest and behaviors. How do you measure somebody's reading engagement? And what are some of the key indicators of a high level of that?
The reading engagement is I conceptualize is that how much children really focus and not just interest itself, but engage in reading so they can focus and understand the reading process together more actively. There are multiple ways to measure reading engagement. Probably the easiest one is to ask your parents. Ask about the child's parents or teachers or primary caregivers. So the others in children's life can answer, OK, this child tend to listen carefully and ask a question if there are any questions, stop the reader, or they ask repetition. So those all behaviors that indicate children really engage in reading processes.
For young children, we develop some measurement that ask teachers as the main reader for the child in a school setting to rate children's behavior. So we try to measure all the observable behavior children, including they look at the book. They are focusing on the illustration. They pointed the parts or the words they do not recognize or they stop the reading and ask questions. Or sometimes they talk with a neighbor to figure out what is the character doing. So those are kind of all observable or expressive behavior we try to measure and observe. And based on those observations, we come up with some kind of composite scores to describe the level or extent of engagement of young children during the reading.
That's incredible, Claire. And I love that you're diving deeply into looking at measurable skills and how they relate to the overall process of reading engagement and the work that they can do. But one thing that-- I'm a teacher from-- I'm very much like you. I came from a teaching background. And I'm kind of curious, what are some of the factors that seem to improve early development of reading and learning skills and children? And then on top of that, I'm always curious about how we can help parents and caregivers help to develop those and support young readers developing those skills over time.
I think that's a really big question. And we have been answering and will answer forever probably. And I think the difficulty of that question is there are so many component skills or parts that involve in reading. So simply maybe just involving recognizing letters and know the letter name and sounds. More blending those letters into words. Like kuh, ah, tuh, and you see three letters and makes the word cat.
And the other side of reading, you need to understand what is when you say cat, we have to know the meaning of the cat, right? So the vocabulary skills or the content knowledge you relate to all the readings. And not just a simple word learning but overall conceptual or background knowledge that helps you to comprehend or understand the passage you just read. So the comprehension of language imparts another big [INAUDIBLE].
So children have to learn two kinds of packets at the same time, like a letter or sound, words, decoding part, [INAUDIBLE] like words, vocabulary, understanding, or paragraph. All those to kinds of different kinds of skills and they want to combine it together. So for the teachers and caregivers, I think it's hard sometimes. Oh my God, they're going to kindergarten next year. What should I do? Should I just change my-- and let's drop this one and let's just start from worksheets? Let's sit down and work on worksheets and let them grab the pencil and practice writing.
Or something like, well, we have been practicing all this nightly storytime, bedtime story from very young. And we have heard so many times about the importance of reading and sharing stories can this kind of helping children when they get to school. So we know lots of things about reading. We have been already doing lots of things as a parent and teachers. But sometimes it's hard to see the connection because reading is complicated and different kinds of skills are involved.
But I can say that early language skills pave the way for the brain and the children to see the importance of see the sounds and words and blending the words into words level and they read the sounds become the meaning in their mind. So if the teachers and parents do the basic language activity like reading, singing songs, do rhyming games, all those small things already build up neural pathways in their children's brains so that they can recognize the sounds. They have tried to understand connection between words and letters and meaning or the semantics and [INAUDIBLE] part. So they are already building all of those connections between different parts of reading skills.
So I think while we know that early reading is really important, reading aloud storybooks or bedtime stories are important, that you're already doing lots of sound activities, lots of awareness skills training through those everyday interactions. So I think as a parent and teachers, you are already doing lots of things. And that will actually count. And that is not just for the fun part or the parent child relation-building activity. That's the one that actually help your child read and success later in school.
Now, it's been a long time since my kids were babies. But I remember the advice that we got was to narrate even when you're just putting clothes on your infant to talk to them the whole time And say what you're doing. And I think from what you're saying, and I'm like, that's building up that relationship between what the content and the language, the what's going on in their world and what the words are that we're using for that. But if a child hasn't had the opportunity to develop these skills before they're age four or five, are there any interventions that can help them catch up to where they would have been if they had been able to access that kind of nurturing of their language skills?
I think that's a really important question to ask to the field of education. Well, in terms of I just mentioned about two different kinds of skills set for reading for the more letter to word based skills versus more language-based, meaning-based skills. For the actual decoding and word reading part, like knowing letters and sounds, if you have repeated specific intervention or training, I think it's easy for children to catch up that later. So reading the part I'm not going to really worry about them unless they have some disability or dyslexic needs.
So we are reading about lots of science of reading behind our reading instruction. And there has been huge interest in science reading. We know how to teach [INAUDIBLE] about the decoding parts. So I think if we have more evidence-based instruction and intervention for the decoding and letter, those parts, we are not going to worry about. We have a wonderful intervention system already in Utah. And they have lots of funding and support for science reading.
But the problem is the meaning part, the language. So if your children develop their language as soon as they are born. So if their children get to school, they are already behind five years of whole exposure to language and semantics and understanding behind other kids if they lost opportunities in their early childhood. And there are lots of trials and efforts to provide intervention in early language. Part of vocabulary and understanding narrative.
But those interventions show that children develop their skills when they're intervened, but those children do not overcome their loss of opportunity. it's really hard to catch up with other kids who already have been advantaged in their early experiences. So only one thing is we have to start early. That's the only way we can help children catch up with their early disadvantages. So [INAUDIBLE] focus on early education, early childcare, head start, all of those opportunities and resources we can provide young children before they get to school.
I love that you're bringing up all of these funding opportunities and all of these different things that are happening here in the state of Utah and beyond as well. Because it's like you said, if we get students to enjoy reading and that we're kind of helping them through that process earlier, it reinforces it throughout the lifespan. I taught ninth-grade English. And the students who read at home were more likely-- at a younger age more likely to enjoy reading in the future. And that helped their grades and all sorts of stuff. So it's an absolutely incredible amount of value for what we put into early educational reading.
So with that said, thank you so much for your time today, Claire. We really appreciate your thoughts and ideas. Is there anywhere that we can come and if people are interested in your research that they can come and check out some of your research online or see some of these interventions in action possibly?
Well, the University of Utah has a reading clinic. So if you have-- UURC stands for the University Utah Reading Clinic. If you can search it, it provides the services, intervention, tutoring clinic, also some related evidence and research articles. That's one way. And when you search the University of Utah Reading and Literacy Program, you will see all of those other reading and literacy-related resources and my research too.
My lab is called Early Lab. It has a website on the University of Utah Education Psychology. If you search the Early Lab University of Utah, you can find the address of the labs. And we include some other references for the different kinds of studies we are doing for the early reading.
That's incredible. Well, again, thank you so much for your time today, Claire, and thank you for explaining some of the amazing things that are going on here in Utah, specifically the University of Utah with early childhood intervention and reading. We really appreciate you.
Thank you very much.
Oh wow, Matt. So my big takeaway is that it's not just nice to start early with literacy skills, like for my own kids, but it's essential to make sure as many kids as possible get to build pre-literacy skills so that they can succeed in school and we can have a happier, healthier Utah.
Absolutely. And I love that she brought up all of the different programs that are happening in the state of Utah, and the things that are going on to support early childhood interventions with reading. It's so important that parents and community members and teachers understand that reading isn't one of those things that we can set aside and hope they pick it up over the course of their lifespan. It's we have to do it early, often, and in multiple ways. Like I've said before, with rhyming games or reading loud or working with sounds and just making sure that the students, the kids can actually make the sounds that they need to and getting them into a good place with that.
One thing we should mention is that UEN does have this online library for kids for pre-K through grade two and their parents and caregivers at preschool.uen.org. And there's a whole section on there for learning letters that can help with making these connections that Claire talked about.
Absolutely. And what a great set of resources that are free and will help teachers and parents to really reinforce the importance of reading in their child's lives. Again, as an early high school, or college teacher, getting students excited about reading and writing earlier in their lives and illustrating that they might not have found the book that they love yet, let's find that book, is such a valuable thing over the course of a lifespan. I read recently that even college graduates in the United States, only pick up something like 12 books a year and read six of them. And I feel like we need to do more of that. We need to have more reading over the lifespan for sure.
Yeah. I have to say, I agree with you. And I'm a huge fan of all the media types. I don't do much with video games, but I love movies. I love TV. I just love the variety. I love podcasts. Reading does something special to your brain. And so it is important to have that be part of your diet, even if you are consuming your media and information through other types of platforms.
Absolutely. It's so important to dive into multiple types and really get into them. And hopefully, if you're listening to this and you have a small child or you work with small children, this will give you some ideas to build some of these skills in your children. So thank you so much, Jen. I'm sad this is our last episode in the series, but hopefully, we can pick this up again next year and talk more about film, talk more about books, and literature, and how they connect together in a larger pattern and schema.
It's been such a pleasure, Matt. And thanks to you and Dani for letting me ride along on the UEN homeroom. It's such a great podcast.
Awesome. Yeah, we were so happy to help out with it. And again, hopefully, we can pick this up for another summer break next year. Take care and we'll see you next time.
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