Vancouver, BC - March 23rd, The Sutton Place Hotel
Panel Members
Gillian McCreary, former Assistant Deputy Minister, Saskatchewan Departments of Education and Learning, former president of the Canadian Education Association
Myer Horowitz, former President of the University of Alberta
Nick Geer, Chair of NavCanada, former Chair and President of ICBC and Vice-Chair of the Pattison Group
Jeff Dowle, Canadian representative to the APEC Business Advisory Council and former Executive Vice-President of HSBC Bank and Chair of the Vancouver Board of Trade
Mary Jean Gallagher, Chief Executive Officer, Literacy and Numeracy
Secretariat
Jim Sinclair, President of the BC Federation of Labour
Confirmed Presentations
Don Jamieson, Ph.D., Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network
Tracy Lavin, Ph.D., Canadian Council on Learning (Author of three NSEL policy papers)
Victoria Purcell-Gates, Ph.D., University of British Columbia
Leanne Conradie, Speech Language Pathologist
Literacy BC and the 2010 Legacies Now Society
Victor Glickman, Ph.D., University of British Columbia
Langley School District
David Mather, Ph.D., University of Victoria
Books for BC Babies, Coquitlam Public Libraries
Michelle Kozey, University of British Columbia
Elizabeth Bredberg, Ph.D., Research Director, Society for the Advancement of Excellence in Education
Fataneh Farnia, Ph.D., OISE, University of Toronto
March 24th, 2009 at 11:22 am
One of the final discussion points at the public hearing yesterday related to the “bigger picture” of literacy and the ability to read for meaning, interpret written material and digest, manipulate and evaluate written material. Nick Geer raised the question about how to address the development of these skills.
In answer to this, it again highlights for me the important role of the Speech-Language Pathologist in literacy development. The issues raised by Nick are “higher level language skills”, and comprise what is referred to in the literature as “cognitive academic language proficiency”. These include skills such as identifying the main idea of text, summarising and paraphrasing text, using language to problem-solve and manipulate information. As such then, it is on the continuum of language development, and therefore falls in the scope of practice of Speech-Language Pathologists; Speech-Language Pathologists help to remediate these difficulties in children who are struggling to develop cognitive academic language proficiency. The Speech-Language Pathologist also has a role to play in helping to facilitate the development of these skills (initially on a verbal level, and then generalising these skills to the reading situation) within the context of school.
The “big picture”: oral language skills are foundational to literacy development, phonological awareness skills allow a child to begin to read and develop an ability to read for meaning, but children also need to be developing verbal reasoning skills in early elementary school, to support and sustain the development of cognitive academic language proficiency.
This relates to the point Dr Farnia made about immigrant children for whom English is a second language. The trend noted was that the older the child was upon arrival in Canada, the less likely they were to do well in the higher grades. This is because although they have mastered phonological awareness skills and “learned to read” they do not have adequate oral language proficiency in English, and so cannot be developing cognitive academic language proficiency in English fast enough to cope with the demands of the curriculum.
The bigger picture as I see it relating to the NSEL proposal is that we need to see literacy development as a progression in skill development from birth to 18 years. Different ingredients/variables are critical to this development at different stages and so different stakeholders have a critical role to play as children progress through literacy development.