This past year, I interviewed Brianna Guild from SLP Literacy Corner for the De Facto Leaders podcast. In preparation for our interview, she shared a detailed summary of what she wanted to discuss in our episode, and I decided to publish it as a post because it has a lot of useful information for clinicians who want to learn more about literacy, or who want to know how they can find their niche within their field.
The interview will be released in April of 2024 on De Facto Leaders.
Brianna is a private practice Speech-Language Pathologist in Ontario, Canada. She provides virtual speech therapy sessions, primarily in the areas of literacy, language, and articulation, to residents of Ontario.
She started her own small business, SLP Literacy Corner, in 2022. She aims to support busy educators by creating resources and sharing activity ideas aligned with the Science of Reading. She is passionate about sharing low-prep resources and ideas for students of all ages, so educators can spend less time planning their literacy lessons.
Her journey to becoming an SLP was not a traditional one. She received her Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry with a minor in Psychology from the University of Guelph, and then her Master of Health Science in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Toronto. She loves that the field of Speech-Language Pathology combines her interests in education, health care, and research.
Brianna and I started out the conversation discussing our own lived experiences learning to read. We discovered we had very similar experiences in that we both struggled initially, but were both able to improve because we received explicit instruction at the right time.
Here is what Brianna had to say:
My background starts with my own personal journey learning how to read. I have vivid memories about learning to read. My parents always read to me as a child. I had favourite books that my parents read to me so many times I had them memorized, and it probably looked like I was reading, but I actually had no idea how to read. In grade 1 we had these colourful bins of leveled books, and I remember my friends were moving up in these levels and bins, and I wasn’t. I just had no idea how to read the words. I remember being taught to look at the pictures to help me read, but I’ve always been a very logical person, I need to understand the “why” and reason behind things, and looking at the pictures to figure out the words never made sense to me. I wanted to know how to read the words. I know my teachers tried their best to help me.
My grade 1 teacher cut these little windows out of paper, and I would move them across the sentence to help me focus on one word at a time, but I couldn’t read the words, so focusing on one at a time didn’t make a difference. I knew the letters, but not what sounds they made. By grade 2, I don’t think I had made much progress with reading because at a parent-teacher interview that year, I specifically remember my grade 2 teacher telling my parents, right in front of me, that I couldn’t read. I felt crushed. I felt like was trying, but I just didn’t understand how to read.
Sometime after that, my mom bought phonics flashcards and some workbooks. We would do flashcard drills and she taught me what sounds all the letters represented, and how to sound out words. That’s when reading started making sense to me. The first books I remember enjoying trying to read were the Junie B Jones series by Barbara Park. My mom would take turns reading the pages with me so I didn’t get too frustrated and could enjoy the story.
I think I was probably caught up to whatever the grade level reading expectations were by grade 3 or 4. I never had any diagnoses or an IEP, and I went on to be very academically inclined and enjoyed school.
When I became an SLP and started learning more about literacy instruction, I already knew that the balanced literacy approach wasn’t an effective approach because I know that it doesn’t work for everyone. It didn’t work for me. I was one of those kids who needed some explicit instruction to learn how to read, and I didn’t get that from the balanced literacy approach being used by my teachers in school.
Clearly, I’ve thought a lot about my own experience with learning to read as I’ve become more familiar with literacy instruction. I think once I figured out how to read and write, I never thought about it again until I started taking literacy trainings. Once I knew how to read and write, I enjoyed it. I wanted to be a teacher because I loved school and learning, and then once I went to university, I wanted to be a professor because I thought, then I could teach and do scientific research.
I had actually never heard about Speech-Language Pathology until my final year of undergrad. I was completing my undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and had decided I didn’t want to be a professor or work in a molecular biology laboratory. I learned about SLP from a career advisor, and started volunteering with SLPs. I immediately loved how SLP combined my interests in education, health care, and research.
I volunteered at a few places including a private practice clinic where the owner had developed a reading program for kids with dyslexia. I remember her saying that reading wasn’t something most SLPs worked on, and she had me observe other SLPs working with articulation and language clients so I could see other sessions. I went on to the SLP Masters program at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, and I learned more about literacy during my first placement. I was at a school board, and my clinical educator was an amazing, experienced SLP who had been part of developing and implementing the small group reading program for struggling readers that is used in that board. As SLP students, we got to help her run this reading program, and it was one of my favourite parts of that placement.
When I graduated from school, I started working for a private practice, where I still work today, and immediately started working with a wide range of clients, including literacy clients. It was an area I was already really interested in and wanted to learn more about, so I started taking more training and workshops, and took on more literacy clients.
In Ontario, Canada we are not allowed to use the terms “specialty” or “specialist” because our college currently does not have any specialty certificates of registration.
But, I have narrowed down my practice areas to primarily literacy, language and articulation, with literacy making up the majority of my caseload.
To gain more knowledge about literacy, I’ve taken additional training and courses, I read literacy professional development books, and I try to keep up with recent research.
I’ve taken a variety of courses that cover literacy instruction across development:
– I completed The Hanen Centre’s ABC and Beyond training. This is a program that I can use with educators of preschool to kindergarten children to help them promote emergent literacy skills including, oral language, vocabulary, story comprehension, print knowledge, and phonological awareness.
– I’m also trained in the Delivering SMARTER Intervention Reading & Writing Curriculum, which I use as the backbone of all my literacy assessment and instruction for kindergarten to high school clients.
– I’m currently completing the Basics of Decoding and Spelling Instruction course by the International Dyslexia Association Ontario Branch, which includes how to teach basic and complex phonics, spelling, strategies for reading and spelling multi-syllable words, and basic morphology.
Some of the books I’ve read this year include:
–“A Fresh Look at Phonics” by Wiley Blevins
–“The Fluent Reader “by Timothy Rasinski
-“The Reading Comprehension Blueprint” by Nancy Lewis Hennessy M.Ed.
I’m always on the search for more literacy professional development opportunities, whether it’s a course, webinar, book, or a podcast like this! Regardless of your profession, if you are interested in learning more about literacy instruction, I think it’s important to stay curious and learn from a variety of different reliable sources to reduce individual biases from any one source.
We then transitioned to talking about the different roles of professionals, as well as how effective literacy instruction should look:
Basically SLPs and other professionals such as special education teachers have 3 main roles:
- Directly working on literacy
- Indirectly working on literacy by using literacy tasks to target other goals
- Advocacy and education.
When it comes to the principles of effective literacy intervention, whether it’s an SLP, reading specialist, special education teacher or general classroom teacher, we need to provide all children with structured literacy instruction. This is instruction that is evidence-based, explicit, systematic, and incorporates review of learned concepts. Explicit means we are explicitly introducing and explaining phonics rules – there is no assuming that kids will figure it out. Systematic means we follow a logical scope and sequence for teaching rules – typically from easier and more common spellings like short vowel sounds, to more challenging or less common spellings.
The research outlines multiple components of effective literacy instruction. In 2000, The National Reading Panel did a review of reading research that identified the key components as phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. More recently in 2020, the International Dyslexia Associationidentified the key components of structured literacy as phoneme awareness, sound-symbol (or phoneme-grapheme) correspondences, orthography, morphology, syntax, and semantics. I hope you can see that there is a lot of overlap in those lists, and personally, I think one of the major takeaways from the research is that literacy is more than just phonics or just reading comprehension. It is more than one thing. There are many different components we need to consider and explicitly work on with children to help them become proficient readers.
When working with other professionals or supporting parents, I think it is important that we take the time to explain the research behind what we are doing and any changes we are making to our instruction as we learn better instruction methods.
In Ontario, Canada there were major updates made to the Ontario Language Curriculum in 2023, which is now rooted in evidence-based reading research, rather than the balanced literacy approach.
Essentially, around the 1990s the balanced approach took over schools. Balanced literacy includes using leveled books and the three-cueing system to teach reading, where you are taught to look at the picture, the first letter in the word, and think about what word makes sense in the sentence. But essentially this is more guessing than reading.
The Science of Reading is the collection of research from multiple disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, and education, that provides scientific evidence for how children learn to read and write, and how to best support literacy development for all readers. The evidence supports the importance of using a structured literacy approach, which teaches literacy skills through systematic and explicit instruction.
A lot of people seem to refer to the transition from balanced literacy to the Science of Reading as just another pendulum swing in literacy instruction. However, this is not the case. The important changes being made to literacy instruction are backed by decades of scientific research. I think that in order to help ourselves, other educators, and parents make this mindset shift to this supposedly new form of literacy instruction, we need to spend some time understanding the why and the research behind what we are doing. If other educators or parents have questions, we need to help provide them with answers and help them understand what we are doing.
One helpful resource that Ontario has is ONlit. This is a website developed by Dyslexia Canada and the International Dyslexia Association Ontario Branch that serves as a comprehensive hub for empowering educators to provide evidence-based systematic and explicit instruction aligned with the new Ontario Language Curriculum. It has tons of helpful resources for both educators and parents. I think having access to reliable resources, such as those complied in the ONlit website, is really important, especially when it comes to showing leadership and working with other professionals or supporting parents.
There are also some things that I’m doing personally to show leadership in the areas of literacy.
In March 2021, I launched the SLP Literacy Corner store on Teachers Pay Teachers. I decided to start sharing my materials because I started thinking that if I needed to create these materials for my clients, then other SLPs and educators might need these materials too, and others may not have the time that I do to make them. My mission with SLP Literacy Corner became to support busy educators by creating resources and sharing activity ideas aligned with the science of reading research. I purposefully create low-prep resources that can be used for virtual or in person sessions and with students of all ages because I work with clients from kindergarten to high school, so I need materials that are age-appropriate for a wide range of clients.
I’ve been growing the SLP Literacy Corner on Instagram and the SLP Literacy Corner Facebook page, and I also started a biweekly email newsletter where I share links to my own resources, freebies, and blogs, as well as other free materials and websites I’m using in literacy sessions. My hope is that these emails give educators some new ideas and make planning a little easier.
As more people discovered SLP Literacy Corner, I’ve had the opportunity to be on a couple different podcasts, and also present to multiple private practices in Canada and the US about the roles of SLPs in literacy, structured literacy instruction, and activity ideas. I absolutely love presenting and talking about literacy so I’m looking forward to presenting more in the future.
Then at the end of 2023, I started a literacy professional development book club with other SLPs in the Toronto area. We read and discussed “The Reading Comprehension Blueprint” by Nancy Lewis Hennessy. It was my first time starting, or even participating in a book club. I’m really happy I took the leap to start it because it has been a wonderful opportunity for us to gather and share our learnings from the book and how we are applying what we’ve learned to our SLP sessions. I’m looking forward to continuing the book club and learning more from my amazing SLP colleagues.
You can connect with Brianna on her SLP Literacy Corner website here, on Instagram @slp.literacy.corner, or on her Facebook page here.
You can find her SLP Literacy Corner Teachers Pay Teachers store here.
Stay tuned for the full interview with Brianna on De Facto Leaders coming in April 2024.
In this conversation, Brianna and I discussed components of language that impact literacy and comprehension, which is what I share in Language Therapy Advance Foundations.
Language Therapy Advance Foundations is a program that shows SLPs how to create a system for language therapy that incorporates research-based strategies for building components of vocabulary, including:
- Phonology
- Morphology
- Orthography
- Semantics
- Syntax
I created this program because like Brianna, I also struggled with reading; and I also uncovered a passion for language and literacy the first few years of my career. My early experience in the schools inspired me to put together a language therapy framework during my doctoral work, and that’s what I share in the program.
You can learn more about how to become a member here.
