The first time I realized I was working with a student with an oral language problem, it wasn’t because he couldn’t read. It was because he could.

His phonics instruction was solid, systematic, and aligned with everything I had been trained to do. His reading accuracy and automaticity improved. On paper, he appeared to be a student who should be just fine. However, when I asked my student to retell the passage he read, his responses were short and fragmented. When I asked him to retell a story, the details collapsed. In front of me was a kid who had worked incredibly hard to close decoding gaps, and yet his confidence and view of himself as a learner faded as he faced grade-level material. 

For a long time, I believed that if phonics instruction was explicit, systematic and consistent, everything else would fall into place. After all, decades of research have shown what works when it comes to teaching the code, and my student made gains that any reading specialist would be pleased with. I assumed that, given the fact that children are surrounded by language, oral language would take care of itself. It wasn’t until I began diving into the pages of language research that I realized the most important component to reading instruction started to take shape long before print ever entered the picture.

What I hadn’t yet learned is that exposure to language is not the same as the intentional development of language, and that if I wanted to develop strong readers in my classroom, I also needed to develop strong language users. As a veteran urban educator, I knew that many of my students were entering the classroom with fewer high-quality language experiences compared to their peers from higher-SES families (Snowling & Hulme, 2016). Many children arrive at school with well-developed oral language systems. Others exhibit uneven, fragile, or delayed language, not because of a lack of intelligence or effort, but because language development is shaped by experience, opportunity, and instruction.

But oral language isn’t just about how much children talk. It’s about how they organize ideas, attach meaning to words, and use language to communicate, think, reason, and connect information. It lives beneath the surface of classroom conversation, often unnoticed until increased linguistic and academic demands make it visible. 

And here’s the part that matters most:

When children begin learning to read, the cognitive and linguistic demands increase rapidly. Vocabulary must be precise. Sentences must be held in memory. Meaning must be constructed across phrases, clauses, and ideas. Students who have well-developed oral language can absorb this shift with relative ease. Students who do not often struggle in ways that are difficult to explain if we’re only looking at their progress with print. This is why oral language difficulties are often missed and therefore not included in literacy instruction. It’s not absent. It’s just invisible, until it isn’t.

Early in my career, I was so deeply focused on supporting students in cracking the code that I missed the critical foundations of oral language instruction. All content areas require language instruction to meet the increased demands of text complexity. From learning how to communicate basic needs to conducting a scientific experiment, when instruction is uneven, even the most excellent reading instruction can feel like it isn’t working.

As educators, many of us were trained to focus on what we can see: letter-sound knowledge, word reading accuracy, and written output. Oral language, by contrast, is dynamic and fleeting. It lives in conversation, in play, reading, and writing, and in explanations that disappear as quickly as they’re spoken. However, decades of research indicate that oral language development is one of the strongest predictors of later reading success. Long before children struggle with reading comprehension, the patterns are already forming in how they use and understand spoken language (Hulme et al, 2015). Recent work by neuroscientist,  Dr. Nadine Gaab, suggests that divergence in reading‐related skill trajectories, often linked to later reading difficulties, can be observed as early as 18 months of age, long before children encounter formal literacy instruction.

This series invites readers to slow down and examine the underlying dynamics of literacy instruction. In the posts that follow, we’ll explore how oral language supports every component of reading, why some students need more explicit language instruction to benefit from phonics, and how educators can strengthen oral language without adding more to their already full plates.

Because once you learn to see oral language, you start noticing it everywhere—and you realize how much possibility lives there, long before a child ever opens a book.

 

 

References

 

Gaab, N. (2025). Reading skill development and early neurocognitive markers. Harvard Gazette. https://news.harvard.edu

Hulme, C., Nash, H. M., Gooch, D., Lervåg, A., & Snowling, M. J. (2015). The foundations of literacy development in children at familial risk of dyslexia. Psychological Science, 26(12), 1877–1886. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615603702 

Snowling, M. J., & Hulme, C. (2016). Reading comprehension: Nature, assessment, and teaching. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 7(4), 264–275. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1393

 

 

Bio

 

MaryKate DeSantis Ed.M, CAS, is the founder of Left Side Strong LLC and an educator, consultant, and researcher specializing in oral language, literacy development, and evidence-based instruction. She began her career as a special educator and reading specialist, later serving as a district-wide literacy coach, where she worked directly with students and teachers to support learners with diverse language and reading profiles. These early roles gave her firsthand experience with the challenges educators face in translating research into effective classroom practice, which sparked her interest in studying language, literacy, and developmental trajectories. MaryKate has held a full-time research faculty appointment at the MGH Institute of Health Professions and worked as a clinician in the Neurology Department at Boston Children’s Hospital. She is a research collaborator at Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, an adjunct professor at Boston College Lynch School of Human Development, and a Ph.D. student in Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education. MaryKate’s most important role is being a mom to Ava (4) and Aly (3).