In school, as Susie continued to gather and organize information about glaciers, she moved easily between reading and writing. To me it seemed she relied all the while on strategies and thinking skills I'd observed in her writing. Whereas I'd often watched her planning ahead in her writing, now I watched as she surveyed the text before her, read, made predictions, and organized her attack. The executive function which had given her flexibility and control in writing seemed crucial to her reading, for as she proceeded through books, she monitored and directed her processes, shuttling between reading/rereading/planning/recalling/questioning/reading/ talking/writing...1
This 4th issue of the 30th anniversary volume of Topics in Language Disorders (TLD) highlights connections between spoken and written language and thinking, and between executive functions and content learning and processes. It provides practical suggestions and explores the potential for expository texts to provide authentic contexts for curriculum-based language assessment and intervention. It also represents the values of the journal's editor emerita, Dr. Kay Butler, who took us "up the down staircase" when she brought the vision of this topical, international, and interdisciplinary journal to life 30 years ago. Kay taught us how to blend analysis and synthesis, and to stimulate the thinking of readers across generations and continents to ask new questions about relationships (see Issue 1 of Volume 30 for examples).
In the introductory quote to this column, Lucy Calkins (1983) described the higher level processes Susie developed across the elementary grades while learning to compose and comprehend complex texts in writing and in reading. Some of Susie's learning seemed driven by a desire to communicate; some was more clearly a direct response to formal education; and some seemed to grow from and into the pure joy of learning, creating, and working with ideas. Calkins showed how focusing on students' ideas could lay the foundation for building a bridge to higher level concepts and more literate language.
The issue begins with an article by Westby, Culatta, Lawrence, and Hall-Kenyon on the relationships of teacher learning and student learning about macrostructures and how summarization can reflect what students know, perhaps helping them strengthen their abilities to bridge the unknown to the known.
The other articles in this issue describe the structure and substance of the bridge and how to adapt it for students with language disorders and risks. Scott and Balthazar bring awareness to the importance and role of complex microstructures of the "grammar of information" by providing a framework for analyzing syntactic structures in the discipline-specific texts that students are asked to read and in the academic language (spoken and written) that students are asked to generate. Culatta, Blank, and Black then show how instructional conversation can be tailored to help children imagine worlds that are not part of their direct experience. Authors of this issue also offer rich insights into age-appropriate procedures for helping children gain skill in processing informational texts in the preschool (Culatta, Hall-Kenyon, and Black), elementary (Hall-Kenyon and Black), and adolescent years (Horn).
For 30 years, TLD has been a journal aimed at building bridges and stimulating ideas through peer-reviewed, scholarly, rigorous, expository texts. The deeper purpose is to build a strong and trustworthy foundation for the work of professionals across disciplines who share the vision to make life better for children and adults with language disorders. This topical issue on helping all children, preschool through adolescence, gain access to learning from informational texts builds on that tradition well.
Nickola Wolf Nelson, PhD
Editor
Katharine G. Butler, PhD
Editor Emerita
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