Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:00:00]:
Welcome, advocates, to another episode of the Lead in Equity podcast, a podcast that focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their schools. Today's Special guest is Dr. Martha Martinez and Dr. India Lindos. Without further ado, Martha. India, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:00:19]:
Thanks for having us.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:00:20]:
Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:00:21]:
Oh, yeah, the pleasure is mine. I'm excited for today's topic. We're going to be talking about reading and the science of reading. But before we get into that, Martha, I'd love to start with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what currently do.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:00:32]:
Sure. Well, I am the head of research and evaluation for an organization called seal, so Broader Early Academic Language. We're based in California, and we provide professional development for preschool through elementary school educators that's focused on improving the instructional quality and the outcomes of multilingual learners.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:00:51]:
Perfect. Perfect. And, India, what about yourself?

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:00:53]:
I'm a professor at of Special Education at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, and a core faculty member in the Alice Neely Special Education Research and Service Institute, which works with TCU and its community to help improve reading outcomes for students or learning outcomes broadly for students with disabilities.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:01:13]:
All right, well, let's do it. It sounds like we have two qualified candidates to have this conversation, so I'm really excited for this because we're going to be talking about the science of reading. And, Martha, I want to throw this one out to you first, because I want us to have a baseline as far as we all have an understanding. My listeners have an understanding of what is the science of. Of reading. So can you break that down for us, please?

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:01:33]:
Sure. Well, first, I want to say that science of reading is getting narrowed, I would say, in kind of policy, especially policy enactment, and what we have been engaged in as seal, this organization, is trying to really make sure that the emphasis is on the full body of science. When we're talking about the science of reading, it's not just about the science of the decoding part, which is essential. And we don't want to pretend like that isn't essential and important, but we really, really want to also hold up the other side of what is often called this reading equation, which includes comprehension. And we actually don't know as much about comprehension as we do about the decoding, especially on how to measure it and then how to teach it. And the other piece that tends to get lost in the mix, which we highlight in. In this paper that India and I both wrote, is Language and Culture, which is, of course, Tied up with how we perceive the world. And that of course then is important on how we learn, which includes how we learn about reading.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:02:36]:
You can't really divorce language, culture and reading because language is tied up in there. And then the third piece we talk about in the article really is about the science around teaching reading, which also tends to get short shrift. And there's a, actually a great model Duke and Cartwright did which really brings in the reader into this equation because you have to attend to the reader. You have to make sure of reading. Yes, exactly. The active view of reading. Thank you, India. That really then talks about the ways in which the reader is engaged in this process.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:03:07]:
And you can't negate that either. There's a lot of research on the importance of engagement. And so it's really these three kind of shifts that we're hoping that get greater emphasis because we are very culturally and linguistically and as Dr. India is going to talk about soon too, is a neurodiverse population. And we want to make sure then the science attends to all of the populations.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:03:31]:
Thank you. So is the, I guess the question, and maybe, maybe India, this one's for you. Is the original research because like when we think about like reading skills and teaching our young ones how to read, is that based off of best practices? But those best practices were done so many years ago that things have changed or maybe the classroom settings look different. What are your thoughts on why did. I guess why do we feel like this piece that you wrote together needed to happen?

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:04:01]:
Well, because the larger conversation around the science of reading because policy wise and wisely. In many ways we're saying focus on early intervention. We want to get kids supports early. And there was such a push on that. And that's great. But we that led to focus on what she was talking about, that equation, it's called the simple view of reading. It's like we've done all this research and we look at this thing and we know in the end that the big potent pieces us researchers like to know what gives us the boat. What's the best predictor.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:04:29]:
But it's not the only thing in the equation is the problem. So the best predictors are decoding in the early years, particularly decoding. It's the best predictor of what students reading performance is going to be in the future. But it shifts that equation is. It looks like it's like R equals D times C. So D is decoding C being comprehension. But comprehension is far more predictive as kids get older. And it's still very much important later.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:04:56]:
So the shifting in that equation changes. But there are other factors and that's what Duke and Cartwright saying in the active view they're trying to bring back some of those other aspects like motivation and those things. But I'll add to this. So that led to the conversation of the science of reading and the focus on. We know from lots of research that explicit systematic phonics instruction is important but that is like a small part of the lesson that should be happening. We just need to make sure that that is happening and often it doesn't. And now it's kind of like disproportionately occurring. Either it's not happening.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:05:27]:
Well necessarily I'm not saying that, but it's not. It's like that's all we're doing or all we can think of doing. And I say there's over 50 years of evidence based research about reading comprehension. I'm right now looking at a slide that I'm working on a meta analysis. We've been doing that we hundreds of studies. Our federal government funded lots of projects while I was at Vanderbilt to study comprehension. So there's a swath of information out there. But the problem back to your equity question is who's included in these samples? We talk about.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:05:56]:
In psychology, they talk a lot more. Most of our research here is what we called weird and it's. Have you heard that term before?

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:06:04]:
Weird? Like actually weird?

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:06:06]:
Yeah, like it's, it's weird acronym. Yeah, it's Westernized.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:06:10]:
Okay.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:06:11]:
Industrial. Like I gotta pull it up. Real sorry. Will, let me be great.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:06:16]:
Westernized, Eurocentric, Industrialized. That would be my guess.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:06:19]:
So. So it represents a very small segment of our world and the same people are there the samples and often they're convenient samples. So of our studies, so the, the population that we are most often talking about as far as being at risk, which we hate that term and are not performing as we'd anticipate, are often minimally included in the research. Or if they are included, we don't focus on, we don't disaggregate those outcomes. We don't look at the specifically so we might have that they are responding but responding differently. And we just kind of mix it in with the mean and say this is great. And we don't interrogate what are the things that we need to know or do or focus on. Maybe they need a different kind of shift.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:07:03]:
So Nicole Patentari, who's the director of the Florida center for Reading research published in 21 a state piece and she talks about there's no explicit recognition of the historical, political and sociocultural systems in place that allow black and brown children to not be reading well in US schools. But she also knows that the student populations and learning conditions in which the majority of the nation's public schools are in the sorry that are in the majority of our nation's public schools do not reflect the conditions on which much of the reading research has been carried out. And so when I look at like the just looking at the comprehension research that we included in this meta analysis, I'm always that person. I want to know who's in the sample. Less than half of the sample included kids with reading disabilities. So these are reading intervention studies. And half of them they're not necessarily kids who have diagnosed disabilities or risk status per se in them SES we have even smaller proportions of folks represented. 70 something percent of it is like high sub samples.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:08:05]:
We don't know. We might know the school level, but we don't know the actual participants in the study. We really don't do enough research looking beyond ninth grade and race and ethnicity. We often again we have only about 20 something percent of certain groups represented. And there's also this tendency in our world to kind of separate. So there might be a study about bilingual and comprehension or reading risk and comprehension, but we're not going to put them together because we're keeping our research clean. But that means we don't deal with those kids that I often will talk about that kind of multiple vulnerabilities and so they end up having more persistent difficulties there. There's this kind of I talk about it being a dissonance between the further I am from what's kind of typical culture, language experience and what that is reflected in my curriculum and my books and the lesson and the, the more work I have to do to be successful.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:09:02]:
And so the more things that when our teaching force and our curriculum is all written for white middle class, upper middle class, English monolingual folks and I'm not that I'm all of them, not that that's a further step for me, not that I can't do it and be successful, but that I have more barriers or hurdles to jump to just read that same text little Jacob who is in a middle class family and who was only speaking English and is engaging in and so we have to be mindful of what does that look like, what are the things we have to do to scaffold or minimize those hurdles for what is now the majority of our students in public Schools in most places.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:09:44]:
And what the research is also really pointing to is that reading is really dependent upon the knowledge, the background knowledge that you have. And that there was a study done many years ago, I want to say like over 20 years ago, where they gave some students, elementary school students a passage and it was all about basic baseball and reading ability. Did not predict reading comprehension. Knowledge of baseball predicted reading comprehension. And that was a long time ago, that study. But again, it, it really kind of points to our need to really understand the full body of the science of reading and really unpack with comprehension and its relationship to language. And that's actually where our work really lies when it deals with multilingual learners. They're learning each other English.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:10:28]:
And so then when you're teaching them to read in English, there absolutely has to be some comprehension even of the language. And so that's not even talking about the content of the language, but really then the comprehension of, of structures as well as then the contents. You got to transfer then that information from their existing language and then bring that on board, which is what we, we really do just try and keep bringing home is the. There are assets for you to build on here. There are cultural linguistic assets that really should be leveraged in support of learning to read, not just in one language. Ideally it would be best if we were teaching reading of 2, but at least not to try and, or to pretend that knowing another language or have, or being a have a linguistically diverse background is a deficit. It's not, it's an amazing asset for you to leverage and continue to build.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:11:22]:
Yeah, historically many, I like to say, well intentioned folks spent a lot of time and we were confusing kids and stuff. And that's a lack of knowledge about how cognitive science work and our brain works in this way. And Maya Angelou said, when you know better, do better, we know better, let's do better. And I like to add in the conversation about this is by multidialet as well, because it's not just we have a lot of conversations and we'll have a conversation about doing this work in the bilingual population, but not recognizing that those kids, Julie Washington was just here on our campus talking a lot. She talks a lot about the mismatch, hypotheses and diagnosis density. And what we know from research is those kids who are living in more concentrated populations. So our heavily black communities, and especially if it's a lower SES population, like all of those compounds, they're more likely to be AAE or African American English speakers. And that and the density of that.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:12:18]:
Many of us swap and engage in it. And it's cool when it's on the radio and all that, but that's a whole nother question. So press low and high prestige of those things and how we use it. Also the conversation around again that dissonance piece of how many more barriers that they're needing to engage because of the limited opportunities they may have had to engage with these friends, but also the difference in their language and language. And AE is a language, it's rule governed, it has policy, but we treat it as just bad English. And we can say the same thing if we're talking about Appalachian world. And like I said, I'm from New Orleans and grandma was Cajun. I can get into that too.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:12:59]:
I mean we have all of these different dialects, but some are closer to the academic text that we're engaging in than others. Some have more exposure to those. And so we have to be intentional about that. So I love the active view of reading and there are a few other models out there that really think about background knowledge and encounter in there. But I actually have been pushing lately for what I call a coarsely informed model for reading comprehension. I'm writing that up soon because it's not that it's so different in this, in the sense of it's about background knowledge, but it really is that pull out of the recognition and true focus on that in our research, in our practice, in our conversations about the science of reading and reading period that reading is a culture bound tact. And so what's different in this is that there's really a pullout of the cultural context and knowledge that is needed. I asked them to think about culturally bound prior knowledge, cultural schematics that people have.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:13:58]:
Just some things that people that don't even make sense to me that I see going on because that was not something we ever were going to do in New Orleans or culturally experienced. And how do I connect that when I'm reading in text and understanding cultural relevance of the text that we engage culturally influenced interpretations of some of those things. What we see from answers on assessments and stuff is that black kids, particularly Julie Washington talks about it all the time, as I said, respond differently on these oral language, gray oral language because we tend to function on the floor. We are talk about vocabulary as a function of things like the fire hydrant is. The example she gives is actually the water, the firewater holder. So we don't have the word hydrant but we know what it is. So we know the vocabulary we just don't have the name for it. So the name calling and we value heavily name calling in some cultures.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:14:50]:
So there. There's some spaces. My mom might not have said all the names to things. She told me to do it and understand it and what. But. So I know what it is. I know what its function is. So I have the meaning, but I don't have the name or tag for.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:15:02]:
And if I. So if I can't produce that though in my reading task, it doesn't capture what I know. Similarly, having it in. I may have it, but I have it in a different language. I don't know the name in English yet, but I have the knowledge I need to value. We need to leverage that knowledge versus just kind of not tapping into it to build meaning and schema for kids.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:15:23]:
I love this con. I love this conversation. And, and it's got me thinking, right, What I'm hearing from the two of you, it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm hearing from the two of you is comprehension. The that we measure whether or not an individual is comprehending. Their skills and comprehension does depend on their background knowledge of the content, if you will. And so like the example Martha gave in regards to the baseball. Like if. But how baseball works, you probably will understand the text better than if you had absolutely no idea what baseball looks like.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:15:54]:
It really got me thinking because I know like nowadays kind of with India's example, as far as like African American dialect, if I know all the rap lyrics, like a lot of our kids, they can. They can recite Kendrick Lamar all day and, and tell you what it's all about. What it's about. It really brought me back to like, when I first started teaching, I was teaching in the Virgin Islands and they speak English and I could talk to some of my students and they could break down any reggae song, any. Any. And. And tell. And I would say, what are they saying? Because they're speaking English, but I could not understand.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:16:24]:
And they could tell me what they said. And I said, okay, but those words don't. I mean, it's English, but it means different things here. Like the slang is different, different. And they can not only tell me what the lyrics were, but they can also break it down for me and tell me exactly what that individual was talking about. Now, it wasn't always the most appropriate conversations based off the lyrics, but at least I knew what they were insinuating and all those things. So my question then is. And if you're saying it is how we need to revisit how we we measure comprehension and it needs to be culturally responsive or relevant to our individuals that we are assessing.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:17:01]:
Well, I'll say yes. It's also we have to be comfortable engaging and allowing. There's a mismatch also between our teaching force often and the students that we're engaging. How do they. How are they aware of our their cultural norms and how does that so that they're aware of where the mismatches are to identify also are comfortable allowing like I often get the well but how do I score this Translanguaging is a tool that we talk about a lot in bilingual being able to use all your full linguistic repertoire, whatever that looks like. So say it how you say it, do it how you do it and we can tweak it later and get it into the textbook English when we're writing it or everything. And what you're alluding to what I was hearing in your first part of the question was the importance of oral language which is really critical and do we allow enough time for that and do we allow enough time actually for reading and engaging that isn't hyper focused on correcting to do it correctly but also but getting that idea, getting the meaning piece and in how we work to explicitly translate that is an important aspect. So I think there's yes, it's about having this cultural framing and focus but I think part of the reason we tend not to is because we're not necessarily comfortable in that space.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:18:16]:
We don't feel like we're knowledgeable about the diversity that's in our room or we have this one way we have to do it and we have to get our practice often has now to get efficient and to ensure things are doing is that we script all of it and that that's great for a resource but then I have to know when to adapt. If I what I'm talking about is like just over here for my kids they're not there at all. Like I have to be able to modify and adapt that. And a lot of people don't feel like they know what those tools are and it's not a thing. I mean I've got survey data that shows me that ours in the special education field particularly they had a follower et AL in 2019 did a survey of our special education professionals and fewer than half of them and it gets lower in every thing that I'm about to talk about as far as the demographic found themselves competent working with difference really. So basically I would say our teachers said that they were only. Only 40 something percent. Like 43% of the teachers said they were comfortable working with kids who were with a different or highly competent.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:19:18]:
Not comfortable. That's a wrong phrase. Let me clarify that. Felt highly competent in working with students and families who were a different socioeconomic level. Only 37% rated themselves as competent dealing with families and students who were ethnically and racially diverse are different from them. And then only 22% felt they were competent in dealing with kids who and families who were demographically different from in language skills or language that they were speaking. And so that tells me, you know, that the majority of our teaching force, or at least the special education, you know, I'm a couch it there because that's who they survey are not feeling like they have their. The skill.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:19:57]:
Are we covering that in our teacher trainings, in our professional development? And I guess I would say just currently there's been such a shift and avoidance in that. And so we're not talking about how to think about it on the front end and they're not being included from the researcher side adequately or focused on and emphasized in the development of the knowledge. So we're not hitting it in the development, we're not hitting it in the application. Where are we? But we expect different outcomes. Yet we see we've seen the same trends the entire time that I have been an education professional. Our trends have looked the same and we've done lots of work.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:20:31]:
Yeah, I mean I'm really glad that India brought up oral language too because that's something that we just drive home as well. The importance of oral language, rich oral language as this way to really engage in language in a deep way and then transition that or see the connections of that to the written language. And then this clarity around there is a standard in the schools that we're looking at around English. It's academic American English. And to really help students see that actually there's different registers of language depending upon what is the discipline of the content that they're studying. And then how is it that you communicate basically in this register and, and to recognize then the value of all registers instead of seeing one register as, as superior. It's just this is the way in which it operates and, and you have to learn then the rules and structure of that. And so then to get back to this point about comprehension and should we just measure it better? I mean we've tried to.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:21:33]:
In some ways we are agnostic about knowledge and it's not culturally agnostic that it's Embedded in culture and language. And so there's only so much we can do around cultural bias when we get to assessments. We have to also just kind of acknowledge along the way that there is different knowledge basis that we're going to be learning. We have to teach, then our children access to that. But we also need to be divers, diversifying our knowledge base, including when it gets to literature, around that there's technical knowledge. That of course, then is. We learn the technical expertise, but they're in literature or reading and social studies or how is it then that we bring in the. And value the various cultural backgrounds, the various ways of expression, and the deep learning reflected in those culture and languages into, into the classroom.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:22:25]:
So it's, it's. It's not just about assessment, but it definitely is about getting better and getting clear that you're meas a specific kind of knowledge here. And let's make sure our students have access to that. And let's also think about how we can diversify the knowledge base as well, recognizing that there's value in other cultural forms of knowledge.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:22:45]:
And honestly, we also, I mean, we can use an updated study on this too, but I haven't seen as much. We don't teach comprehension very well often in school. We're getting better. I'd like to say that, but I would say we kind of get. We teach you the code and then expect you're going to understand. We might give you some vocabulary. And we don't necessarily do the best in how we teach vocabulary, those lists of 20 words. And not the best approach.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:23:10]:
I mean, we, we. We really have to think about. We often assess comprehension, but we don't teach it. So the solution is you read it again. Well, if a kid is struggling with the reading and it may not be the decoding, it may be that they don't have the schema. They read those words, they decode or they let me correct that they decoded those words, fine. They applied the rules that you gave them. They understand it.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:23:30]:
But in that sense, or they were proficient in decoding. But if they don't have a schema to put that information with, if they don't have an understanding or if they spend so much of their energy just translating that, we only have so many cognitive resources, period. And so our goal is to get automatic and fluent with things like decoding. And that's why we drill it and focus on it so much so that we have more of our cognitive resources available to us to do things like interacting with the text, integrating, creating meaning, recognizing that I've got a. Part of our inferencing is a comprehension skill. And what it requires is often you bring in your background knowledge to the text because the answer is not in the text. Well, if this is not the background knowledge, if it's not anchored in a cultural domain that you're familiar with, what do you have to bring to it? You know what I mean? And so that. That's the dissonance piece.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:24:20]:
It depends on how far whatever I'm learning about a reading is from my real. So when I'm reading about Shakespearean's old English, like, what am I tapping into in this?

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:24:30]:
I never understood. I never understood why we still teach Shakespeare. Shakespeare.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:24:33]:
I mean, I love Shakespeare, but that's a whole nother thing. That's that. But. But is it gonna pull my, you know, ninth grader who is struggling with, you know, the code and learning a language and all that, like, now adding old English, like, is that the thing? Is that it's not really the thing college readiness is gonna hinge on, I don't think. But, yeah, there are lots of questions. And I mean, it certainly for us, we talk about recognizing the unique and linguistic cultural experience of our students. Importance of mirrors in books, are they reflected? Are their experiences reflected in the materials that they're seeing? Are we using practices like engaging in that oral exchange and dialogue and process that makes it relevant and connects to them, developing their own identity as a reader and just not a name caller. Self efficacy.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:25:21]:
You know, I was telling somebody recently, I was like, you know, we do oral reading fluency because it's important to build fluency. And that's great, but. But I was like, I don't do fluency probes without at least one comprehension question. Because what I often find is that it reinforces the idea that the objective of reading is just getting through the print without making meaning because you're measuring rate and accuracy, and there's no real probe of understanding. And so, I mean, even for my kids who have never really struggled in reading, I've had that. Like, I remember there would be in school, and I'm like, well, you just blew through that. No prosody, no expression. And she's like, well, I've got to get as many words as possible.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:25:53]:
I'm like, yeah, but if you couldn't answer the question at the end, if you can't tell me one thing that's happened, what's the point? Like, don't lose the focus of reading. Reading. So I try to avoid also reinforcing in Our practices, the things that aren't really about reading, but in the sense of equity piece, we. We often kind of get drawn into just kind of the, the what do I have to do for compliance? What I mean, and I've got to do this. I got to do this. And not really. We. We talk about database decision making.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:26:17]:
We collect all this data, but what are we doing with it? Are we able. Are we looking at those measures and looking at, hey, this kid is really an AAE speaker. It's not, not just that they don't know the word. And so I expect these patterns. And so that's not an error. That's a dialect. We've spent decades now talking about what's language difference versus disability in my field, and we still don't have great measures to detect it. Poverty looks like disability, whether or not it really is or isn't.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:26:44]:
And all tests are reading tests. That's right.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:26:46]:
No matter what English are, English tests.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:26:50]:
It's all about language. And all tests are reading tests. What do we do? We've got.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:26:55]:
Thank you. Well, Martha, I want to ask you this because I don't want to end this, this episode with, oh, man, we need to do better. And our comprehension is like, what, what maybe, are there some book titles? Are there some authors that you would suggest that that would be good for us to bring into our classrooms that kind of touch on a lot of the stuff that we're talking about today?

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:27:15]:
I guess when you're talking about book titles, I, I don't want to like, say, oh, there's this one book, right, that's out there. What you have to do is start with your students, who are your students, and then really connect then the literature to the backgrounds of those students. And so we don't see enough in classroom classrooms at all levels. That represents the cultural and linguistic diversity of that classroom. And that's really what you have to do. So there's not like a given title. I would look at what is the representation of the demographics of the students that you serve and then try to reflect that in the literature, the resources, the reading resources that you have available to them and then also engage your families. I mean, that's the other thing is engage with families in the, the literature, the literacy building that goes on.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:28:03]:
Build. That really draws upon their cultural and linguistic assets, too.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:28:08]:
Okay. What about you, India? Do you have any titles, books, or thoughts on that as well?

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:28:13]:
Well, I mean, I agree. I think we have to build and connect. I mean, there. There's a couple of books about Engaging in the community better and being better collaborators with family. Like just schools by I think It's Ismari in 2020 wrote that one. I've got a stack of books here about like literacy foundations for English learners. I mean, so it is, well, who's your population, who you're working with? A Google search of Julie Washington will get you wonderful resources about AAE and some of the things, some of the issues we're seeing with the tools as that as well as kind of learning about the format. The Reading League is pub.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:28:49]:
Some things I've, I worked actually with. Part of Answers is we've, we've worked with scholars from across the country called the Coalition Advancing Knowledge at the Intersection. And part of our goal, like I said, we are the researchers. So we're like, we're holding research accountable. We want to know where the gaps are and how do we fill those gaps and trying to work as a coalition to work target those. So one of the projects that we're doing is the science of Reading at the Intersections. And so we presented at aera, the American Education Research association, just recently we've been at Council for Exceptional Children. We have a special issue that I was the editor of in Literacy Today, which is the magazine.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:29:26]:
And I can share those links with you if that's helpful, because they're open and free to people that talk about this kind of intersection and some of the things we're thinking about. So I think there's just a lot to digest and I think it's who's. I completely agree about who's your population? No, it looks different when you're, you know, we, a lot of our bilingual work is heavily focused on Spanish. But, you know, you take away English and Spanish here in Texas and the next language is Vietnamese. And where's the research in that population? There's not a lot of research to me in some of these areas or a lot of works published. When I go, I've been going through the science of reading resources and just looking for how much they cover culture or any of these groups. And it's nil. It's often just to talk about the disparities in the performance, but rarely in the solution, reporting or formation.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:30:16]:
So that's what we're trying to make sure out there. But there are some great resources and teams that are doing work to put that out there. So I've like I said, the reading lead has been pulling us in to have those conversations as well as our coalition, the Florida center for Reading Research has had some folks doing that. And like I said, people like Julie Washington have been wonderful in extending that conversation about trans languaging for our African American and black dialect speakers.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:30:42]:
Well, the two of you, I would say this. I have thoroughly learned a lot from you and and it's really got me thinking as far as how we looking at reading comprehension and science of reading. Martha, I want to start with you. I'd love for you to take us home with any final words of advice you want to provide to our listeners.

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:30:57]:
Sure. I would say that don't forget comprehension. Don't forget about language and culture when you're thinking about the science of reading and make sure that you don't dismantle bilingual education in the goal to try and create stronger readers of English. English don't make the testing of English be the goal, but really literacy and full literacy development. I didn't mention in the resources the National Committee for Effective Literacy and I can also share some resources about that and happy to do so.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:31:27]:
Thank you. And India, final words of advice.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:31:29]:
I like this house. You just they're feeling in many of our educational professionals I know it's feeling like it's so much and it's always something new but we have the tools and most of them we already know what we're doing. We just have to be intentional about how we're engaging and recognizing who we are engaging. You can't teach who you don't know. And you have to also recognize that we have to adapt and be intentional in the planning of instruction. I encourage our teachers to be intentional about how they prepare, organize, encourage kids to elaborate, be metacognitive in their thinking and being able to summarize or poems. As I like to say, good comprehension instruction is multi component. It it's culturally context and it's gonna engage and you have the tools you need.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:32:13]:
Just really be intentional about applying them in your instruction.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:32:16]:
Perfect. Martha, if we have some folks that want to connect with you, what's the best way to reach you online?

Dr. Martha Martinez [00:32:20]:
My email address is Martha M A R T H A S E A dot S e dash A L dot or all right.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:32:28]:
And India, I'm E Lindo L I N D O T C U edu.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:32:35]:
Is well Martha and India, it has truly been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.

Dr. Endia Lindo [00:32:39]:
Thank you so much for having us. Have a great one.

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