Building Foundations: Teacher Prep Programs Incorporate Established Science on Language, Literacy

ook at a picture of an elementary school classroom from the 1990s and you’ll see the hallmarks of that time: overhead projectors instead of today’s smart boards, TVs and VCRs wheeled in on carts instead of tablets in individual students’ hands, and kids wearing scrunchies and oversized sweatshirts.

Julie McClellan remembers what those classrooms were like when she first started teaching in the ’90s. She has seen a myriad of changes since then — not only in the technology and fashion choices, but in the methods used to teach key skills, like reading and writing.

McClellan is an early intervention program teacher for second- through fourth-grade students at Camp Creek Elementary in Lilburn, Ga., and recently earned her master’s degree in special education and an endorsement in dyslexia education from Georgia State University’s College of Education & Human Development (CEHD). And the knowledge and expertise she gained in her degree program have been a game changer in her classroom — particularly for the literacy lessons she’s teaching.

“After attending Georgia State’s program, I feel like I am a new teacher with a whole new toolbox of strategies to help students who struggle to learn to read. I have background knowledge of why we need to teach students phonics,” she says. “When I teach a new phonics rule, I have multiple ways to present the information to make sure the students have ample opportunities to understand.”

Quality literacy instruction is vital, particularly in the early childhood years. It lays the foundation for success — not only academically, but also in individuals’ personal and professional lives.

Teachers like McClellan play an important role in guiding young children through their first experiences with reading and writing, showing them how these skills are used in everyday life. Her understanding of effective literacy instruction directly shapes her students’ success. University researchers like Gary Bingham understand this kind of knowledge is key to helping educators like McClellan implement effective strategies for reading and writing development.

Gary Bingham, the Hettie Floyd Lee Professor of Young Learners in Urban Settings and director of the CEHD’s Urban Child Study Center, focuses his research on what teachers, families and communities can do to ensure children from birth through age 8 become successful readers and writers.

“We read and write to learn from and communicate with others — writing a note to a friend, sharing our likes and dislikes, convincing others of something or communicating information. We write to inform, to persuade and to communicate about our life experiences,” says Bingham, the Hettie Floyd Lee Professor of Young Learners in Urban Settings and director of the CEHD’s Urban Child Study Center.

Bingham’s research focuses on what teachers, families and communities can do to ensure children from birth through age 8 become successful readers and writers. He’s received funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition to support his research on young learners’ literacy and language development. He has also been selected to serve a three-year term as an at-large director with the Society for Scientific Study of Reading.

“One thing we teach students is how reading and writing are connected. They rely on similar developmental processes. How you read or decode a word relies on your understanding of the English written system,” he explains. “English is considered an opaque language or a semi-transparent language, which means it has a lot of irregularities. This is why children need to be explicitly taught how to map oral language onto written language. Helping teachers understand the best approaches for supporting young readers and writers and connect oral language to reading and writing is crucial.”

In the last two years, Bingham has applied his years of research and experience in early childhood settings to his work on the Georgia Council on Literacy, a group of legislators, school leaders and others appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Speaker Jon Burns to oversee implementation of the Georgia Early Literacy Act (HB 538).

The Georgia General Assembly passed the legislation in 2023, requiring Georgia schools to have reading screeners that can help determine whether a student is struggling to read, to provide training for K-3 teachers in the “science of reading, structured literacy and foundational literacy skills,” and to direct local school boards to “approve high quality instructional materials for these grades.”

The Georgia Council on Literacy’s members help set priorities related to HB 538 and establish goals to guide state agencies in meeting those priorities. To do this, they created working groups in different areas — birth through 5, kindergarten through third grade, professional learning and teacher preparation, and community literacy, among others — to bring together individuals from those fields to discuss how the legislation is helping schools make changes, to help identify instructional materials for schools to use, support mandated screening and other tasks outlined in the legislation.

The council’s work will take time to implement, but Bingham knows that universities like Georgia State can play a key role in improving literacy in Georgia.

“Higher education is part of the solution not only because we train teachers, but because we conduct research on how things are working or not working for kids,” Bingham says. “This is a challenging, systematic issue and we need a comprehensive approach to address how we are supporting Georgia educators. And we need to support all learners, including children with very different needs.”

HB 538 emphasizes the Science of Reading (SOR), which is a body of interdisciplinary research spanning multiple decades on how children learn to read.

“The Science of Reading is really a collection of research over time from multiple fields of study, and these studies either confirm or disconfirm how children best learn to read. It is not a product, a curriculum or an intervention you can buy,” says Carla Tanguay, CEHD’s assistant dean for educator preparation and accreditation.

Carla Tanguay, assistant dean for educator preparation and accreditation, has connected with her counterparts at the University of Georgia and Kennesaw State University to further discuss the Science of Reading and how universities’ educator preparation programs can ensure future teachers are prepared with this knowledge base.

“It’s research on the components of reading, such as phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension and more. It also includes important elements of literacy, like oral language development, content and background knowledge, vocabulary, and making connections between reading and writing.”

The College of Education & Human Development has been using the Science of Reading as part of its foundational coursework in teacher preparation programs for years, and the college’s faculty have contributed to the body of research on SOR.

Since HB 538 was passed in 2023, Tanguay and her colleagues have completed a thorough assessment of the college’s teacher preparation programs to ensure they’re in compliance with the Georgia Early Literacy Act, and to explicitly identify the Science of Reading in program materials.

To do this, Tanguay and college faculty created curriculum maps for 25 teacher preparation programs that show how the courses, assignments and tests are aligned to the Science of Reading.

“A curriculum map has all the standards that are aligned to the Science of Reading, like knowledge acquisition, curriculum and instruction, assessment, professional leadership and dispositions, and more,” Tanguay says. “In each map, we include all our courses for each program that are aligned to those standards, and then in each course, we decide which instructional activities and assessments fit those rules. We also indicate whether these concepts are introduced, practiced or mastered.”

Tanguay has also connected with her counterparts at the University of Georgia and Kennesaw State University to further discuss the Science of Reading and how universities’ educator preparation programs can ensure future teachers are prepared with this knowledge base.

They took their work to the University System of Georgia (USG) to establish the Science of Reading Higher Education Consortium, which allows faculty from universities across the state to connect in monthly sessions aimed at improving literacy outcomes for all students in Georgia.

“As a result, we’ve been able to bring together 100-plus literacy faculty and we have created and shared instructional materials aligned to the Science of Reading,” Tanguay says. “We’ve also provided professional learning webinars that are available to teachers and parents online.”

Tanguay’s work with the USG Science of Reading Higher Education Consortium has also resulted in a new course called “Foundations of Reading” that’s required for all undergraduate teacher preparation programs, regardless of discipline. This way, all Georgia State graduates with teaching degrees receive a foundational knowledge in the Science of Reading.

“Literacy is critical in all fields, so we’re helping future teachers understand and get a foundational knowledge of the Science of Reading,” Tanguay says. “When you’re teaching any subject, you’re using language that’s specific to that discipline, and teachers need to know how to teach literacy skills, no matter what course or field they’re in.”

The Science of Reading continues to change over time as researchers conduct literacy education studies in early childhood and elementary school settings.

Several Georgia State faculty members are among those researchers studying reading and writing, including JeanMarie Farrow, an assistant professor of reading in the Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education and director of the CEHD’s reading endorsement program.

Assistant Professor JeanMarie Farrow's research focuses on supporting language and literacy growth in children, strategies for educators to foster language and literacy development across developmental stages, and methods to empower teachers in facilitating this growth.

Her research focuses on supporting language and literacy growth in children, strategies for educators to foster language and literacy development across developmental stages, and methods to empower teachers in facilitating this growth. In two recently published articles in the Early Childhood Education Journal and the Journal of Child Language, Farrow looked at how teachers’ literacy instruction impacts students’ reading and writing development.

She understands the importance of effective literacy instruction for young students, especially in Pre-K and elementary classrooms, and how writing skills are intertwined with reading.

“Reading and writing both rely on the same foundational language skills, such as vocabulary, syntax and phonemic awareness,” Farrow explains. “While children draw upon these core oral language abilities in both processes, they engage them in distinct ways when reading and writing. This reciprocal relationship enhances their deeper processing in both domains. Early composing serves as a pathway to reading, just as early reading skills reinforce and support writing development. Providing children with authentic activities in reading and writing that scaffold these unique processes can further bolster their overall literacy and cognitive development.”

Isabel Vargas-Bell, an assistant professor of reading instruction and assessment, taught dual-language immersion classes for five years and focuses her research on scientifically based reading instruction and assessment for multilingual students. She says the Science of Reading supports the principle that reading comprehension is the product of two broad skill categories: skills that contribute to decoding and skills that contribute to linguistic comprehension.

Decoding, or word-reading, skills allow students to read words quickly and accurately. Language comprehension skills — like vocabulary — allow students to glean meaning and understanding from those words.

Assistant Professor Isabel Vargas-Bell says the Science of Reading supports the principle that reading comprehension is the product of two broad skill categories: skills that contribute to decoding and skills that contribute to linguistic comprehension.

“All students need proficiency in both word reading and linguistic comprehension for successful reading comprehension to occur as reading comprehension is really the product of those two skills working together,” Vargas-Bell says. “And no amount of skill in one category can compensate for the lack in the other. A student with the ability to decode isolated words quickly and accurately will not comprehend text if they are unable to derive meaning from the words they read. Similarly, a student who has a strong understanding of language and language structures will not be able to successfully comprehend a text if they are unable to decode the words in the text.”

And language comprehension is one area all teachers have a hand in helping to build for their students — be they physical education, art or music specialists. PE teachers on the kickball field, for example, help reinforce language comprehension by defining the difference between the similar sounding “base” (as in second base on the diamond) and “bass” (the musical term referring to an instrument or sonic range).

“Academic success for children is impacted by their ability to read proficiently, as reading comprehension is an essential skill necessary across the school curriculum. Therefore, language and literacy instruction shouldn’t only occur during students’ designated language arts class,” Vargas-Bell says. “Students can grow their background knowledge, vocabulary and listening comprehension tremendously outside of English-language arts classes.”

To that end, Georgia State’s teacher preparation program ensures educators across specialties are trained to support literacy, regardless of their focus area. One way it does that is by incorporating literacy education modules into the curriculum for those training to work both in and outside of literacy specialties, such as hard sciences, art and PE.

Assistant Professor Lisa Domke created literacy education modules that can be used in the curriculum for those training to work both in and outside of literacy specialties, such as the hard sciences, art and PE.

Lisa Domke, an assistant professor of language and (bi)literacy education and the college’s dual language and immersion education program coordinator, created seven modules to highlight principles of literacy education to pre-service educators and demonstrate those concepts, especially to those who aren’t taking a deep dive into literacy education as part of their degree specialty. The modules start by building background knowledge on the history of literacy education and research.

“It was important for me not only to meet Georgia’s standards of what pre-service teachers should be aware of for literacy, but also to infuse what we know about multilingual learners and to show how literacy concepts are enacted across ages and disciplines/specialties,” says Domke, who was a classroom teacher and a certified K-12 literacy specialist for eight years before working in higher education.

The modules are flexible enough that each CEHD program can introduce them and build them into their curriculum map in the ways that work best for their areas. They are also presented to in-service teachers renewing or gaining new credentials.

Regina Wright, a second-grade teacher and a master’s student in the CEHD’s reading endorsement program, has learned a great deal about the Science of Reading and how it can be implemented in her classroom.

“One of my favorite things about the Georgia State reading program is that it is really providing practice and research for Science of Reading in real time,” she says. “The reading program has done a great job of making sure it is providing the necessary training for teachers, from writing lesson plans that will actually be used or sharing guidance on how to work with current curriculums to meet the new requirements.”

Melissa Sapp, another master’s student in the reading endorsement program, teaches first grade and has learned several Science of Reading specifics from the classes she’s taking.

“I learned about the importance of structured literacy, early intervention and a phonics-based approach for primary grades,” she says. “As a first-grade teacher, I understood the importance of phonological and phonemic awareness, but these classes also taught me the importance of linguistic comprehension skills.”

Sapp has already seen a difference in her classroom and her colleagues’ classrooms after incorporating more Science of Reading concepts from her coursework into her curriculum.

“I have been able to use what I have learned from this program to create my own slides and lesson plans,” she says. “I have been creating the plans for my entire team for both reading and writing, and they have told me that they have seen a positive difference with their kids’ reading comprehension skills, as well as their craft and elaboration during writing time.”

Michael Davis (B.A. ’03) contributed to this article. Portraits by Steven Thackston.