Oral language is the heart of literacy and learning. It’s fundamental to a child’s educational journey, serving as the foundation for reading, comprehension, communication, and social interaction. Students need to understand and be understood to thrive.

Yet despite the significant attention given to phonics and literacy more generally, oral language often remains overlooked and is not prioritized in classrooms.

Critically, oral language skills are essential in learning to read. The Simple View of Reading states that you need two skills to understand what you’re reading: decoding and language comprehension. Decoding is crucial, but it won’t get you very far without a solid grasp of language. You can know how to pronounce every word, but if you don’t understand the meaning of what you’re reading, the whole point is lost.

It’s also important to recognize that reading comprehension is a product of decoding and language comprehension. If a student is weak in one area, for example language comprehension, their overall reading comprehension will be diminished, even if they are strong in the other skill.

However, there is research that takes the Simple View of Reading model further, showing that language underpins the whole process of learning to read. Oral language is essential not only for reading comprehension, as shown by the Simple View of Reading, but also for the development of foundational decoding skills — phoneme awareness and letter knowledge.

This expanded model comes from a long-term research study that followed three groups of students from ages 3 to 8 years, including those with a preschool language delay, those with a dyslexic family member, and a control group. The study found that language skills at 3.5 years strongly predict students’ pre-reading skills at school entry, which in turn predict how well they can read words at the end of their first year in school.

In other words, early language skills, before a child has even started to learn to read, strongly relate to how well they will learn to read words once they enter school. Furthermore, these early language skills also strongly relate to the children’s understanding of what they read at age 8.

Looking at each group aged 8 in more detail, 7% of the control group had reading difficulties, which is about what we would expect in the general population, and 26% of those with a dyslexic family member had reading difficulties. But, perhaps most surprisingly, 66% of children with poor language skills at 3.5 years had poor reading skills at age 8.

The average reading score for Michigan students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress decreased over the past 25 years and lags the national average. Addressing delayed language development offers a science-backed key to make a real difference in children’s reading skills — and their lives.