SeeHearSpeak Podcast

00:12 Tiffany Hogan: Welcome to See Hear Speak Podcast Episode 21. In this Episode I talk with Laida Restrepo, Professor at Arizona State University. Laida and I discuss issues around dual language learners. This includes educational policies, identification of developmental language disorder, literacy growth, the impact of speaking more than one language to children with and without DLD, and her current studies of reading comprehension in bilingual children.
Thank you for listening! And don’t forget to check out www.seehearspeakpodcast.com to sign up for email alerts for new episodes and content, read a transcript of this podcast, access articles and resources that we discussed, and find more information about our guests. Speaking of these resources, I’m a bit behind on getting them posted to the website. Why, you might ask? I’ve been traveling quite a bit this fall, both locally and nationally, to conferences to present my research findings, and I have ASHA next week. My goal is to get the website resources up to date in early December, so stay posted on social media where I’ll make that announcement. And don’t forget, if you enjoy this podcast, please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a positive rating in apple podcast or wherever you are listening.
01:41 Tiffany Hogan: Laida, thank you for joining me on SeeHearSpeak podcast. I'm very excited to talk to you today about your research! I’ll have you start by introducing yourself.

01:51 Laida Restrepo: Well hello! I'm Laida Restrepo; I'm faculty professor at Arizona State University in the program of Speech and Hearing Science. I have been at ASU since 2004. [chuckle] I've been here 15 years.

02:14 TH: Oh yes.

02:15 LR: Since last year, I'm also an assistant for research. So that has given me a broad view of healthcare, in the College of Health Solutions. It also made me think how reading also fits into the healthcare model. So, it's hard to think about that, but we see it as a critical component of health is literacy in general, so... Anyway.

02:45 TH: Oh, that's great, I didn't know that Laida. Congratulations on that position. I didn't know you had that, that's very cool. Very cool. You know, because you're not busy enough!

02:53 LR: Right?

[laughter]

02:54 TH: So, I had the pleasure of working with you on the Language and Reading Research Consortium, or LARRC, and in that project. I've talked about it on the podcast before, but we had several arms of it, but one of them was to study children longitudinally, Pre-K to Grade 3. Then we also had an intervention portion. And you really headed up a portion that I haven't talked that much about, and that is the bilingual portion of the study. Can you tell the listeners what your involvement was in LARRC and what that sample was like for both the longitudinal and for intervention?

03:33 LR: Sure. So, the bilingual sample in the LARRC project came strictly from Arizona. We started with about 280 children in preschool, and we followed them longitudinally until third grade. So we basically evaluated their oral language decoding and phonemic awareness skills. Then we also evaluated their memory. All from pre-K through third grade. We started with Spanish measures, as these children were coming from Spanish-speaking backgrounds, and then we had to switch to English. We would have liked to maintain both languages, but we were doing five to six hours of testing on these kids. We had to compromise on the number of measures, but we followed this sample and now we have two other grades that are following them through sixth and eighth grade as well.

04:39 TH: Well, that's great. And then, did you do intervention work with them, correct? We had the intervention in Spanish.

04:45 LR: But that was a different sample, so I wasn't as involved with the intervention. Well, I shouldn't say that. I was involved with the intervention to some level, not as much as with the assessment piece. But we did do an intervention, but only in preschool. So we have a curriculum for preschool children, and the results were, these are still are actually being evaluated. We know we have significant effects for vocabulary. But in the other areas of the preschool, we're still kind of working on that.

05:30 TH: So, I will put in the podcast resources the link to the lessons for LARRC. I don't know if the bilingual lessons are on there, actually. I haven't looked.

05:46 LR: I don't know, actually.

05:47 TH: I'm not sure, either. I'll have to check and see. I'll make a note on the resources page, but the English lessons are there for pre-K through Grade 3, so in case listeners wanna check those out. You mentioned that the bilingual children were from Arizona only. In your experiences, what are some of the differences of bilingual children in Arizona versus other states?

06:07 LR: Okay, that's a very good question. So, there's the political situation. You know, that it's an English-only state, which means that there's a law forbidding bilingual education for English language learners, so dual language learners. So that has implications on how their native language develops and so on. I can talk to you a little bit more about that later. The other big thing about the greater Phoenix area is that we tend to have a very low income, and low parental education sample. It doesn't mean that they're all like that; it means that when we go to schools that are primarily Latino, that's the makeup of the school. You know, there's a large educated population in Arizona, but for efficiency purpose, when we go and do research in Latino schools, those schools are primarily 90% free and reduced lunch. In our sample we have 60% of the parents don't have high school education. So we have multiple risk factors that in other states might not be the case. If we go outside the Phoenix area, or we expand to schools that are not primarily Latino, then we see more variation.

07:50 TH: That makes sense.

07:54 LR: And I often find differences in the schools with Texas and Minnesota and Massachusetts, and I think it's that multiple set of risk factors that are present in our samples.

08:08 TH: That makes a lot of sense. And I've published on a different study that you're not involved in with your colleague Shelley Gray and Mary Alt. We had a sample of children bilingual, where we were testing their working memory. We had a paper come out last year in language speech hearing services in the schools and a special issue on working memory where we showed we didn’t. That the children in our sample didn't have the bilingual advantage that everyone talks about, in central executive functioning in particular, but in lots of measures in working memory. One of the reasons we proposed was that the sample that we have in Arizona is different than what we see in other places. A lot of that bilingual advantage work is done out of Canada, French-English, and they do tend to have some higher socio-economic status. I think also just even some factors in Canada, where they promote and cherish the bilingualism. Whereas, you said in Arizona, the policies are such that it's really looking towards an English only, so more of enculturation, to a single language.

09:15 LR: Right, right. And they're forbidden in many cases of speaking their language at school.

09:21 TH: Wow. I didn't know that. When I came as a professor at the University of Arizona, one thing that really shocked me was when I would work with my students who had a background, their family was from Mexico, and maybe they were first or second generation. They didn't have the language skills in Spanish that I thought they might based on their family interactions. They told me that a lot of it was because they were told, even in their family, "You need to speak English. You need to be English." Interestingly enough, there were those who were not coming from a background of having Spanish in the home, who spoke better Spanish, and were the bilingual speech pathologists. Some of them had even gone to Spanish immersion programs. And to get into the Spanish immersion program, you had to show good English skills, which was just shocking to me. I thought it was such a discrepancy by who was bilingual, and I'm wondering if you're seeing that too with some of your students.

10:29 LR: We see this because a lot of these children don't develop literacy in their native language, and because they are not allowed to speak. And many times the teachers, pediatricians tell the parents to only speak English to help the child. Unknowingly, that actually it has all kinds of negative consequences for their family, the cultural transmission, for the literacy development, and language development in their native language. So, yes that's often the case. Fred Genesee says this is a waste of a wonderful resource. So, my students and children are having a resource that it would be valuable to the whole community.

11:22 TH: Absolutely. So, you work with children with language impairments in both only English, and those who are bilingual. When you talk to these families, how do you counter that? What do you tell them to counter advice they might be getting, wrong advice from pediatricians or whoever to say only speak one language?

11:43 LR: So, the first thing is that only speaking a language doesn't make the disorder go away. IT does not cure it or make it any less severe. Second, that by only speaking in English, the second language, the consequences are the lack of communication of reducing the ability to communicate at home. There is no evidence, there's zero evidence that focusing only on English helps at all. The research that we have either shows that developing the two languages is as good for English achievement as focusing only on English, or sometimes focusing only on English makes the situation worse. So, the native language, it doesn't mean which language, can have a facilitative effect, can help them transition. Developing literacy skills helps them solidify their native language. But the consequences are mostly in communication in their home and with their own culture.

12:56 LR: But at the same time, there's no evidence that it helps. We have evidence that it actually, it's harmful in developing the native language which is the home language for communication. So, I have to convince them that it's not going to hurt. In fact, it's going to help the English by having strong language and strong communication skills at home.

13:18 TH: How is it received by parents when you talk to them? Is there resistance? Are they relieved?

13:26 LR: No. They actually feel empowered.

13:27 TH: Great.

13:27 LR: Some of them say that's what I thought but the teacher told me this, or the psychologist told me that or the pediatrician told me that. So, once they understand that it can have negative consequences in the home and their behavior management and how they talk to their children, they value it. And as long as you tell them it doesn't hurt their English, because they want their children to be successful in English. So, if they understand that, then they feel receptive to improving their home language.

14:02 TH: Oh, that's great. Yeah, that's fantastic. I hope that message gets out more and more. It's such a critically important message. And as you said, it's not only that it doesn't cure the language in parent, but it can really hurt the interactions at home and create more communication difficulty at home. Also the cultural identity aspect too. Now, this is a minor question...

14:25 LR: Because someone doesn't get their own culture, and they also don't feel accepted in the second culture. So, my goal for them and the families is that they have a bilingual bi-cultural and bi-literate identity. Yeah.

14:40 TH: Yes. What policies do you think need to be in place to support that goal, that are not in place now?

14:48 LR: So they are not in place now. Arizona, we have a new superintendent of schools. She would like to repeal the English-only policy. They have found that that actually performance has decreased in academic achievement. It has not had any of the positive effects that people were told it was gonna have. The reading achievement continues to be lagging behind. So my hope is that the law will be repealed, and that bilingual dual immersion education becomes available to the dual language learners. Right now, it's only available to children that speak English. But it defeats the whole purpose of dual language immersion, which allows children who speak another language to be the role models for the English speakers in that other language. So I'm hoping that that will happen this year, and that we'll see some changes. I think we also need to see some changes. The law had the segregation policy. So the children were pulled out of all the academics, like social studies, science and so on, for four hours. Then it became two hours, but during that time, there was a lot of drill into English development and use of very inappropriate curriculum.

16:17 LR: In fact, I have a teacher in my master’s class now who is now pursuing speech pathology. She was very disappointed in that they had to do this English rote repetition and memorization curriculum that serve the children no purpose. She was literally in tears, trying to explain to the rest of the class how powerless she felt in that classroom. So I'm hoping that those policies of the taking curriculums that are not appropriate even for English acquisition go away, and the teachers can use their knowledge and skills to instruct the kids. Because these teachers were pretty much told exactly what to do.

17:05 TH: Wow, that's so disappointing. So the new superintendent of schools? Is she a speech pathologist?

17:12 LR: She's actually a speech pathologist and teacher. So she has background in both areas.

17:20 TH: That gives a lot of hope. Are there certain states you think do it right? That you'll base as an example for Arizona?

17:29 LR: Oh, that's a tough question. Actually, Massachusetts seems to have very high achievement, but they did have for a while the English-only law. When I was there, there was bilingual education. Texas has bilingual education, but I was just with a colleague that is actually working in bilingual education and there's other issues. So I don't think bilingual education per se solves all the problems. We have to have quality curriculum, appropriate professional development. Then it comes down to, do we have the appropriate tools to get the right curriculum and stuff. So California just abolished it a couple of years ago. So I haven't seen recent results, but I would like to see how California is doing it. But we need high quality curriculum for everybody, with the appropriate techniques. That’s what's needed for both special ed and regular ed. My students right now that are in eighth grade. They say they have eighth graders right now, whole classrooms of eighth graders reading below their grade. They can't decode, they can't comprehend, and it's like, we can't go keep blaming the kids.

19:00 TH: Right. It's educational malpractice, really. It's shocking when you see what these children have had to go through.

19:09 LR: And we have very hard-working teachers, so I don't want to blame teachers.

19:18 TH: Right.

19:19 LR: Because they are working hard and they're in the classroom every day, so we have to give them the tools that deliver the appropriate curriculum.

19:29 TH: When I think about educational malpractice, I think less of the teachers and more about the policies that are I think what's driving it. One thing, this is a minor question, but I'm curious. There's a lot of terms thrown around for children who are learning, so I've heard English as a second language, dual language learners. What term do you prefer and why?

19:52 LR: I prefer dual language learners, which Head Start adopted a while ago. Because the children are still developing both languages and English as a second language is only focused on English, and English language learners again it's also focused on English. But children are developing both languages. There's also the term emergent bilinguals, but that's kind of more of the earlier stages, of the second language. So I normally use dual language learners.

20:33 TH: That makes sense. I was wondering about that, even when I was thinking about this podcast, I was thinking what do I say? But I know your publications, you use dual language learners. And you've traveled quite a bit, were you on sabbatical recently?

20:45 LR: I was in Israel, 2017-2018, was working at Bar-Ilan University, yeah.

20:52 TH: And what do they think about... Or what do you think from a world perspective, that we can learn about dual language learners here?

21:00 LR: Oh my God, from a world perspective? It depends... It's an interesting opinion I have.

21:02 TH: Yeah.

21:09 LR: Because countries that value bilingualism, value them until they have a minority population. So Europe is very well valued until they have people from Turkey or Syria, the Middle East, and then that population doesn't get valued as well, and then the bilingualism doesn't work. They don't believe bilingualism for those populations. In Israel, there's bilingualism valued, right?

21:47 TH: Yeah.

20:48 LR: And Arabic speaking kids learn Arabic and Hebrew. But it's not as common that the Hebrew-speaking kids learn Arabic.

21:57 TH: Interesting.

21:58 LR: When there's bilingual education, there's the majority rule kind of situation. So there's always that political, cultural, influence in how bilingualism is perceived and implemented.

21:14 TH: Oh, that's really interesting, that is, that's pretty fascinating. Cause you often, I often think about other countries just have it right. Cause they know that you should have more than one language, and especially in Europe, but it does make sense that you're still people, and when people implement policies, biases play into those policies because people have biases.

22:37 LR: Right.

22:38 TH: Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, I followed some of your travel, so I thought it looked really interesting.

[laughter]

22:44 TH: And I was like, "Oh that's cool, I bet she's learning a lot about different ways of bilingualism, across the world."

22:50 LR: Yes and what's interesting about Arabic for example, is that the oral language and written language are different.

22:58 TH: Yes.

23:00 LR: So how do you promote literacy in children who are not quite reading, but you want them to be ready for literacy in Arabic? And then you have different scripts when you have Hebrew and Arabic. So you know, those things are just interesting and kids learn, that no matter what, so even if it's in Arabic and the Hebrew alphabet and they all become literate and stuff so I think it's fascinating all the possibilities. And at least when we're looking at literacy across languages that have scripts, this idea that kids get confused. No they don't. They sometimes mix codes but eventually they sort them out. Like you develop language and you make errors or you use different tenses while you're learning the language. So there are normal developmental processes in these different languages that are very typical, and they don't confuse the kids. Which is one of the biggest myths, that if you teach the kids to read in two languages they get confused, but they don't.

24:17 TH: Well and if they do get confused like you said, it's just the developmental process that the system is disrupted for a bit but then it aligns itself and gets... Learns along the way. So maybe it is a little trickier in the beginning, but then at the end it's sorted out.

24:33 LR: Right. So they sort it out. And they make kind of errors that make sense. They're using one language or the other. But it just develops to normal levels, like in everybody.

24:52 TH: Right. So in thinking about this, you said, most children learn it, of course they do, and that's really fascinating. And I was struck by that even when I was visiting China in May. Just the Chinese characters and it's just so overwhelming to think about that but they do learn it. But then there's some children who don't and I know your interest and mine too is in developmental language disorder.

25:14 LR: Yeah.

24:15 TH: And of course, there's been a whole field on trying to figure who has developmental language disorder, and good sensitivity and specificity and diagnostic parameters. But then it adds an extra layer when you have this dual language learning situation or multiple language learning. So, based on the work you've done, what is the best way to identify or some promising ways to identify language disorders in children who are learning two languages?

25:43 LR: So, we are actually a group of us that are all bilingual researchers in the country finishing... I actually have a paper under review.

25:53 TH: Oh.

25:54 LR: Right now, that is addressing this. And we're basing it, as we're calling it "Looking for Converging Evidence." The whole premise is that, we look at different sources of information and making informed decisions. So we look at language samples. We look at the dynamic assessment. We look at standardized test if they're available. Parent and teacher report, and try to find converging evidence to support the presence or absence of that disorder. So that way you don't rely on one source that might not be a hundred percent sensitive to the identification of the language disorders. I've been saying this for many many years in terms of the assessment process, that we have to have multiple sources of evidence to make such a diagnosis. Yeah. So there's no magic bullet yet.

26:58 TH: I think that makes a lot of sense. And we're finding that in the study of dyslexia too, like everyone thinks, or there's a lot of work showing that they have phonological deficits in dyslexia, for instance. But even now that we have these policies to do early identification of dyslexia, those that are researching identification are really going towards this multi-factorial model because it does seem like you need to have multiple factors that indicate that you have dyslexia versus just one factor. Or at least especially when you're thinking about risk, too.

27:29 LR: Yeah.

27:30 TH: So that makes a lot of sense.

27:31 LR: So what are the other factors that you're finding?

27:33 TH: Hmm?

27:34 LR: What are the other factors that you're finding?

27:36 TH: Well, one of them would be family history, is a big one. So, if they have a family history. If they have had receptive language problems, if they have speech production problems early on. If they have a phonological deficit that plays in. But even just... I was at International Dyslexia Association. Hugh Catts and Yaacov Petscher were presenting on some of the new work they have. Even looking at perseverance and some more, thinking of more of even personality kinds of traits that play into the risk factor, and they find it's really the interaction between all of these factors that seems to be making the determination, but it's very similar to what you're talking about with this converging evidence, because it is this idea that maybe one factor... As you add on factors, it's gonna just be accumulating model of risk.

28:30 LR: Yeah, yeah.

28:31 TH: And then they also talked a lot about protective factors, too. So maybe you have risk, like a checklist kind of thing, like you have two points of risk, but maybe you have three points of protection, and protection factors would be like, for instance, a really strong intervention environment, maybe a home literacy environment, or if you have this perseverance, or maybe you have good processing speed, that's another one. So there's a lot of these different protective factors, too, which would be interesting to think about with your converging evidence paper as well as what are some of the factors that help.

29:07 LR: Yeah. We haven't done that, that's important.

29:12 TH: It's actually kind of funny. The model Hugh talked about, I think it's called Cumulative Risk And Protection Model, and he was joking about it, saying it was the CRAP model. Doesn't have a great acronym! [laughter] And I think everyone... And because of that, I think everyone's gonna remember it. I know I did! [laughter] But I think that it was really fun to talk about that and think about the protective part, cause we often don't think about that aspect in any impairments, not just dyslexia, but I think that's a new area coming from social psychology, looking at resilience in kids who've had...

29:51 LR: Absolutely.

29:52 TH: Yeah, right? Like kids who've been in traumatic situations, like why are some, some have better outcomes than others, and so that's really interesting. So it seems to me...

29:58 LR: So we have the results of that focus on looking at instead of how to manage complex cases when everything goes down is how successful complex cases get resolved or intervened. So I've seen that in high school social sciences out of risk factors for behavior but on healthcare, and it's great that it's now coming into language and literacy. It's looking at a protective factor system, and resilience factors.

30:34 TH: Yeah, I think that, yeah, especially I think as we move towards more universal screening approaches, not only for dyslexia... I'd love to see it for language impairment too, but then, how it is with, when you're doing those models of who's at risk and who's not, then it really gets complicated, cause it's all a probability, you know how that is.

30:55 LR: Yeah.

30:56 TH: And in thinking about the language impairment diagnosed, it does seem like, and maybe... I'd love to hear about what you discussed in your converging evidence paper in this regard. So I hear this two schools of thought. One is, you should always assess the child in their native language to determine if they have a language impairment, and the other one is more pragmatic in the sense that we can't always assess in the native language, so dynamic assessment's one way to go. So teach them something in English, or just even dynamic assessment being more like progress monitoring over time. So where do you fall on that continuum of thinking? How does converging evidence play into that kind of discussion?

31:33 LR: So we'd actually argue that you need to look at both languages as much as possible. I know pragmatically that's not always possible, because kids have different strengths, and Liz Pena has shown that, where kids will have a strength in semantic development and a weakness in morphology in one language versus the other, and in their assessment you're looking at their strength across the different skills and languages, so you're not making the decision just based on one language, because it could be that they have higher vocabulary in English, but better grammar in Spanish, for example. So in that sense, it's always important to look at the two languages as much as you can. Pragmatically, that's not always the case. Dynamic assessment, it's interesting because there's only a handful of tools available that are actually standardized and known for that purpose. You still need to have a measure that is valid for that purpose, so unless you have a validated measure you're doing dynamic assessment, it's problematic.

32:54 TH: Yeah.

32:55 LR: So in our equation, dynamic assessment enters into part of that converging evidence. What was most discriminated about dynamic assessment is the modifiability scale. It's not so much the pre and post test scores, but the more thought out modifiability scale, and that's very consistent across studies. And so, for example, when we looked in a little part of the study we did on response to intervention, all children learn, but in dynamic assessment, what differentiates is how much effort does the clinician put into getting change?

33:40 TH: Oh, that's really interesting. So that's what you mean by modifiability scale?

33:44 LR: Exactly, yes. It is how the child responds to the paths, how much clinician effort was the attention of the child and so on. There's a couple of different scales, but one is more focused on the child and one is more focused on the clinician effort with that change.

34:09 TH: Oh that's really interesting.

34:10 LR: And those are the ones that are differentiating, not so much the pre post test, per se.

34:16 TH: That's really intriguing and makes a lot of sense because I can think about children I've worked with at the end they may have the same score, but whew, I had to give lots of repetitions or I had a lot of re-directions or there was a lot of pause time or, is that kind of what you're thinking of modifiability scale?

34:33 LR: Yeah, right. It's all those. Was the child on task? Was the generalizability of the task and so on.

34:36 TH: That's very interesting. And is that in the paper? Do you talk a little bit about that?

34:51 LR: We have a paper, that in the paper, but Liz Pena has published quite a bit on that.

34:58 TH: Okay.

34:59 LR: In the paper she has, and my student, who is now a faculty, and I know you did a study with Navajo children and again the modifiability all alone discriminated with 100% accuracy.

35:15 TH: Wow! That's so intriguing. It seems like maybe the modifiability also gets at a nuance that might even be a sense of this resilience or protective factor.

35:28 LR: It could be.

35:29 TH: Yeah. Cause maybe if the kid is a child who really perseveres, and has maybe extra attention or things like that, that can play into what would be counted as resilience, that would give them a better modifiability score. That's very cool. I'll definitely put those resources in the podcast website cause I think the listeners will be interested in that new aspect. But speaking of new, what are some of your recent findings and what do they mean for clinical practice? What are you telling your audiences that you present to and your students these days?

36:09 LR: Oh gosh. In what areas?

36:14 TH: I like to ask the really hard questions live. [laughter]

36:18 LR: In terms of a language sample analysis, I still find it very valuable but understanding the child's history of where they've been and how much input they're getting. I'll put that doing in the language, it becomes very important because we see children that improve, children that plateau and children that decrease ability in the native language. When we look at language sample analysis, we need to know what the language history of the child is in order to determine is this consistent with the input and output, are the results consistent with the input and output that child is getting?

37:10 LR: So that's one area that I think, and we're not calling it so much language loss anymore, but are we seeing there's a restructuring of the language, or protracted development in the native language in the morphology aspect, that it might not continue to develop, especially in context where there's no simulation outside the home. That's why it's very critical that clinicians understand that. In other areas, we are using embodied cognition to do interventions for reading comprehension and for language development.

37:48 LR: So we have our grant from the Arts and Humanities, the grant of the department of Ed, at teaching theater techniques to teachers to enhance reading and teaching children as they do their dialogic reading and so on. And so it's teaching drama techniques to enact characters and so on. I'm excited about that. We think it's an improved comprehension but it's implementing and we're working with a theater company, a local theater company, like Childsplay in Arizona that have very good experience in professional development in the theater, but they never evaluated the language growth in the children.

38:39 TH: Wow!

38:40 LR: That is very exciting. And then also we have a grant from the National Science Foundation to implement dialogic reading with parents on iPads. These are for bilingual parents, so we're developing a virtual tutoring system for parents to read to their kids in Spanish and learn how to ask questions and so on. So there's been some models on that and we're hoping to start testing our app with that. The virtual tutoring system. And it also uses actual embodied cognition so kids can move the characters and so on, but the focus of this grant is training the parents, and if they can't read, the iPad can read for them in Spanish. You would get over the low literacy issues that we encounter with many parents that they don't have the skill to read.

39:45 TH: Wow. That's so cool, Laida. What age for students, for the theater and for the app? What age?

39:51 LR: The theater is for preschool and the NSF grant is for school age kids age, like 7 through 9 years of age.

40:05 TH: Wow. I think that's so great. I love how you're incorporating the literacy part too, not just the language aspect but really thinking about the language literacy connection in these dual language learners.

40:14 LR: Absolutely.

40:15 TH: Yeah, that's great. I don't know that that's always as common as it could be, so I appreciate that so much.

40:22 LR: So the drama is all connected to books. Also to books that they're reading and learning to use tools from drama to comprehend and think about and discuss about the book.

40:40 TH: Oh, that's so awesome.

40:41 LR: Yeah, and then the other one is literacy value of bringing parents to read with their kids at the school age, because often we see it supported in the preschool but not so much in school-age kids.

40:56 TH: Wow. And I love how you get around the literacy aspect by having the iPad read to them, so that the parents don't have to feel that, "Oh, I can't read this to them, I don't have that literacy."

41:08 LR: Yeah.

41:10 TH: That's great. Well, speaking of literacy, I'm mindful of our time and I'm gonna wrap up here pretty quick with you, what a great discussion, but I'm wondering about your favorite book from childhood, or now, so it could be either, but just a favorite book of yours?

41:24 LR: I was thinking about that. The favorite book from childhood was actually a book of rhymes that I'm trying to... The author is Rafael Pongo, I think. I'm not positive, I'm gonna have to look it up.

41:42 TH: Okay.

41:43 LR: But it's rhymes, so I remember carrying that book every place, and it was all little stories and rhymes that I really enjoyed. But I'm telling that I really enjoyed reading Isabella Allende, she's a Chilean author, but she's very prolific in the US and lives in the US and she's... I really enjoy her books, as well, so...

42:13 TH: And Laida, where were you born and raised?

42:17 LR: I was born in Medellin, Colombia.

42:20 TH: Colombia.

42:21 LR: And I moved here 40 years ago.

42:24 TH: Oh wow. 40 years.

42:25 LR: Yes.

40:27 TH: Wow, that's great. Do you visit often?

42:29 LR: Not as often as I would like.

[laughter]

42:34 TH: I know. I think I know why after you told me all your projects. [laughter]

42:39 LR: Yeah. It's a very good time.

42:41 TH: Well Laida, thank you so much for talking with me today. I really appreciate it.

42:45 LR: Thank you for having me. Yeah. I really enjoyed this.

42:51 Tiffany Hogan: Check out www.seehearspeakpodcast.com for helpful resources associated with this podcast including, for example, the podcast transcript, research articles, & speakers bios. You can also sign up for email alerts on the website or subscribe to the podcast on apple podcasts or any other listening platform, so you will be the first to hear about new episodes.

Thank you for listening and good luck to you, making the world a better place by helping one child at a time.