To the Editor:
Thank you for the insightful reporting in the April 20 article, “Kindergartners Aren’t Talking Enough in Class. Why that Matters.” The experts quoted are right: Oral-language development has been crowded out, and children—particularly multilingual learners—are paying the price. In my experience teaching multilingual learners, I saw the unfortunate lack of opportunities for daily oral-language practice in classrooms. Teachers don’t often prioritize time for rich class discussions, and they need more support in how to facilitate and monitor productive student talk.
Students who are still building their English vocabulary and syntax can’t fully participate in read-alouds, discussions, or text-based tasks, no matter how strong the materials are. The comprehension gap described in the article by Sonia Cabell, the associate director of the Florida Center for Reading Research, disproportionately affects multilingual students who never had structured opportunities to develop the oral language that reading comprehension depends on.
This is also a timely caution about where schools are turning to fill instructional gaps. As scrutiny of ed-tech programs grows, one underexamined limitation is structural: Software cannot replicate the back-and-forth conversation that the MIT cognitive scientists identified as essential to language development in the 2018 study cited in the article. A student completing an adaptive reading program is receiving input and has limited opportunities for responses, not engaging in dialogue. For multilingual learners, that distinction matters enormously.
High-quality curriculum should make space for both the foundational skills students need and the rich discussion that builds the vocabulary and comprehension required to use those skills meaningfully. One without the other isn’t enough.
The room that “hums with excited discussions” should be the model, not the exception.
Sarah Webb
Senior Director of Humanities Curriculum & Editorial
Great Minds PBC
Dayton, Ohio
