Why this course?
This course is designed for primary and secondary teachers - and is also suitable for allied health professionals and parents who want to understand more about the Science of Language and Reading as this pertains to initial reading instruction and support for struggling learners.
You will further develop your skills and knowledge about reading instruction and intervention for all children, through the integration of information from linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience to derive best practice for reading instruction and intervention with a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) framework.
Course content
Topics covered include:
Oral language: a deeper dive. Vocabulary across the tiers, discourse genres, inferencing and metalanguage
Cognitive Load Theory, explicit instruction, and leveraging neuroscience research in the classroom.
Progress monitoring in reading: Making the most of Multi-Tiered Systems of Support.
Developmental Language Disorder: The most common disorder you've never heard of.
Learning Difficulties: Early identification and intervention to close the achievement gap.
This course is delivered by La Trobe University SOLAR Lab Directors; Professor Pamela Snow and Associate Professor Tanya Serry.
You’ll learn to:
Apply the concept of vocabulary tiers to their teaching and will understand how literal and non-literal language differ from each other.
Design explicit teaching tasks and learning activities that take account of limited working memory capacity, to maximise long-term memory gains.
Apply Response to Intervention tiers to teaching in their school and appropriately place this within a context-specific MTSS framework.
Define and describe language disorder and developmental language disorder and consider the implications and practical solutions for students with these diagnoses in the classroom.
Define and describe learning difficulty and learning disability and examine the implications for students. We use a Response to Intervention framework alongside regular progress monitoring, to contextualise this topic.
Your study experience
Delivered online over five 1.5-hour weekly webinars, which will also be made available as recordings, you will have the opportunity to engage with our subject matter experts for detailed responses, and access learning resources, discussion forums, and practical tools to support you in applying the techniques learned in the webinar. The total time commitment will be up to 15 hours.
Following each online session, you'll be able to access learning resources and practical tools to support you in applying the techniques learned in the seminar, the online weekly sessions are recorded and available as synchronous or asynchronous presentations. You can also choose to undertake self-assessment quizzes to track your learning process and understanding.
At the conclusion, you will receive a Certificate of Attendance for 7.5 hours of Continuing Professional Development (CPD).
Dates
Session 1: Wednesday 23 April 2025
Session 2: Wednesday 30 April 2025
Session 3: Wednesday 7 May 2025
Session 4: Wednesday 14 May 2025
Session 5: Wednesday 21 May 2025
4.00 PM - 5.30 PM AEST (6.00 PM - 7.30 PM NZST)
Cost
AUD $440.00
About the La Trobe SOLAR Lab
The SOLAR Lab was established in the School of Education at La Trobe University in 2020 to promote the scientific study of the role of oral language skills in the emergence and consolidation of reading skills across the school years (pre-school to secondary). We use the term “reading” to specifically identify core skills in text decoding and language comprehension that also promote success in writing and spelling.