Danielle “Nell” Thompson and Terrie Noland lead schools from fragmented efforts to coherent literacy practices
Literacy improvement efforts have swept across the nation by policy or by passion, yet results remain uneven. One reason is clear: language and literacy have been treated as separate rather than as an integrated developmental process. Reading development is not separate from language but built on it (Snowling and Hulme, 2025).
Sustained literacy improvement requires a leadership shift; it demands systems thinking from leaders who move from managing programs to aligning systems and from monitoring compliance to cultivating coherence. By intentionally placing oral language at the foundation of literacy instruction, leaders create developmentally sound conditions that are powerful and equitable for all learners.
The Bigger Picture: Oral Language Is the Engine of Comprehension
Decoding is essential, but it is not the destination, and while the destination is comprehension, this depends on far more than the ability to translate print to speech. Decades of research confirm that oral language development, including vocabulary, syntax, background knowledge, discourse skills, and narrative understanding, is highly predictive of later reading comprehension (Language and Reading Research Consortium LARRC, 2015; Catts, 2018; Snowling et al., 2022). Longitudinal studies show that children with strong early oral language skills demonstrate significantly stronger reading outcomes through adolescence, even after controlling for early decoding ability (Dickinson and Tabors, 2001; Nation, 2019).
This matters because comprehension difficulties rarely stem from decoding. Instead, they emerge when students lack the language resources necessary to interpret, integrate, and evaluate text. As Snow and Matthews (2016) explain, comprehension is fundamentally a language process.
Yet oral language is one of the least systematically supported domains in schools. While oral language instruction is often presumed to be integrated within the English language arts standards, those standards primarily focus on speaking and listening, which serve as participation and performance expectations rather than as a framework for the developmental construction of oral language. As a result, the linguistic foundations that support comprehension—vocabulary, syntax, narrative and expository discourse, and inferencing—are often assumed rather than explicitly taught (Snow and Matthews, 2016; Snowling et al., 2022; Spies, 2023).
Oral language develops through purposeful use in meaningful contexts. Students benefit from repeated opportunities to use language that is relevant to their lives, connected to real ideas, and grounded in meaningful texts and experiences (Petersen et al., 2020).
When oral language is intentionally embedded, classrooms sound different. Students explain their thinking, build on one another’s ideas, and experiment with new vocabulary and sentence structures. These environments do not arise by chance; they result from leadership decisions that prioritize language as the foundation of literacy and design systems accordingly.
What Leaders Must Understand to Create Coherence
Great literacy leadership is not about managing programs. It is about developing knowledge of the language-to-literacy connection, cultivating alignment between word reading and oral language, and integrating evidence-based practices across classrooms, grades, and tiers of instruction.
This work requires three major leadership shifts.
1. From Adoption to Alignment
For many leaders, the pressure to improve literacy outcomes leads to program accumulation rather than system coherence. A core ELA curriculum is adopted. Then, in response to data, intensifications or supplemental curricula are layered into the implementation. This may include a more structured phonics curriculum to address decoding, a stand-alone intervention for struggling readers, and separate resources supporting vocabulary and writing. Each decision may be defensible in isolation, yet together they often form a fragmented instructional system rather than a unified approach to literacy development.
Alignment requires literacy leadership teams to intentionally connect the components of literacy instruction—oral language, listening comprehension, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, content knowledge, and writing—so that each component reinforces shared instructional priorities (Fullan, 2020). Recent language-based models of reading underscore that literacy is best understood as an integrated language system rather than a sequence of disconnected skills, with oral language serving as the foundation across grades and contexts. When instruction is fragmented, students may acquire isolated skills without developing the linguistic coherence needed for deep comprehension and learning (Spies, 2023).
Vaughn and Fletcher (2020–21) warn that schools frequently operate with “multiple, uncoordinated efforts” that fail to work in concert. Their research underscores that literacy improvement depends less on the strength of individual programs and more on the coherence of the system as a whole.
In aligned systems, the level of coherence goes beyond an integrated literacy block to intentionally creating alignment between assessment, core instruction, and intervention. Vocabulary taught in content classes appears in reading and writing tasks. Oral language routines used in early grades evolve into more sophisticated academic discourse in later grades. Intervention supports do not replace core instruction; they strengthen and extend it.
Alignment is not about doing more. It is about ensuring that what already exists works together to support the continuous development of language and literacy.
2. From Compliance to Instructional Understanding
Alignment at the system level depends on instructional understanding at the leadership level. Leaders do not need to be reading scientists, but they do need a working understanding of how language and reading develop. Snowling and Hulme (2025) emphasize that reading is a developmental process built on the interaction between word recognition and language comprehension.
When leaders lack this understanding, decision-making becomes superficial. Program fidelity replaces instructional intent. Observations focus on whether materials are used rather than whether learning is occurring.
Instructional understanding changes the questions leaders ask.
Instead of asking, “Are teachers following the program?,” leaders ask, “How are students using language to make meaning?”
Instead of asking, “Was the phonics lesson delivered as written?,” leaders ask, “How does this instruction connect to vocabulary, comprehension, and writing?”
Vaughn and Fletcher (2020–2021) emphasize that even evidence-based practices lose effectiveness when leaders do not understand how they fit together. Without informed leadership, strong instructional components become fragmented, inconsistently applied, or misaligned across grades and settings.
Instructional understanding empowers leaders to coach more effectively, support teachers more intentionally, and recognize when gaps are systemic rather than individual.
3. From Fragmented Efforts to a Coherent Literacy Model
A coherent literacy system does not treat the components of literacy development as separate initiatives (e.g., decoding, vocabulary, writing, spelling) but as interdependent components of a single instructional model unified by shared language goals and developmental purpose. Coherently designed curriculum and instruction reduce teacher overwhelm and increase instructional time, and with them, students develop stronger, more transferable literacy skills.
Coherence must also extend across tiers of instruction. Vaughn and Fletcher (2020–2021) highlight the importance of alignment between core instruction, supplemental supports, and intervention. When intervention focuses narrowly on skills disconnected from classroom instruction, students often struggle to transfer learning. In contrast, when interventions reinforce the same language structures, vocabulary, and knowledge emphasized in core instruction, students are more likely to transfer learning and sustain growth.
This coherence is especially vital because language is built through contextualized experiences over time. Language learning doesn’t reset and start over at the doorway of the intervention room. Language grows through repeated opportunities to listen, speak, read, and write about meaningful content. This compounding effect is important for all students, but it is critical for multilingual students, for whom fragmented instruction can significantly limit access to comprehension and meaning-making (Spies, 2023).
In coherent systems, responsibility for language development is shared across the grade levels and content areas. Consistent expectations for listening, speaking, reading, and writing are supported by all educators across settings, providing students repeated opportunities to use language to reason, explain, and make meaning. Over time, these aligned experiences accumulate, creating a collective effect across classrooms and grades.
Coherent Literacy Leadership in Practice
Coherence is not theoretical. It is built through deliberate, replicable leadership actions.
1. Define a Shared Literacy Vision
A coherent system begins with clarity. Leaders must articulate what effective literacy instruction looks and sounds like in their schools. District and school leaders must specify that literacy development encompasses oral language, narrative and expository discourse, syntax, vocabulary, inferencing, and content knowledge alongside decoding. Narrative language, in particular, provides a unifying context because it captures how students use vocabulary, syntax, and discourse to construct meaning across listening, speaking, reading, and writing (Petersen et al., 2020).
The leader’s role is not simply to create the vision, but to animate it, name it, and make it visible every day. Vision becomes coherent only when it has cadence. Leaders establish that cadence by walking the vision into classrooms, talking the vision in meetings and conversations, and using the vision as the lens through which instructional decisions are made. Through regular classroom observations, leaders begin to learn to recognize and name effective practice.
When leaders highlight examples of strong, contextualized oral language instruction, they signal what the organization values. By publicly affirming these practices, during walkthroughs, staff meetings, coaching conversations, or informal interactions, they help teachers see themselves as contributors to a shared mission.
The vision must function not as a mandate but a mantra. A mandate relies on compliance; a mantra builds commitment. When leaders consistently return to the same language, naming oral language as foundational, emphasizing coherence across instruction, and reinforcing the connection between talk, knowledge, and comprehension, the vision becomes part of the school’s professional identity. Teachers begin to use the language themselves. Conversations shift from “What program are we using?” to “How is this strengthening language and meaning-making?”
In coherent systems, leaders do not inspect for fidelity alone; they attend to alignment. They listen for student talk. They notice how vocabulary travels across lessons and content areas. They ask questions that reinforce the vision:
How are students using language to explain their thinking?
How does this instruction support comprehension over time?
By walking and talking the vision daily, leaders create conditions for coherence to take root. The vision stops living on paper and begins living in practice.
2. Audit for Alignment, Redundancy, and Gaps
In coherent systems, leaders regularly step back to examine how instructional components function together. An alignment audit is not a compliance exercise; it is a systems-level inquiry into whether instructional practices reinforce or compete with one another. Leaders should routinely ask:
- Where do our programs overlap or compete for instructional time and attention?
- Where are teachers compensating for missing structures by creating workarounds?
- How intentionally are we supporting oral language development vertically and horizontally?
These questions shift the focus from individual programs to collective impact. Often, alignment audits reveal that schools are doing too much in some areas while leaving critical gaps in others. For example, a school may invest heavily in phonics and intervention while assuming oral language will develop incidentally. In other cases, multiple tools may target similar skills, creating redundancy that fragments instructional time.
When leaders identify and address redundancy, they do more than streamline materials. They free cognitive space for teachers and students alike to focus on deeper instructional work. Alignment audits allow leaders to decide what to keep, what to refine, and what to let go, ensuring that every instructional element advances a shared literacy vision rather than pulling the system in competing directions.
3. Build Teacher Knowledge Through Ongoing Learning
Teacher knowledge is an essential driver for instructional quality. Research has established that teachers’ understanding of content and pedagogy shapes what a student has access to learn (Cohen et al., 2017). More recently, evidence suggests teachers’ knowledge of language and literacy reliably predicts student gains in foundational literacy (Porter et al., 2024). These findings underscore a leadership responsibility: if leaders are to create coherence, they must make a deliberate and consistent investment in building teacher knowledge.In coherent systems, professional learning is designed not simply to train teachers on materials but to deepen their understanding of how language and literacy develop over time.
High-quality professional learning helps teachers understand:
- How oral language develops and why it matters
- Why contextualized vocabulary instruction is necessary
- How discourse routines support reasoning, meaning-making, and comprehension
- How writing strengthens language development
When professional learning is grounded in understanding, teachers are better equipped to make instructional decisions. They can adapt lessons thoughtfully, recognize when students need additional language support, and apply strategies across contexts.
For leaders, this means prioritizing learning experiences that build shared understanding across staff. Professional development becomes a mechanism for coherence when it reinforces common language, shared instructional priorities, and a unified model of literacy. Over time, this shared knowledge base reduces instructional variability and increases collective efficacy across a school system.
4. Prioritize Oral Language Across the School Day
Oral language development cannot be left to chance. In coherent systems, leaders ensure that opportunities for meaningful language production are intentionally planned and embedded throughout the school day. This includes:
- Structured academic conversation protocols that support purposeful talk
- Interactive read-alouds that prioritize student-to-student discussion and reasoning
- Routines for narrative, explanatory, and argumentative talk across disciplines
- Vocabulary and syntax instruction that requires students to produce language, not merely recognize or define it
These practices communicate a clear message: language is not an add-on to instruction; it is the medium through which learning occurs.
For leaders, prioritizing oral language means ensuring that these practices are visible and sustained. It means protecting time for discussion, modeling expectations for academic talk, and reinforcing the belief that every classroom is a language-rich environment.
5. Monitor for Coherence, Not Just Compliance
In coherent systems, monitoring shifts from checking fidelity to attending to alignment. While program implementation matters, it is not the ultimate measure of instructional quality. Leaders must look beyond whether a script was followed and instead focus on whether instruction is purposeful and connected and intentionally leverages language comprehension and production to support meaning-making and reasoning.
Listening becomes as important as looking. Leaders listen not only for participation but for the structure and coherence of students’ language—how ideas are sequenced, how relationships between concepts and events are expressed, and how meaning is sustained across multiple turns in talk or text. These indicators provide far more insight into instructional coherence than surface-level compliance checks that focus on whether a behavior occurred rather than on the quality and function of the language being used.
When monitoring prioritizes coherence, feedback becomes more meaningful. Conversations with teachers focus on strengthening alignment, intentionally scaffolding how language is received and expressed, and ensuring consistent, productive language building. Over time, this approach reinforces a culture in which instruction is guided by a shared understanding over external mandates.
A Call to Leadership
The future will be shaped by leaders who recognize that literacy and language have too often been treated as separate and who are committed to bringing forth a developmental understanding of reading—one in which reading is language and develops from language, making oral language the cornerstone of instruction.
The work of leadership moving forward is the work of alignment: aligning systems for coherence and cultivating instructional cultures where oral language production, listening comprehension, and knowledge-building are treated as essential foundations rather than optional enrichments.
Leaders who choose coherence over convenience will build schools where literacy thrives.
References
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Danielle “Nell” Thompson, PhD, CCC-SLP, is a literacy leader and leadership coach, founder of the Transformative Reading Teacher Group and the Big Sky Literacy Summit. She advances a language-centered paradigm shift in literacy by helping educators align assessment, instruction, and leadership so every learner can thrive.
Terrie Noland, PhD, CALT, is a bold champion of leadership development as the greatest driver of literacy transformation. A former educator, school leader, and nonprofit executive, she now serves as a strategic advisor, keynote speaker, and mentor. She advances leadership-centered literacy transformation by equipping educators and system leaders to align vision, culture, and practice so leadership capacity multiplies and impact endures.