SPELLTalk Questions and Answers:
The Language Literacy Network

1. Why wasn’t planning, organizing, writing, editing included for writing?

I view those as writing tasks (very important writing tasks/components of the writing process) that draw upon multiple processes: cognitive, executive function, language…with a heavy emphasis on EF skills, especially during planning, organizing, and self-monitoring (editing). The Language Literacy Network is focused on the language aspects of literacy. All of The Language Literacy Network components would be drawn upon –very meta-linguistically and strategically– during those writing tasks.

2. Where would idea generation be located in The Language Literacy Network?

I guess it depends on how ideas are generated. I typically think of idea generation as a cognitive skill that draws upon Background Knowledge and can be mediated by language (Verbal Reasoning and others). The ideas presented in the text interact with those the reader brings to the task during reading. During writing, the writer generates ideas from their academic, experiential, etc., knowledge store and translated into language.

3. Where do word retrieval deficits or word-finding impairments fall in The Language Literacy Network?

The Language Literacy Network represents normal processes of reading and writing. Automaticity in written word recognition (reading) and written word production (writing) relies on a robust lexical representation in long-term lexical memory, a lexical representation in which the phonological, orthographic, and morphologic/semantic representations are fully expressed and interconnected. Separately, there may be a rapid automatized naming (RAN) deficit or global processing speed deficit contributing to how long it takes for a lexical representation to be retrieved from long-term memory.

The Language Literacy Network infographic is attached and may be freely shared –unaltered and for non-commercial purposes– with this reference: Wasowicz, J. (2021). The Language Literacy Network. Learning By Design, Inc.

Download the PDF file here.

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