It was 2007, and Danielle “Nell” Thompson was standing in a small museum in Kotzebue, Alaska, inside the Arctic Circle. On the wall hung a photograph of a group of linguists who had travelled north in the mid-1970s to translate the Iñupiaq language into writing for the first time. Thompson, then a young speech-language pathologist working in Indigenous communities, happened to be carrying a copy of Louisa Moats’s Speech to Print at the time. And then it hit her. “Wait a second,” she remembers thinking. “You mean Iñupiaq has been an oral language, completely, entirely, throughout all of history, until 1975, when a linguist wrote it down? And now I’m testing children in a written language? Their brains and their people have spoken language for thousands of years.” She laughs telling the story now. “I was just like, that’s annoying.”
But the moment stayed with her. It humbled her, she says, and it set the course for everything she’s built since: The Transformative Reading Teacher Group, the Big Sky Literacy Summit in Montana, and her work as President of The Reading League Montana. In a recent conversation on the ShiftED Podcast with host Chris Colley, Thompson kept circling back to one idea she thinks the field has quietly lost: language is the foundation of literacy, not a side note to it.
She traces the drift back to around 2000, when the National Reading Panel laid out five pillars — phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension — and publishers built their materials around them. What got left out? Oral language. Written expression. The relationship between the two. “Reading is a developmental extension of language,” she says. But somewhere along the way, “we made reading into a mechanistic process.” A phonics lesson stopped being about how the sounds of speech map onto a written code humans invented, and became a spelling test on Friday. The system isn’t broken, she argues — it just leans too far in one direction.
Her favourite line for teachers is disarmingly honest: “We’re only partially right.” You plan what you think is a great lesson, the exit tickets come back, and forty percent of the room didn’t get it. That isn’t failure, she says. That’s information. Teachers are scientists in their classrooms. She wants school leaders to think of themselves the same way — less as consultants who parachute in with answers, more as coaches who build people from the inside out. “When we change from the inside,” she says, “we change others around us.”
The shift she sees coming next is a full integration of speaking, listening, reading, and writing across every subject, taught by educators who understand language as the original architecture of every learning brain. For Thompson, that isn’t a curriculum overhaul. It’s a homecoming.
