Carol Tolman, Ed.D., is a national and international literacy consultant at the state, district, and school levels. As a special educator with over 25 years of public school experience, she spent 12 of those years designing and implementing an innovative, exemplary program for academically challenged high school students. Along with Dr. Louisa Moats, Dr. Tolman is the co-author of LETRS, 3rd ed. (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling), revolutionary professional development aimed at providing educators with the knowledge necessary to improve literacy rates for all students. Beyond LETRS, Carol is the published author of numerous chapters and articles centering on the knowledge necessary to inform educators, administrators, and parents as they support children in their journey to becoming proficient readers and writers. As a mother, teacher, presenter, and author, Carol’s life passion centers on her family and on enabling access to high-quality instruction for every child. She is excited to share information with you.
Gough and Tunmer’s Simple View of Reading (SVR) identifies two major components to reading comprehension: word recognition and language comprehension. Dr. Tolman’s presentation focuses on language comprehension; specifically, on the areas of language structures and verbal reasoning, two often-ignored components of reading comprehension lessons crucial to the success of reading deeply. Increasing teachers’ awareness of how to analyze sentence types, develop sentence sense, and predict complex sentence structures is key to supporting students’ understandings of what they read and hear. Additionally, marking text to identify pronouns and their references, along with analyzing the cohesiveness of an author’s work, provides a deeper understanding of written discourse.
