Tool Tuesday: Summer Study Series, Part 3—Expository Intervention Research!

For our third and final entry of this year’s Summer Study Series, we return to review a research-based update on a very handy and easy-to-use expository language support—“Sketch and Speak.” This approach has been described in the past here, but I will talk about it more specifically in this post.

Sketch and Speak works like it sounds, scaffolding students’ use of pictography, or quick sketches, to visualize details of an expository passage, followed by their oral description. This process has terrific synergy with MindWing’s methodology and materials, particularly ThemeMaker, as structural comprehension approaches (i.e. ,analyzing List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast, and other structures) go hand-in-hand with developing understanding of the expository content.

In fact, MindWing’s Expository Maps go so well with this strategy, they can literally be used as the space for it. Let’s look at how this would work with this article from NewsELA, which describes how dogs’ tail wagging could spring from humans’ enjoyment of that body language, rather than being a real sign of the dogs’ happiness. DocHub is a good place to put this into practice—besides print, pen and paper—as you can easily make a sketch on a PDF such as the digital MindWing Maps available through your manual:

Sketches show the sequence of researchers who wonder why wolves do not tail-wag, and the finding that humans liked the rhythm of tail wagging, then selected those dogs that exhibited it best to be their pets.

In brief, Sketch and Speak incorporates visualization lessons such as the following, then later proceed to more writing-based activities such as “bulleted notes” (again, the MindWing Maps would be a great space for bulleted notes and provide the structural focus):

• Read aloud text with print in view.
• Stop to identify an important or interesting idea.
• Turn the idea into a "quick and easy, just enough to remember" pictography note. This involves sketching iconic images that help students break away from the source text's words.
• Say a full sentence from the pictography.
• Say the full sentence again, revising it if needed for quality or accuracy.
• Repeat these steps for each text idea until the article is read and a number of pictographs are made.
• Say a full oral report from the pictographs.

If adding an additional “study” element to this post, I would recommend checking out a very recent article by Peterson and Ukrainetz, “Examining the Social Validity of Sketch and Speak Expository Intervention for Adolescent Students, Their Parents, and Their Speech-Language Pathologists” (2025). The title made me ask: “wait, what is social validity?” This term refers to the ways in which the goals, procedures, and outcomes of an intervention are relevant and socially important to the student receiving the intervention, and to other stakeholders (such as family, teachers, or caregivers).

 In this research note, three adolescents with LLDs received the intervention via telepractice (interesting). The students perceived potential independent use of the strategies in school activities and expressed confidence in their ability to use them, while parents reported improvements in their children's overall learning confidence and ability to understand and express information.

SLPs’ responses revealed three main themes: 1) strategy buy-in, 2) generalizability across curriculum, and 3) barriers to implementation (such as time, logistics, and potential lack of teacher buy-in). Overall, all three participant groups shared perceptions of increased student confidence and ownership of learned strategies, concluding that Sketch and Speak may be a socially valid and academically useful intervention for students, even when delivered remotely.

So, to conclude with a little technical support on some of the above, here are some steps you may follow:

1. Obtain Expository Map PDFs via the link in your manual, and upload to your Google Drive.
2. Open a PDF by clicking on it in Google Drive, and in the top center click Open With and select DocHub (or Connect more apps if you don’t see this option)
3. Allow permissions and then use the tools in the top menu to add text or sketches

As an alternate procedure, you can use MindWing’s Digital Icons with a lot of flexibility, adding icons, text and sketches to a digital whiteboard space such as those offered free through Miro.