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Learning Outcomes By the end of this chapter you will be able to accomplish the following objectives:

1. Analyze the importance of reading to academic success.

2. Summarize the reading process from decoding through comprehension.

3. Demonstrate how to make use of ELLs’ existing knowledge and skills in literacy using methods of instructional scaffolding.

4. Define content-area literacy and describe the language elements that ELLs need to acquire if they are to meet Common Core State Standards.

5. Explicate the principles that determine how communicative approaches to teaching are imple- mented in methods for teaching reading to ELLs.

6Learn to Read, Read to Learn

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Section 6.1 Why Reading Matters

Introduction Fifty years ago, many Americans learned French or Spanish or German by translating text. Although it was not an effective way to learn conversational skills or even writing skills, many did acquire a “reading knowledge” of the language. Today ELLs are in a very different situa- tion. They need to acquire both social and cognitive/academic language abilities. Although they might be able to rely on oral language skills for many social situations, oral language ability is not sufficient for academic purposes. Moreover, a “reading knowledge” is precisely what many are lacking. It is usually the failure to acquire adequate literacy skills that causes ELLs to become long-term English language learners (Chapter 5).

Beginning with a review and further discussion of the centrality of reading to language and content learning, we delve deeper into what the process of reading entails. What do we know about the reading process that helps us understand the task that confronts ELLs in learning to read English? As we have seen in earlier chapters, if ELLs are able to read in their native language(s), they have a head start on learning to read in English. In this chapter we examine how teachers can take advantage of learners’ prior knowledge by using a variety of methods to build skills in English reading and writing.

In school, children learn to read so that they can read to learn. Content-area literacy, then, is not only the goal of but also a major component of reading comprehension. What is reading comprehension? Can reading and writing be taught simultaneously? Does content or aca- demic literacy differ from “other” reading and writing? If so, how is it learned?

The final section of the chapter synthesizes the different perspectives we’ve used to look at ELL literacy within the communicative approach to teaching (Chapter 4). Recognizing that there is no one method that works for all learners (or for all teachers), we conclude the chap- ter with guidelines and principles that characterize effective methods for teaching reading to ELLs.

6.1 Why Reading Matters An excellent predictor of academic success for all children is reading ability. It’s a common sense claim, but it also happens to be one supported by research. Table 6.1 summarizes some of the more significant findings of the past two decades. Although all of the studies conclude that the level of reading ability (by third grade) is a strong predictor of later academic suc- cess, another finding is somewhat more surprising. Specifically, three studies all showed that an even better predictor is math ability in kindergarten. This finding does not mean that we should abandon reading to children or that reading is not important. Rather, they were uni- fied in their results and their conclusions: Kindergarten math ability is a predictor of third grade reading ability, and it is this ability that leads to further engagement in reading, which in turn improves comprehension.

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Section 6.1 Why Reading Matters

Table 6.1: Selected research findings on the importance of early reading ability

Researchers Studied . . . And concluded that . . .

Cunningham & Stanovich (1997)

First graders followed up as 11th graders

• Early exposure to print and comprehension ability both predict the level of reading engagement in 11th grade (p. 941);

• Third grade is pivotal year. Children who lag behind in first grade but catch up by third or fifth are likely to be engaged readers in 11th grade (p. 942);

• Early success at reading acquisition is one of the keys that unlocks a lifetime of reading habits; and

• “The subsequent exercise of this habit serves to further develop reading comprehension ability . . .” (p. 943).

Hernandez (2012) 4,000 children from first grade through age 19

• Children who do not read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma than proficient readers (p. 4);

• For the worst readers, those who could not master even the basic skills by third grade, the dropout rate is nearly six times greater (p. 4);

• Children with the lowest reading scores account for one-third of students, but for more than three-fifths (63%) of all children who do not graduate from high school (p. 6);

• About 33% of Hispanic students who did not achieve third grade proficiency failed to graduate on time, a rate higher than for white students with poor reading skills; but

• The ethnic gap disappears when Hispanic children do read at grade level by third grade and were not living in poverty (p. 5).

Duncan et al. (2007) Data from 35,000 children in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom

• The strongest predictors of later achievement are school-entry math, reading, and attention skills (p. 1,428); and

• Early math skills had the greatest predictive power, not only of later achievement in math, but also of later achievement in reading.

Romano et al. (2010) Canadian data on 1,500 school children

• Kindergarten math skills are best predictor of reading ability in third grade (p. 995); and

• Kindergarten literacy also predicted later academic achievement.

Hooper et al. (2010) African-American and white children in the United States

• Kindergarten math skills are the best predictor of later academic achievement in both groups; and

• There are indications that early expressive language skills are important to later achievement in both reading and math (p. 1,018).

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Section 6.1 Why Reading Matters

The reason that reading is so crucial to academic achievement goes beyond the obvious fact that content learning requires reading at a high level of competence. There are long- term cognitive consequences of learning to read, and to reading, and they are significant. At the early stages of learning to read, a great deal of cognitive activity goes into decoding as readers try to figure out how the marks on the page relate to the language they know. As they become more proficient at decoding, the process becomes automated, and when this happens readers have more cognitive resources to devote to “ . . . more general language skills, such as vocabulary, background knowledge, familiarity with complex syntactic struc- tures, etc.” (Cunningham & Stanovich, 2001, p. 138). The faster the process becomes auto- mated, the better, because children who struggle with decoding and word identification are exposed to less text than skilled readers, and they often find the materials too difficult for them. Their deficiencies in decoding skills, lack of reading practice, and materials that are too difficult significantly impact their ability to develop the automaticity they need to develop the higher order cognitive skills. In contrast, skilled readers acquire decoding skills very quickly, and with these “running on automatic” they can devote attention and cognitive resources to extracting meaning, increasing vocabulary, and acquiring content knowledge. It is a spiral, either upward or downward.

Because ELLs face the dual challenge of acquiring language and content area knowledge, often to catch up to their grade level, it is especially important for them to learn to read quickly and well. It is important that they learn the lower-order skills (decoding and word identification) so that they can move onto the higher order skills as soon as possible. To learn content, they need to be able to:

• understand sentence structure, • have a large vocabulary on which to draw, • understand how different kinds of writing (e.g., narrative, factual, biographical) are

structured, • comprehend ideas, • follow an argument, • understand the writer’s purpose for the text, • detect implications of the material, and • integrate what they read into their prior knowledge of the subject.

English language learners will not acquire all these skills by being left alone in the back of a classroom to figure things out or by being handed a textbook and a dictionary. The develop- ment of reading skills must hold a prominent place in instructional plans for ELLs from the beginning. The reason is simple: Academic success depends on it. Once an ELL learns to read, she can read to learn. What is needed is targeted instruction. The remainder of this chap- ter explores what teachers need to know about the reading process and how to build on a learner’s prior knowledge, about content-area reading, and about how reading instruction is implemented within a communicative approach to teaching.

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Section 6.2 What Is Involved in Learning to Read?

6.2 What Is Involved in Learning to Read? Understanding the characteristics of proficient readers is helpful for understanding the process of reading but does not constitute a road map for teaching reading (Chapter 2). Kenneth Goodman’s definition of reading helps us to understand why. Goodman, one of the preeminent researchers to study the reading process in the last several decades, defined reading as “a psycholinguistic guessing game” involving “an interaction between thought and language.”

Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive clues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time. (1976, p. 2)

Native speakers have more “clues”—their linguistic- and content knowledge—on which to base their guesses. And yet, ELLs also bring something to the task, raising the question we will address shortly: What transfers? Before attempting to answer that, however, it will be useful to consider in a little more depth what is available to transfer. In other words, what does the reading process require of the reader?

In recent decades, researchers have made progress toward understanding the cognitive pro- cesses involved in learning to read, and while the neurological and psychological bases are not yet fully understood, there appears to be agreement that there are certain necessary pro- cesses required. We know, for example, that reading begins with decoding and word identifi- cation, but also has to involve comprehension.

Decoding Humans have been speaking for tens of thousands of years. During this time, genetic changes have favored the brain’s ability to acquire and process spoken language, even setting aside specialized areas of the brain to accomplish these tasks . . . . Speaking is a normal, genetically hardwired capability; reading is not. In fact, reading is probably the most difficult task we ask the young brain to undertake. (Sousa, 2011, Ch. 4)

From birth, and possibly before, infants can distinguish speech from other sounds. Shortly after birth, they begin to comprehend that those sounds have meaning corresponding to some real-world object or event. This is the beginning of phonological awareness and it happens naturally in all hearing infants no matter what language is spoken around them. The second phase of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness, which is the under- standing that words are made up of individual sounds and that these sounds can be reor- ganized or manipulated to form new words. As soon as infants realize that the family feline is a cat, which differs from the thing that keeps their heads warm, and that neither is the

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Section 6.2 What Is Involved in Learning to Read?

same as a cup, bowl, banana, and so on, they have begun to be aware of phonemes. The ability to isolate one sound from others in a word is another aspect of phonemic aware- ness. Early evidence of this awareness is found in children’s rhyming. Notice that so far no print is involved. ELLs with prior exposure to reading in an alphabetic language will usually have acquired both aspects of phonological awareness, and all learners will have acquired the first phase—that speech is made up of individual sounds—long before they reach school age.

The next step in learning to read is to figure out the relationship that exists between sounds and what initially appear to be squiggles on the page. Phoneme-grapheme awareness, commonly referred to as sound-symbol correspondence, is a necessary step for learning any alphabetic language. It is also used by very young Chinese children learning to read pinyin before moving on to characters. To get some idea of how difficult the task can be for young children, consider the following string of symbols:

The cat wore his hat in the heat.

Each symbol corresponds to a sound (yes, in English!). But unless you can read Wingdings, you won’t know that the sentence is represented in standard orthography, or the conven- tional spelling system, as

The cat wore his hat in the heat.

For a child encountering print for the first time, the two “sentences” are equally meaning- less, so the first task is to figure out what the squiggles mean. Those of us who already know how to read might approach the Wingdings task differently than beginners. In all likelihood we would look for patterns or repeated symbols, a or at, for example. This would be essentially a phonics approach, but it is not the only one. We could also approach the problem from a whole word recognition perspective, looking at larger chunks: the which appears twice, or cat and hat which have very similar features. However, with both approaches, without some context we have little chance of cracking the code. Once someone utters the sentence aloud, however, we can figure it out pretty quickly using either method.

It is in the sound-symbol correspondence task that different processes may be involved, depending on the language. As we saw in Chapter 2, not all languages have alphabetic writ- ing systems, and when children learn to read logographic languages, there is no sound- symbol correspondence to learn. Rather, they have to learn a different character or symbol for each word or morpheme. Chinese children normally do learn an alphabetic system initially ( pinyin), but they have to learn to recognize characters in order to become proficient readers, and processing characters is cognitively different from processing alphabet-based text. The difference is schematically shown in Figure 6.1 and Figure 6.2.

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Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness

Sound to Symbol Correspondence (Phonemes to Graphemes)

Sound to Symbol (pinyin) used in initial instruction only

/mâo/≠/bâo/≠/dôu/

/mâo/= =mâo

/kæt/= /mâo/=

/kæt/= =cat /hæt/= /hit/=

/kæt/≠/hæt/≠/hit/

=heat=hat

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness

Sound to Symbol Correspondence (Phonemes to Graphemes)

Sound to Symbol (pinyin) used in initial instruction only

/mâo/≠/bâo/≠/dôu/

/mâo/= =mâo

/kæt/= /mâo/=

/kæt/= =cat /hæt/= /hit/=

/kæt/≠/hæt/≠/hit/

=heat=hat

Section 6.2 What Is Involved in Learning to Read?

Figure 6.1: Learning to read: The beginning

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness

Sound to Symbol Correspondence (Phonemes to Graphemes)

Sound to Symbol (pinyin) used in initial instruction only

/mâo/≠/bâo/≠/dôu/

/mâo/= =mâo

/kæt/= /mâo/=

/kæt/= =cat /hæt/= /hit/=

/kæt/≠/hæt/≠/hit/

=heat=hat

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness

Sound to Symbol Correspondence (Phonemes to Graphemes)

Sound to Symbol (pinyin) used in initial instruction only

/mâo/≠/bâo/≠/dôu/

/mâo/= =mâo

/kæt/= /mâo/=

/kæt/= =cat /hæt/= /hit/=

/kæt/≠/hæt/≠/hit/

=heat=hat

Figure 6.2: Learning to read: Chinese

Regardless of an individual’s native language, reading requires that the brain match symbols with sounds. To be successful, this process requires the cooperation of three neural systems, working together to decode the sound-to-symbol relationships peculiar to the language. This is not an easy skill to develop and does not occur for most people without direct instruction (Sousa, 2011, Ch. 4).

The neural systems involved are the visual processing center, the auditory processing center, and the executive system. This is how it is thought to work:

• Continuing with the examples in Figures 6.1 and 6.2, the visual processing center records the word cat and then works with the auditory processing system (Broca’s area of the brain), and the two systems together analyze the phonemes that com- prise the word.

• If the combination of phonemes exists in the mind’s lexicon (mental diction- ary), the information is moved to the executive system in the frontal lobe, which consolidates the information from the two areas as a representation of the family pet with whiskers and a long tail.

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Section 6.2 What Is Involved in Learning to Read?

• Logographic writing systems require that the brain also activate an area of the right hemisphere associated with graphical or pictorial representations.

Taken together, these processes constitute decoding. Keep in mind that this process is only the beginning of the reading process. The brain also has to learn how to speed up or auto- mate the recognition process so that it becomes less laborious. And the next time the reader encounters the word, it is recognized without having to go through being fully processed in each area of the brain.

A Teacher’s Story: The Codebreaker

I asked to meet with Mai’s parents to discuss Mai’s lack of progress in literacy. They came, bring- ing with them one of Mai’s teenaged cousins to act as interpreter because their English was very basic. I learned that before coming to the United States, Mai’s education had been sporadic at best. The family had spent time in three different overseas camps en route to the United States. I also learned that although her parents were themselves literate, educated people, they had not taught Mai to read in Vietnamese because they were convinced that it would interfere with her ability to learn English. The interpreter also said that although there had been English classes in some of the camps, the instructors concentrated on basic spoken English.

After that meeting, I decided that Mai needed special assistance if she were ever to catch up with others in her class, and so I consulted a district reading specialist. She was overwhelmed with requests, but she sent me an intern, Casey, who worked with Mai for 40 minutes a day. I had assumed that Casey would use simplified materials, but she said that no, she would use the same materials I used in the class. One day a few weeks later, Mai held up her hand in class, volunteering to read a passage aloud from our social studies lesson. She read it almost perfectly, and I was amazed. I was even more amazed when she couldn’t answer a simple ques- tion about what she’d read. I asked her to read it again, silently, and then I asked her the same question, and again she couldn’t answer. After a few more similar incidents, I understood: Mai had mastered sound-symbol correspondence and could decode very effectively. But her com- prehension was almost entirely lacking.

Ellen’s experience with Mai in A Teacher’s Story: The Codebreaker reminds us of an obvi- ous but important fact about reading: All reading is about comprehension. Yes, decoding is important, but it is not safe to assume that because an ELL has a good command of spoken English and is able to identify and pronounce written words, that comprehension follows. In Mai’s case it had not, and it is a mistake to assume that what appears to be a neces- sary condition for reading—basic sound-symbol correspondence—is a sufficient one for reading comprehension. In fact, we know that it is not a necessary condition. Nonhearing people learn to read; proficient hearing readers understand the meanings of words they cannot pronounce; people learn to read a foreign language without knowing how to speak it or how it sounds. Nevertheless, in normal, hearing children, the easiest path to reading begins with understanding the relationship between the language they see in print and the language they hear and speak.

Mai’s story also illustrates the relationship between prior educational experience and suc- cess in academic language learning. Because her previous schooling was only sporadic, Mai likely did not have the background knowledge to make sense of the social studies

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Section 6.2 What Is Involved in Learning to Read?

text she was reading. Proficiency in reading means that the reader can understand indi- vidual sentences and how they “fit together” in the overall structure of a piece of writing. It means that the reader can comprehend the purpose of the text and the ideas presented as well as follow the argument and understand implications. Proficiency in reading means that a reader who understands the meanings of some of the words in a text can sometimes figure out the meanings of unfamiliar words from the context provided by the known words. Perhaps most importantly, proficiency means that a reader can distinguish what is important and what is not related to the task at hand—the writer’s purpose and the reader’s purpose. In other words, reading proficiency means that a reader is able to focus on those elements that carry meaning and ignore those that do not. Consider the following pair of sentences:

He had two reasons to move to Oregon. His two reasons to move to Oregon had just evaporated.

The phrase two reasons has a different level of significance in the two contexts. In the first, the phrase signals the reader that what is coming next is very likely the identification and perhaps some explanation of the two reasons. The second sentence also demands that the reader pay attention to what comes next, but in this case, what the proficient reader expects to see is what happened, what “evaporated.” The second sentence also illustrates how a proficient reader needs to be able to work out the meaning of a familiar word used in an unfamiliar context. Learning a new meaning for a familiar word is the same as learn- ing a new word. Proficient readers increase their vocabularies by reading, which in turn makes them better readers, which in turn makes it easier for them to learn academic content.

Word Recognition Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have been able to see which parts of the brain are the most active at any particular point in time. In addition to verifying that there are three areas in the left side of the brain that are activated during read- ing, research has revealed that the left hemisphere of the reader’s brain has a dedicated area with the unique highly specialized function of recognizing whole written words. This “brain dictionary” is not something that the species evolved, but is learned in each individual (Glezer et al., 2009). If each word that a reader learns is associated with its own set of neurons, then it is possible that:

• the brain is organized in much the same way for reading alphabetic and logographic languages;

• in teaching children pinyin, the Chinese have made it easier for children to learn to read an alphabetic writing system later; and

• the initial learning processes might be even more similar than they appear in Figures 6.1 and 6.2.

Understanding what is involved in decoding and word identification, however useful, does not immediately lead us to an understanding of how comprehension develops, because com- prehension involves more than decoding, identifying and then matching the printed word to a word in the mental dictionary. Without comprehension, there is little point to any of the prior processing.

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Section 6.2 What Is Involved in Learning to Read?

Comprehension At the heart of the matter is the question, How does the reader interact with the text to extract the writer’s intended meaning?

In order to read with clear comprehension, students also need to under- stand the words they read, construct an interpretive cognitive model of what the author is trying to say, and have the requisite background knowledge to categorize, interpret, and remember what an author is saying in relation to established facts or a field of understanding (such as a content-area subject). (Lawrence et al., 2011)

We saw in an earlier example that it is possible to “read” a passage—decoding, identifying, and correctly pronouncing most if not all words—and still have little understanding of the meaning. This is especially true for ELLs, as research has shown.

. . . by and large for language-minority children, word-level components of lit- eracy (e.g., decoding, spelling) either are or can be (with appropriate instruc- tion) at levels equal to those of their monolingual peers. However, this is not the case for text-level skills, like reading comprehension, which rarely approach the levels achieved by their monolingual peers. (August & Wan, 2007)

In the text that follows, we can see that comprehension involves much more than knowing the meanings of words.

Messy ninth end for Sweden

A measurement in Canada’s favour in the eighth end and a trio of misses by Sweden in the ninth sealed the win for Jones. In that ninth end, Sweden’s Maria Wennerstroem had her final rock pick up debris, opening up a pair of takeouts by Lawes. That, coupled with a miss by Christina Betrup, left Canada lying three with skip stones remaining. An in-turn raise by Prytz only gave Sweden second shot rock before Jones’s last shot of the end drew onto the button. Prytz’s final chance to salvage a point evaporated when her attempt to knock Canada off the button nicked her own stone in the four-foot, giving Canada a steal of two and a three-point lead heading into the final end. “Of course it’s disappointing,” Sigfridsson said. “I know we won silver, but it really just feels like we lost gold.” Canada simply ran the Swedes out of rocks in the final end, and the Canadian celebration was on. (Piercy, 2014)

How much of this did you understand? In terms of the reading process just described, how far did you get? In all likelihood, every reader knows the meaning of every word with the excep- tion of proper nouns. Some will even know that the topic is something that happened in the sport of curling. A few might understand exactly what actions were described. For many read- ers, however, the text is almost incomprehensible because we have no background knowl- edge, no experiential context upon which to reconstruct the writer’s meaning.

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Reader

Text

Comprehension

Sociocultural Context

Section 6.2 What Is Involved in Learning to Read?

Reading comprehension is what hap- pens at the intersection of reader and text, within a sociocultural context, as represented in Figure 6.3. It is an active process of extraction and recon- struction of meaning. Understanding what comprehension entails means understanding first that reading is an activity that takes place when a reader encounters text, but that the process is not static—it changes as a reader gains practice and becomes more proficient and also learns to approach the read- ing of different texts in different ways.

The Reader The reader brings to the activity a wide range of capacities and abilities, knowl- edge, and experience, as well as moti- vation. Cognitive capacities include attention, memory, linguistic, and ana- lytical ability. Knowledge includes lin- guistic knowledge such as vocabulary, morphology, and sentence structure, as well as content knowledge, knowledge of how texts are structured, and some degree of awareness about what has worked in the past as a comprehension strategy. Motivation refers to the purpose for reading. If it is for pleasure, the reader will usually approach the task differently than when reading for information or to learn a skill. Whether the purpose is externally imposed or a choice made by the reader can also impact motivation and thus comprehension. High stress situations such as taking a test or learning how to give CPR to a co-worker in distress may affect how well the reader comprehends and how quickly. The reader’s motivation can also be influenced by her degree of reading fluency. A fluent reader will experience less stress and have developed more effective comprehension strategies than a nonfluent reader. All the capacities, knowledge, and abilities that a reader brings to the task of reading change with experience and with instruction.

The Text Text can be thought of in terms of purpose, format, and delivery mode. Writers have many purposes for creating text—letters, reports, opinion pieces, advertising copy—to tell stories that are real, as in biography, or imagined, as in fiction. The list goes on. Writers also have a variety of formats in which to present their writing—magazines, newspapers, books, novel- las, journals, billboards, and so on—and they have a choice whether to use paper or electronic means or, as in the case of this text, both. Text can be difficult or easy depending both on inherent factors such as sentence length and the use of specialized or uncommon vocabulary and on what the reader brings to the task. The mode may also interact with the reader’s moti- vation—reading articles discovered in an internet search may cause the reader to read more quickly, looking for key information, while articles that the reader has taken the time to find in the library and copy to take home may demand more time and attention.

Reader

Text

Comprehension

Sociocultural Context

Figure 6.3: Interactions involved in comprehension

Reading comprehension, the intersection of reader and text, occurs within a sociocultural context.

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Section 6.3 Transfer of Existing Skills

Sociocultural Context Cultural factors influence learners in many different ways (Chapter 2). An important aspect of sociocultural context for reading comprehension is instruction, because how ELLs learn to read is shaped, to a large degree, by what happens in the classroom.

When we think about the context of learning to read, we think mostly of class- rooms. Of course, children bring to their classrooms vastly varying capacities and understandings about reading, which are in turn influenced, or in some cases determined, by their experiences in their homes and neighborhoods. Further, classrooms and schools themselves reflect the neighborhood context and the economic disparities of the larger society. (Snow, 2003, p. 16)

For ELLs, the most significant cultural factors are the attitudes of home and of community to reading (Is it strictly a utilitarian activity or is it valued for other purposes?); the value the community places on formal education (Is it strictly job preparation or a place for learning that has value in itself ?); and school or culture shock (Is the classroom too far outside the ELL’s experience for comfort?).

Extracting and reconstructing meaning from the written word, reading comprehension is thus a highly complex cognitive process influenced by many factors both internal and external to the learner. The question for teachers is how do we take advantage of the reading skills that ELLs bring to the task of learning to read in English? We explore this topic in the next section.

6.3 Transfer of Existing Skills Language-minority students are not blank slates. They enter classrooms with varying degrees of oral proficiency and literacy in their first language. There is clear evidence that tapping into first-language literacy can confer advantages to English-language learners. (August & Shanahan, 2006, p. 5)

Finding the best ways to use the knowledge that ELLs bring to the reading process helps teachers to guide ELLs along the path toward literacy. Each learner brings different experi- ences, but all can serve as the foundation on which teachers can support learning by scaffold- ing learning activities.

Prior Knowledge and Experience Language proficiency, whether in the first language or English or both, is the foundation upon which the ELL teacher helps ELLs build their English literacy skills. The stronger the profi- ciency, the better. Similarly, the greater a learner’s content-area knowledge, the better chance the learner will have for developing both content-area and language proficiency. Unfortunately, ELLs arrive at school with varying levels of first language reading ability, and they are more likely than their English-speaking peers to lack the background knowledge needed for under- standing subject-area texts (Irujo, 2007). Many ELLs arrive at school with some degree of read- ing ability, even if only print awareness. If their first language is an alphabetic one, they may have knowledge or at least awareness of sound-symbol correspondence. Teachers can build upon that experience. If ELLs have learned to read a non-alphabetic language such as Chinese

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Section 6.3 Transfer of Existing Skills

Jack Hollingsworth/Digital Vision/Thinkstock

This young boy is learning that words can be represented by marks on paper and that they tell stories. By the time he gets to school, he may even have learned something about sound- symbol correspondence. This early start will be very important when he begins to read in English at school.

or Japanese, teachers will have to teach sound-symbol correspondence but they will be able to take advantage of other cognitive skills that readers use to extract meaning from text. Depending on their level of oral language development, ELLs may need work on oral language skills first, but children such as Mai or others in second grade or above can benefit from simultaneous work on literacy and oral language. Even kindergarten and first grade ELLs can benefit from seeing how familiar words are represented in print.

Whatever language and literacy abilities learners bring to the classroom, they will need instructional support to build further skills. One widely used approach for supporting learners is instructional scaffolding.

Building Reading Skills with Scaffolding Instructional scaffolding refers to the ways in which an appropriate level of support is provided for learners to help move them toward independence. First introduced in the mid- 20th century, scaffolding is a well-established practice in education. Jerome Bruner used the term to describe how parents help young children to acquire language by providing informal teaching and other kinds of support needed for learning (Bruner, 1966; Wood et al., 1976). The purpose of scaffolding is to help learners become independent by figuring things out for themselves, and can be thought of as the helpful interactions between teacher and learner that help the learner move beyond the current level of independence to the next stage. Then the scaffolding is taken away and recreated for the next stage of teaching and learning. There are a number of ways in which teachers can use ELLs’ prior knowledge of reading as a founda- tion on which to scaffold the learning that eventually leads to independence in reading.

Use Prior Content Knowledge We have seen the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension. Estab- lishing what they know about the topic of the text they are about to read and then expanding on that knowledge helps them to know what to expect and make better predictions as they read. Making notes that everyone can see, especially if they are organized in a way that paral- lels the structure of the text, not only helps connect oral and written language, but helps to build necessary vocabulary.

Another way to take advantage of prior knowledge is to select materials that are culturally famil- iar to ELLs. Using multicultural materials can in fact have many benefits not only for ELLs, but for all students in the class. The most obvious benefit is that good literature from or about other cultures helps to build a true community in the classroom. Using diverse literature also helps expand learners’ perspectives and build understanding and respect for diversity by reducing ethnocentrism. Moreover, through “. . . reading, hearing, and using culturally diverse materials,

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Section 6.3 Transfer of Existing Skills

young people learn that beneath surface differences of color, culture, or ethnicity, all people experience universal feelings of love, sadness, self-worth, justice, and kindness (Dowd, 1992, p. 220). For ELLs, in particular, reading stories and books about their own culture can be very important to minority students’ sense of self-worth and in helping them make important con- nections between the two cultures and languages in which they live. For all learners, good qual- ity literature from and about people of other cultures gives them insight into the universality of the human condition and the diversity that exists in how people in different cultures cope with issues and problems that touch most people’s lives. Choosing the right literature, whether as a text for use in the curriculum or as a supplemental text in a classroom or school library, requires some care. Selecting Multicultural Texts elaborates on this idea.

Selecting Multicultural Texts Finding out about and then finding materials that relate to learners’ backgrounds allows teachers to engage them in literacy experiences that relate to their background knowledge, thereby building on this knowledge. Before looking for multicultural texts, it is helpful to build a classroom culture of interest in and respect for diversity:

1. Become a student of the different cultures represented in your classroom. 2. Engage students in teaching you and others about their culture, but do not expect them

to be the sole source of information about an entire culture. Also, do not put students in uncomfortable positions—ask them beforehand if they are willing to share experiences or information with the class.

3. Build bridges between topics introduced in class and the students’ experiences.

Use stories and folktales from other cultures to encourage students to make the connections between what they are reading and their own experiences. Choosing these texts can be a chal- lenge, but over time teachers learn which ones stimulate interest and which ones do not. In general, multicultural literature should have the following characteristics:

1. It avoids negative attitudes or representations. The material should acknowledge the diversity of experiences within a particular cultural group and not overgeneralize or stereotype.

2. The author of the story or book is from the culture being depicted. 3. The material related is historically accurate. 4. It inspires, amuses, or takes on themes important to learners with well-crafted prose

and good storytelling. 5. If the book is written in English, it includes words and phrases used in the culture being

depicted. 6. The material is nonjudgmental and does not set different cultures in opposition to one

another. 7. The values of the culture depicted are accurately reflected.

Source: Edward, n.d.

Introduce Unfamiliar Vocabulary While eliciting and expanding on what ELLs know about the topic, teachers have an oppor- tunity to see what vocabulary must be introduced to make the text comprehensible. This is a good time to introduce new words, because there is a built-in context and learners will be able to hear the pronunciation before they encounter the words in print.

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Section 6.3 Transfer of Existing Skills

Use Mixed-Ability Grouping Combining learners with stronger language skills with less proficient learners for certain activities can benefit both groups. Learners with weaker skills may be more receptive to peer assistance because they are closer in communicative language ability. If they speak the same first language, the more pro- ficient learner may assist with translation if needed. The more proficient learners may more accurately gauge the language abilities and gaps in knowledge than the teachers. Both groups are engaged in a com- mon activity, but they will require different kinds of support. The teacher’s interaction with the more pro- ficient learners provides one level of scaffolding, and the proficient learners in turn provide a more acces- sible level of scaffolding for the less proficient.

Use Visual Scaffolding Teachers like to talk! But ELL learners benefit from “dual input,” or having a visual represen- tation as well as oral. Seeing a visual image helps them to understand and remember what the teacher is explaining, thus making the input more comprehensible. It helps them access prior knowledge by finding any connections that exist between what the teacher is explain- ing about the text and what they already know. Whether the visual consists of words, graphs, pictures, outlines, diagrams, drawings, or maps and whether they are presented on paper, chalkboards, smart boards, or computer monitors does not necessarily matter. The medium is not as important as the visual itself.

Motivate! ELL teachers will usually find their classrooms filled with learners of mixed ability and some- times with different language backgrounds. Their interests will also be different. Motivating such a diverse group is a challenge, especially in reading—even majority language children have different tastes and interests in reading matter. As we see in A Teacher’s Story: Read- ing, Mai makes progress and motivation can be critically important. As her teacher, Ellen Rodriguez, learned, allowing learners to have some choice in what they read is one way of motivating them to want become active participants in reading.

Johncopland/iStock/Thinkstock

Do you understand what this sign says? Is it because you can read Arabic? Prior knowledge and context help readers predict the meaning of text.

A Teacher’s Story: Reading

Soon, Mai tired of “reading.” What had been something of a game for her—matching the sounds with the squiggles on the page—was no longer fun, probably because I kept pushing her in activities to improve her comprehension. Maybe I pushed too hard, because Mai became very resistant. She simply didn’t want to read. Then one day, another child was telling a story and I was writing it down and I noticed that Mai was paying close attention. The story the

(continued)

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Section 6.4 Content-area Literacy

Fourth Grade CCSS for Reading Informational Text Key Ideas and Details

• Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

• Determine the main idea of a text and explain how it is supported by key details; summarize the text.

(continued)

JordiDelgado/iStock/Thinkstock

Content-area literacy in math means knowing the vocabulary of the discipline as well as the oral and written language necessary for reading relevant texts, taking notes, and participating in class.

A Teacher’s Story: Reading (continued)

other girl told was about a little girl who got into trouble because she lost one of her mother’s necklaces that she had borrowed without permission. They had combed the path to the play area, the play area itself, the girl’s book bag—everywhere they could think to look but to no avail. The story teller finished her story by saying that her character had gone to bed that night without finding the necklace. That ending did not suit Mai, though. She insisted on knowing what happened next, and so I asked her what she thought happened. With a little encourage- ment, Mai told a fanciful tale about a bird who saw the shiny object and carried it away to a nest. Others in the group added a few suggestions for details, which Mai accepted. I wrote the story down on a flip chart. Mai copied it down into her book, and it became her first real reading experience.

6.4 Content-area Literacy Content-area literacy refers not only to read- ing and writing, although reading is at the cen- ter of academic competency. In fact, “even when teachers base their instruction on content area instruction, they still need strategies for dealing with language itself, as content is not separate from the language through which it is pre- sented” (Schleppegrell & Achugar, 2003, p. 21). To be literate and competent, a learner needs to be able to demonstrate knowledge and under- standing of the subject area in reading, writ- ing, speaking, and listening. In other words, the ELL should be able to read and to demonstrate comprehension of informational text orally and in writing. A good place to start in understand- ing what is required for content-area literacy is to look at the Common Core State Standards for reading informational text. Fourth Grade CCSS for Reading Informational Text outlines the standards that would be expected of fourth graders in Mai’s class.

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Section 6.4 Content-area Literacy

Fourth Grade CCSS for Reading Informational Text (continued)

• Explain events, procedures, ideas, or concepts in a historical, scientific, or technical text, including what happened and why, based on specific information in the text.

Craft and Structure

• Determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words or phrases in a text relevant to a grade-four topic or subject area.

• Describe the overall structure (e.g., chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/ solution) of events, ideas, concepts, or information in a text or part of a text.

• Compare and contrast a firsthand and secondhand account of the same event or topic; describe the differences in focus and the information provided.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

• Interpret information presented visually, orally, or quantitatively (e.g., in charts, graphs, diagrams, timelines, animations, or interactive elements on web pages) and explain how the information contributes to an understanding of the text in which it appears.

• Explain how an author uses reasons and evidence to support particular points in a text. • Integrate information from two texts on the same topic in order to write or speak about

the subject knowledgeably.

Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity

By the end of year, read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, in the grades four through five text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range. Source: Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2015.

Literacy in the content areas depends on ELLs acquiring the following:

• Vocabulary. Understanding the words relevant to the subject area is particularly important for comprehension and thus learning.

• Question formation. Knowing how to construct, orally and in writing, the appropriate question to clarify or gather further information is necessary if ELLs are to advance their understanding of the subject matter.

• The purpose of the text. History books and novels are written for different purposes than business letters and thank-you notes. Understanding what the author is trying to accomplish helps readers establish context for vocabulary as well as understand how the text is organized.

• How text is constructed. Math texts differ from science texts, which in turn differ from social studies texts in language, organization, and style of presentation. It is important to learn the orientation of text construction in order to make sense of the material. A learner who has read or heard only stories may have difficulty in solving word problems, as required, for example, by

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Section 6.5 Implementing a Communicative Approach

the CCSS for fourth grade mathematics. Similarly, story and mathematics text structures differ from the structure of social studies texts in that students need to be able to read the description of an historical process, such as how a bill becomes law, as required by sixth grade Common Core standards.

• Note taking and summarizing. It is important that ELLs learn to summarize, orally and in writing, what they have learned (from listening or reading), not only as a memory device and as a way of learning how to study and learn, but to assist the teacher in identifying gaps in the learner’s understanding. To meet the CCSS standard “Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions,” a sixth grader would need to be proficient at taking notes, and in order to take notes efficiently would have to know how to summarize.

6.5 Implementing a Communicative Approach We have analyzed and discussed reading from a variety of perspectives—its importance for academic success, its relation to learning in the content areas, the process itself, and how to help students to build on their first language literacy skills and background knowledge to become proficient readers in English. How do we now synthesize all this information into a coherent approach to the teaching of reading?

The quick answer is an easy one: An approach that is content-based and consistent with the broader communicative approach discussed in Chapter 5 will work best for all learners. Drill- ing down into the methods and techniques for implementing such an approach is more dif- ficult. No single method works for every teacher or every learner, and there are a great many techniques that can be used within each method.

Some of the methods used for native speakers of English can be adapted for use with sec- ond language learners, but generally, without adaptation they are not effective, as noted by the National Literacy Panel in their report on developing literacy in language minority children:

Instructional approaches found to be successful with native English speakers do not have as positive a learning impact on language-minority students. It is not enough to teach language-minority students reading skills alone. Exten- sive oral English development must be incorporated into successful instruc- tion . . . . Literacy programs that provide instructional support of oral language development in English, aligned with high-quality literacy instruction, are the most successful. (August and Shanahan, 2006, p. 4)

Although August and Shanahan use the term approaches, a closer reading of the report suggests that the focus of the underlying research was on methods and techniques (recall the distinction drawn in Chapter 5). The goals of reading in the elementary school are the same for ELLs as for other children, although there is more emphasis on the simultaneous

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Section 6.5 Implementing a Communicative Approach

building of oral and literacy skills for ELLs, and so a communicative approach can be broadly applied. The actual methods and techniques may be very different or at least adapted.

. . . while approaches that are similar to those used with native-language populations are effective, the research suggests that adjustments to these approaches are needed to have maximum benefit with language-minority students. For example, young Spanish-speaking students learning to read in English might make the best progress when given more work with particular phonemes and combinations of phonemes in English that do not exist in their home language. (August and Shanahan, 2006, p. 3)

There is no one method that works for all ELLs, but research and practice over several decades provide us with guidelines and principles that characterize effective methods for teaching reading to ELLs.

Engage Parents Whenever Possible Parents of minority language children are sometimes overlooked as resources for helping their children to read. This is a mistake.

The majority of the parents of ELLs have come to the United States in order that they and their children will have a “better life.” And many of these fami- lies quickly come to believe that supporting their children’s educational attainment is central to turning this dream into a reality. (Waterman & Harry, 2008, p. 15)

Even though communicative teaching approaches do not rely on use of the home language, we have seen that the more ELLs know about and have experienced literacy in any language gives them a head start on learning to read in English. Reviewing rel- evant research, the National Literacy Panel found that “bridging home-school differ- ences in interaction patterns or styles can enhance students’ engagement, motivation, and participation in classroom instruction” (August & Shanahan, 2006, p. 7). Although the same research could not establish a clear, direct relationship between such bridging and later levels of literacy, the finding is nevertheless significant because it emphasizes the importance of instruc- tion. Teachers are thus wise to work with parents to engage them in their children’s learning.

Digital Vision/Photodisc/Thinkstock

Involving parents in the education of their children is beneficial to the entire family.

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Section 6.5 Implementing a Communicative Approach

Ultimately, the possibilities are promising and compelling. If schools devote time and resources toward developing new ways of understanding and approaching parent-school collaboration, they will generate a strong and cohesive source of support for increased ELL school engagement and success, as well as increased satisfaction for parents and school staff. (Waterman & Harry, 2008, p. 16)

Don’t Forget Oral Language In recent decades we have come to understand that for children, reading skills in any lan- guage are best built on a solid foundation of oral language, and at least one of the studies, summarized in Table 6.1, supports that view. Ellen Rodriguez learned, however, that excel- lent oral language skills do not necessarily mean an easy path to literacy. In A Lesson for the Teacher (Chapter 2), Ellen introduced us to Mai, a Vietnamese girl with good oral language skills who struggled with beginning reading skills. In A Teacher’s Story: Reading, we learned more of Mai’s story.

We learned in Chapter 5 that one of the defining characteristics of communicative approaches is the focus on listening and speaking. In this chapter, we have stressed the importance of reading. Not only is emphasizing oral language consistent with a communicative approach, it is consistent with research findings that for ELLs, “well-developed oral proficiency in Eng- lish is associated with English reading comprehension and writing skills” (August, 2008, p. 10). Teachers should work on listening comprehension, as well as sentence production and increasing vocabulary, not as separate from but as integral to the teaching of reading and writing.

A good rule to follow with all ELLs is “listen first.” Before they even look at the written text, tell them about what they are about to read. If the text is a story, write the names of the char- acters so that they can see them and practice pronouncing them. Tell them that there may be some new words in the text. Write them and elicit what they already know about the words before defining them. Questions such as “What else would you like to know about . . .?” pro- vide opportunities for them to learn and practice question formation for an authentic pur- pose. Then read the text aloud. By the time the text is read aloud, the learners will be better prepared to understand what they are hearing. For beginning readers, they are now ready for the text itself, but it is often useful to let them follow along as it is read aloud one more time. Later, they can listen to recordings or online readings for stories. (See Additional Resources at the end of this chapter for suggested sites.)

Oral language should play a leading role in classroom reading activities. One way is to pro- vide advance organizers that combine oral language with text. Figure 6.4 shows one type of graphic organizer that would support oral and literacy development for kindergarten or first grade ELLs.

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What do we know about dogs?

Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion

growl

bark

wag tail

like to play

like bones

don’t like cats

large small

many sizes brown spots black white

many colors

What do we know about this dog?

harry dirtywhite spots

What do we want to know about this dog?

How did he get dirty?

Will he get clean?

How?

Section 6.5 Implementing a Communicative Approach

What do we know about dogs?

Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion

growl

bark

wag tail

like to play

like bones

don’t like cats

large small

many sizes brown spots black white

many colors

What do we know about this dog?

harry dirtywhite spots

What do we want to know about this dog?

How did he get dirty?

Will he get clean?

How?

Figure 6.4: Preparing for Harry

An advance organizer blends together oral language and text to help learners with classroom reading activities. This particular organizer would work well when combined with a reading of Gene Zion’s book Harry the Dirty Dog.

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Section 6.5 Implementing a Communicative Approach

Table 6.2: Before we read

Who?

What?

Where?

When?

Why?

How?

Older learners will benefit from a more structured language-based story guide (Table 6.2) that prepares them for listening or reading and can be used to elicit written or oral responses. Normally the teacher guides the students to pay attention to the who, what, where, when, and so on, before the lesson, filling in any known information. After the reading, the teacher encourages learners to fill in the remaining blanks on their own before doing comprehen- sion checks to see how they have fared in the task. It is also important that ELLs learn how to define words, first orally and then in writing, as this metalinguistic ability is also associated with good reading comprehension (August & Shanahan, 2006, p. 4). New words are practiced orally, defined, and immediately written down. Definitions should be at the learner’s level of proficiency or just beyond. They may be a one-word synonym for beginners and very young learners but be more grammatically sophisticated for older learners.

One word of caution, however: Although oral language and literacy development are interre- lated, and although activities that encourage both are ideal, reading aloud is not a substitute for authentic oral language use. Oral reading is useful way for a teacher to determine if an ELL has a problem with word identification. But it does not give any good indication of true reading ability because it requires the reader to pay particular attention to pronunciation and other relatively low-level skills and not to the meaning of the text. Nevertheless, most ELLs need help in making the connections between sounds and symbols that are a critical part of word identification.

Most ELLs Need Word Identification Strategies Although one of the pillars of communicative language is to create natural, authentic opportu- nities and contexts for language acquisition—and targeted decoding and word identification activities don’t appear to be “natural”—we have seen that they are essential for learners to acquire as a prerequisite to reading comprehension and content-area literacy. For many ELLs, this process begins with phoneme-grapheme correspondence. It is easy to understand why. Spanish has approximately 35 phonemes, depending on the dialect, with only 38 different ways of spelling those sounds. The correspondence is almost one to one. In contrast, English has 44 different phonemes with an alphabet of 26 letters to represent them, and yet there are more than 1,100 different ways of spelling the sounds (Sousa, 2011, Ch. 4). It is no wonder that ELLs typically require more assistance than majority language students. It is sometimes necessary to target particular problem areas, such as the th, ch, and sh digraphs, for example, or the different pronunciations of ough. But these activities should be done mostly in the context of vocabulary development and the building of background knowledge in pre-reading

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Section 6.5 Implementing a Communicative Approach

activities, in part because there are so many exceptions to phonics “rules” that second lan- guage learners find them less than helpful. Eventually they learn to take advantage of context to figure out that rough and tough are pronounced in one way and through, trough, and ought in others.

Even within a communicative approach, it is perfectly acceptable to target the specific sound- symbol problems and to work with learners to learn the distinctions between similar sounds and what they look like in print, but remember that communicative language teaching is also learner centered. Whenever possible, these activities should not be isolated from but be con- textualized within other language activities. Examples include the vocabulary needed before starting a new text, the questions asked in preparation for or following reading, and stand- alone mini-lessons such as a humorous story about what happens when cheap, chip, sheep, and ship get confused. The point is to practice, not to drill.

Vocabulary Development Learning words, the pronunciation of words, the spelling of words and, of course, the meaning of words is crucial to all English language learning, but it is especially important for learning to read. If readers know the meanings of the nouns and verbs in a sentence, they can often predict the meaning before they know much about sentence structure because they know the real-world relationship between the objects or ideas the words represent. (Lawrence et al., 2011, p. 1)

Reading comprehension, especially in content-area reading, depends to a large extent on word knowledge. For the purposes of teaching reading comprehension, the purpose of teach- ing vocabulary is twofold:

a) To link the words that learners may have heard and used orally with how they are written and used in text, and

b) To expand the learner’s lexicon by introducing new vocabulary.

Therefore, methods that provide ample opportunities for vocabulary development will be more successful when integrated simultaneously into oral and literacy activities rather than in isolation.

Methods that focus on key vocabulary for specific academic texts will provide a useful and meaningful context. Expanding vocabulary isn’t always about introducing new words. Draw- ing learners’ attention to the root of the word and then eliciting or introducing other words with the same root not only expands their inventory of words, but serves as a memory aid. Drawing their attention to the affixes—the morphemes that change one part of speech to another or serve a grammatical function—not only increases the learner’s inventory, but also provide the opportunity for grammatical learning without a grammar lesson.

Methods that extend the vocabulary introduced for one purpose to other uses will expand learners’ ability to understand both oral and written language. Methods that use visuals to support language will improve understanding and retention of word meanings. Increasing the number of words an ELL recognizes, understands, and can use is not the only way, but it is the single best way to improve reading comprehension. Knowing the meanings of key

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Section 6.5 Implementing a Communicative Approach

words allows learners to make better predictions and better guesses in the “psycholinguistic guessing game” that is reading. Effective vocabulary development, then, helps to ensure that learners:

• can correctly identify and spell the word, • are able to use the word, • are able to define the word, using synonyms and sentences, • know other meanings of the same spelling, • can recognize the word in other contexts, and • can use the words in other contexts—in other words, can make it their own.

It is also very helpful to vocabulary growth to introduce antonyms and homonyms. It often helps learners to remember the meaning of a word to know that it is “not X” or “the opposite of Y.” For ELLs, it is also helpful and less confusing to know that words that sound the same can have very different spellings and meanings—wait/weight, ate/eight, be/bee, deer/dear, and so on.

The environment in which all these methods work is necessarily filled with language of all kinds. ELLs need exposure to and practice with oral language for social and multiple aca- demic purposes—they need to learn the language for carrying out routine classroom busi- ness, to learn to listen productively, to read and to write stories, and to practice with the language of math, social studies, science, and all the other content in the curriculum. What they need, in short, is a language-rich environment.

Create a Language-Rich Environment Children learn their first language because they are surrounded by people talking and they are included in the conversation in varying degrees, depending on the culture. The job of the teacher working within a communicative approach is, broadly, the same as that of any teacher—to create an environment that is filled with talk and text about all manner of subjects and in many different formats. We saw in Chapter 5 that the interaction hypothesis stresses the importance of the communicative environment and the opportunities ELLs have to inter- act with native speakers. We saw too that classrooms can be organized in ways that optimize interaction, which helps learners develop oral language skills. We have seen in this chapter that oral language and literacy acquisition are interactive and mutually supportive.

For reading, it is especially important to provide more than the text. In addition to the pre- reading and scaffolding activities described earlier, it is helpful for learners to have access to computers or other means to listen to stories or texts being read while they follow along. It is also helpful to have classroom walls hung with posters and student work; labels on objects, books, reference books (including grade-level appropriate dictionaries); word walls—all kinds of print materials that are changed frequently to reflect what the class is studying or focusing on. Having students tell or retell stories while the teacher or other learners write them down adds another opportunity for reading and writing practice, one with familiar vocabulary. The same principles that kindergarten and elementary teachers use for creating language- and learner-centered classrooms can guide ELL teachers. For example, kindergar- ten teachers often label classroom items so that their students can see how familiar words are written. Beginning ELLs can use those same labels as a memory aid to remember the names of the objects and, simultaneously, start to learn sound-symbol correspondence.

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Summary & Resources

Why I Teach: Katarina Katarina has an undergraduate degree in math and a graduate degree in computing science. After working for three years in the private sector as part of a team that developed and beta tested educational games for middle school–aged children, Katarina quit her job and returned to class to earn her teaching certificate. She now teaches second grade in an urban Florida school. Why? In her own words,

I teach because I believe that the classroom is one of the few places where you know you can make a difference. Sure, it’s frustrating sometimes. Just the other day, I was scrambling to figure out another way to help one of my little fellows who is struggling with reading, which means he’s struggling with a lot of the curriculum. His mother assured me that he could read in Spanish, but if he can, it hasn’t transferred over to English yet. But I asked him to bring me one of his favorite books in Spanish. The next day, he did. I sat with him and the other children in the class and asked him to read it to us. He was hesitant at first, but a page or so in he began to read the story fluently. I would interrupt him from time to time and ask him to tell us in English what he was reading. With a little help from other Spanish-speaking children in the class, he did. As he told me the story, I wrote down what he was saying. Then after school I sat down at my computer and created a book from my notes. I even added a few stock pictures that I found on the web. The next day, that book was our text and Carlos was eager to try. Using the same techniques I had been using with him but with “his book,” he made real progress that day. I used a similar technique, transcribing stories he or other children would tell me and turning them into books. By the end of that year, Carlos was reading at grade level. It’s progress that you can see and it’s why I teach.

Summary & Resources

Summary To become proficient in English, ELLs have to acquire competency in all four language domains—speaking, listening, reading, and writing. For succeeding in school, the core com- petency is reading, not only because content is usually presented in text form and ELLs are assessed on their knowledge with written tests, but learning to read has a cognitive effect on all other aspects of learning. In school, children learn to read so that they can read to learn. If reading is at the core of academic learning, comprehension lies at the core of reading— whatever the purpose for reading—for pleasure, for information, for instruction—it cannot be achieved unless the reader understands or comprehends what the writer created. Decod- ing and word identification skills are prerequisites to comprehension. One of the goals of reading instruction is to help learners reach the stage at which these skills are automatic so that their attention and cognitive resources can be devoted toward extracting meaning and gaining comprehension.

This chapter has examined the reading process and how teachers can make use of ELLs’ existing knowledge and skills, both linguistic and content-related, to support their learning, using instructional scaffolding techniques to facilitate reading and thus learning in the con- tent areas. How do we synthesize what we have learned from all these different perspectives on literacy into a coherent framework for teaching? Building on what we learned in Chap- ter 5 about communicative language, we identified five features that guide teaching within a communicative framework. We concluded this chapter by personalizing some of this chap- ter’s major themes through the words of a second grade teacher named Katarina.

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Summary & Resources

Key Ideas

1. The best predictor of academic achievement is an ELL’s reading ability at the end of third grade. The lack of reading skills is the major language barrier to ELLs achieving academic success.

2. Learning to read fluently has long-term cognitive consequences: The faster the read- ing process becomes automated, the more cognitive resources a learner has avail- able for other learning.

3. A major goal of reading instruction, therefore, is to help learners reach the stage at which their decoding and word identification are automated.

4. The ability to read in any language is an asset when learning to read in a new language. 5. Learners with literacy skills in logographic languages may need assistance with sound-

symbol correspondence, even if they are proficient readers in their own language. 6. Comprehension is the goal of reading, and it involves a reader interacting with the

text to extract meaning. 7. Language proficiency, oral and written in either the first language or English, is the

foundation upon which literacy skills are built. 8. Scaffolding is a kind of instructional support that builds on prior knowledge to help

learners become independent by figuring things out for themselves. 9. Knowledge of content-area vocabulary is a critical component of comprehension,

and teaching lessons that integrate vocabulary into other oral and written language activities are most effective.

10. A language-rich environment is the cornerstone of a communicatively based classroom.

antonym A word opposite in meaning to another.

content-area literacy A learner’s ability to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the subject area in all four language domains: reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

decoding The process of translating a printed word into sound, specifically the appropriate spoken word.

homonyms A group of words that share pronunciation and sometimes spelling but that may have different meanings. Hom- onyms that share the same spelling are also considered homographs, although some homographs, such as invalid (meaning both not valid and a person who is ill), may have different pronunciations.

instructional scaffolding The ways in which an appropriate level of support is provided for learners to help to move them toward independence.

logographic languages Languages in which a character or asymbol represents a word (or morpheme) in print.

metalinguistic ability A person’s aware- ness of language as an object or a thing and the ability to reflect on the process of lan- guage and the use of language.

phoneme-grapheme awareness The relationship that exists between sounds and written symbols.

phonemic awareness The understanding that words are made up of individual sounds and that these sounds can be reorganized or manipulated to form new words.

standard orthography The conventional spelling system.

Key Terms

pip82223_06_c06_135-162.indd 160 6/30/15 11:13 AM

Text

L1 ≠ L2

Reader

L1 = L2

Text

L1 ≠ L2

Reading

Does L1 = L2?

Summary & Resources

Text

L1 ≠ L2

Reader

L1 = L2

Text

L1 ≠ L2

Reading

Does L1 = L2?

Figure 6.5: A definition for reading

Critical Thinking Questions

1. How does the graphic shown in Figure 6.5 define reading? How would you answer the question posed?

2. Assuming that both children have acquired basic literacy in the first language, what differences are likely to exist between a Mandarin speaker and a Spanish speaker in learning to read English?

3. How does the notion of scaffolding relate to Krashen’s input hypothesis (Chapter 5)? 4. Suggest two different ways of providing visual scaffolding for first grade ELLs pre-

paring to read a story commonly read in first grade. (You choose!) 5. Explain the role that advance organizers can play in activating an ELL’s prior

knowledge.

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Vocabulary

The Writer’s Purpose

How Questions

are Formed

Structure of Text

Summarizing and Note

Taking

Summary & Resources

6. Look at the graphic shown in Figure 6.6. Based on what you have read in this chap- ter, who do you think is doing the juggling, the ELL or the teacher? What factors did you take into consideration when answering?

Vocabulary

The Writer’s Purpose

How Questions

are Formed

Structure of Text

Summarizing and Note

Taking

Vocabulary

The Writer’s Purpose

How Questions

are Formed

Structure of Text

Summarizing and Note

Taking

Figure 6.6: Skills for content-area reading

7. In what sense can reading be considered a “psycholinguistic guessing game?” 8. Why is vocabulary development so important to academic achievement?

Additional Resources For an excellent graphic showing how areas of the brain function during word recognition, see http://content.time.com/time/covers/1101030728/brain/brain.swf

Examples and help for creating visual organizers for narrative text can be found at http://schools.dcsdk12.org/education/components/scrapbook/default.php?sectiondetailid =194160&linkid=nav-menu-original-4-19314

For a readable account of dyslexia in “The new science of dyslexia,” Time, see C. Gorman (2003) online at http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2047912,00.html

A good site to find celebrities reading quality children’s stories aloud is http://www.storylineonline.net/

Kristina Robinson discusses the importance of and provides ideas for creating a language friendly classroom at http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/33047/

pip82223_06_c06_135-162.indd 162 6/30/15 11:13 AM

http://content.time.com/time/covers/1101030728/brain/brain.swf

http://schools.dcsdk12.org/education/components/scrapbook/default.php?sectiondetailid=194160&linkid=nav-menu-original-4-19314

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2047912,00.html

http://www.storylineonline.net/

http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/33047/