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Visible Learning & Teaching MLs

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What can the Visible Learning database ( www.visibiblelearningmetax.com) tell us about improving learning outcomes for students who are learning more than one language? With our colleagues John Hattie and Oscar Corrigan, we reviewed the evidence to answer this very question. There are a wide range of influences that have the potential to impact multilingual learners from assessment to grouping to settings.

Overall, the impact of bilingual programs (as they are known in the research database) have an average effect size of .36, which is slightly below the average of all influences on learning. Having said that, it's important to note that efforts to ensure that students develop linguistic skills in more than one language is an accelerator in and of itself. Of course, there is variation in the settings in which multilingual learners are educated. In some cases, multilingual learners are in dual language learning environments in which instruction is provided in more than one language. In other cases, they are in settings that focus on the development of a single language. Regardless of the setting, we noted that there were some conditions that increase the likelihood that multilingual learners will learn more and better.

#1: Climate for Learning.

The climate that is created in the classroom and school has a significant impact on students' learning. The classroom environment either cultivates or inhibits the social, emotional, psychological, and motivational dimensions of learning that are essential for all students to thrive. Students want to feel that they belong, that they are welcomed and valued members of the classroom, and that their experiences are important. As Carter and Biggs (2021) note, "We all hope that students will feel truly 'at home' in their classrooms. We want them to feel valued and accepted by their peers and teachers. We strive to create connections among students that lead to reciprocal relationships." That's a good place to start when it comes to creating the climate for learning that multilingual learners need. As part of this climate, educators can create an environment that includes an ethical imperative-to teach and support others when we learn something. In part, the climate is established by the way teachers group students. In a study of 3748 kindergarten multilingual learners, mathematics achievement was predicted by two factors-the teachers' perceptions of students' math ability and the grouping patterns, with ability grouping or only whole class instruction resulting in poor outcomes for students (Garrett & Hong, 2016).

#2: Challenge as Learning.

Students want learning to be a challenge and they want support to achieve those challenges. They are not interested in boring tasks and busy work. In a survey of 452,329 students, 83 percent of the respondents said that they push themselves to do better academically, and 42 percent said they liked challenging assignments (Quaglia Institute, 2022). Unfortunately, most of the assignments given to students are well below grade level. As noted by TNTP (2018), based on their review of more than twenty thousand assignments, students spent, on average, 133 out of every 180 hours-73 percent of their time-on below-grade-level tasks. This report also noted that in four out of every ten classrooms with a majority of students of color, students never received a single grade-level assignment. In maintaining a challenging learning environment, educators telegraph a message to students that they believe their students will learn at high levels and that there are supports in place to ensure that learning is accomplished. Remember, multilingual learners are doing double the work-that is, learning language and content at the same time (Short & Fitzsimmons, 2007). But the expectations for their learning should not be compromised. Rather, multilingual students should be supported with appropriate scaffolds to accomplish the learning goals. We recognize that it takes time to learn in another language and that challenges are often increased when the learning occurs in another language. However, following an approach that sets high expectations for student learning and then aligns the instruction with those expectations is the best way forward.

#3: Clarity of Learning.

Students want to know what they are learning and how they know that they have learned something.

Research on teacher clarity has existed for decades. It was described by Rosenshine and Furst (1971) as a critical factor in students' learning. When they identified eleven general categories of teacher behavior, they noted that teacher clarity topped the list in terms of impact on students' learning. The components of teacher clarity they identified included these:

The clarity of the presentation is apparent to the students.

The points the teacher makes are clear and easy to understand.

The teacher explains concepts clearly and answers questions intelligently.

The lesson is organized.

We developed three student-facing questions that serve as a beacon for teacher clarity practices (Fisher, Frey, & Hattie, 2016):

What am I learning today?

Why am I learning it?

How will I know that I learned it?

The first question focuses on the learning intention, the second on the relevance, and the third on the ways in which students know what it means to learn something. When students can answer these questions, the likelihood of their learning increases.

As we noted, multilingual learners are doing double work, that is learning language and content simultaneously. As a result, their learning intentions and success criteria must have an explicit focus on language, not just content. For example, in a lesson focused on inequalities in mathematics, teachers may include the following success criteria: I can use less than, equal to, or greater than to compare groups or numbers. In this way, the vocabulary of the lesson is made clear to students. Similarly, in a lesson focused on the digestive system, teachers may include the following success criteria: I can explain to my partner the process digestion, from the first bite through the body. In this case, the language functions to summarize and explain the focus, and students are asked to engage in peer conversations to accomplish the learning goal.

#4: Cohesion in Learning.

There was a time when "learning" was a seen as a black box; educators and researchers were not sure how it operated.

As a profession, we recognized that there were inputs that likely assisted with learning and outputs that allowed us to check to see if learning occurred, but the process of learning itself was unclear.

Fast forward several decades, and we know a lot about learning for multilingual learners. Language is crucial for cognition, and multilingual learners are doubly challenged in terms of how they allocate cognitive resources when learning. As one example, students reading in a second language may find retrieving information from an earlier part of the text more difficult; therefore, they may have lower comprehension (Morishima, 2013). In this case, it isn't a matter of not being able to understand the story, but rather they have reached cognitive overload because they must dedicate increased attention to what they are reading in the moment. Cognitive overload has direct implications for instruction. Breaking the reading into smaller chunks, with opportunities to discuss incrementally, can aid in text comprehension.

There are specific instructional moves that successful teachers make to increase the likelihood that multilingual students learn. A dominant theory in this area is the gradual release of responsibility, which suggests that educators intentionally and purposefully design learning experiences and then move along this trajectory: (1) assuming all the responsibility for learning; (2) sharing responsibility for learning; (3) ensuring that students have increasing levels of cognitive responsibility for their learning (Fisher & Frey, 2021). Multilingual learners benefit from a robust instructional framework that aligns with what the educational sciences tell us about learning. That means we must weave language and linguistic supports into our content instruction.

One example of this is the focus on contrastive grammar during guided instruction, which teaches multilingual learners to notice the grammar of their L1 or home language and then to compare this grammar to that of standard English. The emphasis of this approach is descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Contrastive grammar analysis moves students away from correctness and toward codeswitching. A contrastive grammar analysis approach situates the merit of the language used in home and community.

#5: Checks into Learning.

Assessment is an important aspect of monitoring students' learning and progress. When educators have good assessment information, they can make wise decisions about where to go next with students. There are several tools that teachers can use to collect data, but without careful analysis, the data are not likely to impact students' learning. When classroom assessments are used to design learning experiences rather than to solely to document learning, students benefit.

Assessment for multilingual learners requires attention to the whole child. This multidimensional approach is necessary for a true picture to emerge. It requires balancing large-scale assessments with individualized, informal ones that illuminate strengths and do not simply catalog deficits (Gottlieb, 2021). In other words, teachers should regularly collect evidence from multilingual learners to monitor their progress in both language and content learning. There are a number of tools that teachers can use from writing samples to oral language inventories. The point is that the data are collected, interpreted, and then used to guide instruction.

Conclusion

In reality, these conditions are much more integrated and interdependent than this post allows us to share. We believe each of these is important in its own right and that they influence one another. We also know that together they foster language, literacy, and content learning. If educators are to meet the needs of their multilingual learners, then specific attention to each of these factors is necessary.
References:
Carter, E. W., & Biggs, E. E. (2021). Creating Communities of Belonging for Students with Significant Cognitive Disabilities. University of Minnesota, TIES Center.

Garrett, R., & Hong, G. (2016). Impacts of grouping and time on the math learning of language minority kindergartners. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 38, 222 - 244.

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2021). Better learning through structured teaching: a framework for the gradual release of responsibility (3rd ed.). Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Hattie, J. (2016). Visible learning for literacy, grades K-12: Implementing the practices that work best to accelerate student learning. Corwin.

Gottlieb, M. (2021). Classroom assessment in multiple languages: A handbook for teachers. Corwin.

Morishima, Y. (2013). Allocation of limited cognitive resources during text comprehension in a second language. Discourse Processes, 50(8), 577-597.

Quaglia Institute. (2022). Student voice: A decade of data. Retrieved from https://quagliainstitute.org/uploads/legacy/Student_Voice_Grades_6-12_Decade_of_Data_Report.pdf

Rosenshine, B., & Furst, N. (1971). Research on teacher performance criteria. In B.O. Smith (Ed.), Research in Teacher Education (pp. 37-72). Prentice Hall.

TNTP. (2018). The opportunity myth: What students can show us about how school is letting them down-and how to fix it. Author.

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author: John Hattie, Kateri Thunder, Michelle Shin, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey

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author: Nicole Law and Sonja Hollins-Alexander

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Visible Learning and Teaching Multilingual Learners: 5 Considerations - Corwin Connect

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Explore the latest Visible Learning research and find out which influences have the greatest potential to improve learning for multilingual learners.

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When a child has logged in, there are a range of accessibility features within World Stories, but individuals are not singled out when they use them as these adjustments are presented as 'options'. They are then seen as something everyone in the class can use, not a special adjustment a child's peers may otherwise make fun of.

Thanks to the wonderful support of writers, storytellers, translators, broadcasters and actors, these stories can be read, listened to and downloaded in English and their original language. We are continually working to add new stories, recordings and translations.

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World Stories is an online resource with 175 traditional and original stories from around the world representing the 32 most commonly spoken languages

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How SoR Applies to MLs: Careful Consideration

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How SoR Applies to MLs: Careful Consideration

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One of the hottest topics in education in recent years has been the "science of reading." This term can has been known to cause heated debates among scholars and educators. It has been controversial and at times misunderstood. In this blog, we hope to shed light on what the science of reading is and how it applies to multilingual learners of English.

The science of reading is the body of research on how humans learn to read. Though the term "science of reading" has become popular in recent years, the science on how humans learn to read is not new, is not complete, is not a singular program, and is not solely about phonics. Instead, the science of reading is ongoing, continues to evolve, and includes five big ideas: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Wise educators are keenly aware that combining the science of learning with the science of reading is essential. And when we have multilingual learners of English (MLEs), we cannot ignore the science of second language acquisition. Rather than focusing narrowly on one of these, we have to keep in mind that each of them plays a role and that children are the focal point.

What Do Teachers Need to Know About Teaching Reading (and Writing) to Multilingual Learners of English?

Languages have foundational skills. Some students will join our classrooms having been exposed to formal foundational skills in their first language while other students may not have had such opportunities or have had limited or interrupted opportunities. Once foundational reading skills in a language are learned, there isn't more to learn. Much like a strong foundation underneath a house, strong foundational skills in the first language support second language acquisition and learning.

MLEs come into our schools and classrooms at various points in their lives, some very early, such as in kindergarten or first grade, and others later, such as in eighth or ninth grade. These MLEs will have vastly differing experiences with literacy in their first language that they will bring into their new learning experience. The more we know and understand about the MLEs in our care, the better their outcomes for success will be. For instance, it is helpful to know

how similar their first language is to English,

whether there are sounds in English that are not existent in their first language,

whether the alphabet is the same or different, and

how the is text read and written (directionality).

MLEs come with additional resources! Teaching MLEs to read and write in English while validating their linguistic repertoire is important. The lived experiences, backgrounds, cultures, and languages that MLEs have are assets. If these assets are left ignored in the reading and writing classroom, however, they can become invisible and lost.

What Can Teachers Do?

Be curious about students and their languages; get to know your students deeply. Teachers of MLEs must know as much as they can about their learners. Beyond knowing their English proficiency level, investigate information about the student's literacy in their first language, language similarities and differences, educational experiences, home life, and more.

Encourage and invite all languages into the classroom and school. Even though the mode of instruction might be English, using and honoring all languages opens opportunities for participation and validates students' identities. You do not need to be proficient in each child's language to do this.

Teach foundational skills explicitly and infuse this instruction with cross-linguistic exploration. MLEs are not blank slates. They may have heard, spoken, and even learned to read and write in another language. Pointing out the similarities and differences between English and their other language helps students to make connections with reading, writing, listening, speaking, and learning.

Ensure that MLEs receive dedicated English language development time that differs from foundational skills practice. Oral language development is essential to students who are learning to read in a language they are learning. Dr. Claude Goldenberg discusses this and more about the science of reading and MLEs in this podcast episode.

Read to students regularly and embed opportunities for discussion. Students, especially young learners, learn from hearing their teachers read from literature they are unable to decode. Their listening comprehension is greater than their reading comprehension for many years. Reading to students also helps them find their reading identities and love for reading, and it inspires writers.

Create conditions where students want to be themselves and to think and share ideas freely. Students will feel more at ease and learn more when they can belong just as they are in the classroom. Incorporate routines for partner and group work and participation. Peer-to-peer speaking and listening is essential.

Science of Reading at the Secondary Level: Vocabulary

Perhaps the term "science of reading" is inaccurately named, and the term competencies of reading is more fitting. For secondary MLEs who have acquired word recognition competencies (i.e., phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition), focusing on language comprehension competencies is the next task. Because future articles in our series will touch on background knowledge and language structures, we'll focus this article on the science of reading "big idea" of vocabulary instruction.

The first step of highly effective vocabulary instruction is selecting a small list (seven to eight) of the most unit-essential words that can be used again in other contexts (see Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan). For example, the word scarcity is central to the free verse novel Inside Out and Back Again (an award-winning novel inspired by the author's childhood experience as a refugee) because the scarcity of resources deteriorates the character's quality of life. Because the word scarcity is not bound to one content area or context, it will appear in other situations. Teaching it in the English language arts class can help students if it appears in other subjects, too, such as math, humanities, and the arts.

After identifying this selective group of words, the second step is to create engaging opportunities for students to play with them. This does not mean printing out vocabulary worksheets. Instead, for each word, create various situational prompts where students have to use the vocabulary word to engage with the prompt.

For example, a situation prompt for scarcity might be "What does an athlete not want a scarcity of?" The response is open ended and requires students to understand the concept of scarcity to produce a logical answer. On the next day, the situational prompt might be "What resource do you not want a scarcity of when raising a puppy?" Though it's a different context, students are again engaging with the prompt by using the meaning of the vocabulary word to come up with ideas. By the tenth engagement with scarcity using this approach, students acquire a new vocabulary word in a joyful and playful way.

Literacy is an essential component of academic success. In the end, because MLEs know more than one language, we must consider how this impacts learning to read in a language they are also learning.

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How the Science of Reading Applies to Multilingual Learners of English: Careful Consideration | TESOL | International Association

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One of the hottest topics in education in recent years has been the "science of reading." This term can has been known to cause heated debates among scholars and educators. It has been controversial and at times misunderstood. In this blog, we hope to shed light on what the science of reading is and how it applies to multilingual learners of English.

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Leslie: We have seen anecdotal evidence that state and local education leaders are using the Science of Reading (SoR) to push English-only literacy agendas. Does the research support that the SoR applies only to English?

Ester: There are two pieces to that. One is that there's a lot of research in terms of cognitive sciences and reading in other languages that is similar to what we see in the United States. There is research in Italy, the Netherlands and in other countries with the same idea of understanding how children learn to read in their home language. So it's not an English phenomenon, per se, in terms of what we know about how kids learn to read.

I like to remind people that the processes are similar in the brain. Children [regardless of home language] still need to connect whatever is presented orally to what is on paper. That is the level of commonality that we have. At the same time, there are some language-specific differences in terms of whether you're learning to read in Spanish versus when you're learning to read in Dutch or in English or Arabic. So, there's commonality because of the process of mapping, the oral language and the written word; but also differences due to the nature of the languages themselves.

Secondly, what we are seeing in terms of the Science of Reading is that learning additional languages are not being brought into the conversation, as though learning to read in your home language is the same as learning to read in your second or third language. It's sort of implied that the Science of Reading applies to any child learning in any language; the nuance of learning to read in your first versus additional language gets lost in the conversation. And when English learners specifically are considered, there is a very strong emphasis on what we think happens or would happen for these bilingual learners in English-medium settings.

What isn't being talked about as part of the Science of Reading is how students learn to read in dual language bilingual education program settings, that is what happens in biliteracy development. And because of this omission it may seem like the Science of Reading is not interested in learning bilingually.

I can see how the Science of Reading can easily be turned into an English-only conversation because that's where the focus is in our education system. This is why I think we need to keep emphasizing that it doesn't matter what program the student is in, whether they are in a [dual] language program or in an English-dominant setting, we still need to think about these students as bilingual children.

Leslie: What can we expect to see in terms of the efficacy of SoR policies on ELs' literacy development if practices enacted in the name of Science of Reading do not adequately address pillars that are critically important to ELs like incorporating their home language oral skills and cultural differences into instruction and making sure literacy instruction accounts for ELs' varying English proficiency levels?

Ester: Unfortunately, one thing we already see happening is that more English learners are being referred to special education. This will happen because they will not match where the curriculum or the assessment says they are "supposed" to be. They will be identified as "at risk" or "struggling readers" even though they are simply still in the process of developing proficiency in English as their additional language. Another thing we have seen in practice, is that - in response to this assessment- they will get intervention program after intervention program until that is all their schooling is.

The second thing that will happen is that their curricular experience is going to be extraordinarily narrow. This will not prepare them for state tests which means they will not do well on those tests and then the whole cycle continues. This will only get worse over time.

We are already seeing this happen where kids are being referred to special education and speech pathologists because they don't do the "right" mouth movement. There seems to be a fine line between wanting these students to make a connection from oral language to print and creating a narrow understanding of what is the " right" oral language for this print.

And lastly, I think the other thing you're going to see is a school experience for bilingual children that is stripped from anything that recognizes them for who they are. This disconnect will lead to early dropouts because they will disengage from instruction. We know how important it is for kids to see themselves in the curriculum, to see themselves in being recognized for who they are, and have this sense of connection and belonging in school. It's an important aspect of both psychological well being but also academic achievement. And although there are people who are talking about the need for culturally responsive materials as part of the Science of Reading curriculum, this will not matter if the pedagogy does not put that into practice.

Leslie: Several panelists explained that the Science of Reading is not a one-size-fits-all curriculum or model. How important is it to consider the instructional model used to educate students identified as ELs (i.e. dual language/bilingual or English as a second language) in how Science of Reading is rolled out?

Ester: Yes, it is important but the model is just one dimension. We know that when the goal [of a model/program] is bilingualism and biliteracy, the cognitive sciences play an important role because that's the process that children in those programs are engaged in.

At the curricular level, it's interesting to think about how specialist ELD teachers work with mainstream teachers to provide holistic literacy instruction. So even from that perspective, you need to think about how to bring those pieces together.

The other piece that is important to consider is the need to differentiate for simple things like different proficiency levels among EL students, the different home languages represented among these students in a classroom, and the different literacy experiences that students come with. A scripted, paced, one-size-fits all curriculum approach will not be responsive to this diversity.

When it comes to the current Science of Reading movement, there's a bit of an assumption that you can never have too much of a good thing, like phonics. There is this notion that it is good for everybody at all times, and getting extra doesn't matter. However, I've seen data that shows that it does matter and too much of it can actually take away from children's ability to excel. And I think that needs to be heard.

So, yes, the model is important, but we need to dig deeper there. Differentiation needs to happen in many different ways.

Leslie: During the webinar you focused your remarks on what second language acquisition (SLA) research says about the literacy needs of students identified as ELs. At the same time you stated that what really needs to be added to the conversation is the research-base on bilingual and biliteracy development. Can you elaborate on what that means? And why is the research base on bilingual and biliteracy development important for students identified as ELs when it comes to reading?

Ester: I think you need both. You need to understand how children learn another language.

Today we know that it's important to know how children acquire English as an additional language and consider what we know about them developmentally. We also need to think about what the conditions for success are in the classroom to learn another language. But you can't have that conversation without also paying attention to the other languages and cultural experiences that they come with.

These things may be obvious in dual language contexts where two languages are actually being taught and there is real consideration about how to put those two pieces together in a meaningful way for the child. Many of these dual language programs have an English side and a Spanish side, and the teachers operate within their language. But we know that holistically the child does not keep those two languages separate. So there's a real point of connection where teachers need to know and understand how what is being taught in English is connected to what they're doing in Spanish and vice versa.

In the spirit of accelerating the learning process, rather than repeating content in one language and then the other, teachers really need to work together to think about the commonalities and differences.

So it's about identifying what doesn't need to be repeated and what's really language specific that we need to be paying attention to, and how do we make that a coherent curriculum so that a child is developing these skills in and through both languages.

In English medium settings, on the other hand, we kind of forget that the home/first language is still there. And it's not because the child doesn't use their home language anymore. These students go home and continue to use and develop that language in their community and then they end up bringing that oral language base and literacy experiences to the task of learning English.

This is where understanding student-specific information is key. For example, if a student speaks Japanese at home there might be certain sound patterns in English that may be more challenging or new for this particular student compared to a German speaker. And as a teacher, you need to know that because these differences are very relevant when it comes to phonics lessons.

And that brings us back to differentiation. Teachers cannot assume that all students can distinguish between sounds the same because that skill is influenced by their home language. So even in an English medium setting we cannot forget that this other language is part of who the student is and that it's a resource they will use to figure out what's going on in the classroom.

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Q & A with Ester de Jong on the Bilingual and Biliteracy Dimensions of the Science of Reading

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The nuances of learning to read in more than one language and differentiating service for ELs cannot be left out of the SoR shift.

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Rooted Linguistics: Serving Teachers of Multilingual Learners

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Krofne with Baba is a children's picture book by Valentina Gonzalez and her daughter Juliana Gonzalez. It is a story about a little girl and her grandmother spending the day together making a special Serbian treat, krofne. This book celebrates culture and languages.

The book is printed in colorful paperback and was illustrated by Valentina Gonzalez. In the end, it includes a recipe for Baba's krofne and a glossary of the Serbian words in the book.

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Krofne with Baba is a children's picture book by Valentina Gonzalez and her daughter Juliana Gonzalez. It is a story about a little girl and her grandmother spending the day together making a special Serbian treat, krofne. This book celebrates culture and languages.

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6 ways to level up
with the science of reading

John Luke Bell and Cindy Jiban

Many of us who teach literacy are now shifting our practices to better align to the science of reading. We're using evidence-based practices like systematic and explicit phonics instruction. Now what? It's time to take our implementation of science of reading practices to the next level. Let's consider how we can more fully align to the science around a few key themes that can sometimes be overlooked.

View article

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6 ways to level up with the science of reading

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Implementing the science of reading is ongoing process to shift instructional strategies to evidence-based practices. Two literacy experts from NWEA share six ways literacy educators can continue to build on their progress and take the science of reading to the next level.

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How stories shape our minds | The science of storytelling | BBC Ideas

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Rooted Linguistics: Serving Teachers of Multilingual Learners

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Click the image to download the PDF with live links to each platform.

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Ellevation: ML Program Management Tools for K-12

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This free guided learning toolkit offers a comprehensive program that delves into effective literacy instruction strategies tailored to the unique needs of ELs, offering insights into enhancing reading and writing skills.

Topics include refining literacy instruction techniques, incorporating guided reading approaches, mastering the workshop model, and implementing targeted listening comprehension exercises and assessments. Elevate your teaching skills, foster language development, and create an inclusive learning environment to support the academic success of English learners.

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A Comprehensive Guide to Literacy Instruction for English Learners

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This free guided learning toolkit offers a comprehensive program that delves into effective literacy instruction strategies tailored to the unique needs of ELs, offering insights into enhancing reading and writing skills. Topics include refining literacy instruction techniques, incorporating guided reading approaches, mastering the workshop model, and implementing targeted listening comprehension exercises and assessments.

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Learn Languages - Grammar and Vocabulary

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This website offers free learning lessons in 100 languages from Afrikaans to Zulu from grammar, vocabulary to phrases and quizes. Enjoy learnign with our lessons!

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From Language Magazine

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Moving at the Speed of Light

Literacy is at the heart of the educational enterprise. It is therefore not surprising that researchers, teachers, parents, and policymakers are highly invested in ensuring that all children grow up learning the critical skills of effective communication, orally and through reading and writing.

Most recently, we have heard a lot about the science of reading-a body of research that draws from different cognitive research traditions (including the neurosciences, psychology, linguistics, and educational studies) and aims to understand how children learn to read from a cognitive science perspective. While this research does not address the broader social and cultural context of literacy (including writing and multimodality), understanding what happens cognitively when children read is important for teachers.

Unfortunately, what we have seen nationwide is that the media, parent groups, and policymakers have selectively taken this research and have rapidly turned it into strict state mandates for professional development, curriculum and materials, and teacher preparation requirements. These efforts, better referred to as the science of reading movement, unfortunately misrepresent much of what the reading research indicates and rarely do justice to the nuances and complexities that are integral to language and literacy teaching and learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020).

In fact, the public conversation about teaching reading and the perceived reading crisis is too frequently reduced to how best to teach phonemic awareness and phonics. This crisis perspective commonly has resulted in a narrowed emphasis in classroom practice, relegating learners who are experiencing reading difficulties to reductionist methods of teaching reading.

In this article, we want to expand the current conversation about reading-and particularly the conversation driven by the science of reading movement-to be explicitly inclusive of one of the fastest-growing populations in the US-that is, children who grow up knowing a language other than English at home, or multilingual learners (MLs).

Shining Light on Multilingual Learners

Public school classrooms in the US reflect significant levels of linguistic diversity. Across the country, more than five million students (10.4%) are classified as English learners (ELs). In twelve states, at least one out of every ten students is an EL/ML, and in an additional 22 states ELs/MLs comprise 6-10% of total enrollment (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2022). Many school districts have populations of ELs/MLs that far exceed the national average. For example, learners in one rural Midwestern school district speak 45 different home languages and account for 46% of the student population.

The Reading League recognizes the need for a "more intentional focus on ensuring the right of literacy for our nation's multilingual citizens and students" (Kurto, 2023).

It further indicates that practices that prevent students from developing skilled literacy are at the heart of the urgency in the science of reading movement. This is certainly true and would call for a review of scientific research that has been conducted specifically with EL-designated students.

The lack of attention to MLs unfortunately and dangerously leads to an assumption of universality that is not supported by research. Both research on second-language literacy development (August and Shanahan, 2006; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM], 2017) and other research (e.g., Guilamo, 2021) clearly point to fundamental differences between monolingual children learning to read in their native languages and bilingual children learning to read in their second languages.

Moreover, a recent systematic review of the science of reading research identified two glaring gaps: research on cross-linguistic connections and research on reading comprehension (Kittle et al., in press; cited in Budde, 2023).

Listening to and Amplifying ML Teacher Voices

Follow any conversation from the many teacher groups that have popped up on social media and you will hear themes in the comments of educators attempting to apply the science of reading within the contextualized realities of their unique spaces.
Although many teachers appreciate being informed about the existing research base on how the brain learns to read, they are left to grapple with disjuncts between instructional practices promoted, cautioned, and/or discouraged by the science of reading movement and the language, literacy, and socioemotional needs of learners. In this section, we highlight three of the most common themes, weaving in the voices of three teachers in three different districts (both urban and rural settings) as they entered into conversation with us regarding their experiences with teaching reading.

The Realities of the Science of Reading Movement

Phonics is not the/a magic bullet
There is little doubt that phonics instruction is important in the process of learning to read in English. The hyperfocus on phonics and phonemic awareness mandated by policies passed in the name of the science of reading has greatly undermined teachers' abilities to meet their students' diverse needs and, more specifically, to provide their MLs with access to effective instruction.
Phonics instruction stands out among teachers for the intensity of focus and the time spent. They struggle to see the applicability of instruction hyperfocused on foundations, especially when such foundational skills for reading are approached from a sequential perspective (with prerequisites) rather than a simultaneous one.

One challenge the teachers identified, for example, is the overreliance on testing for phonics and fluency. Passing these tests has become a prerequisite for students to be "allowed" to engage in other reading-related activities. Not passing the test means more instruction exclusively directed at isolated phonics instruction designed for students who are already fluent speakers of English. Progress in literacy skills development by ELs/MLs often is determined solely by utilizing tools designed to capture advances made by monolingual learners. Given the pressure to increase scores and make benchmarks on tests that "matter," other methods of gathering evidence of incremental gains are underutilized. The result is an endless cycle of students failing to make sufficient gains on standardized assessments, with the interventions used to "differentiate" their subsequent instruction reflecting the same types of limitations as those evident in the core instruction. As one teacher attested, "the kids felt defeated even before they began to read."

One size does not fit all
Researchers aligned with the science of reading assert that differentiation of instruction is key to meeting the individual needs of the learner. In practice, states and districts purchase scripted programs that ask teachers to adhere to a systematic, timed, and rigid plan for reading instruction, assuming universality of appropriateness for all learners. This undifferentiated, "one-size-fits-all" approach fails to recognize the diversity in today's classrooms. As one teacher participant explained,

"The focus is on a blanket reading curriculum that every kid needs to fit. And oh, well, this curriculum says some ELL options down here at the bottom. So we're going to call that a 'one-size-fits-all' thing, you know?... A student who one: struggles with the language, and then two: also struggles to read is never going to pass a phonics screener. And so, they give them [ELs] these phonics screeners. Well, of course, he bombed the thing."

Experienced ML teachers note that these programs fail to sufficiently attend to oral language development, comprehension, and reading to achieve meaningful goals (e.g., pleasure, exchange of ideas, self-expression, participation in the life of a literate community). One teacher commented on the insufficient opportunities to use language for authentic communication. She shared,

"I didn't see a lot of opportunity for kids to have the academic discourse. To really practice the language. And just to fall in love with reading because it [the curriculum] was again really fast-paced [so] the kids just felt that, okay, it's a task. It was very much pressured and like I never saw that enjoyment."

A fellow participant similarly expressed her desire to use both the science of reading and her knowledge of theory- and research-based literacy practices to reach learners in more effective ways:

"Taking what I know about [the] science of reading and combined with what I also know about needing to have rich language and being exposed to rich text, umm, trying to figure out, how can I combine both to try something brand new? That hasn't been done... so that... we aren't just giving students the exact same thing that they've gotten their entire elementary career when we know it's obviously not working."

Teachers, through their daily interactions with students, are poised to be responsive to the needs of individual learners as they apply the science of reading. The comments of these teachers raise questions about whether the science of reading is being maximized in ways that benefit all learners.

Students Need Asset-Based, Meaningful Learning
Advances in neuroscience and psychological and educational research demonstrate the need for teachers to engage the whole child. An emphasis on rigid instructional cycles that decenter the learner leads to literacy instruction that becomes lifeless and devoid of relevance, meaning, and joy.
Reading is intended to open doors to communication, idea generation, and perspective taking. The science of reading movement has led many teachers to feel pressured to retreat from utilizing instructional methods and strategies designed to leverage learners' assets, experiences, and knowledge systems (home, community, and school). Doing so leaves teachers and students to operate from a deficit perspective, as learners are not provided the opportunities to make public and utilize what they know and can do. As one teacher described,
"They came to just read this book that didn't make any sense to them, and they... had that idea in their mind already, like 'I don't know, I don't know anything'... Rather than getting them excited and helping them realize that they do. They bring a lot to the table. They do know. They do know a lot."
This discrepancy in what knowledge and ideas matter for literacy development results in tension for teachers as they make daily decisions between doing what is right for learners (as evidenced by gains in learning, language, and literacy) and staying within the prescribed boundaries for instruction. Teachers' comments reveal the reality that they experience limited autonomy to apply their knowledge of the students they serve in order to reach the shared literacy goals.

Concluding Thoughts

The research represented by the science of reading (scholarship) makes an important contribution to the knowledge base surrounding the reader's cognitive processes. However, the picture represented by this research, particularly as the science of reading has been taken up through the media and by politicians, is only one dimension of all that is involved in becoming a literate citizen of the world. Missing from the current conversation are considerations such as the following:

Research-driven understandings that reading and becoming literate are additionally a social act, not merely an individual's cognitive process

Insights from research that is inclusive of cross-linguistic phenomena (bilingualism/multilingualism), oracy, and language comprehension

Allowance within systems for research that is grounded in alternative and innovative methodologies that bridge between the science of reading and what is known about the emergent bilingual/multilingual learner

Feedback and insights from experienced ML teachers who observe both the positive and negative impacts of limiting reading instruction methods and curricula for MLs and their access to high-quality and appropriate instruction

The science of reading movement has been allowed to hijack the more nuanced research base that informs the science
of reading. It also has positioned teaching as a simplistic technical act and teachers as technicians who are expected to implement what has been given to them.

We know teaching is more than that and teachers' feedback and voices need to be heard. We urge policy makers and practitioners to engage in a critical dialogue which ensures that reading instruction keeps the ultimate goal of education and literacy front and center: "learning to communicate, read, and write as a means of expression to gain knowledge by accessing stories, information, and voices across time and across the world" (National Committee for Effective Literacy, 2022, p. 3; Darling-Hammond et al., 2020).

References
August, D., and Shanahan, T. (2006). Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. Washington, DC.
Budde, C. (2023). "The Science of Reading and Multilingual Learners." Presentation, CCSSO-ELL/ELA Collaborative. Virtual Conference.
Darling-Hammond, L., Flook, L., Cook-Harvey, C., Barron, B., and Osher, D. (2020). "Implications for Educational Practice of the Science of Learning and Development." Applied Developmental Science, 24(2), 97-140. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2018.1537791
Guilamo, A. (2021). "The Science of Reading in Dual Language." Language Magazine. www.languagemagazine.com/2021/04/20/the-science-of-reading-in-dual-language
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) (2017), Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth Learning English: Promising Futures. Washington, DC.
Escamilla, K., Olsen, L., and Slavick, J. (2022). "Toward Comprehensive Effective Literacy Policy and Instruction for English Language Learner/Emergent Bilingual Students." National Committee for Effective Literacy. https://multilingualliteracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/21018-NCEL-Effective-Literacy-White-Paper-FINAL_v2.0.pdf
Schwartz, S. (2022). "The 'Science of Reading' and English Language Learners: What the research says." Education Week. www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-science-of-reading-and-english-language-learners-what-the-research-says/2022/04

Socorro G. Herrera is a keynote speaker, district consultant, and trainer of trainers, as well as a professor in the College of Education and director of the Center for Intercultural and Multilingual Advocacy (CIMA) at Kansas State University. Her K-12 teaching experience includes an emphasis on literacy development, and her research focuses on literacy opportunities with culturally and linguistically diverse students, reading strategies, and domestic and international teacher preparation for diversity in the classroom.

Ester J. de Jong is professor and program leader in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education program at the University of Colorado Denver. Prior to UC Denver, she was the director of the School of Teaching and Learning and professor in ESOL/bilingual education at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. She has published extensively on dual language education and general education teacher preparation for English language learners. Dr. de Jong was president of TESOL International Association (2017-2018).

Both authors want to express a deep-felt thank-you to the three teachers who dialogued with us and helped us understand the realities on the ground. We are grateful for their time and ongoing efforts to engage others in advocating for effective literacy practices for MLs. They wished to remain anonymous for the purpose of this article.

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English Literacy for Multilingual Learners: Voices from the Field - Language Magazine

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Moving at the Speed of Light Literacy is at the heart of the educational enterprise. It is therefore not surprising that researchers, teachers, parents, and policymakers are highly invested in ensuring that all children grow up learning the critical skills of effective communication, orally and through reading and writing.

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Social Justice & Equity in Reading Programs NCTE

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Social Justice & Equity in Reading Programs NCTE

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NCTE - National Council of Teachers of English

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How can we attune our instruction to support the reading development of multilingual students? This complex question has become even more tricky given the current thrust of media messages about the "best way" about how reading should be taught. The Science of Reading (SOR) movement has been highly successful in messaging teachers, administrators, and the public about the need for specific components of foundational reading and corresponding instructional moves to support early readers. But do all students, including multilingual students, need the same reading instructional techniques to become successful readers? If not, what kind of adjustments to foundational reading instruction need to be considered for multilingual students?

Let's start by clarifying what I refer to reading in this short piece. I refer to reading as the complex orchestration of reading words, understanding their meanings, and understanding the meaning of words in relation to larger pieces of texts. This is a departure from how reading is commonly currently conveyed by SOR advocates. In the current discourse word reading or decoding is commonly the only portion of the entire reading puzzle being referenced. Decoding is the ability to use knowledge about letters and their sounds to read a word and is, undoubtedly, a foundational aspect of reading. However, for multilingual students decoding a word does not necessarily mean that they "read it." In other words, while multilingual students may have the knowledge of sound-letter relationships to sound out a word, decoding does not mean that multilingual students can understand the word on its own or in relation to the words around it. Clarity about what educators mean when we refer to reading is always essential because it impacts what instructional practices educators design and how much time we dedicate to the instructional practices we choose to employ.

For multilingual students learning to read, phonemic awareness exercises can have an extra layer of complexity. Phonemic awareness is the ability to play with sounds of a word and to manipulate them. It is considered one of the cornerstones of early reading abilities. Ideally young readers should engage in short, intentional, and powerful instruction to support students' acquisition of phonemic awareness. For young children who are asked, "if I say seat, change the s to a ch," and who have ample experience with English, the exercise can target their phonemic awareness. But for multilingual students, it's not that simple. Did the teacher say, "ch" or "sh?" And what do these words mean?

These layers of complexity are consistently present throughout a range of different foundational reading experiences for multilingual students. Take for instance the following anecdote: in a first grade classroom, teachers are working with multilingual students through foundational skills curriculum. Students are instructed to pick out the word that is different from the others. They are given the following three words: "pepper, letter, and perfect." While for many students, it is clear that the word, "letter" is different from the others because it starts with the letter, "l," for many multilingual students there are a range of confounding factors that may make this simple exercise much more than identifying an initial letter sound. For example, when the teacher says to identify something different about one word, what kind of difference is he/she referring to? Students may be confused if they should identify a difference in letters at the beginning or the end? They may think, should I look for which word means something different? Exercises like this are meant to be fast paced, yet, multilingual learners may still be processing what is exactly required of them, thus not actually engaged in the targeted skill that these exercises intend for students to practice.

In another instance, the teacher sends students to a table to work in a small group reading nonsense words like, "puk, jaf, kuf." Before starting the activity, one of the students, a Latinx boy, asks the teacher, "can we use sounds in Spanish?" This example demonstrates that for many multilingual students, they may have knowledge of letter sounds across the languages that they use daily. In the case of nonsense words, it's important for students to know if the teachers want them to employ all of their knowledge of sounds, even if it goes beyond English, or do they need to keep within the confines of English sounds?

As these types of foundational exercises have become increasingly popular and even mandated by law for students, it is important for educators who work with multilingual students to be reminded that their professional expertise is fundamental to "skillful implementation" (professional communication, Melissa Lambert, 2/1/23) of these foundational instructional techniques for multilingual readers. These proceeding anecdotes demonstrate that multilingual learners approach tasks that are meant to target foundational reading skills in a way that differs from monolingual students. Assuming that the same instructional tasks will activate the same type of learning for all students including multilingual students is reflective of the monolingual bias in activities such as these (Ascenzi-Moreno, unpublished manuscript).

The vast research on bilingualism and reading indicates that there are differences between monolingual and multilingual students as they develop to be readers (Reyes, 2012). It is critical that research on biliteracy sits alongside and on equal ground with research promoted by SOR advocates. While SOR advocates argue for universality or of the claim that all readers need the same instructional techniques regardless of their profiles, it is clear that multilingual students need something different in developing to be successful readers.

What exactly do we know about how multilingual students and monolingual students differ in how they learn to read? While there are many ways that multilingual students' reading development differ from monolingual students, in this short piece, two ways in which they differ will be highlighted. First, language and literacy are intertwined (Razfar & Rumenapp, 2014). For multilingual students this means that while we may try to isolate reading skills from language, this only works for students who already are quite adept in knowing the meaning of words. For multilingual students, the danger when we engage in these types of practices is that we are missing an opportunity for language development. Secondly, multilingual students operate across named languages or use their translanguaging abilities - meaning that they have knowledge about different components of reading in two or more named languages. Therefore, they may know a variety of sounds associated with a given letter in more than one named language. They may also have knowledge of words and texts in languages in addition to English. Therefore, the need for students to understand their resources cross-linguistically becomes critically important (Cárdenas-Hagan, 2020). For example, multilingual students may benefit from discussing and practicing similarities and differences between sounds in the named languages that they use.

So what does a multilingual approach to teaching early reading looks like? Because language and reading are intertwined for multilingual students there are a couple of shifts that can take place for multilingual students to account for their rich linguistic and cultural resources. Reading is both cumulative and componential (Lesaux, 2015). For multilingual students, this means that not only do multiple experiences need to add up to continually develop a thoughtful and skillful reader, but also that the skills need to relate to each other. One of the first things that teachers can consider is how foundational exercises are related to meaning? For multilingual students when meaning is not integrated into learning, there is a lost opportunity for language development. When reading skills are compartmentalized, then multilingual students' overall comprehension may be impacted in the long run, because the relationship between word reading and language is not made over time.

For example, before asking students if they know the sound the word starts with, it's important that students know what the word means. This can be accomplished by asking students what the word means in the languages that they use or even by showing visuals, if applicable. A second way to support multilingual students' acquisition of foundational skills is to integrate a space within foundational reading skills to explore the ways in which their named language works - the similarities and the differences - between the languages that they use. This means that students have the opportunity to hear how the "th" sounds in English and compare it, let's say for a Spanish speaker, to how the medial "d" sounds, "media" (or sock), which has similarities. The vast body of biliteracy research emphasizes the importance of metalinguistic awareness in the development of biliteracy for multilingual students (Reyes, 2012).

Calls for universality in the teaching of foundational skills makes a complex instructional landscape for multilingual students invisible. When the actual learning of multilingual students is not perceived, then their needs cannot be attended to adequately, and in the end multilingual students will lose out on crucial reading instruction that is attuned to their profiles. An overemphasis on word work unconnected to meaning, in the long run may cumulatively lead to weaknesses in meaning-based reading abilities. Of course, multilingual students need foundational skills - all students do - however, the ways that word reading and meaning come together for multilingual students during foundational skills development deserves both dedicated attention and a different approach that matches the research base on multilingual students. Educators will need to advocate for multilingual students by exercising their professional expertise to adapt foundational skills based on what research says about how multilingual students learn.
References
Ascenzi-Moreno, L. (Unpublished Manuscript). Bilinguifying reading instruction through a translanguaging perspective on reading and readers.

Cárdenas-Hagan, E. (2020). Literacy foundations for English learners: A comprehensive guide to evidence-based instruction. Brookes.

Lesaux, N. (2015). Cultivating knowledge, building language: Literacy instruction for English learners in elementary school. Heinneman.

Razar, A. & Rumenapp, J. (2014). Applying linguistics in the classroom: A Sociocultural approach. Routledge.

Reyes, I. (2012). Biliteracy among children and youths. Reading Research Quarterly, 47( 3), 307-327.
Dr. Laura Ascenzi-Moreno is a professor of bilingual education and bilingual program coordinator at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Brooklyn, NY, USA

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How can we attune our instruction to support the reading development of multilingual students? This complex question has become even more tricky given the current thrust of media messages about the "best way" about how reading should be taught.

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According to the U.S. Department of Education, enrollment of English learners in K-12 has increased by more than 1 million, representing 5.3 million students in U.S. public schools. Historically, this population has experienced inequities in educational outcomes due to factors including poverty, discrimination, poor instruction, exposure to crime and lack of health care and mental health services.

These disparities became more pronounced during the pandemic despite civil rights laws that are supposed to ensure English learners have equal access to education. Reversing these trends and improving educational outcomes for children who speak a language other than English at home involves attending to their individual learning through both effective instruction and accurate assessment.

Effective instruction means employing approaches differentiated by the students' languages, culture and social experiences to address these significant educational disparities. Accurate assessment means measuring students' levels of ability in given academic areas to provide educators with predictive information about which are on track for proficiency and which are at risk.

But universal screening assessments are largely published and administered in English. Testing children in all the languages they speak would be ideal; however, more than 300 languages are spoken in the U.S., and creating each exam and providing the tools and staff to administer them would not be easy. It would mean hiring educators capable of testing students in all languages and investing in the creation of each assessment - which requires researching the literacy and science of reading in each language as well as validating the assessment through field testing and item calibration. While not impossible, this is a costly endeavor that would take years to accomplish.

Since Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language in the nation, and the first language for 75% to 80% of English learners, providing high-quality assessments in that language should be a priority.

Because language development does not necessarily happen at the same rate or in the same pattern in both languages, English-only approaches underestimate a child's ability, generally providing more information about what students can't do rather than capturing their actual skill set in their home language. This deficit-based approach may provide inaccurate information to guide instructional planning for these students. Assessing Spanish-speaking students in English only, without taking into consideration their English proficiency, can result in lower levels of performance, which may be mistaken for reading disabilities. Therefore, accurate assessment is needed in both languages in order to truly understand a child's language and literacy skills and to provide the appropriate level of instructional support.

Learning to read is central to academic success. Poor literacy can lead to low educational attainment, depressed wages and generational poverty. Reading scores as early as third grade are highly predictive of life outcomes.

Assessing bilingual students in both their home language and in English provides the most accurate estimates of their overall ability. It is important for teachers to know what children are capable of in their home language, because they can leverage these skills during English and bilingual instruction to design effective educational experiences, including lessons, games, group work, that are tailored to the child's ability levels in both languages. This is particularly true in the early elementary grades, when home language exposure has a much greater impact on proficiency than the language spoken in school.

Some experts in the field note that high-quality reading assessments for Spanish speakers should focus on the same critical early literacy skills as for English speakers. They should be efficient and easy to administer, and account for specific linguistic features of Spanish. For example, they should include letters that are particular to the Spanish alphabet, and passages should reflect that language's syntactical, lexical and grammatical rules.

As an alternative, teachers can support students by learning more about their home languages through parents or interpreters, and understanding which sounds English and the home language have in common. Sounds that are not present in both will be harder for a child to hear and say; knowing this will help a teacher better understand what will transfer between languages and what might present difficulty.

There is a critical need for educators to learn about and start using high-quality reading assessments with students in their home language, especially given the instructional loss that occurred during the pandemic, and particularly in literacy. It is a first necessary step toward identifying the right instruction to help English learners become successful readers.

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Test English Learners in the Languages They Speak at School and at Home

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According to the U.S. Department of Education, enrollment of English learners in K-12 has increased by more than 1 million, representing 5.3 million students in U.S. public schools. Historically, this population has experienced inequities in educational outcomes due to factors including poverty, discrimination, poor instruction, exposure to crime and lack of health care and mental [...]

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Listen to The Effective Literacy Podcast on Spotify.

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Pursuing Clarity in the Science of Reading Debate

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The Science of the Bilingual REading Brain

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The Science of the Bilingual REading Brain

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The Science of the Bilingual Reading Brain

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AI (Artificial Intelligence) concept. “We are plural. The I is an illusion: bilinguals know this, they are hybrid like the words inside them, surprised halfway on the translation path.” (Jurgenson, 2014, p. 115). Yes, we have always been and will always be plural. That is, until we are taught to div…

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Strong readers who had higher scores on the PISA reading test also read on screens at home, but they tended to use their devices to gather information, such as reading the news or browsing the internet for school work. When these strong readers wanted to read a book, they opted to read in paper format or balance their reading time between paper and digital devices.

Every three years, when 600,000 students around the world take the PISA test, they fill out surveys about their families and their reading habits. Researchers at the OECD compared these survey responses with test scores and noticed intriguing relationships between books in the home, a preference for reading on paper and reading achievement. The report, " Does the digital world open up an increasing divide in access to print books? " was published on July 12, 2022.

In the United States, 31 percent of 15-year-olds said they never or rarely read books, compared with 35 percent worldwide. Meanwhile, 35 percent of American students said they primarily read paper books, almost matching the international average of 36 percent. Another 16 percent of Americans said they read books more often on screens and 18 percent responded that they read books equally on both paper and screens.

Digital books have become extremely popular among students in some regions of Asia, but students who read books on paper still outperformed even in cultures where digital reading is commonplace. More than 40 percent of students in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand reported reading books more often on digital devices. Yet in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan, students who read books mostly on paper or read in both formats scored higher than those who primarily read digital books. Both Thailand and Indonesia were exceptions; digital readers did better. Hong Kong and Taiwan are two of the highest performing education systems in the world and even after adjusting for students' socioeconomic status, the advantage for paper reading remained pronounced.

Teens around the world are rapidly turning away from reading, according to OECD surveys. Fifteen-year-olds are reading less for leisure and fewer fiction books. The number of students who consider reading a "waste of time" jumped by more than 5 percentage points. Simultaneously, reading performance around the world, which had been slowly improving up until 2012, declined between 2012 and 2018. Across OECD countries that participated in both assessments, reading performance fell back to what it had been in 2006.

OECD researchers wonder if the presence of physical books at home still matters in the digital age. In the student surveys, students were told that each meter of shelving typically holds 40 books and were asked to estimate the number of books in their homes. Both rich and poor students alike reported fewer books in the home over the past 18 years, but the book gap between the two remained persistently large with wealthier students living amid twice as many books as poorer students.

The influence of books at home is a bit of a chicken-egg riddle. The OECD found that students who had more books at home reported that they enjoyed reading more. Logically, students who are surrounded by physical books may feel more encouraged by their families and inspired to read. But it could be that students who enjoy reading receive lots of books as presents or bring more books home from the library. It's also possible that both are true simultaneously in a virtuous two-way spiral: more books at home inspire kids to read and voracious readers buy more books.

OECD researchers are most worried about poorer students. Low-income students made huge strides in access to digital technology well before the pandemic. Ninety-four percent of students from low-income families across 26 developed nations had access to the internet at home in 2018, up from 75 percent in 2009. "While disadvantaged students are catching up in terms of access to digital resources, their access to cultural capital like paper books at home has diminished," the OECD report noted.

As one gap closes, another one opens.

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Paper books linked to stronger readers in an international study - MindShift

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Strong readers who had higher scores on the PISA reading test also read on screens at home, but they tended to use their devices to gather information, such as reading the news or browsing the internet for school work.

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Unifying Language Acquisition with Literacy

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Unifying Language Acquisition with Literacy

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Unifying Language Acquisition with Literacy Instruction for Language-Minority Students - Language Magazine

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Lexia Learning, a company specializing in structured literacy, recently convened a roundtable on a subject that has been given considerable attention in Language Magazine over recent years, "Unifying Language Acquisition with Literacy Instruction for Language-Minority Students."Organized by José A. Viana, former assistant deputy secretary and director of the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA), the [...]

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Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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Phonics instruction is not enough for English Learners, or anyone. But it's still foundational for all.
Posted April 14, 2022 by Dr. Claude Goldenberg, Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Education, emeritus, Stanford University
The newest front in the never-ending wars and squabbles over how to teach reading involves English language learners (EL), students learning to read (and write) in English while simultaneously learning to speak and understand it.

In the wake of renewed prominence of research supporting an early focus on phonics and decoding (aka the "science of reading"), EL advocates around the country have been sounding alarms.

For example, a recent EdSource article led with the following: "As California launches a new literacy campaign, some advocates worry that for English learners, a focus on sounding out words will come at the expense of learning the meaning of words."

In Colorado: "Colorado's emphasis on phonics in reading could hurt English language learners, advocates say."

The concern is understandable. Learning to decode words if you don't understand what they mean seems pointless. In addition, solely focusing on phonics during reading instruction provides a meager literacy diet.

But the concern misses the larger point that learning to read requires integrating written language with oral language. This integration is impossible if you can't recognize- read -the words on the page accurately and automatically followed by verifying the words' accuracy and meaning.

Word recognition is foundational to reading. Knowing word meanings is important for confirmation. Among skilled readers, the process works automatically, effortlessly, and efficiently. Beginning and early readers need varying degrees of support, scaffolding, and direct teaching to acquire these skills. Some require very little and appear to "catch on" easily; others need a great deal of direct teaching; most are somewhere in between.

This larger point applies to readers in general, not just ELs. I'll use a metaphor to try to illustrate.

Imagine two roads that begin separately and eventually converge at some desired destination. One road is, let's say, the "road to the code," where you learn how the sounds of a spoken language are represented in writing. Progress along this road is relatively straightforward, although it has its challenges. It involves developing phonological awareness, knowledge of letters, letter combinations, and corresponding sounds, and how to use that knowledge to identify written words, often referred to as "phonics" or "decoding."

I'll call the other road the "road to understanding." Here's where you learn how to make sense of the world as you experience it either directly or through someone's oral retelling or through electronic media or in written texts. To proceed successfully along this road, you need to learn aspects of language that carry meaning (e.g., vocabulary, morphology, syntax), background knowledge and knowledge of the world, and comprehension and thinking skills and strategies.

Eventually, the roads must converge at their destination: full and competent literacy. The roads start out separately because they proceed in different parts of the brain. Metaphorically, they originate in different geographic locations and traverse distinct landscapes.

Successful travel through the code road in an alphabetic language essentially requires knowing and being able to apply the sound-symbol mapping system of the language's orthography. Letters are human inventions developed to represent the sounds of speech. There is nothing inherently meaningful about letters, although since their names typically contain the sounds they represent, learning letter names helps connect them to those sounds. The whole idea of learning to read is to make those letters and sounds meaningful by connecting them to meaningful oral language.

Here's a critical point: Research has shown that the best way to help learners master the road to the code is through direct and explicit instruction in what is sometimes called the "alphabetic principle," that is, the basic understanding that printed letters represent speech sounds and using that understanding (aka phonics and decoding) to read words. (The issues are somewhat different in nonalphabetic writing systems.)

Mastering the code road is no guarantee of full literacy. Learners must also successfully travel along the path to understanding. This path can be complex and winding. It typically commences even before the road code appears. Explicit teaching contributes to progress along the path to understanding, but so do-perhaps even to a greater extent-direct experiences with the world, interactions with others, and planned and unplanned events and activities.

The path to understanding matters immensely if you are to get to the ultimate destination of literacy. If you can read accurately but without understanding, full literacy is impossible.

Similarly, if you don't travel well and far on the code road-e.g., someone tells you to take a shortcut by guessing at words-your path to uniting with the road to understanding will be truncated. You won't get to your destination of full literacy. Why? Because if you don't successfully traverse the road to the code, your world will be limited to what doesn't require accurate and fluent reading of written language.

The necessity of traveling along two distinct but ultimately converging paths is as true for English learners as it is for learners who already speak English. This has been amply demonstrated by neurocognitive and neurolinguistic studies involving many different first and second languages and learners around the world.

For English learners or, more generally, students learning to read in a language they are simultaneously learning to speak and understand, there is an important qualification: Care must be taken that words (and text) they are being taught to read are meaningful to them.

We can typically assume that students learning to read in a language they already know already understand words used in beginning and early reading instruction, words such as run, dog, me, and can. We can't make that assumption with second-language literacy learners. As we take them along the code road, we must also make sure they're making corresponding progress on the road to understanding the words the code road is helping them learn to read.

This has been well documented in studies by Sharon Vaughn, Linnea Ehri, and their colleagues. These researchers have found that students learning to read in English while gaining English proficiency, but experiencing early reading difficulties, make greater progress when instruction is focused on helping them progress along both roads.

Children were taught the foundations of word recognition directly and explicitly. They were also taught the meaning of the words they were being taught to read and to use those meanings to cross-check what they read using their developing word reading skills.

Note that I'm referring here to English learners learning to read in English. If they are in a bilingual program and learning to read in their home language, learning to read while learning the language is not an issue. While learning to read in your home language might be preferable for any number of reasons, the fact is a large majority of English learners learn to read in English as they are learning English.

The implication is straightforward: English learners need to be helped-taught-to understand the words and text they are being taught to read. But they need to learn, explicitly and directly, the foundations of word recognition to accurately read the words. Both are essential if these students are to become fully, functionally, and successfully literate.

About the author

Claude Goldenberg, Ph.D. is Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Education, emeritus, Stanford University. He is author of Successful school change: Creating settings to improve teaching and learning (Teachers College); co-author with Rhoda Coleman of Promoting academic achievement among English Learners: A guide to the research (Corwin); and co-editor with Aydin Durgunoglu of Language and literacy development in bilingual settings (Guilford). He has published and been on the editorial boards of various literacy and education academic and professional journals. Previous projects focused on improving literacy achievement among English Learners in elementary and middle school, language and literacy development among Mexican children in Mexico, and a randomized control trial of an early literacy intervention in Rwanda. Current projects include consulting for the US Department of Justice on English Learner issues and chairing a research advisory panel on early childhood education for Arizona's First Things First.

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Phonics instruction is not enough for English Learners, or anyone. But it's still foundational for all. - Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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by Dr. Claude Goldenberg, Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Education, emeritus, Stanford University The newest front in the never-ending wars and squabbles over how to teach reading involves English language learners (EL), students learning to read (and write) in English while simultaneously learning to speak and understand it.

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‎Highest Aspirations: S8/E3: Using Guided Reading Strategies to Support English Learners with Melanie Sembritski, Wesley Sever and Kelsi Iturralde on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show Highest Aspirations, Ep S8/E3: Using Guided Reading Strategies to Support English Learners with Melanie Sembritski, Wesley Sever and Kelsi Iturralde - Feb 15, 2022

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S8/E8: Why Decoding Isn’t Enough for Literacy: The Path Toward Comprehension with Dr. Kathy Escamilla and Dr. Sue Hopewell

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What is the relationship between decoding and comprehension when reading, and why is it important for educators to prioritize both? Why are key literacy resources like school librarians or educational media specialists and classroom libraries growing scarce and what are the consequences? How can lis…

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"As I was reading this, I immediately wanted to tell all of my teacher friends working with elementary-aged students to get this book. This is surely a book that has been waiting for decades to be written."

"Valentina and Melinda have created a terrific, clear, & easy to apply literacy framework for ELs and ALL learners."

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Home | Reading & Writing with English Learners

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"As I was reading this, I immediately wanted to tell all of my teacher friends working with elementary-aged students to get this book. This is surely a book that has been waiting for decades to be written." "Valentina and Melinda have created a terrific, clear, & easy to apply literacy framework for ELs and ALL learners."

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The need to explicitly teach letter-sound relationships in U.S. classrooms is settled science. 1 However, too often such instruction is not provided in the most efficient or effective way. These instructional missteps mean that fewer children will develop strong word-reading skills. In addition, ineffective phonics instruction is likely to require more class time and/or later compensatory intervention, taking time away from the growth of other important contributors to literacy development. We have encountered many dozens, if not hundreds, of phonics faux pas. In this article, we focus on seven in early reading instruction that deserve our serious attention.

1. Spending Too Little or Too Much Time on Phonics Instruction

Our field has long had a problem with teachers devoting an inadequate amount of time to phonics instruction. Although some children will pick up word reading with little instructional effort, many require considerable instruction to master the complex task of looking at a series of lines and curves to ascertain the spoken word they represent. In languages in which there is a relatively simple relationship between letters and sounds, such as Finnish and Spanish, by the middle of first grade, children are able to read real words and pseudo-words in the language accurately almost 100 percent of the time.* In languages in which the relationships are somewhat more complex, such as Danish and French, children are about 70 percent accurate by that time point. In English, in which the relationship between letters and sounds is extremely complex, children are about 40 percent accurate at that point. 2 Put another way, English word reading requires a lot more effort to teach and learn than many other languages.

On the other hand, there is such a thing as too much phonics instruction. We have seen prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms in which the better part of the day is focused on letter-sound instruction (and often in a manner inconsistent with what research would recommend). This is problematic because it leaves insufficient time for many other important areas of development. For example, vocabulary and concept knowledge, which are strong predictors of long-term reading and writing success, also need attention. In fact, vocabulary knowledge affects word-reading development. We sometimes cannot even know whether we have read a word accurately unless we already have the word in our vocabulary. Is the word lemic pronounced with a short e, like lemon, or a long e, like lemur? Unless you already know this word, you aren't sure. For children trying to learn to read words with low vocabulary knowledge, such uncertainty is common.

Likely the question on your mind is, "How much is enough and not too much?" Unfortunately, research does not offer a decisive answer to this fundamental question. Typically, recommendations range from 30 to 60 minutes per day in grades K-2, with that time including a number of different activities we discuss below.

However, we suggest that the answer also varies by child and should be informed by simple diagnostic assessments. Some children are able to develop letter-sound knowledge more quickly and efficiently than others. This is one reason why differentiated phonics instruction is so well advised. Some instruction is provided to the whole class, but then it is reinforced and gaps are filled in as needed in a small-group context. Research has shown that reading achievement is supported when instruction is differentiated. 3 A number of researchers have developed systems by which assessments determine which letter-sound relationships each child has learned and not yet learned, and a systematic series of lessons are provided accordingly. 4 An important direction for our field is to work toward determining the most time-efficient approaches to ensuring each child in a class meets grade-level expectations in word reading each year.

2. Neglecting the Alphabetic Principle, Concept of Word in Print, and Other Concepts of Print

Imagine going to work for a shipbuilding company. You go to work the first day and are schooled in all the different types of bolts, screws, and nails. You learn their names, the different sizes, and the different types, but you never learn that their purpose is to join pieces of metal and that those pieces of metal are used to build ships! Although this situation is clearly ridiculous, it is actually analogous to what we see in some prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms. Children are being taught to name letters or even identify the sounds that the letters represent, but they are unclear about why they are learning it. Letter-sound knowledge is being learned in a vacuum; the child has no context for how to use the information, no "big picture."

To understand the big picture, children must understand the alphabetic principle-how our English system of writing works. The alphabetic principle is simply that visual symbols (letters) represent speech sounds (phonemes). To write the spoken word "dog," you use alphabetic symbols to represent the speech sounds. We can combine and recombine letter symbols to form words. As odd as it may sound, children can learn letters and even letter sounds in very rote ways without understanding the alphabetic system. When children do not understand the alphabetic principle, they may do the following:

Write something but not know how to read it back because they are not using letter sounds.

Copy words but not be able to read them back.

Write letters without any match to sounds (e.g., I went to the store = bmlssmii).

Use letters they know to write all words, regardless of sounds.

Look to the teacher when they can't read a word.

Say the name of a letter when asked to read a word (e.g., no = "en").

To understand the big picture, children must understand other concepts of print as well. Concepts of print are the many understandings about how print works, including that print serves specific purposes (e.g., to help us remember or to entertain us); that print is language written down; and that, in English, we read from left to right and from the top of the page to the bottom. All of these and other "mechanics" about how print works are important to learn alongside letters and sounds.

In order to have a true understanding of the purpose and function of letters and letter sounds, children must understand how words are represented in print, or concept of word. 5 This means they know that words are collections of letters that represent a series of speech sounds that collectively represent a unit of meaning. They need to understand that each new word is signified by a space that does not contain any letters. They need to understand that you can see a word as well as say a word.

To understand concept of word in print, children need to watch others reading print and pointing to words. 6 In classrooms, this may be a teacher reading charts or big books to children and pointing to the words as they read. Teachers may also use pointers and sometimes ask children to point to words. In addition to watching others, children need to practice pointing to words themselves. A great way to do this is to allow children to point to words in a memorized line of print, in a dictated story of their own words, or in a simple book with short, repetitive sentences. Although it sounds like a really simple task, it is not. In fact, there are actually stages that occur as children learn to point to print. Specifically, they must gain control of multisyllabic words and show understanding that a word like elephant, with three syllables, is actually one unified word. When children cannot handle multisyllabic words, they will point to new words for each syllable in a word (e.g., if the text said "kittens cry," the child would point at the word "kittens" for the syllable kit and then point at the word "cry" for the syllable tens).

Essentially, whenever phonics is taught, there should be a very print-rich environment, with teachers and children interacting with print to acquire the alphabetic principle, concept of word, and other concepts of print. Without these instructional nonnegotiables, letter-sound knowledge will remain inert information.

3. Teaching Letter Names without Letter Sounds

From the alphabet song to children's toys, much of the messaging that young children receive about letters is focused on the names of letters. Although research does suggest the importance of teaching and learning letter names, also vitally important is teaching the sounds associated with the letters. A common faux pas is neglecting instruction in those sounds throughout prekindergarten and sometimes well into kindergarten.

Some people think that teaching letter names is essentially teaching their sounds, but unfortunately that is not the case in English. Some letter names don't have a sound commonly associated with the letter at all. Neither Hh, Ww, nor Yy has its commonly associated sound in its name (e.g., there is no /h/, as in happy, in the name of the letter Hh ("aych")). Knowing these letters' names definitely does not lead children to know their associated sounds. Some other letters' names contain one of the sounds commonly associated with the name but not the other. For example, Cc has one of its common sounds in its name (/s/) but not the other (/k/).

The primary vowels are like this as well. We would have been much better off if they were named by their short sounds (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, as in pat, pet, pit, pot, and putt), because those are more common in the words read by beginning readers than their long vowel sounds (the letters' names)-but no such luck. Letter names are also challenging for young readers because they aren't consistent in whether the commonly associated sound is at the beginning or end of the name. For example, in Mm/"em," the letter's target sound is at the end of the letter name, but in Jj/"jay," the target sound is at the beginning. That means for letter names to help children, they must memorize whether the target sound is at the beginning or end of the name.

The complexities of letter names in English might lead you to think we should not teach letter names at all, but research suggests that teaching letter names is still worthwhile 7-it just needs to be accompanied by lots of attention to the sound or sounds commonly associated with each letter and by a thorough understanding of the challenges posed by English letter names. A teacher with such knowledge would understand, for example, why a young child might spell the word daisy as WAZ. Why? Sometimes children write "W" for the /d/ sound because the letter name for Ww-"double-u"-begins with the /d/ sound. The next sound we hear in daisy is the letter name for Aa (the long a sound), and the third and fourth sounds in daisy are the name of the letter Zz ("zee").

A final point about letter-name knowledge: it is often noted that letter-name knowledge in preschool and kindergarten is a strong predictor of children's later literacy achievement. This is true, but it is not because letter-name knowledge is an even-close-to-sufficient contributor to actual reading or writing. It is helpful, but some children learn to read knowing only letter sounds-no letter names. The predictive power of letter names lies largely in the fact that it is a proxy for other things. Children who know letter names early are more likely to have experienced a substantial emphasis on print literacy in the home and to have attended a strong preschool, for example, which in turn increase the likelihood of higher later reading and writing achievement. Naming letters is only one facet of letter knowledge, and probably not even the most important one. It is the application of letter-sound knowledge that advances children's reading and spelling.

4. Using Inappropriate Alphabet Key Words

A common tool for teaching the alphabet is alphabet key words, such as Aa is for apple, Bb is for ball, and so on. The idea is to make alphabet learning easier by creating meaningful associations between the letter and a word that begins with that letter. Unfortunately, too often, alphabet key words are problematic, creating more confusion than clarity for young children. Good alphabet key words need to begin with one of the sounds commonly associated with that letter. For example, Oo is for octopus works-the first sound in octopus is the short o sound. However, Oo is for orange does not work. The o in orange is what we call an r-controlled vowel. It does not make its typical short or long vowel sound. Similarly, Tt is for thumb does not work because there is no /t/ sound in thumb-there is a th digraph (two letters representing one sound). Another pitfall to watch out for is an alphabet key word that begins with a letter name, which can be really confusing to children. For example, Ee is for elephant is confusing because it begins the letter name for Ll ("el"), and Cc is for cake is problematic because it begins with the letter name for Kk ("kay").

Alphabet key words also need to be depicted clearly in a photo or drawing, not easily confused with other items, and they should be words that are known to or can be readily learned by children. We recommend two alphabet key words for the letters c, g, a, e, i, o, and u-one for each of their two common sounds. Caution should be exercised in using children's names as key words, as some do not make a sound typically associated with the letter in English (e.g., Juan). In these cases, we suggest using the child's name to show the shape and name of the letter but to focus on a different alphabet key word for the sound.

For key words to do their job, children must be able to separate the first sound in the word from the rest of the word (e.g., to separate the /b/ from the /all/ in ball). Ideally, children develop this skill, called initial phoneme segmentation, during or before the prekindergarten year. However, not all children meet this expectation. Fortunately, you can work on this skill while teaching the alphabet, including alphabet key words. Research strongly suggests that phonemic awareness (conscious awareness of the individual sounds in spoken words-for example, recognizing that sheep has three sounds: /sh/, /ee/, and /p/), although an entirely oral skill, is actually best developed with accompanying letters. This initial phoneme segmentation issue is also why you should be judicious about using alphabet key words that begin with blends (two consonant letters pronounced in succession in a syllable, such as dr in drum); it is especially difficult for young children to separate the initial phoneme in a blend.

5. Lacking a Scope and Sequence

You can teach phonics in many different ways. You can use word or picture cards, magnetic letters, letter tiles, games, or even more traditional methods. However, if you want phonics instruction to be effective, you need to know the content (e.g., consonants, short vowels, digraphs) that you are teaching and the order in which children typically learn, and thus that you will teach, that content. We call this a scope and sequence. 8 Across decades, evidence has accumulated to suggest that systematic phonics instruction with a scope and sequence will produce better outcomes than instruction that does not follow a scope and sequence. 9

Historically, a range of less systematic approaches have been popular. Typically, these approaches do not have a clear scope or follow a sequence but instead address letter sounds only as they arise incidentally in interactions with children or are needed to read words within a specific text. So, if a teacher is reading the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, she will teach the ee sound because it is found in the word see. The problem with this kind of serendipitous approach as the driver of phonics instruction is that information is not presented logically to the child and information gets missed. Of course, children should read connected text as they are learning phonics, and teachers should point out words they are reading that match taught patterns. But the scope and sequence of phonics instruction should not be based primarily on opportune moments in text reading.

Scope and sequence is also important because it helps children to organize information into cognitive categories, or "file folders," that support better cognitive storage and retrieval of information. For example, if one teaches information without a scope and sequence, one might move from teaching the short a sound in a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern (e.g., bag), to teaching the vowel digraph oa (e.g., boat), to teaching ch (e.g., chip), to teaching i_e (e.g., bike). It would be a lot easier to remember these patterns if they were taught in groups: for example, teaching all the short vowel sounds ( a, e, i, o, and u), consonant digraphs that represent unique sounds ( th, sh, ch), all the CVC- e (silent e) patterns ( mate, Pete, bike, note, cute), and then both of the spelling patterns that represent the /oi/ sound (called a diphthong; oy and oi). If instruction follows a scope and sequence, the variations don't seem random but rather work to form a category (e.g., "Oh this th is kind of like the ch, two letters that make a new consonant sound").

6. Using a Problematic Approach to Teaching Sight Words

Often, even teachers who do devote considerable time to phonics instruction do not apply that instruction to teaching "sight words." Instead, they teach children to memorize sight words visually rather than to decode them. Research suggests that's the wrong approach. 10

Let's back up and talk about terminology. A sight word actually refers to any word that can be read by sight. Differentiation is a sight word for us-we recognize it essentially instantly when we see it. What many teachers call sight words are actually high-frequency words. Because a small number of high-frequency words have less regular patterns (e.g., was, the), some people call all high-frequency words sight words and think that they must be learned visually and holistically by sight.

In point of fact, letter-sound information amalgamates the word's units into memory better than any other process. When we teach high-frequency words, we need to fully analyze the letter-sound relationships within them, whether the word is comprised of expected letter-sound relationships, as in can (/k/, /a/, and /n/, just as we would expect); some expected and some unexpected letter-sound relationships, as in said (/s/ and /d/ are as expected, /ai/ would normally represent the long a, not the short e, sound); or entirely unexpected letter-sound relationships, such as of (/uv/). Nearly two-thirds of high-frequency words are actually very regular (e.g., at, in, it), but even with those that are not, we need to fully analyze the letter-sound relationships as well as read them accurately many times. We suggest studying each letter's association with each sound, relating the word to other words with the same letter-sound patterns when possible (e.g., no, go, so), and teaching high-frequency words alongside meaningful words (e.g., like with bike).

7. Missing Essential Elements of Phonics Instruction

We often observe phonics instruction that has some strengths but also some gaps. Effective phonics instruction is multifaceted. You've likely already heard about the need for explicit instruction. Explicit instruction is direct, precise, and unambiguous (e.g., telling children what sound the letters sh represent together, rather than making the connection indirectly or asking them to figure it out themselves). You probably also realize the need to apply general learning principles (e.g., specific feedback). Some other facets that must be present are:

Specific, Applicable Generalizations

Simplistic, broad generalizations or "rules" do not work. For example, if we say that silent e signals a long vowel sound all the time, then we have a lot of issues. But if the generalization is made more specific, it is more applicable. For example, the silent e pattern is consistent more than 75 percent of the time in a_e, i_e, o_e, and u_e, but only consistent 16 percent of the time with e_e.

Active Construction and Deconstruction of Words

Just explicitly teaching letter-sound relationships is not enough. If it were, we could just tell infants what each letter-sound relationship is and then they could read. Children need opportunities to move letter tiles to build and change words, listen to words and spell them by sound, and so on.

Opportunities for Application

The evidence is clear that young children benefit from opportunities to read text that emphasizes letter-sound relationships they have learned to date. 11 This reinforces the value of their hard work and of using decoding to read words. Children's reading opportunities should not be restricted to decodable texts, or those with only letter sounds they have been taught, but such texts should be a regular part of the reading diet. TextProject.org is a great resource for texts, and information about texts, that support beginning readers to learn to decode, without being as boring or unnatural as some decodable texts are.

Responsiveness

Phonics instruction must be informed by our ongoing observation and assessment of children's phonics knowledge and word-reading skills. We should respond when we notice that a child is confused, is insecure with a particular skill, or has had a major breakthrough. If we are not responsive to our students, some students are likely to be left behind in their word-reading development.

For too long, much discourse around beginning reading instruction has focused on whether to teach phonics. It is time for greater attention to how-and how not-to do so. Universally high-quality phonics instruction-that avoids common missteps-should be our collective focus.
Nell K. Duke is a professor of language, literacy, and culture, and a professor in the combined program in education and psychology, at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on early literacy development, particularly among children living in poverty. Heidi Anne E. Mesmer is a professor of literacy in the School of Education at Virginia Tech. A former third-grade teacher, her work focuses on beginning reading materials and text difficulty.
*Pseudo-words are words with letter-sound relationships that are plausible in a language but do not actually form a real word. ( back to article)

Endnotes

1. See, for example, Barbara Foorman et al., Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade, What Works Clearinghouse, NCEE 2016-4008 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2016).

2. Philip H. K. Seymour, Mikko Aro, and Jane M. Erskine, in collaboration with COST Action A8, "Foundation Literacy Acquisition in European Orthographies," British Journal of Psychology 94, no. 2 (May 2003): 143-174.

3. See, for example, Carol McDonald Connor, Frederick J. Morrison, and Leslie E. Katch, "Beyond the Reading Wars: Exploring the Effect of Child-Instruction Interactions on Growth in Early Reading," Scientific Studies of Reading 8, no. 4 (2004): 305-336.

4. See, for example, Heidi Anne E. Mesmer, Letter Lessons and First Words (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, forthcoming); Donald R. Bear et al., Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction (New York: Pearson, 2015); and Sharon Walpole and Michael C. McKenna, How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction (New York: Guilford Press, 2017).

5. Darrell Morris et al., "Developmental Steps in Learning to Read: A Longitudinal Study in Kindergarten and First Grade," Reading Research Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2003): 302-328.

6. See, for example, Laura M. Justice et al., "Print-Focused Read-Alouds in Preschool Classrooms: Intervention Effectiveness and Moderators of Child Outcomes," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 41 (2010): 504-520.

7. Shayne B. Piasta, David J. Purpura, and Richard K. Wagner, "Fostering Alphabet Knowledge Development: A Comparison of Two Instructional Approaches," Reading & Writing Quarterly 23 (2010): 607-626.

8. Heidi Anne E. Mesmer and Priscilla L. Griffith, "Everybody's Selling It-but Just What Is Explicit, Systematic Phonics Instruction?," The Reading Teacher 59, no. 4 (2005): 366-376.

9. Sebastian P. Suggate, "A Meta-Analysis of the Long-Term Effects of Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, and Reading Comprehension Interventions," Journal of Learning Disabilities 49, no. 1 (2016): 77-96.

10. Linnea C. Ehri, Eric Satlow, and Irene Gaskins, "Grapho-Phonemic Enrichment Strengthens Keyword Analogy Instruction for Struggling Young Readers," Reading & Writing Quarterly 25, no. 2-3 (2009): 162-191; and Linnea C. Ehri, "Learning to Read Words: Theory, Findings, and Issues," Scientific Studies of Reading 9, no. 2 (2005): 167-188.

11. Jennifer P. Cheatham and Jill H. Allor, "The Influence of Decodability in Early Reading Text on Reading Achievement: A Review of the Evidence," Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 25, no. 9 (2012): 2223-2246.

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The need to explicitly teach letter-sound relationships in U.S. classrooms is settled science. 1 However, too often such instruction is not provided in the most efficient or effective way. These instructional missteps mean that fewer children will develop strong word-reading skills.

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Co-Teaching and the Components of Literacy(1)

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Leveraging What We Know About Learning, Children, & Literacy

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Leveraging What We Know About Learning, Children, & Literacy

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Dr. P. David Pearson is known for his work in the areas of literacy history, literacy policy, and literacy practice. He has authored more than 300 books, articles, and chapters with almost 300 co-authors. Notably, he has written and co-edited the Handbook of Reading Research, now in its fourth edition, and his newest book, A History of Literacy Education: Waves of Research and Practice, written with Rob Tierney was recently released. He has served on the Boards for Reading Research Quarterly, Science, Journal of Literacy Research, Journal of Educational Psychology, Cognition and Instruction, Research in Teaching English, and Review of Educational Research. He has served multiple terms as editor of 3 major research publications-- Reading Research Quarterly, National Reading Conference Yearbook, and Review of Research in Education. David has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the 1989 Oscar Causey Award from the National Reading Conference (now the Literacy Research Association) for outstanding contributions to reading research and, in 1990, the William S.Gray Citation of Merit from the International Reading Association (now International Literacy Association) for his contributions to theory, research, and practice. In 1990, he was also inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame. He became a member of the National Academy of Education in 2003, and in 2004, he received the Alan Purves Award from National Council of Teachers of English for the Research in Teaching English article most likely to influence practice. In 2005, he received the Albert J. Harris Award from IRA for scholarship on reading difficulties. In 2006, the University of Minnesota honored him with the Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award, the highest non-academic award given at the University, for his contributions to educational research and practice. In 2003, he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Education and in 2009 to membership as a Fellow of the AERA. In 2010, he received the American Educational Research Association Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award. In 2012, the Literacy Research Association created the P. David Pearson Scholarly Influence Award to honor scholarship that impacts literacy practice. He has served as an advisor to the National Academy of Science, the Children's Television Workshop (now the Sesame Workshop), many school districts and state agencies, as well as educational public and private educational enterprises. He has been a reading program author for publishers such as Ginn & Co., Silver Burdett & Ginn, National Geographic, and Pearson Scott-Foresman. After graduating from University of Minnesota, completing post-doctoral studies at the University of Texas Austin and Stanford University, David has enjoyed a long career in positions as faculty member, a Dean, and Center director at four universities, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State, and University of California Berkeley. Dr. Pearson is now emeritus faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

You can follow Dr. Pearson on Twitter @PDavidPearson

Previous Classroom Caffeine guests mentioned in this episode: Peter Afflerbach and Peter Johnston

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Dr. P. David Pearson is known for his work in the areas of literacy history, literacy policy, and literacy practice. He has authored more than 300 books, articles, and chapters with almost 300 co-authors. Notably, he has written and co-edited the Handbook of Reading Research, now in its fourth edition, and his newest book, A History of Literacy Education: Waves of Research and Practice, written with Rob Tierney was recently released. He has served on the Boards for Reading Research Quarterly, Science, Journal of Literacy Research, Journal of Educational Psychology, Cognition and Instruction, Research in Teaching English, and Review of Educational Research. He has served multiple terms as editor of 3 major research publications-- Reading Research Quarterly, National Reading Conference Yearbook, and Review of Research in Education. David has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the 1989 Oscar Causey Award from the National Reading Conference (now the Literacy Research Association) for outstanding contributions to reading research and, in 1990, the William S.Gray Citation of Merit from the International Reading Association (now International Literacy Association) for his contributions to theory, research, and practice. In 1990, he was also inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame. He became a member of the National Academy of Education in 2003, and in 2004, he received the Alan Purves Award from National Council of Teachers of English for the Research in Teaching English article most likely to influence practice. In 2005, he received the Albert J. Harris Award from IRA for scholarship on reading difficulties. In 2006, the University of Minnesota honored him with the Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award, the highest non-academic award given at the University, for his contributions to educational research and practice. In 2003, he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Education and in 2009 to membership as a Fellow of the AERA. In 2010, he received the American Educational Research Association Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award. In 2012, the Literacy Research Association created the P. David Pearson Scholarly Influence Award to honor scholarship that impacts literacy practice. He has served as an advisor to the National Academy of Science, the Children's Television Workshop (now the Sesame Workshop), many school districts and state agencies, as well as educational public and private educational enterprises. He has been a reading program author for publishers such as Ginn & Co., Silver Burdett & Ginn, National Geographic, and Pearson Scott-Foresman. After graduating from University of Minnesota, completing post-doctoral studies at the University of Texas Austin and Stanford University, David has enjoyed a long career in positions as faculty member, a Dean, and Center director at four universities, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State, and University of California Berkeley. Dr. Pearson is now emeritus faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

You can follow Dr. Pearson on Twitter @PDavidPearson

Previous Classroom Caffeine guests mentioned in this episode: Peter Afflerbach and Peter Johnston

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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P. David Pearson - Classroom Caffeine ™ Podcast

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Dr. P. David Pearson is known for his work in the areas of literacy history, literacy policy, and literacy practice. He has authored more than 300 books, articles, and chapters with almost 300 co-authors.

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Don't Let Monolingual Agendas Lead Multilingual Learners p. 7 & 8

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Don't Let Monolingual Agendas Lead Multilingual Learners p. 7 & 8

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See pages 7 & 8

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LITERACY AWARDS LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The Library of Congress Best Practice Literacy Award, originated by entrepreneur and philanthropist, David M. Rubenstein, honors organizations doing exemplary, innovative, and replicable work to promote literacy across the states and around the world. Bring Me A Book is honored to share in receiving this award. We are grateful to our wonderful Board and to our generous supporters, partners, and Literacy Champions who dedicate their time, energy, and expertise to the children and families we serve.

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The Library of Congress Best Practice Literacy Award, originated by entrepreneur and philanthropist, David M. Rubenstein, honors organizations doing exemplary, innovative, and replicable work to promote literacy across the states and around the world. Bring Me A Book is honored to share in receiving this award.

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Valuing Multilingual Newcomers' Language & Literacy

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Valuing Multilingual Newcomers' Language & Literacy

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(one hour webinar)

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Valuing Multilingual Newcomers' Language & Literacy

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Why diverse children's books are important tools for teaching kids about themselves and others

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Children's books are both mirrors in which kids can feel seen and windows into worlds unlike their own. At Book Culture in Long Island City, NY, "CBS This Morning" co-host Tony Dokoupil learns why both are important.

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A Lovely Conversation

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A Lovely Conversation about Teaching Readers: What Matters Most

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CORE BELIEFS

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"Literacy has two beginnings: one, in the world, the other, in each person who learns to read and write."-Margaret Meek
This quote has continued to rewind and repeat in my mind as a more than 50-year research "war" re-emerges to declare to the educational world that science has definitely and universally revealed how all children learn to read. Yes, all children... But what the science of reading hasn't revealed is that the studies only represented "typical classroom teachers" and "typical American or English-speaking students" (National Reading Panel U.S. and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). Leaving out the details of where this research world begins, and ends, is a matter of equity and access to accurate knowledge, resources, and educational approaches that have been confirmed in their truth around the world.

It is an omission that withholds undeniable science about how dual language students learn to read in two languages and how best to teach them. More tangibly, the exclusion of key information in the science-of reading-narrative has condemned many dual language educators to an impossible ultimatum-either conform to this approach or be labeled as defiant to research-based practices. And therein lies the problem. Emergent bilinguals and dual language students learn how to read differently than monolingual, English-speaking students, and there's decades of research to prove it. So, what has research revealed about the science of reading for dual language programs that's been excluded from the reading wars?

The Reading Wars

Let's start with a quick version of what the reading wars, or the sciences of reading, are. While there are many different scientific models for how children learn to read, there are only two views that have claimed center stage in the debate. There is the simple view of reading (Gough and Tunmer, 1986; Hoover and Gough, 1990), which says that reading comprehension is the result of decoding and linguistic comprehension, or D x C = R. Then there is whole language or the three cuing view of reading (Goodman, 1967), which says that reading in English is as natural a human process as learning to speak-a process that should emphasize making meaning and expressing meaning in reading and writing.
These two views were positioned as each other's rivals, and the monolingual world was forced to choose-explicit phonics or whole language. Meanwhile, in the world of second-language acquisition and dual language (particularly in the vast majority of programs that leverage Spanish and English as partner languages), this war seemed founded on a common understanding of reading, language, learning, and teaching that was fundamentally flawed (Pennycook, 2001). Dual language programs draw from an immense body of research and system of beliefs that assume the benefit and utility of each language (DeMatthews et al., 2017) and that cannot be separated from literacy in that language, texts that reflect the cultures that speak that language, distinct pedagogies, and instructional practices that stem from an understanding of the way in which that language works.

In short, the war appeared to use language in a way that manipulated and undermined the validity of a third view of reading that has also been systematically built. It is a view of learning to read in two languages that requires meaning making and reading words, efficiency of practice, and focus on purpose, all while systematically leveraging the most useful aspects of each language. In the world of dual language, an equally substantial body of research has found that neither decoding ability nor the ability to use the three cues can exist without the other if children are to receive instruction that provides any benefit in reading in two languages while becoming proficient in both. While the evidence abounds, looking at the phonics debate alone provides more than enough.

The Science of Decoding in Dual Language

Let's take, as an example, the part of the formula for the simple view of reading that is decoding, which includes phonics and phonemic awareness.

The way we define decoding is the same in Spanish and English. Phonics is the ability to recognize and accurately match graphemes, or letters, to the phonemes, or the sounds, they make. Phonemic awareness, on the other hand, is the ability to focus on and manipulate the phonemes of a word. If students know what to do with each part of a word, they can read the whole word. As all students build confidence and competence in decoding, they begin something called orthographic mapping, which is basically the brain's muscle memory for identifying similar parts in new words. Once children understand a phonemic pattern (like the -ght in light), they use it like a map or a fingerprint to read other words with the same pattern. That pattern then gets used to read more words automatically (Kilpatrick, 2015).

But here is where the monolingual and dual language worlds diverge. English is highly irregular, which means there are many more parts to identify and manipulate. Spanish is not. In the most widely cited meta-analysis to date, the importance of the English language's orthographic structure is brought into question: "if children were taught only the 44 letter-sound correspondences, they would be able to read any word they encountered, and there would be no reading problems (Aukerman, 1981; Popp, 1975)" (National Reading Panel U.S. and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).

Why is this point critical? Well, it helps educators understand that each word part children have to decode is governed by orthography, or the structure of a language itself. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. However, as noted in the report, there are 44 possible phonemes (25 consonant correspondences and 19 possible vowel correspondences). This is because English is considered a language that is highly irregular, deep (or inconsistent), and full of pronunciation deviations. Just because students hear a sound doesn't mean that they can always predict the letter or letter combination that produced that sound, which is why explicit instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness is needed.

This instruction then must include strategies that are designed to help students learn how to manipulate, delete, blend, etc. However, this is not the case for all languages. In the case of Spanish, which is taught in the greatest number of dual language programs in the country, there is a much different orthography. There are 27 letters but only 22-24 phonemes. This is because Spanish is considered a very consistent, shallow, and ideally phonemic language, where the spelling of a word is the most transparent indicator of how to pronounce the word. What you see is what you almost always get, and if you can see it, you can say it, and then you can read it. The fact that Spanish is one of the most transparent languages in the world is the anti-reason for an equivalent length and intensity of explicit instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness. And here is where orthographic mapping re-emerges and gets really interesting. For dual language and emergent bilingual children, there isn't an actual linguistic or cognitive wall between their two languages. The two literacy and language systems dynamically flow through a corriente of linguistic resources and codes (Garcia et al., 2017). Research has shown that bilingual/biliterate students are able to use the same orthographic mapping process but with their full linguistic resources and codes within and across languages (Van Hell and Dijkstra, 2002; Dijksra et al., 1998). Program models might separate the languages of instruction, but linguistic resources and codes will continue to seek connections.

What's most interesting for Spanish-English dual language children is how few linguistic resources from the corriente are needed for decoding in Spanish, and so all those resources are redirected to play a larger role for processing words in English (Harm and Seidenberg, 2004). And this is where dual language education is uniquely situated to disrupt the reading wars. What's collectively known about learning to read while learning a language across the hundreds of languages that define and unite people is that semantic and syntactic information, better known as MSV, and decoding of words are interrelated and codependent processes. Dual language students deserve access to all research that will accelerate how they break the code, understand the code, and deposit the code into the corriente for continued use in both languages. That means that biliteracy will require linguistic comprehension and explicit phonics instruction in English for skills that are untransferable and more ambiguous (Gottlob et al., 1999).

Science-Based Recommendations

Any pedagogical recommendation should include investigating, discovering, confirming, and sharing out any and all methods, strategies, or "approaches that have been found, through research, to give kids a learning advantage in reading" (Shanahan, T., 2018). This requires shared responsibility between dual language and literacy departments to scrutinize research's limitations (Kubotra, 2004), collective inquiry into and understanding of the science behind program models, and implementation of language-specific reading processes that may be different but no less valid. Through this collective inquiry, programs can focus resources and energies to create:

A coherent definition of biliteracy (not literacy) that balances analytical and synthetic methods and aligns to the three goals;

Shared responsibility and knowledge of research-confirmed methods, strategies, and approaches that are accurately matched to each program language;

Authentic and systematic processes for assessing, monitoring, and supporting a language-specific sequence of skills;

Collaboration and focus on actionable steps informed by valid assessments;

Texts, tools, and talk that are authentic, identity affirming, motivating to students, and allow the application of reading skills when it matters most-in the act of reading.

In short, it goes back to what Margaret Meek says. Developing biliteracy really does have two beginnings, one designed for the typical classroom and another designed to be so much more-designed to give dual language learners access to the promise of dual language education itself. So, there can be no reading war for dual language educators. The only way to attain biliteracy and bilingualism is to leave the typical formula for reading as decoding and linguistic comprehension, or D x C = R, for the formula for developing biliteracy as oracy + decoding + linguistic comprehension + transfer, or O x C x D x T = R2.

References available at www.languagemagazine.com/references-the-science-of-reading-in-dual-language.

Alexandra Guilamo is a dual language expert, author, keynote speaker, and chief equity and achievement officer at TaJu Educational Solutions, a company dedicated to professional development, coaching, and technical support for dual language and bilingual programs.
Visit www.tajulearning.com or follow Alexandra @TajuLearning on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram

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The Science of Reading in Dual Language - Language Magazine

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"Literacy has two beginnings: one, in the world, the other, in each person who learns to read and write."-Margaret MeekThis quote has continued to rewind and repeat in my mind as a more than 50-year research "war" re-emerges to declare to the educational world that science has definitely and universally revealed how all children learn [...]

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What Does Research Say About Teaching ELs to Read

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What Does Research Say About Teaching ELs to Read

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August, D., & Shanahan, T. (Eds.). (2006). Executive summary. Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Available at: http://www.cal.org/natl-lit-panel/reports/Executive_Summary.pdf

August, D., & Shanahan, T. (Eds.). (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Collier, R., ∓ Thomas, W. P. (1997). School effectiveness for language minority students. Resource Collection Series #9. Washington, DC: National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education.

The Education Alliance at Brown University. (n.d.). The knowledge loom: Spotlight on elementary literacy. Available at http://knowledgeloom.org/elemlit/index.jsp

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. (NIH Pub. No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Available at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/smallbook.cfm

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What Does Research Tell Us About Teaching Reading to English Language Learners?

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In this article, a seasoned ELL teacher synthesizes her own classroom experience and the findings of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth to make recommendations for effective literacy instruction of ELL students.

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Shared Writing

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Shared Writing Cooperative Strip Paragraph

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Podcast with Tan

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In this episode, @ValentinaESL shares strategies to make reading and writing workshop a successful learning experience for language learners. This model of literacy instruction is loved by many educators, and Valentina will share how language learners can learn in this model as well.
To read her blog post on the workshop model, use this link (https://www.empoweringells.com/ell-workshop/)
To purchase her book on the workshop model, use this link (https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-English-Learners-Framework/dp/1732194874)
To learn more about one of Tan's courses, go to https://www.empoweringells.com/courses/You can connect with Tan on Twitter at @TanKHuynh

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ep 44. valentina gonzalez -implementing reading & writing workshop for language learners

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‎Empowering LLs: Ep 44. Valentina Gonzalez -Implementing reading & writing workshop for language learners on Apple Podcasts

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‎In this episode, @ValentinaESL shares strategies to make reading and writing workshop a successful learning experience for language learners. This model of literacy instruction is loved by many educators, and Valentina will share how language learners can learn in this model as well. To read her bl...

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podcast

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Ep 53. Dr. Melinda Miller - Making reading workshop work

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@DrMelindaMiller shares how we can make reading workshop effective for language learners. This was such a wonderful conversation. To learn more about one of Tan's courses, go to https://www.empoweringells.com/courses/. You can connect with Tan on Twitter a...

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podcast

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This podcast is for teachers who are passionate about working with multilingual learners. Some links are Amazon Affiliate links. The podcast receives a tiny commission at no expense to buyers.

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Ep 54. Dr. Melinda Miller - Working on Writing Workshop | Teaching MLs

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Dr. Melinda Miller (@DrMelindaMiller) returns to the podcast. This time, she'll talk about writing workshop and language learners. She's amazing! To learn more about one of Tan's courses, go to https://www.empoweringells.com/courses/. You can connect with Tan on Twitter at @TanKHuynh https://twitter.com/tankhuynh

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podcast

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Ep 55. Regie Routman - Guiding learning through guided reading

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A literacy legend, Regie Routman (@regieroutman), shares her take on guided reading and authentic literacy instruction. To learn more about one of Tan's courses, go to https://www.empoweringells.com/courses/. You can connect with Tan on Twitter at @TanKHuy...

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with Dr. Stephen Fleenor

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English Language Learners

A look at what English learners need in order to develop the skills and motivation to improve their ability to read in English.

ZUMA Press Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

English learners (ELs) are the fastest growing group of students in the United States, and the NEA expects that by the year 2025, roughly one fourth of our students will be ELs. These students bring a rich diversity into our classrooms-they represent over 400 languages. With this beautiful diversity comes a need for educators to understand language acquisition and linguistic differences and similarities.

Because English learners are far from monolithic, it's dangerous to paint them with one brush, especially when it comes to teaching reading. It is critical that we consider students first, before considering content. It's also important that language acquisition be addressed in balance with reading instruction. All states have language standards to support linguistic development.

ELs may not have had the same opportunities with English as native English speakers, but they have other experiences with language, including speaking and hearing another language since birth. And in addition to language, students enter classrooms with backgrounds and experiences that influence their ability to read.

Additional factors come into play when teaching reading to English learners. If a child has already "cracked the code" in their first language (L1)-so that they understand the connections between sounds and symbols-reading instruction will differ from that of a child who has not yet cracked the code in their L1. Some factors to consider include:

the student's first language proficiency (listening, speaking, reading, and writing),

the student's current English language proficiency,

the student's background knowledge and opportunities,

the student's access to language at home, and

similarities and differences between the student's first language and English (cognates and written features).

The primary grades are traditionally highly language-rich environments. Many students, no matter their language experience, are emergent readers and writers. At this very early stage of school, phonemic awareness and phonics should be explicitly and systematically taught to all learners. This helps students learn to crack the code. Since reading is not a natural experience, students must be taught to lift letters off the page, turn them into sounds, connect sounds, and make words.

Decoding, however, is only one aspect of reading-another is comprehension. ELs who already read in their L1 can transfer knowledge and skills they've learned to acquiring English. Some may also benefit from individualized, explicit phonics instruction. For example, a third-grade newcomer EL from Venezuela may need additional support with English letters and sounds that are nonexistent in Spanish. Formatively assessing students' first language reading by listening to them read in their L1, asking them questions about their reading life, and/or talking to caregivers about their reading experiences will help teachers make instructional decisions.

There is much we can learn from observing a child read in their primary language even if we don't speak or understand the language. The simple act of sitting side-by-side with a student and observing them with a book in their language allows us to see how they interact with text, and we can listen for expression and watch for visual clues of engagement or excitement.

What Do ELs need?

ELs need high quality tier one reading instruction. Here are some characteristics of tier one reading instruction that is designed to meet ELs' cognitive, affective, and linguistic needs.

Cognitive needs: Instruction provides ELs with access to grade-level state standards with the support of second language acquisition methods. Teachers can set high expectations for ELs while providing them with supports such as:

Native language resources,

Visuals and gestures,

Opportunities to listen and speak with peers,

Sentence stems for speaking and writing, and

Content and language objectives.

Affective needs: Instruction supports ELs' confidence, self-assurance, positive identity, and self-efficacy as readers. Teachers can provide a safe environment for reading that follows a gradual release of responsibility and represents all learners by:

Building a strong classroom community,

Fostering a love of literacy,

Allowing and encouraging reading in L1, and

Providing books that represent students' experiences.

Linguistic needs: Instruction supports ELs' English proficiency and bridges or leverages students' first language and uses English Language Proficiency Standards and grade level state standards to guide students to reach literacy goals for listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

This work is not the sole responsibility of the English as a second language teacher but rather a collaborative effort by all stakeholders.

3 Ways Teachers Can Help Motivate ELs as Readers

Motivation to read is built by creating environments where students want to pick up books and then don't want to put them down. Here are three ways teachers can create conditions to motivate ELs as readers.

1. Provide books that represent students: Rudine Sims Bishop wrote about the importance of seeing ourselves and learning about the world and others in books we read. Providing rich bookshelves with selections that represent students and their experiences can help students feel connected, build community, and motivate students to turn the pages.

2. Factor in student choice and interest in reading materials: Readers are more apt to read and understand a book they find interesting than one they don't. They bring their own experiences and background knowledge to the text. By removing limits, such as letting ELs read books in their primary language, we leverage their assets and increase engagement and reading growth.

3. Increase student talk and interaction: By definition, ELs are acquiring English. They benefit from multiple opportunities to listen, speak, read, and write in English. Saving space for students to talk about the books they are reading is an excellent way to help them think about their reading and comprehension.

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An Asset-Based Approach to Supporting English Learners' Reading Skills

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English Language Learners A look at what English learners need in order to develop the skills and motivation to improve their ability to read in English. ZUMA Press Inc / Alamy Stock Photo English learners (ELs) are the fastest growing group of students in the United States, and the NEA expects that by the year 2025, roughly one fourth of our students will be ELs.

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Research indicates a strong relationship between early phoneme awareness and later reading success, and it links some reading failure to insufficiently developed phoneme awareness skills. Intervention research clearly demonstrates the benefits of explicitly teaching phoneme awareness skills.

Many children at risk for reading failure are in general education classrooms where phoneme awareness training is not part of their reading program. This article presents a set of developmental phoneme awareness training activities that the special educator can integrate collaboratively into existing kindergarten and first-grade reading programs.

Instructional considerations

Before preparing to conduct phoneme awareness activities in a general education setting, the special educator needs to become familiar with the method being used to teach reading and should observe the class in action.

Most of the phoneme awareness activities should not take more than 15 or 20 minutes to complete and should fit the context of the classroom. Although a particular activity can be selected well in advance, the specific words targeted for phoneme awareness should be selected from material used actively in the class, such as a story or picture book that was just read and discussed, the immediate environment, words fitting a thematic unit being taught, or discussions about a field trip.

Phoneme awareness activities work well in classrooms where teachers implement shared reading. Typically, after previewing the text with the class, the teacher reads aloud a large-print text on a chart or in a big book, the teacher and children read the selection together, and then students complete individual activities related to the selection (Holdaway, 1979). Phoneme awareness activities are a natural extension of the shared reading activities.

To be successful, however, the general educator and special educator must plan ahead for sharing time, space, and teaching together in a collaborative effort. The benefits for the children far outweigh any disadvantages for the teachers. The willingness of the special educator to fit the activities to the contexts of the classroom can help diminish any existing reluctance a general education teacher might have toward phoneme awareness training.

Specific guidelines

Teachers need to be aware of the developmental requirements of phoneme awareness activities. For example, when teaching children to partition words into parts, segmenting a compound word into its two parts ("What two words do you hear in cowboy?") precedes segmenting syllables and sounds.

Similarly, identification tasks ("Which one doesn't rhyme - cat, hat, sun?") are generally easier than production tasks ("Tell me the first sound in car"). The difficulty level of most activities can be manipulated by changing the input or response modes. For example, "Find the picture that starts with /r/" will be easier than "What sounds do you hear in robe?" A set of guidelines to keep in mind when planning instructional activities is provided below.

Instructional Guidelines for Planning Phoneme Awareness Activities

Identify the precise phoneme awareness task on which you wish to focus and select developmentally appropriate activities for engaging children in the task. Activities should be fun and exciting - "play" with sounds, don't "drill" them.

Be sure to use phoneme sounds (represented by / /) and not letter names when doing the activities. Likewise, remember that one sound may be represented by two or more letters. There are only three sounds in the word cheese: /ch/-/ee/-/z/. You may want to target specific sounds/words at first and "practice" beforehand until you are comfortable making them.

Continuant sounds (e.g., /m/, /s/, /i/) are easier to manipulate and hear than stop sounds (e.g., /t/, /q/, /p/ /b/). When introducing continuants, exaggerate by holding on to them: rrrrrring. With stop sounds, just pronounce the short "pure" consonant sound one time and without the "uh" sound added at the end, to ensure accurate blending. For example, /b/ should not be pronounced "buh".

When identifying sounds in different positions, the initial position is easiest, followed by the final position, with the medial position being most difficult (e.g., top, pot, setter).

When identifying or combining sound sequences, a CV pattern should be used before a VC pattern, followed by a CVC pattern (e.g., pie, egg, red).*

*Note: CV = consonant-vowel; VC = vowel-consonant; CVC = consonant-vowel-consonant

Awareness of onset and rime

Phonograms are the common elements in word families (e.g., the letter sequence "and" in sand, hand, band, and land). The initial consonant that changes the meaning of the word is called an onset and the following vowel/consonant combination that remains constant is called a rime. Because an awareness of syllables, onsets, and rimes develops before an awareness of phonemes (Goswami, 1994, p. 36), the first set of suggestions focuses on ways to expose children to word play.

Literature

A natural and spontaneous way of providing children with exposure to phonemes is to focus on literature that deals playfully with speech sounds through rhymes. Simple rhyme patterns are easily recalled after repeated exposure, and children will get the idea of creating new rhymes.

In There's a Wocket in My Pocket (Seuss, 1974), initial sounds of everyday objects are substituted as a child talks about the strange creatures around the house, such as the "zamp in the lamp." Children can make up their own strange creatures in the classroom such as the "zuk in my book."

Alliteration is the repetition of an initial consonant sound across several words, such as presented in the alphabet book Faint Frogs Feeling Feverish and Other Terrifically Tantalizing Tongue Twisters (Obligato, 1983).

Assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds within words, is often combined with rhyme, as in "It rains and hails and shakes the sails" from Sheep on a Ship (Shaw, 1989) or in humorous ways such as "The tooter tries to tutor two tooters to toot" in Moses Supposes His Toeses Are Roses (Patz, 1983). Some books include music to go with the rhymes, such as Down by the Bay (Raffi, 1987), in which two children try to outdo one another in making up questions that rhyme, such as "Did you ever see a goose kissing a moose?"

Yopp (1995) presented an annotated bibliography of 44 books for young children that deal playfully with language. She also provided guidelines for using these books in class:

read and reread the stories;

comment on the language use;

encourage predictions of sound, word, and sentence patterns;

comment on or elicit specific aspects of sound patterns (e.g., "What sound do you hear at the beginning of all those words?"); and

be creative in inventing new versions of the language patterns utilized in the stories.

Word families chart

The exposure to rhymes leads naturally to the use of phonograms and the creation of word family charts. Charts can contain words from one story or a brain-stormed list from the children.

A story that leads naturally to a word family chart is Tog the Dog (Hawkins & Hawkins, 1986), which is constructed so that as each page is turned, a different letter lines up with the rime "og." For example, when Tog takes a jog, the letter "j" lines up with the "og." The children can dictate to the teacher words to be placed on a word family chart. As they begin to develop letter/sound knowledge, they can copy or write the words themselves.

You can use magnetic letters to "create" words for a word family chart. Provide a rime of plastic letters (e.g., at) and have the children take turns placing different letters in the onset position to create new words (e.g., hat, bat, sat, rat). These charts can be used as reference charts (or the children can make their own word families reference book) for spelling and creative writing activities.

Direct instruction

Children who are struggling with recognizing and creating rhymed words may need more direct intervention. Initial rhyme recognition can be reinforced by direct modeling of instances ( nose/ rose) and non-instances ( bed/ car) of rhyming word pairs. The children are then presented other word pairs and asked if the two words sound the same or sound different.

This can be made into a game-like activity by having them respond with a "happy face" card if the words rhyme and a "sad face" card if they don't (or they can use a "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" response). It is important for the teacher to ask a child to repeat the rhyming pairs in this and the following activities to reinforce the verbal production of rhymed words.

Pictures provide visual cues for rhyme recognition and can be used during the modeling phase of instruction. The teacher can then present three pictures and ask the child to select and say the two that rhyme. A variation would be to display two nonrhyming pictures and have the child select the one that rhymes with the word being said by the teacher.

Bradley and Bryant (1983) used an activity called "Odd Word Out," which can be done with or without pictures. Four words, three of which rhyme, are presented by the teacher (e.g., weed, bead, pill, seed). The child determines which word is the odd one that doesn't belong with the others.

The game of concentration or memory is a good practice activity for rhyme recognition. Separate pictures (not printed words) of rhyming word pairs (e.g., cat/ bat) are shuffled, and all are placed facedown in a grid pattern. The children take turns turning two cards face-up, trying to match a rhyme pair. If a match is made, the child keeps that pair and takes another turn. If not, the cards are turned facedown and the next child gets a turn.

A summary of activities to heighten awareness of onset and rhyme is offered in the table below.
Awareness of Onset and Rime
Simple phonemic awareness

Isolated sound recognition

As stated by Lewkowicz (1980), "Children should be familiarized with speech sounds in isolation before they attempt to detect sounds within words" (p. 694). Because children are usually unaware that words are made up of individual speech sounds that can be produced in isolation, it is up to the teacher to provide children with a concept of speech sounds.

This is probably best done by associating phonemes with a creature, an action, or an object that is familiar to the child. For example, the phoneme /s/ can be associated with the hissing sound a snake makes - sssssss. A sound personality can be created by calling /s/ the "Sammy snake" sound. Many sounds have natural associations, such as a crowing rooster for /r/, a buzzing bee for /z/, and the "be quiet" sound for /sh/.

Figure 1. An example of pictures of sound personalities incorporating letter-shape association.

Sound personalities can be introduced naturally and in context by selecting a particular sound to talk about that is stressed in alphabet or other books that use alliteration. For example, Obligato (1983) presented "smiling snakes sipping strawberry sodas" for the alphabet letter S. It is helpful to create or provide pictures that represent these sound personalities and to post them in the room as each is introduced. A natural connection can sometimes be made between the sound and the letter, such as presenting a picture of "Sammy snake" drawn in the shape of the letter S or "Buzzy bee" flying in a pattern of the letter Z (see Figure 1).

Besides providing a label to facilitate talking about sounds, the pictures provide self-correcting cues for children engaged in initial sound isolation and sound-to-word matching activities.

Word, syllable, and phoneme counting

Because words and syllables are more salient and more directly perceivable than individual phonemes, activities that involve counting the number of words in a sentence or syllables in a word can be used as initial steps leading to isolated phoneme synthesis and segmentation (Lundberg, Frost, & Peterson, 1988).

Word counting can be done for any sentence selected from a reading or writing lesson. The sentence should be read to the children without being visible. The children listen and place a marker from left to right for each word heard. The teacher can confirm the number of words by showing the printed sentence to the children, pointing to each word as it is read, and having the children touch their tokens in one-to-one correspondence. Or the teacher can reinforce the children's "counting" using auditory input only by repeating the sentence and having them touch each token to confirm the number of words heard.

To count syllables in words, activities can be used such as clapping hands, tapping the desk, or marching in place to the syllables in children's names ( Ma- ry), items in the immediate environment ( win- dow), or words from a favorite story ( wi- shy, wa- shy). Initially, two-syllable words can be targeted, building up to three. Visible, manipulable representation of sounds also helps to clarify and guide counting and segmentation tasks for beginners (Lewkowicz, 1980).

The marker activity used for word counting can be adapted for use in counting syllables by providing each child with two or three horizontally connected boxes drawn on a sheet of paper. The children place a token in each box from left to right as they hear each syllable in a word. These same activities can be used to count sounds in words.

Sound synthesis

Sound synthesis or sound blending is an essential skill related to later reading ability (Lewkowicz, 1980; Lundberg et al., 1988; Wagner, Torgeson, Laughon, Simmons, & Bashotte, 1993) and one of the easiest phoneme awareness tasks for children to perform (Yopp, 1988).

Sound synthesis can be done using the following sequence: blending an initial sound onto the remainder of a word, followed by blending syllables of a word together, and then blending isolated phonemes into a word.

The teacher can model blending an initial sound onto a word by using the jingle, "It starts with /l/ and it ends with ight, put it together, and it says light." When they have the idea, the children supply the final word.

An element of excitement can be created by using children's names for this activity and asking each child to recognize and say his or her own name when it is presented - "It starts with /b/ and it ends with etsy, put it together and it says ." Context can be provided by limiting the words to objects that can be seen in the room or to words from a particular story the children just read. As the children become proficient, they can take turns using the jingle to present their own words to be blended by the class.

Guessing games that utilize words broken into syllables or isolated phonemes provide fun sound blending activities.

One involves using a puppet (perhaps representing a character from a current reading lesson) who speaks "funny" by saying words syllable-by-syllable or sound-by-sound for the children to figure out. Initial clues can be provided by displaying three pictures, one of which is the word being said by the puppet. The puppet can confirm or negate a student response by picking up the picture and saying the word being segmented: "/f/-/i/-/sh/ - I said fish!"

Another is the familiar "What's in the bag?" activity. Instead of describing what is in the bag, the teacher says the word syllable-by-syllable or sound-by-sound and the children guess the word. A correct response is confirmed when the teacher brings the object out of the bag.

Yopp (1992) suggested the use of song games and presented an example to the tune of "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands":

If you think you know this word, shout it out!
If you think you know this word, shout it out!
If you think you know this word,
Then tell me what you've heard,
If you think you know this word, shout it out!

The teacher says a segmented word such as /k/-/a/-/t/, and the children respond by saying the blended word (pp. 700-701).

Sound-to-word matching

Sound-to-word matching is useful as a beginning step in sound segmentation. Basically, sound-to-word matching requires that the child identify the beginning sound of a word.

Awareness of the initial sound in a word can be done by showing the children a picture (dog) and asking the children to identify the correct word out of three: "Is this a /mmm/- og, a /d/d/d/- og, or a /sss/- og?" A variation is to ask if the word has a particular sound: "Is there a /d/ in dog?" This can then be switched to "Which sound does dog start with - /d/, /sh/, or /l/?" This sequence encourages the children to try out the three onsets with the rime to see which one is correct.

It is easiest to use continuants that can be exaggerated and prolonged to heighten the sound input. Iteration should be used with stop consonants to add emphasis.

Yopp (1992) also suggested the use of songs in sound matching activities. One of several examples she presented uses the tune of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm":

What's the sound that starts these words?
Turtle, time, and teeth.
(Wait for a response from the children.)
/t/ is the sound that starts these words:
Turtle, time, and teeth.
With a /t/, /t/ here, and a /t/, /t/ there,
Here a /t/, there a /t/, everywhere a /t/, /t/.
/t/ is the sound that starts these words:
Turtle, time, and teeth! (p. 700)

The children might use favorite stories from their reading lessons to identify different sets of three words that start with the same sound to incorporate into the song. Each repeated verse could then emphasize a different sound. The teacher again is cautioned to use the phoneme sounds, not the letter names for these activities.

Identification of sound positions

Establishing that sounds occur in different positions of words - initial, final, and medial - helps some children with the later task of segmenting whole words into isolated sound components.

One method of representing sound positions is to display a picture of a train composed of an engine, a passenger car, and a caboose. Three connecting boxes can be drawn under each component: one under the engine, connected to one under the passenger car, connected to the one under the caboose (use poster board and laminate). Explain that words have beginning, middle, and end sounds just like the train has a beginning, a middle, and an end part.

Demonstrate by slowly articulating a CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant word (e.g., /p/-/i/-/g/) and pointing to the box corresponding to the position of each sound in the word. You can then repeat the word and ask the children to identify where they hear the different sounds - "Where do you hear the /g/ in pig?" Slowly articulate other CVC words for them to listen to and have them mark the box under the train that indicates the position of the sound you specify.

Sound segmentation

Segmenting refers to the act of isolating the sounds in a spoken word by separately pronouncing each one in order (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Spector, 1992; Wagner et al., 1993).

Yopp (1988) stated that segmenting the sounds in a word is one of the more difficult simple phonemic tasks for children to perform. Lewkowicz (1980) and Yopp (1992) suggested starting with isolated productions of initial phonemes as a precursor to segmenting entire words. The previous sound-to-word matching and identification of position activities help in early recognition and practice with initial phonemes.

Figure 2. An example of Elkonin boxes used for hearing sounds in words.

Several researchers (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Griffith & Olson, 1992; Lewkowicz, 1980) have used visual and tactile cues based on Elkonin boxes (Elkonin, 1973) to help with phoneme segmentation. A card is prepared with a picture of a simple word at the top. Below the picture is a matrix that contains a box for each phoneme (not letter) in the word (see Figure 2).

The teacher models the process by slowing articulating the word phoneme-by-phoneme while pushing a counter into a box for each phoneme. The children can say the word with the teacher while the counters are being placed. Gradually the children should participate in this "say it and move it" (Ball & Blachman, 1991) activity by taking turns placing the counters in each box while saying each sound in a word. Both the matrix and picture can be eliminated over time so that the children are segmenting the word without visual clues.

Words should be selected from familiar text to ensure a whole-to-part sequence of instruction and to provide the children with contextual cues that link word segmentation to everyday classroom lessons.

Letter-sound association

Many researchers (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Byrne & Field- Barnsley, 1993; Hurford et al., 1994; Iversen & Tunmer, 1993) have demonstrated the advantage of combining phoneme awareness with letter knowledge in a classroom setting. As stated by Griffith and Olson (1992), "The most pedagogically sound method of phoneme awareness training is one that eventually makes explicit the complete letter-to-sound mappings in segmented words" (p. 518).

All phoneme awareness activities that use tokens or other visual representations of sounds can be modified to include letter- sound associations. As individual sounds are mastered by the children, their corresponding letter names can be introduced and placed on the tokens (magnetic letters or Scrabble tiles can be used) and gradually introduced into the segmentation activities.

At first, only one letter or tile should be provided, and the remainder should be blank. After the child has successfully segmented with one letter or tile, others can be added as new letter names are mastered.

To reinforce letter names, Blachman (1991) played "post office" - the children select a picture, say the initial sound of the picture, and identify the letter represented by the first sound by "mailing" it in the appropriate letter pouch.

A modified game of bingo can provide practice in sound-letter association. The desired letters to be emphasized are selected, starting with two or three, and adding more as the children progress. The letters are printed in random order on cards that have 4-by-4 or 5-by-5 grids drawn on them, one card for each child.

The teacher draws from a container letter tiles matching those on the children's cards. The teacher says the phoneme for the letter drawn from the container (replacing it each time) and asks the children to identify the letter corresponding to the phoneme by placing a marker in the appropriate box on their cards. Any child who fills a row or column can then name the letters aloud.

The practice of invented spelling in a classroom can also be used to make explicit connections between sound segments and letters. Children select words they wish to write but don't know how to spell.

A box is drawn for each sound in the word (remember that one sound may be represented by two or more letters - the word shoes, for example, has only three phonemes, /sh/-/oo/-/z/). A child can fill in the letters he or she hears and knows with the teacher's help. The teacher can fill in any letters the child does not know.

A summary of activities for enhancing simple phonemic awareness is presented in the table below.
Simple Phonemic Awareness

Targeted Skill

Example

Isolated sound recognition

Sammy snake sound says... (/s/)

Word/syllable/phoneme counting

How many (words/syllables/sounds) do you hear in this (sentence/word)?

Sound synthesis

It starts with /l/ and ends with ight, put it together and it says... ( light)
What word am I saying?
Put these sounds together to make a word - /f/-/i/-/sh/.

Compound phonemic awareness

Word-to-word matching

Compound phonemic awareness requires holding a given sound in memory while performing a second operation such as determining whether two words begin with the same sound in a word-to-word matching task (e.g., "Do cup and cake begin the same?"; Yopp, 1988). Byrne (1991) offered several games for practicing word-to-word matching.

Make a set of dominoes that have two pictured objects on each card. The children are required to join cards sharing beginning (or ending) sounds.

A version of "snap" uses cards having one picture. The children take turns drawing a card from a face-down pile and placing it in a face-up pile. When a newly drawn card has the same beginning (or end) sound as the top card in the face-up pile, the first child to identify the match by saying "snap" collects the pile.

Sound bingo uses bingo cards with pictures that children mark if one of their pictures has the same beginning (or end) sound as the word said by the caller.

Each of these games can be related to other classroom activities by having the children make their own dominoes, snap cards, and bingo cards using pictures cut from catalogs or magazines, or hand drawn and laminated. The pictures selected by the children can represent things related to the literature and themes being covered in class.

Sound deletion

Because sound deletion tasks require manipulation of phonemes in words, they are considered to be more difficult than other types of phoneme awareness tasks.

Cole and Mengler (1994) stated that it is not until a mental age of approximately 7 years that children are able to perform phoneme deletion tasks adequately. Lewkowicz (1980) suggested that sound deletion activities be done after the children exhibit some skill in segmentation and after letter names have been introduced. Because phoneme deletion of medial consonants puts an undue burden on young children's memory, sound deletion should target only initial or final sounds in words.

To introduce the idea of deleting parts of a word, the teacher can show pictures or point to objects in the room that are compound words and demonstrate how each word can be said with a part missing. For example, "This is a seesaw. If I say seesaw without the see, it says saw (give other examples). Now you try it. This is a hotdog. Say hotdog without the dog." An element of fun can be introduced by making it a "Simon says" activity: "Simon says, 'say bookmark without the book.'"

Identification of a missing sound can be accomplished through a "What's missing?" guessing game. The teacher says two words for comparison and asks the children to identify the missing element: "Listen: eat/ meat. What's missing in eat that you can hear in meat?"

Final position deletions can be done in the same way (e.g., "What's missing in play that you can hear in plane?"). The children can be encouraged to make up their own "What's missing?" words for the initial position by referring to the phonograms on the word families charts: "What's missing in an that you can hear in pan ( man, ran, can)."

Identifying the missing element using phonograms tends to be easier than using unrelated words because the initial consonant determines the meaning of the word for the child and the rime remains constant.

The actual task of deleting a sound from a word can be made easier by building on earlier segmentation practice, playing a game of "sound take-away." The teacher models how to orally segment a word into the "target" sound plus "everything else" and then take the target sound away.

A modified version of the sound blending jingle can be used: " Chair. It starts with /ch/ and it ends with air; take the first sound away, and it says air." The jingle can be used until the children can delete sounds with a simple prompt: "Say ball without the /b/." A sound deletion that results in a "real" word such as deer becoming ear or card becoming car is easier than one resulting in a "nonsense" word such as book becoming ook or sun becoming su (although some children enjoy making "alien" or funny words).

Children who have difficulty with deleting sounds might benefit from visual clues. By placing two colored blocks side-by-side, the teacher can designate one as representing the target sound and the other as representing the remainder of the word: "I'm going to use these blocks to say moon. This (red block) says moo and this (yellow block) says /n/." The child is then asked what the first block says when the second block is removed.

A summary of compound phonemic awareness activities is given in the table below.
Compound Phonemic Awareness
Conclusion

Research has demonstrated not only a predictive relationship between phoneme awareness and reading success, but also a causal relationship. Phoneme awareness that has a positive impact on reading can be developed in children through systematic instruction in kindergarten and first-grade settings. Early training in phoneme awareness should be a priority for those interested in improving early reading instruction and in reducing reading failure.

General and special educators should be supported in their efforts to collaborate on incorporating phoneme awareness activities into kindergarten and first-grade classrooms.

These activities are not intended to replace children's interactions with meaningful language and print, but to be incorporated into classrooms as part of a language-rich environment. Reading aloud, using big books and predictable books, developing language experience charts, and using other language-oriented practices give children valuable reading experiences.

However, by supplementing these experiences with related phoneme awareness activities, general and special educators can draw children's attention to a critical aspect of their language - its phonemic base.

It takes only a few minutes a day to integrate activities that emphasize the sounds of language into the rich, oral language environments we are creating for our children. Those few minutes can result in a lifetime of reading benefits to children who otherwise might not learn to read.

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How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities

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Research indicates a strong relationship between early phoneme awareness and later reading success, and it links some reading failure to insufficiently developed phoneme awareness skills. Intervention research clearly demonstrates the benefits of explicitly teaching phoneme awareness skills. Many children at risk for reading failure are in general education classrooms where phoneme awareness training is not part of their reading program.

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by Valentina Gonzalez, coauthor of Reading and Writing for English Learners

Learning to read is one of the first things that comes to mind when we think of school and education. Reading is critical and necessary for all content areas and remains critical for success after the school years. Reading allows us to continue to grow our knowledge base, increase our vocabulary, become stronger writers, speak more eloquently, and so much more. But how exactly do we build the foundations for our students to become strong readers?

In reality, the forming of reading foundations begins long before students walk into our classrooms. Think back on how you developed literacy. Before you learn to read, you learn to speak. Before you learn to speak, you make sounds. You communicate. You learn to listen with comprehension. As young children, our oral fluency is greater than our reading ability. But at some point, there's a shift. At first, it's oral proficiency that strengthens reading achievement; later it swings the other way, and it's reading that begins to promote better speaking ability (Goldenberg & Coleman, 2010).

Students joining a class in their native language come having already acquired oracy in that language. A student joining a class not in their native language usually does not have the same acquired oracy; native English speakers who have heard and spoken English for years will have acquired oracy in English, whereas a student whose native language is Vietnamese, for example, may not have those same English language experiences, but she does have oracy in Vietnamese. This difference should not be seen as a negative. In Literacy Development with English Learners (2016), Lori Helman reminds us that "Emergent bilinguals also have a language foundation on which to grow their literacy: their home language" (p. 141) Our EL students are not entering our classrooms with blank oracy slates. Their slates are merely filled with different experiences. Adding English oracy to those slates requires time and scaffolds, particularly as our ELs are learning to speak and listen in a new language in addition to learning to read and write in it.

What If a Student Can Already Read in Their First Language?

English learners are not all the same. As all teachers know, each child is unique, so it's important to know them well beyond what is found in their permanent record folder. The better we know our students, the better we can help them accelerate their language development. Some will come to our classrooms fully literate in their first language, while others will not. Some will be able to speak in their first language but lack the ability to read or write in it. Others will join our classrooms with little experience in first language literacy. No matter the circumstance, we can leverage what they bring to the table. Our first step is simply knowing what they bring.

Students who can already read in their first language have already discovered the letter-sound relationship. They understand that sounds make words, and they know how to connect sounds to build words. They can decode. "EL students who bring literacy skills from a first language to English reading learn to read more quickly and easily than do students without native-language literacy" (Genesse et al., as cited in Helman, 2016, p. 5).

Let's leverage students' first languages! Literacy in any language is a stepping stone to literacy in a new language. Learning to read in a second language includes some of the same processes as learning to read in a first language. In other words, if a student can read in L1 (first language), many of the skills they have are transferable. One way we can facilitate transfer of literacy skills is to encourage reading and writing in L1 at home and at school. We can listen to students read in L1 even if we can't understand the language. We can still learn a lot about the reader's habits by observing their reading behaviors.

A Focus on Foundations

In 1997, Congress convened the National Reading Panel (NRP) to review existing research on reading. The NRP was asked to determine the effectiveness of different approaches. Although not without controversy, the major findings of the National Reading Panel have stood the test of time. The NRP focused on these five areas: phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Let's take a closer look at each one.

Phonemic Awareness

"Phonemic awarenessis the ability to focus on and manipulate the phonemes (sounds) within words" (Cárdenas-Hagan, p. 33). English has some sounds that other languages do not, and that offers a challenge to some ELs, especially newcomer students. For example, my parents still struggle with the "th" sound and vowels, likely because in Serbian there isn't a "th" sound. Another difference between Serbian and English is that, in Serbian, vowels only make one sound whereas in English, vowels can make many different sounds. When we work with ELs, it helps to consider how similar their native language is to English. If the language is more similar, it might be easier for the ELs to acquire English. If the language is very different, it could be more difficult (Helman, 2016).

One way to model for and guide students in acquiring phonemic awareness in our language-rich classrooms is through Write-Alouds and Shared Writing. Both of these techniques help make foundational literacy visible to English learners within authentic learning rather than through isolation. In our book Reading & Writing with English Learners, Dr. Miller and I write that "shared writing is especially helpful for English learners and struggling readers, as it helps students hear and see words as they are written" (p. 100).

Phonics

No matter how old ELs are when they begin learning English, phonics will be an important facet to their reading success. Earlier learners will receive phonics instruction in their classroom alongside grade level peers. Older ELs (such as newcomers in grades 3-12) may need targeted phonics instruction as well.

Phonics that is purposeful, interactive, hands-on, and engaging is most effective for learners. In Appendix I of Reading & Writing with English Learners, we share several ways to incorporate phonics into authentic lessons. "Phonics is not an end in itself; it's a tool to help students access print in meaningful ways in their world" (Helman, 2016, p. 176).

In order to decode, readers must have a grasp of letter-sound correspondence. This skill is critical for early readers but continues to be important even for proficient readers. Think of a time recently when you read something, perhaps a news article, instructions, or a legal document, and you came to a word you weren't familiar with. What did you do? How did you tackle the word? Likely you sounded it out using what you remember about letters, sounds, blends, chunks, and patterns. Then if you hadn't heard the word before, you tried to gather context clues to figure out the meaning, because reading is not simply decoding. Adding comprehension turns decoding into reading.

Oral Reading Fluency

Oral reading fluency can be described as the ability to read with accuracy, automaticity, and prosody. As students become more fluent readers, they become more proficient in constructing meaning from text. The goal of oral reading fluency is not to become a speed reader. Rather, a natural rate of reading with intonation and expression that increase comprehension is ideal. "Reading too slowly or too fast can both interfere with comprehension" (Goldenberg &Coleman, 2010, p. 45).
One way to promote oral reading fluency is through repeated reading of texts. Many teachers do this as a shared reading experience. Repeatedly reading a text as a class ( shared reading) is particularly helpful to ELs because it allows students to hear their teachers and peers read, it actively engages students as a community of readers, and it lowers the students' affective filters, creating a safe reading space. "Research shows that when children reach primary grades, repeated readings of the same picture book (at least three times) increase vocabulary acquisition by 15 to 40 percent, and the learning is relatively permanent" (Trelease, 2019, p. 5). Teachers can lead the class in Echo Reading or Choral Reading the text, which supports English learners because it provides a safe space to practice fluency, builds confidence, models prosody and English language structures, and fosters community (Gonzalez & Miller, 2020, p. 53) .

Vocabulary

Vocabularyis an essential component to reading, as it deeps comprehension. When I was in school, typical vocabulary instruction consisted of receiving a list of words on Monday, looking up and memorizing definitions, and taking a test on Friday. Repeat. Unfortunately this model still happens in classrooms, though research shows that effective word learning is not limited to word exposure but rather includes repetition, contextualization, and authentic reasons to use the words in speaking, reading, and writing (Fisher, Frey & Hattie, 2016).

Vocabulary begins with listening. We all first grew our vocabularies by listening to our caregivers. Our vocabulary banks grew, and we began to speak the words we knew from our listening vocabulary (Trelease, 2019). This is one reason Read-Alouds are excellent sources for continuing to grow students' vocabularies. Surprisingly, picture books are often filled with low-frequency words that children won't come across in everyday conversations.

Two additional ways to support English learners' vocabularies are through independent reading and word work (also known as word study). Word work can be a fun, interactive method for students to play with words, letters, and sounds while building a vocabulary bank.

Reading Comprehension

Years ago, I had a newcomer EL from Russia in my third grade classroom. When I sat down to informally assess her, I found that she was able to decode at a second grade level, but after asking her some questions about the passage, it was clear that there was a misalignment with comprehension. Though she could decode, she was unable to comprehend the full message of the passage.

As mentioned above, reading is a combination of both decoding and comprehension. Going one step further, reading comprehension is influenced by phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, and vocabulary. Since my student was new to the United States and had limited experience with English, she was still acquiring the language and vocabulary necessary to understand the text she read. On the other hand, a native English speaker her age might have already been exposed to this vocabulary, since they'd had more time to hear English in social and academic settings.

While the National Reading Panel (2000) found that systematic phonics instruction does have a positive impact on reading comprehension for learners in kindergarten and first grade and for struggling readers, they also conclude that phonics should be "integrated with other reading instruction to create a balanced reading program" (p. 2-136).

How Can I Support the Foundations of Reading in Virtual Classrooms?

No one has to remind educators of the challenges distance learning creates. What we can do is find subtle yet effective ways to make the experience work better.

Gamify to increase engagement. As a people, we tend to enjoy the social aspect of games, the immediate feedback, and the challenge. Some teachers have found success with creating online lessons using BoomLearning, Kahoot, Quizlet, and other applications.

Do it synchronously. Young learners and young or older English learners may benefit more from distance learning that is in unison, where students and teacher gather at the same time regularly for direct instruction, modeling, and practice.

Maximize caregivers' support. If we are in the homes for virtual learning with students and caregivers are there, let's leverage them! Ask them to participate, engage them in lessons, pull them in if they are up for it! After all, they are partners in educating their child with us. When caregivers participate in lessons, they see and hear models of how to practice with their children.

Final thoughts...

I'll leave you with four key questions to ponder and discuss among colleagues when you plan reading instruction for English learners:

What are your goals for readers?

What are the challenges you face teaching students to read?

What are the challenges students face learning to read?

What assets do students bring as readers or emergent readers?

Maya Angelou, the amazing poet and civil rights activist, is famously quoted for saying, "Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his needs, is good for him." My hope is that we balance instruction to foster the love and joy of reading with the tools students need to be successful readers.
Want to learn more from Valentina about supporting English learners in balanced literacy classrooms? Check out References cited in this article: Reading and Writing for English Learners, co-written by Valentina Gonzalez and Dr. Melinda Miller, and join us for related trainings and events!
Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Hattie, J. A. (2016). Visible learning for literacy: Implementing the practices that work best to accelerate student learning: Grades K-12. Thousand Oaks (California): Corwin.

Goldenberg, C. N., & Coleman, R. (2010). Promoting academic achievement among English learners: A guide to the research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Gonzalez, V., & Miller, M. S. (2020). Reading & writing with English learners: A framework for K-5. Irving, TX: Seidlitz Education.

Hagan, E. C. (2020). Literacy foundations for English learners: A comprehensive guide to evidence-based instruction. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing.

Helman, L. (2016). Literacy development with English learners: Research-based instruction in grades K-6 (2nd ed.). New York,, NY: The Guilford Press.

National Reading Panel. (2000) Report of the National Reading Panel-Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Trelease, J., & Giorgis, C. (2019). Jim Trelease's read-aloud handbook (8th ed.). New York, NY: PENGUIN BOOKS.

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by Valentina Gonzalez, coauthor of Reading and Writing for English Learners Learning to read is one of the first things that comes to mind when we think of school and education. Reading is critical and necessary for all content areas and remains critical for success after the school years.

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GLAD Strategy: Cooperative Strip Paragraph
​
What is the cooperative strip paragraph?
The Cooperative Strip Paragraph is by far one of my favorite GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Design) strategies because it promotes cooperative learning, reading and writing in all content areas. BAM!
I first learned about it several years ago when I went through GLAD training. I used to be a certified GLAD trainer for my district (but we let our certification expire). The great thing is that even if your certification expires, the knowledge you've gained never does!
Anyhow, I instantly fell in love with Cooperative Strip Paragraphs after using them with my own students. What I love most about CSP is that it allows my students to process their learning while they write in cooperative groups, practice reading at their own readability level, and go through the steps of revising and editing in an authentic way using a shared piece of work. And the fact that CSP can be used in any content area K-12 is an additional BONUS!

CSP incorporates shared reading and shared writing. And it benefits my students who are struggling readers as well as my ELLs because they have multiple opportunities to read, read, read the text that we write together.

Here's how it works:
Let's say for example that we've been learning about the solar system (but it can be just about any topic or even a book)...

I ask the students to work in collaborative groups to come up with one sentence together about the topic. Group one might write about Mars and group 2 might write about Earth...so on.
Teacher: "Scientists, we've been learning about the solar system. Put your heads together and write a sentence about the planet that interests you most. Remember, work together to come up with your sentence. Everyone must agree."

Students put their heads together and discuss until they come up with one sentence together. Each group uses a different colored marker to write their sentence on a sentence strip. Once sentences are ready, a student from each group places them on the pocket chart in the front of the class. Don't worry about the order of the sentences. That will be part of the revising process later.

After all the sentences are up, the class will come together in front of the pocket chart and read the sentences chorally. The teacher will come up with a topic sentence and write it in black on a sentence strip. For this example it may be something like: The solar system has many planets.

We begin by highlighting in yellow what we like about our writing. What have we done well? Which words sound scientific and academic? By putting a spotlight on what we've done well, we boost the confidence of our young writers.

Before we revise, we chorally reread our piece of writing. Now let's look at possible revisions. Many districts already some type of revising and editing checklist. You can use the one that your district supports or the one included here. Using a kid-friendly revising and editing checklist will help ELLs move through this critical process.

First we look at the clarity of our writing. Does our writing make sense or do we need to make any changes to make our piece more clear for the reader? We start from the beginning and work our way down thinking about whether or not we need to add in words or take words out to make our writing more clear. We look at the ORDER and structure of our piece and we begin to rearrange our sentence strips to make more sense.

During the Revising and Editing process the teacher makes edits in BLACK marker and if needed tears sentence trips to add words in or take words out with the permission of the class (shared writing, revising and editing).

After revising together, the class will use an Editing Check list to edit the piece together. During each step of the process, the class will practice chorally reading the piece. (SOO much reading)!

And finally the teacher will guide students in crafting a conclusion sentence together.

And once again, REREAD it!

After the piece is complete, the teacher will type it up and this piece can become a fluency practice for readers.
Also the teacher can recreate the piece on new sentence strips matching the colors. Then this can be used as a small group reading activity. The teacher will rearrange the strips and allow the group to rebuild it. And guess what!? They reread it again. All this reading practice is amazing for your ELLs and struggling readers. The gains they make are fabulous!
After they have completed the task, the teacher can cut the sentence strips into smaller chunks and do some more rearranging and students can play again and reread! This can continue until the strips are cut down to a word.
Relationship to State Testing
Does your state have a standardized writing test? We do...and our ELLs usually don't do well on the revising and editing portion. But teaching revising and editing in isolation or with texts that aren't their own isn't relevant to students. They can't connect with the learning and carry it forward into application. The built in component of authentically revising and editing a piece of shared writing is arguably the most powerful part of CSP. Rather than having students practice using reading passages they are unfamiliar with and answer multiple choice questions, CSP relies on a more organic approach to practicing revising and editing.
State testing has its value, but like many of you, I do not believe in teaching to a test. Tests change every year. Rather I'm a supporter in relying on the state curriculum standards. If we use those to guide our instruction, and we know our students well, then we should be able to help them do well on any assessment put in front of them. ​

Let me know if you've used Cooperative Strip Paragraph before or if you plan on using it. Please share in the comments below. I would love to hear your experiences!

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GLAD Strategy: Cooperative Strip Paragraph ​What is the cooperative strip paragraph? The Cooperative Strip Paragraph is by far one of my favorite GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Design) strategies because it promotes cooperative learning, reading and writing in all content areas. BAM! I first learned about it several years ago when I went through GLAD training.

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Resources for Books

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TeachingBooks | Author & Book Resources to Support Reading Education

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TeachingBooks strives to enrich everyone's experience reading children's and young adult books with our original and curated literary resources.

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WriteReader is a research based online book creating and learning tool to increase student’s motivation and literacy skills in the classroom.

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Book Creator - Love Learning - Book Creator app

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Teachers love it. Students love it. Book Creator is the simplest, most inclusive way to create content in the classroom.

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From frustration...

...to understanding

Don't let an abstruse lexicon heighten your trepidation. Rewordify.com can assuage your anxiety.

Don't let a difficult and confusing word list increase your fear and nervousness. Rewordify.com can calm your fear and stress.

Rewordify.com simplifies difficult English. Enter hard sentences (or whole chapters) into the yellow box at the top of the page. (You can also enter a web site URL.) Click Rewordify text and you'll instantly see an easier version, for fast understanding. The reworded words are highlighted- click them to hear and learn the original harder word. You can change how the highlighting works to match the way you learn!

Do you dislike dictionaries because they're confusing and unhelpful? You'll love Rewordify.com's clear, easy-to-understand definitions-they change to match the original word or phrase's part of speech, verb tense, and singular/plural form, so they make sense. Our amazing Rewordifying Engine is what makes it all possible, and no other web site has it.

Want to see something now? Click Classic Literature at the top and start reading-easier.

Learn more words faster. Our exclusive Learning Sessions actively teach you words so you learn them. Any time you paste in a block of text, our software finds all the hard words, lets you pick which ones you want to learn, and then teaches them to you in a Learning Session.

A Learning Session isn't an online quiz: it's an effective, step by step process where you hear words and phrases, type them, and read them. The software re-teaches you exactly what you need when you need it, and moves ahead when you're ready. When you've learned a word, the site stops "rewording" it, so the site grows with you as you learn! Learn more about Learning Sessions.

Learn the way you want-from what you want to read. You can change the way the site works to fit your learning style as you read and learn from almost any text passage or web page. See the different highlighting styles in the box? You can pick any of them, and lots more options. Click the Settings link (at the bottom of the page now, or at the top of any page) to see all the choices you have. (The demo text in the box here never changes.)

Chart your progress and have fun. You can keep track of your learning with lots of detailed charts that show how you're doing. Plus, as you use the site, you earn points and get Learning Stars -a fun reward for reading and learning!

Now you can easily get your students involved in their learning: let them select the text that interests them. Let them print and complete the activities with which they're most comfortable. Imagine each student learning vocabulary customized to his or her interests, while you have time to teach instead of typing. Could differentiation by interest or readiness be any easier? You can start doing it today, for free.

You never have to type another vocabulary list or quiz again.

Type (or copy-paste) in any block of text in the yellow box at the top of this page, click Rewordify text, and click the Print/Learning activities button. Here's how. You (or your students!) can select from a rich variety of quizzes and learning activities, with or without answer keys.

Do you need to teach (or not teach) particular vocabulary words and phrases? Rewordify.com gives you the exact control you need for specialized vocabulary instruction. You can make customized word lists so the site rewords and teaches any word or phrase exactly the way you want.

Learn the way you want-from what you want to read. You can change the way the site works to fit your learning style as you read and learn from almost any text passage or web page. See the different highlighting styles in the box? You can pick any of them, and lots more options. Click the Settings link (at the bottom of the page now, or at the top of any page) to see all the choices you have. (The demo text in the box here never changes.)

Chart your progress and have fun. You can keep track of your learning with lots of detailed charts that show how you're doing. Plus, as you use the site, you earn points and get Learning Stars -a fun reward for reading and learning!

Now you can easily get your students involved in their learning: let them select the text that interests them. Let them print and complete the activities with which they're most comfortable. Imagine each student learning vocabulary customized to his or her interests, while you have time to teach instead of typing. Could differentiation by interest or readiness be any easier? You can start doing it today, for free.

Save all your documents online so anyone can read them and learn from them at any time.

Just log in, rewordify something, and click the Share button.

Select how public or private you want the document, enter the title, author, etc., and you're done!

You get a link that you can put in your online lesson plans, teacher web pages, or blog. No more rewordifying the same thing over and over again!

You can view, manage and edit all your documents from any computer. Just log in (or create a free, safe account) and start building your learning library. Here's how to do it.

At Educator Central, you can create and manage student accounts, monitor your students' learning, and get detailed reading and learning analytics that help you make smart classroom decisions. For free. Now.
(In a hurry? Log in. Click Educator Central at the top.)

In a few minutes, you can create student accounts on Rewordify.com, and easily monitor your students' reading and learning progress. Get actionable learning and error analytics as your students read and learn from any document you post, or from any document or web page they want to read.

Imagine each student learning different words based on his or her interest or ability level. It's easy to do: Rewordify.com designs and teaches individualized vocabulary lessons with our highly effective Learning Sessions, so you have the time to teach students the important stuff: how to learn, how to break through obstacles, how to believe the words "I can do it."

As your students read and learn, get detailed charts and reports that tell you what you need to know-by student, by class, or for all your classes.

Effectively match interventions with students, based on detailed error breakdowns that let you see what you need to see in a few clicks.

Student accounts are anonymous, and they keep your students safe and focused on learning.

Start using it now: Log in and click on Educator Central at the top. Read more about Educator Central.

Rewordify.com is free online software. You're using it now. There's nothing to buy or install. It works on any computer, tablet, or smartphone. Just point your browser to Rewordify.com and start reading and learning. Yes, it's tablet-friendly-no mouse needed. Yes, your whole school district can create teacher and student accounts, without entering any personal information. When? Now.

It's fast. Wasting your (and your students' time) is bad. That's why Rewordify.com was designed from the ground up to be lightning-fast and use very little data. The site doesn't have a hundred images of puppies and kittens and a hundred links to a hundred lists. What it does have is speed and ease of use, which are very nice when you have to teach a room full of teenagers. Or adults.

It's an app. Want the app? You're using it. Wasn't that easy? The site is a web app, which is great for you, because you get almost-daily site updates automatically -so you can read and learn, not download and install app updates.

We keep kids safe online. Rewordify.com requires no personal information. Student accounts are completely anonymous and cannot post or share anything. Read more about how we protect children's privacy.

Rewordify.com can display simplified versions of web pages. Our state-of-the-art web filtering technology blocks millions of inappropriate sites and questionable language, to protect kids online and keep them reading only what they should be reading. Read more about how we protect children from inappropriate material.

Difficult English is intelligently simplified with our exclusive Rewordifying Engine

Saves time when reading hard text, improves comprehension and self-confidence, and increases total reading time

Copy-paste entire text passages into the yellow box and press Rewordify text. You'll see a simplified version. Read more.

Definitions are easy to understand, context-aware, and match verb tense and part of speech

Reduces frustration and improves comprehension by maximizing time spent reading versus dictionary research

Copy-paste any text passage into the yellow box and "rewordify" it. Click the highlighted words. Read more.

Learning Sessions actively teach individualized vocabulary lessons with research-proven multimodal techniques

Improves vocabulary and word retention

After you "rewordify" text, you'll see a purple bar at the top. Click the buttons to pick hard words and learn them in an effective Learning Session. Read more.

Site carefully monitors student reading time, learning progress, and learning errors, and gives educators full-color, real-time charts and reports

Gives actionable learning data that helps improve student learning outcomes

Create an account. Click on Educator Central. Create free student accounts. Post assignments online. Get learning data. Make smart classroom decisions based on valid data. Read more.

Site identifies and extracts over 58,000 difficult words and phrases from any text and creates a rich variety of learning activities with answer keys

Saves time when teaching and gives students individualized learning activities

Copy-paste any text passage into the yellow box and "rewordify" it. Click Print/Learning Activities. Pick the quizzes, activities, vocab lists, cloze activities you want, with keys. Print them. Read more.

Software allows users to change the difficulty level and presentation style of the output text

Improves engagement by allowing easy differentiation by learning style and readiness

Copy-paste any text passage and "rewordify" it. Click Settings. Change the text presentation style, "rewordifying level" (difficulty level), even the highlighting style. Read more.

Site works as an app on any device, using a minimum of data

Allows for easy district rollout on nearly any existing device while conserving Internet bandwith

Point any device's browser to Rewordify.com and it works like an app. Here's how to make an app icon on your home screen or desktop.

Site calculates accurate text complexity measures, including our exclusive READ score

Improves engagement and learning through the selection of appropriate reading materials

Rewordify any text passage. Click the Stats button. Read more.

Site's browser app (bookmarklet) extracts most web pages to Rewordify.com for learning in one click

Improves engagement and total reading time through independent selection of high-interest materials

Install our free browser app. Browse the web. At any page, click the "Rewordify text" button. Read the extracted text on Rewordify.com.

You can post any document and share it publicly, privately, or with a password

Increases reading time and organization of learning materials

Log in. Paste in a document and "rewordify" it. Click the Share button, share it, and get a link. Post the link to your teacher page. Or, add it as a Rewordify.com assignment. Here's how to post documents. Here's how to create assignments.

Site calculates points and displays Learning Stars based on total minutes read and words learned

Increases reading time and engagement by making the site more fun

Log in and start reading and clicking on the purple bar to do Learning Sessions. Points and Learning Stars will display. Click My Learning/My Documents to see charts of your progress. Read more.

Over 300 pieces of classic literature are available

Improves comprehension of the classics-from Shakespeare to Douglass to Austen

Click Classic literature at the top. Or, type a word like Frankenstein into the search box at the top.

Here's what to do next:

First, do the demo. You'll be an expert in five minutes: Click here for the demo.

Learn the site, step by step. Our First-Time User Guide clearly shows you how to get started.

Teachers: Learn about Educator Central and all it can do to help improve student learning outcomes. Also, you can print lots of free, full-color literature to help you get started in the classroom.

Have some fun. Are you up for a vocabulary challenge? Play Rewordo. Be aware: it's not easy.

Browse some classics. Want to be more sure of Shakespeare, or brush up on Bronte? Scroll to the top, and click the Classic Literature link. It's a fast way to get started using the site. Or, use the Search bar at the top. Try entering the word raven to understand the deal with Poe, that black bird, and the "Nevermore" thing.

Check out the goodies. You can install our One-Click Learning browser applet that lets you rewordify most web pages in one click. Our cool (and free, of course) School Clock tells you the current time and date, what class period you're currently in, countdowns to the next period, and more. You can customize it for any school's schedule, and make as many different School Clocks as you have different day schedules. Use it now.

Show the love! Please tell us about mistakes the site makes when "rewording" and defining words. That feedback is the single most valuable thing you can do to help the site (and learners around the world). Click here to contact us. Do you want to help defray the site's operating costs, and read a great thriller at the same time? You can! Get your copy of Electric Dawn.

Contact us. We want to help you! Please use the Contact page with any questions or comments.

Site summary: Rewordify.com helps with reading comprehension and vocabulary development by simplifying English to a lower reading level. It lets you reword a sentence or reword a paragraph. It will simplify English by reducing text complexity. It's a dictionary alternative that will improve comprehension and teach vocabulary. It's an important part of reading instruction and vocabulary instruction for ESL students, people with reading disabilities, people with a learning disability, or anyone who wants to improve reading skill.

35650 / 9.0

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Rewordify.com | Understand what you read

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Rewordify.com helps you read more, understand better, learn new words, and teach more effectively.

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It's time to improve literacy skills during social studies instruction and ensure that readers of all abilities have what they need to access grade-level social studies concepts.

Join us on Thursday, December 7 for a look at scaffolded materials that provide extra literacy support while building key social studies concepts and skills.

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Newsela | Content and assessment platform

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Content Aligned To National & State Standard, Flexible To Support Relevant Curriculum. Find the Perfect Piece Of Content For Lessons. Go beyond the book.

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For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser.

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Share with Students

Assign text-dependent questions to hold students accountable for high-level reading and writing.

Track Progress

Analyze student performance and compare class reports on key reading and writing skills.

Resources for Remote Learning

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Browse our free collection of reading passages in all literary and nonfiction genres for grades 3-12.

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Parents, get 30 days free! Educators, get it free How to get your kids reading & loving it! MORE FEATURES AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Personalize their daily reading. Daily age- and level-appropriate recommendations customized to their interests. Track progress. See what books your kid likes, time spent reading and more.

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TeachingBooks | Author & Book Resources to Support Reading Education

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TeachingBooks strives to enrich everyone's experience reading children's and young adult books with our original and curated literary resources.

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Make instruction active and engaging to turn students into skilled readers.

English is an alphabetic language with 26 letters. Alone and in combination, they stand for 44 sounds. Phonics instruction is the teaching of these spelling-sound correspondences. Learning the basic phonics skills we typically teach in kindergarten and in first and second grades gives students a way to sound out approximately 84 percent of the words in English-language text. That's a powerful tool!

But reading is more than sounding out words. Once we sound out a word, we have to attach meaning to it. We string together the meanings of the words in a sentence and relate it to what we know already to understand the message. From a simple handwritten sentence such as "This Sunday, we are going to Grandma's" to a tale about three little pigs to an informational book about sharks, children are eager to crack the code of our written language to enjoy stories and build knowledge. Phonics instruction sets all of this in motion.

The Science of Reading

Phonics has been central to the national conversation surrounding the "science of reading," but it is not alone. Old models of reading, such as the "simple view of reading" (Gough and Tunmer, 1986) and "reading rope" (Scarborough, 2001) have reemerged to clarify the role of phonics in reading instruction.

The simple view of reading says that reading comprehension is a product of decoding (achieved through phonics instruction) and language comprehension (achieved by building vocabulary and content knowledge). One without the other does not result in comprehension, and both need an instructional emphasis in an early reading curriculum.

The reading rope extends this understanding by showing how, as word recognition skills improve (through phonics and decoding instruction) and readers become more strategic in using their language comprehension skills (e.g., vocabulary and background knowledge), they begin to intertwine like a rope, creating skilled readers.

The discussion has widened our view on the research around early reading instruction by looking at the evidence provided by scientists in medicine, psychology, and education. For example, researchers have taken pictures of the brain as readers read. These functional MRIs show how the parts of the brain work together to help us read. What's undeniable is that the mental pathways used by skilled readers are different from those used by unskilled readers.

One important brain research study out of Stanford University taught the participants one of two ways to read a new alphabetic text: sounding out the words using phonics or learning words by sight as whole units. What did they find? That participants who read by sounding-out words activated the parts of the brain that skilled readers use to access text. Readers who learned to read by sight-memorizing whole words behaved in ways that mirrored
the brains of unskilled readers.

The participants who learned by sighting whole words got off to a fast start, but their learning was not transferable to new, unknown words; they hit a wall. Study participants who learned to sound out words got off to a slower start; it was work, and sometimes, it was hard work. But that learning transferred to new, unknown words, and the sounding out readers were able to surpass the sight-readers.

Unfortunately, too many of our nation's students spend the first year or two in school focusing primarily on reading texts by sight-memorizing words and story patterns through leveled texts, with few or no words that can be sounded out based on phonics skills. Is this the case with your students? Phonics instruction with follow-up reading in decodable, phonics-based texts is a strategy that works best.

Picking a Curriculum

School and district administrators have a responsibility to ensure that the hallmarks of good phonics instruction are firmly in place in the curriculum they choose.

Strong phonics instruction requires a skilled, informed teacher and seven key characteristics:

Readiness skills. Phonemic awareness and alphabet recognition are the two best predictors of early reading success, and they play a critical role in beginning phonics instruction.

Scope and sequence. A curriculum should feature a well-defined scope and sequence that build from simple to complex with built-in review and repetition.

Blending. Teaching students how to sound out words being read must be modeled and applied frequently.

Dictation. Guided spelling helps students transfer their growing reading skills to writing.

Word awareness. Activities such as word sorts and word building engage students in conversations about words, solidifying their understanding of how words work.

High-frequency words. Students need to master the most commonly used words in English. Some are irregular, and others must be taught before students have the phonics skills needed to sound them out.

Reading connected text. Decodable texts-those with a high percentage of words that can be sounded out-have the biggest impact on accelerating mastery of phonics skills; writing about these texts further extends their instructional impact.

These resources should also be evaluated to avoid the common barriers that limit student success (see "The 10 Common Breakdowns in Phonics Instruction"). Principals play a significant role in evaluating teachers' effectiveness in implementing these resources.

The two words most closely associated with strong phonics instruction are "explicit" and "systematic." "Explicit" means that sound-spelling correspondences are initially taught directly to students, rather than using a discovery (implicit) method. The teaching is intentional. Students are taught, for example, that the /s/ sound can be spelled with the letter s.

Systematic means that the instruction builds from simple to more complex skills with built-in review and repetition to ensure mastery. Systematic phonics instruction has a clearly defined scope and sequence rather than being random, and it builds from the known to the new in steps that make learning easier to grasp.

The best phonics instruction is also active, engaging, and thought-provoking. Students "play" with letters and sounds and discuss what they observe about how words work to deepen their understanding. Phonics instruction involves talk, observation, and application so that the skills can be transferred to all reading situations.

This can be challenging for administrators who haven't taught the primary grades or don't have backgrounds in early reading. Videotaping master teachers implementing phonics lessons and analyzing key aspects of those lessons can improve teacher feedback and aid student learning.

To assist in teacher observation and ensure your phonics program is paying off, check the administrator "look-fors" surrounding key aspects of phonics instruction (see "What to Look for in Phonics Instruction").

Use these as a springboard for feedback to ensure that the phonics instruction your teachers deliver is effective, efficient, and impactful-instruction that accelerates student learning and prepares them to be skilled, lifelong readers.

The 10 Common Breakdowns in Phonics Instruction

Many phonics and reading curricula have flaws that stand in the way of maximizing student learning. Since we have only a few years to get students to master basic phonics skills, we need instruction that's efficient, effective, and impactful. That requires us to take a critical look at curricular materials and remove any barriers standing in the way of rapid student growth.

There are 10 common barriers to phonics instruction:

1. An inadequate or nonexistent review and repetition cycle. Many curricular materials focus on exposure, rapidly moving from one phonics skill to the next. Most students need significantly more time in applying the skill after the initial introduction to achieve mastery-often at least four to six weeks.

2. Lack of application to real reading and writing experiences. Learning sticks when applied, and students need to apply their growing phonics skills to reading and writing daily in texts with ample decodable words.

3. Inappropriate reading materials to practice skills. Decodable texts are an essential part of each day's phonics lessons. Leveled texts often don't contain enough decodable words to bring all students to mastery.

4. Ineffective use of the gradual release model. Whoever does the thinking in a lesson does the learning, so teachers must not oversupport lessons; the teacher's role is to model, provide ample practice opportunities,
and offer corrective feedback.

5. Losing time in transitions. Phonics lessons often require a lot of resources, such as books and manipulatives. Too much time is lost distributing and collecting these materials; these moments need to be preplanned around review skills and treated as important instructional moments.

6. Limited teacher knowledge of research-​based phonics routines and linguistics. Building teacher capacity around phonics and linguistics, including key instructional routines, has been proven to increase student learning.

7. Inappropriate pacing. Lessons need to be fast-paced and engaging, focusing on the most high-
​impact activities (blending, dictation, word building,
and reading and writing about decodable texts).

8. A lack of comprehensive or cumulative mastery assessment tools. A big issue with phonics instruction is when there isn't enough review and repetition. Use comprehensive assessment tools to place students along a phonics continuum, and cumulative assessments to check mastery and/or decayed learning and make course corrections.

9. Transitioning to multisyllabic words too late. Students encounter a large number of multisyllabic words in grade 2 texts, yet phonics instruction at that level generally doesn't address longer, more complex words early enough or with enough intensity.

10. Overdoing it (especially in isolated skills work). Equal attention must be paid to phonics and building vocabulary and content knowledge. Rich, interactive, daily read-alouds-especially around science and social studies concepts-are beneficial.

What to Look for in Phonics Instruction
1. Blending (Modeling how to sound out words)

This is a fast-paced activity during which the teacher models one or two words, then has students do the rest the first time.

Blending word sets are revisited quickly by calling on students, rows, etc. They are also revisited multiple times throughout the week.

Copies of blending word sets can be used for independent and at-home work.

2. Dictation (Guided spelling)

Dictation begins in kindergarten.

The teacher extends sound box activity by having students replace counters with letters.

The teacher analyzes student writing for evidence of the use of taught phonics skills.

3. Reading Connected (Decodable) Texts

Decodable/accountable texts are a daily part of phonics lessons.

The reading of these texts focuses on decoding strategies, checking comprehension, and building vocabulary.

4. High-Frequency Words

Are teachers using a research-based routine to accelerate mastery?

Are more challenging words (e.g., words that begin with th and wh) cycled throughout the year?

5. Word Awareness Activities (Word sorts, word building)

Follow-up discussion about what students learned about how words work.

Performed every week, and in small groups for students needing more support.

6. Readiness Skills (Phonemic awareness and alphabet recognition)

Is there more focus on the "power skills" of oral blending and oral segmentation in K-1?

Are students assessed for more complex phonemic awareness skills at the end of grade 1?

Are instructional resources available for teachers in grades 2 and 3 to work on these skills?

Are the skills taught in a progression or in multiple levels for a whole group?

Are supports such as sound boxes and counters provided?

Does the instructional language result in confusion (e.g., rhyme)?

Does the alphabet sequence enable students to make words early on?

7. Professional Development

Can you build capacity to bring teacher control to reading instruction so they can be more responsive to individual student needs?

Is fidelity to flawed resources hurting student growth?

Can you restructure professional development to differentiate individual teachers' needs?

Wiley Blevins is the author of A Fresh Look at Phonics, Phonics From A to Z, Meaningful Phonics and Word Study, and the International Literacy Association's Literacy Leadership Brief "Meeting the Challenges of Early Literacy Phonics Instruction."

Copyright © 2021. National Association of Elementary School Principals. No part of the articles in NAESP magazines, newsletters, or website may be reproduced in any medium without the permission of the National Association of Elementary School Principals. For more information, view NAESP's reprint policy.

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Make instruction active and engaging to turn students into skilled readers. English is an alphabetic language with 26 letters. Alone and in combination, they stand for 44 sounds. Phonics instruction is the teaching of these spelling-sound correspondences.

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by Valentina Gonzalez

Let's begin by saying that a workshop is not necessarily a program that is purchased and implemented by reading from a script day to day (though there are some out there). Workshop is a structure for teaching, and it can be implemented in nearly any content-area classroom. In my own classroom several years ago, I implemented a reading workshop with a basal reader and the small literacy library our campus had just started. Writing workshop is no different. It's the same structure.

Mini Lesson:

Basically, my reading workshop meant that I spent about ten minutes at the start of the reading block engaging with the students in whole-group instruction. This period of time, called the mini lesson, was focused on an objective that the entire class would benefit from learning. It was tight and brief. Planning for this part of the lesson didn't take long since it was a small portion of the workshop.

Independent Reading:

Next, I sent my students off to read independently from self-selected texts for about forty-five minutes. Now, we did spend a good deal of time at the beginning of the year talking about book selection and how to find books that fit. Students were urged to find books that they wanted to read and that were in their range of comprehension. We veered away from restricting them to particular levels only.

So as students got comfortable around the room reading, I began to confer with each of them one on one. One-on-one conferences are truly like small reading conversations. I sat next to each student and asked them what they were reading and why they chose it, and then I asked them to read a little to me. Then I complimented one thing they did well and coached them on another. One-on-one conferences were very important because they helped me decide how to form small groups.

As I conferred, I gathered important data (anecdotal notes) about the reading and I analyzed that information to form small groups of students who had the same or similar reading needs. For example, if I noticed that four of my students struggled with reading fluently, I would gather them together in a small group on a subsequent day. My small-group instruction with these students would include explicit instruction on fluency, as well as time for them to practice with my support. My small-group time with them would be about ten minutes.

Another type of small group I could visit with during independent reading was a guided reading group. These were students who were reading at about the same reading level. I would gather them together for around ten minutes and give each of them the same book. I would begin by conducting an extensive book talk to prepare them for reading the book. During this book talk, my goal was to set them up for success. Then I'd ask each one to start reading, and I'd listen to them read. As they finished, I would give the group a teaching point, something I wanted them to hold on to as readers.

Most of my planning time was spent on lessons for my small-group instruction. This was the heart of my workshop and where I helped my students grow. Since I wanted to support all my students individually at their given proficiencies and levels of background knowledge, I needed to deeply understand them as learners in order to know my next steps with them. I planned for their language and academic needs by analyzing the anecdotal notes I gathered each time I met with them, either one on one or in small groups. My small groups were constantly changing. They were fluid, and the kids never knew who was going to be called for a group. I didn't want to unintentionally stigmatize any child, and groups changed based on skill, language, and reading levels.

Finally, as the workshop came to a close, we spent the last five minutes sharing. There were different ways that we shared what we did during our workshop time. Sometimes I randomly called on a few students to talk about their reading. Other times, each student shared with their reading buddy. Students knew that they might be asked to share and were held accountable for their reading time.

The workshop approach benefits English learners in many ways, as seen in the chart below.

Independent Reading/Writing

During this large block of time, the teacher is able to pull small groups for guided reading and writing or strategy, lowering the teacher:student ratio.

Students can read or write with partners to build on or share ideas.

Students work independently on reading or writing at their own, individualized instructional level.

Teachers are able to confer one on one with students to co-create goals and evaluate progress, both academic and linguistic.

However, it is still important that as teachers we remember to accommodate for the linguistic needs of each student. Students who are at earlier stages of language proficiency will need more support in reading and writing than those who are at higher levels of language proficiency. These are some ways to accommodate the workshop to give additional support to English learners.

Published

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The Workshop Approach and How it Can Support English Learners

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by Valentina Gonzalez What Is Workshop? Let's begin by saying that a workshop is not necessarily a program that is purchased and implemented by reading from a script day to day (though there are some out there). Workshop is a structure for teaching, and it can be implemented in nearly any content-area classroom.

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Reading & Writing with English Learners was written for:

* K-5 Classroom Teachers

* ESL Teachers

* Reading and Writing Instructional Coaches

* District Leaders

Reading & Writing with English Learners includes:

* the components of Reading & Writing Workshop

* accommodations that support English Learners

* high yield practices for Reading & Writing Workshop during remote teaching

* the role of phonics

* a culturally inclusive booklist

* activities that support Reading & Writing Workshop

And more!

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Reading & Writing with English Learners was written for: * K-5 Classroom Teachers * ESL Teachers * Reading and Writing Instructional Coaches * District Leaders Reading & Writing with English Learners includes: * the components of Reading & Writing Workshop * accommodations that support English Learners * high yield practices for Reading & Writing Workshop during remote teaching * the role of phonics * a culturally inclusive booklist * activities that support Reading & Writing Workshop And more!

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Let Them Read, Please

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What it takes to build a culture of reading in secondary schools.

During our first class meeting this fall, I surveyed my freshman college students about their reading habits. Half said they never read books. Another 20 percent checked rarely. Less than 10 percent said they read often. These students may have started kindergarten mesmerized by books, but they exited 12th grade habitually uninterested. Far too many of my students tell me year after year that they completed high school courses without reading a single book. They no longer have the stamina to read 70 pages between Tuesday's class and Thursday's book club meeting. They've substituted the academic trickery of pretending to read or quoting summaries of books for the satisfying experience of devouring finely crafted sentences, and their schools rewarded them with diplomas for it.

So what is a teacher or leader to do when faced with a classroom of young people who believe reading is only about finding answers, which they can easily access online? Today's middle and high school students do not need another strategy or a lesson on comprehension. They need something much more difficult to orchestrate in this digital age: They need to enter "the unseen sanctuary of the reading act," as cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf calls it, "redirecting thoughts beyond the self to the good of others" (2018). The act of reading relieves stress and invites empathy. It can break through passivity and ignite curiosity, which drives deeper learning throughout the school day.

We want students who are hungry to learn, and as Lois Bridges says, reading can have a snowball effect:

Reading engagement is nothing short of miraculous. Engaged readers spend 500 percent more time reading than do their peers who aren't turned on by books-and all those extra hours inside books they love gives them a leg up in everything that leads to a happy, productive life: deep conceptual understanding about a wide range of topics, expanded vocabulary, strategic reading ability, critical literacy skills, and engagement with the world that's more likely to make them dynamic citizens drawn into full civic participation. (2010)

I aim to achieve this "miraculous" level of reading engagement with my students every year I teach. I begin by seeking to understand why my students have stopped reading. I listen. I give them time to read and access to the best books I can find. Students must see themselves-and each other-in the books they read, as Rudine Sims Bishop said so eloquently in her 1990 essay, "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors." I include many voices and many points of view in the books I buy for my classroom library, and I read aloud enticing passages from books (fiction, non-fiction, and poetry) at the start of each class-a practice I advocate for at every level. I also confer with students, to encourage them and help them solve problems of understanding. I listen to their thinking.

But one classroom will never be enough. We must have a vision for all readers. As Mike Schmoker said in the pages of this magazine, "Students should read and/or be read to for a minimum of 60 minutes daily, across the curriculum, at every grade level" (2019). As I found at a high school in New Hampshire where I taught for more than 20 years, it is possible to create a school of readers when we prioritize time to read, offer access to irresistible books, give students choice, and encourage teacher learning.

Bringing Reading Into the Classroom

When I started teaching high school, I assigned reading outside of class. I had students focus on passages in class, but many students could not understand the whole of the book because they literally weren't reading the pages in between. My principal and I surveyed hundreds of students in our school, and the results showed that across content areas, students were listening to teachers talk about ideas in books, but they weren't engaged in making meaning of the texts themselves. Students skimmed pages to find answers; few hungered for more reading.

To immerse students in books during class time, I started a book club. I initially carved out time for my American Literature students to sample titles and choose what they wanted to read. The time they then spent immersed in those books in class resulted in more reading outside of it. Daily reading increased their joy and fluency, confidence and stamina. My students were reading books from start to finish. In biology, world history, economics, and health, I worked with teachers to create additional book clubs around big ideas in the curriculum, and together we have watched students' thinking deepen in each classroom.

Too many schools today push reading outside the school day and then use reading logs, incentive programs, and computerized tests of comprehension to check on compliance. The time spent checking on compliance would be better spent reading.

Gay Ivey, an elected member of the Reading Hall of Fame and 2018 president of the Literacy Research Association, studied middle school classrooms that prioritize reading engagement. She concluded in a joint interview she and I did in 2019, that the teachers in these classrooms

... arranged for students to have meaningful experiences by providing a vast collection of relevant books, letting students choose, and giving them ample time in class to read, all with no strings attached-no comprehension questions, journal responses, projects, or requirement for reading a set number of books, and so forth. These decisions resulted in students reading more, and willingly so; they were also reading more strategically and analytically, but far surpassing what is expected on any set of curriculum standards I have seen. (2019)

Yet some leaders still say independent reading in school is a waste of time. Even some teachers say this. Isn't pretending to read a bigger one? What do we think students learn when we give them high marks for not reading-for observing class discussions, but not joining them, and then using what they hear others say to answer quiz questions and write essays? They know they didn't read the books assigned; you know they didn't. Why doesn't this bother us more?

In school we can set the conditions for deep reading. We know many students will not find quiet or a wide array of books in their homes. But we can give them productive reading space in school. As one of my college students told me this week, "I stay focused when everyone in the class is focused on reading, too. And I become interested in what others are reading." If all independent reading moves outside school walls, we miss the chance to confer with students and support them amid their struggles to understand. We miss building their confidence, noticing a student's disengagement and addressing it, or simply celebrating the gains each student is making.

Celebrate the Diversity of Readers, Celebrate Choice

Personalize. Differentiate. These are not just words; they are actions that focus our attention on how we teach, so that all students can learn more. Our curricula should leverage the power of personalization around student interests. A curriculum guide can't tell me what to say when I pull up my chair alongside my student Shane, but I know he needs to experience reading as a meaning-making process. I don't quiz Shane; I help him connect what he knows from his years playing baseball to his understanding of Moneyball.

In order to balance teacher and student choices in reading, Kelly Gallagher and I have proposed a 9th grade reading map of 25 percent common texts, 25 percent book clubs, and 50 percent independent reading choices across a school year (2018). This gives students the power to make choices 75 percent of the time. We expect all our students to increase the volume of their reading, increase the complexity of the texts they choose, and form allegiances to particular authors and genres. In short, we invest time into helping every student develop an identity as a reader. We regularly hear from teachers all over the world who have transformed curriculum to prioritize student choice with stunning results. We can do this.

Hire Passionate Readers

If your teachers don't make time to read, it's hard to imagine they'll prioritize that time for their students. As a college freshman told me this fall, "I can't think of one teacher in high school who asked me what I was interested in reading-or ever talked about books that weren't in the curriculum." At my previous high school, our interview committee asked all candidates, "What are you reading?" and then followed up with, "What are you learning from that reading that you can bring to your classroom?" Their responses helped us understand the teacher's ability to support our school culture of engaged reading.

Likewise, our engagement with the profession-with our own learning as we prepare each week to teach-matters. For years I taught graduate education courses on my high school campus and had teachers choose books to study with their colleagues. We read widely, analyzing the claims of researchers in education to understand cognitive science and sound instruction. But we also read and discussed books on dogs, romance, sports, eating well, and the life stories of immigrants and politicians. We learned that we all bring our experiences to a book, which changes how we read it. We saw books differently, and we saw the teaching of reading differently. We had time to reflect, laugh, and learn together through reading together.

Help Students Lean In

In the last 10 years, connecting students to books has gotten even harder. A smartphone is the world in your palm, but it is also a tyrant. A master of your time-of you. It's the easiest thing to reach for when you have a free minute. Silence has replaced conversation at the start of my college class, as students sit " alone together," to borrow the title of Sherry Turkle's 2012 book. As a result, teachers might think it is impossible to engage teenagers with books, but I know differently. Readers thrive in schools that prioritize engagement.

When one of my students, Charisa, began freshman composition this fall, I had her and her peers spend a minute or two with a dozen books. Charisa quickly connected to Dear Martin by Nic Stone. She sustained engagement with the book because each day we set phones aside and read in a community. Once she finished that book, she began The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. When our book club discussions began, I heard her making connections between those two books and I Will Save You by Matt de la Peña, which she read with four students in my class and another dozen in an online book club with Kelly Gallagher's high school seniors in Anaheim, California. Charisa is now reading Know My Name by Chanel Miller, and she has a list of books written in the back of her notebook to read next.

We all want readers like Charisa, but we are far from stoking that fire. We try to speed up learning with our students by asking and answering questions; but reading a series of short passages never adds up to the authentic transaction between a reader and a book. I study passages with students because there is much we can learn from close study, but we can't neglect the sustained engagement with a whole book that ignites our curiosity. Reading requires leaning in and being fully immersed in the experience. The number of books a student reads is, as Nancie Atwell said, "the most significant statistic of all; it represents and predicts so much about his academic future" (2014).

Brick by Brick

In my former high school, we built a culture of reading brick by brick. A small committee of teachers from several content areas studied Richard Allington's research on fluency and stamina (2012) and asked questions: Do all of our students read? Do the conditions in our school encourage engaged reading? We presented these questions to the entire faculty, and our initial thinking expanded as we listened and learned together. Our high school took the courageous leap to add a 25-minute schoolwide reading break between periods one and two on our master schedule. We committed money to purchasing high-interest young adult literature for our school library. We set up a pyramid of interventions (Buffum, 2011) to support students who were resistant to reading, such as the principal's famous read-aloud group that came together year after year, with male students gathering around books like Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos that forced them to reckon with moral dilemmas. Those boys created a community in the principal's office, and teachers created communities in their classrooms.

Our small high school hung onto the practice for years until our leaders stopped prioritizing reading break, monitoring it, or even supporting it. Two school leaders suggested we swap reading break for a study hall period, and we now see hundreds of students scrolling on phones and very few engaged readers.

One Final Plea

As my school experienced, something as big as culture can feel impossible to shift. But it's like training for a marathon or losing 50 pounds: Every big shift is built-and sustained-by small, incremental steps. Pull a dozen of your students together for lunch and listen to them talk about reading. Share a book at every faculty meeting and expect book talks to happen across all content areas, several times a week, in all classrooms. Incorporate student, parent, custodian, and administrative assistant book talks into your school culture. Create posters for the doors of each classroom to celebrate the range of books teachers read: what I just finished reading, what I'm currently reading, and what I'll read next. Make book recommendations a portion of your morning announcements and newsletters home.

Above all, let students read, please.

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During our first class meeting this fall, I surveyed my freshman college students about their reading habits. Half said they never read books. Another 20 percent checked rarely. Less than 10 percent said they read often. These students may have started kindergarten mesmerized by books, but they exit

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Recently I saw a graphic (see below) that shared the percent of children's books that have main characters that are diverse. You can learn more about the article here. The statistics were alarming. It reported that the majority of main characters in on our library shelves are either White or Animals/Objects. I thought to myself, no way...my bookshelf is not representative of that. But then I looked. I started sorting out my books. I made stacks. I was shocked and saddened that my bookshelf truly was not as diverse as I imagined. ​

Students benefit from seeing themselves in the books they read. Why? For one, because seeing ourselves outside of ourselves makes us feel less invisible. As Brene Brown says, "We are hardwired for connection and without it there is suffering." We also gain much knowledge and learn empathy from seeing others in the books we read. So why aren't our shelves filled with books that have diverse characters?

If you've ever questioned why your students aren't interested in the books on your shelves, you might stop to think about the types of books that are there. Do they represent your students? Can the kids connect with them?

I also learned about a non-profit organization called We Need Diverse Books. Check it out. They share a lot of information including lists of diverse books.

In my quest for making my shelf more diverse, I have found some great books. I'll keep adding to this and if you have suggestions, please comment and include a picture if you can.

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Recently I saw a graphic (see below) that shared the percent of children's books that have main characters that are diverse. You can learn more about the article here. The statistics were alarming. It reported that the majority of main characters in on our library shelves are either White or Animals/Objects.

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How to use Picture Word Inductive Model & Sentence Patterning Charts in a Distance Learning Setting

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How to use Picture Word Inductive Model & Sentence Patterning Charts in a Distance Learning Setting