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Why Writing by Hand Beats Typing (in 6 Charts)

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Oral Language Hub | Really Great Reading

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Reading Science and Teaching Literacy to English Learners: Conceptual and Practical Implications

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Reading Science and Teaching Literacy to English Learners: Conceptual and Practical Implications

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Welcome to EDVIEW360.
Claude Goldenberg:
I was on the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth some 20 years ago, and I actually reviewed the research on sociocultural influences on language minority children's reading development, and we found really very little evidence that those culturally relevant, culturally responsive teaching, culturally responsive pedagogy, I say this kind of quaking in my boots that the evidence for that is, I mean, at best very weak.
Narrator:
You've just heard from Dr. Claude Goldenberg, literacy expert and professor at Stanford University. Dr. Goldenberg, along with Dr. Louisa Moats, are our guests today on EDVIEW360.
Pam Austin:
Hello, this is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. We are so excited to kick off the new year with a top-notch discussion with two literacy masters, and we are so glad to have you with us today. I'm conducting today's podcast from our Dallas, TX, headquarters. Today, we are excited to welcome two trailblazing thought leaders. These authors and researchers are renowned in the literacy education field and both have dedicated their lives' work to improve reading for every child, especially those with learning challenges. Before we get started, let me tell you just a bit more about our guests.

Dr. Louisa Moats has been a teacher, psychologist, researcher, graduate school faculty member, and the author of many influential scientific journal articles, books, and policy papers about reading, spelling, language, and teacher preparation. Dr. Moats is the author of LANGUAGE! Live®, a blended reading intervention program for grades 5 to 12. The lead author of LETRS®, professional development and the textbook, Speech to Print Language Essentials for Teachers. She recently wrote an advisory for the World Bank about teaching reading to students across the world. Dr. Moats is also co-author of Spellography, a structured language word-study program. Her awards include the prestigious Samuel T. and June L. Orton Award from the International Dyslexia Association® for Outstanding Contributions to the Field, the Eminent Researcher Award from Learning Disabilities Australia, and the Benita Blachman Award from The Reading League.

Dr. Claude Goldenberg is the Nomelini and Olivia Professor of Education emeritus at Stanford University. He taught junior high school in San Antonio, TX, and first grade in a bilingual elementary school in Los Angeles. A native of Argentina, his areas of research centered on promoting academic achievement among language minority students, particularly those from Spanish-speaking backgrounds. Dr. Goldenberg was on the National Research Council's Committee for the Prevention of Early Reading Difficulties in Young Children and the National Literacy Panel of Language Minority Children and Youth, which synthesized research about promoting literacy development among multilingual learners. He is also co-author of Promoting Academic Achievement Among English Learners: A Guide To The Research, and co-editor of Language and Literacy Development in Bilingual Settings.

Welcome, Dr. Moats and Dr. Goldenberg.
LM:
Yeah, great to be with you.
PA:
You know, there is so much debate about the science of reading and teaching reading to English learners. Let's start at the beginning. What does reading science tell us about how students learn to read in a language other than their own? Is there a science of reading instruction that pertains across language contexts?
CG:
Well, that's a great question to start off with, Pam. Thanks. So, I guess I'll jump in right away. So, let me just start by saying full disclosure: The term science of reading kind of makes me, well, let me use the technical terms. It kind of sometimes gives me the creeps because it's become a polarizing term. You know, it's become a lightning rod and I have found that people refer to the science of reading and they mean really different things.

People who are advocating the science of reading will talk about its comprehensiveness and there's lots going on, but how important foundational skills are. And then people who are skeptical of the science of reading, they'll say it's more than just phonics, on the faulty assumption that the science of reading is just about phonics. So, I like to think about reading research, and reading research that is basic. That is applied. That is instructional. That informs us on the process. What needs to happen in kids' brains, and then what needs to happen in classrooms, what needs to happen in communities and in families and in schools, of course, to promote literacy. So, I just wanted to get that on the table from the get-go and I'd be interested if Louisa has any comments about that specific issue. But to your question, there is a lot of research knowledge that we have about how children learn to read and under what conditions learning and reading development can be optimized and we have it, certainly for kids who know the language as they're learning to read it, which is what most of the research is about. There's a smaller but not insignificant body of research on individuals who are learning to read in a language while they are simultaneously learning to speak and understand, and that's the situation with English learners. So, Louisa will elaborate on this more profoundly than I can. Let me just start off with, we know for a fact about as factual as you can be in the social sciences that in order to become literate there's got to be constructed in your brain something called the reading circuit or the literacy circuit.

We're born knowing intuitively that oral language, speech that comes in through our ears. We know intuitively it's meaningful. Human speech is the external stimulus that newborns orient most towards and there's a good evolutionary reason for that. Human speech is in part of our evolution for I don't know, 300,000 years at least, but literacy, written language, which is different from oral language. Written language comes to us through our eyes and it's got to be processed differently and we've got to make those in Louisa's famous phrase, those speech-to-print connections. We've got to make it in our brain to create that reading circuit and we've got to have instructional conditions and environmental conditions that'll promote the creation of that reading circuit. That is true whether you know the language that you're learning to read and write in or you're learning the language that you're learning to read and write in. That is really non-negotiable. You cannot be literate, fully literate, without that literacy circuit being constructed.

Now, the issue with English learners is that they're learning the language simultaneously, right? So, they not only have to learn the orthography, the spelling system in English if that's the second language. Now, just footnote here: There are, and Louisa can speak of this also based on the paper she recently wrote, there are millions of children around the world who are learning to read in the language they're simultaneously learning to speak and understand. Here, we call them English learners. Around the world they could be French learners, they could be Polish learners, they could be whatever.

It's a question of what's your first language or what's your second language. And if your first language is the one you're learning to read and write in, you have to learn that orthography. You have to make that connection, the speech-to-print connection. The sounds of the language have got to get mapped on to their written representation and then that's got to be mapped on to the meanings that the words carry. If you know the language, you know the sounds of the language, you know the meaning the words carry.

If you're learning the language, you not only have to learn the orthography, you've got to learn the sounds of the language and you've got to learn the meaning that the words carry. So, that's a bigger challenge for the learner and, to be clear, to be blunt, it's a bigger challenge for teachers. It's more difficult, it's more challenging to teach children to read and write a language they are simultaneously learning. But the same basic brain circuitry has got to be created. There's no getting around that. But what teachers have to do is provide additional instructional support to familiarize students with the sounds of the language that they're then mapping letters onto and the meanings of the words, in order to make that circuitry between sound, meaning, and print vibrant and solid. Because if that's not solid, your literacy development is going to be hampered. Louisa, I'd be very interested in your take on what I just pontificated about.
Louisa Moats:
Yeah. Well, absolutely. That's a very clear and understandable explanation of what has to go on. So, I'm thinking about the position I was in when the World Bank came to me to write a paper about the fundamentals of teaching reading in any language across the world, and at first I said, "Well, I'm not really qualified to do this. First of all, I'm monolingual and secondly, I have no experience in schools in Africa or anywhere else other than schools here in the U.S.," where there may be a high population of English learners, such as the BIE schools, which are fascinating. Bureau of Indian Education schools, where even in my own backyard, the majority of the kids are English learners. They are Hispanic English learners, from various cultures actually. So, I had to ask myself: "What are the universals?" Are there any universals and what evidence can I cite about any universals? And I decided that I could explain just what you summarized, Claude, which is that, no matter what the language and what the situation, this reading brain has to be constructed and there have to be links made between the orthography or the writing system, the speech-sound system of the language, and the meanings of the words that are being read. And, as fundamental as that seems, it needed to be explained, because across the world, even that, and especially in developing countries, even that is a foreign idea.

The prevailing idea, apparently, and I got all this secondhand from people who have worked in developing countries especially, and that's what the World Bank does, the prevailing idea is that if you just put a bunch of flashcards in front of kids and force them to memorize and recite, that somehow the words are going to be imprinted on their brains. It was kind of a fundamental version of whole language that took hold here in the states. So, that was the universal idea that kids are learning language and all of these things we're talking about. The speech-sound system of the language. The way it is embodied in the print system that's being used, and the meanings of the words all have to do with language processing. Reading is only, incidentally, visual, and that's an old phrase from the 1970s that I learned when I was beginning to learn about this.

But yeah, I'd love to talk more about what we know. If the research on kids who are learning English as they are learning to read, it specifies in some way that the instructional process is different. I think where there's a lot of debate is well, is it different and how should it be different? And what evidence do we have about the universalities of instruction? What's going to work for everybody? Regardless.
CG:
Well, I mean, I think the first thing we need to get clear is I don't know anything that works for everybody all the time. Nothing. We have a lot of insight into strategies and approaches, techniques that are more likely to work than others, but even when we get to our best Tier 1 classroom instruction and then layer on that Tier 2 instruction for the roughly let's just say 20 percent who need additional support, and then the high-powered, really intensive Tier 3 instruction, we're still, under the best of circumstances, at about 90 percent, 95 percent success. So, we don't have anything that works across the board to my knowledge, and I try to emphasize that, and this is part of the science of reading that people don't get. People assume that science means certainty and that for any particular individual there's no certainty. There's higher probability and lower probability, and we know that if we focus on creating the reading brain inside the brain and creating the conditions outside the brain, it'll facilitate that. You have a much higher chance of success with your students than if you don't, than if you just sort of put up flashcards or just flood them with books or put them in a rich literacy environment all of which are OK things. I have no objection to using flashcards. Strategically. I have no objection to rich literacy environment. I'm a big fan of even before schooling starts. I mean, no one opposes that. But by themselves, if you don't really focus explicitly on creating that reading circuitry with the map on that we talked about, if you focus on that, you're much more likely to be successful. So, we have kids, even when language is not an issue, who have very serious challenges for all sorts of reasons. And we try to in the research...Presumably you get closer and closer to things that will work...they're more and more likely to work for as many children as possible.

But when we get to the English learners, we're in the same situation with the additional layer of you're dealing with a second language learning and there's tremendous variability in second language learning, just as there's tremendous variability in literacy learning. So, you have sort of one compounding the other, which makes it a challenge for students and it makes it a challenge for teachers. But I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty and I should cite a couple of studies just to make sure we're scientific in our discussion. The studies that we have, as relatively few as they are, in an amazing way converge with what the neuroscience says. Neuroscientists talk about brains. We teachers talk about kids, and the neuroscientists say the brains need additional support if you're learning to read in a language you're simultaneously learning to speak and understand. You need support in the phonological regions, the sound system of language, and in the semantic regions, the meaning system of language. They've got these diagrams, the brains and the different things going on and what's got to be connected. And we have studies, the ones I cite all the time are by your friends, Sharon Vaughn and Linnea Ehri, and they've both done very solid, convincing studies that I'm telling you, Louisa, converge with the neuroscientists in a way that you would think someone's making it up, because what they've done is they've taken interventions that have been successful. This is for early readers at risk for reading difficulties. They've taken interventions that have worked for monolingual kids, and when I say work, increase the likelihood of success, I want to make sure we talk about working, we operationalize it, increasing the chance of success compared to some comparison condition. So, they take monolingual interventions for monolingual kids having difficulty getting traction in reading and they add on language supports so that there's instruction in the words that are being used to teach children to read and the sounds of the words and the sound symbol mapping on.

Like you said, people don't really realize this. You don't realize that if you know the language, you take for granted that once you decode a word that's familiar to you, usually not always, but usually recognize it immediately. Right, if I'm decoding run, and I know the word run, a typical early CVC word that we teach in beginning decoding once I've decoded it and kind of said it to myself: "Oh, run, right." So, decoding is not the same as word recognition. But if you know the words, it's very close. For English learners, if they don't know the words that you're teaching to decode, they can't recognize them. Literally.

You know that orthographic mapping concept that Linnea Ehri has gifted to the world. That is a direct behavioral analogy to what the neuroscientists say is the support that needs to be provided to the brain. They have this concept. The technical term is binding.

The neuroscientists talk about binding the sound system to the spelling system, to the semantic system, binding. That's what orthographic mapping is.

You connect the sounds of the word to its written representation, letter by letter. Not a whole thing, but letter by letter. You map those and then you map it to the meaning and once you're exposed to that several times, you've got...that becomes a sight word.

Sight words are no longer just those irregular words you have to memorize as a big blob. Sight words are words that have gone through the orthographic mapping process and they become part of your sight vocabulary. So, Linnea's and Sharon's studies really demonstrate this in a very convincing way that if you take what works for kids in general, which is based on orthographic mapping and based on fluency and based on reading orally fluently, but map on to that instruction that specifically looks at the words, make sure kids understand the words that you're teaching them to decode and can decode them. Because the first time they come across them they have to decode them but then map them on to the sound system, the spelling system, the semantic system. You are increasing the likelihood that those kids who were having difficulty getting traction in early reading are going to start getting traction and their interventions really demonstrate that they get moderate, about equivalent to what the early interventions get with monolingual kids. So, I think, as small as the research base is, from my perspective it's pretty robust.
PA:
I'd like to interject right now because there's so much information that both of you have been sharing, and my teacher brain has just been igniting with all of this information and just because of the background experiences I've had. I'm still a teacher at heart and what I am hearing from you is research, that body of research we're looking at. It's so important in understanding that background of what needs to happen. Right? Those language processes. And, I'm just reiterating because my teacher brain is just looking at it this way so we're looking at oral, the orthography, sound mapping, moving on to meeting all those additional layers that is also expected for your English language learners. One thing that you said previously, Claude, was that practical application, and you too, Louisa, talking about what it means in that classroom experience, the basic applied Instruction, and, as you both speak, that's what gets to the heart of it. Right, understanding what it is, but understanding what the students need, because everyone won't need everything in the same degree or manner that is expected. So, with that in mind, let us move on to the next question.
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PA:
I want to think about some fundamental ideas and practices. So, we talked in general terms of ideas and practices for teaching English language learners, and what should every teacher know? You alluded to this, but I want to really get at the practical nature of "what?" As a teacher is walking into the classroom, I've got 25 kids in my classroom. They speak 13 different languages. What do I do? Louisa, do you want to start with answering this question?
LM:
Oh, I'll try. I mean. That's a question that comes up over and over again and the question of my mind is: OK, where have I seen evidence for what is the best approach? For example, a question is: Do kids need to have a translator available to them in the classroom if they speak a minority language of some kind, or are they going to be able to learn just if they're plunged into English language instruction? And if it does work, what kind of things should the teacher be doing to help it work? And there are many classrooms where there are many languages in a big melting pot. So, what is the teacher to do? So, this is all I have seen about it, that Teresa Roberts, for example, I remember did a study with Vietnamese immigrant children who were in one of the city schools, I think in California, and the question was: If we just go ahead with English language instruction, beginning with direct instruction of what the speech sounds are in English, which are very different from Vietnamese, and we teach them the same way that we teach the English-speaking kids, and at the same time we bolster their understanding of what the words are that they are beginning to repeat and sound out and work with in phoneme awareness will it work? And it was overwhelmingly positive. It did work and those kids learned faster and better than the comparison group of English-speaking kids who weren't getting that kind of instruction. So, I thought, well, that's interesting, that kind of defies the other belief and I'm characterizing it as a belief the kids have to have command of a language at the oral language, conversational level to be able to learn the symbol system for reading. And then just to her presentation by the people who ran The Reading First program for the Bureau of Indian Education Schools, and they got some of the best results of any Reading First grant program, where they ended up doubling the number of kids at proficient and advanced levels in those schools. And how did they do it? And a lot of these kids only spoke their tribal language when they came into school. They did not have command of English and what they did was direct instruction, reading mastery, intensively, with some supervision, and those kids did better than, after several years of instruction, did better on all kinds of measures than kids who had not had that kind of instruction.

But reading mastery is a comprehensive, systematic, explicit program. That also seems to defy the myth that it's not culturally relevant, because in these tribal cultures the kids don't make eye contact, they don't like to speak. If you ask them to respond orally, that will be defying their cultural norm and so on. And the guy who was a head of this, who was a Comanche by heritage, said "Hogwash." If the job is to teach them English and to teach them how to read, this is what worked and he, Casey Sovo, is continuing the work in other tribal schools and other parts of the country because of the evidence that it was so powerful and the message was you don't need to wait until the kids are comfortable with English conversation.

You can teach them to link sound, print, and meaning as long as there is enough opportunity to respond, to get correct feedback, to learn what the words mean.

Yes, you have to do that more. You have to have more wait time. That's another thing that Tony Fierro talks about a lot. He's a bilingual colleague of ours. Many people have heard him speak and he always talks about the extra cognitive load the kids are under, who are trying to manage learning what the words mean while they're learning to match speech and print, and he also is in favor of explicit, direct instruction on what the sounds are. You know how they're different from English, and the more explicit we can be in comparing the languages that this symbol represents this in English, it represents that in Spanish, and so on. The more refined the instruction will be. But I want to throw this back to Claude and ask, since Claude has been in the middle of these national debates and has recently engineered a kind of rapprochement between various schools of thought about this, where have the debates moved at this point in our national discussion? You've been in the thick of it since the beginning.
CG:
So, if you'll pardon me, let me take a little digression here and I'm not avoiding anything, although you might think I am. I just want to say a word about bilingual education, because that's always in the space, shall we say, when we talk about literacy and education in general. We call them language minority kids, we call them Emergent Bilinguals, we call them English learners, that term du jour is multilingual learners. We use them interchangeably, they mean slightly different things, but we don't wanna get into a semantic rabbit hole. I just wanna be very clear that I think there are a lot of advantages of bilingual education and if I could wave a magic wand, I would make bilingual education kind of the norm and make it part of the curriculum, and not just for English learners but for kids in general. People in general. And we should join the rest of the world and be at least bilingual, if not multilingual. Most people around the world are multilingual, and the United States is rather unique in being almost maniacally monolingual English. There are various reasons, we don't need to get into that, but I think bilingual education should be part of the curriculum, just like math and science and social studies and the rest, and there are a lot of reasons for this and I don't want to get too far into this digression and we can talk about it if you'd like.

But the fact of the matter is that most kids in the United States, most English learners, the very most are learning to read and write in a language they're learning to speak and understand, even if they're in a bilingual program. Typically it's a very short-term bilingual program, called Transitional, so they may develop first some literacy skills in their home language, typically Spanish, but it could be others. There's Korean. There's Japanese. But Spanish by far is the largest number. And even if they're in an early transition bilingual education program, eventually in second, third, fourth grade they're gonna be transitioning over to English, which they are still learning. Most of these kids when they transition to English instruction they're still English learners because they haven't hit the threshold to be classified fully English proficient. So, even the minority that are in a transitional program will eventually end up in a program where they're still learning English to become proficient, equivalent to their third-, fourth-grade peers. So, they're still in a situation where they're learning to read and write in a language they're simultaneously learning. So, a lot of the work that I've been doing has been focusing on this group of kids.

Not because I disparage in any way bilingual education. I just wanna make that clear. We'd be having a different conversation. We talked about that, and Pam and Louisa, we can dip into that later if you want, but I just wanna make that very clear. We'd be better off if we had bilingual education for everyone, but we'd be in a different place.

But we're talking about the reality. I'm a big fan of reality, don't leave home without it, and even though all of my bilingual colleagues deeply wish we were in a bilingual society, we are not, and so we need to talk about how to help kids improve in the context that they're in. As far as the practical application and cultural relevance and the hogwash that your Comanche colleague said, I won't go that far because, well, I don't wanna get in trouble with my bilingual English learner colleagues. Whom I esteem, I mean, I think it's important for us to really recognize that different people bring different things to the table.

I was on the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth some 20 years ago, and I actually reviewed the research on sociocultural influences on language minority children's reading development and we found really very little evidence that those culturally relevant, culturally responsive teaching, culturally responsive pedagogy, I say this kind of quaking in my boots because I know you talk about lightning rods, I mean that is one of the biggest lightning rods around. That the evidence for that is, I mean, at best, very weak.

What we have evidence for, and this isn't really super strong. But there's more of this. If you think about culturally responsive as connecting with children's lived experiences, right? Culturally responsive is such a vague term. It's kind of like the science of reading. People construct different things and so they use these terms and they'll say it's very important to have culturally responsive teaching. Well, OK, what do you mean exactly? You mean have a quinceanera? Have mariachis? I mean, what exactly are you talking about? Well, what I think they mean, what they should mean, is connecting with children's lived experiences and, as you well know, Louisa, certainly you do.

I mean there's a vast cognitive psychology and instructional psychology literature that one of the things you wanna do is connect with what kids know. You wanna connect with their background knowledge if they don't have it provide it, because background knowledge is a very important precursor to additional learning, even if you think of it like Vygotsky in terms that zone of proximal development. The instructional space is what kids can do independently because they already know how to do it, and what they can't do unless you provide assistance, which I like to think of as teaching. I think of teaching as assistance, helping kids go through that zone of proximal development. And part of going through that zone of proximal development is either tapping into what they already know or providing what they need to know in order to get to that next stage of learning. And the evidence is really quite clear, just from the general psychological and instructionalpsychology perspective, that you need to build on what you know and if you don't know something, you need to provide that. But when we talk about culturally responsive, it's very vague and when you look at the literature, it's I'll tell you, when I looked at the literature and some of this literature interestingly enough, Louisa, comes from Africa and I found some studies where they looked at kids' relative comprehension of text.

If the text tapped into familiar legends and stories and narrative forms that were familiar to them from their culture. Ojibwe that would be here in the United States. In Africa the kids speak Swahili or Kinyarwanda. I did some work in Rwanda some years ago. So, if they come from that culture, there are certain legends and themes and story grammar and genres that they're familiar with and when they read stories that were familiar to them, in contrast to those that had, say, a more Western orientation, they were more likely to understand those stories. But you know what was the biggest input, the biggest parameter in determining comprehension? Their familiarity with the language of the story they were reading. So, if they understood the language, they had a higher language proficiency in English or French or whatever the first or second language was in the country. If they were more proficient in that language, they were much more likely to understand the content and the effect size. The effect of knowing the language proficiency was much greater than any positive effect from knowing the familiarity.

So, it's not that familiarity doesn't matter, but relative to knowing the language that you're reading in, it's a relatively minor factor and I'd make the same analogy with some research that my former colleague at Stanford did, Susanna Loeb, and I don't know if you're familiar with this, Louisa, but it was a very interesting study, where she looked at a huge sample in Miami of Spanish-speaking kids, and she looked at the influences. What predicted the article was something called Is a Good Teacher a Good Teacher for All? Comparing Value-Added of Teachers with Their English Learners and Non-English Learners. I'm butchering the title, but something like that and what she did, what she found, that when teachers were more effective with kids in general, and by effective I'm talking about you talk about value added. I know it's very controversial among educators value added, VAM scores. Where you calculate how much growth in achievement test scores kids acquire as a function of the teacher they have and some school districts starting to use that for pay raises? I mean it's become very controversial. But Susanna is a very careful scholar and she calculated the achievement gains by students that can be attributed to individual teachers in a very large sample over several years.
So, I think there were very stable predictors and she found that teachers who are more effective with kids in general, non-English learners were also more effective with English learners. I mean the amount of overlap was substantial. Now, if teachers had more experience with English learners, if they had some kind of English learner certificate, either a bilingual authorization or an English learner certificate, there was a little boost in their value added scores with EL specifically. It wasn't consistent. It was more for secondary than for elementary and it was more for language arts and it was for math, but it was very inconsistent, but very consistently across language arts and math teachers who were effective in general and effective not some judgment, but based on value added to students achievement scores.

Teachers who were effective with kids in general were also more effective with English learners. And the policy implications of this. Because, Susanna, as you might know as a policy person, the policy implications are if you have a choice between a teacher who is documented to be effective with kids in general or a teacher who has an EL certificate who has had experience with English learners, and it's one or the other, then go for the teacher with documented effectiveness with kids in general. Now, if you have the luxury of having teachers who are effective in general and they've had some experience with ELs, or they have an endorsement bilingual or an ESL endorsement then that's great. Go for that. Because that gives you more value added. But by far and away, teachers who are effective with kids in general are much more likely effective with English learner kids. So, those are the guiding kind of studies that I think about when I think about what it would take? We need effective instruction.

The thing that English learners lack most that I see in classrooms is effective instruction. One of the reasons they're lacking effective instruction is there's too little emphasis in the PD on effective instructional practices. These are things that people find kind of boring, like modeling, direct teaching, explicit instruction, feedback, guided practice. These things that are bread and butter but people are, "Oh yeah," they already know that we need to focus on all this other stuff. This last thing I want to say, Pam, because I know I'm just yammering on too long, but it's kind of like trying to put ornaments on a tree that is just crumbling. It's like putting bobbles on something that has a missing foundation that's just crumbling. It's just completely upside down the way we approach PD for English learners, Emergent Bilinguals, multilingual learners. Sorry, I'm going to stop now.
PA:
No, no. And thinking about being on both sides of the PD, being the one getting, receiving, and also delivering. What I have to say about this answer was very impressive from both of you, both Dr. Goldenberg and Dr. Moats. Here, let's go back to how we began this question. We began with getting some insight on fundamental ideas, right? Practices about teaching ELs, and you all have provided so much information and I like to do a little bit of a recap because this is such a great conversation. So, thinking about the great examples of success stories, that was wonderful to hear. That we can be successful in teaching our EL students.

Also, taking a look at those practical applications again, thinking about wait time for processing that direct, explicit instruction when focusing on sounds, maybe sounds that are different in a language all these things we have to consider in contrastive analysis, but also, how do we help our students gain meaning? One thing that I thought was very impactful was the fact that you know what it is necessary to connect with kids, right? The cultural relevance there. It is necessary to connect with kids, but it's more necessary. This is my takeaway is to provide that practical, explicit instruction that works. What's working in the classroom? What's happening between the teacher and the student? Thank you so much for sharing that. I think people are going to have to go back and rewind and take a second listen, because the information you both have shared has been so packed full of valuable, practical information that will be supportive for teachers. So, Louisa, is there anything else you would like to add to that?
LM:
Well, yeah, I'm just thrilled to hear what Claude has said about the almost distraction of the debates about cultural responsiveness and culturally responsive instruction. It is this catchphrase that's in every document, even the consensus documents that you just engineered. It had to be there, right? To please the gods. But I've had exactly the same questions, and to hear you affirm why I feel so kind of befuddled about culturally responsive instruction, I've never really understood or gotten a good answer from anyone who espouses it about what exactly it means in terms of instructional science and what we know about the process of teaching that works the best. And I'm thrilled to hear about this study that shows that the competence in teaching and the processes of teaching are your best bet and that means that we can be very effective in situations where we have kids from multiple backgrounds. And to me, cultural responsiveness has meant that we're respectful of kids' cultural backgrounds, we're accepting of them, and where possible and when appropriate, we also teach and encourage those kids to know their own home language and home culture if the situation permits it.

And I'm thinking again of the visit I did to the tribal school many years ago during Reading First, where the kids had reading mastery for one period and then the next period they went across the hall to the language and culture room, where their home language was being taught by elders in the tribe and one of their pottery arts was being taught, and that was part of the school day. It wasn't a contradiction. It was embedded in the curriculum that they would learn how to read and speak and write English, but they would also learn their tribal history, their culture, their language, and that to me was cultural responsiveness. But it didn't mean that somehow there was something fundamentally different about the process of teaching kids how to read.
CG:
That's such a great story. I was in North Dakota a few weeks ago and I saw something very similar where, literally, I went to a reading class. I think this was a school that actually was using, you remember Success for All, Louisa? It's still around. And this is a school that started Success for All like 20 years ago and then drifted from it for some reason. And then some people say what were you doing Success for All? Why did we stop doing it? It was working, wasn't it? And then they engineered bringing it back and it seemed to be getting traction.

And then I went to a class where one of the elders from the community was teaching the kids some, I think it was Ojibwe, actually it was the language. And, the interesting thing is he was using it. He was using a very recitation type style, right? Where he would say a word in English and have a kid stand up and say it in Ojibwe, so we could talk about his pedagogy there. But it was a very recitation-oriented thing. Just in passing.

But the more important thing I want to emphasize that you said that it's so important and there's no contradiction there. I think there is no reason to think that direct, explicit teaching, when appropriate...Now, there's sometimes a direct, explicit teaching. You know, as we know from cognitive psychology, there's well structured domains of learning. Right when it's, it can be hierarchical, getting it right is pretty clear cut and the sound-symbol system is pretty much like that. But there's some domains of learning where, well, you want to teach the meaning but you want to have more discussion in Socratic dialogues or however you conceive of these things. I used to work on something called instructional conversations, where you try to work on and discuss themes with kids that kind of defy hierarchical or linear instruction. So, direct instruction isn't for everything, but we should use it for what it's for, and learning the sound-symbol system is a prime example of where direct, explicit, systematic, unambiguous, demystifying instruction is totally called for, and that is in no way contradicting the importance of affirming kids' cultures, enhancing them, drawing on them.

You know, one of the popular phrases in the literature now is Funds of Knowledge, as if Funds of Knowledge and culturally responsive teaching is contradictory to direct instruction, things that we know increase the likelihood of success, and there's no reason for there to be this contradiction. Just one last thing. I mean, I think what's happened, part of the history here and we can really get in a rabbit hole in history, is these kids, whether they're languages of minority or African-American or Latino or Khmer. There's a long history of cultural appropriation, homogenization, the big melting pot, and a lot of this emphasis on culturally responsive teaching, which is now called culturally affirming or culturally sustaining. We have this evolution of terms that I just think create greater ambiguity, is a response to historical, not just neglect, but historical, and not just assimilation but destruction. I mean, the history of the United States around natives, around African-Americans, Latinos in the Southwest is not something to be proud of, and I think part of what we're seeing in education is a reaction to that. Part of like we've been doing groups of kids such a disservice and their families, their whole populations, whole communities. We've been doing them such a disservice. We need to kind of right the ship here, and I think a lot of the impetus for culturally sustaining, culturally responsive, whatever you call it, is in part a reaction to that, and I think it's important to keep that in mind and try to consider the word rapprochement. OK, I'll accept that, because I think there are things we can agree on, that we must agree on, because otherwise this kind of, these nefarious reading wars, whatever you call them they just don't do anyone any good, unless you have a particular intellectual tradition you want to protect, not to mention publication rights you want to protect. There are all sorts of reasons people get dug in and don't want to see that there's a whole here that's bigger and more important than any particular niche we occupy.
PA:
And sometimes it's because it's a heart decision. I'm feeling this in my heart versus this is the practical application in use and it's going to give the most benefit. We have had some great discussion here today and we do have one more question before our time ends together, and it's a pretty long one. It's a big one, so I just want to get a summary of your ideas here. Lastly, one thing I want to ask, do we see a resolution soon to the debate? We talked a little bit about that debate between the science of reading advocates and our English language learner advocates?

You've given me some insight already, or given the audience some insight already, on what that should be. Maybe you can expound on that just a little bit or recap that for us. We know that you have spoken before about the two Agreement documents that have been published. Both of you have referenced those. I want you to tell us a little bit about what's in them, just a quick little overview so that we can understand and maybe some of our listeners might want to dive in to learn a bit more about that. And how did they come about? Maybe a little bit of background and they are in fact, a major step forward.
CG:
Do you want me to go first, Louisa?
LM:
You were on those panels. I was not.
CG:
I was. This is true. OK, I want to really try to be brief here. So, the two documents and there are a couple of articles that came out in an online publication in California called EdSource. I'm seeing a thumbs up so good. So, I would really encourage people to take a look at the articles in EdSource because they give kind of a brief context and overview and then documents themselves.

So, the first one of these is one that I was very directly involved in. The title is something like Narrowing Down to Find Common Ground, and this is a more California-centric document, where we had a group about 15 academic scholars, advocates, parents, different groups of people represent different perspectives, and we tried to sort of get ahead of some of the policy issues that are going to be coming up in California over the next few years, and we identified three areas that we found some common ground on. One has to do with multilingual learners, Emergent Bilinguals, and we affirmed the importance, the value of bilingual education, and not just for English learners but for kids in general, just the value of bilingualism and bilingual education being one of the paths towards that. It's an opportunity to enrich the linguistic fabric of the state, certainly, and of the country. The second issue we found common ground on was the importance of foundational literacy skills, those skills that I started talking about at the top of the hour that map the sounds of the language, the written representations, and then connect that to meaning, that you need to have systematic, explicit instruction in those skills because they form the foundation of literacy. Now there are other foundational things, like oral language. I mean, we know we learned to read from speech to print. So, you've got to have that speech, you have to have that oral language and if you don't have that oral language, as I said before, you've got to help kids acquire it. You have to provide it. That's very important. But those foundational literacy skills that connect to the language, the spoken language to written language, that is the key connection that's got to be made and then to meaning.

So, there was some agreement. We had some arguing and some haggling and some disputations about whether systematic and explicit were the words we wanted to use. We decided, yes, we do want to use systematic and explicit, but caution, you want to define what that means, because systematic and explicit can mean different things. There are some documents in California, EL-supported documents, that use systematic, explicit, foundational skills. So, it was not a total revolution, but it was just making us aware that, yeah, that exists in the literature. It's not something that we need to shy away from or distance ourselves from, because we have some consensus on that and we nailed it down there.

The third area that we found agreement on was the importance of early screening for potential reading difficulties. That, if you don't know, there are signposts, and Louisa can certainly talk about this. There are signposts that alert you, that provide potential red flags that a child might have difficulty acquiring the speech-to-print connection before reading instruction even takes place. If they're having trouble with phonological discriminations. If they have issue with short-term memory. There are signposts of difficulties, not dyslexia. One of the issues here is that people want to talk about screening for dyslexia. You can't really screen for dyslexia in kindergarten. Now, I know this from my good friend, Jack Fletcher, who's made it very clear that you've got to teach first and then see how that goes. In early kindergarten, no one's been taught enough. You can say, well, this kid has the potiential for dyslexia. So, we want to talk about screening for early reading difficulties, potential difficulties, including dyslexia, among other things, and we came to some agreement. There's some benefit to that, as long as you use appropriate instruments that are linguistically and culturally appropriate, there's that word again, and that have been validated, shown to be reliable with the populations in question. So, there's some caveats there. But the importance of early screening for potential reading difficulties. We came to some agreement, with some caveats and safeguards. So, that was one thing. The other one was I was less directly involved and that was The Reading League and that was really largely engineered by Kari Kurto, who Louisa knows, I'm sure, and Pam, you probably do too of The Reading League and Martha Hernandez of Californians Together and the National Committee on Effective Literacy. We had a big summit in Las Vegas. It's gonna be in, thankfully, in San Diego next year and not Las Vegas. Again, not to dis Las Vegas, but in San Diego...we have a better venue.

And it really was a result of a year of conversations, first Zoom conversations that, ironically enough, was kicked off by this very unfortunate white paper that the National Committee on Effective Literacy put out in an even more unfortunate webinar. They really put science of reading and English learners at loggerheads as if they were in competition with each other. That the science of reading was doing damage to English learners. It didn't respect all sorts of things like the bilingual brain and various other things and when that came out, people were very upset, very worried. They wanted some return fire and a group of us got this decided. There's some things we can agree on here, because the action steps at the end were like we gotta be mindful of English learners and their learning needs. We need to think beyond phonics and decoding. OK, you don't have to tell me that twice. So, there are things we could agree on, and so we decided to build on those and write a response that identified the agreements, as we have things to agree on, even though in this document there are things that are a little bit or a lot misleading.

So, we gotta stop the misleading, agree on what we can agree on and build from that. And from that we had a series of webinars and Zoom discussions among Californians Together, The Reading League again, this is engineered by Kari and Martha all of which led up to this summit last year, I think in March it was. From that again, Kari and Martha and their colleagues, I was part of that, writing the consensus document, but kind of marginal to it.

And, again systematic and explicit instruction was there. Meaning they'd take into account the needs of second language learners, the importance and the value of bilingualism and bi-literacy, and that's how they came about, and I think it's a step forward. I wanna hear what Louisa says about it, but I'll tell you, I think a lot depends on what happens next, because you can have these documents that are very encouraging.

I mean, I think better to have them than not to have them. But then it depends on what people do if they really take it seriously or if they say, "OK, we agree." And then you go back to the respective corners and plow the respective fields and forget. Look, there are things here that we need to build on, rather than say, "OK, we agree, now let's get back to our agenda." There's always a danger of that happening. I don't know if it's gonna happen, but a lot depends on what happens from here on out whether we build on these documents.
PA:
Thank you, Dr. Goldenberg and Dr. Moats. I really would like to hear your take on that. I always believe in pausing to take a break, finding that common ground and taking it from there. Do you have any comments that you would like to add?
LM:
You know, your question was are we getting somewhere nationally? Are we building national consensus? Are we changing our practices on the scale that we need to change them to make really meaningful progress with kids and leave fewer kids behind? And I think we are. I think I'm quite hopeful and positive about the progress that's being made. I think those consensus documents were a big step in the right direction and, yes, it's going to take a while for people to really act on some of the things that are specified there, that are so well articulated in those documents. But I think, yeah. All very positive.
PA:
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this time together with you. Thank you, Dr. Moats and Dr. Goldenberg. I want our listeners to know that we will post the links to those two agreement documents on our website. You'll be finding this within the podcast. This has been an amazing discussion and we appreciate you joining us today. Please tell our listeners where they can learn more about your work, Dr. Goldenberg, Dr. Moats. Dr. Goldenberg, you first.
CG:
Well, you can go to my website at Stanford, but don't worry about that. I mean I want people to read those documents. I mean I think that's really where we want to go and you know, I've done some blogs and some webinars over the past couple of years on these issues, English learners, but also finding common ground. And yeah, just Google me. Sorry, that's all I can really tell you.
PA:
Thank you. Dr. Moats?
LM:
Well, if anyone's interested in the World Bank paper, I have it posted on my website, which is louisamoats.com. Easy to find, and a bunch of papers are posted there.
PA:
Awesome. Thank you both very much. This is Pam Austin, bringing the best thought leaders in education directly to you.
Narrator:
This has been an EDVIEW360 podcast. For additional thought-provoking discussions, sign up for our blog, webinar, and podcast series at voyagersopris.com/edview360. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts and to help other people like you find our show. Thank you.

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Reading Science and Teaching Literacy to English Learners: Conceptual and Practical Implications

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Join us for this lively and informative discussion between two literacy powerhouses.

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In this conversation, Dr. Pamela Snow will discuss oral language in early childhood and across the school years, with a focus on its importance and role in developing, and being developed by, reading skills.

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How Explicit Writing Instruction Can Compensate for Gaps in Background Knowledge on Apple Podcasts

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How Explicit Writing Instruction Can Compensate for Gaps in Background Knowledge on Apple Podcasts

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Writing is potentially the most powerful lever we have for building knowledge and improving reading comprehension. It can uncover gaps in background knowledge that prevent students from accessing grade-level material. And, because writing helps new information stick, it can also boost students' academic performance.
But writing is the most difficult thing we ask students to do. If inexperienced writers are asked to write at length, they can easily become overwhelmed as they juggle everything from spelling to word choice to organizing their thoughts. And if students are asked to write only about personal experience or topics in a separate writing curriculum, writing won't help them acquire the knowledge they need to succeed in school.
Join this informative podcast as we talk with esteemed researcher and author Natalie Wexler. She will share ways to make writing less overwhelming by starting at the sentence level and how to include writing activities in the content of the core curriculum. This is an approach that shouldn't be limited to English classes. It can have powerful effects in any subject-and at any grade level.

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how explicit writing instruction can compensate for gaps in background knowledge

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‎EDVIEW 360: How Explicit Writing Instruction Can Compensate for Gaps in Background Knowledge on Apple Podcasts

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Writing is potentially the most powerful lever we have for building knowledge and improving reading comprehension. It can uncover gaps in background knowledge that prevent students from accessing grade-level material. And, because writing helps new information stick, it can also boost students' acad...

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Sign in to your a Summer Teacher PD_ Writing K-2 (1).pdf ccount

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 Final ELA High Leverage Instructional Resources (Gr. K-12)

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As California pushes schools to adopt research-based approaches to teaching children how to read, often called the "science of reading," some teachers and advocates for English learners have expressed concerns that techniques used to teach reading in English to native speakers may not work for students who are learning English as a second language.

But an in-depth look at the science behind how language is developed reveals an interesting parallel between the science of reading and second language learning. In fact, the science of reading can actually provide support when it comes to teaching students whose native language is not English.

The science of reading and the science of language learning both require an explicit and structured approach to literacy that can actually help answer the longstanding question of: How can I teach English academic skills to a student who has no English oral ones?

A key strength of the science of reading approach is its focus on the development on both language (speaking) and literacy (reading) within the same instructional space. Gone are the days of encouraging separate subject blocks within English language arts, where literacy and oral fluency are taught as separate entities. Science-based approaches encourage teaching language and literacy hand-in-hand, complementing and building off one another based on each child's development and progression. This focus is effective for all students, but especially for English learners who must learn oral skills at the same time as they are learning academic ones. As they are sounding out the word, they are also learning what that word means.

The traditional separation of oral language and literacy skills in English leads to an increase of "scaffolding" support for native English speakers - and even more so for non-native English speakers. Already pressed for time, teachers often find themselves supporting needed oral skills within literacy instruction, only to turn around and add needed literacy skills within oral language instruction. By teaching the two skills separately, teachers end up taking more time for each skill that is developmentally intertwined with the other.

The science of reading approaches these skills as interwoven, giving equal importance to both oral language and literacy instruction within the same space. This immediately reduces the need for scaffolds and emphasizes looking at language and literacy through a lens of cognition and development, instead of repetition and memorization.

Teaching oral, comprehension and vocabulary skills alongside language structure and syntax is something that has been much-needed for teaching English learners. Take Marco, an English learner, for example. Marco might sound out the word "net" correctly and might recognize a sight word (a commonly used word such as "she," "be" or "had") when reading. But does he know what those words mean, or how to apply them in context? Is he even given the opportunity to find out? Too often, Marco has no idea. He simply gets a "high five" for decoding one word correctly and recognizing another with no comprehension because that was the skill focus for that lesson. Marco continues in his learning process, only learning certain skills in a limited sense and not a fully comprehensive and applicable one.

This not only limits Marco's literacy skills in the other language, but his language proficiency skills as well. He misses out on the opportunity for comprehension, vocabulary expansion, and active skill application of the language being learned because of this compartmentalized approach.

Marco needs both the functional application and the comprehensive skills to be taught purposefully and in combination. He also needs this done within the same learning period while the concepts are still fresh and relatable.

It's an important step forward that this combined approach of language and literacy is now encouraged in whole-group and small-group instructional settings through the science of reading.

Looking at reading and the science behind it from a cognitive standpoint can provide us with a more equitable approach to teaching because it is based on what constitutes - and makes sense functionally - in the brain's processing of information, something that is universal. How vocabulary is developed, alongside its symbols and sounds in reading and writing, is simultaneously developed in all language and literacy learning.

The science of reading challenges teachers to look beyond the surface of the language spoken and more deeply into how it functions. On the surface, it is easy for teachers to fear they cannot help or support English learners if they do not speak the student's language. However, by applying the science of reading's explicit language and literacy approach, teachers will be reminded of how they themselves made meaning and developed English literacy. Yes, they spoke English, but they still had to learn the structure and written form and how to read English in the classroom, just as their English learner students will. A key difference is that the English learner may not have any pre-existing English oral skills, but these skills, now more than ever, are encouraged and can be taught as they are developed, alongside literacy instruction.

Simply applying the science of reading won't provide all the solutions to the complexities of teaching English learners, but it can provide teachers with a purposeful starting point through its explicit focus on, and the equal importance given, to both language and literacy development.

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Rachel Hawthorne has a background in linguistics and taught for several years as a bilingual teacher for grades preK-5. She now works as an English learner product developer for Really Great Reading, a company that provides literacy instruction support to educators.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.

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The science of reading also applies to students learning English as a second language

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A key strength of the science of reading approach is its focus on the development on both language (speaking) and literacy (reading) within the same instructional space.

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The “bilingual brain” and reading research: Questions about teaching English Learners to read in English

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The “bilingual brain” and reading research: Questions about teaching English Learners to read in English

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The “bilingual brain” and reading research: Questions about teaching English Learners to read in English

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Controversies over how best to teach children to read go back many years. Most recently, two questions have emerged that leave teachers of English Learners puzzled:First, does research on reading, sometimes referred to as “the science of reading,” include English Learners, or is it based solely on E…

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The 'Science of Reading' and English-Language Learners: What the Research Says

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The 'Science of Reading' and English-Language Learners: What the Research Says

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As more states and districts are embracing the "science of reading," some educators and advocates have raised the question: Will these methods work for English-language learners?

The "science of reading" has become shorthand in some literacy circles for approaches to early reading instruction that emphasize explicit, systematic teaching.

Some researchers and ELL experts say that's a problem. The National Committee for Effective Literacy, a new advocacy organization formed this year, has argued that states that have taken up these initiatives have narrowed literacy instruction to "a few foundational reading skills" that fail to meet the needs of English learners.

The group's aim, said Martha Hernandez, an NCEL member and the executive director of Californians Together, is to "ensure that the research and policies and practices that address English learner and emergent bilinguals were spotlighted, and are part of the national literacy conversation."

Other early literacy researchers, though, have said that NCEL is misrepresenting some of the changes that states and districts are making to their reading teaching methods-and that a lot of the strategies that work for native English speakers can be effective for English learners, too.

So what are these areas of overlap, and where do English learners need something different?

What do school systems mean when they say the "science of reading"?

States that have recently passed laws aiming to improve reading instruction have mandated that teachers be trained in delivering this kind of foundational skills instruction, or that schools use materials and assessments that support it.

Systematic, explicit instruction in letters and sounds is crucial for beginning readers, especially those with dyslexia or phonological processing problems, said Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, a bilingual speech-language pathologist and an associate research professor at the University of Houston.

Still, she said, "phonology and phonics are one piece of the puzzle. It's not everything that literacy is about."

Teachers need to help students develop a host of early literacy skills, like their ability to express themselves through spoken language, their ability to understand what others are saying to them, and their vocabulary, Cárdenas-Hagan said. Students should have opportunities for practice that integrates listening, speaking, reading, and writing, she added.

While these new state laws mandate certain approaches to foundational skills instruction, they direct schools to prioritize other reading skills, too. Many cite the five components of reading studied in the National Reading Panel in 2000-instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension.

Even so, critics of these laws worry that a more comprehensive focus will be lost in their implementation, and that school systems will be incentivized to double down on foundational skills instruction at the expense of all else.

"When it hits the classroom, when it hits district administration, that's what they look for, that's what they assess," said Laurie Olsen, an NCEL member and the board president of Californians Together.

Still, he said, new state laws often don't specify how much time to spend on different reading skills or how to teach them-nor should they, Goldenberg said: "You can't expect legislation to be curriculum guides." That means, though, that these laws' success or failure lies in implementation, he said.

Does this research apply to English-language learners, too?

In 2002, the U.S. Department of Education convened the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, tasking it with reviewing the research on best practices for literacy development among ELLs.

The panel's report, published in 2006, found that a lot of what works for kids whose first language is English is also effective for kids who speak a different language at home. Instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension-the five components of reading studied in the National Reading Panel a few years earlier-all had "clear benefits" for ELLs.

But the literature also showed that instruction was most effective when it was tailored to ELLs' specific needs and unique founts of knowledge. And crucially, kids learning English needed more instruction in oral English proficiency than their peers: things like vocabulary knowledge, listening comprehension, and syntax.

The panel found that schools weren't supporting students enough in these areas, and more recent research finds that schools still aren't doing enough to help ELLs develop academic language in English.

With these students, teachers need to discuss the meaning of words constantly-even shorter, simpler words that teachers might not treat as vocabulary words with native English speakers, said Cárdenas-Hagan. In working with students who are learning how to speak a new language, teachers need to be purposeful about developing vocabulary and oral language skills in every lesson.

In part, this is so that students can understand that the words they're sounding out have meaning, said Kathy Escamilla, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an NCEL member. She gave the example of a 1st grade class, where a teacher might ask students to clap out how many sounds are in the word "sofa."

Native English speakers would know that word, but other students might not. If the teacher doesn't help English learners understand the meaning, then it's harder for students to make the connection that these sounds represent word parts, Escamilla said.

And there are other reasons why English learners might need teachers to pay more attention to vocabulary instruction. A word like "run," for example, has multiple meanings in English: You can run a race, but you can also run your finger down a list, or run a computer program. Discussing those multiple meanings as students encounter these words in phonics lessons is a key part of vocabulary instruction for English learners, Cárdenas-Hagan said.

Teachers need to build students' oral vocabulary beyond these words, too, so that they're prepared for the more challenging texts they'll encounter after the earliest grades, said Goldenberg. This is important for all students, but especially so for English learners.

"If the only English-language development that kids are getting in K, 1, 2 are the words they're learning to read, that is an impoverished ELD curriculum," he said.

Research on interventions for Spanish-speaking students who are at risk of reading difficulties has found that successful approaches combine both instruction in the five components of reading identified in the National Reading Panel report, and additional support in developing spoken language skills in English from trained bilingual intervention teachers.

What if students are in bilingual programs and learning to read in two languages?

English learners aren't blank slates. They come into schools with language-and often literacy-skills from the language they speak at home. These skills can support them in developing proficiency in English.

The number of dual-language programs in the United States is growing, but there's still a shortage of certified bilingual teachers-and, as Education Week has reported, English learners often face competition for spots in these programs from affluent, native English-speaking parents who are increasingly seeking out bilingual education for their children.

In its position paper, NCEL outlined best practices for English learners in dual-language programs. Good teaching in a bilingual setting isn't just "repeating the same thing in two languages," they write.

It requires "coordinated and aligned" literacy teaching, with a scope and sequence that makes sense in each language. Students should have access to high-quality materials and assessments in both languages, as well as opportunities to write, have conversations, and deliver presentations in both.

And importantly, they write, dual language programs should celebrate diversity, "including learning about the benefits of bilingualism and explicit efforts to equalize the status of 'minoritized' languages."

But Escamilla says the two goals aren't mutually exclusive. "While it is true that most of the kids who are labeled as English learners are in English programs, that does not mean that we shouldn't advocate or push for the development of bilingual programs."

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The 'Science of Reading' and English-Language Learners: What the Research Says

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As more states embrace certain evidence-based methods, advocates question: Will they work for English learners?

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English Learners / Emergent Bilinguals and the Science of Reading

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English Learners / Emergent Bilinguals and the Science of Reading

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History and Finding Alignment

Historically, there have been divergent viewpoints between experts in the science of reading field and some experts who support English Learner/Emergent Bilingual(EL/EB) students. However, it is important to recognize that the shared objective among all stakeholders is to facilitate positive literacy outcomes for all students, ultimately aiming for proficient reading and writing skills.

Despite a broad consensus on numerous topics, such as the importance of building language and knowledge, having high expectations for students, and the important role of foundational reading skills, there have been instances when presentations and papers have perpetuated a narrative of disconnection between these groups. For instance, in 2022, the National Committee for Effective Literacy (NCEL) published a White Paper that extensively discredited practices associated with the "science of reading" approach. Interestingly, the frustrations expressed by the EL/EB community, which led to the development of this paper, often stemmed from practices that deviated from the scientifically supported evidence on how students acquire reading skills. These practices were implemented in schools where administrators mistakenly believed they were aligned with the science of reading. One notable example is the excessive emphasis on phonemic awareness or phonics instruction, with daily instruction lasting 90 minutes, at the expense of other critical literacy areas such as oral language development, vocabulary, and language comprehension. It is crucial to note that such practices are not congruent with the principles of the science of reading.

Overall, it will be important to draw upon our understanding of what the science of reading is, and what it is not, and proceed with a united message that evidence-aligned instruction must address all components of language comprehension, writing, word recognition and, for EL/EB students, English language development.

A response to the NCEL White Paper was drafted by Goldenberg et al. (2022) in an effort to find common ground. Following this response, The Reading League assembled a group of stakeholders to discuss some of the most critical points of contention in a series of meetings. The intent was to listen, learn, and build trust. This group knew that in order to truly unpack this disconnect, collaborative conversations had to occur that began from a place of mutual respect and understanding.

In March 2022 at the first virtual convening, the group of stakeholders agreed that proponents of the science of reading do not always place enough intentional emphasis on supporting the language needs of ELs/EBs. They also worked to dispel myths often perpetuated by many referring to the science of reading as a one-size fits all approach, a program of instruction, phonics-only, or any number of misinformed beliefs that describe anything other than what the science of reading is-a body of knowledge derived from decades of scientifically-based reading research.

The group convened multiple times from the spring to fall of 2022 with the objective of addressing significant topics, fostering clarity, and establishing trust. Through these discussions, several essential areas of agreement emerged, while other important questions surfaced that required further exploration. These shared alignments and questions served as the foundation for more in-depth discussions during the in-person gathering held in March, The Reading League Summit.

During these discussions, another group of EL/EB and science of reading experts had been meeting and discussing concrete alignments in California. This group developed an excellent resource that can serve as a foundation for conversations based on collaboration.
Pivot Learning published its final conclusions in this report:
The Reading League Summit, Joint Statement, and Report

In 2022-2023, efforts to bridge the disconnect between proponents of the science of reading and experts supporting the needs of EL/EBs led to the belief that the various stakeholder groups can move forward together. Continued conversations between The Reading League and friends and NCEL and friends led to an historic one-day Summit in Las Vegas on March 25, 2023.

The Summit featured four moderated panel discussions on a variety of topics. A video archive of the 2023 Summit is available here:

Register for the second annual The Reading League Summit 2024 on April 27, 2024, in San Diego, CA.
Joint Statement:
Following the Summit, panelists and moderators reconvened to address growing misconceptions about the science of reading. The following statement was drafted in order to continue the work of advancing literacy outcomes for all students, together.
Report:
Dr. Tanji Reed Marshall, director of P-12 Practice at The Education Trust, recounts the day's events in the following report.

Research
Is there scientifically-based research that helps us understand how to meet the literacy needs of ELs/EBs?
There is a claim made by certain individuals suggesting that all research conducted within the realm of the science of reading solely pertains to monolingual contexts. However, it is important to emphasize that all scientifically grounded research aimed at comprehending the process of reading acquisition-including studies explicitly addressing questions related to EL/EB students-falls within the scope of the science of reading. Although further research is warranted to gain a comprehensive understanding of effective support for EL/EB students, it is categorically incorrect to assert that no research exists regarding optimal strategies for assisting this particular student population.
There are multiple, reliable resources that have summarized research and lifted up best practices for EL/EB students including the following:

The Reading League has purchased the digital rights with a limited number of permitted downloads of the Developing Literacy in Second Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth (Executive Summary). We welcome you to download the PDF of this resource for future use while it is available.

Additionally, because our nation's classrooms have a growing number of EL/EB students, they have been participants in much of the research that is part of the body of knowledge known as the science of reading. For example, the initial 1990 study validating the Simple View of Reading was conducted on students along the Texas/Mexico border who spoke multiple languages.

There are also many scientifically-based research studies that help us understand how to meet the needs of ELs/EBs specifically. Unfortunately, many of them remain behind a paywall, but interested readers can contact the authors directly to request access. A sampling of just a handful of the studies that specifically address EL/EB students includes:

Curriculum and Instruction

Learning to read in a language you are learning is similar, but not identical, to learning to read in a language that is new to you. - Dr. Claude Goldenberg

One of the areas of continued discussion revolves around foundational skills. These are skills such as phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, phonics, phonic decoding, and encoding, that must be developed to automaticity in order to support accurate and automatic word recognition and spelling.

An element of instruction that is a frequent point of contention is the use of context cues when teaching reading. Emily Hanford's Sold a Story podcast explains the faulty logic and lack of research for relying on cues to decode words. An important distinction to understand is that cueing as a strategy to develop word recognition is not supported by research, but using cues to confirm the meaning of words once they have been read accurately can be beneficial for students, including ELs/EBs.
This article by Dr. Louise Spear-Swerling clarifies this distinction: Dr. Linnea Ehri and Dr. Susan Brady discuss the role of meaning:
For readers, our brains have three separate kinds of representations for words in different areas of the brain that make up words' lexical representations: 1) a phonological representation of how the word is pronounced; 2) a semantic representation that encompasses the word's meaning attributes, including how the word is used in different contexts and connects to the meanings of other words that have related meanings; 3) and an orthographic map that specifies the spelling of the word. The orthographic map results from code-based grapheme-phoneme mapping when a reader encounters a word in print and decodes it, or when the reader spells the word. Once an orthographic map is well-established for a word, the reader no longer needs to decode that word but automatically accesses the map when reading or spelling, and even just when hearing the word. The different kinds of representations become more strongly neurologically connected as the learner has experience with the word in language and in print. Thus when reading a known word, the semantic and phonological representations are activated as well as the orthographic map. For words to fully exist in our 'sight word' memory, they must have these other forms of representation well connected with the orthographic map. Research also indicates that connections with the motor region of the brain that controls handwriting are also activated when a word is used. Educational practices that integrate all aspects of word knowledge strengthen the connections, supporting automaticity of word recognition and comprehension.

Research on both monolingual and bilingual students has documented that explicit and systematic instruction in phoneme awareness and decoding are essential for orthographic mapping, however these skills are not sufficient to develop skilled reading if the other forms of representation are not established as well. If students are taught to decode the words, but do not know the meanings of the words they are reading, comprehension will not occur. Thus, ensuring that students know the meanings of words they are decoding is necessary, too. In short, EL/EB students need rich instruction in English oral language to build their second language expertise, supporting both their oral language use and providing necessary phonological and semantic representations for English words they are seeing in print.
According to Dr. Linnea Ehri in an interview for The Reading League Compass:
To be fully mapped and exist as a sight word in memory, the meaning must be connected to the spelling and pronunciation. Also the syntactic identity of the word needs to become connected to the other identities, that is, its function in sentences-especially if its meaning is only activated in sentences (e.g., function words like was, from, if, and with, and irregular past tense verbs that sound like nonsense words when produced in isolation like held, took, gave, and wrote). This would be especially important for EL students. These words need to be read in meaningful contexts in order for the connection forming processes to become complete and to establish high quality lexical representations of sight words in memory. A word isn't a word without meaning.

Thus, it is essential to undergird lessons whenever possible with meaningful vocabulary, language, and English language support is essential for EL/EB students.
Resources to further understanding
The Reading League's Curriculum Evaluation Guidelines (CEGs) include "red flags" (instructional practices that do not align with the science of reading) as well as aligned practices that support both word recognition and language comprehension. The CEGs also include specific, evidence-aligned components to support EL/EB students. Many of the evidence-aligned language comprehension components of the CEGs align directly with the WIDA English Language Development Standards (2020). Developing understanding of grammar, cohesive devices, syntax, and text structure is supported by the science of reading and advocated by those supporting EL/EBs. Understanding these connections and emphasizing these similarities will help us all move forward together to support all learners. Additionally, New Mexico's Structured Literacy and English Learners page provides helpful information on instruction and resources such as walkthrough tools and lesson templates.

The following excerpts from California's ELD Standards Publication are also helpful in thinking through the evidence-aligned needs of ELs/EBs.
English learners benefit from Reading Foundational Skills instruction.
Research Findings: Instruction in the components of reading foundational skills-such as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension (NICHD 2000)-benefits ELs.
Implications: Instruction in foundational literacy skills is essential for ELs. However, the instruction should be adjusted based on students' spoken English proficiency (they may or may not be familiar with the English sound system) and native language or English literacy proficiency (they may or may not be familiar with any type of writing system or with the Latin alphabet writing system in particular). Note that some ELs at any age may not be literate in any language when they arrive in the U.S. school system; their native language may not have a written form, or they may not have had opportunities to develop literacy in their native language or in a local language of wider communication.
Oral English language proficiency is crucial for English literacy learning.
Research Findings: Oral proficiency in English (including oral vocabulary, grammar, and listening comprehension) is critical for ELs to develop proficiency in text-level English reading comprehension. Word-identification skills are necessary, but not sufficient. Students who have learning disabilities (as diagnosed separately from their EL designation)-or whose literacy skills in either their native language or English remain below grade level after intensive and extensive instruction-may need specialized literacy intervention services.
Implications: Instruction for ELs in oral language knowledge, skills, and abilities must be explicit, intensive, and extensive. In order to be successful in reading English, ELs must develop proficiency in listening and speaking skills in English-depth and breadth of vocabulary, as well as grammatical structures-at the same time that they are developing foundational skills in reading and writing English.
Native language literacy skills facilitate English literacy learning.
Research Findings: ELs' native language literacy skills can help them learn English foundational literacy skills.
Implications: Instruction for ELs will need to vary based on variations among ELs' native language writing systems, as well as ELs' experiences with literacy in their native language. For example, students who are literate in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (such as Spanish) will be able to transfer decoding and writing skills more easily than a student who is literate in a language with a non-Latin alphabet (such as Arabic, Korean, or Russian) or a language with a symbol-based writing system (such as Chinese). Similarly, students who are literate in a language related to English (such as Spanish) will be able to use knowledge of cognates (words with similar meaning and spelling in both languages), whereas students who are literate in unrelated languages (such as Arabic, Chinese, or Korean) will not.

Multilingualism as an Asset

In our increasingly multilingual and multicultural society, it is important to consider the impact of bilingualism on the development of language, and how exposure to more than one language from a young age might shape an individual's brain both structurally and functionally. In the recent past, bilingualism was thought to impede cognitive and linguistic development, effectively 'confusing' the child's brain with multiple languages. We now know that this is NOT the case. (Arredondo et al, 2018)

A point that was universally agreed-upon at The Reading League Summit is that from a cultural, cognitive, and an academic perspective, multilingualism is an asset. For students, learning vocabulary and background knowledge in their home language can lead to positive transfer of this knowledge when learning the language of instruction, which supports comprehension. Dual language instruction is an optimal setting for this.

The reality, however, is that most EL/EB students are not afforded the opportunity to learn in a dual language setting that instructs, at least part time, in their home language. Thus, students must learn to read in a language they are learning to understand. Even in English-only settings, educators can still capitalize on the asset of a student's home language by leveraging cognates, or words in different languages that have a similar phonological, orthographic, and semantic form. Educators can also use a student's home language to highlight similar elements of phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, and grammar and lessen the cognitive load of new learning by engaging in contrastive analysis, or the comparing of two languages to determine the similarities and differences of specific elements of the language. Teachers can also support better comprehension skills when they are able to choose texts that relate to children's previous experiences and world knowledge. In this way teachers can provide culturally relevant content that is more likely to be familiar to children and therefore more likely to be understood.

In this EdSource article (2023), Tim Shanahan states:
There are things that, depending on the language, might overlap with English and that the children might already know, in which case, those don't necessarily need to be retaught or certainly not to the same extent as with a first language student. For example, a lot of the sound letter matches are identical across Spanish and English, so if the child already knows how to read in Spanish, the classroom instructor wouldn't need to put a lot of time into teaching those things. On the other hand, there definitely are sounds that we have in English that don't exist in Spanish. And studies have found that it's useful to teach those quite explicitly and thoroughly. These resources are useful in helping educators understand elements of language that may be similar or different across languages:
Assessment

Dr. Lilian Duran of the University of Oregon offers the following advice for The Reading League Compass on assessment for ELs/EBs:

When planning assessment to learn more about the reading abilities of English Learners, it is important to understand their word recognition abilities, but one must also understand the role of language proficiency in both the child's home language(s) and English. Assessing literacy development in multilingual children requires attention to the child's level of proficiency in all of the languages that they have been regularly exposed to and how they will interact with the child's performance on the assessments administered.

In the context of the United States, most reading assessments are conducted only in English. Many children enter US schools speaking languages other than English at home and in their communities and are in the process of acquiring English. It is mandated that all children whose parents identify that a language other than English is spoken in the home are administered an English proficiency test with the goal of more effectively providing appropriate support for learning in predominantly English instructional environments.

Language is the foundation of literacy, and for EL students, measuring language development is critical to understanding the foundation they are bringing to the task of learning to read in English. Assessment in a child's home language is also important to provide a window into their ability to learn in general. Most children in the U.S. will be exposed to English-only instruction, but prior to school entry all of their learning, their concept knowledge, and their communication abilities are simply stored in a different language. Measuring vocabulary, semantic, and morphosyntactic development provides the teacher with more awareness of the student's strengths, abilities, and learning potential.

In addition to attending to the level of language development of students, it is also important to consider the language or languages of instruction. If children are only taught how to read in English, you cannot assume that the child will have reading skills in Spanish. However, if a child is in a dual language program that systematically teaches reading in both English and Spanish, then reading assessment in both languages is important and a better reflection of their overall ability level.

The main take-away for assessing reading skills for ELs is as follows: teachers must take a nuanced approach that strategically considers the quantity and quality of a child's exposure to their home language(s) and English and how this interacts with the language of their reading instruction. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather a decision-making process that should be undertaken to choose the appropriate assessments in the appropriate language that are most likely to capture the child's overall language and reading ability.
For more information on this topic:
Students Who Use Black English Should Be Included in Conversations

Dr. Altheria Caldera, TRL's DEIB consultant, offers the following advice for The Reading League Compass regarding speakers of Black English:

According to a 2021 infographic published by the Office of English Language Acquisition, only 2.9% of Black students are English Learners (ELs). Most of these non-native English speakers are foreign-born, with 8 of the top 10 countries being located in Africa. These Black English Learners are often "overlooked" in conversations around the needs of multilingual learners. This exclusion has significant implications for the reading education, with its recent focus on the importance of teaching foundational reading skills to beginning readers.

Black English, sometimes referred to as African American Vernacular English, is a dialect of English with syntactic and grammatical distinctions from Standard (also Dominant) American English. Important, too, is the differences in vocabulary, oral language, phonics, and phonemic awareness, all of which are integral components of structured literacy. As an example, a student who speaks Black English might read the word "flow" and understand it to be a surface on which one walks and may fail to recognize the word "floor" as the standard way the term is pronounced. The impact of dialectical differences such as this are examined in this 2012 article.

Questions surrounding implications for reading instruction for speakers of Black English have been pursued since at least the 1970s. Recent scholars like Ramona Pittman and Julie A. Washington, whose research and writing center students who speak Black English are urging the broader multilingual education community to include speakers of Black English, and other bi-dialectical students, in their efforts to advance the needs of multilingual learners.

Students who speak dialects other than English have needs similar to, though not identical to, needs as speakers of other languages. The former, sometimes referred to as Standard English Learners, deserve this nuanced classification along with corresponding support. California is one of the states leading the way in this language equity work. While it is arguable that speakers of Black English should be identified as ELs; unequivocally, students who speak Black English and other bi-dialectical students should be included in the literacy conversation, and their needs should be uplifted.

Resources

These additional resources are helpful to understand research as it relates to supporting English Learners and Emergent Bilinguals.

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English Learners / Emergent Bilinguals and the Science of Reading

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Explore the science of reading for English learners and emergent bilinguals. Join us in advancing literacy education.

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/12pG5rBNxa4OeGMU3ZUmu0oSVpCH9liyMy227uMOLJ-I/edit?usp=sharing

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Students need to learn planning strategies for organizing their thoughts, including the use of prewriting graphic organizers.

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Graphic Organizers to Help Kids With Writing

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Discover four graphic organizers that can help kids organize their ideas in a very visual way. They also help break a writing project into smaller, more manageable steps. Graphic organizers are especially helpful for children with dysgraphia, executive functioning issues, and other issues that can c…

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Students benefit from explicit instruction for brainstorming strategies and skills for gathering information from written and multi-media sources, such as note taking.

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Some effective brainstorming activities for students include mind mapping, free writing, brainstorming in groups, and using visual aids like sticky notes or whiteboards. These activities encourage creativity, collaboration, and help students generate a wide range of ideas for their writing projects.

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Critical thinking requires an awareness of the writing process (i.e., organizing, drafting, writing, revising). Students engage in critical thinking as they think about what they want to communicate through their writing. If they are composing an informational or opinion piece, they may need to tap into comprehension skills to gather information from sources.

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Critical Thinking: Summary Writing, Writing From Text Sources, & Putting It All Together

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Critical Thinking: Summary Writing, Writing From Text Sources, & Putting It All Together

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Session 5: Critical Thinking: Summary Writing, Writing From Text Sources, & Putting It All Together

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Using Glow/Grow Feedback Protocol for Feedback in First Grade

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Steve Graham: What works in teaching writing

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Uploaded by Reading Rockets on 2013-07-10.

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Steve Graham: Persuasive and Informative Writing

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https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BxadkB3Dv_tERpvIFeFFCDI2Mpiiln6afKzyeBhnfb4/edit?usp=sharing

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FINAL AI - Elementary ELA Summer PD 2024

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Clay, M.M. (1991). Introducing a new storybook to young readers. The Reading Teacher, 45(4), 264-273. doi:10.1598/RT.45.4.2

Fountas, I.C., & Pinnell, G.S. (1996). Guided reading: Good first teaching for all children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Honig, B., Diamond, L., & Gutlohn, L. (2000). Teaching reading: Sourcebook for kindergarten through eighth grade. Novato, CA: Arena.

Kelley, M.J., & Clausen-Grace, N. (2007). Comprehension shouldn't be silent: From strategy instruction to student independence. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Kelley, M.J., & Clausen-Grace, N. (2008). From picture walk to text feature walk: Guiding students to strategically preview informational text. Journal of Content Area Reading, 7(1), 9-31.

Kibby, M.W. (1995). The organization and teaching of things and the words that signify them. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 39(3), 208-233.

Lubliner, S. (2001). A practical guide to reciprocal teaching. Bothell, WA: Wright Group.

Nagy, W.E., & Scott, J.A. (2004). Vocabulary processes. In R.B. Ruddell & N.J. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (5th ed., pp. 574-593). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Recht, D.R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers' memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16-20. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.80.1.16

Ruddell, R.B. (2009). How to teach reading to elementary and middle school students: Practical ideas from highly effective teachers. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Rupley, W.H., Logan, J.W., & Nichols, W.D. (1998). Vocabulary instruction in a balanced reading program. The Reading Teacher, 52(4), 336-346.

Spencer, B.H. (2003). Text maps: Helping students navigate informational texts. The Reading Teacher, 56(8), 752-756.

Stahl, K.A.D. (2004). Proof, practice, and promise: Comprehension strategy instruction in the primary grades. The Reading Teacher, 57(7), 598-609.

Taylor, B. (2002, July). The CIERA school change project: Supporting schools as they translate research into practice to improve students' reading achievement. Paper presented at the third annual Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement Summer Institute, Ann Arbor, MI.

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Guiding Students Through Expository Text with Text Feature Walks

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The text feature walk guides students in the reading of text features in order to access prior knowledge, make connections, and set a purpose for reading expository text. Results from a pilot study illustrate the benefits of using the strategy, and practical suggestions for implementation are offered.

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Learn about the most common text features, the purpose of each, and how explicit instruction in identifying and using text features can support comprehension and strengthen student writing.

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https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16T_i-WNR3ZHuPhe7FyU6wiBZHZBJYwlVkCwvBKXv5_g/edit?usp=sharing

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Check out this US Letter (Landscape) designed by FABIOLA CAICEDO-GARCIA.

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Learn about the most common text features, the purpose of each, and how explicit instruction in identifying and using text features can support comprehension and strengthen student writing.

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Using the Science of Writing to Support Literacy Instruction 

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Using the Science of Writing to Support Literacy Instruction 

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In this episode of All For Literacy, Dr. Young-Suk Kim joins host Dr. Liz Brooke for a technically in-depth conversation about the interconnectedness of reading and writing skills and the Direct and Indirect Effect Model of Writing. Tune in for a masterclass on translating the science behind language and literacy development in daily classroom practices.

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using the science of writing to support literacy instruction with dr. young-suk kim

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‎All For Literacy: Using the Science of Writing to Support Literacy Instruction With Dr. Young-Suk Kim on Apple Podcasts

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In this episode of All For Literacy, Dr. Young-Suk Kim joins host Dr. Liz Brooke for a technically in-depth conversation about the interconnectedness of reading and writing skills and the Direct and Indirect Effect Model of Writing. Tune in for a masterclass on translating the science behind languag...

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Using the Science of Writing to Support Literacy Instruction 

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Using the Science of Writing to Support Literacy Instruction 

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Using the Science of Writing to Support Literacy Instruction Featuring Dr. Young-Suk Kim

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Introduction to the Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Writing (DIEW)

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ELA Writing Resources, Lessons, & Videos

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ELA Writing Resources, Lessons, & Videos

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Find lessons on Writing Arguments for all grades. Free interactive resources and activities for the classroom and home.

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Professional Development and Literacy Consulting

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Published Mentor Text List compiled by M.Rice 2.1.24

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This blog post is devoted to encouraging teachers of all grades and subject areas to teach students about text structure. It is an excellent way to improve writing and reading comprehension.

Text structure is the arrangement of ideas and the relationships among the ideas; readers and writers who are familiar with text structure recognize how the information is unfolding. Common Core Reading Standard #5 focuses on teaching text structure.

As students advance to middle and high school grades, the text that they have to read and write become increasingly varied in style, vocabulary, text structure, purpose, and intended audience.

Authors use structural elements to organize information and ideas, and to highlight important parts of the text. Text structures can be used to gain meaning when comprehending something we read, and to convey meaning when writing. Click here for a document that shows the comprehension-writing structure connection. Structural elements can be organized into two categories: text features and text structures as listed and described below.
Structural Elements

Text features, such as title and headings, help identify the topic and overall organization of ideas. Headings represent topical sections of text, making it easier for readers to work their way through a longer piece of text in manageable "chunks." Graphics and captions highlight important details and present an alternative representation of information to support the textual representation.

The ability to recognize the type of writing (i.e., argument, informational, narrative) and genre allows readers to access clues about how the text is organized and presented. Introductions and conclusions help readers determine the topic and purpose of the text.

Recognition of specific patterns of organization (e.g., sequence, compare and contrast) also supports comprehension and retention of information (Akhondi et al, 2011). Download a set of paragraph templates that can be used to help students learn how to write using different patterns of organization.

Although it is often overlooked, the use of transition words and phrases is an important structural element. Transitions make connections among sentences, paragraphs, and larger pieces of text. Transition words and phrases often provide the reader with clues about patterns of text organization. Here is a list of common transition words.

Knowledge of sentence and paragraph structure enables writers to develop the individual ideas within sentences (these ideas are also called propositions) and combine them to develop the main ideas in paragraphs.

Professional development for both The Key Comprehension Routine and Keys to Content Writing include suggestions for teaching text structure.

Here are some additional resources about teaching text structure:

Joan Sedita

Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy and author of the Keys to Literacy professional development programs. She is an experienced educator, nationally recognized speaker and teacher trainer. She has worked for over 35 years in the literacy education field and has presented to thousands of teachers and related professionals at schools, colleges, clinics, and professional conferences.

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Teaching Text Structures - Keys to Literacy

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This blog post is devoted to encouraging teachers of all grades and subject areas to teach students about text structure.

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Find lessons on Text Structure for all grades. Free interactive resources and activities for the classroom and home.

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Text Structure Techniques - Problem / Solution & Cause / Effect

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Implementing the Text Structure Strategy in Your Classroom

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Implementing the Text Structure Strategy in Your Classroom

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Meyer, B. J. F. (1975). The organization of prose and its effects on memory. Amsterdam: North -Holland.

Meyer, B. J. F., Brandt, D. M. & Bluth, G. J. (1980). Use of the top-level structure in text: Key for reading comprehension of ninth-grade students. Reading Research Quarterly, 16, 72-103.

Meyer, B. J. F., Middlemiss, W., Theodorou, E., S., Brezinski, K. L., McDougall, J., & Bartlett, B. J. (2002). Older adults tutoring fifth-grade children in the structure strategy via the Internet. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94 (3), 486-519.

Meyer, B. J. F., & Poon, L. W. (2001). Effects of the structure strategy and signaling on recall of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 93, 141-159.

Meyer, B. J. F., Wijekumar, K., Middlemiss, W., Higley, K., Lei, P., Meier, C., & Spielvogel, J. (2010). Web-based tutoring of the structure strategy with or without elaborated feedback or choice for fifth- and seventh-grade readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 45, 62-92.

Wijekumar, K. K., Meyer, B. J. F., & Lei, P. (2013). High-fidelity implementation of web-basedIntelligent tutoring system improves fourth and fifth graders content area reading comprehension. Computers & Education, 68, 366-379.

Wijekumar, K., Meyer, B.J.F., Lei, P. (2012). Large-scale randomized controlled trial with 4 th graders using intelligent tutoring of the structure strategy to improve nonfiction reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Technology Research and Development. 60, 987-1013.

Wijekumar, K., Meyer, B.J.F., Lei, P.-W, Lin, Y., Johnson, L.A., Shurmatz, K., Spielvogel, J., Ray,M, & Cook, M. (2014). Improving reading comprehension for 5 th grade readers in rural and suburban schools using web-based intelligent tutoring systems. Journal of Research in Educational Effectiveness, 7:4, 331-357, DOI: 10.1080/19345747.2013.853333

Wijekumar, K., Meyer, B.J.F., Lei, P-W, Hernandez, A., August, D. (in press). Effects of web-based text structure instruction for 4-6 th grade Spanish Els reading comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Williams, J. P., Hall, K. M., Lauer, K. D., Stafford, K. B., DeSisto, L. A., & deCani, J. S. (2005). Expository text comprehension in the primary grade classroom. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 538-550.

Williams, J. P., Stafford, K. B., Lauer, K. D., Hall, K. M., & Pollini, S. (2009). Embedding reading comprehension training in content-area instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101, 1-20.

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Implementing the Text Structure Strategy in Your Classroom

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Learn how to implement a research-based text structure strategy that infuses text structures at every step of reading comprehension instruction, beginning with the introduction of the lesson, previewing of text, selecting important ideas, writing a main idea, generating inferences, and monitoring comprehension.

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Opinion Writing for Kids | Episode 1 | What Is It?

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Read Aloud: Stella Writes an Opinion By Janiel Wagstaff

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Writing: Text Types and Purposes - Grades 2-3 | PBS LearningMedia

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Teachers model classroom strategies for writing, using text types to achieve a varietyof purposes. Students will write opinion pieces and learn the components of narrative writing. Teachers emphasize the importance of the ability to comprehend and communicate one's ideas through writing in school and in life.

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Perspect Lang Lit. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 Mar 25.

Published in final edited form as:

As shown by the publication of this issue of Perspectives on Language and Literacy, there is increasing attention to the role of sentences and grammar in both typical and atypical readers and writers. We know that a child's oral language and, specifically, listening comprehension abilities are a major determinant of reading comprehension ( Kamhi & Catts, 2012). We know that syntactic difficulties are a core feature in the profiles of children with specific language impairment (SLI), and we also know these children are at high risk for long-lasting reading difficulties ( Catts, Bridges, Little, & Tomblin, 2008). We are gratified to see increased emphasis on sentence-level components of text complexity in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). And, recent knowledge and practice standards for teachers of reading single out sentence processing and structure as important knowledge domains ( International Dyslexia Association [IDA], 2010).

Although this attention to sentences is encouraging, it is another matter entirely to translate this information into principles and practices that influence what educators, clinicians, and special educators actually do. Even though sentence processing and structure are cited in IDA's Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers ( http://www.interdys.org/standards.htm) as areas teachers should know about, sentences are not discussed in the section of the IDA standards on assessment for planning instruction, and there is only one brief mention in the entire section on structured language teaching, which adheres to the outline instantiated by the National Reading Panel, namely, phonology, phonics/word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. There are undoubtedly many reasons for the lack of translation to educational and clinical practice, but, in our view, three stand out. These include a lack of information or understanding about 1) syntax per se and the formidable processing challenges posed by syntactic variations found in academic texts, 2) how to determine whether syntactic difficulties are actually contributing to reading or writing problems for a particular student, and 3) instructional implications when a student's sentence understanding or production is not strong. In this article, we concentrate on the first two issues. (Authors Nelson, Schleppegrell, Eberhardt, and Hochman discuss instructional implications in their respective articles in this issue of Perspectives.)

Syntactic Structures and Principles Important for Reading and Writing

Recently, we were working with a 10-year-old with a language disorder who was struggling academically. Although reading accuracy and fluency were within broad normal limits, he struggled to comprehend what he read. We suspected that poor sentence comprehension was part of the problem, and to investigate further, we read (out loud) a grade-level passage about Rachel Carson, periodically stopping to ask sentence- specific comprehension questions:

The sentence just read:

Rachel Carson, who was a scientist, writer, and ecologist, grew up in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania.

The question:

What do you know about Carson now?

Student answer:

They grew up together in the same place.

His answer provided a clue that he had "hooked up" the wrong subject with the verb grew up. Instead of the true subject, Rachel Carson, he thought the subject was the scientist, writer, and ecologist, in other words- they. This type of comprehension mistake-where the noun closest to the verb is taken to be its subject-is not unusual ( Scott, 2009).

In our work with struggling readers and writers in whom we suspect sentence-level problems, we routinely ask questions such as those listed in Table 1 . Answering these questions requires, at a minimum, knowledge of the types of syntactic features shown in the right column of the table. In the next several pages, we discuss a syntactic framework that should assist readers in addressing these questions. For this discussion, we will assume that simple sentences (those with one subject and verb) are adequately understood and produced, but complex sentences can present problems.

TABLE 1

Question

Syntactic Knowledge

1. Are the sentences the student speaks and writes of sufficient length, complexity, and well-formedness (free of grammatical errors) for his or her age?

Recognize simple versus complex sentences

For complex sentences, recognize:

dependent vs. independent clauses

number of clauses per sentence

three main types of dependent clauses (adverbial, object complements, relatives)

common grammatical errors for students with language disorders

General developmental guidelines

How written sentence patterns differ from spoken patterns

2. What are the syntactic requirements of assessment tests/tasks or of common class assignments?

The ability to deconstruct a test/task (or classroom activity) and individual stimulus items according to syntactic requirements that may complicate processing

3. Does the inability to parse a particular sentence (or sentences) in a text interfere with text comprehension?

Same as questions 1 and 2

What Makes Sentences Complex?

Noun Phrase Expansion Increases Sentence Length

While length is not the only determinant of syntactic complexity, in general, longer sentences are more complex. One of the major ways that sentences become longer is by adding modifiers to nouns. Grammarians use the term noun phrase (NP) to define a noun and all the words that modify it. Nouns can have modifiers that come before (or premodify) them in the NP, such as adjectives, as in "I heard a new song." Nouns can also have modifiers that follow them (or postmodify), as in "The song playing on the radio is new." The following sentence contains two NPs (underlined) whose nouns are shown in italics:

The three-alarm fire destroyed the recently refurbished apartment building that was just completed last year.

The noun fire in the first NP is premodified by three words and is the grammatical subject of the sentence. The second NP serves as the grammatical object of the sentence. Its noun building is premodified by four words and postmodified by a relative clause that has six words. To illustrate how NPs can "grow," consider the two sentences below. The subject of sentence 2 is a simple NP with two words, but it has the capacity to be expanded considerably, as in sentence 3 where the NP is now 10 words:

The amendment was a disaster.

The thoroughly rewritten and meaningless amendment inserted by his aide was a disaster.

Sentence 3 manages to tell three things about the amendment within the confines of the NP: that it was rewritten, that it was a meaningless revision, and that an aide inserted it. Creating long NPs with extensive pre- and postmodification is one of the major ways that writers "pack" information into a text. Because these long and complex NPs can be found any place that a noun is found in a sentence-as grammatical subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, and objects of prepositions, there is great potential to embed information in any one sentence-information that must be "unpacked" in the reading (or listening) comprehension process. Without the ability to recognize NPs as language units functioning as a whole in particular grammatical roles, the reader will have difficulty extracting meaning (like the student in the Rachel Carson example). We can also appreciate that, for writers, crafting sentences such as sentences 1 and 3 would require the ability to translate considerable knowledge about a topic into a complex linguistic form.

Subordination Increases Sentence Length

Sentences are also lengthened by the process of subordination-when one or more clauses (basically simple sentences) are combined within one sentence in an arrangement where one clause is the main one (independent and can stand alone), and the other is subordinate to the main clause (dependent and cannot stand alone). In adult expository writing, the average sentence has three clauses, and some have many more. These multiclausal sentences take planning and effort to construct as a writer, and the reader must be able to discern the main proposition from the others and the subordinate and logical meaning relationships among them.

Three types of subordination account for a large majority of multiclausal sentences. In sentences with adverbial clauses, a subordinate clause is joined to a main clause with a conjunction such as although, while, whereas, because, if, unless, and so forth. These types of clauses expand on the verb in the main clause by adding information about time, manner, or place, just like adverbs (as single words). In the following sentence, the adverbial clause (underlined) adds manner information to the main clause by stating something unexpected:

Even though he had already broken the record for the most gold medals, he stated that his goal was to win even more in the next Olympic Games.

The prototypical adverbial clause appears after the main clause, but in the example above, it has been moved to an earlier position (pre-posed).

This sentence also illustrates a second type of subordination by using an object complement clause (in italics) where the direct object of the main clause verb ( stated) is itself an entire clause. These types of clauses often begin with that, but this is optional, and, if taken away, the sentence would be perfectly grammatical. Other words that begin object complement clauses include question words such as what, when who, where (e.g., She decided what she would wear to the inauguration). Note that not all main clause verbs can "take" an object complement, and the ones that do tend to be verbs referring to state of being or communicative acts (stative and reportative verbs, such as be, let, tell, say, and exclaim) or that code mental states (cognitive state verbs, metalinguistic verbs) such as think, know, conclude, decide, and predict. This group of verbs is important in academic language because they allow writers to address processes, ideas, and opinions.

Relative clauses, the third type of subordinate clause, follow a noun (as in sentence 1) and provide additional information about that noun. As noted earlier, they form the postmodfication portion of the NP. Typically they begin with a relative pronoun ( that, who, whose, which) but that can be optional, and sometimes the clause is further reduced (see sentence 3 where that was has been omitted before inserted but is still understood). A relative clause can modify any noun in a sentence-in sentence 1 it postmodifies the direct object building and completes the sentence. When a relative clause postmodifies a subject noun (see amendment in sentence 3) it interrupts the subject and verb. These are often called center-embedded relatives. In sentence 3, it is not the aide that is a disaster, it's the amendment. Relative clauses also vary in another important way, namely, whether the relative pronoun replaces the subject or object of the relative clause. In the complex sentence below, based on the two simple sentences shown beneath, the relative pronoun replaces the subject of the relative clause:

In sentence 6, however, the relative pronoun replaces the object, which then "moves" to the beginning of the relative clause:

This type of relative clause is harder to process because the relative pronoun must be related to a "trace" (indicated by the caret) that is farther away than is the case for the subject in sentence 5. Linguists refer to these situations as "long distance dependencies."

Multiclausal sentences may contain all three types of subordinate clauses or more than one of each type. Because clauses, by definition, must contain a verb, a reliable way to tell how many clauses are in a sentence is to count the verbs, which are underlined in the following sentence:

Although the President acknowledges that recovery is slow, he will not deviate from key policies that his team announced earlier in order to stimulate growth.

This five-clause sentence begins with a pre-posed adverbial clause that has an object complement clause ( that recovery is slow) embedded within it. A relative clause postmodifies policies in the main clause and another adverbial clause ( in order to stimulate growth) is embedded within the relative clause. It is easy to imagine that a reader with weak general comprehension skills would struggle with this sentence.

Other Contributors to Sentence Complexity

Several other linguistic factors increase complexity and render sentences harder to comprehend and produce. First, any change from an expected word order increases processing load. English is a subject-verb-object (SVO) language where the canonical (or typical) word order is the grammatical subject (the agent) followed by the verb and object. In passive sentences, which are harder to process than active sentences, the grammatical agent follows the verb ( media in the passive sentence that follows):

He was criticized by the media for his remarks.

Pre-posed adverbial clauses (see sentences 4 and 7) also represent a type of order variation because the entire main clause is "delayed." Cleft sentences are another variation on word order. In these types of sentences an element of the sentence is brought to the front for focus. In the following cleft sentence, the element tone of voice is moved to the left, making it harder to "reconstitute" the underlying SVO structure of this basic sentence ( Her boss reacted to her tone of voice):

It could have been her tone of voice that her boss reacted to.

Another factor that increases complexity is when two critical elements that are normally close together are separated (also called long-distance dependencies, see sentence 6). Center-embedded relative clauses can be hard to understand because the main clause subject and verb are effectively interrupted (see sentences 3, 5, and 6).

Sentences in Academic Texts

From the mid-elementary through the secondary school years, the main job of a student is to learn, and this takes place increasingly in the context of language that is written (not spoken), is expository/informational (not narrative), and is discipline specific. Functional linguists ( Halliday, 1987) have provided rich descriptions of sentence-level patterns unique to each of these distinctions. Compared with spoken sentences, written sentences are lexically dense (having a higher proportion of content words, that is, nouns, adjectives, verbs) and nominally embedded (having a larger number of long NPs with both pre- and postmodification). Written sentences are also longer, with more instances of multiclausal embedding, where one clause is subordinate to another subordinate clause. Halliday (1987) used the term hierarchical to refer to written text, which he contrasted with the linear format of spoken language, where clauses are connected with coordinating conjunctions (e.g., and, but, so) and common subordinating conjunctions (e.g., because, when, if). Others emphasize the fact that the writer, who has more time to make grammatical choices, uses a greater variety of complex structures than the speaker, who is under more stringent fluency constraints in real time ( Biber, 2001). Due to these and many other differences, we could, with fair accuracy, judge which sentences were spoken and which were written if we heard them out of context. As evidence that they have somehow absorbed these grammatical differences, mid-elementary school children are beginning to write sentences that they would be unlikely to say, such as " There stood a little tiger cub"(an example used by Scott [2012, p. 255] that appeared in a story about a picnic written by an eight-year-old). When comparing sentences in narrative and expository texts, long complex NPs are again a contrastive feature of the latter. Additional high-frequency syntactic features of expository sentences include a) passives, b) nominalizations (use of the nominal derivative of a verb, e.g., evaporate to evaporation), c) nonfinite forms of verbs (verbs not marked for tense or number, e.g., failing to improve in the last quarter, the economy ...), and d) phrasal coordination (global warming is affecting agricultural productivity and wildlife migration patterns). (See Scott and Balthazar (2010) for a discussion of these and other syntactic features common in informational text.)

The fact that separate standards for history/social studies, science, and technical subjects are found in the CCSS belies an increased emphasis on disciplinary literacy-the idea that learning within a discipline requires an understanding of the way that discipline uses language to encode its unique nature and purposes. For example, the natural sciences are concerned with classification, description, and processes, while history works to "weave together" events and groups, often with incomplete evidence, thus requiring interpretation and perspective of the writer. In a recent article, Fang (2012) illustrates the lexical and syntactic features that distinguish science, math, and history texts and links these differences to underlying discipline-specific purposes. Readers of his work would find reference to many of the structures discussed in this section, but with an added appreciation for their unique employment as required by subject matter.

Identifying Students Whose Syntactic Problems Contribute to Reading and Writing Problems

As a student gets older, language problems may have indirect and less obvious consequences for academic performance. The impact is often profound for overall academic achievement, but the evidence can be subtle-observable mainly in more challenging and complex contexts, such as when students are writing, or using an academic style of writing, or learning disciplinary content independently. For some students, sentence comprehension and production are major contributors. It is possible to ferret out sentence-level (syntactic) problems once they are suspected. The first step is understanding which students are likely to have syntactic problems.

Using Language and Academic Histories to Identify Individuals at Risk

Syntactic limitations may be suspected when a student who is performing poorly with reading and writing has a known history of developmental language disorder, because syntactic deficits are a particular hallmark of language disorders ( Leonard, 1998; Scott & Koonce, in press). Some, but not all, children with reading comprehension deficits have a documented history of difficulty with language development, and students with language disorders are at greater risk for reading comprehension problems ( Catts & Kamhi, 2005). The evidence suggests that reading skill development (including both word identification and comprehension) among children with language disorders lags behind well into high school, although it follows a trajectory that is similar to that of typically developing peers ( Catts, Bridges, Little, & Tomblin, 2008). For these reasons, students with a history of language disorders will be among the most likely to experience syntactic problems in reading and writing, and their problems should, as a general rule, be assessed with that in mind.

Whether or not a student has a documented language disorder, sentence-level problems should also be suspected in students who have difficulty with both listening comprehension and reading ( Scott, 2009). under the Simple View of Reading ( Gough & Tunmer, 1986), reading problems can result from either poor word recognition or poor listening comprehension. Kamhi & Catts (2012) described subtypes of reading disability resulting from the combination of good or poor performance on these two factors in the Simple View. Students with poor word recognition and good listening comprehension were classified as dyslexic, while those with good word recognition and poor listening comprehension were classified as having a specific comprehension deficit. Researchers have shown that some of these latter children appear to be typical readers in early elementary years when the emphasis is on reading accuracy, only to "lose ground" by late elementary years when their texts become more challenging ( Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006). Struggling readers with poor performance in both word recognition and listening comprehension were designated as having a mixed reading disability and have been variously referred to as low achievers, backward readers, or garden-variety poor readers.

Children with reading disabilities that fall into either the specific comprehension deficit or mixed reading disability categories are candidates for further assessment regarding syntactic knowledge. Word (vocabulary), sentence (syntax), and discourse (e.g., inference) problems can all contribute to reading and writing difficulties, so is important to try to isolate the impact of sentence-level contributions. What follows are some general developmental guidelines that pertain to sentence-level syntactic abilities.

Using Sentence Development Guidelines to Identify Individuals at Risk

By kindergarten, we should hear many complex sentences in a child's spoken language, and some examples of all three types of dependent clauses. By that age, there should be very few, if any, problems with verb tense in spoken language. As children progress through elementary school, average sentence length (in words) roughly corresponds to chronological age to age 10, or about the fourth grade. Also around that time, a child's writing should begin to contain sentences with distinctly written syntactic structures (i.e., sentences that would sound too formal if spoken). From late elementary school on into middle and high school, students' written language should continue to become more differentiated from spoken language and should demonstrate greater structural complexity and variety. A good sign that a student is increasing fluency with academic sentence form is the ability to combine several complex features within one sentence, for example, an adverbial clause and a relative clause. By age 12, a child should write sentences that are at least as long as spoken sentences, and sometimes longer (pertinent developmental studies and reviews include Berman & Nir, 2010; Mackie & Dockrell, 2004; Nippold, Hesketh, Duthie, & Mansfield, 2005; Scott, 2010).

There may be a sizable proportion of students with reading and writing problems who have no history of language disorders but who fail to progress with respect to these sentence-level developmental expectations. In such cases, some relatively quick and accessible testing tools might be used to further narrow the field. If oral language skills have not been assessed, it is possible to look for indicators of potential sentence-level problems on tasks that include sentence recall, sentence combining, or recognizing sentence paraphrases. The following standardized subtests, any of which can be administered in 15 or so minutes, can be used for this purpose.

Poor performance on any of these measures would increase the likelihood of syntactic contributions to reading and writing problems, and indicate a need for consultation or referral for speech and language evaluation.

A survey of sentence types and quantity in a student's written work can also be revealing, especially if multiple samples can be reviewed. Consultation with a classroom teacher can usually produce examples of written sentences, such as responses to essay questions, journal entries, stories, and reports. Syntactic difficulties would be suspected when such samples are briefer than those of most classmates, contain little variety in sentence form, exhibit patterns of verb tense or pronoun errors, tend to omit words or word endings, or lack more formal, written-sounding sentences. Additionally, fragments and punctuation troubles that exceed grade-level expectations may indicate a lack of understanding about what constitutes a sentence-a skill necessary for writing.

Students with syntactic problems are likely to struggle more with the kinds of classroom activities that pose greater sentence-level challenges. It is important to do a task analysis of assignments that carry heavy sentence comprehension loads, such as verbal math problems, assignment instructions, and reading comprehension questions, as well as assignments that require writing at the text level. Poor performance in these contexts in particular presents "probable cause" for the existence of a syntactic contribution to reading comprehension problems ( Scott, 2009).

Identifying Individual Problems with Sentences

Because students must bring to bear multiple processes, skills, and knowledge as they meet academic challenges, it can be puzzling to sort out language problems at the sentence level from those more related to other aspects of language, such as vocabulary (especially multiple meaning words and, of course, unfamiliar words and concepts), problems related to general knowledge (as when comprehension depends in part on prior experience with content), problems drawing inferences, decoding (misunderstanding when words are skipped or misread), or fluency (as when reading takes so long a student does not remember the content well).

There are several efficient ways to investigate whether and how syntactic deficits are affecting an individual's reading and writing performance. One way is to carefully scrutinize classroom performance for particular kinds of problems associated with syntactic difficulties. A second is to extend or modify assessment and intervention practices to better understand the specific syntactic barriers to a student's performance. The emphasis of this scrutiny should fall on those sentence structures that pose the greatest challenges to comprehension and tend to develop later.

Examining Classroom Work for Syntactic Problems

Individual student problems related to sentences can be seen in many forms. Table 2 summarizes some observable behaviors in oral and written expression among students with syntactic weaknesses. Not all of these behaviors would be expected for a given individual, and individual performance could vary substantially depending upon how challenging the task is.

TABLE 2

For complex sentences, recognize:

False starts, multiple attempts, incomplete sentence formulation

Fragments and punctuation troubles (especially placement of periods or commas) that exceed grade-level expectations

Omissions of words or word endings, especially (but not only) verb tense errors

Inflexibility with attempting different ways to say the same thing (in tasks requiring paraphrasing or clarifying or sentence combining)

Errors or difficulties related to syntactic movement, embedding, and subordination:

Pronominal reference (pronouns and antecedents)

Constructing relative clauses (especially center-embedded and object-relatives),

Pre-posed adverbial clauses

Errors or difficulties with key vocabulary for complex sentences:

Limited range of metacognitive/cognitive state verbs used

Atypical or awkward-sounding object complement clauses

Limited range of meaning and variety of adverbial conjunctions used, or overuse of one or a few conjunctions (e.g., because) whether viable or not

For students with syntactic problems, it is common to find very limited oral or written language output relative to grade- level expectations, and this would in turn limit opportunities to observe features such as the variety and frequency of use of various sentence structures; however, many of the problems listed in Table 2 are evident even in small samples of student writing, and limited written output is itself a sign of potential sentence-level problems. It is also possible to get a better picture of student capabilities by looking at several work samples. As the examples of class work accumulate, patterns may emerge. An individual student's sentence-related performance can usually be characterized by one or more of the problem types in Table 2 , and this information will direct further assessment and intervention with the exact sentence types requiring support. For example, a student who tends to connect sentences primarily with and and provides few details about nouns may have restricted ability with relative clauses. It would be useful to know whether he or she understands and could use relative clauses given the opportunity, and if so, which types. The extent of sentence-level knowledge can be evaluated dynamically using some of the methods described in the next section of this article.

Extending Assessment and Intervention Practices to Sentences and Syntax

Assessment is an ongoing process that is integral to teaching and intervention. It is a process by which knowledge and skill are continually monitored and addressed directly in the course of instruction. Educators are familiar with assessments aimed at the word and text levels of language, and have many tools at hand for those purposes. Generally, such tools are not designed to provide a means of evaluating sentence-level capabilities; thus, it is left to the skill of the educator or clinician to find ways to do so. The following sections describe some common academic activities that can be adapted to examine sentences, to determine whether a particular type of clause or sentence is responsible for a student's problem. As a general guideline, we start with the prime suspects-later-developing varieties of subordinate clauses. Table 3 summarizes these later-developing structures.

TABLE 3

Relative clauses

Center-embedded

The scientists who discovered a way to help the body fight cancer won the Nobel Prize for chemistry this year.

Relative pronouns that stand for (deleted) objects in the relative clause (object-relative)

Ranchers in the west closely watch the cattle, which FDA inspectors have quarantined (the cattle).

Adverbial clauses

Adverbial conjunctions that express

condition ( if, unless, even if, if only, in case, provided t hat)

contrast ( while, whereas)

concession (although, even though, even if, while, whereas, when)

Pre-posed adverbial clauses

While scientists debate global warming trends, summers in southern states are getting hotter and hotter.

Object complement clauses

Main clause verbs that can take object complements and are

low-frequency (e.g., suggest, determine, speculate)

The audience speculated that the reality show contestants were actors .

"meta" (e.g., predict, hypothesize, assume)

Every press conference confirms what we already know about the team .

Sentence Combining

Generating sentences is a necessary part of writing at the text level, and use of more varied and complex sentence structures can be both assessed and supported with activities such as sentence combining ( Scott & Nelson, 2009). When sentence combining is already a part of classroom activities, these activities can be focused or expanded to address the individual needs of a student with reading and writing problems. When sentence combining is not explicitly part of classroom activities, it can be incorporated into composition tasks as a part of the revision process. Sentence combining is a type of writing task that can be completed and evaluated relatively quickly, and it offers more control over the content and output than a free-writing activity ( Scott & Nelson, 2009). Further control over specific sentence structure characteristics, such as subordinate clause position (which is a developmentally and clinically significant feature), can be exerted by limiting responses with a starter word or phrase, or by providing a cloze-type (i.e., fill-in-the-blank) response format. Sentence combining works particularly well to expand noun phrases using multiple tools such as relative clauses, appositives, and various noun modifiers, but it also can be used for generating subordinate clauses with adverbial conjunctions.

Application of these concepts is illustrated below for two later-developing structures-the center-embedded, object relative clause and the pre-posed adverbial clause. The center- embedded relative clause modifies a main clause subject noun. It must be placed right after the noun it modifies, and the subordinate clause will always have that main clause subject noun (or its pronoun) in it as either its subject or object. To create a sentence combining task to assess a center-embedded, object-relative clause, then, we generate two sentences, where the second sentence (sentence 11) has the subject noun of the first sentence (sentence 10) in object position. We instruct the student to make one longer sentence that says both things without using the conjunctions and, but, so, or then. This request could be open-ended, or a starter or cloze response format could be provided as in sentences 12 and 13. In the example below, the target sentence would be " The store owner that the plaintiff's attorney called to testify witnessed the car accident." Note that there are other ways to combine these two kernel sentences, such as "The store owner who was called to testify by the plaintiff's attorney witnessed the car accident" or "The plaintiff's attorney called the store owner, a witness to the accident, to testify."

The store owner witnessed the car accident. (Target main clause, target NP in bold)

The plaintiff's attorney called the store owner to testify. (Target embedded clause, target NP in bold)

Note that the target NP in the embedded clause is in object position, so it would have to be deleted and replaced with a relative pronoun, which would be moved to the beginning of the clause (this is the most difficult and latest-developing type of relative clause).

Students who have not developed facility with this structure will often attempt to combine using conjunctions, such as The store owner witnessed the car accident and the plaintiff's attorney called him to testify, even if instructed not to do so. If an open-ended request produces these types of attempts, the more restrictive response formats in sentences 12 and 13 can force an attempt at a relative clause:

The store owner that _________________________________.

The store owner _____________________________ witnessed the accident.

Later-developing adverbial clauses can be elicited with sentence combining as well. We suggest "forcing" an attempt at pre-posing the adverbial clause so that it is stated before the main clause by using a cloze response format (which would allow the student to pick the exact adverbial conjunction) or by requiring the student to start with an adverbial conjunction (which would restrict the possible meaning relationships between the clauses). Two kernel sentences with some obvious or deducible (to the student) time, place, or manner relationship can be provided, such as sentences 14 and 15. Starter word and cloze response formats are shown in sentences 16 and 17. Here, our target production would be " Whereas students elsewhere attend for at least 182 days, Chicago Public School students go to school 177 days a year." As before, there are other possible solutions, using other adverbial conjunctions that signal contrast such as while or although. If left open-ended, an acceptable response could also include non-pre-posed adverbial clauses, such as " Chicago Public School students go to school 177 days a year, while students elsewhere attend for at least 182." The advantage of the open-ended and cloze formats is that the student must generate his or her own adverbial conjunction, and this can offer insight into the diversity and abstractness of their lexical choices for complex sentences. An advantage of the cloze format is that it can restrict the position of the adverbial clause to before the main clause, which is a later-developing form.

On the other hand, students with sentence-level problems often find both of these response formats to be very difficult, which could mask what they know. For this reason, it is also worthwhile to explore student responses when given a starter adverbial and the instruction, "Begin your sentence with the word I give you." using that strategy, lower frequency adverbial conjunctions that a student is likely to encounter, or has already demonstrated problems with, can be sampled.

Chicago Public School students go to school 177 days a year.

Students elsewhere attend for at least 182 days a year.

Whereas _______________________________________

______________________________________________, Chicago Public School students go to school 177 days a year.

Paraphrasing

In the context of reading activities, it is very helpful to assess comprehension of individual sentences along the way, and one method for doing so is to ask a student to paraphrase periodically what he or she has learned ( Gillam, Fargo, & Robertson, 2009; Scott & Balthazar, 2010). We have found paraphrasing to be particularly helpful for identifying student misunderstandings in longer sentences, which often involve multiple forms of complexity and challenging concepts or vocabulary simultaneously. The technique is less helpful with shorter sentences, which students might simply repeat from memory whether they understand them or not.

An informed instructor can identify potentially troublesome sentences as they occur during a reading activity or can review materials in advance. After each is read, a request to paraphrase can be inserted, such as "What did you learn about in this sentence?" or "Tell me what you just learned in your own words." When the student explains what he or she learned, we can question information that was left out or follow up with questions focused specifically on the meanings encoded by particular syntactic structures.

Comprehension Questions

Reading comprehension is typically assessed with a variety of question types at the end of a given passage, but for identifying sentence-level comprehension issues, strategic placement of comprehension questions after complex, later-developing sentence types is more useful ( Balthazar & Scott, in press). It is best to prepare these questions in advance so that they can be formulated precisely to focus on specific syntactic culprits.

The art of asking sentence-level comprehension questions builds upon the ability to identify the later-developing clause structures and how they function in a sentence. Table 4 offers a few key landmarks for detecting the presence of later-developing relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and object complement clauses, and some examples of questions aimed at identifying potential comprehension problems.

TABLE 4

Clause Type/Landmark Features

Comprehension Question

Relative Clause

Always follows the noun it tells about

Often begins with a relative pronoun (that, which, who, whose, etc.)

a) Center-embedded

Comes after the main clause subject NP and before the main clause verb

b) Object-relative

Relative pronoun replaces the object NP in the relative clause

Question Form: Who did what?
Example for (a)
Reading: All insects that go through incomplete metamorphosis must shed their outer skeletons as they grow. A new larger skeleton then forms around its body.
Question Options:
What insects shed their outer skeletons as they grow? (only the ones that.....)
Do all insects shed their outer skeletons as they grow? (no or just the ones that....)
Example for (b)
Reading: The Berlin Wall, which communist guards patrolled during the Cold War, divided Germany into two sides.
Questions:
What divided Germany into two sides? (the Berlin Wall.... not the Cold War....)
What did communist guards patrol? (the Berlin Wall)

Pre-posed Adverbial Clause

Starts with an adverbial conjunction

Comes before the main clause to which it is attached

Question Form: Does it mean the same thing?
Example
Reading: These insects have only three stages of development: egg, nymph, and adult. At each stage the insect looks different from the way it looks at another stage. When a grasshopper nymph first hatches, it doesn't have wings.
Question Options:
Do grasshopper nymphs have wings? (yes, but not when they first hatch)
Does a grasshopper nymph have wings when it first hatches? (no)
Listen to these two sentences and tell me if they mean the same thing:
When a grasshopper nymph first hatches, it doesn't have wings.
A grasshopper nymph doesn't have wings when it first hatches. (yes)

Object Complement Clause

Associated with cognitive state and metacognitive verbs

Can be in the direct object or indirect object position

May start with that or a question word

Question Form: What did X verb?
Example
Gregor Mendel, who was a monk and a scientist, spent much of his time working with pea plants in a monastery garden. He observed that some plants produced green peas and others produced yellow peas.
Question Options:
What did Gregor Mendel observe? (that some plants...)
If I said, "He saw that some plants produced green peas and others produced yellow peas," would that mean the same thing? (yes)

For relative clauses, the emphasis should be on determining the student's understanding of who did what in the main and embedded clauses. Recall that the anticipated problem here is that the student will assign the closest NP before the verb as its subject, so when a relative clause intervenes between a subject and its verb, a misunderstanding may occur.

For adverbial clauses, there are two approaches. First, if a student has paraphrased or generated a sentence containing a pre-posed adverbial clause incorrectly, it is helpful to reduce the lexical difficulty and have them try again, replacing the adverbial conjunction with a more common synonym or alternative. If the student's problem resolves, then it is likely that it had more to do with vocabulary than sentence structure. If not, it is likely that the later-developing pre-posed position of the clause is at least part of the barrier to comprehension. The second approach would be to present a complex sentence with the adverbial clause twice, once in pre- and once in post-posed positions, and then ask if they mean the same thing. As a single instance, this may not be a reliable indicator, because a student has a 50/50 chance of a correct answer due to the nature of the question; but if several of these were presented, and if some foils were included, it would be possible to discern problems with the later-developing clause position.

For object complements, note that the difficulty a student might have here depends upon how well they have fleshed- out the sentence frames of lower-frequency verbs that take complements and recognize that the entire subordinate clause is the verb's object. The examples in Table 4 are focused on the structure of object complements for later-developing verbs, but object complements are found very early in language development with common stative and reportative verbs (i.e., verbs used to describe states of being, conditions, or behaviors), such as be, let, have, say, ask, and tell, as well as common verbs referring to social and emotional experiences, such as promise, suppose, help, make, and try. Most of these allow for the subordinate clause verb to be in an infinitive ("to") form (with or sometimes without the word "to" included) or nonfinite ("-ing") form, both of which are less common patterns to be associated with the later-developing verbs. As with adverbial clauses, the testing of comprehension for object complement clauses involves manipulating lexical difficulty by replacing a troublesome verb with a more common synonym. We have found that most students can understand sentences with object complement clauses, provided they have good knowledge of the verb. However, we suspect that part of developing knowledge of less frequent and more academic verbs involves deducing their meanings from subordinate clauses, and that this may be an area of weakness for students with sentence- level challenges.

A Place for Sentences

Even with ample research pointing to sentences as a unit of language that confounds some struggling readers and writers, it isn't easy to apply this information. One obstacle is the fact that sentence structure (grammar) is a huge topic. Which structures? Which sentences? unless educators and clinicians have a clear sense of how sentences become complex to the point of having an impact on reading and writing, it is difficult to take the next step-identifying which students have this problem. We hope that this discussion establishes a place for the sentence in our instructional practices for students with reading and writing problems and encourages educators and clinicians to identify and support them accordingly.

Acknowledgments

Preparation of this manuscript was supported in part by Grant #1R15011165-01 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders or the National Institutes of Health.

Biographies

Cheryl Scott, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is a Professor in the Department of Communication Disorders and Sciences at Rush University Medical Center where her teaching, research, and clinical work focus on language and literacy disorders of school-age children and adolescents. Dr. Scott is currently collaborating with Dr. Catherine Balthazar on a study examining the effect of treatment centered on complex sentences in students with language disorders, with funding from the NIH/NIDCD. Dr. Scott is a fellow of ASHA.

Catherine Balthazar, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is Associate Professor of Communication Disorders at Governors State University, where her teaching and research focus on language assessment and intervention for school-age children. She is a principal investigator for an NIDCD-funded study examining the effect of treatment on children's complex sentence knowledge.

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The Role of Complex Sentence Knowledge in Children with Reading and Writing Difficulties

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Perspect Lang Lit. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 Mar 25. Published in final edited form as: As shown by the publication of this issue of Perspectives on Language and Literacy, there is increasing attention to the role of sentences and grammar in both typical and atypical readers and writers.

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Conjunction Song from Grammaropolis - "Let's Bring It All Together"

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Some of the research done that involves sentence combining comes from a whole language perspective. We"ve listed some of that research here. Our instructions for using sentence combining encourage a more explicit approach to using the strategy than what is included in some of the research listed below.

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools - A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC Alliance for Excellent Education.

Robinson, L. K., & Howell, K. W. (2008). Best practices in curriculum-based evaluation & written expression. In A. Thomas & J. Grimes (Eds.), Best Practices in School Psychology V (pp. 439-452). Bethesda, MD: National Association of School Psychologists.

Saddler, B. (2005). Sentence combining: A sentence-level writing intervention. Reading Teacher, 58, 468-471.

Strong, W. (1986). Creative approaches to sentence combining. Urbana, IL: ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills & National Council of Teachers of English.

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Combining sentences encourages students to take two or more short, choppy sentences and combine them into one effective sentence - to make their writing more readable and engaging. Sentence combining is a skill that develops over several short practice sessions.

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Help your students classify ideas and communicate more effectively with these free graphic organizer templates, available for download. They can be used to structure writing projects and help in problem solving, decision making, studying, planning research, and brainstorming.

Printable Graphic Organizers

Select a blank graphic organizer from the following categories depending on your curriculum needs.

Sequence of Events

Main Topic and Key Details

Compare/Contrast

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Free Downloadable Graphic Organizer Templates

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Use these free graphic organizer templates to help your students communicate more effectively by classifying ideas, structuring writing projects, and more.

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Teaching Strategies for Using Summarizing for Comprehension : Reading Lessons

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Summarizing: Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then

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Explore reading basics as well as the key role of background knowledge and motivation in becoming a lifelong reader and learner. Watch our PBS Launching Young Readers series and try our self-paced Reading 101 course to deepen your understanding.

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4 Ways Reading and Writing Interlock: What the Research Says

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In putting together this special report on how writing instruction can and should build on the science of reading, Education Week reporters read through dozens of studies and spoke to leading researchers in the field.

From this reporting, we landed on four main research takeaways, each of which are worth reiterating here and consulting as school districts assess the strength of their own writing programs.

1. Reading and writing are intimately connected.

Research on the connections between the two disciplines began in the early 1980s and has grown more robust with time. Although there are elements specific to each, like handwriting, that need to be practiced on their own, reading and writing instruction appear to be effective when combined.

Among the newest and most important additions are three research syntheses conducted by Steve Graham, a professor at the University of Arizona, and his research partners. One of them examined whether writing instruction also led to improvements in students' reading ability; a second examined the inverse question. Both found significant positive effects for reading and writing.

A third meta-analysis gets one step closer to classroom instruction. Graham and partners examined 47 studies of instructional programs that balanced both reading and writing -no program could feature more than 60 percent of one or the other. The results showed generally positive effects on both reading and writing measures.

2. Writing matters even at the earliest grades, when students are learning to read.

Studies show that the prewriting students do in early education carries meaningful signals about their decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension later on.

Reading experts say that students should be supported in writing almost as soon as they begin reading, and evidence suggests that both spelling and handwriting are linked to the ability to connect speech to print-a process known as encoding -and to oral language development.

3. Like reading, writing must be taught explicitly.

Writing is a complex task that demands much of students' cognitive resources. Researchers generally agree that writing must be explicitly taught-rather than left up to students to "figure out" the rules on their own. That way, they can spend more time focusing on what they want to say, rather than trying to determine how to say it effectively.

There isn't as much research about how precisely to do this. One 2019 review, in fact, found significant overlap among the dozen writing programs studied, and concluded that all showed signs of boosting learning. Debates abound about the amount of structure students need and in what sequence, such as whether they need to master sentence construction before moving onto paragraphs and lengthier texts.

But in general, students should be guided on how to construct sentences and paragraphs, and they should have access to models and exemplars, the research suggests. They also need to understand the iterative nature of writing, including how to draft and revise.

A number of different writing frameworks incorporating various degrees of structure and modeling are available, though most of them have not been studied empirically.

4. Writing can help students learn content-and make sense of it.

Much of reading comprehension depends on helping students absorb "world knowledge"-think arts, ancient cultures, literature, and science-so that they can make sense of increasingly sophisticated texts and ideas as their reading improves. Writing can enhance students' absorption of this background knowledge, and should be emphasized rather than taking a back seat to the more commonly taught exercises, such as stories and personal reflections.

Graham and colleagues conducted another meta-analysis of nearly 60 studies looking at this idea of "writing to learn" in mathematics, science, and social studies. The studies included a mix of higher-order assignments, like analyses and argumentative writing, and lower-level ones, like summarizing and explaining.

Stephen Sawchuk is an assistant managing editor for Education Week, leading coverage of teaching, learning, and curriculum.

This bibliography is by no means comprehensive, but it includes some of the studies and commentaries that we found most helpful in putting together this special report.
Berninger V. W., Abbott, R. D., Abbott, S. P., Graham S., & Richards T. (2002). Writing and reading: Connections between language by hand and language by eye. Journal of Learning Disabilities. Special Issue: The Language of Written Language, 35(1), 39-56
Berninger, Virginia, Robert D. Abbott, Janine Jones, Beverly J. Wolf, Laura Gould, Marci Anderson-Younstrom, Shirley Shimada, Kenn Apel. (2006) "Early development of language by hand: composing, reading, listening, and speaking connections; three letter-writing modes; and fast mapping in spelling." Developmental Neuropsychology, 29(1), pp. 61-92
Cabell, Sonia Q, Laura S. Tortorelli, and Hope K. Gerde (2013). "How Do I Write...? Scaffolding Preschoolers' Early Writing Skills." The Reading Teacher, 66(8), pp. 650-659.
Gerde, H.K., Bingham, G.E. & Wasik, B.A. (2012). "Writing in Early Childhood Classrooms: Guidance for Best Practices." Early Childhood Education Journal 40, 351-359 (2012)
Gilbert, Jennifer, and Steve Graham. (2010). "Teaching Writing to Elementary Students in Grades 4-6: A National Survey." The Elementary School Journal 110(44)
Graham, Steve, et al. (2017). "Effectiveness of Literacy Programs Balancing Reading and Writing Instruction: A Meta-Analysis." Reading Research Quarterly, 53(3) pp. 279-304
Graham, Steve, and Michael Hebert. (2011). "Writing to Read: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Writing and Writing Instruction on Reading." Harvard Educational Review (2011) 81(4): 710-744.
Graham, Steve. (2020). "The Sciences of Reading and Writing Must Become More Fully Integrated." Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1) pp. S35-S44
Graham, Steve, Sharlene A. Kiuhara, and Meade MacKay. (2020)."The Effects of Writing on Learning in Science, Social Studies, and Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis." Review of Educational Research April 2020, Vol 90, No. 2, pp. 179-226
Shanahan, Timothy. "History of Writing and Reading Connections." in Shanahan, Timothy. (2016). "Relationships between reading and writing development." In C. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (2nd ed., pp. 194-207). New York, NY: Guilford.
Slavin, Robert, Lake, C., Inns, A., Baye, A., Dachet, D., & Haslam, J. (2019). "A quantitative synthesis of research on writing approaches in grades 2 to 12." London: Education Endowment Foundation.
Troia, Gary. (2014). Evidence-based practices for writing instruction (Document No. IC-5). Retrieved from University of Florida, Collaboration for Effective Educator, Development, Accountability, and Reform Center website: http://ceedar.education.ufl.edu/tools/innovation-configuration/
Troia, Gary, and Steve Graham. (2016)."Common Core Writing and Language Standards and Aligned State Assessments: A National Survey of Teacher Beliefs and Attitudes." Reading and Writing 29(9).

A version of this article appeared in the January 25, 2023 edition of Education Week as 4 Key Things to Know About How Reading and Writing Interlock

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4 Ways Reading and Writing Interlock: What the Research Says

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Remove Save to favorites Save to favorites Print In putting together this special report on how writing instruction can and should build on the science of reading, Education Week reporters read through dozens of studies and spoke to leading researchers in the field.

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Judith C. Hochman, Toni-Ann Vroom, Dina Zoleo

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Writing has many benefits. It can improve children’s speaking, boost their reading comprehension, build their knowledge, and elevate their thinking. But one reason it’s hard to learn is that without explicit writing instruction, children often write the way they speak.

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The Writing Rope: A Framework for Evidence-Based Writing Instruction

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Writing is a task as complex and multifaceted as reading—but it’s often taught as a single skill. Our podcast guest is Joan Sedita, the successful author of the popular book, The Writing Rope.

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