Assessing and Grouping ELL's for Guided Reading Instruction

Guided Reading, focused small group reading instruction, has become a staple of effective reading programs in schools all around the world.  In each of those schools, though, Guided Reading may be implemented in many different ways.  When I first learned to use Guided Reading, the component that was most stressed was that students should be reading the same book, out loud at the same time.  We were trained to tune our ears in to one student each day as he/she was reading aloud with the group and provide support as needed.  I taught for many years believing that Guided Reading was nothing more than a group of 3-5 students reading at the same time, at different paces, and sometimes at very different skill levels.  According to Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, experts on early literacy, this difference in reading proficiency among students is one of the main causes of concern for teachers trying to implement Guided Reading instruction.

Because of this, initial and ongoing assessment of students is essential.  Dr. Jan Richardson, in her book The Next Step in Guided Reading, gives several examples of assessments that can be done with readers at many different levels.  For students in grades kindergarten through second grade, Richardson recommends assessing letter identification, sight word reading, sentence dictation, and taking running records.  Running records are an integral component of Marie Clay's Reading Recovery Program.

When analyzing a running record, Richardson identifies six steps to include in the analysis (p. 41-47).  I found these to be extremely helpful:

• Step One: Determine the accuracy level
• Step Two: Analyze errors (structure vs. visual errors)
• Step Three: Analyze strategies
• Self-monitoring
• Cross-checking
• Self-correcting
• Step Four: Assess fluency (Words per minute, expression, attention to punctuation)
• Step Five: Assess comprehension
• Does the student substitute words that make sense?
• Does the student reread to confirm or repair meaning?
• Does the student read with expression?
• Can the student retell the main ideas and some details of the text?
• Step Six: Select a focus for instruction:
• Risk-taking (stop correcting the child; provide encouragement instead)
• Self-monitoring
• A caveat when working with ELL's: asking "What would sound right?" or "What would make sense?" (p. 43) may not be appropriate for students at intermediate or below English proficiency levels.  Students still learning English will not always be able to identify what sounds right or makes sense in what is still an unknown language.
• Decoding
• Fluency
• Oral retell
• Comprehension

So, what if your students are Transitional, Intermediate, or Fluent readers?  Richardson has assessment suggestions for those readers, as well (p. 49-53).  For Transitional readers, she includes a Word Study Inventory (p. 48) that I just started using with one of my second grade groups, and I love it!  In the inventory, the teacher dictates words with common phonics skills to the student and then plans word study based on the areas that need improvement.  For Transitional, Intermediate and Fluent readers, Richardson recommends the following assessments:

• Oral reading (running record)
• Retelling
• Comprehension questions
• Determining instructional reading level (student reads with 90% accuracy and 75-85% comprehension)
• Cpmprehension Interview

The above mentioned resources, and many others, can be found in the textbook or on Jan Richardson's website.  I highly recommend both!

For ELL's, Guided Reading can be very beneficial in not only improving reading and writing, but also for strengthening  listening and speaking skills.  When a teacher modifies Guided Reading instruction to include targeted vocabulary instruction (including any front-loading of background knowledge), attention to the structure of English, cultural relevance, academic language, as well as development of oral language, ELL's can make dramatic gains in reading comprehension.  In the article Modified Guided Reading: Gateway to English as a Second Language and Literacy Learning, the authors add an important element to the assessment and grouping piece of Guided Reading: the inclusion of English language proficiency level in forming small groups for reading instruction.

Preparing for Guided Reading by assessing and thoughtfully grouping students based not only on reading and writing skill assessments, but also language proficiency, is an important first step to successfully implementing Guided Reading instruction in the classroom.

Happy reading!
Jacquie

Oral Language Development and Reading Readiness

Marie Clay, expert on emergent literacy, emphasizes the importance of oral language skills in the development of reading readiness in young children.  In her book Becoming Literate, she writes, "Children who have been read to a great deal will already know, in some way, that the language of books is different from the language that they speak.  They will be developing 'an ear' for bookish or literary forms of language." (p. 28).   Children who are read to at home easily figure out that the pictures tell a story and can create a story based on pictures.  So, what do we do about children who have never heard a story read aloud until beginning kindergarten?

The majority of ELL's that I've worked with over the years have parents with little to no educational experience.  Many of them are illiterate in their own language, as well as in English. That leaves the important work of developing that early reading readiness to the children's first teachers.  Marie clay posits that "most difficulties in learning to read stem from inappropriate experiences rather than from impaired structures.  Unfortunately they are equally difficult to overcome." (p. 43).  As teachers of ELL's, we need then to step up our practice to include dedicated time spent creating meaningful opportunites for students to develop their oral language. 

Marie Clay has also researched school entry, which is a very different experience for non-English speaking children--whether immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants--from low-income families.  Many of their parents have little, if any, experience with school and so do not prepare their children for school the way that many "typical" US families do.  So the teacher must take each child's individual experiences prior to beginning school and build upon those so that all of the students have common experiences to share.  "Schools have created policies which exclude unready children from opportunities to learn to be ready.  Sometimes they are found to be unready to attend school; sometimes they are retained in a class where they did not learn in the hope that second time around something surprising will happen.  Schools demand from the child performances which the school itself should be developing." (p. 68)

So, what then do we do to build the oral language and early reading experiences children need to be successful readers?  For one, we know that awareness of rhyme and alliteration has a positive correlation to reading and spelling success.  Children who start school already knowing, for example, nursery rhymes, have a leg up on children who start school without this knowledge.  Poetry should be an integral part of our early instruction of ELL's who are learning to read.

There are many oral language development resources available for teachers and parents/caregivers.  Here are a couple that I found to be useful:

Tips on promoting oral language development with students:
http://www.med.unc.edu/ahs/clds/files/early-childhood-resources/Promoting%20Oral%20Language%20Development.pdf

Fun oral language activities that promote reading readiness:
http://www.literacyconnections.com/OralLanguage.php

Happy reading!
Jacquie

Marie Clay's Theories and ELL's--First Post

So, as I mentioned in my last post, I'm beginning my Reading Endorsement at Otterbein University this semester.  One of our texts this semester is Becoming Literate by Marie Clay, the reading guru who created the Reading Recovery approach.   I've only read the Introduction and Chapter One so far, but several things have already struck me.  Clay mentions the multitude of research she has done on beginning reading which has informed her theory of what good readers do and how to help struggling readers.  On pages 11-13, Clay gives just brief summaries of some of her research, but I noticed the following similarity in her research: the children she studied are all English speaking (different dialects, but English speaking nonetheless) and appear to come from literate families, as she writes that "a group of co-operative mothers kept diary records of what literacy activities the children were producing at home" (pg. 11). 

I did a little extra checking.  Marie Clay does appear to have excluded ELL students in the Reading Recovery studies done outside of the United States.  However, when Reading Recovery was studied in Ohio schools, no children were excluded based on language difference.  I'm excited to read more about the study done through Ohio State University to see what, if any, conclusions were made about the effectiveness of Reading Recovery with ELL's. 

I also found links to fourteen other articles that studied Reading Recovery with ELL's on the What Works Clearinghouse site.  Unfortunately, because none of the studies had a comparison group, no conclusion could be drawn about the true effectiveness of the program with ELL's.  I still plan to read each of the articles, though, just to get as much information as I can.

As all of my students are ELL's, and most of them are the children of parents who never learned to read or write, I look at research studies through a different lens.  My experience learning to read as the daughter of college-educated, upper middle class white American parents is very different from the experience of my students.  So, while Clay recommends that "when we are reading about learning to read we can always check what authorities are claiming against what we are able to observe in our own behaviour as readers" (pg. 9), as a teacher of children whose background is very different from mine, I feel I need to also check what I read against the reading behaviors I see in my students.  As Clay says, instruction should start not where the teacher is, but where the student is (pg. 16).  I'm looking forward to learning more about how children develop literacy so that I can better help my students become strong readers and writers. 

Happy reading,
Jacquie