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