Language Experience Approach and Dr. Seuss

In honor of Dr. Seuss's birthday, for the past two weeks my reading instruction has centered around texts my students created after repeated readings of The Sneetches, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, and Green Eggs and Ham.  I used the Language Experience Approach with students to create texts on their level that we could read and work with all week.  In their article, The Power of Language Experience for Cross-Cultural Reading and Writing, authors David Landis, Joanne Umolu and Sunday Mancha assert that LEA is "a means of providing interesting and relevant texts for diverse students' reading and writing."  I often use LEA when I want to introduce my students to rich literature that is too vocabulary dense to be an appropriate text for them to work with independently.

My kindergarten students listened to and (even during the first reading!) helped me read Green Eggs and Ham.  We used the book to study transportation and food vocabulary, most of which were new to my students.  Then, we wrote a very simple text together about foods we don't like to eat.  Every few lines, we threw in their favorite refrain, "I will not eat it here or there.  I will not eat it anywhere."  They gleefully shouted those lines when we came to them.  Using our Language Experience Approach-created text, students took turns tracking the words and performing the return sweep while reading.  We also used their text to practice counting words in a sentence and to identify words they knew using word swatters.  This was a quick way to take notes on which of my kindergarteners are still working on many of these Concepts About Print, and which have already mastered them.

In first grade, we read The Sneetches.  We're in the middle of a unit on friendship, so this book fit in nicely!  In addition to focusing on the theme of the book (not judging others by what's on the outside), we also wrote a summary of the book that we used as one of our texts this week.  Two of my first graders are still working on one to one matching and recognizing kindergarten sight words, so that was their focus with our word work this week.  My other students are working on r-controlled vowels and transition words like "First", "Next", "Then", so they worked with those skills.  Language Experience texts give teachers the opportunity to use one text to work with students at a variety of levels, which is very helpful in an ESL pull-out class setting.  We often have limited time (30-40 minutes) and multiple levels of language proficiency in our small groups, so being able to use one text to teach many skills makes better use of our precious time!

My second grade students also created a Language Experience text, but theirs was a different format.  Before I read And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, I explained to students that the story was about a boy who, when walking home from school, imagines all the wonderful things he could see.  We then made a list of all of the things they see on their bus ride home from school.  Once we made our list, I read them the book.  We discussed the differences between what the boy imagines he could see and what we really see on our way home each day.  The following day, I re-read the book.  We then made a list of the imagined sights along Mulberry Street.  The students then made lines to compare similar items in the lists.  We talked about why it's important to make connections while we read.  The students completed our book study by writing their own version of the book: And to Think That I Saw It on Walnut Street (our school's street name).  We published the stories and hung them in the hallway for our friends to read.

LEA gave my students the opportunity to work with great literature at their level.  By taking their ideas and thoughts about what we read together, I was able to correct grammar in a natural, conversational setting, encourage the use of new vocabulary, and demonstrate to students that their words and thoughts are worthy of study.  All in all, a fun and successful week using the Language Experience Approach to make Dr. Seuss's lovely literature accessible to my students learning English. 

Happy reading,
Jacquie

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

Two Interesting Articles

After almost a year's absence, I'm back to my blog!  I'm starting my Reading Endorsement at Otterbein University here in Ohio--I'm really excited about the classes I'll be taking!!  As part of the first class, I need to write a blog post every week, so this should get me into the habit of posting...(I hope!!)

Below are two articles that I posted for colleagues on Schoology.  If you haven't already checked out Schoology, I highly recommend it.  The site is very similar to Facebook.  School districts can get a district account so that all of its educators can be linked together for the ultimate professional collaboration experience!  Our district has even developed high school courses for students and professional development courses for teachers through Schoology.

This study was recently released.  It looks at technology's effectiveness in teaching ELL's. The focuses on a few different programs: RocketShip Education, HELP Math, ELLevation, Achieve Language, Voki, and the ESL program in Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. 


Good article about the challenges ELL's face having to learn English at the same time that CCSS are asking for students to master sophisticated language. It discusses the challenges, highlights initiatives and strategies to advance ELLs' language and content learning, and outlines how policy and practice must change to help ELLs graduate ready for college and a career.

Happy reading!
Jacquie

Boost Reading Skills With One Small Change

                                                         

An OSU study found that making one little change to reading aloud--referencing print--boosts children's reading skills later on. Interesting! Is this something you do when you read aloud to your students? your children?

InfOhio Resources

                          



InfOhio offers free Webinars that would be great to use with ESL students.

The live webinars are from 3:30-4:30, but each webinar is archived so you can view it anytime. A couple of interesting ones are:

• INFOhio - we're not just English anymore! Enrich, Enhance, and Extend Curriculum with New Digital Language Content
• The K-12 e-reader: Uniting students with e-reading devices
• How 2 Engage in 2.0 Tools.

Many others look good, too!  Enjoy!