ELA Learning via New Literacy modes

Blogging and video conferencing to enhance English Language Arts curriculum are two new literacy tools that lend themselves to incorporating reading and writing (via blogging) and listening and speaking (via video conferencing). I have included a concept map of Literacy and what it means to me as a second language teacher:

conceptmap-1.doc

My on-going objective is to explore all aspects of new literacies that can be used to optimize second language acquisition (SLA). Optimal SLA teaching includes direct instruction, comprehensible input, and instructor feedback. As Brian Cambourne points out in his article entitled, "Toward an educationally relevant theory of literacy learning: Twenty years of inquiry" [The Reading Teacher 49, 3 (1995)], engagement and relevancy are crucial conditions of learning that directly and indirectly affect all other conditions of learning in his literacy learning model. As Cambourne points out, "This theory of learning resulted in a predictable pattern of teaching practice (...) Repetitive drill and practice was the core teaching procedure employed." (op. cit., p. 183). This attitude towards literacy learning extended to SLA and foreign language teaching and gained the label of "audiolingualism" or Audiolingual Methodology (ALM). This language teaching method places the instructor as the central figure in the learning environment and it reflects the behavorist psychology with the structural linguistics research popular before the 1970s. Language teaching focus was on not allowing students to make errors, because errors were evidence of "bad habits".

It is only through a rich environment of comprehensible input that intake leads to acquisition of a second language, which is crucial for teaching all ELL students from non-English language backgrounds. All input is not comprehensible. It is through careful lesson planning that includes conscientious differentiation and accommodation that SLA teachers can meet the needs of all students.

Comprehensible input includes input in more than one medium (oral and visual) and that is contextualized in a context that is meaningful to the language learners. The new literacy of blogging and video conferencing provide further mediums for ELA teaching. This context also serves an important underlying purpose: that of motivational arousal. The aspects of motivation (goals, effortful behavior, desire to attain goals) provide the learner with a favorable attitude towards an activity, or what we consider ‘engagement’. We do not engage our students, but through comprehensible input that is in a meaningful context and is relevant to the learner, we provide the key ingredients for motivational arousal. Students engage themselves.

Reflecting on my exploration of new literacy modes for ELA learning, it was my desire to tap into these aspects of motivation so that I could elicit effortful behavior and favorable attitudes toward learning activities which is crucial to my goal of optimal SLA and ELA teaching. Attitude is everything!

Bound Together by Literacy...

This was the title and the theme of the Michigan Reading Association's 52nd Annual Conference which I attended last weekend in Detroit. As a volunteer, I learned that roughly 3,000 participants attended this conference, and we began Friday evening with 17 large plastic bins full of orientation folders to distribute to our speakers! With such a diverse myriad of topics and high-quality speakers, I found it difficult to decide which sessions to attend. I decided to focus on issues concerning reading comprehension and addressing difficulties of comprehension and instructional strategies for struggling readers.

Nell Duke (MSU) spoke on several subjects, including Preventing, Understanding, and Addressing Comprehension Difficulties. She began with describing categories of causes of reading comprehension difficulties and how to gather evidence of persistent comprehension difficulties that are not caused by word recognition or decoding skills such as hyperlexia (Wahlberg 2001) which involves high word recognition but low comprehension and high oral and listening comprehension but poor reading comprehension. Many difficulties with fluency involve issues of working memory limitation. Difficulties with written language may be tied to specific genres and may include written language register and/or oral language register. One way to differentiate between the registers would be to ask a child to "read" a textless picture book after "picture walking" once through the pages for contextual meaning. If the child is then able to create the text orally, and discuss their interpretation of the story, then the written language register may be solely explored. Often lack of strategies or very poor use of reading strategies (such as making left-field connections that don't help with deciphering the meaning of the text) are the cause of comprehension difficulties. Some examples of these types of problems are the failure of accessing relevant prior knowledge, the failure to apply prior knowledge, or the application of irrelevant prior knowledge. Any of these problems can lead to inability to comprehend written text. Comprehension can be lacking due to a lack of engagement by the reader or by other factors such as eye movement problems or other self-regulating meta-cognitive issues. An exploratory factor analysis of fourth graders word identification skills and overall reading comprehension breaks areas of difficulty into these profiles: automatic word callers, struggling word callers, word stumblers (who comprehend a lot!), slow and steady comprehension (can't pass timed tests!), slow word callers, and "disabled" (about 9% of those 4th graders with problems) which scored low in all areas. Duke points out that there are multiple areas and causes of difficulty and often they are clumped together as one problem ("needs phonics", etc.). What can we do to address these issues of comprehension difficulty? Here are 7 points that educators need to address: (1) Appropriate attention to underlying or accompanying skills, (2) Extensive language exposure (written and oral) with explicit vocabulary teaching, (3) Language Intervention (much more than speech therapy!), (4) Explicitly teach reading comprehension strategies (questioning, inferring, mental imaging, attending to structure, summarizing and synthesizing, and self-monitoring skills) using the components of teaching strategies (such as modeling and talk-aloud), (5) Knowledge building through reading, hands-on experimentation, and discussion (make sure that about 1/3 of all texts are of informational genre), (6) Foster Engagement (CORI: Concept Oriented Reading Instruction), and lastly but most importantly (7) Assessment (let our continual assessment guide our teaching). There is a good reading comprehension assessment available free-of-charge at MSU's website (msularc.org) called COCA (Concepts of Comprehension Assessment) which you may use to help assess students with reading comprehension difficulty (takes about 15 min. per child).

Chryse Hutchins, co-author of 7 Keys to Comprehension: How to Help Your Kids Read It and Get It!, spoke on the subject of "Reading Mindfully: Cultivating Awareness as We Puzzle through Text." Hutchins emphasized the importance of knowing your students and what they know in order to know how to reach students who have no background knowledge and therefore lack understanding (including our ELL students). Readers who lack background knowledge fail to build meaning on their own and lack internal monitoring skills necessary to get themselves 'back on rack' when comprehension breaks down. We must teach strategies that will help students independently recognize when reading goes off-course and independently take steps to get back on the road to understanding. She talked about students' "inner voice" and "distracting voice" to describe these internal monitors. As an explicit teaching strategy, we should find books that students don't have a lot of background knowledge about. For instance, in a midwestern community, a book such as The Very Last First Time (which requires knowledge of ocean tides) would be something students may have very little or no prior knowledge to bring to the reading. Design lessons whereby students (1) write about the book and (2) write to the book. Writing about the book in the form of a letter to the teacher when they are approximately in the middle of their reading; they describe an interesting scene and end with "I wonder...". This provides the teacher with a comprehension check and focused mini-lessons on color-coding their reading (students make their own legend for coding scheme) to zoom in on great vocabulary, words describing feelings, noting figurative language, repeating words, etc. Writing to the book (after the reading) involves an exit question where students break into 4-way share groups with their own color-coded texts to compare and discuss interpretations and then the teacher announces, "Let's do a quick write". A series of creative mini-lessons focused on inferring by using a Gary Larson single-frame cartoon with all text blocked out. Most children had no prior knowledge of these scenarios, so then the teacher can "drop a hint" on the context as children are struggling to assign meaning to the cartoon, causing students to then consciously access their cued background knowledge to help them understand the cartoon drawing and write a caption. What a fun way to teach a strategy! Hutchins went on to describe productive uses of Book Clubs that help students' ability to monitoring their own comprehension. She teaches students to "Be a selfish reader" and think "What's in this for me?" When asking a reading comprehension synthesis question, often struggling readers will answer "I don't know!" A good response to this is "I know that you don't know, but if you did, what would you say?" This gives the student permission to go for it and take risks in interpreting texts. Encourage students generate their own questions as they read (perhaps in the margins of a photocopied text or in a journal) and then help students to sort them for quality and answer them. Some good fifth grade texts for doing this "questioning" strategy lesson are: Rose Blanche (Innocenti) and Charlie Anderson (Ambercrombie). A "Status as a class" assessment with sticky notes with written symbols can be used to monitor comprehension: stop and think (!); re-read (<--); ask a question (?). The genre of poetry can be well used to teach background-knowledge-accessing strategies: Take a poem like Gary Soto's "Black Hair" (or a riddle-type poem for younger readers) and block out the title before copying it for your readers. They can write their questions in the margins as they read along and then actually see the "synthesis" of their thinking processes throughout the reading of the poem.

Richard Allington (author of What Really Matters for Struggling Readers) spoke about fluency and what really matters for struggling readers and why. This was a research-based presentation that was well-grounded in the issues of concern to reading specialist, literacy coaches, interventionists, and teachers of all levels of reading. Allington stressed that the major problem that struggling readers are faced with boils down to two issues: (1) Texts that are too difficult and (2) lots of interruptions (by well-intentioned teachers and classmates!). These two issues undermine the development of the reader's internal monitor. An instructional level text should be at 95% accuracy beforehand (assuming readers "picture walk" through the text before they begin reading to give context and activate background knowledge) and 99% accuracy after the reading. Allington advocates using repeated reading (1 text, 3 times--after the 4th or 5th week of the new school year when routines are established). Repeated readings allow for many opportunities to practice accuracy, prosody, and inferring in a given text reading. Extensive reading works for fluency development. Independent reading works as well as repeated readings. In his multiple studies, Allington finds that wide reading ended up working better than repeated readings! He notes that repeated readings result in faster reading and DIEBLS assessments measure accuracy and rate, but not fluency! Oral language skills transfer to silent independent reading, but a level of accuracy in reading is necessary before this transfer can happen. Issues of working memory and attention are integral to fluency. If a reader's working memory is over-taxed, then there is a lack of ability to attend to the meaning. The most important thing that we can do to facilitate fluency in struggling readers is to allow adequate time for the modeling of good readers reading aloud which boils down to comprehensible input for struggling readers. Teachers must place processing monitoring responsibility back onto the readers. This can be accomplished through targeted comprehension checks at the end of sentences ("Does that make sense?" "Read that again." "Does that sound right?") But struggling readers are all too often frequently interupted and asked to "sound it out" by well-intentioned teachers. Constant interruptions and focus on orthographic processing teaches the struggling reader to wait for the teacher's interruption and then guess at a word until he/she gives the correct word, thus undermining the reader's development of internal monitoring skills. As teachers, we need to stop interrupting. If we must interrupt, it should be at the end of a sentence or a paragraph. Another word of advice from Allington is to rotate reading choices/materials. He suggested buying inexpensive plastic rain gutters (at a home improvement center) and mount them on the classroom walls as book displays to showcase books. The bottom line is that focused practice results in fluency. His data on fourth graders shows direct correlation between the number of hours spent reading each day and the child's reading level. For instance, a fourth grader who reads at fourth grade reading level spends about two hours a day reading, a fourth grader who spends 8 hours a day reading reads at the 8th grade level (95th percentile!) and the 4th grade struggling reader who reads at a 2nd grade level spends only 1/2 hour reading per day. Since only about 1.5 hours are spent reading in-class, this means that the good readers are spending the remainder of this time reading outside of the classroom. Think that 4-6 hours a day reading is something most 4th graders aren't capable of doing? Think again... this is the amount of time that many children this age spend watching television and playing computer games! Allington ended his presentation with a quick rule of thumb for estimating reading rates. Based upon 1,000-word books (Frog & Toad series, Stone Fox, Fox & His Friends, etc.), you can time a child reading one of these to determine their reading rate: Five minutes would equate to 200 words per minute, 10 minutes = 100 w.p.m., and 20 minutes = 50 w.p.m. What a quick way to assess reading rate!

One presentation that I found particularly useful to pre-service teachers was Pam Allyn (author, The Complete 4: How to Teach Reading and Writing Through Daily Lessons, Monthly Units and Yearlong Calendars) who spoke about "The Complete Year: Teaching Reading and Writing through Integrated Units of Study". This presentation focused upon each child being at a specific point in an ongoing continuum of their life, their development, and their interests. Allyn advises us to take a lesson that we love and justify why we can teach it as a unit and throughout a year-long continuum of study. Take the lesson that we are passionate about and contextualize it, breaking the subject into units of study that range from 1-6 weeks in length. Make sure that each unit has a beginning, middle and end and pre-assess students at the beginning and post-assess students at the end. How do we support all students? We base our units upon our state standards and GLCEs and make sure that every unit's needs must spiral up through the grade levels. We can do this by having a strategies and processes focus. These units need to understand the process of reading and writing, reading and writing in many different genres, needs to develop strategic readers and writers, and demonstrate command of the conventions of the English language. How do we cram all of these processes and strategies into a school year? By balancing our instruction and planning on a year-long continuum, and by spiraling majors and minors of strategies and processes, ensuring that each unit has a framing question and clearly defined goals. Allyn took process, genre, strategy, and conventions and showed us how to work these elements into narrative, non-fiction, and poetry genre over an academic year calendar. Her book and website (litlifeinfo.com) go into detail on how to make the most of this effective long-term standards-based planning. Her personal stories and humor made her presentation come alive!

This was the first state-wide reading conference that I attended and had the pleasure to work as a volunteer. I strongly recommend working at a MRA annual conference, as it allows a special "behind-the-scenes" glimpse at the daunting task of organizing and orchestrating one of the most invigorating methods of educating ourselves as teaching professionals and networking with colleagues who share our passion for high-quality literacy instruction. I can't wait to participate in next year's MRA conference in Grand Rapids!

Connecting Writing to Reading... Why write?

In synthesizing the reading and writing processes, the importance of writing for English language learners (ELL) is integral to the development of fluency in their developing language system. Just as structured input activities--such as information gap activities--are crucial to the ELL who is learning how to manipulate the new (second language or L2) input that s/he is hearing and reading, so too must these learners engage in structured output activities. Output is any production of language, be it oral or written, and production of the second language requires multiple strategies and demands on the ELL. These production (or output) processes include accessing or retrieving of the correct forms, monitoring or editing one's speech/writing, and production strategies used for stringing forms and words together into sentences and connected discourse. All of these processes are affected by a variety of factors (see the research of Pienemann, 1998). The term "access" was first used for referring to retrieval by Terrell (1986, 1991) and is part of the binding process whereby an L2 learner binds a word or form with its meaning. According to Terrell's theory, production in an L2 involves two processes or abilities: (1) the ability to express a particular meaning using a particular form or structure, and (2) the ability to string together forms and structures in appropriate ways. The first process is what Terrell refers to as access and the second process is what Terrell defines as production strategies. Access involves retrieving the correct verb tense when attempting to express the associated concept temporally. What is important for teachers to keep in mind is that access does not automatically follow language acquisition. Simply because an ELL student has incorporated a particular form or structure into his or her developing L2 system does not mean that it can be easily accessed and thus produced (in oral or written output) automatically. It is important to to note that learners can acquire a great deal of grammatical information, but not be able to apply it in communicative situations. The ability to read a language, therefore, does not provide the opportunity to create output in that language. Hence, the importance of writing in the L2 in order to practice access as well as producing output which in turn increases accessing abilities. Output then serves as further input of the L2 as the learner writes, edits, and reads his or her work. Structuring output refers to sequencing the production activities to follow the input activities, creating coherent grammar lessons that take the student from processing a grammatical feature in the input (reading, listening) to accessing the feature from his or her developing language system, to creating the feature in his or her output (writing, speaking). Creating structured output activities for ELLs, the teacher should keep the learner's processes in mind, presenting one thing at a time, keeping meaning in focus (meaningful context), moving from sentences to connected discourse, using both written and oral output, and having others respond to the content of the output through grand discussion, group work, and instructor feedback. It is through writing that all learners use their developing grammar and vocabulary to communicate information, and writers need ample opportunities to express themselves. Only through writing and discussing writing do learners activate all the processes responsible for the development of language fluency and accuracy. Write on!

Technology as a Differentiation Tool...

Technology as a tool in second language acquisition and foreign language teaching is only in its infancy. Early software programs have fallen short of communicative language teaching pedagogy and goals, imitating the drills of audiolingual methodology of the 1950s and 60s. It has been a marketer’s dream of the magical ‘pill’ of foreign language mastery in an easy-to-learn, guaranteed-to-succeed set of CD-ROMs (guaranteed to succeed in making money for the publisher, that is!). I have begun to use blogging in my own French teaching at MSU, as well as multiple on-line language learning resources. The more variety of input mediums and contexts that I provide my diverse group of learners, the more chances I have of meeting their individual learning styles and processes. It is only through the use of multimedia in reading, listening, writing, and speaking, that I can truly begin to differentiate my teaching within a highly-structured departmental curriculum. Our 200-level textbook takes the role of ‘resource’ in the classroom. As the old adage goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” becomes the backdrop to a rich array of visual media (photographs, video clips, news footage, music videos…) that I can use to provide contextual meaning and activate schema and prior knowledge of my students. By using images within context, a second language learner can ‘bind’ new vocabulary directly to the action or object, without translating from their first language lexicon. This concept of binding is crucial to building contextual cognitive webs of lexicon, whereby new vocabulary words are ultimately associated directly with their meaning and not with a translation. Anchoring second language input is not limited to visuals, but visual representation of sentences and connected discourse can enhance auditive comprehension, simultaneously providing language input in two forms (seeing and hearing), and thus increasing the chances of a learner attending to a form or a task at hand. Technology is rapidly progressively towards being more and more interactive, which is mandatory for optimal foreign language teaching scenarios. Just as we would research and critique any new teaching approach or textbook, so do we need to be critical investigators and consumers of technology use in the classroom. If the focus of the task is based upon the activity and not the objectives, then we are no longer constructively using the technology. Do I believe that new literacies can help us with issues of equity and differentiation in our classrooms? You betcha!

Exploring New Literacies...

Emergent, developing, and fluent are very broad literacy evaluation labels that do not encompass habits and processes such as attitude, purpose, and use. I would label myself Developing in new literacies. I prioritize the new literacies and apply myself only to those that I find useful for second language teaching. Within each field of interest, there is a plethora of literacies and available media technologies. If, however, I do not find a new literacy constructive in multiple purposes and uses of my students’ language learning, then I do not feel that it is a good use of my time to integrate it into my curriculum. With our rapidly growing technologies, I feel that educators need to spend more time evaluating the merits of each development, with a critical eye towards possible applications in the field that will enhance the classroom experience. The one aspect of emergent readers and writers that I wish to maintain in my own developing new literacies exploration is their belief that learning is fun and exciting. This attitude is the intrinsic motivation to exploring digital literacies and incorporating multiple media resources in a language learning environment.