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The purpose of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth is to look at the elements that needs to be present in any reading approach or program necessary for students to be successful in reading. The panel looked at the development of literacy, look at the relationship between English oral proficiency and English literacy, the relationship between first language literacy and second language literacy, and instructional and professional development. The panel also looked at factors that influence second-language literacy development, that includes societal/cultural factors, familial/cultural factors, and individual factors.

One finding indicates that certain components of literacy cannot fully develop until other, precursor skills are acquired. First language literacy is related in important ways to second language literacy. Thus, language minority students who are literate in their first language are more likely to be literate in the second language. I have an English language student that started kindergarten with the ability to read only simple Spanish books. She quickly learned how to read in English soon after. She was able to transfer some of the common words over. She recognized the cognates. For example: she read a Spanish book about the magic bus. Bus in Spanish is autobus. She looked at the same book in English and recognized that bus had the same spelling and same /b/ sound.

An effective practice mentioned by the panel to teach vocabulary is select vocabulary from rich children’s literature by pre-teaching vocabulary, teach vocabulary in context by supplying synonyms, teach basic words related to the story’s theme, teach ‘other words and phrases’ such as cohesion markers, idioms, adverbs, and adjectives. For my kindergarten class, I choose vocabulary from the text, write them on index cards, and place them on pocket charts. I go over the words everyday for one to two weeks. The students give me sentences orally using the vocabulary words. Those words then become their sight words. The students become familiarized with the words, and start using them in their independent writing journal. Eventually, they are able to recognize the word in their reading books. For example: one vocabulary word was grow. One English language learner wrote in her journal, “The plant get bigr with watr.” Later on, she wrote “ The plant get tall when I give it lot of watr and put it sun.” Once she was able to comprehend that vocabulary, she wrote “ The plant grow up tall and big when I take good care of it. It need sun watr and ar.”

The National Reading Panel also found that features of family life like domestic workload, religious activities appear to influence the value children place on reading and their concepts of themselves as readers. So far from my teaching experience, I noticed that my students who go to child care after school do not perform as well as students who go home after school with their parents. The students whose parents work less, spends more time with their child, have less behavior and academic problems, than those students who spend less time with their parents. The kids who do not go to child care work on reading and homework with their parents. The child care kids work on their homework with the child care attendant, and do not have one-on-one help. Some of my students’ parents do not speak or read any English, but they provide the push that the child needs. I grew up as an English language learner myself and my parents were not able to help me with my homework, but they always sat with me and made sure that I did my homework. They constantly told me how much education was important to succeed in life.

Findings show that excellent instruction that is systematic, intensive, and differentiated generates expected levels of performance on word-level skills. Focusing instruction on key components, such as phonemic awareness, decoding, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing, has clear benefits. I taught third grade last year, and many of my students including English only students, lack the basic skills of decoding and phonemic awareness. They were so far behind; some of them couldn’t even chunk their words or identify short or long vowels. There wasn’t enough time for me to go back and teach them phonics, when I had to focus on reading comprehension and vocabulary. I’ve also heard from upper grade teachers who complained that some of their students lack the basic skills. I think it’s important for primary teachers to work intensely on phonemic awareness and phonics. The students need to acquire the basic skills to read effectively.