Kelly

In 1997, the United States Congress asked the Secretary of Education to convene a national panel to assess the effectiveness of different approaches used to teach children to read. Over the course of the next 2 years the panel reviewed research in the areas of: reading processes, best practices, assessments, implementation in classrooms, teacher preparation and more. Unfortunately, in looking at the studies, the members of the NRP chose not to address the needs of second language learners. The National Literacy Panel was convened in response to this void. This panel was charged with conducting a comprehensive, evidence-based review of the research literature on the development of literacy among language minority children and youth. The panel looked at over 2000 documents in the acquisition of language in order to answer Roger and Hammerstein’s question, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” The last chapter of the report is written by Catherine Snow who was given the task of summarizing second language literacy. As I was reading through her chapter I was struck with the fact that the research supports many things that I have thought over the years. One of those is that second language learners can achieve //adequate performance// on measures of word recognition but have greater difficulty with reading comprehension and vocabulary. I have always heard this called “word calling”. When I read with adolescents in small group or individually they rarely have trouble with reading what is on the page but when asked to make meaning of it they struggle. The struggle comes when students are asked to move to more difficult passages that include multisyllabic words, content area words and novel reading which involves holding on to a story line for a significant amount of time. Some of the factors examined in the report related to societal, familial and individual factors. I was surprised that the evidence does not support the impact that those factors play in the lives of language minority children. This is true especially in light of the fact that they impact monolingual children. I question how parental education and literacy levels, socioeconomic status could not play a role. In my own experience, children of recent immigrant parents who are literate and educated in their own country perform better than those children that come from 2nd, 3rd or 4th generation immigrants that the school system has failed. The children from the latter families seem to never progress beyond an intermediate level of English proficiency. The children from the former excel at an accelerated rate. Another section deals with assessment. As we saw from our Educational Methods class, assessment is a difficult bird to catch. Most are subjective, unreliable and/or invalid. That is especially true of the language assessment used here in California, the CELDT. As we know, from the mock test presented to us, the test is not a good measure of language acquisition. Not surprisingly the research supports what we already know. I think the most interesting learning I had so far was the importance of listening and speaking on the language minority student. In secondary education this will require more of a paradigm shift. With the Junior High School Departmentalized model, teachers are subject matter experts. This leads to a type of teaching called “sage on stage”. What this means for students is that they spend a lot of time taking notes while the teacher talks. There is not much time for talking about what you are learning. My district has spent the last 4 years trying to break this cycle. Our professional development has focused on shifting the talk to the students and modeling what the talk is supposed to sound like. In my own classroom I spend a good portion of my instructional time letting students talk to each other about our work. I try to help them frame it in academic language and I make them listen to each other. But reflecting about that work as it relates to the California State Standards, I can say that I have not given as much attention to the Listening and Speaking portion of the English Language Arts Standards as I should. The knowledge of the importance of listening and speaking will change the way I draw up my curriculum for next year. I will be making sure that I include those listening and speaking pieces as part of my instruction and assessment.