1. Literacy Instruction for Older ELL Students with Limited Prior Literacy Marcia Gaudet

2. Information for this session from: What’s Different About Teaching Reading to Students Learning English? By Dorothy Kauffman Center for Applied Linguistics Washington D.C.

3. The Goal: Graduation for all! The SFSD served 1820 Els this year from 67 countries, speaking 61 languages

4. Our Challenge In the SFSD we are serving four types of Els 1) ELs born in the U.S. and educated here 2) ELs new to the U.S. with strong educational backgrounds 3) ELs new to the U.S. with interrupted education but have literacy in their first language 4) ELs new to the U.S. with no prior literacy

5. Talk with a partner: 1.What is your partner’s name? Where do they teach? What do they teach? 2.What educational concerns brought them here today? 3.What would they like to get from today? Report out to the group: Please share with the large group what your partner would like to get from today.

6. There are 115 million children in the world who do not attend primary school. In Africa, only 59% attend school at all, and only 1 in 3 will complete primary school. Why? - Their families need them to work – fetching water, farming, or even working in bonded labor to pay off a debt. - 29% of the world’s children ages 5-14 are engaged in child labor. Reasons for limited literacy

7. A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park Reasons for limited literacy

8. Schools in refugee camps often have limited resources. In some camps children must pay to attend the schools.

9. There are many reasons for limited literacy: The US spends about $1780 per capita on primary and secondary education. Uganda spends just about $5.00 per capita Today: 1 in 6 adults in the world is illiterate 2/3 of the illiterate are women Reasons for limited literacy

10. Important to remember “Our people did not carry their stories in heavy books, but in our songs.” – Home of the Brave Cultures without literacy are rich in relationships – if you need to know how to do something, you don’t Google it, you ask a friend. Parents from these cultures who come here, highly value education!

11. Factors to Keep in Mind When Teaching 2 nd Language Speakers to Read English 1.Not all languages are alphabetic; neither do they share the same syntactic characteristics. 1.Reading models include the same set of three processing dimensions: visual phonological syntactic *Phonology: the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language. *Syntax - the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural language. 2.What is not considered in reading models is the second language reader’s prior knowledge of the sound-letter correspondences in the native language experiences with them.

12. Factors to Keep in Mind When Teaching 2 nd Language Speakers to Read English 4. ELLs come from around the globe & bring different sets of language experiences with them. 5. Teachers need to understand the similarities and differences between students’ languages and writing systems and English in order to be able to teach English language learners.

13. Chinese Numbers 1. Write the number of toes you have. 2. Write the answer to 4 + 4 = _____ 3. Write the number of days in a week. 4. Write your phone number.

14. What is Phonemic Awareness? “Knowing the sounds of a language is a prerequisite to being able to start to match it with print.” – Ramirez 2000 “ Phonemic awareness if the ability to notice, think, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words.” – Adler 2001

15. What is Phonemic Awareness? This means that individuals are aware of how the individual sounds in words work. They can break words into their component sounds, identify onsets and rhymes, and make new words by deleting or replacing sounds. Words are made of speech sounds called phonemes. Phonemes are the small, discrete spoken sounds of a language that help to distinguish one word for another. For example, change the first phoneme in the word bat to /h/. Changing the /b/ to /h/ changes the word from bat to hat and also changes the meaning of the word.

16. Some Ways Students Develop Phonemic Awareness

17. Some Ways Children Develop Phonemic Awareness

18. Phonics Is… …the predictable relationship between the sounds (phonemes) of spoken language and the letters and spellings (graphemes) that represent those sounds in written language (Antunez, 2002).

19. Phonics Instruction Is… …a way of teaching reading. It focuses on teaching children to understand the relationships between the sounds of the spoken words they hear and the letters of written words they see in print so they can use these relationships to read and write words (Adler, 2001; Heilman, 1968)

20. Factors to Keep in Mind When Teaching Phonics Phonics programs for native English speakers generally begin with consonants, because they tend to have a close one-to-one correspondence with one letter to one sound. Phonics instruction that is systematic and explicit contributes to a student’s growth in reading.

21. Factors to Keep in Mind When Teaching Phonics For ELLs, instruction in phonemic awareness that includes letter-sound associates, or phonics, is more likely to be productive then teaching speech sounds alone (Adams, Foorman, Lunderg, & Beeler, 1998; Oudeans, 2004, cited in August & Shanahan, 2006).

22. Factors to Keep in Mind When Teaching Phonics Phonics instruction should begin with the most frequently occurring letter-sound relationships in English so that children can read words as soon as possible. (Texas Education Agency, n.d.) All students can best benefit from phonics instruction that is taught in meaningful contexts (Peregoy & Boyles, 2001; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).

23. What is Required for Skilled Reading? Skilled reading clearly requires skill in both decoding and comprehension… A student who cannot decode cannot read; a student who cannot comprehend cannot read either. Literacy – reading ability – can be found only in the presence of both decoding and comprehension. Both skills are necessary; neither is sufficient.

24. Some English language learners may Speak languages that do not have the visual, phonological, or syntactic matches of spoken and written English (Bernhardt, 2003) Be literate in their native language but know very little oral English (Bernhardt, 2003) not be literate in their native language, so English is the language in which they develop literacy (Bernhardt, 2003)

25. Some English language learners may Need to develop a phonological concept for English words (Bernhardt, 2003) Develop early reading skills in many of the same ways as native English speakers (Ramirez, 2000) Be able to use what they now about the phonological features of their native language to develop phonemic awareness in English (Bernhardt, 2003)

26. Some English language learners may Need to learn the alphabetic writing system of English because the writing system of their native language is different from what of English (Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Hancin- Bhatt, 1991)) Benefit from instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics that teaches English speech sounds alone and letter- sound associations (Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998; Oudeans, 2004, cited in August & Shanahan, 2006)

27. Older Learners need: Language Experience Approach Picture Books with mature themes/Nonfiction texts

28. Spanish has 24 distinct sounds - Words usually end in vowels - Vowels very consistent in sound English as 44 distinct sounds (System 44) Swahili – every word ends in a vowel Arabic – read from right to left Is it an Asian pictorial language? plural? Are there male and female pronouns in their first language? Learn as much as you can about a student’s first language

29. Assessment It is important to assess Els at the beginning of each semester to know where they are starting and to measure their growth. The DRA is an assessment used for beginning readers. It can be useful for EL to determine what level of reading a student has in English. The TOWER if an assessment used for FAME

30. Small Groups are a must Begin each semester with a reading assessment to determine reading level Adjust classroom routine to accommodate small group instruction to differentiate Begin with illustrated repetitive text

31. Before Reading Teach key vocabulary Preview & Predict During Reading Model Reading / model decoding strategies Focus on the first sound in words After Reading Review and Retell story Shared writing about story Small Group Reading Instruction

32. Retell by drawing pictures, then writing 1.2.3. ___________________ __________________ 4.5.6. __________________________________________________________