Framing the issue

Welcome to the 2020 Volume 2 issue of the MinneTESOL Journal. This issue addresses timely topics, covering the COVID-19 pandemic and its racialized impact on schooling, as well as book reviews and articles providing instructional guidance for ESOL teachers for learners of all ages and in multiple contexts.   

We are thrilled to include an article by 2019 MELEd keynote speaker Dr. Luciana C. de Oliveira. In “Planning and Application Using a Language-Based Approach to Content Instruction (LACI) in Multilingual Classrooms,” Dr. de Oliveira presents a language-based approach to content instruction (LACI) and provides a framework for addressing content and language needs of multilingual learners. 

Two additional articles addressing instruction touch on reading and assessment. First, Holly Krech Thomas in “The Big Picture: Visualization As A Tool For Decoding And Reading Comprehension,” provides guidance for leveraging a visualization strategy to support literacy development; the article provides a variety of activities that encourage students of all ages to visualize both the forms and meanings of words. In the second article, former Minnesota State University, Mankato student Kadidja Koné writes about her experience teaching English in Mali as a Fulbright Scholar. In “Assess Us, But Don’t Torture Us: Transforming An Assessment Into A Moment Of Learning And Enjoyment,” Koné describes weaving performance based assessments (PBA) and learner journaling to understand how Directed Motivational Current (Muir & Dörnyei, 2013) was at play in learning. 

The issue includes two articles on the impact of racism and white supremacy on schooling for students of color. Dr. Jenna Cushing-Leubner, in “Looking For Racial Equity In English Language Teaching,” describes the agentic experience of multilingual youth labeled “long-term English learners” and “heritage language learners” as they participated in ethnic studies and youth participatory action initiatives. The article includes suggestions for educators who seek to center their English language teaching as anti-racist and anti-biased work. In a related piece titled “Fearful No More: Teachers Amplifying Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Familial Voices in Technological Spaces,” Drs. Katherine Barko-Alva, Lisa Porter, and Socorro Herrera report on their field research and observations about racialized impacts on the learning opportunities available for emergent bilinguals during the pandemic. They provide recommended tech-rich instructional strategies buoyed by critical consciousness and a priority to create equitable learning spaces.

Finally, we offer two book reviews. First, Jacqueline Noiset breaks down Navigating the Common Core with English Language Learners: Developing Higher-Order Thinking Skills, by Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Sypnieski (2016). The review offers specific examples, illustrating how Ferlazzon and Sypnieski share practical guidance to help teachers support their learners’ higher-order thinking skills. Then, adult ESOL instructor Nan Frydland offers a review of the recently published edited volume, Teaching Adult Immigrants with Limited Formal Education: Theory, Research and Practice, by Joy Kreeft Peyton and Martha Young-Scholten (2020). In this review, Frydland offers a synopsis of each contributed chapter and observes that as early advocates for Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults (LESLLA), Peyton and Young-Scholten’s are well situated to offer much needed in a time of mass displacement and forced migration around the world.

This issue also marks a change in MinneTESOL Journal leadership. Having served as the MinneTESOL Journal Technical Editor (2015 – 2018) and then as a Senior Co-Editor (2017 – 2020), I (Jen Vanek) will step into the role of Senior Editor Emeritus. This journal has been a labor of love—there is no other edited journal I can think of that mentors and then publishes the work of new scholars and practitioners alongside luminaries in our field. The journal also serves to bridge a research to practice divide by publishing in an open access format—ensuring that innovative work reaches classroom teachers. This important work will continue as Suzanne McCurdy, currently in the PhD program in Second Language Education at the University of Minnesota, joins Dr. Michelle Benegas as Senior Editor. 

We hope you will stay connected to our MinneTESOL Journal community by following the journal on Facebook and on Twitter (@MnTESOLjournal). Share articles with colleagues, and consider publishing your work here!

Dr. Jen Vanek and Dr. Michelle Benegas

 

References

Ferlazzo, L., & Sypnieski, K. (2016). Navigating the common core with English language learners: Developing higher-order thinking skills. Jossey-Bass.

Muir, C., & Dörnyei, Z. (2013). Directed motivational currents: Using vision to create effective motivational pathways. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 3(3), 357-375. https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2013.3.3.3

Peyton, J. K., & Young-Scholten, M. (2020). Teaching adult immigrants with limited formal education: Theory, research and practice. Multilingual Matters.

 

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Luciana C. de Oliveira

A language-based approach to content instruction (LACI) provides a framework for addressing content and language needs of multilingual learners by focusing on six Cs of support for scaffolding.
Key words: language-based approach to content instruction, English language learners, bilingual students, scaffolding, multilingual classrooms, general education classrooms  

Increasing numbers of multilingual learners (MLs) in schools have led teachers to search for approaches to help them reach this student population. One such approach is entitled a language-based approach to content instruction (LACI; de Oliveira, 2016, 2017). LACI places emphasis on language learning in the content area classroom, helping teachers foreground the language as a way into the content. Teachers, therefore, address both language and content simultaneously, as these are inseparable components. LACI, with a focus on content through language rather than on language through content, can be a means through which instruction for multilingual learners (MLs) can be accomplished in meaningful ways in a general education content area classroom.

LACI provides MLs with access to the language of the different content areas, not by simplifying content but by enabling MLs to manipulate language as it is written, without simplification. The notion of making content accessible is taken here to mean providing access to the academic language that constructs content knowledge. This approach is a powerful tool for raising teachers’ awareness about the challenges of learning content, and enables them to more effectively contribute to the language development of MLs. The goal is to provide teachers with ways of talking about the language that enable them to focus on content and language. 

This article describes LACI’s six Cs of support for scaffolding content and language instruction for MLs (see Figure 1). It presents a lesson plan template for planning instruction for MLs and a guide for teachers to address the six Cs of support and structure content area instruction for MLs.

Figure 1. LACI’s Six Cs of Support for Scaffolding Content Area Instruction for Multilingual Learners (based on de Oliveira, 2016)

LACI’s six Cs of support

LACI builds on six Cs of support to provide scaffolding that have identified specific elements of instructional activities for MLs, as presented in Figure 1. The C of connection refers to the ways in which teachers can connect pedagogy and curriculum to students’ backgrounds and experiences (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Lucas & Villegas, 2011; Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2012). The C of culture as a principle enables students to build on prior knowledge by accessing cultural and linguistic resources (Moll et al., 1992; Valenzuela, 1999). Students’ cultural and linguistic resources, or their “funds of knowledge” from home communities (Moll et al, 1992), are used to support academic learning as MLs develop new resources to be able to participate in new situations, bridging home and school and enhancing opportunities for students to learn (Valenzuela, 1999). 

Code-breaking involves explicitly teaching ways of doing school, academic literacy, and disciplinary, linguistic, and cultural codes of content learning (Fang, 2006; Moore & Schleppegrell, 2014; Schleppegrell, 2001, 2004). It is through this C of support that we see a clear integration of language and content as inseparable instructional components. The focus on academic literacy as a process of making academic dimensions of subject matter transparent for MLs includes bridging everyday and academic language as essential for understanding of content (Gibbons, 2006). Code-breaking uses principles of a meaning-based theory of language, systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). This theory does not separately address language and content, but instead sees language as the realization of meaning in context. From this perspective, we place emphasis on content, helping teachers understand how the language works to construct knowledge in the discipline. LACI, and specifically code-breaking, enables a focus on language from each of these three angles: presenting ideas, enacting a relationship with the reader or listener, and constructing a cohesive message (de Oliveira & Schleppegrell, 2015). In terms of presenting ideas, we focus on the content of the message, looking at verbal and visual resources that construct the content presented in the nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases, and adverbs. Enacting a relationship with the reader or listener enables us to identify language resources that indicate the kind of relationship we are enacting; whether it is formal or informal, close or distant, and whether it includes attitudes of various kinds. We can explore the verbal and visual resources that construct the nature of relationships among speakers/listeners, writers/readers, and viewers, and what is viewed. Constructing a cohesive message involves language choices that construct a message that holds together. We explore the verbal and visual resources that are concerned with the organization of the information and elements of texts and images used to present content in a cohesive way.

Challenge relates to classroom goals and activities that explore disciplinary literacy and higher-order thinking and reasoning. High challenge and high academic standards and content are maintained for MLs (Hammond, 2006). The C of community and collaboration refers to joint productive activity in which students co-construct knowledge (Brown & Campione, 1994; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Teachers create communities of learners where all students participate in activities to socially construct knowledge (Nieto, 2000). 

Classroom interactions focus on “interactional scaffolding,” the use of oral discourse to prompt elaboration, build academic literacy, and move discourse and learning forward (de Oliveira & Smith, 2019; de Oliveira et al., 2020; Hammond & Gibbons, 2005). Interactional scaffolding includes three main processes: 

  1. Linking to prior experience, pointing to new experiences, and recapping refers to teachers’ ability to target a specific learning area to MLs’ current levels of knowledge and their English language abilities. 
  2. Appropriating and recasting students’ contributions, typically during discussions or elicitations, involves the teacher’s direction of students’ contributions by means of recasting their words into more content, language, context appropriate discourse. 
  3. Using the Initiation, Response, Feedback (IRF) sequence includes teachers offering strong verbal or gestural hints about expected responses, especially targeting specific students for specific purposes so students can say more and reflect on their understanding, that is, they ask for clarifications, probe a student’s response, or ask to explain a particular point in detail.  

LACI application framework for content area teaching

LACI has been applied in pre-service and in-service teacher education to focus on the teaching of all content areas—English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. For this article, I show the lesson plan format used for LACI planning and a planning guide with LACI’s 6 Cs of support.

Lesson plan

The lesson plan format that evolved from the implementation of LACI over the years is presented next. This lesson plan format includes the principles of the six Cs of support along with the more “traditional” elements of a lesson plan, including:

  • content and English language development standards
  • content and language objectives
  • instructional strategies and learning tasks through which teachers plan the delivery of the lesson and how they will differentiate for different groups of students

Planning guide utilizing the six Cs of support for content instruction of multilingual learners

The planning guide shown after the lesson plan (Table 1) presents questions, examples, and a column for teachers to plan how they would address the six Cs of support and structure content area instruction for MLs. Teachers can use this guide as they are using the lesson plan template.

Table 1. Planning Sheet Utilizing the Six Cs of Support for Content Instruction of Multilingual Learners

Conclusion

This article presented LACI’s six Cs of support for scaffolding, a lesson plan template using these Cs, and a guide to help teachers plan instruction for MLs. Content area teachers need knowledge and practical ideas about addressing the academic language needs of MLs since they have the dual responsibility of facilitating MLs’ content learning while also supporting their ongoing English language development. LACI accomplishes this dual focus by helping teachers develop ways to talk about both language and content. The six Cs of support integrated in LACI provide the kind of access that is crucial for MLs who are learning content and language and simultaneously.

References

Brown, A. L., & Campione, J. C. (1994). Guided discovery in a community of learners. In K. McGilly (Ed.) Classroom lessons: Integrating cognitive theory and classroom practice (pp. 229-270). MIT Press. 

de Oliveira, L. C. (2016). A language-based approach to content instruction (LACI) for English language learners: Examples from two elementary teachers. International Multilingual Research Journal, 10(3), 217-231. https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2016.1185911 

de Oliveira, L. C. (2017). A language-based approach to content instruction (LACI) in science for English language learners. In A. Oliveira & M. Weinburgh (Eds), Science teacher preparation in content-based second language acquisition (pp. 41-58). Association of Science Teacher Education and Springer.

de Oliveira, L. C., Jones, L., & Smith, S. L. (2020). Interactional scaffolding in a first-grade classroom through the teaching/learning cycle. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2020.1798867 

de Oliveira, L. C., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2015). Focus on grammar and meaning. Oxford University Press. 

de Oliveira, L. C., & Smith, S. L. (2019). Interactions with and around texts: Writing in elementary schools. In N. Caplan, & A. Johns (Eds.), Changing practices for the L2 writing classroom: Moving beyond the five-paragraph essay (pp. 65-88). University of Michigan Press.

Fang, Z. (2006). The language demands of science reading in middle school. International Journal of Science Education, 28(5), 491-520. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500690500339092 

Gibbons, P. (2006). Bridging discourses in the ESL classroom: Students, teachers and researchers. Continuum.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C.M. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar (3rd ed). Arnold.

Hammond, J. & Gibbons, P. (2005). Putting scaffolding to work: The contribution of scaffolding in articulating ESL education. Prospect, 20(1), 6-30 http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/329484 

Hammond, J. (2006). High challenge, high support: Integrating language and content instruction for diverse learners in an English literature classroom. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5, 269-283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2006.08.006 

Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a. the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74-84. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.84.1.p2rj131485484751 

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.

Lucas, T., & Villegas, A. M. (2011). A framework for preparing linguistically responsive teachers. In T. Lucas (Ed.), Teacher preparation for linguistically diverse classrooms: A resource for teacher educators (pp. 55–72). Routledge.

Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D. & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31(2), 132-141. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405849209543534 

Moore, J., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2014). Using a functional linguistics metalanguage to support academic language development in the English Language Arts. Linguistics and Education 26, 92-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.LINGED.2014.01.002 

Nieto, S. (2000). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education (3rd ed.). Longman.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93-97. https://doi.org/10.3102%2F0013189X12441244 

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.

Schleppegrell, M. J. (2001). Linguistic features of the language of schooling. Linguistics and Education, 12(4), 431-459. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1016/S0898-5898(01)00073-0 

Schleppegrell, M. J. (2004). The language of schooling: A functional linguistics perspective. Erlbaum.

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. SUNY Press.

 

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In a “voices from the field” essay, Dr. Jenna Cushing-Leubner reflects on the question, “What can racial equity look like to the teaching of English to racialized bilingual youth?” She describes the efforts made by multilingual youth labeled “long-term English learners” and “heritage language learners” through ethnic studies and youth participatory action research projects to communicate to language teachers what they need to know and be able/willing to do. In this call to action, she shares these findings from almost a decade of work with multilingual youth of color and their language teachers, and suggests resources for teachers invested in anti-racist and anti-biased English language teaching.
Key words: sustainable multilingualism, ethnic studies, racial equity, long-term English learners, heritage language

One spring day in 2012, twenty language teachers and administrators gathered for a day of professional development in a South Minneapolis classroom. They gathered almost exactly two miles from what would become George Floyd Square and the George Floyd Autonomous Zone in the wake of years of violence, surveillance, detention, and deportation experienced by Black, Indigenous, and non-Black/Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC), which came to a head in the summer of 2020 when George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police in the early months of COVID-19’s stay-at-home orders and economic destabilizations. The professional development was designed and facilitated by a group of multilingual Latinx high school students who had all experienced some form of ESL. Some had spent so many years in ESL and English-only U.S. schooling that they had become labeled “long-term English learners”—a term that critical language educators argue doubles down on the idea that multilingual children of color either don’t want to or can’t learn English, and therefore don’t want to or can’t do intellectual work in school, which is done primarily through English (Flores et al., 2015; Menken & Kleyn, 2009; Tse, 2001). 

The professional development that day grew out of a process called youth participatory action research (Cammarota & Fine, 2010; Mirra et al., 2015; Youth Activism Project, 2018). Youth had been asking: 

  1. What would it take to have the kind of education that we deserve? 
  2. What do our teachers need to know, be able, and be willing to do to teach us in ways we deserve? 

Race-conscious language education

Youth were part of a Spanish Heritage Language class, where they had spent two years in intra-ethnic studies classes within the context of a world language course. Through these ethnic studies language classes, youth disentangled themselves from negative narratives and images about themselves, their families, and their communities. They explored relationships of colonization and systemic racism with language in education and school curricula. 

They were reclaiming their home languages. They were trying to reconnect with family members and strengthen familial bonds. Through those reconnections, they were trying to recognize their families’ and communities’ ways of knowing and doing things, which had been frayed or severed through intergenerational separations, caused in part by home language removal and replacement (first by Spanish and later by English). And they were studying examples of movements to fight for economic, educational, and sociopolitical justice led by coalitions of multilingual and multidialectal BIPOC communities. 

From their ethnic studies courses and through doing youth participatory action research, they knew that systemic racism had shaped their educational experiences as multilingual people of color. They knew that, in the eyes of schools, they (and other multilingual and multidialectal BIPOC youth) were labeled and treated as problems. They were viewed as (long-term) English learners who were “at risk” and in need of remediation (Flores et al., 2015); potentially dangerous and untrustworthy, and in need of surveillance and control (Giroux, 2009); and ultimately disposable (Darder, 2006; Rocco, 2016).

Through their schooling experiences (Au et al., 2016; Spring, 2016), they were learning lessons about the denigration and erasure of Indigenous peoples. They were learning lessons about the denigration and vilification of people of African descent—particularly African Americans and Afro-Latinx people with histories of enslavement across the Americas. They were learning lessons about the supposed superiority and natural dominance of people of European descent. And they knew that these lessons were roiling around themselves and their loved ones, as people of color viewed as perpetual outsiders in a country dominated by English, white supremacy and its privileges, removal of Indigenous peoples and relationships, and anti-blackness. 

What can racial equity in English language education look like?

This group of youth—like so many groups of multilingual youth of color taught by the language teachers we have worked with in the years that followed—decided to use their multilingualism to push for changes. First, they developed content-specific curriculum suggestions and presented them to teachers, administrators, students, and district officials. Next, they went to elementary schools to teach younger children. Finally, they designed professional development for pre-service and practicing language teachers—who they viewed as their most immediate and potential advocates for educational change.

As multilingual BIPOC youth, they were not just interested in linguistic changes to schools. They were insisting on raciolinguistic (Alim et al., 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015) transformation—transformations that reflect intersections of language, race, and ethnolinguistic funds of knowledge. This article’s call to action consists of their calls to action. If we are looking for racial equity in English language teaching, here is what that involves, and what it asks of us:

1. Approach English language development as a component of sustaining existing multilingualism

As a field, and in the majority of ESL programming, our primary focus is on English language development only. This puts English language development at the expense of the loss (by removal and replacement) of home languages (Skutknabb-Kangas, 2019). 

The ESL teaching field (“TESOL”) is for the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. This means that our goal should be in sustaining multilingualism and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Alim & Paris, 2017), with English becoming an additional language—not the primary, dominant, or only language. 

2. Take identities, relationships, and power seriously

Know yourself as a person and an educator. Be able to name the implicit and explicit messages that have shaped your views of power systems, languages, and racialized people. Your students may not know you for your personal experiences. You also represent roles in larger systems of power. Regardless of our racial and ethnolinguistic identities, as English language teachers, we have to prove that we are committed to racial and linguistic justice.

Accompany your students in fighting for changes they believe in. Once they identify what changes need to happen, use organizing practices like power mapping as instructional tools for meaningful language. Change-making spans content areas. Learn language by participating in transformation (Advocates for Youth, 2019; Cushing-Leubner & Eik, 2018).

3. Insist on, and leverage support for, more multilingual teachers of color

Multilingual BIPOC children seldom have multilingual BIPOC teachers. Just because we have multilingual BIPOC teachers, doesn’t mean our teacher education and ongoing professional development opportunities have been supportive of how to teach in translingual1 ways, in ways that are community-driven, or in ways that are informed by racial consciousness and community funds of knowledge. This means that our teacher preparation programs and our school environments are not typically nurturing of developing and strengthening these teaching practices.

If you are a multilingual BIPOC teacher, get connected with personal and professional networks that will support you and sustain your teaching in ways that will allow your students to get access to the benefits of multilingualism from a multilingual teacher. If you are a white and/or English-dominant teacher, advocate at your school and district-level for the hiring of multilingual BIPOC teachers and for professional development support explicitly connected to multilingual, culturally sustaining teaching and instructional materials. 

4. Ensure access to intra-ethnic studies

Access to ethnic studies courses (Tolteka Cuauhtin et al., 2019) positively impacts academic success and social-emotional protective factors (Cabrera et al., 2014; Dee & Penner, 2017; Sleeter, 2011; Sleeter & Zavala, 2020). Efforts to offer ethnic studies in schools are not new. When ethnic studies are available, they are typically offered as elective courses. However, English language development and co-curricular language and literacy remediation coursework limits access to elective courses for multilingual BIPOC students labeled English learners (Estrada, 2014). 

Advocate to your school, district, and the state for the inclusion of ethnic studies in the mainstream curriculum and as special interest electives. Inventory your own teaching—how are you providing ethnic studies content and pedagogies (Tolteka Cuauhtin et al., 2019) as an English language teacher? If you do not have the background knowledge or teaching practices for ethnic studies, seek professional development and advocate for paid positions, teacher preparation, and licensure support for community-educators who do.

5. Teach how race, racial formation, and systemic racism works in the United States

We must teach about how race works in the United States, how new immigrants and immigrant communities experience racialization, and how messages of white superiority and anti-blackness are integral to the Americanization process. It’s not helpful to pretend that race works in simple ways across communities of color, particularly with recent experiences with immigration. Multilingual BIPOC children deserve to understand how racialization is at play in their own experiences and across their communities. And they deserve to have the tools of racial literacy and reckoning with the violence and harms of anti-blackness and white supremacy. If you do not feel knowledgeable or comfortable teaching about this and the particular ways racism plays out in relationship to your students’ communities, this is an area for explicit and intentional personal and professional development. Advocate for paid positions, teacher preparation, and licensure support for multilingual BIPOC community-educators who do.

Coda

The United States is no stranger to racial inequities or its violences. Recognizing systemic racism and its everyday enactments is not enough. The calls to action shared here are about interruption, dismantlement, and creating different ways of doing things all together. Working against racism as individual actors can shake up our corners of racist systems, but on their own they will never result in systemic transformation and lasting change. Luckily, working alone is a choice that doesn’t need to be made. These calls to action ask for collective efforts, following the directives of BIPOC-led strategies that have been developed out of engaging in struggles for liberation and freedom for centuries. And we each have a place in this project. 

Suggested resources (to start)

Books

Regional Organizations

Podcasts

Teaching Resources

Notes

  1. The term “translingual” refers to how languages mix, mesh, merge, and are created in the natural world, where people come into contact and create new ways of using languages to communicate. The term “translanguaging” refers to the use of these translingual practices in educational environments for teaching and learning.

 

References

Advocates for Youth (2019). Youth activist toolkit. Retrievable from: https://www.advocatesforyouth.org/wpcontent/uploads/storage//advfy/documents/Activist_Toolkit/activisttoolkit.pdf

Alim, H. S., & Paris, D. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.

Alim, H.S., Rickford, J.R., & Ball, A.F. (2016). Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race. Oxford University Press.

Au, W., Brown, A. L., & Calderón, D. (2016). Reclaiming the multicultural roots of US curriculum: Communities of color and official knowledge in education. Teachers College Press.

Cabrera, N. L., Milem, J. F., Jaquette, O., & Marx, R. W. (2014). Missing the (student achievement) forest for all the (political) trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American studies controversy in Tucson. American Educational Research Journal, 51(6), 1084-1118.

Cammarota, J., & Fine, M. (Eds.). (2010). Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion. Routledge.

Cushing-Leubner, J., & Eik, J. (2018). Our wild tongues: Language justice and youth research. In J. Ayala, J. Cammarota, M. Rivera, L. F. Rodríguez, M. Berta-Ávila, & M. E Torre (Eds.), PAR entremundo: A pedagogy of the Américas (pp 117-133). Peter Lang.  

Darder, A. (2006). Latino youth: Pedagogy, praxis, and policy. Latino Studies, 4(3), 302-304. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600205

Dee, T. S., & Penner, E. K. (2017). The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an ethnic studies curriculum. American Educational Research Journal, 54(1), 127-166. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831216677002 

Estrada, P. (2014). English learner curricular streams in four middle schools: Triage in the trenches. The Urban Review, 46(4), 535-573. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-014-0276-7

Flores, N., Kleyn, T., & Menken, K. (2015). Looking holistically in a climate of partiality: Identities of students labeled long-term English language learners. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 14(2), 113-132. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2015.1019787

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149-171. http://dx.doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149 

Giroux, H. (2009). Youth in a suspect society: Democracy or disposability? Springer.

Menken, K. & Kleyn, T. (2009). The difficult road for long-term English learners. Educational Leadership, 66(7), 26-29.

Mirra, N., Garcia, A., & Morrell, E. (2015). Doing youth participatory action research: Transforming inquiry with researchers, educators, and students. Routledge.

Rocco, R. (2016). Disposable subjects: The racial normativity of neoliberalism and Latino immigrants. Latino Studies, 14(1), 99-117. https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2015.51 

Skutknabb-Kangas, T. (2019). Imagining multilingual TESOL revisited: Where are we now? Presented at TESOL International Conference 2019, Atlanta, GA. Retrievable from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG-bW7oWErE  

Sleeter, C. E. (2011). The academic and social value of ethnic studies. National Education Association. Retrievable from: https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/84024/AcademicSocialValue.pdf

Sleeter, C. E., & Zavala, M. (2020). Transformative ethnic studies in schools: Curriculum, pedagogy, and research. Teachers College Press.

Spring, J. (2016). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality: A brief history of the education of dominated cultures in the United States. Routledge.

Tolteka Cuauhtin, R., Zavala, M., Sleeter, C., & Au, W. (2019). Rethinking ethnic studies. Rethinking Schools. https://rethinkingschools.org/books/rethinking-ethnic-studies/

Tse, L. (2001). Why don’t they learn English? Separating fact from fallacy in the U.S. language debate. New York: Teachers College Press. Linked review accessible online: https://www.hepg.org/her-home/issues/harvard-educational-review-volume-72-issue-3/herbooknote/why-don%E2%80%99t-they-learn-english-_54

Youth Activism Project (2018). What is youth participatory action research? A where-to-start guide for youth, educators, and youth workers around the world. https://youthactivismproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Youth-Activism-Project-YPAR-Guide.pdf

 

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Based on field research and observations, this work challenges existing assumptions about using technology to support learner engagement and recommends tech-rich instructional strategies made possible when teachers engage critical consciousness and reflection to create equitable learning spaces.
Key words: equity, culturally and linguistically diverse families, teaching, technology 

Introduction

Learner access to technologies and the instruction delivered through them does not equate to inclusion unless paired with a focus on opportunity and justice. Educators and political leaders are attempting to redefine teaching and learning expectations to create equitable educational contexts in a time of crisis. Despite this effort, we argue that schools have contributed to the moment in which we are living—where access to technology supported learning is not equitable (Vakil, 2018). Furthermore, we argue that with the onset of COVID-19, instructional actions surrounding the equitable use of technology and antiracist pedagogies1 are central to the provision of inclusive learning opportunities. Thus, subsequent conversations have begun to explore the gaps that have widened-under the radar.

What has been missing in the rush to move teaching and learning online is building relations of trust with the family and enhancing teaching capacities for accommodation readiness (Herrera & Murry, 2016), which leads to authentic cariño (Bartolomé, 2008; Herrera et al., 2020; Valenzuela, 1999). This Spanish term shared especially among Latinx caregivers/families is a linguistic variant of the Spanish word corazón, or heart. In education, children from various cultures share some notion of heart as a metaphor for empathy, caring, and giving. Just as the heart supplies the lifeblood to the human body, authentic cariño embodies genuine understanding, compassion, and unequivocal responsiveness as well as action to promote learning spaces wherein Emergent Bilinguals and their families are able to see their academic, sociocultural, cognitive, and linguistic assets as key parts of the curriculum (Herrera, 2016). The authors recognize that many teachers are already balancing the notion of authentic cariño to care for their students and their families; however, external forces sanctioned by monolingual/standardized orientations make this work both challenging and stressful.  

Identifying the issues

As a result of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter (BLM), educators are tasked with being cognizant of the intersectionality of race, social justice, and equity. While BLM is a movement that has highlighted the copious inequities Black communities have always faced, it has a ripple effect on long-standing systemic inequities in the classroom. Noting the diversity found within our culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) families and students, it is crucial to be aware of the socio-political complexities, and how they impact teaching and learning, yet this is not happening uniformly.

Addressing what comes first: Is technology the great equalizer?

School districts are racing to purchase additional technological devices for students as the nation’s K-12 schools deepen reliance on e-learning. While well-intended, and an important first step, these initiatives are reactionary and may reinforce socioeconomic and racial divisions, particularly for Emergent Bilinguals. Educational systems are still trapped in the dichotomous rhetoric of the “digital divide” that equates equity with access. Research has challenged the limitations of this concept and what digital equity truly means (DiMaggio & Hargittai, 2001; Talaee & Noroozi, 2019; Warschauer, 2004). The issue with technology is not so much about being connected, rather it is about the inequities that exist for connected users. One approach schools have taken in the name of “bridging the digital divide” has been to purchase and provide devices (e.g., typically a tablet, Chromebook, or laptop) for each child. Purchasing a computer/tablet for each child is not going to rid the systematic institutionalized lack of preparedness for transforming schools to embrace equity as they create pathways for academic success for Emergent Bilinguals and their families. Successful moves toward equity must move beyond provision of devices and begin to recognize the hegemonic influences of white middle-class culture in the curriculum, school culture, and school system’s relationship with families and communities (see Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Burke, 2012).

Defining cultural capital: An asset-based perspective

As a system, we have traditionally relied upon structures to provide equity, failing to dig deeper into the cultural and linguistic assets, or cultural capital, of CLD families and Emergent Bilinguals. Bourdieu’s (1984) cultural capital is defined as the collective of socially mediated skills, norms, and behaviors that enhances social mobility and creates academic, economic, and social opportunities. All families possess cultural capital; yet, not always does it encompass technological capital traditionally defined by school systems (Selwyn, 2003). Families often use familiar technologies to stay connected and find resources to support their children’s learning experience. For example, WhatsApp is a very common technology used around the world. A mother taking a picture of homework and sending it to a bilingual tutor using WhatsApp for support is an example of cultural capital that bridges into technological capital. In this example, critical consciousness challenges the assumption held within educational spaces about what type of technology counts, and how CLD families often use it to support their children. This is where the link is lost between the cultural, linguistic, and technological capital.   

Acts of courage: Transforming learning spaces

Given this moment of transformation and resistance, educators must embrace acts of courage in which they find themselves in dissonance with the fossilized practices embedded in the educational system. As educators try to navigate an educational environment in-flux, agency, reflection, and action become non-negotiable. Hence, pedagogical decisions should be guided by the following premises: 

  • Technology is currently enacted using a monocultural/monolingual lens.
  • The connection is absent between cultural, linguistic, and technological capital.
  • Antiracist pedagogies require critical reflection, agency, and transformation.

Instruction resting on these premises opens the door to antiracist pedagogies (see Dei, 1996; Kendi, 2019) that make visible students who are already marginalized by the system and shifts the focus of technology-enhanced efforts to the authenticity of learner assets, identified needs, and culture-bound funds of knowledge. If we are to adopt antiracist pedagogies in the midst of a pandemic, we must rethink curriculum and technology purposes, deployment, and maximization. 

When teaching is enacted to liberate (Freire, 1968), the goal for educators should be to shift the learning paradigm (Barr & Tagg, 1995) so knowledge can be generated at home using multiple entry points. Rather than continuing to rely upon school-centric “push-out” initiatives, educators need to re-envision how to harvest or “pull-in” the biography of the families utilizing whatever technology is available at home (Barko-Alva, Porter, & Herrera, 2020). Table 1 offers examples of instruction that can capitalize on the potential of technology to enable a more inclusive, just, and asset-driven perspective. These examples are derived from the collective works of the authors as researchers and practitioners.

Table 1 Cultural Capital: Family skills-based approach 
Subject Area  Technology Use  Product 
Language Arts  Use your phone to record or take pictures of your community and provide a quick description on how COVID19 has impacted the people who live around you. In response to the pictures you have taken: Interview family members about their experiences during the pandemic. Write a summary (using all your languages) and share with your teacher or a family member. 
Ask a family member to write the steps to a favorite family recipe, create a video or home-made eBook,and use the phone to share the recipes with others.  Homemade video/eBook of family recipe to distribute. 
Utilizing the technology available, computer, tablet, iPad, or phone, and have the student prepare a service announcement based on a reading. Upload and share to the social media of your choice (i.e., Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Text-messaging). A persuasive, informative, or entertaining video.  
Science  Using WhatsApp, create a way to monitor and document the weather throughout the week. A week’s worth of weather monitoring and documentation to share daily with your WhatsApp network (or other social media platforms). 
Think about a science experiment you would like to conduct that documents what has happened with the environment since the beginning of the pandemic. Pose a question and document your findings.  Share what you learn over social media or share it with a caregiver/family member.
Math  Create a word problem using materials you have at home. Record yourself reading the problem (i.e., with a smartphone, iPad, or tablet).  Send problems and challenge your techamigos technology friends) to find the answer. 
Think about what your family members do at home or work that require them to use math. Ask them to take a picture of themselves at their job. Interview them and ask what type of math they use every day. Create a short infomercial sharing their math story and highlighting their profession/trade.  Send your infomercial out to the world via your caregiver/parent’s favorite social media outlet (i.e., WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok)
Social Studies  Find and listen to different podcasts/news stories that highlight how two different countries are addressing the challenges brought by COVID-19. Use any language to gather information. 

Create a pictograph or collage of possible solutions

Compare and contrast both approaches. Based on the evidence, which country would you support? This could be done in English or home language. 

Using your phone, send a survey to find out which country’s initiatives they would support.
Specials  Celebrate the arts and get moving! Create a video teaching someone a new skill in art, dance, or music. Bonus points if it is connected to your culture. 

Authentic cariño as action

Without examining our practices, advocating for antiracist pedagogies as well as utilizing technology and its potential to create equitable learning spaces in the classroom, we fall short of providing inclusive instruction. Students and families’ biographies best inform educators in their efforts to demonstrate authentic cariño in teaching and learning (Herrera et al., 2020). Models advocating meaningful change must be situated to the current and future context of teaching and learning, which has always needed to embrace the fight against racism and discrimination. The use of technology and anti-racist pedagogies can be stabilizers during this pandemic and sociopolitical revolution to embrace families’ cultural capital. If schools are driven by prescriptive programming, they remain disconnected from creating meaningful and innovating technological spaces that foster and promote authentic connections with Emergent Bilinguals and their families. Authentic cariño creates possibilities for transforming how technology is used in the classroom to build upon CLD families’ cultural capital while revolutionizing teaching and learning into actions that embrace equity, social justice, and inclusion.

Notes

  1. Antiracist pedagogies refer to instructional practices that actively dismantle the predominant white narrative found in US schools, while promoting equity and justice in the curriculum and elevating the voices that have been silenced throughout history (see Dei, 1996; Kendi, 2019).

 

References

Barko-Alva, K., Porter, L., & Herrera, S.G. (2020). Technology as technocracy: Pre-service teachers’ conscientious use of technology for authentic family engagement. In R. E. Ferdig, E. Baumgartner, R. Hartshorne, R. Kaplan-Rakowski, C. Mouza (Eds.), Teaching, technology, and teacher education during the COVID-19 pandemic: Stories from the field (pp. 765-768). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

Barr, R., & Tagg, J. (1995). From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change, 27(6), 12-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.1995.10544672 

Bartolomé, L. (2008). Authentic cariño and respect in minority education: The political and ideological dimensions of love. The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 1(1), 1-16.

Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists: Color-Blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States (2nd ed). Rowman and Littlefield

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. Harvard University Press. 

Burke, M. (2012). Discursive fault lines: Reproducing white habitus in a racially diverse community. Critical Sociology, 38(5), 645-668. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920511411207 

Dei, G. J. (1996). Critical perspectives in antiracism: An introduction. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue Canadienne de Sociologie, 33(3), 247-267. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-618X.1996.tb02452.x 

DiMaggio, P., & Hargittai, E. (2001). From the ‘digital divide’ to ‘digital inequality’: Studying internet use as penetration increases. Working Papers 47. Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. Retrievable from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pri/cpanda/workpap15.html.html

Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Seabury Press.

Herrera, S. G. (2016). Biography-driven culturally responsive teaching. Teachers College Press.

Herrera, S. G., & Murry, K. M. (2016). Mastering ESL/EFL methods: Differentiated instruction for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students (3rd ed). Pearson.

Herrera, S. G., Porter, L., & Barko-Alva, K. (2020). Equity in school-parent partnerships: Cultivating community and family trust in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Teachers College Press.

Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an antiracist. Random House.

Selwyn, N. (2002). Defining the ‘digital divide’: Defining a theoretical understanding of inequalities in the information age. Cardiff University.

Talaee, E., & Noroozi, O. (2019). Reconceptualization of “digital divide” among primary children in an era of saturated access to technology. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 12(1), 27-35. https://doi.org/10.26822/iejee.2019155334

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U. S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. State University of New York Press.

Vakil, S. (2018). Ethics, identity, and political vision: Toward a justice-centered approach to equity in computer science education. Harvard Educational Review, 88(1), 26–52. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-88.1.26 

Warschauer, M. (2004). Technology and social inclusion: Rethinking the digital divide. MIT press.

 

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The cognitive processes involved in reading comprehension depend on accurate decoding. This paper explains how visualization improves both comprehension and decoding, and it provides a variety of activities that encourage students of all ages to visualize both the forms and meanings of words.
Key words: reading comprehension, decoding, visualization, interactive

Competent readers make movies when they read, picturing the events, characters, and information in their minds (Bell, 2007). Although the clarity and detail of the pictures may vary, a good reader can see a fish when reading “f-i-s-h,” and can imagine the scene of Harry Potter’s first broom ride when he chased after Neville’s Remembrall. If readers cannot make movies as they read, their understanding and memory of the text can be severely compromised (Bell, 2007). 

Visualizing what we read is important not only for comprehension, but also for decoding because the critical first steps in learning to read involve phonemic awareness and linking the visual images of letters to their sounds. Words are stored by sound in long term memory, yet recognized visually when reading, so both the sounds and the letters of a word are needed to recognize written words (Farrell & Cushen White, 2018; Seidenberg, 2017). Can you close your eyes and picture the letters in “fish”? Readers who cannot picture the letters in words may struggle with word recognition and spelling (Bell, 2001, p. 29).  

For beginning or struggling readers of any age, then, training in how to visualize the spelling and meaning of words can be enormously beneficial. After exploring the cognitive processes behind the roles of visualization in decoding and comprehension, this paper describes strategies for helping students visualize what they read.

Cognitive Processes

Decoding

Learning to read begins with phonemic awareness and decoding, which entail using the pronunciation of a word to link sounds to letters (Kilpatrick, 2015, pp. 253-269). Seidenberg (2017, p. 119-120) asserts that the “initial hurdle” of decoding involves understanding how letters in written language represent phonemes (sounds) in spoken language. Phonemic awareness entails taking spoken words that are uttered as a series of connected phonemes and teasing out the individual sounds. Then these sounds are associated with arbitrary written symbols, or letters. Because the decoding task is cross modal, linking auditory and visual information, it becomes even more difficult. Yet the links between phonemes and letters must become automatic—quickly and effortlessly accessed—in order for a reader to comprehend a text, in large part because of the limits of working memory.

Working memory only lasts 20 seconds and holds only about five to seven pieces of information in adults (Goldstein, 2015, pp. 127-129). Working memory is not so much about storing information as it is about using information (Baddeley, 2012). For example, working memory allows a listener to process what someone says, holding the first part of an utterance in mind, combining it with the next part of the utterance, and making sense of the entire statement. Similarly, readers use working memory to parse what they read, connecting information in the first part of a sentence or paragraph to the next part. 

For readers who are not fluent, decoding becomes a bottleneck that reduces or even eliminates comprehension. This bottleneck in processing can be traced to many sources for second language (L2) readers, including slow word recognition, trouble with syntax, and pronunciation (Koda, 2007; Nassaji, 2007; Shiotsu & Weir, 2007). For young readers, whether they are L2 learners or not, simply recognizing letters and linking them to sounds can pose such a hurdle that the beginning of a CVC word is lost to working memory before the final consonant is ever reached. Furthermore, automatic decoding allows words to be identified as chunks of information, so that “fish” counts as only one item in working memory rather than four separate letters or three phonemes. Because the working memory capacity of children is even more limited than adults, with 3-4 items for elementary students (Paulson, 2018), automatic decoding is essential for young readers.

Comprehension

For comprehension of longer texts, which is to say, anything that exceeds the 20-second time limit of working memory, readers need to convert the words to semantics, or meaning, that can be stored in long-term memory. This conversion is necessary because long-term memory stores most information semantically, based on meaning and associations (Goldstein, 2015, p. 160). Visualization facilitates this conversion, allowing mental images to replace the individual words that created the scenes. In other words, although I could not quote J. K. Rowlings’ exact description of Harry Potter’s first broom flight, I could provide a fairly detailed description of what happened based on my mental image of the event.

Given that comprehending a text involves many cognitive processes which essentially require a back-and-forth interplay between working memory and long-term memory, making a movie as one reads enables ongoing comprehension. Working memory busily processes the incoming visual words, retrieving their phonemic representations and semantics from long-term memory. When this process is automatic, the meanings of individual words are easily combined in phrases and paragraphs, whose images are stored in long-term memory for later access as the longer text unfolds. If the process is not automatic, readers may be unable to either retrieve word meanings from long-term memory, or to make images of phrases that can be encoded in long-term memory. As Bell (2007) points out, readers who fail to create a picture in their mind of what they are reading will end up not understanding or remembering a text they have just labored over.

Visualization strategies

Many strategies that help students visualize meaning and spelling echo the best practices English Learner (EL) teachers already use to engage students.  However, by intentionally linking interactive techniques to visualization, students not only benefit from engaging, multimodal activities, but they also gain specific skills that equip them to become stronger readers and more proficient spellers. Some strategies described in this paper target meaning:   

A. drawing

B. using props

C. acting.

These meaning-based strategies were inspired by Bell’s (2007) work on visualizing and verbalizing, but instead of requiring students to verbally describe their mental images as Bell does, these strategies encourage nonverbal communication. Visualization techniques that target spelling and decoding (adapted from Bell, 2001 and Slingerland, 1971) include:

D. air writing 

E. backwards spelling bee.

All of these visualization strategies are outlined below, with tips for implementation. These strategies can be used with students of all ages, and most can be modified for small or large groups, or for online learning. 

Strategies that target meaning

The first step in each of the meaning-based strategies is for students to read a word, sentence, or passage. Keep in mind that the way that students read the material can vary, depending on how challenging it is for them. For example, they may read independently and silently, or they may read aloud with the support of choral reading or partner work. Even in distance learning, students can read aloud. In one-on-one online contexts, the student could read aloud for the teacher; in a synchronous group meeting, volunteers could read the text aloud. For asynchronous lessons, a teacher can model reading aloud to a stuffed animal, a pet, or a family member, and encourage students to do the same. Regardless of how students read the material, immediately following their reading, they use a visualization strategy to practice seeing in their mind what they just read.

A. Steps for drawing:

1. Students read a word, sentence, or passage. As noted above, give students as much or little support as needed for this step.

a. Tip: Students who struggle may need the support of choral reading, help sounding out words, targeted pronunciation work, or comprehension checks.

b. Tip: More skilled readers may be able to read silently and independently, or aloud with a partner. 

2. On a separate piece of paper, students sketch a picture of what they read.  

a. Tip: It often helps to set a time limit of 2-3 minutes so that students do not get bogged down in trying to create elaborate drawings. 

b. Variation: Students can draw on a whiteboard, which facilitates several rounds of reading and drawing.

c. Variation: The teacher can create a worksheet with a box next to each word or passage for students to draw what they visualize.  

d. Variation: The teacher can create worksheets with pictures that students match or cut and glue. The Explode the Code series (Hall & Price, 2016, available in hard copy or online) also has exercises for matching words and pictures for a range of reading levels. 

3. Students share their pictures. They can share quickly by holding up their pictures so the teacher and other students can see what they drew, but it can be helpful to have some or all students briefly explain what their picture shows and receive feedback.  

a. Tip: The immediate feedback should target important details that students did or did not include, such as, “I see Julio drew the cat sitting on the mat instead of standing. That’s great because the sentence said that the cat was sitting.”

b. Variation: Students could do a gallery walk, partner share, or other interactive strategies, particularly if they have read a longer passage.

c. Variations for online lessons: Synchronous video lessons might allow students to hold up their pictures to their camera for others to see. With Flipgrid, students could create a brief video showing and explaining their work. Other applications, such as Padlet, would allow students to take a picture of their work and upload it with a brief written comment.

B. Steps for using props (see Figure 1):

1. Students read a sentence or passage. Give students as much or little support as they need; for differentiation ideas for this step, see the “Tips” in A. 1. above.

a. Tip: This technique works well for longer passages that students re-read with a partner as they use the props. In this case, the initial reading could be independent or choral.

2. Students receive, choose, or create props to use.

a. Tip: Depending on your goals for the lesson, this step can take as little time as distributing materials, or it can be a multi-day project for creating materials.

b. Tip: Before distributing materials, model how the props might be used to show meaning. Modeling is especially important the first few times this activity is used.

c. Variation: Props might include figurines, puppets, toys, and math or science manipulatives.

d. Variation: Props that students create could be made with playdough, paper, felt, or objects such as rocks, sticks, and cardboard boxes.

3. Students use props to show the meaning of the sentence or passage. 

a. Tip: If students work with partners, the stronger reader can read the passage aloud while the weaker reader shows the meaning using the props, and then the students switch roles.

b. Tip: With non-fiction texts, partners can work together to decide how to show the meaning of the passage. Then some or all groups would demonstrate their work to the class.

c. Variation: To encourage students to demonstrate deeper understanding, ask students to analyze and evaluate, rather than create. The teacher or a volunteer can use props to show the meaning of a passage, sometimes deliberately making mistakes. The rest of the class gives a thumbs up or down, or some other response, to indicate if the demonstration matches the passage.

d. Variations for online lessons: For synchronous lessons, variation C above would work well (having the teacher or a volunteer use props while others give a thumbs up or down). For asynchronous lessons, Flipgrid or other video tools would allow students to submit their own puppet shows. 

Figure 1. Ideas for Props

C. Steps for acting:

1. Students read a sentence or passage. Give students as much or little support as they need; for differentiation ideas for this step, see the “Tips” in A. 1. above.

a. Tip: Like using props, this technique works well for longer passages that students re-read in small groups.

b. Variation: Instead of having all students act out the passage, skip steps 2 and 3 below and have just the teacher and perhaps some volunteers act it out. This variation is useful when first introducing the activity to a class, or if students are not confident because of limited English skills or because a collaborative class culture is still being built.

2. Students rehearse the scene. Model how to act out a scene before asking students to rehearse and act, particularly the first few times this activity is used. Depending on students’ needs, the teacher can model the entire scene, a portion of it, or a different scene from the one students will perform. 

a. Tip: When modeling how to act out the meaning, a student who is a strong reader can narrate while the teacher acts. 

b. Tip: Having some simple props makes the activity more fun.

c. Tip: Introduce or assign roles. For example, a fiction text about a dog and boy could have three roles: narrator, dog, boy. A nonfiction text about the water cycle could have two roles: narrator, water. By making the roles clear, groups can focus more quickly on rehearsing.

d. Variation: If the passage is short, students might not need to rehearse, but can go straight to performing their assigned sentence. In this case, each group could be assigned a different sentence. The class could read all sentences at the beginning of the activity, then groups perform them in turn. Alternatively, the class could read a sentence together, one group performs it, then the class would read the next sentence, a different group performs it, and so on.

3. Students perform the scene.  

a. Tip: To save time, only one or two groups perform for the whole class. The groups can be chosen as the teacher circulates among groups, and the teacher might let the selected groups know that they will be performing.

b. Variation: Although it is often helpful to have a narrator who reads the text while others act out the meaning, omitting a narrator may be appropriate for longer texts.

c. Variation: Groups are paired to perform for each other. In this case, the teacher gives a signal, such as ringing a bell, when it is time for the second group in a pair to perform.

d. Variations for online lessons: For asynchronous lessons, students can be assigned different sentences or texts to perform, without reading the text during their performance. Using a platform like Flipgrid, students watch each others’ videos and post comments to guess which texts their classmates performed. Synchronous lessons could include a similar game, either using the comment box or offering guesses aloud after each performance.

Strategies that target spelling and decoding

Visualizing the letters in words can be as fun as visualizing meaning through drawing and puppet shows. Because readers need to visualize both the letters and the meanings of words, visualization strategies that target spelling can and should be used in conjunction with strategies that target meaning. Depending on students’ needs, it may make sense to introduce spelling and decoding strategies first. A group of native English-speaking kindergarteners, for example, probably needs more work initially with visualizing letters and linking them to sounds in words. In contrast, a group of WIDA Level 2 EL eighth graders who are literate in their home language may benefit most from practice picturing the meaning of what they read, and only later working on visualizing the spelling of words.  

The visualization strategies below can be quick exercises at the beginning of a lesson, or they can be longer activities that are the focus of a lesson. In either case, pacing is key to giving students enough time to think while at the same time maintaining a good energy level.

D. Steps for air writing (adapted from Bell, 2001; Slingerland, 1971; see linked website Sight Words, 2020):

1. Introduce a word visually, saying the word aloud and encouraging students to notice all the letters.

a. Tip: Students chorally repeat the word and tap out the phonemes as you point to the corresponding letters. As needed, notice the number of letters and syllables, prefixes and suffixes, stress, and applicable spelling rules.

b. Variation: Words can be written on a board, shown as flash cards, or read in a book or worksheet.

c. Variation: When working on sounding out words or applying spelling rules, omit showing the word, or show it after students have printed it in the air so they can check their accuracy.

2. Students use one finger and a straight arm to write the word in the air.

a. Tip: The letters need to be about the size a teacher would write on a whiteboard, and written carefully in a straight line in front of the student. Sloppy air writing or overlapping letters minimizes the benefit of visualizing and feeling the letters.

b. Tip: Students can imagine they are writing on a whiteboard, even choosing the color of dry erase marker they are using.

c. Variation: Write the word, using one finger, on a table or the floor instead of in the air.

3. Students close their eyes and visualize the word they wrote.

a. Tip: Erase or remove the word you showed in step 1.

b. Tip: Ask students what color their word is, if they can see specific letters, what the last letter is, or other probing questions to help them really “look” at the word.

c. Variation: Students keep their eyes open and look at the imaginary whiteboard in front of them, or the table or floor where they wrote the word, and visualize the word.

d. Variation for online lessons: Air writing could be done in a synchronous lesson if the teacher can see students; it would work best in lessons with 1-3 students.

E. Steps for backwards spelling bee (adapted from Bell, 2001):

1. Show students a word on a flashcard or whiteboard; students read the word aloud. Then, hide or erase the word.

a. Variation: Instead of reading the word chorally, students may read it silently, or individual students can be called on to read it.

b. Variation: To make the activity more game-like, familiar words can be flashed to students for just a second or two.

c. Variation: Cover one letter at a time instead of the whole word to help students gain confidence.

2. Outloud, one student spells the word forwards.

a. Tip: To keep a fun fast pace, encourage students to spell quickly, or give them a time limit.

b. Tip: If a student cannot spell the word or misspells it, go to the next student. If several students in a row cannot spell the word, either ask for a volunteer to spell it, or show the word again and go to the next student in line.

c. Variation: For the first practice session with a set of words, all students write the word on a whiteboard, check it when the teacher shows the word again, then erase it. This variation can also be used in subsequent sessions to make the task easier and less competitive.

d. Variation: To make the task easier, one student writes the word on a whiteboard, shows it, then erases it.

e. Variation: To make the task harder, skip this step and go straight to step 3, spelling the word backwards.

3. Outloud, another student spells the word backwards. Confirm the correct spelling enthusiastically.

a. Tip: Encourage students to go slowly and take their time. The cognitive load of spelling backwards is high, requiring visualization as the speller toggles between working memory and long-term memory.

b. Tip: As in step 2, if a student cannot successfully spell the word backwards, go to the next student, ask for a volunteer, or show the word again and go to the next student.

c. Tip: Unlike writing the word forwards, writing backwards can be confusing and unhelpful, so I avoid writing on this step. Instead, students can point to the invisible letters in the air, going backwards.

d. Variation: Ask the rest of the class to say whether the word was spelled correctly; if they are uncertain or disagree, have the speller spell the word again so the class has a second chance to evaluate the spelling.

e. Variation for online lessons: The game-like aspect of this activity works well in synchronous lessons, whether with one student or a group. To avoid students cheating by writing down the word, student videos should be visible.

Strategies and learning

When choosing visualization strategies, teachers should consider not just the type of visualization that a strategy targets, whether meaning or spelling, but how visualization fits in the goals of a lesson or unit. To encourage peer interaction, using props and acting emphasize partner and group work, but drawing can also incorporate interactive sharing at the end of the activity. For in-person or online teaching, drawing lends itself well to assignments that are submitted, but using props and acting could be assigned if students can use video tools such as Flipgrid. Online lessons that incorporate air writing can be delivered as pre-recorded videos or as synchronous video meetings, but in-person work on air writing may make it easier to give feedback to students and make sure they are practicing effectively. Whatever way a teacher decides to use visualization activities, it is fairly simple to adapt them to different settings and lessons, so these research-based strategies are both versatile and fun.  

Recommended resources

 

References

Baddeley, A. (2012). Working memory: Theories, models, and controversies. The Annual Review of Psychology, 63, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100422

Bell, N. (2001). Seeing stars: Symbol imagery for phonemic awareness, sight words and spelling. Gander Educational Publishing.

Bell, N. (2007). Visualizing and verbalizing: For language comprehension and thinking (2nd ed.). Gander Educational Publishing.

Farrell, M. L., & Cushen White, N.  (2018). Structured literacy instruction. In J. R. Birsh & S. Carreker (Eds.) Multisensory teaching of basic language skills (4th ed) (pp. 35-80). Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

Goldstein, E. B. (2015). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Hall, N., & Price, R. (2016). Explode the code 1: Essential lessons for phonics mastery (2nd ed.). Educators Publishing Service.

Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015). Essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties.  Wiley.

Koda, K. (2007). Reading and language learning: Crosslinguistic constraints on second language reading development. Language Learning, 57(S1), 1–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/0023-8333.101997010-i1 

Maslen, B. L. (2006). The red car. Scholastic Inc.

Nassaji, H. (2007). Schema theory and knowledge-based processes in second language reading comprehension: A need for alternative perspectives. Language Learning, 57(S1), 79–113.  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2007.00413.x 

Paulson, L. H. (2018). Teaching phonemic awareness. In J. R. Birsh & S. Carreker (Eds.) Multisensory teaching of basic language skills (4th ed.) (pp. 205-253). Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

Seidenberg, M. (2017). Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can’t, and what can be done about it. Basic Books.

Shiotsu, T., & Weir, C. J. (2007). The relative significance of syntactic knowledge and vocabulary breadth in the prediction of reading comprehension test performance. Language Testing, 24(1), 99–128.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0265532207071513 

Sight Words. (2020). Technique four: Air writing. https://sightwords.com/sight-words/lessons/air-writing/

Slingerland, B. H. (1971). A multi-sensory approach to language arts for specific language disability children: A guide for primary teachers, Book 1. Educators Publishing Service, Inc.

 

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Learning a language is a lifelong process. Therefore, it is essential to transform an assessment into a moment of learning and joy. To reach this goal, Directed Motivational Current (DMC) theory (Muir & Dörnyei, 2013) was successfully experimented in a Malian English as a Foreign Language classroom in order to intentionally generate the learners’ motivation and push them to surpass themselves during an assessment so that successful learning could take place. The results revealed that the learners experienced an intense motivational level that stimulated an exceptional interest in the assessment instrument.
Key words: Directed Motivational Currents, motivation, assessment, oral presentation project, intense

What happened in my teaching context?

Language assessment is a significant element in the process of teaching and learning. Its outcomes are normally used to improve teaching and learning processes, but in my teaching context, specifically Mali (a West African country) where English is learned as a compulsory foreign language from the seventh grade to university, teachers and the school administrations consider an assessment as their sole property. They use the outcomes of an assessment to make administrative decisions such as validating a course credit. They are rarely utilized to improve the teaching and learning process. As a result, an assessment may increase social inequity instead of minimizing it as claimed by certain specialists in the field of evaluation such as Darling-Hammond (1994). In addition to these issues, most of the Malian English teachers mainly use grammar translation as a method to teach English to their learners. Therefore, during the assessment, these teachers use decontextualized tests (such as multiple-choice questions, true or false questions, matching, and translation from French to English or vice versa) to measure their learners’ competencies. As this way of assessing does not take into account learners’ communicative skills such as written and oral productions, oral interactive tasks, problem solving activities, and project work, it is difficult for the teachers to offer quality feedback to their students. Besides, decontextualized tests may not have a high washback. According to Brown and Abeywickrama (2010), washback is the positive or negative impact that testing has on learning and the teaching process. 

Certain Malian English learners are so demotivated that they consider the English language to be a mirage that they will never reach unless they go to inner circle countries such as Canada, Great Britain, the United States of America, or to some African anglophone countries (e.g., Ghana, Nigeria, or South Africa). Additionally, going to these countries increases the social barriers and promotes exclusion because most of the Malian English learners who are attending public schools are from poor and middle-class families. Most of them cannot afford to go to these English-speaking countries. In the case that they have financial means, obtaining a visa may be another obstacle to their English learning abroad. 

All of these issues motivated me to apply for the Fulbright Scholarship. I learned about this prestigious scholarship thanks to one of my role model professors who was also a Fulbright alumnus. It is worth mentioning that the Fulbright selection process is highly competitive because each candidate is supposed to obtain at least 80 out of 120 on the TOEFL Internet-Based Test (iBT) so that their application can be considered for the final selection. In 2013, my dream became true and I was sent to Minnesota State University, Mankato where I majored in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL).  

For my first semester there, I was hypnotized by my professors’ ways of personalizing their feedback and nurturing their students. Long and anxious traditional timed tests were over and these professors considered different learning experiences as course assessments. Projects were also adapted to students’ lives outside of school. This attention was so unique and new for me that I called TESL my ‘little refuge’. As a result, my Master’s thesis focused on the topics of performance-based assessment (PBA) and motivation. PBAs, which are also referred to as authentic assessments or performance assessments, “require students to accomplish approximations of real-life authentic tasks, usually using the productive skills of speaking or writing but also using reading or writing or combining skills” (Brown & Hudson, 1998, p. 662). Data were collected from 25 English learners using pre- and post-project motivation questionnaires to explore their motivational responses to a PBA, specifically an oral presentation project done in small groups. The results indicated that these participants responded positively to an oral presentation project done in small groups. Their test-taking anxiety was also maintained at an optimal level, so it did not interfere with their overall production (Koné, 2015). Other researchers from the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context such as Birjandi and Tamjid (2010), Fook and Sidhu (2010), Nier, Silvio, and Malone (2014), and Zohoorian (2015) also found that PBA had a positive impact on the learning and teaching process. Stefanou and Parkes (2003) additionally argued that a PBA can lead to higher motivation and greater interest in an activity. PBA further motivated learners to stay focused and engaged (Koné, 2015). Based on these positive results, I was curious to figure out my learners’ motivational reactions to a PBA activity, specifically an oral presentation project framed within a Directed Motivational Current (DMC) theory perspective. 

What did I do to make changes in my teaching context?

Although changes did not happen overnight, I decided to use a framework for focused intervention in my EFL classroom that involved 60 first-year students who would be working in small groups of four or five (Dörnyei, Henry, & Muir, 2016). Among them, there were 25 female students and 35 male students whose ages ranged from 17 to 21. There were 13 groups (eight groups of five students and five groups of four students). These students were attending the Professional and Technical Teacher’s Training School in Bamako, the capital city of Mali. They were majoring in communication and office work. Before explaining how I applied such a robust theory in my EFL classroom, it is worth defining a DMC. 

According to Dörnyei, Henry, and Muir (2016), Ibrahim (2016), Ibrahim and Al-Hoorie (2019), Muir (2016), and Muir and Dörnyei (2013), DMCs are an intense motivational surge that goes beyond the motivational level of a highly and intrinsically motivated student. This heightened motivation is so intense that it can support second language learning for a long time (Dörnyei et al., 2016). DMCs can last for a week or even years, but they are finite (Dörnyei et al., 2016). Dörnyei et al. (2016) proposed a teaching methodology called project-based learning and framework variants that can be used to apply DMCs in a language classroom. Among these framework variants, I have used a combination of That’s Me! and All eyes on the Final Product to trigger my EFL learners’ DMCs. A project organized around a That’s Me! framework has a strong connection with learners’ identities and lives. In other words, it values them as learners and takes their needs and particularities into account (Dörnyei et al., 2016; Muir, 2016). It additionally allows them to have their own voice and work on a topic that increases their curiosity and passion. A good example of a project reflecting the That’s Me! framework is the Freedom Writers Diary, a best seller of The New York Times. The Freedom Writers Diary project gave voice to some students who were labelled as low-achievers to be heard on the world stage. They wrote about their lives, dreams, fears, and hope in a journal, and the classroom teacher responded to their entries. Finally, giving learners the opportunity to present their project outcome to a real audience increases its authenticity. 

Regarding a project built around the All eyes on the Final Product framework, this gives learners the opportunity to work on a real-life project and present its outcomes to a real audience (Dörnyei et al., 2016; Muir, 2016). To achieve this aim, the goal of a project must be clear with a strong vision so that learners can be involved in it from the beginning to the end (Muir, 2016). Creating a blog or making a video are examples of projects that reflect an All eyes on the Final Product variant (Dörnyei et al., 2016). Learners should use their second language to record the experiences related to their project work in a journal for each framework variant mentioned previously. To adapt my project to some of the requirements of these frameworks, I allowed the learners to choose their own topics in relation to their specific field as seen in Table 1.

Table 1. Topics of the Oral Presentation Project
Table 1. Topics of the Oral Presentation Project

The project was named Free Topic Oral Presentation and it spanned over six weeks. The class met twice a week and each course lasted two hours. Table 2 offers a thorough description of the course and the project. 

Table 2. Project Description and Course Schedule 
Table 2. Project Description and Course Schedule

Concerning the learners’ reflective comments written in their journals, I paired groups to minimize the workload. For example, Group 1 wrote comments for each member of Group 2. Each week, I read their reflective comments and provided them with feedback as decided at the beginning of the project. In a DMC, this step is called a “progress check” (Dörnyei et al., 2016). In the journal, there was a section called My Course. In this part, each learner was allowed to write about their impressions ranging from their motivation, the teaching and assessment techniques used by the teacher, the classroom environment, to anything miscellaneous related to the course that they would like to share.

What did I find in the learners’ reflective journals?

I read the students’ reflective journals and interpreted the data based on the number of references to a theme. I also checked if the markers of group-DMCs were present. It is worth noting that a colleague of mine helped me analyze the data and classified them based on the number of references to a theme. Some students’ comments were also selected based on their relevance and clarity to illustrate each theme. However, this does not mean that the other samples were not useful. Table 3 shows the various themes that were chosen based on the interpretation of the data extracted from the learners’ reflective comments. The number of references is between parentheses. 

Table 3. Students Samples and Themes found in the Data
Table 3. Students Samples and Themes found in the Data

Based on these results, it can be said that these learners were caught up in the flow of group-DMCs. This happened because of the teaching methodology and the combination of the framework variants that were used to design the project. The launch of the DMCs was difficult, but it happened once the various groups matured and became cohesive. These findings parallel the study by Ibrahim (2016), which indicated that the group maturity is a sine qua non in order to generate a group-DMC. Ibrahim also confirmed that a cohesive group with positive group norms was conducive to facilitating a group-DMC. The difficulties observed at the beginning of the project can be explained by the learners’ non-familiarity with project-based learning and oral presentations. One needs to know that the grammar translation method is widespread in this teaching context as explained earlier. Therefore, transitioning from one method to another may be challenging for certain learners as argued by this student in his reflective journal:

“This was my first time to speak much English and do an expose [oral presentation]. I was anxious and said how can I do this. I never work like this. I learn my lessons by heart and during the exam I recite [recall] them, but Madam asked us to work like professionals and this was difficult. I really really worked hard with my group. But my teacher helped and at end I became confident and I plunged myself in it.”

As I was familiar with this teaching method, I had regular conferences with the learners upon request in order to help them reach their goals and provide them with quality feedback that could help them achieve the goals set for the project work. Having conferences with learners and providing them with quality feedback is an integrative part of DMCs and project-based learning (Dörnyei et al., 2016). It additionally increases the positive impact that teaching may have on the learning process if learners consider the feedback given by the teacher while improving their ongoing projects. It can be deduced that this was the case for this project because the students mentioned most of the characteristics of a DMC as noted by this learner while reflecting on his oral presentation:

“I had never worked like this. I was so strong and powerful. I think I could do all the things I like. I was like fly in the air. I was not heavy and I could understand new things easily. I was not afraid of working even if it was sometimes challenge [challenging] and hard. If I can be like this all the time I will speak English in one year like an Anglophone. I want to revive this again and again because I want to speak English.”

When learners are caught up in the motivational flows, they establish routines such as reading books in the second language in order to achieve their learning goals. These routines may be so automatic that they will become an integral part of the learning process and will no longer require an explicit effort. Once the currents start waning, some people may feel nostalgic about their lived experiences. Accordingly, a teacher should help their learners set new learning habits to value the DMC experiences and to facilitate a smooth transition from an energetic state to a normal motivational level.

My impressions

Based on this classroom project, it can be concluded that the Malian EFL learners can experience purposefully generated DMCs. Additionally, while caught up in the flow of DMCs, these learners showed that they could learn and speak their English in Mali. This new motivational state empowered them and increased their motivation so that successful EFL learning could happen. The teacher’s familiarity with project-based learning also made the classroom environment friendly and supportive as claimed by this student: 

“To know that Madam was with us not against is important. She was not in the class to give us bad notes or traumatize students. She helps us to learn and speak English. She sit [sits] near us and discuss as a family. I really like this of her.” 

The title of the article was inspired by this student’s comment. Furthermore, this proves that these learners used to view an assessment as a moment of torture and stress. They seemed not to consider it as a component of their learning. The results of this classroom-based research demonstrated that PBA, specifically project work, can be one of the solutions to the assessment issues in the Malian EFL context. However, teachers there can also explore other assessment methods in order to decrease their learners’ test-taking anxiety and transform their assessment into a moment of learning and enjoyment. Researchers from other teaching contexts should experiment with the DMC theory in their language classrooms because motivation matters, as it is one of the key predictors of successful language learning.                       

 

References

Birjandi, P., & Tamjid, H. N. (2010). The role of self-assessment in promoting Iranian EFL learners’ motivation. English Language Teaching, 3(3), 211-220. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v3n3p211 

Brown, H. D., & Abeywickrama, P. (2010). Language assessment: Principles and classroom practices. (2nd ed). Pearson Longman.

Brown, J. D., & Hudson, T. (1998). The alternatives in language assessment. TESOL Quarterly, 32(4), 653-675. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587999 

Darling-Hammond, L. (1994). Performance-based assessment and educational equity. Harvard Educational Review, 64(1), 5-30. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.64.1.j57n353226536276 

Dörnyei, Z., Henry, A., & Muir, C. (2016). Motivational currents in language learning: Frameworks for focused interventions. Routledge. 

Fook, Y. C., & Sidhu, K. G. (2010). Authentic assessment and pedagogical strategies in higher education. Journal of Social Sciences, 6(2), 153-161. https://doi.org/10.3844/jssp.2010.153.161

Ibrahim, Z. (2016). Directed motivational currents: Optimal productivity and long-term sustainability in second language acquisition (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Nottingham. Retrievable from http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/33489/ 

Ibrahim, Z., & Al-Hoorie, A. H. (2019). Shared, sustained flow: Triggering motivation with collaborative projects. ELT Journal, 73(1), 51-60. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccy025 

Koné, K. (2015). The impact of performance-based assessment on university ESL learners’ motivation (Unpublished master’s thesis). Minnesota State University, Mankato. Retrievable from https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/etds/402 

Muir, C. (2016). The dynamics of intense long-term motivation in language learning: Directed motivational currents in theory and practice (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Nottingham. Retrievable from http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/33810/

Muir, C., & Dörnyei, Z. (2013). Directed motivational currents: Using vision to create effective motivational pathways. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 3(3), 357-375. https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2013.3.3.3

Nier, V. C., Silvio, F. D., & Malone, M. E. (2014). Beliefs about assessment and language from Arabian instructors and students. The NECTFL Review, 73, 56-76.

Stefanou, C., & Parkes, J. (2003). Effects of classroom assessment on student motivation in fifth-grade science. The Journal of Educational Research, 96(3), 152-162. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220670309598803

Zohoorian, Z. (2015). Motivation level: A study on the effect of an authentic context. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 192, 15-25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.06.003 

 

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“Navigating the Common Core with English Language Learners: Developing Higher-Order Thinking Skills,” by Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Sypnieski. 2016. 370 pages, paperback, $30.55 USD. ISBN 978-1-119-02300-5
Key words: ELL, Common core, higher order thinking, scaffolding, graphic organizer, modeling, https://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/

As teachers, we have all spent time in meetings unpacking the Common Core Standards. In their book Navigating the Common Core with English Language Learners, two California high school teachers, Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull Sypnieski, take this unpacking a step further and address the needs of English language learners (ELLs) in light of the Common Core. 

Navigating the Common Core uses both research on ELLs and the authors’ and contributors’ extensive experience working with high school ELLs to bring the reader practical, scaffolded ideas for developing higher-order thinking skills that the Common Core now requires of all learners, including ELLs. One of the writers’ best successes toward this goal can be seen in the very explicit lesson examples. In a section on the importance of questions, for instance, the authors first introduce literal and interpretive questions through modeling. They go on to discuss different question starters for each category. Then, using a graphic organizer, students are led to develop interpretive questions for a history unit. Finally, the authors give an example of what they call a “test in reverse,” where students are given the test answers and must come up with the matching literal and/or interpretive questions (p. 38). 

The book is divided into nine chapters. The first chapter gives a valuable overview of ELLs and the Common Core. It is followed by a timely chapter addressing the importance of social emotional learning (SEL) in an ELL’s route to successfully navigating the Common Core. Practical, ready-to-use lessons on goal-setting, metacognition, critical thinking, creativity/innovation, self-control, and persistence/resilience are included. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 each delve into a separate domain of language learning, namely, reading, writing, and speaking/listening. These chapters, as well as Chapter 6, on language, follow a similar format. The Common Core standards are unpacked and translated to answer the question, “What does this mean in my classroom?” Next, clear examples of lessons are shared. The final Chapters 7, 8, and 9 address the areas of mathematics, social studies, and science, incorporating the work of experienced content teachers as contributors in these specialized subject areas. This change in authorship is notable in the change of format and tone. At the end of the book, readers will find a very extensive index that teachers will find very useful for locating additional information. 

One chapter that I found particularly useful was Chapter 5 on speaking and listening. This chapter identifies the Common Core requirements of comprehension and collaboration and of presentation of knowledge and ideas. As a teacher of very young learners, I believe that nearly all of the suggestions given in this chapter are easily adaptable to any age. The authors start with the necessary classroom environment for successful discussion: one which is safe, provides tasks at the right level, where the student participation is authentic, and there is student ownership. They also emphasize what they call the iron rule, “Never do for others what they can do for themselves.” 

This chapter gives a simple but potentially impactful exercise for practicing active listening by having a student identify what it looks like and what it does not look like, then demonstrating both with a peer. This amounts to metacognitive listening, which is valuable for anyone. Two other examples of easily adaptable ideas from this chapter are “elevator pitches” and using speaker frames, which could easily be taught in an elementary school show-and-tell setting, beginning to expose students to presentation skills. The sentence frames for discussion, such as I think that…, could also be chosen for any level. 

Rather than just telling teachers what they could use in class, the authors provide many specific examples, graphic organizers, sentence frames for responses, and follow-up work and extensions, including online resources. One author, Larry Ferlazzo, has written and compiled useful information in his extensive blog. Ferlazzo provides the titles to information in his blog for easy retrieval. Additionally, downloadable lesson plans and handouts are given. While the book is a valuable tool for teachers as is, two bonus online chapters are provided that address how teachers can use art with ELLs and how school counselors can provide both student and teacher support. 

While there are some lessons for beginning ELLs, the authors have written the book for more advanced learners. However, their boots-on-the-ground approach gives teachers practical strategies for scaffolding Common Core tasks, particularly with their emphasis on higher-order thinking, in a manner that can lead to success with our ELLs. Even though the book was not directed at me, a kindergarten teacher, I still found there were many take-aways that I could adapt for my classroom. 

While the chapters on mathematics, science, and social studies also contained practical ideas, I wish Ferlazzo and Sypnieski had required the writers of these three chapters to follow the same format of the earlier chapters, as this would have given the work more continuity of voice and perhaps leveled the language and content for ease of both reading and use. The Common Core asks for higher-level thinking right out of the gate, so while the specific lessons may be geared to more advanced students in secondary schools, good teaching is good teaching. Teachers at any level can glean valuable ideas for ELLs and reflect on their own teaching by reading this book, especially the first six chapters. They will also know that what they have read is grounded in research and experience. 

Though this book is four years old, the content is still of great interest to teachers today. In particular, teachers who are new to working with ELLs may find implementing Common Core with this student population to be a somewhat daunting task, but Navigating the Common Core with English Language Learners: Developing Higher-Order Thinking Skills can certainly help all teachers as they work with their ELL populations. Perhaps the two strongest features of this book are the teacher-friendly accessible language used to explain the concepts and the extensive inclusion of classroom-ready materials. For these reasons and many others, I strongly recommend this book to ELL teachers.

 

Reference:

Ferlazzo, L., & Sypnieski, K. (2016). Navigating the common core with English language learners: Developing higher-order thinking skills. Jossey-Bass.

 

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“Teaching Adult Immigrants with Limited Formal Education: Theory, Research and Practice,” by Joy Kreeft Peyton and Martha Young-Scholten (Eds). 2020. 191 pages, paperback, $34.95 USD. Multilingual Matters.
Key words: English as a second language, teacher education, LESLLA, SLIFE, refugee education

If you are as hungry as I am for the knowledge and skills to facilitate your journey in becoming the most effective educator you can be to migrants whose literacy proficiency is low, read this book. For the novice, this volume will serve as a graduate course in the current issues, challenges, and research pertaining to teaching immigrants with literacy needs. You are likely to mark, mangle, and annotate every page. If you are already an experienced professional, read this for the joy of discovering the newest research and practical implications related to teaching immigrants with limited education in a ridiculously concise volume. For every educator, practitioner, and researcher seeking a compilation of the latest theory and research on teaching adult migrants to read, this edited volume presents international perspectives from world-renowned practitioners and researchers.

Larry Condelli contextualizes the book in his foreword, as the culmination of decades of research and practice from an international community that coalesced in 2005 and created what is today the Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults organization (LESLLA). Today, LESLLA is unique as the only association devoted solely to the study of second language (L2) acquisition research and teaching as they relate to adult migrants. LESLLA has inspired a European team of researchers to create the Digital Literacy Instructor, or DigLin, a computer program used for testing and learning for adults with low literacy proficiency. LESLLA was also a catalyst for the creation of the European Speakers of Other Languages: Teaching Adult Migrants and Training their Teachers (EU-Speak), a research community that assessed the needs of teachers and delivered training modules to meet them. Out of this laudable history, comes this volume edited by Joy Kreeft Peyton and Martha Young-Scholten.

Peyton and Young-Scholten have been pioneering leaders in the field of L2 acquisition since its inception, as reflected in their substantial publishing history as original thinkers, researchers, and editors. Peyton may be best known for her advocacy of heritage languages and her work encouraging the use of dialogue journals and reflective writing. I remember a slender but mighty book that she edited, Approaches to Adult ESL Instruction (Language in Education) (1993), because of its chapters on Freire and participatory learning, and other timeless topics critical to teaching migrants today. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Linguistics, where she served as vice president for 16 years.

Young-Scholten shares Peyton’s interest in heritage languages, but her research focus has been primarily in L2 acquisition of morphosyntax, of phonology, and reading development for migrants with limited education. She is second language professor at Newcastle University, a coordinator of EU-Speak, and a co-director of Simply Cracking Good Stories, a project designed to teach nonwriters to compose engaging and accessible fiction for immigrant adults with basic reading skills. 

In their latest collaboration as authors and editors, Peyton and Young-Scholten have produced a concise and consequential contribution to the growing literature on a topic that has long been marginalized in research, conference, and journal attention within the larger scope of L2 acquisition. In Chapter 1, Peyton and Young-Scholten reflect on some of the challenges that educators encounter when teaching adult migrants to read for the first time in an L2. 

Learning to read for the first time as an adult is a slow process and educators sorely need more research on this topic to inform their teaching practices. The editors/authors urge readers to conduct their own research on the subjects of non- and low-literate learners, L2 acquisition, and the influence of literacy on the acquisition of linguistic competence. The authors describe the history of teaching adult migrants over the past decades, how a small group of professionals serendipitously came together to share their experience, and then engaged in developing an organization dedicated to serving this population. Decades later, not only is there still a dearth of research on the topic of teaching adult migrants with low literacy, but there is also an unmet need to provide the education that teachers need in order to deliver effective literacy instruction. In an effort to meet this need, a project called European Speakers of Other Languages: Teaching Adult Migrants and Training Their Teachers conducted a survey to elicit what knowledge and skills teachers and tutors wanted, and from 2010-2018, six six-week modules were delivered twice by prominent researchers from Finland, Spain, Germany, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, reaching over 1,000 educators in twenty-one countries. This volume represents the findings of the researchers and practitioners who were involved in the EU-Speak modules. (Information about the development of the EU-Speak modules may be found in the Appendix, pp. 8-10.)

Chapter 2, by Minna Suni and Taina Tammelin-Laine at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, focuses on language and literacy in social context. Suni and Tammelin-Laine report that lack of literacy skills is a main contributor to marginalization in industrialized countries and that promoting family literacy improves outcomes for multi-generations. In the 21st century, the idea of multiliteracies addresses how information is increasingly shared in technologically-rich environments, expanding our notion of literacy and making it more important to incorporate digital literacy in literacy classes. Suni and Tammelin-Laine also address learning inside and outside the classroom, the need for social interaction for language development, and the role of input. They argue that literacy skills will produce the best outcomes for migrants, including high self-esteem, broader work opportunities, economic security, and civic involvement.

Marcin Sosiński from the University of Granada, Spain, reports in Chapter 3 on reading from a psycholinguistic perspective. He addresses the components of reading that include decoding, phonemic and phonological awareness, and two instructional methods for reading: the Generative Word Approach and the Language Experience Approach. Sosiński presents different lower-level and higher-level strategies for the process of reading until it becomes automatic; he promotes use of the Digital Literacy Instructor as one way for non-literate migrants to learn to read. He also addresses the need for reading materials for low-literate learners for extensive reading and reading for pleasure. Sosiński recommends Simply Cracking Good Stories as a project that aims to address this need.

Chapter 4 is written by Andreas Rohde, Kerstin Chlubek, Pia Holtappels, Kim-Sarah Schick, and Johanna Schmuch, all from the University of Cologne, Germany, who report on one of the most important aspects of literacy: vocabulary. This is the longest chapter in the book, perhaps because learning new words is so important and learning the vocabulary of a new language raises many issues. Rohde et al. explain that although there is little research with low-literate learners, it isn’t crucial, since there is no critical period for word acquisition, and it will take place over a lifetime. Secondly, humans are hard-wired to acquire new language, which depends on exposure to it. Words are learned explicitly and implicitly, but some of the strategies associated with learning words require a metacognitive awareness or knowledge that low-literate learners may not have. The authors describe the fast mapping process, its importance, and how teachers can support it.

Martha Young-Scholten and Rola Naeb, from Northumbria University, U.K., cover an aspect of linguistic competence essential to comprehension: the acquisition of morphosyntax, in Chapter 5. Young-Scholten and Naeb report that unlike other research areas, some of the most important studies of L2 morphosyntax have been of migrants. They describe the history of competing grammar acquisition theories including Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, Halliday’s functional grammar, construction grammar, and emergentist theory of acquisition. The authors discuss memorization of expressions and the role of explicit teaching of morphosyntactic forms. Studies have converged on the conclusion that there are common stages of development independent of learners’ L1, exposure to language, or literacy level, with important pedagogical implications for adult migrants and their teachers. How and what migrants learn is examined and implications for working with migrants are supplied. This chapter concludes with a section on assessment that raises questions about what is being tested and what is reliable and valid. 

Belma Haznedar, from Bogaziçi University, Turkey, discusses bilingualism and multilingualism in Chapter 6. Adult migrants are often motivated to be language learners in order to help children with their schooling. Haznedar reports on the benefits of families becoming bilingual or multilingual and the issues that arise throughout the lifespan through the themes of language; discusses simultaneous bilingualism, successive bilingualism, and code switching; and describes the cognitive and neurological benefits of bilingualism. Haznedar advocates for the maintenance and development of heritage languages led by this chapter’s author and the editors of this book. 

In Chapter 7, Nancy Faux, a founding member of LESLLA, and Susan Watson, ESOL Specialist for The Literacy Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University, begin by focusing on the sociocultural aspects of literacy and then proceed with a discussion of seven topics to guide effective instruction in literacy development. The first of these is what it means to be a literacy learner, with reference to Wrigley and Guth’s (1993) ground-breaking work Bringing Literacy to Life, which describes the wealth of knowledge, skills, attitudes and experience that migrants bring to the learning environment. The authors provide advice on preparing to teach adult literacy classes that includes creating an engaging learning environment that connects instruction to learners’ lives, designing separate learning stations for projects and independent learning, and choosing adult-appropriate materials. Developing print awareness and phonological and phonemic awareness are components of literacy instruction. Finally, the authors offer strategies for teaching multilevel classes, guidance in using a learner-centered approach or the Language Experience Approach, and information about types of assessment tools.

This book is required reading for teachers, tutors, teacher educators, and researchers serving emergent learners. It is a much-needed resource that comes at a time when more than 79 million migrants are displaced worldwide, many of whom have limited education and will undertake learning a new language and literacy while adapting to living in a new country. This thought-provoking collection written by outstanding researchers and practitioners provides current, critical information to inform teaching and research worldwide for years to come. 

 

References

Peyton, J. K. (1993). Approaches to adult ESL instruction (language in education). Center for Applied Linguistics.

Wrigley, H. S., & Guth, G. J. A. (1993). Bringing literacy to life. U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education.

 

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