Teaching Reading to English Language Learners

A Reflective Guide

Thomas S. C. Farrell

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412957359
• eBook ISBN: 9781452294643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

"Truly a pleasure to read, with much helpful information."
—Deb Bible, Literacy Teacher
CUSD 300, West Dundee, IL

"The author models a program of success and helps the educator become better qualified in teaching the EL learner."
—Lucia deSombre Malo, Former Instructor
Utah Valley State College

Practical, easy-to-implement methods for helping English language learners succeed in reading!

Successfully teaching reading to English language learners (ELLs) requires an in-depth understanding of the unique processes by which they learn to read as well as proven strategies that teachers can use to support reading development. This resource focuses on helping students "read to learn" instead of "learn to read."

In clear, accessible language, this resource demystifies the research and clarifies the process for teaching reading to ELLs. The author introduces the key principles of reading instruction for ELLs and offers a wealth of action-oriented strategies—for use before, during, and after reading—to adapt for individual student needs. Each chapter includes reflection questions to help educators examine their own reading practices and better understand what it means to be a reader. Teachers will discover how to:

• Increase students? fluency and comprehension
• Teach vocabulary and text structure
• Prepare reading lessons
• Assess reading proficiency

Teaching Reading to English Language Learners is an ideal primer for educators who may or may not have had experience working with ELLs.

1

Teaching Reading to ELLs

Reading can be one of the greatest pleasures we experience throughout our lives. Reading helps us in many ways: It entertains, educates, communicates, and informs us about the past, the present, and even the future. Many (but not all) children learn how to read in their first language before they enter the school system, and once in school, all depend on their teachers to help further develop their reading skills so that eventually they can discover the joy of reading. In many of our classrooms today, we find that many of our students do not use English as their first language and that many English language learners (ELLs—I use the term English language learner throughout this book to refer to students who are learning English as a second or subsequent language as well as those learning English as a foreign language) learning to read use similar, but not the same, processes as beginning readers learning to read in their first language. For example, many times, beginning ELLs plunge into a text when they start to read, but when they meet a difficult word or confusing sentence or paragraph, their reading grinds to a halt and becomes painful, boring, no fun, or too difficult for them to continue, and so some give up trying to learn how to read in the second/subsequent language.

Some of the problems associated with ELLs struggling to read can unfortunately be attributed to particular methods of reading instruction that either test rather than teach reading or that do not take into consideration the differences between learning to read in a first and a second/subsequent language. For instance, when a reading teacher asks his or her students to read a passage and answer the comprehension questions that follow (or the ten-question syndrome, as my former colleagues at the National Institute of Education in Singapore called it), or to write a summary, or to explain the meaning of individual words and then to write the words in a sentence, all these are testing and not really teaching reading. Testing reading has a place in the curriculum but only after we teach our students how to read. We must also recognize that students learning to read in their first language have more knowledge of grammar and vocabulary than ELLs learning to read in a second/subsequent language. Furthermore, ELLs also have varying levels of English language proficiency that have an impact on reading comprehension.

The good news is that we can teach reading to our ELLs. Throughout this book I propose that the goal of teaching reading to ELLs is for our students to be able to turn “learning to read” into “reading to learn” (Carrell, 1998) so that they can become fully functioning members of our society. This chapter first discusses some of the differences between learning to read in a first language and learning to read in a subsequent language, because we cannot assume that second language readers from different language backgrounds (e.g., Chinese, Hmong, Spanish) will carry out the reading processes in the same ways when they learn to read in English. Then it outlines some principles of teaching reading to ELLs that lead to individual chapters, which form most of the contents of this book.

In addition, because this is a book about teaching reading, and because many of the activities in the book involve prereading and postreading activities, I also include such activities (under the heading Reflection) for readers to use when reading the contents of this book. I use one term for these activities: reflection, and this includes reflection-for-reading (or prereading reflection), reflecting-during-reading (or during-reading reflection), and reflection-on-reading (or postreading reflection). Thus I hope you can see that I am attempting to practice what I am preaching.

REFLECTION

• What do you think are the main differences between learning to read in a first language and a second/subsequent language?

LEARNING TO READ IN A FIRST AND A SECOND/SUBSEQUENT LANGUAGE

Most of the research that has been conducted on reading has focused on students learning to read in their first language, but an increasing amount of recent reading research has related to students learning to read in their second and subsequent languages. However, many of these studies have been based on the original first language studies, and as Grabe and Stoller (2002, p. 40) have noted, “One of the most difficult talks we face as reading teachers is deciding how to make use of reading research for our own purposes [as teachers of ELLs].” That said, there is general agreement that ELLs begin reading in the second/subsequent language with a different knowledge base (e.g., more world knowledge, more developed cognitive abilities) than they had when they started to read in their first language (Grabe, 1991), and this has an impact on how we teachers should approach reading instruction.

The ways in which second language comprehension processes and instruction may differ from first language contexts can be classified as follows (adapted from Aebersold & Field, 1997, and Grabe & Stoller, 2002):

• Linguistic differences between the first and the second/subsequent language.

• Individual differences between first and second/subsequent language readers.

• Sociocultural differences between the first and second/subsequent language.

LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES

Research has suggested that there are differing amounts of lexical, grammatical, and discourse knowledge at the initial stages of first and second language reading. For example, Grabe and Stoller (2002) point out that by the age of six, most first language readers are “ready” to read because they have already learned (tacitly) grammatical structures of their first language, and they already have nearly 7,000 words stored in their heads. However, ELLs do not have this word bank to draw on when learning to read in the second/subsequent language. Thus, having them sound out a word to “discover” its meaning, a popular reading activity in many reading classes the world over, is not very effective, although it may still be effective for first language students.

In addition, because ELL readers do not have a tacit knowledge of the second language grammar, they need some additional instruction in building a foundation of structural knowledge and text organization for more effective reading comprehension (see Chapter 5, Teaching Text Structure to ELLs). Teachers of ELLs will probably need to teach vocabulary and discourse structure to their students from the very beginning of their reading classes, because most ELL readers will not have been exposed to many English language texts (through reading that is). So they will not have been able to build up any real processing skills nor the large recognition vocabulary that readers learning in their first language have. In fact, first language readers already have spent years building up this amount of exposure to print needed to develop fluency and automaticity in reading.

Another aspect of linguistic differences between two languages that teachers of ELLs may want to consider, because it may influence second language reading comprehension, concerns the differences between the ELLs’ first language and the second/subsequent language they are learning to read in, in this case English. Grabe and Stoller (2002, p. 47), for example, have pointed out that ELL students whose first language is a Romance language (e.g., Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese) tend to focus greater amounts of attention on “the ends of the words because there is more grammatical information there than in English,” while readers whose first language is Chinese, Japanese, or Korean “will make greater use of visual processing” than readers of English, because of their “first language orthography.” These linguistic differences can lead to variations in reading rates and reading fluency, and thus teachers of reading to ELLs may want to become more aware of their students’ first language orthography and rhetorical structures. This can be accomplished by surveying the students about these on the very first day of instruction.

REFLECTION

• Why would it be important to become more aware of your ELLs’ educational and linguistic backgrounds?

• I suggested above that you could survey your ELLs on the first day about their educational and linguistics backgrounds. How would you go about this? What questions would you ask them and why?

• What would be the implications for you as a teacher of reading to ELLs if you discovered that a student was illiterate in his or her first language? How would this impact your teaching of reading?

• What would be the implications for you as a teacher of reading to ELLs if you discovered that a student’s first language writing system was very similar to English or very different from that of English?

• What would be the implications for you as a teacher of reading to ELLs if you discovered that a student could or could not describe and discuss rules of his or her own first language?

• Which students in the previous two questions do you think would improve faster as readers of English and why?

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Just as linguistic differences between the first and second/subsequent language influence the rate and success of learning to read, proficiency levels in the first language can also influence reading abilities and successes for ELLs. Research suggests that ELLs who are more literate in their first language are more able to transfer reading skills from their first language, although the exact way ELL readers can positively transfer this knowledge is still not clear. Koda (2005) suggests that ELLs who are less literate in their first language cannot really be expected to transfer many supporting resources to their second/subsequent language reading contexts.

In addition, individual ELLs tend to differ in terms of their cognitive development and learning style, especially when they start to study in the second language (Aebersold & Field, 1997). For example, the reading strategies of a six-year-old learning to read in a second/subsequent language are quite different from those of a 20-year-old learning to read in the second/subsequent language in terms of world knowledge and reading strategies acquired in the first language. So teachers of reading to ELLs may have to consider different approaches for children than for adults.

REFLECTION

• How would different levels of language proficiency impact your teaching of reading to ELLs?

• How would you approach teaching of reading to young ELLs and adult ELLs? Would it be the same or different?

• Rivera (1999) has suggested that ELLs may benefit from using their native language literacy skills, because they can transfer some basic skills in reading from their first to their second/subsequent language. Do you agree, and if so, what skills could they transfer? If you disagree, why do you think such skills are not transferable?

SOCIOCULTURAL DIFFERENCES

In some cultures literacy in the form of written texts may not be as common as it is in English. So teachers may want to consider what it means to be literate and how literacy is valued, used, and displayed in their ELL students’ first languages. In addition, texts are not always organized in the same linear display in other languages as they are in English. For example, although this is controversial, Kaplan (1987) has pointed out that the linear approach to English language includes a writer responsibility to make the text clear and direct to readers, and this is in direct contrast to the spiral structure and indirectness of many Asian languages, which have a tradition of reader responsibility to extract meaning from the text.

More specifically, there can be cultural differences in the ways texts express interpersonal relations with the reader in terms of presence or absence of personal pronouns and in terms of whether it is the writer’s responsibility to provide details or the reader’s responsibility to read between the lines. So, teachers may want to become more aware of their ELL students’ attitudes toward different types of text, their purposes for reading, and the types of reading skills and strategies they use in their first language. Teachers may also be interested in understanding their students’ use of different reading skills and strategies in the second/subsequent language, their beliefs about the reading process (e.g., the use of inference, memorization, nature of comprehension), their knowledge of text types in their first language (their formal schemata), and their background knowledge (their content schemata). This is because all of the above influence the level of success their ELLs will achieve while learning to read.

REFLECTION

• Read the following short paragraph (from Eskey, 2002, p. 6) and answer the 10 questions that follow.

It was the day of the big party. Mary wondered if Johnny would like a kite. She ran to her bedroom, picked up her piggy bank, and shook it. There was no sound.

1. Does this story take place in the past, present, or future?

2. What did Mary wonder?

3. What does the word wonder signal?

4. What is a kite?

5. What is a piggy bank?

6. What kind of party do you think this is?

7. Are Mary and Johnny adults or children?

8. How is the kite related to the party?

9. Why did Mary shake her piggy bank?

10.Mary has a big problem; what is it?

• What do you notice about the reading skills and strategies you used to answer questions 1 to 5 and questions 6 to 10?

• Did you use the same or different skills and strategies to answer both sets of questions? Explain.

I usually answer questions like 1 to 5 by only decoding the text, because all the relevant information is included in the text. However, in order to answer questions 6 to 10, I must have certain knowledge of Western culture and particularly of birthday parties. This knowledge is not directly in the text, and some ELLs may not possess it. In order to make meaning from the text in the previous Reflection activity, ELLs must engage in what Eskey (2002, p. 6) has called “parallel processing,” whereby the reader simultaneously decodes and engages in cultural interpretations of the text. This invisible process of reading produces enormous challenges for teachers of ELLs, because reading does not “generate any product that a teacher can see or hear or respond to” (Eskey, 2002, p. 6).

From the discussion above, I present the following principles of teaching reading; much of the following chapters are based on these principles.

PRINCIPLES OF TEACHING READING TO ELLs

The previous section outlined various differences (backed by research) between learning to read in a first language and in a second/subsequent language. Of course, we may wish that methods of teaching reading, either for first or subsequent language, had caught up with the results of these various research studies, but unfortunately this is not the case. In fact, there is still a general lack of agreement as to how reading...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Chapter 1: Teaching Reading to ELLs
• Chapter 2: Reflecting on the Reading Process
• Chapter 3: Teaching Reading Fluency and Comprehension to ELLs
• Chapter 4: Teaching Reading Strategies to ELLs
• Chapter 5: Teaching Text Structure to ELLs
• Chapter 6: Teaching Vocabulary to ELLs
• Chapter 7: Planning Effective Reading Lessons for ELLs
• Chapter 8: Promoting Extensive Reading for ELLs
• Chapter 9: Authentic Reading Assessment for ELLs
• References
• Index