Month: September 2019

English Language Learners (ELL) Developmental Language Levels

Response Protocol

“Designed to help teachers better their understanding of students’ language development and broaden their repertoire for meeting the needs of this special population” (Vacca, Vacca & Gove, 2012, p. 72). Some examples are shown below:

Contributions Approach – Teachers include culturally specific celebrations and holidays such as Martin Luther King Day and Columbus Day.

Additive Approach – A thematic approach, where a teacher might incorporate multicultural issues into the curriculum for a unit but they don’t always.

Transformative Approach – Teachers try to help students to learn diverse ethnic and cultural perspectives by giving them opportunities to read about concepts and events, make judgement about them, think critically, and come up with their own ideas and opinions.

Decision-Making and Social-Action Approach – Let’s students do activities and projects related to the cultural issues they have read about.

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Instructional Beliefs About Academic and Cognitive Diversity

Academic and cognitive diversity are grounded in definitions, categories, and labels. These result is legislation stepping in and creating new guidelines and policies. This is where the term exceptional children came from. The exceptional child refers to a students who is either above or below the norm. This means these students need adapted material to meet their needs. These exceptionalities include:

• learning disabilities
• emotional and behavioral disorders
• mental retardation
• intellectual gifts and talents

The Public Law 94-142, or the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which was passed in 1975 has several principles that are still in effect today. These include:

• Nondiscriminatory identification and evaluation
• Free, appropriate public education
• Least restrictive environment
• Parent and student participation and shared decision making.

The law was then redesigned and the IDEA 2004 was added. This allowed for procedures to identifying students with specific learning disabilities:

• The states must not require that the criteria for determining a specific learning disability include a severe discrepancy between intellectual ability and achievement.
• The states may use alternative research-based methods to determine whether a student has a specific learning disability.
• The states must allow the use of a child’s response to scientifically research-based intervention when identifying specific learning disabilities.
• With respect to language arts, the criteria include failure of the child to adequately achieve in any one of the following areas: oral expression, listening comprehension, written expression, basic reading skills, fluency, or reading comprehension when provided with appropriate instruction based on state standards.

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Instructional Principles for Academic and Cognitive Diversity

The essential components of an effective literacy program include instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. Some useful guidelines include:

• Students need to be engaged with authentic texts
• Students with diverse abilities need to see reading as purposeful
• Students who differ in their reading abilities need experiences with literacy tasks that are highly engaging that are focused on their interests as learners
• Students who struggle need teachers who can guide them towards success
• Teachers of students with a variety of abilities need to be focused
• Effective teachers involve parents

Inclusion is when children with special needs are included in the regular education classroom and will receive help from the classroom teacher and a special education teacher. This gives them the opportunity to learn from their peers as well as developing social skills and making friends.

Literacy coaches provide long-term professional development for teachers that result in improved reading achievement. Characteristics of literacy coaches include:

• Strong understanding of the reading process
• Excellence in teaching reading
• Exemplary communication skills with peers
• Skill in literacy assessment and instructional practices

Differentiated Instruction help different learners who have different needs. The teacher proactively plan various ways to teach and express learning based on his/her knowledge of his/her students and their needs. Differentiated instruction can be done in whole class, small group, and individual instruction. Differentiation can look like using different reading topics, different reading levels, or different student interests.

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

I think it is important that we know the different laws that are developed to help the students with exceptionalities. It’s also important to know how to use inclusion, literacy coaches, and differentiated instruction. These are things that will be implemented in the classroom no matter where you work because all students are different.

Instructional Approaches

Basal Reading Approach

• Provides everything needed for a complete reading program
• Wide variety of genres
• Provides scope and sequence (lesson taught in order, students move from level to level) of skills and strategies
• Based on the assumption that students learn to read by reading, writing, and talking about meaningful topics
• Used in small group situations typically at the elementary level
• Word recognition skills are used to expand meaningful reading, discussing, and writing

Language Experience Approach (LEA)

• Includes story dictation, recording the language of children on paper and using what is said as the basis for reading instruction
• Also includes “planned and continuous activities such as individual- and group-dictated stories, the building of word banks of known words, creative writing activities, oral reading of prose and poetry by teacher and students, directed reading-thinking lessons, the investigation of interests using multiple materials, and keeping record of student progress” (Vacca, Vacca, & Gove, 2012, p.48)
• Embraces natural language and uses background experiences (this can be very useful for English Language Learners)

Integrated Language Arts Approach

• Extends the concept of language experience by immersing students in reading, writing, talking, listening, and viewing activities
• The language arts support each other and are connected through the use of informative and imaginative literature

Literature Based Approach

• Accommodate each students differences and focuses on meaning, interest, and enjoyment
• Students select their own books
• Students can write different endings to stories or events that happened in their lives, this could be similar to other stories they have read
• Students can also use what they read in stories to help in their real life such as conflict resolution because of a way characters in a story handled a similar situation

Technology Based Approach/Instruction

• Learning to read through the use of technology
• Started with the development of the CD-ROM, made learning to read more engaging and interactive
• Online opportunities can be easily incorporated into the classroom and can help to greatly enhance the learning of students
• “Technology increases the availability of reading material, changes the way in which reading takes place, provides individual learning opportunities, and encourages students to use good judgement in locating and using information” (Vacca, Vacca, and Gove, 2012, p. 52)

Instructional Scaffolding

• Students become aware of the use of skills and strategies that they need to be successful
• Scaffolding means the students are getting help to do something that they are unable to do on their own at first. Instructional scaffolding means teachers support literacy learning by teaching students the skills and strategies that will lead them to learning how to do it independently
• Can be provided through well-timed questions, explanations, demonstrations, practice, and application. This can all be combined into mini-lessons which provide explicit strategy instruction for students who need instructional guidance with skills and strategies for reading
• Mini-lessons allow teachers to share insight and knowledge with the students that they might not ever come across
• Explicit instruction involves strategic learning, not habit formation

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

I think all of these strategies can be used in the classroom. I like the idea of using LEA after students go on a field trip to create a book that is made up of their ideas. I think that technology is becoming a huge part of the school system but is also a great resource like ReadingAtoZ. I will also use scaffolding and explicit instruction through the use of mini-lessons.

 

The Importance of Belief Systems

A belief system influences the way a teacher teaches. Each teacher can have a different belief system but almost all teachers will agree that the main goal of teaching reading is “to teach children to become independent readers and learners” (Vacca, 2012, p.4).

A systematic instructional approach is an approach the may be effected by a teacher’s belief system. This approach includes direct teaching and a logical instructional sequence. This gives plenty of chance to practice specific skills along a logical timeline.

How Teachers Come to Know About Reading and Learning to Read

Teachers come to know about reading and learning to read in different ways. These ways consist of personal knowledge, practical knowledge, and professional knowledge.

Personal knowledge comes from how a teacher was taught. The way the teacher teaches helps to construct the personal knowledge for their students. Autobiographical narratives can also help to connect personal history as a reader to what is being taught. An autobiographical narrative will help to understand a readers past as well as goals they may have in the future.

Practical knowledge comes from a teachers experience in the classroom as well as experiences outside of the classroom. Teachers can observe their students in the classroom setting and in the community, this can help the teacher to see what learning style may work best for the students as well as things that may be motivating to them.

Professional knowledge comes from workshops, conferences, coworkers, and other professional development opportunities. Teachers may also get a literacy coach. A literacy coach can support a teacher who is just starting in a classroom or they could be a mentor to others who just need some additional help. 

Cognitive Insights into Reading and Learning to Read

One of the most important cognitive aspects to reading and learning to read is the alphabetic principle. The alphabetic principle states that there is a relationship between letters and sounds. Teachers need to understand that children learn the sounds through speech before they realize there are symbols (letters) to represent them.

Skilled readers can also chunk words together into syllables automatically. This knowledge of spelling patterns are also known as orthographic knowledge. This means knowing that the group of letters tion is pronounced “tion” and a skilled reader can figure this out quickly without having to think about it.

Schema Theory can also be used for reading and learning to read, especially reading comprehension. A schemata represents the prior knowledge, experiences, conceptual understandings, attitudes, values, skills, and procedures that a reader brings to a reading situation. If students can bring previous experiences into a reading situation, they will be able to better understand what they are reading as well as being able to remember what is read better. The more a student hears, sees, reads, and experiences new information, the more they will be able to comprehend when they are reading.

Metacognition is defined as “by Ann Brown (1985), refers to knowledge about and regulation of some form of cognitive activity” (Vacca, 2012, p. 20). There are three parts to this:

1. Self-Knowledge: What students think of themselves as readers
2. Task Knowledge: How to do the tasks and strategies that can be used
3. Self-Monitoring: Students monitoring what they are reading and understanding

When a student is reading and they come to a word they don’t know, there are four options for what the teacher can do.

1. Tell the student the word
2. Have the student sound it out
3. Have the student make an educated guess
4. Have the student say blank and keep reading

Each option can be used to help a student to become a better reader. Options 2-4 can be used before option 1 to give the student an opportunity to figure it out. With option 3, the student needs to use the implicit message to figure out the word. The implicit message is what the reading is suppose to say so the student can use context clues to figure out the unknown word. The teacher can also make the implicit message explicit. This means the teacher is using modeling, demonstrating, explaining, rationale-building, thinking aloud, and reflecting. This allows the teacher to help students to develop their metacognitive awareness and strategic knowledge.

Reading from a Language Perspective

Jean Piaget observed children and how they interacted with their environment. Piaget thinks that as children explore their environment they develop meaning to the events they are experiencing. Children need to interact with the environment around them to develop language.

Lev Vygotsky believed that children played a role in their own learning, this is similar to Piaget. Vygotsky thought children needed to experience external languages before they could develop an inner voice.

Readers look for information cues in written language through these three systems:

1. Graphophonemic System: This is the print that it provided to the reader as the major source of information.
2. Syntactic System: This provides the grammatical relationship within the sentence patterns. This means that a student uses the way words are arranged in a sentence to make sense of what the text means.
3. Semantic System: The reader brings background knowledge, experiences, conceptual understandings, attitudes, beliefs, and values (or in other words, schemata).

There are four steps to literacy development. These steps are:

1. Text intent: understanding what the author intended to write
2. Negotiability: creating a meaningful message
3. Risk-taking: making hypotheses and testing them
4. Fine-tuning: using text as a resource for following texts

Models of Reading 

• Bottom-Up Models of Reading – the process of translating print to meaning starts with the print.
• Top-Down Models of Reading – the process of translating print to meaning starts with the reader’s prior knowledge.
• Interactive Models of Reading – the process of translating print to meaning starts with both the print and the reader’s prior knowledge.

RTI (Response to Intervention)

RTI is used to identify and instruct those who struggle with reading. RTI uses a three-tier approach.

• Tier 1 – All students receive research-based instruction
• Tier 2 – More intensive instruction provided to a smaller group of students
• Tier 3 – Even more intensive instruction, typically one-on-one to target specific problems

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman. 

Classroom Application

Some day I will have beliefs of my own in my classroom that will effect the way I teach reading to students. I will also need to understand the students and their backgrounds to help them to learn to the best of their abilities. I liked the different options for helping a student to figure out an unknown word and will definitely use those in my classroom too. RTI will also be used in my classroom some day to help students who are struggling readers to get the most help they need to help them stay at their grade level.