Literacy Talks

Multilingual Momentum: Accelerating Literacy for Diverse Learners

September 11, 2024 • Reading Horizons • Season 6 • Episode 2

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This episode of Literacy Talks delves into the unique strengths and needs of multilingual learners (MLLs). Hosts Stacy Hurst, Donell Pons, and Lindsay Kemeny share valuable insights and practical strategies for effectively teaching phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension to MLLs. They emphasize the importance of honoring students' home languages, building on their existing linguistic knowledge, and creating a welcoming, celebratory environment that empowers all students. 

Listeners will appreciate the cognitive advantages of learning multiple languages and come away with concrete ideas for supporting the literacy development of this rapidly growing student population. Whether you're a classroom teacher, literacy specialist, or administrator, this episode offers essential guidance for ensuring multilingual learners thrive.

Show Notes
Literacy Leaders:

Resources:

Terms:

  • ELL: English Language Learners
  • ESL: English as a Second Language
  • ESOL: English for Speakers of Other Languages
  • ML/MLL: Multilingual Learners
  • BIC: Basic Interpersonal Communication
  • Text engineering: a strategy that modifies grade-level texts to help students understand them better. The goal is to make the text more accessible without simplifying it or lowering its complexity.



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Read the transcripts.

Narrator:

Stacy, welcome to literacy talks, the podcast for literacy leaders and champions everywhere, brought to you by Reading Horizons. Literacy talks is the place to discover new ideas, trends, insights and practical strategies for helping all learners reach reading proficiency. Our hosts are Stacy Hurst, a professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Advisor for Reading Horizons. Donell Pons, a recognized expert and advocate in literacy dyslexia and special education. And Lindsay Kemeny, an elementary classroom teacher, author and speaker. Now let's talk literacy.

Stacy Hurst:

Okay. Welcome to this episode of literacy Talks. My name is Stacy Hurst. I'm the host, and I'm joined by Donell Pons and Lindsay Kemeny, and we are here to talk about literacy. Today we are actually going to talk about multilingual learners. Now that is a newer term. I want to just tell you they're previously known and Donell and Lindsay. You can agree with this or not. There have been so many acronyms for this population. When I began teaching, it was ELLs, and then it became ESL, which was English as a second language, and then ESOL, English for Speakers of Other language, languages. And now we're at ML. Have I did I miss any that you guys have heard? I just think there's so many acronyms in education in general, but specifically here. But we think this will be a really important conversation. I'm going to start, if you two don't mind, with some statistics, and then we're going to have some discussion about how we can best address the needs of these learners. So as of 2021 according to the National Center of educational statistics, 10.6% of students are English language or MLS in our public school system, that equates to about 5.3 million students. 38 states saw increases in that population, and it ranges in the states too, and I think that makes sense to us, but if you would have to guess which state has the highest percentage of English language learners? MLS, sorry, I'm getting used to the new terminology. What state would you guess? Lindsay, would take a guess. I

Lindsay Kemeny:

don't know what, Donell, you were gonna say something

Donell Pons:

Texas. Texas.

Stacy Hurst:

You're right. It is Texas, and that they have 20% of their students in public schools that speak another language. What about the lowest states?

Donell Pons:

Iowa,

Stacy Hurst:

not on the list of lowest states? Good guess, though, and we will leave in the show notes, there's a really great resource where you can click and on your state and see how they they're doing. The low states. The lowest is West Virginia at point eight, and then we have Wyoming, Montana, Vermont and New Hampshire all have less than 3% of their students. So along with Texas, New Mexico, Nevada and California have high percentages. They're just under 20% so lots of Now this, this statistic really kind of blew my mind, and I read this in where did I read this one? Oh, the handbook on the science of early literacy. Here's the statistic, and this is from the US Census Bureau. In 2003 they said this by 2030, about 40% of school age children will speak a language other than English at home. That kind of blows my mind. Actually, most multilingual learners immigrate before kindergarten or they were born in the United States. The most often spoken language other than English is Spanish, and as we have our conversation today, I I think I'll just anchor it to Spanish speaker speakers to give examples because of that fact. But I want to start by asking you guys a question about, oh, one thing I do need to mention, too, less than 5% of teachers have training that's specialized for multilingual learners, and I'm careful the way I word that. I don't want to say teachers are not prepared to teach MLS. What I want to say is they don't have specialized learning. Because a lot of what we're going to talk about today is. The structured language and literacy approach, which works for all learners, but there are some special things we need to do for to meet the needs of MLS. So if you two had any experience with students who are learning English,

Lindsay Kemeny:

well, I imagine we'll kind of get into it as we start you know, this discussion, but you know, they have very, you know, various needs, right? And they're all like, kind of had different levels of proficiency in English. So it's considering that student and what they need,

Stacy Hurst:

yeah, and your pre service instruction. Lindsay, were those students addressed?

Lindsay Kemeny:

No, okay, is that what you were asking? Sorry, yeah,

Stacy Hurst:

but that's okay. I didn't ask it directly. You're good. Okay, Donell, what about you?

Donell Pons:

Yeah, this is a really interesting question and topic. And yes, I do work with a lot of students currently with what I do working with adults who, for whom English is another language. I also, when I received my first teaching assignment, straight fresh out of my master's program in teaching, I moved to a middle school, into a middle school setting where, I would say, a bulk, if not a majority of, my students fit that category of students that spoke another language, other than English at home, and English was for them, another language. And I received absolutely no training. We discussed that I would more than likely have students in my classrooms, and most of what was discussed in my program were things like cultural inclusivity, sensitivity to different cultures, but nothing about language, which really was their primary concern, because I was teaching English. Yeah,

Stacy Hurst:

interesting and that that tracks with what I've heard from others as well. Now I did not in my pre service education. I, in fact, I do remember one day when phonics was mentioned, but the other area, I honestly don't remember learning a lot about students who don't speak English as their first language. I really don't have any memory of that. I did go on to receive my English language endorsement, and I learned a lot through that. I taught the English language development classes at my school, and for those of you who are familiar, those are students whose English language proficiency is low enough that they require extra instruction. So I really counted that as a blessing in my career, to help me with this conversation, but also to learn about the needs of those students. So even though teachers you don't have to have specialized certification, it's helpful, but I think there's a lot we can learn and anchor on what we already know about language and literacy development in our structured literacy instruction. So I was thinking today we could just frame our conversation around those aspects of literacy, instruction and development, and how we would what are good practices for our students, and how we would specifically address the needs of MLS as we're doing that. So there are a lot of things we could let's start with phonemic awareness. What are some things that we would need to consider as we're teaching phonemic awareness in our classroom, if we have MLS as well.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, I think a huge thing here is that the phonemes right, the the the our phonemic awareness instruction focusing on that phoneme articulation and the sound spelling wall. I mean, that's that's huge. And what better way to, you know, help our students with the English language than to introduce them to the phonemes of the English language, and especially being aware of certain phonemes that they don't have in their home language, because those ones need, you know, extra attention. There's things like I was hearing another teacher talk about this. The shhh phoneme is very different, and she talks to her students about the you have, the that CH sound, and really needs to do a lot of work in helping them push that out, to turn it into that sh sound, so just things like that, and, you know, to be and the more we can do to kind of be aware of the sounds that are different, you know, the sounds that are in English that aren't in their

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, that's an excellent point. And you talked home language. about the sound spelling wall and starting with phoneme, not only recognition, but articulation. So as we're using Spanish as an example, there are, we have 15 shared phonemes with Spanish. By the way, they don't have nearly as many. Phonemes in their language. So as a teacher of someone who is speaking Spanish, then I can take a look at a phoneme inventory. We will leave you resources. One is mylanguages.org, color in Colorado is a great resource to help you know the differences for Spanish specifically, but they also have resources for other languages, but that would be an opportunity for a teacher to focus on the same phonemes you won't need to spend as much time on, but the phonemes they don't have in their language to really emphasize and lean into articulation as well. And Lindsay, you talked about it when you use the example, but I'm thinking too of maybe RS or LS, and in Spanish and English, they're pronounced a little differently. Donell, what would you add to that?

Donell Pons:

So I'm glad, Lindsay, that you answered this first, because it addresses the younger learner, and then I'm working mainly with older students now, and what do they need? The same things, which is, you know, something that they always come to me for help. And the thing they're lacking is that nobody backed up instruction far enough to give them the foundation. So they've been guessing from watching TV. They try to mimic. And this is really challenging. And many of them present to me. They'll even bring to show me a certificate that they graduated from another language program. There are many of them around. Maybe it was through work they were given this program. Said, I got a certificate. I still couldn't, I still couldn't do half of the things. How come? How come this happened? That's really interesting, and it'll it generally goes back down to same articulation. They weren't given that opportunity to really feel in their mouths where it would be. What are the sounds? What are the differences between a voiced and a voiceless? These things that are really important were lacking, and so it's just assumed, because you had that first primary language, that you understand all of that about your first language. Well, how many of us remember that about when we learned to speak right in the language, not many of us. So the assumptions that are made with older learners, I think, are interesting, and that's one caution I would give about the phonemic awareness and sounds, is not to assume too much about what you think an older student knows. Likewise, like you were saying, Stacy, is to piggyback on what they do know from that first language about the phonemes and phoneme production in the first language. Likewise, oftentimes my students haven't been asked, how was your acquisition of your first language? Did you have any challenges with the sounds? That's never, never asked a lot of times, and many of them say, yeah, the first language was hard for me. That was a tip off. Second language would need more support.

Stacy Hurst:

That's a really important point, because assessment is critical, and we need to have a sense of how they're doing in their first language compared to English. So with phonemic awareness, as long as they understand the task, you can test that using English words or words from their first language, but they need to understand the task so that doesn't require new materials or different materials, just making sure that they understand what's required of them, and importantly, phonics too, as we move into that discussion as well, how well they can connect those graphemes to the phonemes in their first language will help them in learning English as well. Lindsay, you were gonna say something, yeah?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, I was listening to this webinar with this high school teacher and Jess, she was just talking about that when she taught her MLL students, you know, the sound wall, they just she said their reading and writing took off, and she would give them little personal ones that they could take with them to other classes, right? And they were just like, oh, that's this, oh, this word is this has this side, you know, she was saying, like, it's a very, not berry, and would point that out to them. And talking about, you know, those upper, you know, the high school students have their phones so they record in a race. Record in the race, all the time, they record themselves saying the sounds. They get them out. They look at their mouth. And I just thought that's really cool. And I think a lot of the things we're going to be talking about today, we can, can think about how they can be applied. Right to your space, Donell, to the to the older learner, it's, it's almost some of the scaffolds and things we need to do, it's almost easier, I think, in the lower grades, because we're doing this a lot anyway, we're starting with the basics, you know. So I think it can be a little bit more complicated if you have an older student who is brand new to English,

Stacy Hurst:

yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out. And technology would actually be a plus in that space, because, like you said, Lindsay, they have, chances are, they have more interaction with technology and can use it. That's a good point, also a good time to remember that language development in the brain can always happen. We can always improve it, but we do have a window of opportunity developmentally speaking, and it is right those ages between kindergarten and second grade that it's going to be easier to teach these concepts, for students to learn these concepts than it will be later and to apply them. I also and

Donell Pons:

Stacy, no go ahead just just quickly to make sure in this space that when a student is working on sound production that it's never presented that you're doing it wrong or it's incorrect. That's another thing we need to be careful about. It's different, and maybe it might need a little tweaking so that the pronunciation is clear enough that I understand you. But this idea that it's wrong or incorrect or should be done differently because of that. I think we need to be careful in this space when we're doing that. Yeah,

Stacy Hurst:

and I think that's where understanding as much as you can, you don't need to be you don't need to learn another language, but understand the differences between the two languages. I think we talked about this yesterday when we were having an informal conversation. But if a student spells the word father fodder with a D, then we honor that in their language. In in Spanish, that is how they would pronounce that sound, because they don't have in their language. So we would say, Oh, you got all this sounds and and in English, this is how we spell it. And also really elevating those students because their brains are doing some really complex things that that most of our English language speakers, as a first language really aren't required to do their cognitive load, isn't as much. Great points. Also when we talk about phonemic awareness, of course, the whole reason we focus on phonemic awareness is to move a student toward towards being able to read and spell fluently. And one thing that I noticed when I was teaching English language development courses at my school, we could not use programs that focused on read, reading and writing. We had to only spoke, focus on speaking and listening. I can say this safely now, but I broke those rules. I did focus on reading and writing as well. So keep an eye out for that if you're required to use a program, you might need to supplement by focusing on that phonics piece. So what are some things that are good practices for any student when we're teaching phonics that would be specifically relevant for ml students?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Routines, routines, routines like, don't underestimate that power of consistency helpful for all students, but also especially helpful for students that may be experiencing some type of stress. Or, you know, some of our multilingual learners have migrated, and there's various reasons for that. They may have experienced political unrest in their country. You know, there's all these different things and having just this consistency where they know what's happening and where they go, I just think that, like, we just can't underestimate that.

Stacy Hurst:

That's fantastic. Yeah? Donell, yeah.

Donell Pons:

I was just thinking about it made me think about when I was trying to learn another language, and some of the situations I was placed in where it was that was not the way I was going to learn how to pick up that language. But it's also being familiar enough. Again, we don't have to be experts in their primary language of a student, if it's a language we're unfamiliar with, but just having a general idea that that language has order, it has rules. Just like what you're teaching the student about English, there's order, there are rules. And so if you can be familiar with some of the patterns, so that you can relate that for the student, because that's what we're going to be doing, is teaching them the patterns. And then we're going to clearly, we're going to be starting with those patterns that have a lot of consistency statistically in the language, and then we'll move towards, obviously, later, when the student has a foundation, we'll move towards those things that statistically aren't as frequent in the language, but it's that pattern based governing of how we put the phoneme and grapheme together. Yeah. All

Stacy Hurst:

brains are pattern seekers, right? Another important thing about English, compared to any other language, most any other language. And again, I'm anchoring things to Spanish. Today, they have 27 letters of their alphabet in Spanish, and we have 26 and most of those are the same that their difference is. They have, oh, I'm gonna and yay, I I'm I'm confident my high school Spanish teacher is not listening to me, but I pronounced that correctly. But also, some of the letters look the same. They're the same letters, but they represent different sounds in the language. But one thing that is, as we all know, complex about teaching phonics in English is that one letter can rep. Isn't multiple sounds. Multiple sounds can be spelled different way with many you know, have multiple spellings. So even explaining that explicitly to a student, I think would help, especially those students who come from more shallow orthographies compared to English, which is pretty complex in that way,

Donell Pons:

and Stacy, just recognizing that right there is so comforting, particularly to an older student. And I'm sure youngers would feel the same way too, but particularly older students who've lived maybe, you know, United States for a decade or more, and still struggle with these aspects. They feel like, what's wrong with me? How come I'm not able to get this? And you explain how difficult that is, when you lay out some of the basics of that, then there's a real understanding of Boy, this was really hard, and I didn't receive what I needed to be able to pick it up.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah. Another thing is to just make as many connections as you can. One fun fact, the letter Y in Spanish is called igriga, which means Greek i and when we teach the many jobs of y, as we call it, in the Reading Horizons method, and we teach how many sounds y can represent that will help them to remember that it can represent that I sound, I won't mention that they don't have the short I sound in Spanish. We won't address that right now, the other phonics aspect that I think of when I think of my ml students that I've had over the years is that Ed suffix and how to help them understand how to pronounce that is complex, but doable, right? And it's complex even for speakers of English, but those are things to really emphasize. Also, the way we assess, again, is important to know what they know in their first language compared to English. And you know what in I just I have this student, we assessed using Acadience, and this student was not a native English speaker. Her first language of Spanish, and she never came up at risk on that screener ever. When they did her language testing, they they found that she wasn't proficient enough in speaking and listening, so she ended up in my ELD class, which is how I noticed, as the literacy specialist at the school that she was not comprehending. She sounded Okay, she sounded fluent, she sounded like she was accurate, but she had no comprehension. So when we're assessing it's really important that we're being comprehensive about this assessment. We're assessing phonics. Yes, we need to know how they can map those phonemes to the graphemes, but we also need to check to see if they're comprehending. So that moves us into the next area I want to talk about, which is vocabulary, which is huge for MLS, right? So what kinds of things would you think we need to really emphasize with our ML students when we're teaching vocabulary, teaching anything really with vocabulary,

Lindsay Kemeny:

definitely pictures, right? The student friendly definitions. There's a website called wordsmyth and Smith is with a y, s, m, y, t, h, and they have, like, a visual picture dictionary. And I also like to use that website just when I need, like, I'm like, Okay, here's our vocabulary word. I need a simple definition for it. I can go to there and look it up, but they have a picture dictionary, which I think is great. And when you're teaching those words, if you do like, a lot of like, an action with the word kind of miming to help them understand, if you can connect that word with other words with similar meanings, that's going to help. I mean, this is going to help all your students, but it's especially important for those multilingual learners, and, oh, the academic vocabulary. So I saw a teacher that I thought was really great, because she had like the pictograms in her room, because they're going to hear some of that academic those terms over and over, like, explain, clarify, categorize, and she had up on her board, so she would have like The word clarify with an icon, like of classes, you know, explain, and it's like someone talking, you know, those terms that they're just going to see throughout their school experience.

Donell Pons:

I'm going to piggyback on Lindsay here, when I was working in classrooms where we had students, and this would be middle and high school settings, again, older students, and many of them would show up, you know, first of the year, or even mid year, and they had very little English. Many had very little English. And you think about right away, what are you trying to do for an older individual who also maybe comes to this country and they need English? They're thinking about work vocabulary, typically. Well, first. Students, it's school vocabulary. What do they need to function in a school? And so in a lot of those places, in the rooms, we would place labels that were if we had a majority of students with a particular language, then you would have it in that language, and then also English. But labeling things and pictures were often on things. If we were at that level, we were using pictures, but to get them familiar with just language within the classroom, because that could be really daunting for a student. And then I always like to remind instructors, because I had a bunch of individuals who were helping with reading and teaching English to a lot of students on the way to and from when you would go say you're going to go work with a group, and maybe you move the group from one location to another, or it's an individual student, and you're moving from one location to another. I said, use that as an opportunity to grow vocabulary. So you're touching the wall and you're repeating wall. The student would repeat wall. You're going to look at the floor, touch the floor. We would stairs, talk about stairs, anything we walked by. I also had somebody talk to me the other day, and I thought it was a fantastic idea. They're working in a high school where they have a high number of students who are learning English. Learning English, and they have students take the opportunity to talk to adults using their English. And so those students have, either you put a pass, you know they're learning English, there's a little sign so that they don't get called out. What are they doing in the hall? Why are they talking? It's like a little colored.so they know, oh, this student is learning English. And then they they encourage them, and they get so many points for having a trying to have an English conversation with an adult. So it'd be teacher administrator who's in the hall. That is a great idea, too.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, and providing a lot of opportunities for students to have those conversations. I think just oral language development in general, another thing in the way of vocabulary instruction is you want to well with anything. You want to provide students enough practice opportunities, and that includes speaking and listening, as well as reading and writing. So I think that's a really important thing to emphasize and and to provide opportunities for them to do that. One thing I know I tried to change in my practice, and if I'm this is a really good example of something that's good for native English speakers as well, but just answering in complete sentences, something that simple, requiring that of your students, what color is this picture or this object, instead of just saying blue, say that ball is blue, or, you know, and if the an English somebody's learning English, hesitates in being able to do that, then give them a stem, start them off. Say this ball is and they can say blue, and then have them repeat the sentence. So that helps build speaking and listening vocabulary, along with, like you talked about to Lindsay, academic vocabulary that they're more likely to see when they're reading and spelling. Good points. What else with vocabulary? Because vocabulary is big, what about in the way of morphology? I Okay, clearly, we have lots to say about that. So when we're talking about meaningful word parts and Donell, you brought I paused because you brought this up yesterday when we were talking, but cognates, right? There are 30 to 40% of all words in English have a related word in Spanish that is shared cognates. Yeah. So focusing on that another example that I I read about, for example, the prefix im means the same thing in English and Spanish. So just really focusing on those common parts of language, yeah, and I think that's

Donell Pons:

that's something that I think is surprising, too. And once you start to do a little more reading on teaching English and understanding other languages and their relationships and what's similar, what's different is that you understand there's a lot more shared about how we get to meaning of words in languages, rather than they are different, right? There's a major difference in that a lot of the our English words are not feminine and masculine, which some languages do have, right? And in fact, I find it oftentimes my students are greatly relieved, because they're like, Okay, I have to worry about that. That's pretty awesome. But then you introduce them to all the other things about English, so like, oh, maybe I'll take that back. Yeah, so, but it's those are kind of interesting points too, to have conversations with folks about shared understandings of language. Isn't this interesting? This is unique, isn't this this is different, yeah.

Stacy Hurst:

And I think having those conversations with, like you said, with our students too, because something like dialog may be interesting for them to understand as well, if they're probably most of their day is spent speaking and listening and interacting, basic interpersonal I forgot what we call them, BICS, basic interpersonal communication. But then you have the language of the classroom too, the academic side of it, which. With dialog, seeing that in print, also becoming familiar with differences in their language. In print, right like in Spanish, I'm thinking of the question mark that goes before the sentence and after, and one is upside down, and then they don't have quotation marks. They also mark dialog a little differently in Spanish, so when we're teaching, and I think I've moved us into the area of writing, but maybe syntax or semantics as well. Those are important things to know.

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Donell Pons:

and Stacy, you kind of, you're kind of touching on something Stanislaus Dehaene talked about. And we'll put a link to to this, because it's a free video on YouTube, which I think is amazing the reading League. It was where he spoke at a conference in San Diego, April 2024 it was really good, if you can't tell, I think it was amazing with the enthusiasm in my voice. But one of the things that Stanislaus talked about, and I thought it was really interesting, really interesting, is he said, there needs to always be careful guidance of the visual attention to how we read, also in whatever language it is. So it's pointing out to somebody who's learning English, the top to bottom, left to right, nature of how we read and how to carefully move through a sentence and pay and the things that are important, just like you're talking about, looking for that question mark at the beginning at the end might be in another language, but yet quotation marks are not but not, assuming that we know these road marks and making sure those are taught with intention like the other pieces are.

Stacy Hurst:

Oh, I love that. Something I wanted to mention as you were talking, brought to mind as well. I know when we have these kind of when we're focusing on students who are learning English, we expect them to be a year behind their peers at best, right? And I think we need to stop that. Lindsay gave a great session at a conference that I was able to listen to and having high expectations, not only for our students, but for our teaching and being able to support those differences, whether it is in print or speech and no we cannot accept like that year. Lag is not normal. Like that can't be normal. We can close the gap, especially easier to do if they're younger, right? But as we're talking about, focusing on things like syntax, which could keep a child back a student behind because it would interfere with their comprehension, right? If we're not attending to those things, so syntax becomes an important thing to address. And Donnell, I know you have taught a lot about syntax over the years, but I know it's different in in different languages. Have you had the opportunity to highlight that with your students?

Donell Pons:

Yeah, and in fact, we've, we've taken to using a sticky pad, little sticky notes in different colors to represent different parts of speech in a sentence, so that it's almost like being able to pull down a sort of representation of a sound when you're working on sound work with a student to have a visual representation, but you're also doing the same within a sentence to make sure the students understand the function of that word within a sentence and where it goes. This can be really great activity for students where the syntax is different. Oftentimes, maybe the action comes before the noun or the subject of the sentence. And so you when you have a color to represent, rather than a word, you can talk about, well, so this is the noun or the subject. It's going to be here, the action would come here. You can have a conversation. Oftentimes, that gives the older student and students of different ages an opportunity to not be concentrating on the words themselves, but rather the concept of what you're trying to teach them about how you order the word. So that's just a little thing we stick in, and then we'll move on to adding the word into that sentence, and build from there and doing simple sentences that just might have the subject, the verb, possibly an object, but that's a great way to break it down again. It's just like when you're teaching, reading down to the base concept and building from there

Lindsay Kemeny:

in one resource that's really that can help with. That is the syntax project. I think it's the syntax syntax project.org, I think. And it's really nice because it has these pictures for you and your. Kind of teaching them the basics of a sentence. So we start like, you know, first grade, it starts with a who and a do, and what's the who and what's the do, and then it will have just pictures there and the students, we determine together, what's the who, what's the do. And now put that in a sentence. And then after, you know, time with that, then you're going to add in a where, or, you know, a why. And so, you know, so I had a student last year who had just brand new to English. He hardly knew any English, and so he would go, like, if it was a picture of dog jumping. He would say, dog jump when it's time to put into a sentence. That's all he could do. And so I can go there, and I can model, and I can say, and have him echo the dog. And he would say, the dog is jumping. Is jumping, the dog is jumping, and then he could echo, the dog is jumping. So just like, break it down. Now some of your students, you might be able to, if they can't put it together in a sentence, you might be able to just say the whole sentence, and then they do it. But as an additional scaffold is to break it down the dog is jumping. And you can, you could add it on so you could go the dog, the dog is jumping, they echo, the dog is jumping over the fence. And gradually add a little bit more onto that sentence. So just thinking of those scaffolds that you know, this activity, like in my first grade, it's going to benefit everyone, but not everyone is going to need that level of support. So it's an activity that everyone can do, but you're giving more support and more scaffolds to the ones who need it,

Stacy Hurst:

and always with the focus on comprehending it right and helping in that way, I'm also thinking how awesome to start on that sentence level. And again, this is a great example, good for all learners. Even if you've been speaking English, it's helpful.

Donell Pons:

And you know, Stacy, this points out with Lindsay's example, the real challenge of the older student who comes to this country for whatever reason you're here, and maybe you have very little introduction to English, and you're in a middle school, right? So think about this is fantastic. Lindsay's talking about this great opportunity in a first place, first you know, grade classroom, but this student's sitting in a ninth grade English class. This is one of the things we do here to students that is really harsh, is they might get a little bit of time in a separate classroom, if they're lucky, to get some English introduction, but they're expected very quickly to then show up into a ninth grade English classroom. Wow, right. Think about that. Just we ask a lot. Yeah,

Stacy Hurst:

it's true. Is very true. What are some other ways? And probably this is the big emphasis at the end of the podcast episode here, what are other ways we can support comprehension for our ML students?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, I heard a term that was new to me, that I really liked text engineering. Have you guys heard that I really like that from text engineering and talked about, you don't always need to simplify the text, like, sometimes we talk about, oh, let's get a simpler version that has the same type of content. You don't always need to do that. You can engineer the text so you can chunk it, you can put it into little chunks, and you can embed pictures, like, if it's digital, right? I'm thinking of upper elementary too for that. But if you could have add in captions or visuals, you could have them listen if you're going to read a story, could they listen to the story in their home language before you read it in English? That would be really helpful, too. And, oh, I the idea I saw also with the text engineering that thought was neat. Let's say it's a nonfiction story or that they need to read. And you know how they have captions well before they read they would have them create questions based on the text features. So they would create those questions, and then when they read it, you know, their questions could be answered while they're reading it. So I just thought, I just thought it was neat. I hadn't heard of that before text engineering, and I just liked the idea of that. But just think about those texts. They're complex. What can you do to break it down and help what scaffolds can you help? You know, use to help that student understand it.

Stacy Hurst:

I love that.

Donell Pons:

It's so again, I'm going to hark back to that Stanislaus video, because it was so good, but so you'll really want to watch it on YouTube, is what I'm saying. But he talked about this too, which was really interesting. And he talked about the joint. Importance of decoding and comprehension. And he made a really interesting point. And again, this might be another discussion we could have for a podcast, because I think it would be very interesting, but on sort of a graph that he drew of the sort of optimal or you're having a good experience with with learning to read and write, he shows this graph, and he gives the first six months to a year of instruction to decoding, and yet he shows comprehension fanning over the entire graph. So that's how he overlays. So I'm giving his six months to a year to learn the decoding system, to get the patterns down, and then you're getting this entire lifetime of comprehension, which is really interesting. I thought it's interesting to think about. But then so, then you talk about, what about this individual who didn't learn to decode, that maybe they have dyslexia or whatever other reason, decoding was very challenging for them. They didn't get what they needed, and that you cannot make up for by pretending it's not there. In other words, you can't sit a student down in ninth grade with a ninth grade text and they have the reading capability of fifth grade and expect that that's going to turn out okay. And so he had an X mark through sitting down students with text they can't decode, because then they'll just guess and use all kinds of other unproductive right means in which to try to get to that text. So that means, like Lindsay's saying, all these other ways in which we help a student to be able to reach the demands of the text where they're at, while still ensuring that they have the ability that they're learning how to decode right and whether that takes, how much time that takes, depending on the challenge, we need to be aware of that. So that's what I think about in the middle and high school and adult space, is providing opportunities for individuals to meet the demands their literacy and comprehension demands where they're at while at the same time honoring their the desire and the need to still learn to decode so they can do that on their own. So that for me, in that older space, when you're talking about, hey, what can I do to support that's a lot of things, like immersive reader that Microsoft has these programs that I can either input the information that I would like read to me and with pictures to opportunity for vocabulary, to interact with vocabulary, so I can meet the demands of what's being asked of me while still honoring that. I would like to pick up decoding skills, and I can, as we know that I can, if I'm taught correctly, to be able to do that.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, and we can focus on that no matter if we're on the word level, if we're on the sentence level, if we're on the passage level. And I think thankfully, we do have technology that will help the teacher too. So if I'm teaching a word like cat to my students, just something even simple, then I could translate it into another language, and so they can make those connections. It does feed into that lexical quality idea. The more a student knows about the word, including the meaning, will help them to record, get it in their long term memory faster. So all of those things come into play there. And

Donell Pons:

you know, Stacy, you're talking about comprehension here. And I just have to add, because something has happened within the last few weeks in the evenings, my son has taken and mind you, he now reads really well. I think I've said before he has dyslexia, and boy, did that take years and years and years and years and years to be able to help him. But we finally got there, stumbling along because I didn't have the information I needed. So hopefully a lot of folks have what they need today. But one thing I think is really interesting is that he's been coming in regularly. Has a book he's really enthused about it's about screenwriting. He's really enjoyed it, and he is doing the thing that I did with him when he was young. I love seeing this when he was young, because he couldn't reach the text, but he had the ability to comprehend far better and and and to be able to get into a text and he could decode. And so we would read, he would do his own reading and practice, but then we would read a text of a higher level to him, and then have engaging conversation. I mean, since he was little, well, I've noticed that that's something he's he's now reverting back to, yes, he'll come in and read the text to me. And in fact, it was funny because he shared the book with me, and he says, I can see you're not going to reading this. So why don't I just start you off? So great. So he starts reading, and he does and it's beautiful, and he does his read, and then he'll stop and he'll do a little reflection. Well, what do you think about we have a nice conversation, and I realized we're doing exactly what we did when he was young, but he loved that, right? So if you really get a student into having comprehension and understanding that they can take a text apart, there's such joy there that will carry them, right?

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, as you were talking, it just made me think of the importance of, like Lindsay said at the beginning, procedures and routines and just being repetitive will be helpful. The other thing I think they will need just like because you're talking about your son who has dyslexia, but wait time becomes really important when we're asking a question or requiring a response of a student. I know that I learned things when I taught that ELD class, like my own enunciation, and I have a tendency sometimes to start talking really quickly, and I'm using a lot of hand motions, which could be distracting, so I consciously had to slow down when I was talking and making sure that I was very clear in the way I pronounce things, little things like that, will end up helping all of those processes. And I think the other thing I learned when I got my what was at the time, el endorsement is for any lesson you're teaching any lesson, have a language objective as well, and that would serve all of our students, right? And with structured literacy, thankfully, they always have a language objective, but to really focus on that and help bring that out in our ML students, I think would be so helpful. And then Lindsay, just to highlight this, just at the end of our podcast episode here, when you yesterday, when we were talking about this, you used the word celebrate. So I want you to say more about that.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah, I was just saying, I mean, this is really something to celebrate these students who have multiple languages. What an amazing advantage for them that's going to carry them and be so helpful throughout their lives. So I think, you know, our attitude towards it can be really positive, and let's really support, let's support the home language and in their learning English, because it's just, I mean, I just think it's amazing. And when I hear my students, you know, speak in another language, and then also hear them speaking in English, like I just, I marvel at it. I'm just, Oh, that's amazing, you know, I wish I could do that. So really, it's something to celebrate. And I think also we need to, you know, we want to create that in classroom environment, that positive, positive, welcoming environment, and by celebrating them, I saw a teacher that would hang the different flags from different students, country, you know, countries up. She had a map up in her room, and everyone got to put their name on the map. And I thought that was really neat, but, but don't draw attention to the student without, like, in front of everyone else. Like, be cautious of that, you know, unless they want to say something or talk about it. But I just think we can think a lot about also just being welcoming in our classrooms. And what can we do to show them that we celebrate them and we celebrate their culture, and this gift of language? Yeah, languages, culture,

Donell Pons:

and I would add to that, I appreciate and love what Lindsay said, and add the parents as well. And reassure the parents that that's fantastic that you are speaking multi languages, right? So obviously they're speaking another language at home, oftentimes with the student, and to make sure that they know that's okay, and you're, you're great with it. You think it's fantastic, and none of this, oh, dear, you're speaking too much of the other language that oftentimes might be, you know, some people, they have that idea, and it just isn't true, and making sure that we're not perpetuating that, because that really isn't true of acquiring another language and being supportive of the parents as

Stacy Hurst:

well. It's true. We get in. Some parents do feel like, Oh, I can't encourage our first language because they won't learn English and really helping them to understand that's not the case. So I'm having very fond memories of my time in first grade, and I had a student named Eduardo who is from Mexico, and his mother would visit Mexico frequently, and she'd always bring back games or candy or we always gave that air time in my classroom. And my students were actually learning Spanish, not formally, because I can only speak Spanish in the present tense, but we were learning vocabulary words in Spanish. And I remember, and you guys, I don't even know, maybe we edit this out, but when I was in high school Spanish, we started every class period by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. Why? I do not know. I feel like it's an interesting activity, but whatever. But I learned I can, to this day, with a high level of accuracy repeat the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. I will not do that because my pronunciation isn't great, but in my first grade classroom, whenever I wanted my students attention, sometimes I would just start reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. And it's amazing how many students will listen to you when they don't understand what you're saying, right? Like she's speaking a whole different language. Well, I remember the first time I did that, and Eduardo was working with a group of students, all of a sudden he pops up his head, hey, I know what you're saying. And all of my students were like, You do like, it was some very great thing. And I did, I celebrated that. Yes, he does. And. There goes my secret language, because Eduardo knows it. And so it became just a really cool thing in our classroom, and part of that culture too, he was able to bring it in. We talked about differences in holidays for his parents and grandparents and for him. So lots of great things to celebrate, lots of really great things that can be added to a classroom when you have students who have who are learning English as not their first language, right? So many great possibilities. So thank you today for our conversation. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you were just dying to say, no, okay, Donell and Lindsay are shaking their head no. So on that note, we will thank you again for joining us for this episode. Feel free to share with us any ideas that you have, anything that's worked for you with MLS, and then take advantage of all the resources that we're going to be listing in the show notes, because there are a lot of them for this episode, and we hope to see you on the next episode of Literacy Talks.

Narrator:

Thanks for joining us today. Literacy Talks comes to you from Reading Horizons, where reading momentum begins. Visit readinghorizons.com/literacytalks to access episodes and resources to support your journey in the science of reading.