All students deserve the chance to achieve literacy, but no two come from the same background. Recently, in part one of a three-part IMSE webinar series on classroom strategies for teaching multilingual learners, IMSE literacy specialist Nicole Florez shared insights and best practices for helping ELs add to their language skills. As only 3% of U.S. teachers1 are certified to teach ELs (but a much higher percentage expected to teach them), the webinar, “English Language Learners: Strategies to Support and Enhance Their Classroom Experiences,” could be an invaluable source of guidance for schools and districts around the country. 

With over 25 years of classroom teaching experience in elementary schools, including schools in Spain and Argentina, and a foundation of expertise in Structured Literacy and the science of reading, Nicole is the ideal expert to lead the EL webinar series. In part one, she describes the scope of the need for EL-informed teaching, discusses current research on multilingual learners, and shares several shifts teachers can make to empower their linguistically diverse students.

 

“Learning to read should not depend on your zip code or your family’s income…I want this series to be a resource for all the educators out there who are working so hard to offer literacy to every one of their students.”

 

—Nicole Florez

 

These shifts have never been more important. As Nicole mentions, the Institute for Education Science and the National Center for Education Statistics estimate that five million U.S. students are growing up in households where English is a second language or not spoken at all. Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau has found that ELs are the fastest-growing student population in the country.

Patterns in the Research


Nicole opens her presentation by pointing out landmarks in literacy research and explaining the common themes running through them. As she says, understanding the science around how students learn to read will allow literacy teachers to unearth proven strategies that optimize the student success rate. 

Several major reading panels convened over the years to guide literacy instruction have created reports emphasizing the importance of the five core components of reading: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. This finding holds true for native English speakers and language-minority students alike. Subsequent research has found promise in other strategies such as visual and verbal supports, peer-assisted learning, literacy screening, small-group instruction, and academic vocabulary exercises.

Nicole summarizes this body of research in three key points:

  1. Students’ home language matters.
  2. Educators should promote the learning of content and language simultaneously.
  3. It’s important to value and maximize students’ existing language skills.


Recommendations for Teachers


In part one of the webinar, Nicole focuses on accomplishing the simultaneous learning of content and language. Teachers know that the acquisition of language is a vital process for ELs, but Nicole cautions that this should not come at the expense of content. These students, after all, have advanced linguistic abilities and plenty of background knowledge, so their best chance of success comes from not only decoding words but also comprehending them. 

To help balance these two priorities in the classroom, Nicole makes several recommendations, including but not limited to these:

  1. Create routines to reduce students’ mental load and allow them to focus on content rather than use mental energy to decipher steps, instructions, and expectations. Routines help build confidence and will support a more successful navigation of the school day. Examples of helpful routines include explicit vocabulary instruction, systematic phonics instruction and review, and activity repetition.
  2. Incorporate visual elements and gestures in lessons. This enhances comprehension by activating background knowledge and gives students a better chance to engage in the learning process. Without visual elements, students working to acquire English may not have access to grade-level content. With visuals, they can make more connections and fully use their knowledge to participate in classroom lessons.
  3. Implement a repeated practice approach. Nicole recommends a lesson format that includes preview, review, consolidation, and summarizing stages. These stages provide students time to connect content to what they already know, formulate thoughts about it, and have opportunities to review with a partner. This will give them more confidence during the lesson, as they’ve had the time and space to activate and prepare their thinking.

With so many linguistically diverse students in need of effective reading instruction, implementing the advice that Nicole offers in the webinar series will make a big difference for educators who want to apply evidence-based Structured Literacy in their schools.

For many other tools and strategies, and more details about the topics mentioned here, watch the entire IMSE Linguistically Diverse Students webinar series: 


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Reference

1 Rahman, T., Fox, M. A., Ikoma, S., & Gray, L. (2017). Certification status and experience of U.S. public school teachers: Variation across student subgroups. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.