Literacy Now

Teachers from kindergarten through high school work increasingly with students for whom English is a second or additional language. When it comes to learning, these students have all of the same needs as any other student but they must also learn English in both its spoken and written forms. Teaching English learning students, or ELs, has often been the responsibility of ESL (English as a second language) teachers or bilingual teachers. Even so, general education classroom teachers almost always see ELs for substantial parts of the school day, especially as their English language proficiency increases.

Do you work with students who speak other languages? In the United States, many teachers want to know “How can I make use of my students’ linguistic resources when I am unfamiliar with their languages?” New research and thinking about this question has resulted in a body of work that falls under the label of translanguaging. The foundational principle is that everything people know about language, regardless of how many they might speak, are part of only one language system. An important idea behind translanguaging is that the need to communicate pushes people to send and receive messages using all of the resources at their disposal (see García and Kleifgen, 2010).

García and Wei (2014) argue that teachers need not be bilingual to make use of translanguaging approaches to language and literacy learning. Canagarajah (2013) argues that what matters most is for teachers to help “students critically reflect on their choices through peer critique and intensive feedback.” For example, one of my doctoral students, Mark Pacheco (2015), has shown how a teacher who speaks only English worked with two Arabic-English speaking students who didn’t quite understand the difference between a pumpkin that was muddy and a pumpkin that was filled with mud. The students translated their understanding into Arabic and then explained their work. The teacher provided more information in English and the students revised their Arabic. Their negotiated understanding resulted in students’ increased knowledge of English and better comprehension.

Other important examples of translanguaging teaching can be found in the work of Jim Cummins (2007), who suggests that bilingual students use both their languages to write what he calls identity texts. Cummins shows that students with very limited knowledge of English meaningfully engaged in writing in both English and their first language. Borrero (2011) designed a program in which students were taught how to translate school documents for their parents. As a result, these students made gains in their English reading comprehension. My colleagues and I (Jiménez et al., 2015) have showed that middle-school students who translated carefully selected portions of English language text gained deeper understandings of their first language and English. This understanding, called metalinguistic awareness, has been linked to higher levels of reading comprehension.

Finally, we are finding that local teachers in the Nashville, TN, area have lots of ideas concerning how to better incorporate their students’ languages into their literacy instruction. One teacher shared a questionnaire he created in which he asked high school students to identify one part of an English language text that they found particularly difficult to translate. He also asked them to explain how they translated that part of the text. Students’ comments on these two items have helped us to better understand what happens when they translanguage. Second- and third-grade teachers have explained to us how translanguaging activities can be incorporated into their daily schedules as part of literacy instruction.

Robert Jiménez received his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was previously a faculty member at the University of Oregon and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches courses in research methods, second language literacy, and issues related to the education of Latino/Latina students in the Peabody School at Vanderbilt University.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

In early July, Peter Freebody and Peter Johnston wrote the first in a series of blogs on how practicing professionals in literacy might think about research and its implications. They focused primarily on a category of research that is familiar to most people—controlled studies intended to test theories and to answer questions such as “What works?” and “Which works best?” This is the sort of research most frequently invoked to inform policies and instruction.

Often left out of conversations on “what research says” are studies that dig deeper into school and classroom ecologies and into the lives of students, their families, and communities. Much of this research is qualitative in nature, relying not on statistics, but on methods such as talking and listening to participants and observing them over time in the contexts of teaching and learning. The purpose of this research is not to make claims about what works best, but instead illuminate the complexities of participants’ experiences in ways that are not possible to understand in studies using only fixed, controlled variables.

Good examples of what we can learn from broadening our sense of what “research says” can be found in research on adolescent literacy from the past few decades.  Before the 1990s, most studies of adolescents focused narrowly on the problems associated with textbook reading across the curriculum and were driven by theories assuming that problems were the product of individual cognitive deficiencies and poor texts. However, secondary content area teachers were still not likely to infuse teaching strategies that emanated from this research in the years following its dissemination (O’Brien, Stewart, & Moje, 1995).  

Subsequent qualitative studies examining the broader social, cultural, and political influences on adolescent literacy and exploring the multiple dimensions of students’ lives and literate practices help us see the limitations of narrowing our attention to cognitive processes and conventional school reading. In short, students’ literate experiences are constructed by the texts and tasks they encounter, their identities as readers and people—shaped by school, culture, and society—and their reasons for engaging in literate activity, among other factors. In other words, simple strategies for improving text comprehension that ignore these complexities would be wholly inadequate. Consequently, if you believe, for instance, that a procedure for teaching close reading you have been instructed to use is not having the promised effect, you might consult some of these studies (e.g., Moje, Dillon, & O’Brien, 2000) investigating the social and cultural complexities of adolescents’ lives for perspectives on why. 

Related studies like these, particularly those exploring literate practices out of school and in digital environments (e.g., Black, 2009; Leander & Lovvorn, 2006), reveal adolescents using sophisticated strategies, developing positive identities, engaging with others around complex tasks, and experiencing a sense of agency in literate practices that matter to them within these other spaces despite being viewed in school as marginally engaged or competent. Studies like these and others that uncover the range of positive consequences for students when they are engaged in literacy, such as shifts in moral, social, and personal development (e.g., Ivey & Johnston, 2013), also might inspire conversations in schools about whether we should be satisfied with conventional outcomes, such as demonstrating competence in informational reading as measured by a standardized test.

As Freebody and Johnston noted in their post, “The function of research in education is to help us understand what we are doing in new ways, to develop better explanations (Deutsch, 2011), to approach our teaching practice with the new eyes provided by better theories about what we do.”

Gay Ivey, PhD, is the Tashia F. Morgridge Chair in Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is vice president-elect of the Literacy Research Association and a member of the ILA Literacy Research Panel. Peter Johnston, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Albany-SUNY. He is a member of the ILA Literacy Research Panel.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

There is a vast body of research on literacy teaching and learning, and classroom practice is supposed to be informed by that research. Although there is little support for doing so, teachers and administrators are supposed to decide how research applies in their context and whether their use of research is appropriate. Because research is a social practice, something that people do, even people who do research will make different decisions on these matters. They gather, analyze, and make sense of data and its significance in particular social contexts. Forms of monitoring, assessment, and judgment are inherent parts of this process.

Among researchers there is disagreement about the nature of research, the relationships between research and practice, and even what they think they are researching—the nature of literacy, learning, and teaching. Consequently, it is not uncommon for one researcher to assert that “research says” and another to counter with a different assertion.

Does this mean that research is unhelpful to practicing professionals? Not at all. However, we do think that those charged with making use of (and doing) research in schools—teachers and administrators—could use some help in thinking through the problems that face them. Consequently, this is the first in a series of blogs intended to stimulate conversations we hope might help make sense of these responsibilities

A first step might be to think critically about what we can and cannot learn from research —how to think critically about “research says.” We will do this in part by providing reminders of important concepts and distinctions. For example, it’s important to remember that when a study shows that a group of students improved as a result of instruction, normally it means that they improved on average, not that each student improved.

Thinking through an example of literacy research

In order to understand the value of illustrations in books for beginning readers, Susanna Torcasio and John Sweller (2010) conducted three experiments, each with about twenty 5- to 7-year-old students from schools in “Metropolitan Sydney.” All of the students were classified by their teachers as “beginning readers.” Torcasio and Sweller’s interest was whether illustrations helped or hindered in these early stages of learning to read. Students spent time each day over the course of the experiment with a researcher, who assessed their reading of individual words from the texts provided, sentences from the texts, and new sentences that contained some words form the original texts. The three experiments contrasted the effects on these reading assessments of students’ reading of texts without pictures and texts with pictures that were informative and texts with pictures that were uninformative (did not help make sense of the text).

Torcasio and Sweller summarized their conclusions like this:

While we have no direct evidence that the effects were caused by cognitive load factors, the experiment and hypotheses were generated by the cognitive architecture described above…. The obvious practical implication that flows from the current experiments is that informative illustrations should be eliminated from texts intended to assist children in learning to read…. Of course, these results should not be interpreted as indicating that the use of informative pictures can never be beneficial. (p. 671, emphases added)

What can early-years teachers learn from this? What issues might they raise concerning the credibility and usefulness of this carefully conducted and strongly theorized study?

Breaking down the results

First, many studies have highlighted the cultural, linguistic, and literate diversity of youngsters entering schools in developed countries. Metropolitan Sydney certainly reflects extreme levels of diversity on most counts, diversities that we might consider highly consequential not only for the level of reading but also for the particular kinds of literacy strengths and challenges that any given 5- to 7-year-old student would bring to school. But in this study, students are to represent the generic ‘beginning reader’ regardless of this diversity. Early-years teachers might begin to worry about the direct applicability of the findings to their particular setting.

Second, each treatment grouping within each experiment consisted of 11 or 12 students, and those “beginning-level” students were allocated to each grouping according to a further reading-ability ‘sub-grouping’ based on three levels (“As far as numerically possible, each group had an equal number of children from each of the three sub-groups.” p. 663). This does not tell us what kinds of strengths and challenges these three or four students brought to each study, but it does alert us to the fact that these further sub-groupings were seen to be a necessary factor to be balanced in the research design, and that the researchers considered that three or four students could provide that balance. Statistically, this small number does not allow any reliable conclusions to be drawn about this factor, so it is not surprising that the analyses do not break the results down to explore the performance levels of these sub-groupings. Practically, the doubts of our early-years teachers might be deepening. For what kinds of learners might these findings be directly relevant, and for what kinds might the “elimination” of pictures be counterproductive, and over what time frames might these become consequential?

Third, each experiment lasted 10 days, and students spent 5–10 minutes per day with the researcher. Early-years teachers spend about 180-200 days a year and maybe 50 minutes a day on reading and writing activities, and they use texts that include a range of pictures, some informative and some uninformative (in the researchers’ terms) and some that are merely used to interest and amuse young learners to strengthen their engagement with the strictly word-reading aspects of the work. This amounts to a 10,000-minute program intended to connect directly to the expectations concerning the use of reading materials in the years ahead and will have both intended and unintended consequences for students’ learning in school generally.

Fourth, the significant findings supporting the conclusions were associated with effect sizes ranging from .23 to .45 (median about .31). These moderate effect sizes are partly a result of the small number of students participating in the study, because the differences in mean scores are generally strong. Nonetheless, there were some students whose patterns of performance did not match the general trends, and from an educator’s point of view, this must raise some important questions: Who were those students? What aspects of the study’s procedures might have lessened their “distracting” attention to the pictures, or not? For whom was it too short a period each day, or overall?

Considering the implications

How should we weigh these issues against the findings for classroom practice? Should we implement the intervention as described? We know that in a particular context, the intervention “worked” to increase average performance on a certain measure. However, there are many things we don’t know and must make decisions about. Improvement on average is not the same as improvement for each student. How do we value these measures in the larger context of our efforts? How did the intervention affect students’ other reading and writing work?

In light of the challenges facing literacy educators, more of the same is not an option—moving on is necessary rather than optional. We believe that improving our literacy education efforts relies crucially on our ability to conduct and apply findings from systematic, well-conducted research, skillfully and knowingly applied in a range of settings. The function of research in education is to help us understand what we are doing in new ways, to develop better explanations (Deutsch, 2011), to approach our teaching practice with the new eyes provided by better theories about what we do. This is the promise of research: to build up the coherence of our understanding of the contexts in which certain practices, under certain local conditions, will lead to better outcomes (Pawson, 2013)—in our case, in the ecologies of schooling.

Peter Freebody, PhD, is Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney and the University of Wollongong. He is a member of the ILA Literacy Research Panel. Peter Johnston, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at the University at Albany-SUNY. He is a member of the ILA Literacy Research Panel.The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

This post continues a rebuttal to the claim from a recent report that “To achieve them [the CCSS for kindergarten] usually calls for long hours of drill and worksheets—and reduces other vital areas of learning such as math, science, social studies, art, music and creative play” (p. 6). In the previous post, I discussed one of six example standards listed after this claim. In this post, I discuss the remaining standards.

Print Concepts CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1.D: Recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet.

Being able to recognize and name alphabet letters has long been a focus of kindergarten. There are many ways to develop this knowledge with neither drill nor worksheets. Many teachers use children’s names as a tool for developing alphabet knowledge, so, for example, during morning meeting children learn that J is for Jamal, A is for Ava, and so on. Some teachers engage children in making personalized alphabet books, so that they associate each letter-sound with a word that is personally meaningful to them. For my son, D was for Dinosaur. There are many games, both online and off, that can develop and reinforce alphabet knowledge. A puppet, for example, might only want objects that begin with a certain letter. Piasta (2014) emphasizes that alphabet instruction can be differentiated so that children are learning in small groups about the particular letters they don’t yet know (which varies from child to child).

Phonics and Word Recognition CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.B: Associate the long and short sounds with common spellings (graphemes) for the five major vowels.

Research supports being explicit with children: Sometimes this letter stands for the /ā/ sound, and sometimes it makes the /ă/ sound. Children and teacher can think of words with each of those sounds, stretching the sound as needed to support children. As children gain skill, we can sort pictures or objects on the basis of whether we hear the /ā/ or /ă/ at the beginning. Songs such as Apples and Bananas can reinforce the distinction among vowel sounds. Video clips from PBS programs such as Between the Lions and SuperWHY! can be helpful as well. Another tool that research supports involves drawing around the letter in a way that cues its sound (Ehri, Deffner, & Wilce, 1984). For example, lower case o has a picture of an octopus drawn around it. Writing provides a powerful tool for literacy development in kindergarten (Ouellette & Sénéchal, 2010). As children seek to write messages that are meaningful to them, they listen for sounds and words and think about which letters could represent those sounds. Children can be supported in this during interactive writing (Craig, 2003) and also during play. For example, in the housekeeping center the teacher can leave out paper and pen for children to write a grocery list; as children build block structures in a block center, the teacher can help them label their structures, listening for the vowel and other sounds within the words and representing them with letters.

What if a child doesn’t quite master the long and short vowel sounds by the end of K? There is actually an often-overlooked note on both pages of the Foundational Skills standards that states, “Note: In kindergarten children are expected to demonstrate increasing awareness and competence in the areas that follow,” providing some flexibility. By the end of first grade, children are expected to decode regularly spelled, one-syllable words, which provides additional opportunity to reinforce knowledge of short-vowel sounds and their associated letters. 

With these standards we again see that neither drill nor worksheets is needed, or advised to address the CCSS. Put another way, the CCSS are no excuse for those developmentally inappropriate practices.

Here, also, are my brief responses to the remaining three standards listed in the report.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.9: With prompting and support, identify basic similarities in and differences between two texts on the same topic (e.g., in illustrations, descriptions, or procedures).

This is another standard that should in no way be addressed with drills or worksheets. A popular way to address this standard is to read aloud multiple texts on the same topic and lead children in a discussion of their similarities and differences. For example, the teacher might read aloud two books about the life cycle of butterflies and lead a discussion of what is similar and different in the two texts. Some teachers use hula hoops to make a Venn diagram on the floor, place a copy of the book at the top of each hoop, and then work with children to generate and then place sentence strips with the diagram. For example, children might decide that “has drawings,” goes in one circle, “has photographs” goes in the other circle, and “has pictures” goes in the middle. Note that the texts in this example are on a science topic and could be accompanied by the opportunity for students to watch live butterflies go through a life cycle, engage in artwork inspired by butterflies, write their own books about butterflies, and so on, again contradicting the claim that the CCSS necessarily reduce attention to science and other vital areas of learning.

Research to Build and Present Knowledge CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.K.7: Participate in shared research and writing projects.

Drills and worksheets have no place in shared research and writing projects. In contrast, an example of a shared research and writing project for informational writing is children listening to texts read aloud and watching videos about penguins and then writing a class book about penguins, with each child contributing a page to the book with something interesting or important the child has learned about penguins. For narrative writing, an example of a shared research and writing project involves children taking a field trip and then writing a book about it for their families, drawing on their experiences during the field trip and with the materials (e.g., brochures, maps) they gathered there. Again, consider the possibilities for involvement of vital areas of learning beyond literacy alone.

Vocabulary Acquisition and Use CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.4.B: Use the most frequently occurring inflections and affixes (e.g., -ed, -s, re-, un-, pre-, -ful, -less) as a clue to the meaning of an unknown word.

Role-play can offer a powerful way to address this standard, from the Language strand of the CCSS. The teacher might start by presenting a word pair, for example, spot and spotless. and discussing the meaning of the affix. Then, children would have the opportunity to act out other pairs, for example, first pretending to feel fear and then pretending to be fearless, first creating a classroom full of noise, then creating a classroom that is noiseless. In my experience, young children delight in this kind of activity and grow in their interest in words.

Nell K. Duke is a professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Michigan, a member of the ILA Literacy Research Panel, and author of Inside Information: Developing Powerful Readers and Writers of Informational Text Through Project-Based Instruction.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

In a recent report, three scholars critique the Common Core State Standards for kindergarten. In a two-part blog post, I will focus on one particularly problematic claim in the report. In a box called “Kindergarten has become the New First Grade: Examples from Common Core,” the authors write, “To achieve them [the CCSS for kindergarten] usually calls for long hours of drill and worksheets—and reduces other vital areas of learning such as math, science, social studies, art, music and creative play” (p. 6). The authors go on to list six example standards in the CCSS literacy standards for kindergarten. I believe each standard can be addressed through instruction that involves neither long hours of drill nor worksheets and incorporates other vital areas of learning as well.

The first example standard the authors list is

Fluency CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.4: Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.

Many people have interpreted this standard to mean that children are expected to read by the end of kindergarten. What it actually says is that children are expected to read emergent-reader texts, which is rather different from “reading” as many people understand it. Appendix A of the CCSS defines in its glossary emergent-reader texts as “Texts consisting of short sentences comprised of learned sight words[¹ ] and CVC[²] words; may also include rebuses to represent words that cannot yet be decoded or recognized; see also rebus” (p. 42). An example of an emergent-reader text from TextProject is Buns and Jam. The cover has a photograph of two buns and a bowl of jam along with the title. (Note that in emergent book-reading assessments, teachers are typically expected to read the title to children.) Page one has a photo of buns and the word buns. Page two has a photo of jam and the word jam. The third and final page has a photo of buns with jam on them and reads, “Jam on buns. Yum!”

A more challenging emergent-reader text is Sit by Tom Beedy. Along with the title, the cover has a photo of a hen sitting on eggs. The first page shows a photo of an owl in a tree and reads, “It can sit in a tree.” The word tree has a drawing of a tree above it (a rebus; some books have so much support in the main picture or photo that it might be seen as acting as a rebus, leading more texts to be counted as emergent-reader texts by the CCSS definition). The next page shows a photo of a joey in his or her mother kangaroo’s pouch and reads, “It can sit in Mom.” Notably, this and the other emergent-reader text I described are much less challenging than what we have historically expected children to read by the end of first grade—books such as Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik, for example—contradicting the report’s claim that “Kindergarten has become the New First Grade.”

Not surprisingly, the most straightforward way to help children learn to read emergent-reader texts is to read such books with children. The teacher points to words as he or she reads them to show children that we read from left to right and word by word (Zucker, Ward, & Justice, 2009). Children and teachers discuss the photographs or illustrations in the book, which are often of high interest, building observation skills (Roberts et al., 2013). The teacher demonstrates how to look at each letter, consider the sound associated with that letter, and blend those sounds together to make words; she or he prompts children to use the letters to identify words (Scanlon, Anderson, & Sweeney, 2010). For example, a child who reads “It is a mouse” for “It is a rat” might be coached to look at the first letter and then subsequent letters in the word and try again. The teacher may read the book several times and then provide opportunities for children to do the same, to increase familiarity with the words within.

Neither long hours of drill nor worksheets are needed—or even are effective—at addressing this standard. And emergent-reader texts can be selected that coordinate with the science or social studies curriculum (e.g., using Sit, described above, in a study of animal habitats or a book about jobs for a community helpers unit).

In the second installment of my post, I will discuss ways to address the other five example standards in this section of the report, again demonstrating that neither long hours of drill nor worksheets are needed.

Nell K. Duke is a professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Michigan, a member of the ILA Literacy Research Panel, and author of Inside information: Developing powerful readers and writers of informational text through project-based instruction.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.