Sixty years ago it was defined as "reading means getting meaning from certain combinations of letters. Teach the child what each letter stands for and he can read. Phonics is taught to the child letter by letter and sound by sound until he knows it- and when he knows it he knows how to read" (Farr and Roser 1979, 13,referring to a definition of literacy)
If this was the case, it sure would be easy to teach children how to read by teaching them the letters and the sounds they make. The definition is only referred to reading at the time and it has nothing to do with comprehension. So as teachers, we have to do our best to help the student "learn to read" then transition them to "read to learn". Comprehension is hard and complicated for ELLs becasuse they must learn the academic language first before anything else can be done with literacy.
Today literacy involves reading, speaking, and writing. It does not involve only learning phonics and segmenting but it involves understanding all text from all subjects.
We experienced the same thing that ELLs deal with on a daily basis. We have read three articles and I for one did not understand it the first and even the second time I read them. We found that the text were difficult and the reason is that we are not familiar with the "reading and writing in this field". Our textbooks in the classroom are unfamiliar to our students especially ELLs. So our students need to do what we did - "literate talk". Have the students talk or have discussions to understand the text being used in the classroom. We need to give our students "opportunities to read, reason, investigate, speak, and write about the overarching concepts within that discipline."
Contextual Factors need to be used for ELLs:
- Field - topic of the text
- Tenor - the relationship between speaker and listener or writer and reader
- Mode - the channel of communication, whether it is spoken or written
Students will learn to use different kinds of languages to become literate in different subjects by using prior knowledge and scaffolding.
Amy Benjamin in her book "But, Iam not a reading teacher" suggests scaffolding approach when dealing with ELL students. She defined scaffolding as “Scaffolding is a learning support system of some kind that brings the students far enough along that they can complete the rest of tasks themselves”. Amy also mentioned that “Another tenet of scaffolding is that we absorb only so much information at a time, and then we need to process it before we are ready to learn any more information”. In other words, we should not overwhelm the students with lots of information since their ability to digest and acquire the knowledge is incremental. She suggested for any teacher to communicate with the ELL teacher, build a website so the ELL teacher access the class activities, provide word clusters of key words, offer extended time, and teach english words components. I hope this info will help.
ReplyDeleteWhen i first started reading your blog, I was saying to myself "what in the heck is an ELL". This is a term that i have never heard before, it sure isn't in the book that i am reading right now! One important statement that you stated is that teachers have to teach students "learn to read" and then transition them to "read to learn". I believe this is a concept that a lot of teacher are missing out on because we are way to focused on teaching our students according to the standardize testing! Which is sad and it really needs to change!
ReplyDeleteI really liked this line you wrote, "So as teachers, we have to do our best to help the student "learn to read" then transition them to "read to learn". Comprehension is hard and complicated for ELLs becasuse they must learn the academic language first before anything else can be done with literacy."
ReplyDeleteYou are so right! ELLs have an extremely difficult time with this transition. Plus, like you said academic language is very different from basic of learning another language like in the processes of learning to read. I am working at an ESL Summer Institute now and I see children struggling to read, let alone reading from the texts they will given in August by their teachers.