General Opening Session
a
Building Biliteracy Instruction,
Programs, and Services
Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, Ed.D.
Director, Valley Speech Language and
Learning Center, Brownsville, TX
July 27, 2015
relsouthwest.sedl.org | @RELSouthwest
This presentation was prepared under Contract ED-IES-12-C-0012 by Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest, administered by SEDL.
The content of the presentation does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of IES or the U.S. Department of Education, nor does mention of
trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
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Agenda
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Introduction
Demographics of ELs
Literacy Development among ELs
Instructional Considerations
Intervention Studies
Oracy and Vocabulary Development for ELs
• Closing
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The Need
• English learners are fastest-growing school population
• Represent 400 different home languages
• Significant achievement gap between English learners
and monolingual English speakers
• Must meet Common Core State Standards
• College and career readiness
• Educated workforce
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Second Language Literacy
• Developing oracy and literacy
in a second language is not
a simple task
• Students are often required to
– Develop conversational and basic reading skills
at the same time
– Quickly develop oral and written academic
language skills to facilitate learning in all content
areas
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Degree of Transferability
Depends upon
• Proficiency of native
language skills
• Degree of overlap in the oral
and written characteristics of
the native and second language
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Alphabetic Languages
• Use symbols (an alphabet)
to represent sounds in
speech and print
• Individual sounds, when
printed, are represented
by individual letters,
combinations of letters
• Examples: English, Spanish, Russian
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Alphabetic Language Orthographies
Alphabetic languages differ in the number
of ways to present a single sound in print.
Transparent
Opaque
• Languages that allow for fewer
such mappings
• One sound can be represented
in many ways
• More one-to-one mapping
of symbols to sounds
• One letter or letter combination can
be used to represent several sounds
• Examples: Spanish, Russian
• Example: English
• “ee”, “ei”, and “ea” in need, receive,
and read
• letter a – father, apple, name, banana
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Alphabetic Language − Reading
• Phonological awareness and phonics
are important skills that support the
development of word recognition skills.
• Phonological awareness is positively
correlated across many languages, and
the skills in this domain are similar
across alphabetic languages (to varying
degrees).
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What We Know
• English learners need explicit, early, and
intensive instruction in phonological awareness
to build decoding skills.
– Roughly equal numbers of native and non-native
English speakers encounter difficulties with word
decoding.
– Many English learners develop word decoding
skills equal to those of their peers in early
elementary years.
(Rivera et.al, 2008)
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Five Core Areas of Literacy Instruction
Important for non-English learners and English
learners:
• Phonological awareness
• Phonics (graphophonemic
knowledge)
• Fluency
• Vocabulary
• Comprehension
(August et.al, 2006)
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What We Know
• English learners’ early graphophonemic skills (that is,
letter-sound correspondence and word reading) are
often more developed than higher-order skills, such
as spelling.
• Students who have difficulty developing phonics skills
require extra instruction and support in this area.
• English learners with very early English-language
skills will benefit from phonics instruction.
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Relationship Between Early Spanish and
English Skills
.92
Spanish
PA
.74
English
PA
.69
.68
.65
Spanish
Word
Reading
English
Word
Reading
.74
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Connections from Spanish to English
By the Numbers:
• 60 percent of English language is derived from Latin
• 30 percent of these words share cognates
• 29 sounds in Spanish
• 44 sounds in English
• 19 letter/sound correlations are direct transfers
• 6 letter/sound correlations are partial transfers
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Connections from Spanish to English
 Students need explicit
instruction in the connections.
 Teachers should have
knowledge of the transfer
points.
 Interventions should match
language of instruction model.
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Unique English Elements
• Provide additional structured instruction on
elements known to be unique to English and
not part of the student’s native language
– Draw attention to unique elements and provide
additional practice and application
– Provide speech training for students who are unable
to produce certain sounds in the English language
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Fitting Pieces to the Puzzle
• Capitalize on familiar letter-sound
associations (for example, those
with complete/partial overlap in
Spanish and English)
• Explicitly teach unfamiliar letter-sound associations
• Explicitly teach unfamiliar letter-based phonemes
• Explicitly teach phonemes that do not exist in
Spanish
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Why Teach Phonemes?
Questions for discussion in table groups and chat pods:
• What English phonemes do not exist in Spanish?
• Why is it important to teach these phonemes?
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Because . . . Instructional Considerations
• Unfamiliar phonemes and graphemes make decoding
and spelling difficult
– Important to familiarize students with patterns that do not
exist in their native language but do in English
• Specific sounds and sound placement in words differ
for different languages
– Helping students hear English sounds that do not exist or
are not salient in their native language is beneficial
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Intervention Studies:
English Learners
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Preventing Reading Difficulties Among
Spanish-Speaking Students
• Interventions
• Lesson cycle
• Daily lessons
(Vaughn, et al., 2006)
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Instructional Design – Integrated Strands
Vocabulary and Concept Knowledge
Encoding
Phonemic Awareness
Letter-Sound Recognition
Word Recognition
Repeated Connected Text Reading
Comprehension Strategies
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Results for Interventions
• Statistically significant differences in favor of Spanish
Intervention treatment group for outcomes in
Spanish.
Time x Treatment
• Statistically significant differences in favor of English
Intervention treatment group for outcomes in English.
Time x Treatment
(Vaughn, et al., 2006)
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What We Learned: Instruction for At-Risk Readers
• Best Practices for English learners
• All new information is modeled (Model – Lead – Test)
• Repetitive language and instructional routines
• Students read, write, and practice new skills
• Students develop oral language and literacy
• Time to dialog with teachers and one another
• Modeling and mentoring
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Oracy Development for English Learners:
Read Aloud / Story Retell Procedure
• Elements of the procedure
• Selection of vocabulary words
• Questions that guide vocabulary selection
• Selection of text and read-aloud passages
(Hickman et.al, 2004)
See handout
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Successful Vocabulary Instruction
Steps for Explicit Instruction
• Say and write the word
• Provide definitions (with familiar terms)
• Discuss what is known about the word
• Provide examples (and non-examples)
• Engage in extended discussions/activities
with the word
• Create sentences with the word
(August, et al., 2009)
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Successful Vocabulary Instruction: Example
Steps for Explicit Instruction
• Say and write the word:
– delicious
gigantic
content
• Provide definitions (with familiar terms):
– Delicious means something tastes very good.
– Gigantic means something or someone is very big.
– Content means happy.
(August, et al., 2009)
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Successful Vocabulary Instruction: Example
Steps for Explicit Instruction (cont.)
• Discuss what is known about the word
• Provide examples (and non-examples)
• Engage in extended discussions/activities with the word
• Create sentences with the word
(August, et al., 2009)
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Delicious
Example
Non- Example
(Cardenas-Hagan, 2015)
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Gigantic
Examples
Non-Examples
(Cardenas-Hagan, 2015)
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Content
Example
Non- Example
(Cardenas-Hagan, 2015)
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Engage in Extended Discussions With the Word
• Do you think spinach is delicious? Why or why not?
• Do you think a turtle is gigantic? Why or why not?
• Do you think the girl is content? Why or why not?
(Cardenas-Hagan, 2015)
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Glossaries
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Monitoring Vocabulary Knowledge
Questions for discussion in table groups and chat pods:
• How do you know if an English learner knows the
meaning of a vocabulary word they use to create a
sentence?
• Should you review vocabulary words after the
students show that they know the word? Why or
why not?
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Questions
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