08-14-01 slide 1 a national literacy panel to conduct a comprehensive evidence-based review of the...

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A National Literacy Panel to Conduct a Comprehensive Evidence-Based Review ofthe Research Literature on the Development of Literacy Among Language Minority Children and Youth

National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth

Copyright © 2006 Center for Applied Linguistics

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National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth Copyright © 2006 Center for Applied Linguistics

Support for the PanelSupport for the Panel

Institute of Education Sciences

With additional support fromNational Institute for Child Health and

Development

Office of English Language Acquisition

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Overview of Presentation (and focus of the Overview of Presentation (and focus of the report)report)

Background information about the National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth

Highlights of the Panel report

Development of literacy

Relationship between English oral proficiency and English literacy

Relationship between first language literacy and second language literacy

Role of socio-cultural factors in literacy development

Assessment

Schooling: effective instructional practices

Questions

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Purpose of a National PanelPurpose of a National Panel

Develop an objective research review methodology

Search the research literature on the development of literacy for language minority students

Analyze the research literature

Develop a final report with recommendations for research and suggestions for practice

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Panelists and StaffPanelists and Staff

Panelists

Diane August, Principal Investigator

Timothy Shanahan, Chair

Fred Genesee

Esther Geva

Michael Kamil

Isabelle Beck

Linda Siegel

Keiko Koda

David Francis

Claude Goldenberg

Robert Rueda

Margarita Calderon

Gail McKoon

Georgia Garcia

Senior Research Associates

Cheryl Dressler

Nonie LeSaux

Senior Advisors

Donna Christian

Catherine Snow

Frederick Erickson

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ProcessProcess

US Department of Education constitutes the panel

Five panel meetings, several subgroup meetings, and numerous, ongoing conference calls over the past four years

Five working groups each focused on a different domain

Seven electronic searches and hand searches of key journals

Criteria established for inclusion

Coding of all studies in a file-maker database

Writing

One internal round of review and 2 external rounds of review

Extensive editing and revisions

Report published in July by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

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Parameters for the Research SynthesisParameters for the Research Synthesis

Language minority children

Ages 3-18

Acquisition of literacy in their first language and the societal language

Empirical research

Peer-reviewed journals, dissertations, technical reports

Research published between 1980-2002

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Development of LiteracyDevelopment of Literacy

The word-level literacy skills of language minority students (e.g. decoding, spelling) are much more likely to be at levels equal to mono-lingual English speakers.

However, this is not the case for text level skills (e.g., reading comprehension, writing). These skills rarely reach levels equal to monolingual English speakers.

A crucial area of investigation is how to build the English proficiency skills of second language learners because these skills impede students’ ability to achieve to high levels in text level skills.

There are similar proportions of second language learners and monolingual speakers classified as poor readers.

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Relationship between Second Language Oral Relationship between Second Language Oral Proficiency and Second Language LiteracyProficiency and Second Language Literacy

Measures of oral language proficiency in English correlated positively with word and pseudo-word reading skills in English, but were not strong predictors of these skills. In contrast, various measures of phonological processing skills in English (e.g., phonological awareness) were much more robust predictors of word and pseudo-word reading skills.

In contrast, well developed oral proficiency in English is associated with well-developed reading comprehension skills and writing skills in English.

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Relationship between First Language Relationship between First Language Literacy and Second Language LiteracyLiteracy and Second Language Literacy

First language literacy is related in important ways to second language literacy

First language word and pseudo-word reading, vocabulary (cognates), reading strategies, reading comprehension, spelling, and writing are related to these skills in a second language

Thus, language minority children who are literate in their first language are likely to be advantaged in English

Important to take ‘transfer’ into consideration when planning instruction

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Socio-cultural Factors that Influence Socio-cultural Factors that Influence LiteracyLiteracy

• Little evidence that immigration circumstances influence literacy outcomes.

• Little evidence that discourse and interactional differences influence literacy outcomes.• However, instructional accommodations to

discourse differences improve engagement and participation (e.g. overlapping speech; co-narration; additional wait time) and thus may be related to literacy outcomes.

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Socio-cultural Factors that Influence Socio-cultural Factors that Influence LiteracyLiteracy

• Familiarity with the content of reading materials has a positive effect on comprehension. Might not be related to culture per se but to background knowledge.

• Little other evidence for the impact of cultural factors (aside from language per se) or social group factors (aside from SES-related) on outcomes.

• Language-specific relationship between home language use and literacy outcomes

• Parents can have a positive effect on literacy outcomes. However, schools typically do not take advantage of this.

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AssessmentAssessment

Most assessments cited in the research to gauge language-minority students’ language proficiency and content knowledge in English were inadequate.

However, the research reviewed occurred prior to the implementation of NCLB

There is current ongoing work to assess the development of second language proficiency in language-minority students

Monitor proficiency over time

Assess academic language

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Schooling: Teaching the ElementsSchooling: Teaching the Elements

Methodological ChallengesThe group of experimental studies focused on the elements of

literacy is heterogeneous, creating a challenge to summarize research results across these studies.

Classroom-level factors associated with outcomes for English language learners have received less attention than have other areas of research.

NRP located about 450 studies that examined development of the five components of literacy.

NLP located 17 such studies.

Few studies examine the development of literacy or effective literacy practices for non-Spanish background English language learners.

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Phonemic Awareness and Phonics: Phonemic Awareness and Phonics: ResearchResearch

Specific sounds and sound placement in words differ for different languages (e.g., short vowels in ‘pit’, ‘pet’ and ‘puf’ have no couterparts in Spanish).

Phonological tasks with unknown words are more difficult.

For ELLs, unfamiliar phonemes and graphemes make decoding and spelling difficult.

For literate ELLs, English graphemes have different sounds in L1 (i.e., jar).

Limited English proficiency prevents children from using word meaning to figure out how to read a word.

But need to keep these issues in perspective given the relative ease with which ELLs acquire accuracy in word-level skills compared with text-level skills

Note that word accuracy is not the same as word automaticity

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Findings are consistent with the very solid L1 research findings--both phonemic awareness and phonics instruction confer clear benefits on children’s reading development.• Stuart, 1999; Larsen, 1996; Gunn, Biglan, Smolkowski, & Ary,

2000; Gunn, Smolkowski, Biglan, & Black, 2002

There is no evidence that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction in English needs to be delayed until a certain threshold of English oral language proficiency is attained.• Important to keep in mind issues raised in previous slide• If children have phonological awareness in Spanish, do not need

PA training in English

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Helping students hear English sounds that don’t exist or are not salient in their home language is beneficial.

Examples include minimal pairs such as the initial consonant blends in cheat and sheet.

Kramer, Schell, & Rubison, 1983

Our work:

In testing, directions and practice given in both languages

create a transition curriculum where we emphasize sounds that are different/don’t exist in the first language

Before students read connected text, we use a “Watch & Listen”

technique

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Fluency: Issues for ELLsFluency: Issues for ELLs

Fluency embraces both word recognition and comprehension. That is fluency enables reading comprehension by freeing cognitive resources for interpretation, but also depends on comprehension, as it necessarily includes preliminary interpretive steps. Because of ELLs limited comprehension of second language texts, attaining fluency can be challenging

ELLs often have less opportunity to read aloud in English with feedback.

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Fluency: ResearchFluency: Research

There are too few studies of teaching oral reading fluency with ELLs to draw firm conclusions.

• Denton, 2000; De la Colina, Parker, Hasbrouck, & Lara-Alecio, 2001

Fluency training similarly benefits ELLs and English-speaking students.

• Existing studies have used good English models and paired ELLs with proficient English readers.

• Existing studies ensure students understand the text before they read it.

• With good instruction, ELLs make significant progress

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Fluency: ResearchFluency: Research

Our work

Younger students: after explicit instruction in letter-sound relationships, and ‘watch & listen’ we use echo reading, whisper reading, cloze reading, and partner reading

Older students: model fluent reading and have students practice in pairs with text aligned to core content

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Vocabulary: Issues/StrengthsVocabulary: Issues/Strengths

ELLS arrive at school with a much more limited English vocabulary than English-speaking students.• A total of about 5,000-7,000 words that monolinguals know when

they arrive in school

• Words that English-speaking students know that ELLs do not (adjectives such as hardly, several; adverbs such as nearly, sometimes, often, always; cohesion markers such as but, thus, however; idioms such as near and far, just the one)

ELLs may lack background knowledge as well as labels for English vocabulary.

ELLs and English speakers may have different concepts for the same label.

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Vocabulary: Issues/StrengthsVocabulary: Issues/Strengths

Words with multiple meanings can be a source of confusion. These tend to be high frequency words in English (e.g., bug)

ELLs literate in a first language that has many cognates with English (e.g., perfecto) have an important resource

1/2 to 1/3 of words in a language are cognates (of 10,000-15,000 words in all)

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Vocabulary: ResearchVocabulary: Research

Four empirical studies

Incidental learning improves vocabulary when the oral discourse is aligned with the visual images. However, students needed to have some English proficiency to take advantage of this intervention (Neuman and Koskinen, 1992)

Intentional learning improves vocabulary:

• Teach words (Perez, 1991; Carlo et al., 2002)

• Teach strategies (Carlo et al., 2002)

• Build word consciousness (Carlo et al, 2002)

• Immerse students in a language rich environment (Carlo et al. 2002)

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Vocabulary: Research (Carlo et al., 2004; Vocabulary: Research (Carlo et al., 2004; August et al, 2006)August et al, 2006)

• Teach words: focused on a small number of words that students are likely to encounter often (e.g. heritage, values, obtain, periodically); help students make semantic links to other words and concepts related to the target word)

• Teach strategies: infer meaning from context, use roots and affixes, cognates, morphological relationships, comprehension monitoring

• Build word consciousness: word wizard

• Immerse students in a language rich environment: appealing themes, variety of genres, games, cooperative groups

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Comprehension: Issues for ELLsComprehension: Issues for ELLs

Limited word recognition skills and fluency impede comprehension

Limited vocabulary impedes comprehension

Structural differences between languages can mislead ELLs

Text structures vary across cultures and this may influence comprehension

Culture influences, but does not completely determine, background knowledge

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Comprehension: ResearchComprehension: Research

Only three few empirical studies focus exclusively on comprehension and ELLs.• Simplify text by omitting trivial elements (Bean, 1982)

Too few studies to determine best way to facilitate comprehension in ELLs.

Unlike first language research, strategy instruction did not always help reading comprehension.• Shames, 1998• Swicegood, 1990

Might learn more about promising practices from studies that examine more than one literacy component at a time and from the qualitative research.

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Examples of modifications to interventions Examples of modifications to interventions based on researchbased on research

Identify and clarify difficult words and passages within text to facilitate comprehension• Pre-teach vocabulary (different kinds of words and texts)• Paraphrase text to make it more comprehensible• Use children’s first language

Constantly monitor and build students’ comprehension• Ask lots of questions to build comprehension• Ask different levels of questions

Provide lots of opportunities for students to practice their second language• Story retells• Written responses

Respond to students in ways that build oral proficiency and comprehension

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Results of Teaching the ElementsResults of Teaching the Elements

• Studies suggest that overall the types of instruction that help monolingual English-speaking students are are advantageous for second-language learners as well

•Effect sizes are lower

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• Phonics/PA 4 .54 (.36) n=446 longest study= 5 mos.

• Fluency 2 n=167 longest study=12 weeks

• Vocabulary 2 1.20 n=105 longest study=13 weeks

• Reading comp 2 .11 n=153 longest study=1 year

• Writing 4 .54 n=238 longest study=1 year

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Adjustments are needed, but these were rarely described in detail

•Emphasizing phonemes not available in home language

•Building on students’ first language strengths•Efforts to make word meaning clear through picture cues and other techniques•Identifying and clarifying difficult passages•Ample opportunities for students to practice oral language aligned with the curriculum•Providing extra practice reading words, sentences and stories

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Results: Teaching the ElementsResults: Teaching the Elements

Levels of English proficiency and student capability influence how well a particular intervention works, thus the need for differentiated instruction

Some students do not benefit from instruction because they have learning difficulties or social problems

Second-language learners below a certain level of proficiency are less able to take advantage of some of the interventions (e.g., collaborative strategic teaching)

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Less Targeted ApproachesLess Targeted Approaches

• Some approaches to teaching literacy emphasize teaching of several of the elements

• Many complex or less targeted methods have been successful in teaching monolingual English speakers

• But what about second language learners?

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• Too fractionated a picture to allow large claims to be made for any single approach

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• Encouraging reading and writing (6)• Reading to children (3)• Tutoring and remediation (2)• Success for All (3) • Instructional conversations (2)• Cooperative grouping (1)• Mastery learning (1)• Captioned TV (1)• Parent involvement (1) • Other (2)

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Encouraging reading

English reading

3 studies with positive significant effects

2 studies; n=1238; .56 effect size

Longest study = 2 years

Home language reading on second language outcomes

3 studies with non-significant effects

2 studies; n= 672; effect size -.15

Longest study = 1 year

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Reading to Children

2 of 3 studies with positive significant effects

1 study n=77 .66

Longest study = 57 weeks

Tutoring and Remediation


1 study n=46 1.15

Longest study = 16 weeks

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Success for All


only 1 with English language outcomes

1 study n = 50 .20

Longest study = 2 years

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Results of Less Targeted ApproachesResults of Less Targeted Approaches

• Results were generally positive—meaning that it is clear that we can improve the literacy teaching of second language learners

• 20 studies had English language literacy measures and 12 of those 20 showed significant positive effects

• Across those 20 studies the average effect was .46

• Larger impacts tended to be on decoding measures and smaller impacts on comprehension

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Schooling: Language of InstructionSchooling: Language of Instruction

20 = Total Studies Reviewed (96 were identified)

16 = Studies with Language Minority Students (14 Elementary and 2 Secondary; 15 in Meta-Analysis)

5 = Studies with Language Minority Students used random assignment

26 = Total number of independent study samples in meta-analysis (Total N = 4,567; BE = 2,665; EO = 1,902)

71 = Total number of effect sizes on English literacy outcomes (Study samples by measures)

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Schooling: Language of InstructionSchooling: Language of Instruction

From the analyses conducted, it seems safe to conclude that bilingual education has a positive effect on children’s literacy in English.

The magnitude of this effect is small to moderate in size, but is apparent both in the complete collection of studies, and in the subset of studies that involved random assignment.

There is substantial variability in the magnitude of the effect size across different studies, and within subsets of studies, including the subset of randomized studies.

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Overall ConclusionsOverall Conclusions

• Teaching the literacy elements to second-language learners is a good idea

• Efforts to improve second language literacy in more complex ways are helpful, too

• Instructional innovations have smaller impacts on ELL learning (need to do these things and more)

• Need more experimental research on how to improve the literacy of second language learners

• Need new research-reporting that provides explicit details about how reading instruction was adjusted

• Bilingual schooling has a positive effect on literacy development compared with English-only instruction

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Additional InformationAdditional Information

www.cal.org

[email protected]

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