IRC presentation: Essential Middle School Strategies for English Language Learners (ELLs) in the Content Areas

Eight a.m. came pretty early this morning, but I started out my day with a Dr. Pepper Ten and a hope that I would increase my knowledge about reaching our high population of former-bilingual students.  Even though most of our kiddos receive no bilingual or ELL services, I knew that attending a session dedicated to ELLs would arm me with even more strategies and philosophies to take back to the staff and use immediately with our kiddos.  Boy, was I right!

We attended our first session by Amanda Schacht & Gabriela Carbajal from Crystal Lake School District 47.  The ladies started out their session by explaining that their strategies would be presented in three main categories, headed up with an essential question - which seems to be a hot topic the last few years in the education world.  Their three stages were the preview stage, focused literacy stage, and the application stage.  Unfortunately, most of the sessions here are sixty-minute sessions, so we ran out of time before we could go through each stage thoroughly, but the handouts contained explanations of every strategy.  This made it worth attending, in itself, because I could go back to my room and collect more information afterwards (which is what I am doing currently).

We spent most of our time on the preview stage, trying out out some of the strategies and learning about different language frames.  One point that these ladies made was that working with students who are still developing English language, the preview stage should probably be done orally rather than weighing down activities with written language.  The term language frames was new to me, but when I took a look in the packet, I realized that they were similar to Project CRISS's sentence frames.  Over the last few weeks I've been working in an eighth grade US History class.  While supporting students or delivering instruction, I try to interject sentence frames whenever I can.  We have so many students who still grapple with the English language, that sometimes they struggle with the act of even starting out sentences.  By giving students a frame into which to place ideas, they can use the English language properly and focus more in their ideas than formulating language.  Here's how it works.

When you are asking students who are still developing English language to perform a specific task that requires language (ie. answering a question or responding to media), supply them with several choices in language frames.  

• To make a prediction, start out your sentences with phrases such as "I predict that . . . " "I bet that . . . " or "I wonder if . . . "
• To ask a question, think about using starters such as "What would happen if . . . " "Why did . . . " or "Do you think that . . . "
• To clarify something, supply your students with phrases such as "At first I thought _____, but now I think . . . " "Oh, I get it . . . " or "This part is really saying . . . "
• To encourage students to make a connection, supply them with a things like "This reminds me of . . . " "This part is like . . . " or "This  makes me think of . . . "
• If students are expected to answer a question, support them by giving them the beginning of what you would expect them to supply as the answer, and then let them continue on with their answer.

The above examples are just a small sampling of what Schacht and Carbajal included in their packet of resources, but I'm guessing you get the idea.  One question that a colleague asked me just today was, "At what point do you stop supplying students with these frames?"  I had to really put some thought into that question because at first glance, I can see how a student would use the frames as a crutch, but then I went back to the presentation that I gave later in the day today.  If our kiddos are armed with one hundred percent of the tools they need to perform a task, they will.  If they rely on what we give them as a crutch, there are still skills that they lack.  It is our job to figure out what those skills are, and one of them may very well be dealing with the fear of failure - a skill that many of our reluctant learners have (making them look unmotivated because they refuse to even try).  Perhaps if we made our efforts two-fold and provided students with academic as well as social-emotional support, we might find them moving forward at a much quicker pace and we might see them taking healthy academic risks more often.

The remainder of the presentation included a whole slew of preview, focused literacy, and application strategies such as Word Sorts, Think-Pair-Share (which they termed Think-Partner-Share), TPR (Total Physical Response), Video Jigsaw (see graphic to the right), Pane It / Retain It, Connect 2, THIEVES, Anticipation Guides, Say Something /Write Something, Narrow Reading, Numbered Brains (like Numbered Heads), Jigsaw, Combination Notes, Question / It Says / I Say / And So, GIST, Magnet Summaries (another CRISS strategy), Sketch to Stretch, LEA (Language Experience Approach), Side-By-Side Translations, and Metalinguistic Focus. So you can see that they supplied their participants with a wide variety of strategies to take back to their buildings and use immediately.  

THIEVES example

Late in the presentation, Schacht and Carbajal discussed the THIEVES strategy, which is an in-depth previewing strategy.  During this part of the talk, the ladies showed us a beautiful bookmark that was color coded, and then they unfolded a color coded copy of a chapter from a text book to demonstrate to students which parts of the bookmark coincided with the parts of the chapter.  It was beautifully done, and I could see this being something that could be adapted to a content area to support our students who are still developing English or for any of our students struggling to grapple with the complicated text in their text books.  

All in all, this presentation was a great way to begin my conference, and I am thrilled to bring back some of this information to start using in supporting our content area teachers and students.  With over forty percent of our student population being native Spanish speakers, each content area classroom contains groups of students who might benefit from any number of the strategies presented today during this first session.  

The Importance of Building Background Knowledge

Last week I finally got to sit down with our reading professional development coordinator to show her some of the vocabulary and QRI testing results I had been getting on my eighth grade target students.  She confirmed my fear, after looking at all of the scores.  These kiddos needed support in their oral vocabulary in order for them to build reading skills.  This was the first time I had really gotten a chance to approach this dilemma from a reading specialist standpoint, and I was anxious to hear what she had to say.

She introduced me to the idea of multi-level text sets (different texts on the same topic that require students to determine importance and extract information - all part of our new Common Core Standards), which is not a new concept for me in any respect, but for the sole purpose of building vocabulary it was. This conversation started me thinking about some things I then wanted to develop.

She also introduced me to newsela.com, a news website where teachers can find one article on a topic and download it in four different lexile levels! Her thought was to start with the article in a 730 lexile, do a vocabulary building activity, and then read the exact same article in an 850.  The idea is to read the same article four times, each time building more and more background knowledge, more and more vocabulary, until we got to the article at the 1130 lexile.  She also suggested that I try to use an article that connects somehow with content area material that our kiddos might be studying by the end so that the knowledge and vocabulary might support these students in their content-area classrooms!  Genius!

From this, we started to formulate some thoughts that have been brewing over the last month or so - the idea of building background knowledge.  I was talking to a sixth grader who struggles with reading.  He insisted that he wanted to read the Twilight series.  Now, if you're familiar with the read at all, you might know that the lexile level is in the 600s - a nice easy read for an adult, but it is LONG and rather mature for an eleven-year-old struggling reader.  Many of my adult friends found the book annoying and repetitive, and yet I was captivated by the love story.  Still, this boy was insistent and went on to tell me that he had watched the movie several times AND he had read the graphic novel and he LOVED them.  It was at this point when the conversation I had with our reading professional development coordinator started ringing with me again.  This was a perfect opportunity for this kiddo to challenge himself with a lengthy book on which he already had a TON of background knowledge and maybe build some reading stamina.  So we found the novel for him, and he checked it out for winter break.

After these two incidents last week, a few ideas developed.  Aside from my more solidified plan to go to our Tier 3 team with the pull out idea for vocabulary groups, I'm also going to work to target background knowledge building activities with our struggling readers in their content area classes.  Meeting with some of the content area teachers and coming up with lists of specific students to target is next on my list, and then I'd like to somehow target these students specifically.  One big challenge is finding the time during the day for pull out groups.  For now, however, I'm making a list of ideas (many of which come from the CRISS manual) that will help in building background knowledge.

Keep in mind that building background knowledge and activating background knowledge are very different. When activating background knowledge, you assume that the learners have some background knowledge.  Building it means that there is nothing filed away in your students' schema for them to build upon, and now, not only are you responsible for the new knowledge, but you have to give your kiddos some background in order for the new knowledge to stick as well.

Let me give you an example.  I worked in December with a few colleagues who had their sixth graders writing a RAFT assignment.  The idea was that students would use multiple texts to research something specific about the Olympics and then write a perspective piece based upon that research.  During the time students were supposed to be writing, I noticed that critical pieces of information were being left out or wrongly assumed.  Then it hit me - when one student began to write about a skiing event, and her first paragraph mentioned traveling to an arena for the event.  I finally asked her if she had ever seen an Olympic skiing event before, and she shook her head.  Another one struggled to write about her ice skating event until I realized she had never seen an Olympic ice skating competition or ANY ice skating competition, for that matter.  After that, I spent the entire day looking up Youtube videos of the different events and watching them with the kids.  Two things could have been done to prevent this - and I don't know why we didn't think of it before beginning the project.  Hindsight is always 20/20, I suppose.  We could have spent a day watching videos of the different events together OR we could have left a few more days for research and insisted that each student watch several videos of the events.  However it was, we have noted it and I would like to see us include the extended time for next year's project.

So for this blog, I've made a list of background activation activities and background building activities so that you can begin to think about how to use these effectively with your students.  Keep in mind that many of your students who struggle with reading may need background knowledge building activities because they lack much of the vocabulary necessary to function at grade level.  I think our biggest problem here is differentiation.  You will, undoubtedly, have students in your class who have access to background information.  How you will use some of these ideas in your classrooms most effectively is the next step.  I realize that you may not have these strategies in your pocket, and if you don't, please don't hesitate to ask about them.

Background activation activities

• Preview the reading by looking at text features (titles, subtitles, illustrations, vocabulary, etc.) and making connections/predictions in partners or groups of three.  Give specific guidelines for group work and set strict time limits.
• Use an easy organizer (such as a word map or Venn diagram) and have students work individually or in pairs to fill it out before previewing the information.  
• Easy word sorts or pattern puzzles (both strategies require words cut up ahead of time and are basically matching activities - ironically interesting for our older students) in partners or groups of three.  These usually work, themselves, as classroom managers so you won't have to do much work in terms of management unless you find that your students have no background knowledge on the topic.  In which case, you'll want to skip down to the next section.
• Discussion strategies such as the ABC Brainstorming (literally a list from A-Z where students have to think of an on-topic word that begins with each letter of the alphabet), mind streaming (partners each have to spend one minute blurting out any information that comes to mind on the topic without interruption or stopping), Discussion Webs, Carousel Brainstorming, and previewing using questioning techniques
• K-W-L plus (categorize information gathered on the K-W-L)
• Anticipation Guides (agree/disagree questions for students to consider that are directly related to the topic) and Double Entry Reflective Journals (Questions or statements to be answered before learning and then again after learning.  It's my personal favorite.)
• One sentence summaries and/or paragraph frames before learning

Background building ideas

• Youtube, United Streaming or another video websites
• Articles and/or other text-selections well-below grade-level on the same topic
• Preview vocabulary necessary for learning (use an engaging activity such as word sorts and pattern puzzles that are more guided)
• Web quests or website exploration
• Photos, pictures, artwork, primary source documents (with active learning strategy attached - you could consider having students work through a Double Entry Reflective Journal with these.)
• Easier non-fiction text to build knowledge for fiction and visa versa
• Picture books (another favorite of mine!)
• Musical recordings (with an active learning strategy attached. - for example, have students journal how the music makes them feel when listening.)
• Cartoons (for some reason the Simpsons seem to have an episode for everything!)
• Poetry or lyrics to songs
• Field trips (if your students are lucky enough to be in a district that funds them)

And the list goes on and on . . .

Friends, I implore you to really look hard at your clientele.  Our students need us to understand that we can't take for granted that any of them have the background knowledge or the vocabulary to tackle even the easiest knowledge, skills, or information in our classrooms.  Don't leave your kiddos behind because they lack the background necessary to easily pick up on what others can manage without much thought.  Observe. Evaluate. React. Give them success that they might not have otherwise.

Happy New Year.

Why do many of our English Language Learners suffer in our system?

I'm wondering when my reading specialist colleagues are going to stop answering text messages and emails from me with the subject "vocabulary".  They have to be sick of my ranting by now because I've been beating that poor dead horse all year, and it seems that I'm only beating harder nowadays.  But this time I'm backing up my rants with some real data. 

For two years, I've suspected that vocabulary is at the root of our issues for many of our kiddos, but vocabulary is such a vast and general topic, and I'd never been satisfied with any assessment that I'd seen for vocabulary.  As it currently stands, there's the most commonly accepted Three-Tier Model for reading vocabulary: Tier 1 vocabulary (sight words), Tier 2 vocabulary (academic vocabulary), and Tier 3 vocabulary (content-area vocabulary).  Project CRISS's fourth edition manual now includes a Four-Level Model that, in no way, aligns with the Tiers, but the tiers would absolutely fit into the four levels (mostly academic and/or content-specific vocabulary).  Level 1 critical words are words that must be pre-taught before reading.  Level 2 words are important but do not require a lot of pre-teaching time.  The third level are words that are important, but they are clear in the text and do not require preteaching.  Finally, level 4 words are words that are not necessary to be taught to students before, during, or after.  As an educator, I make automatic assumptions that vocabulary-building means words that you read, right? Well, after this week I have begun to wonder if maybe I had it all wrong from the beginning.

With all of these categories and ways to approach vocabulary, why do we struggle so much once we hit this roadblock in reading?  We seem to have all of the answers for phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency, but yet when it comes to vocabulary - the answers come in all shapes and sizes, and yet none seem to be fitting for so many of our middle schoolers.  Most of us skip considering vocabulary as a major issue because we assume that we are covering it when we teach content or literature-specific words, and when our kiddos test below level in comprehension, we push comprehension strategies, not vocabulary (in my case because I thought I had already covered it).  But what happens when you have a student who started life speaking a different language (in the case of most of our ELLs - Spanish)?  Maybe she began learning English at the age of six.  Imagine all of those important first-words that she missed and then had to learn!  How many years do you think it takes to catch up in a new language?  And how does that impact her at the age of thirteen?  Research tells us that each year our students absorb thousands of new words, but what if you don't start learning them until age six or seven?

So a few months back I remembered an assessment from my graduate work in reading that I wanted to try - one that targets oral vocabulary, specifically.  Although I was unable to get my hands on that specific assessment (the Peabody), our speech pathologist had something very similar for both receptive and expressive vocabulary.  I spent some time skimming through these two assessments and decided to give them a shot with one of our eighth graders (let's call him Tito) who has been through just about every Tier 2 intervention we offer.  At this point in the year, I begin to panic when nothing is working because I know that my time is limited with our almost-freshmen, and I need to act quickly to pinpoint a solution.

What I found did not surprise me one bit with this kiddo, and my former hypothesis that oral vocabulary is at the root of many of our English Language Learners' reading struggles sprung to life again with all sorts of questions attached to it.  Tito's scores on both the receptive and expressive vocabulary tests were in the very low average and below average range.  During the receptive vocabulary testing (where he had to identify pictures that best matched the words that I gave him), his responses came quickly.  However, the expressive vocabulary assessment was almost painful - he took so much time trying to formulate words for the pictures that at one point I wondered if he had forgotten that he was supposed to give an answer!  In several instances he finally gave up and said, "I don't really know."  Also, at times when the answers were incorrect, Tito's response was a short phrase description of the actual word.  It was obvious he was trying his best to express himself correctly every time.

I then started to formulate a list of questions that I will be pondering over the next few months:

• What can I do, as a reading specialist, to help close the gap for these ELLs who fall under the RtI umbrella?  It is my responsibility to "catch them up" in reading, and yet I'm not trained to develop tens of thousands of missing pieces in oral vocabulary.  This is the most loaded question and very general, so then I started to get specific.
• Will testing more of our ELLs produce the same information?
• How do these gaps effect their performance in their content area classes?
• What can I do to communicate this information to our staff?
• How can I support our students who are lacking in oral and aural vocabulary so that they can be more successful?
• What strategies work best for middle level students who have significant gaps in expressive and receptive vocabulary?
• Within the confines of our current schedule, when can we work on these gaps?
• How can my speech path (who is AWESOME, by the way) and I work together to make a plan, even though she is tied mostly to her students with IEPs?
• Who else can help? (I have already talked to our speech pathologist who gave me some ideas, a bilingual reading specialist, and gotten an email from a former colleague who is hoping to help me use some resources to which she has access, and I'm super excited about all of it!)
• At what point do I stop digging? Because I'm exhausted and exhilarated at the same time.  Although the screeners are just screeners, so are our comprehension, fluency, and phonics screeners - but you have to start somewhere, and the fact that both of Tito's tests came out just a few points from each other tells me that we do, indeed, have a problem.  

By next weekend, I hope to have a few more students assessed so I can report on how those went.  I have chosen three more students (three eighth graders and a repeat seventh grader) on which to complete testing. Once I get that done, my next step is to consult with our other reading specialists on this and formulate a plan of action after we put our resources together.

For now, friends, the next time you stand in front of your class and register that you have ten students who appear to have zoned off, take a moment to evaluate how you speak to your class.  The trick is to support them all without "dumbing it down".  The last thing we want to do is to stop exposing them to rich academic vocabulary, but know that if you do that without rephrasing and supporting, many of your kiddos may not have the skills to even understand the words that come out of your mouth.  A few years back I had this exact conversation with a respected social studies colleague who admitted that she hadn't considered that her vocabulary choice when instructing her students would impact their performance in class.  Also, we often think that if we read the text to our kiddos it will make a difference (and it sometimes does!), but imagine trying to keep up with an instructor who spoke to you in words so difficult that you often couldn't understand him, no matter what strategies you used.  What would you do?  I know what I would do, and it certainly wouldn't be to pay more attention and take more notes.  And yet this is often the answer just about every student gives when we ask them what they think they can do to improve themselves - even those who struggle due to language . . .

August 23 CRISS Crumble - Choose Your Words Carefully

Welcome back, friends! This week has been one of adjustment for both students and staff as we move into another year of change, but I have already begun to see glimpses of normalcy throughout the day. By the end of next week, this place will be radiating with the routine hum of learning, and things will settle down.

So what is on the plate for our first Crumble, you ask?  Vocabulary is my focus for our students this year. Every year at the end of the year when we take a look at scores, we shake our heads and say, "I wish there was something more we can do for these kids to help build their vocabularies." But then we leave, hoping something will miraculously come to us (perhaps in a vision induced by overexposure to the sun) over the summer, and by the time we are back into the routine of things here at school in the fall, that wish is forgotten, only to be dredged up again in May. Please tell me that I'm not the only nerd who has this wish every year AND who thinks about it periodically over the summer!

A large percentage of our student population lacks basic academic vocabulary – plain and simple. A few years back I had an eighth grade student (formerly bilingual, but transitioned in fourth grade) whose social studies teacher reported that he "just didn't care" and refused to do the work. After meeting with this student a few times and just listening to him speak, it dawned on me how often I had to either repeat what I said to him or reword entire sentences until he understood what I had said or asked. If I had to do this with him one-on-one, imagine how he felt in a class filled with thirty students and a teacher who couldn't monitor his comprehension every second! So I asked the teacher to reflect upon her presentation style. How did she speak to the students? Her response was, "As adults." But my real question is - what kind of adults? Did she speak to them as if they were all adults who had a rich literate background like she did as a child? Or did she speak to them as if she herself had a rich literate background, but with an understanding that her students may need clarification on basic academic conversations due to lack of vocabulary? Her response was simply raised eyebrows and an, "Ohhhhhhh! Aha!"

To break it down for you, there are three tiers of vocabulary (and many definitions of these tiers, depending on who you ask):

• Tier 1 – basic vocabulary and acquired through every day speech
• Tier 2 – high frequency, academic / multiple-meaning words that appear across all types of text
• Tier 3 – low frequency, domain-specific / content-specific words often termed “vocabulary words” in content areas

Most of our kiddos have a good handle on how to speak to each other using Tier 1 vocabulary (some a little too much!). And we are doing a pretty decent job of exposing them to Tier 3 - but we assume that they can absorb what we are saying in front of our classroom using our Tier 2 words. This is not always the case. Words that we take for granted are being thrown out at our students without even realizing the damage we could be doing by not supporting our own rich use of vocabulary. In this paragraph alone there are probably a dozen or more words that have multiple meanings and would confuse even some of our hardest working strugglers. Words like handle, decent, exposing, assume, absorb, granted, and rich all have double meanings and make the heads of our English language learners spin like tops! And heaven forbid you use an idiomatic phrase (such as make your head spin) with them! They'd go off the deep end for sure. I really need to stop.

The point is, friends, that we need to choose our words carefully. Am I saying that we need to simplify how we say things for our students and stay away from using words that may challenge our kiddos? Heavens, no! In fact, I encourage the use of fancy words! But know that the more you use them, the more you will need to rephrase, check for understanding, illustrate, model, and allow for processing before you move on.

So, create a quiz with words in parenthesis near tough Tier 2 words where you think a student might trip up. Know that your text books are not only full of your content-area vocabulary, but they are also very heavily loaded with Tier 2 words that may confuse your students as well. Teaching Tier 2 words as vocabulary doesn't necessarily make sense in a science or social studies class, but don't assume that your kiddos are going to be able to understand the text book without a lot of support. Know that part of the job that I do at school is to help you service these students, not just in their language arts classes, but across the curriculum, and I am certainly willing to do so. And enjoy reflecting on your own vocabularies over the next week, because I know you will.

Have a fabulous first weekend of the school year.  You deserve it!