You say "tomato", I say "tomato": Word pronunciation, meaning, and spelling

I had an interesting (almost sweet for a story about an eighth grader) experience last week when I was working with a student (let's call him David) on a reading fluency exercise.  He is in his first year out of bilingual, and he struggles, to say the least.  This kid is a cool kid - well-liked, adorable, and goofy.  But he does everything in his power to avoid doing his academic work.  His teachers may complain that he is unmotivated and lacks focus, but I can hypothesize that what is really going on here is that David is trying to "save face" by deflecting any attention away from his lack of skill, which affects his academics.  The best way to do this?  Goof off in class.  You get your peers' attention, a few giggles, and inevitably you get adult attention also. 

So David and I were sitting in the hallway a few weeks ago running a fluency passage.  We use The Six-Minute Solution (Sopris, 2003) for quick and painless fluency training in our short amounts of intervention times that we have.  I cannot even remember the topic of the passage we were reading, but I will forever remember the conversation we had right before David began reading to me.  I always read the passage before the kids to model good fluency and to show them how even I can improve daily on my reading fluency when I practice.  After I read the passage, I looked at David, and he asked, "How do you pronounce that word?"  To me this was a big deal, because he usually doesn't ask - he just mispronounces words over and over again, and with his accent, sometimes it is difficult to determine what he is mispronouncing and what mispronunciations are dialectic.

The word was comfortable.  I pronounced it for him the way I pronounce it (COM-fer-ta-ble), and I could see him testing it out before he started reading.  During his read he stumbled on the word, but he did manage to pronounce it the way I had pronounced it.  I pondered this while I monitored his reading, and similar experiences with other ELLs popped into my head.  Ask a kid to pronounce that word.  I just asked my ten-year-old, and she looked at it, said it (com-FOR-ta-ble) twice, and then a light bulb went on in her head before she said, "COM-FTER-BUL!"  At that point I had to look the word up in the dictionary because I was curious how the dictionary said it should be pronounced, and what did I get?  Multiple pronunciations - both mine and theirs with an ADDITIONAL pronunciation (for kicks, I guess).  Fabulous. 

This situation brought me to the dozens of times when I have worked with students one-on-one or in small groups on reading and spelling.  Our big kids have been mispronouncing certain words for so long that, even when they DO know spelling rules, they misspell because they hear it and repeat it in their heads, naturally changing the pronunciation to how they think it is pronounced and have heard it pronounced over and over again by parents, siblings, and neighbors.  Part of our job is to help them understand that there are some words that may be pronounced differently, and explain how the spellings of those words may or may not follow spelling rules. 

I'm giggling now, because I am recalling a story a colleague shared with me about an issue where one student couldn't place a common phrase into context.  The student, who was writing a story in class, started the story with, "One supana time."  Clearly this student lacked the background knowledge in fairy tales to understand that the phrase was "Once upon a time."  There is nothing wrong with this, except that we assume that our kiddos will have knowledge to read, spell, and write, and some of them just don't.

Another example comes from a sixth grade classroom last year when I happened to be in a room where a teacher was asking students to give definitions or examples of words written on the board.  She asked one sixth grader, who I knew to have trouble with multisyllabic words larger than two syllables, about the meaning of a word (the specific word escapes me now, but it was a -tion word).  He stared at her, fear stricken, before he said he didn't know.  I  KNEW he knew the word, so I said, "I think you do know the word," and I pronounced it for him.  I am a believer in probing some kids until they see success, and I knew I could push him a bit.  The second he heard the word, he said, "Oh, THAT'S what that says?  I know that word!" And he went on to explain it to the class. Success.  I also knew that this student was a good reader as long as you kept his words to one and two-syllable words.  This particular word had three syllables.  That's how specific some of these reading deficits are!

My point here is that we take for granted that these kids can read or have the background knowledge to produce what we think they should.  They all can't - not yet, anyway, and they are brilliant at hiding that fact.  So how can we be absolutely certain we are covering our bases, as teachers of all content areas?  Here are some ideas.

• No matter what content area you teach, pronounce any and all vocabulary words over and over and over and over again.
• Require your entire class to pronounce them back.  Who cares of they think it is silly.  Just tell them that you want to be sure everybody has the correct pronunciation of all of the words.  If you're working with names in social studies, this is an easy justification because some names are just tough!  If they bawk at it, bawk back and make them say them in a British accent or like Dracula or something. 
• If you're out of "bell ringer" exercises (or even if you are not), have students pronounce and spell vocabulary words back and forth to each other in partners.  Don't forget to pronounce them FIRST.  If you have two kids in a partnership and neither one of them knows how to pronounce one of the words, they will inevitably practice it wrong.  Throw in a few words that are not content area vocabulary words but are found in the text just for kicks! The kids will never know the difference!
• Consider the fact that your students may run across other words in their reading that look unfamiliar.  If you know that you have struggling readers in your class (which you all do!), then reading a text book independently and silently is probably not the best way to expect your students to tackle the text.  Be sure to group (or preferably pair) students appropriately. 
• Please do not put a gifted reader into a group of struggling readers or pair them up to support the struggler.  Space out those strugglers amongst your regular kiddos so that they can get some support and do the same with your gifted readers.  In my opinion, struggling readers and gifted readers can be grouped or paired together, but not for reading.  The gap is too wide.  I know you might be temped because you think it might give the struggler a good model, but there are plenty of good models amongst the average readers, and there is such a thing as looking at a gap and feeling like you'll never be able to jump it.  I imagine that is what it feels like to some of the struggling readers when they work with a gifted reader.  Plus, gifted kids are gifted and generally know it.  They're smart enough to know why they've been partnered up with certain people, and the minute the struggler opens her mouth, the gifted student will know.  There is no partnership at this point, and both students may feel like they can't wait for the activity to be over.   And to be honest, not all gifted readers feel like it is their calling to help those who struggle.
• If your text books come with supported or modified text, use it, but use it with care. Don't just give it to kids who struggle with your content, use it with kids who struggle with reading and need reading support.
• Look to your reading specialist, interventionist, data collection specialist, or special education staff to help you identify your strugglers.  There may be data in your school that you don't even know exists!  I hold all of our reading data, and I try to communicate it as much as possible, but with seven hundred kiddos and more than fifty people working in our building, not all information will get to everybody who needs it.  Sometimes you have to ask.  If you notice a student who is not meeting your expectations, look for answers and start with one of these people.

So the next time you notice a student who misspells words, ask the student to pronounce them for you.  Chances are, the problem may lie with the idea that he struggles with the pronunciation.   If you read my previous posts on students who lack vocabulary, you will understand that many of these kiddos are encountering some of these words for the first time and are building their oral vocabularies as fast as they can.  We need to continue to expose them, but we have to expose them properly and thoroughly.  Don't take for granted that they "should know", because some of them just don't.

Using Station Teaching in the Middle School Classroom to motivate readers

I've been working with struggling readers long enough to know that when they don't want to do something, the likelihood of it getting done is slim to none.  Our job as teachers of strugglers is to first make these kiddos WANT to do it or feel like it NEEDS to be done.  We would call this motivation.  Sometimes this doesn't work, and we need to just not give our students time to decide if they want to do it.  That is one of the beauties of station teaching and something I witnessed last week while working and observing in classrooms.

Earlier in the week I had a chance to visit in our seventh grade language arts class designed specifically for struggling readers.  Students in this class hit the same curricular targets, but the teachers in our intervention classes use more accessible text, class sizes are somewhat smaller, a special education teachers is scheduled in each of these classes for a co-teaching model, and I can drop in to work with smaller groups and coach these teachers easily because the kids are all lumped together. In my experience these kiddos are more likely to participate instead of hide behind their peers because there is nothing to hide and nobody in there to "make them feel stupid".  We choose kiddos to be placed in this class when we have seen that the differentiated model of the regular language arts classroom doesn't seem to be working, and many of these students make double the gains of what their peers do in the regular classrooms.

I knew that the teachers in this class had been planning for a station-teaching approach, and I was excited to see it in action.  On this particular week they were just starting out with training their students how to move between stations, work independently, and work under short time constraints.  The teachers had created four stations with different activities.  Each activity hit a specific target and aligned with a selection of text (all connected in some way).  One of the stations was a teacher-led station while the other three were more independent.  These two teachers are lucky because there ARE two of them in the room.  One can lead a station while the other one moves from station to station monitoring the work that the students are doing and answering questions.  We even discussed the possibility of planning me into the mix so that two of us could lead a station while the other one monitored and answered questions of the other two stations.  Students were at each station for about ten minutes before they moved on to the next one.  All materials and directions needed for the station were supplied. 

This type of teaching made me look back at my old approach to classroom instruction, and ironically the special education teacher who was in this class was the same one I had my last few years of classroom teaching.  She and I were able to reflect on that experience and how some of the theories were reflected in this type of instruction. 

The philosophy of station teaching works for a variety of reasons.  First off, at least one station is guaranteed small group instruction by a certified teacher.  Research shows that small group instruction works because each student can get that individual attention he/she needs, and there's no where to hide in a small group.  Sometimes (as seen in the picture at the left), we can even squeeze in some one-on-one time!  It also works because learning is bound to be more social.  As a part of the groups, students were told they could use each other to help them get through material with which they struggled.  There were a few times when students took advantage of this and worked  in partners or in small groups, and it was nice to see them try to rely on each other until the monitoring teacher became available to answer a question.  If you read my summer blog on social learning, you'll know that many of our students (especially our middle schoolers) lean more toward social learning because it makes them feel like they're a part of a whole. 


Finally, students were at each station for about ten minutes before they were moved on to a different station with a different activity.  I find this to be one of the most brilliant components of the approach because of the lack of focus so many of our kiddos have - especially our strugglers!  They struggle for a reason, and some of them struggle because they have very short attention spans. Others have short attention spans BECAUSE they struggle.  Whatever came first, the idea that we move these kids (physically and academically) from one  activity to the next keeps them fresh and engaged.  They don't have TIME to lose focus, and very few of them did!

So how can something like this work in another classroom?  Especially because most of us do not have the luxury of having an extra body in the classroom AND many of our classes are sitting with thirty-plus students.  Here are some ideas to consider while mulling over the idea of station teaching:

• Splitting your "groups" into partners might help in terms of management.  If you have eight students in a group that moves to a station, have them split into work partners so that they're not trying to work in a large group of eight kids.  The activities in these stations should have clear directions, and at least one student who is a natural leader should be put into each group to explain things. 
• Use the timer for both group work and transition time.  Saying, "You have one minute to pack up and move," gives students parameters in which to move and keeps everybody honest, because we all know that transitions can sometimes turn into disasters if not carefully constructed.
• Think about activities that you would normally do whole-class and how you can create stations out of those activities.  Plan four days of stations when you might plan four days of different activities.  Then move your kiddos to a few stations each day.  Try 20 minutes per station each day and have students visit each station twice to keep their mind fresh. 
• Make a station hands-on or more social so that students have a station or two to look forward to. 
• Give explicit directions for each station.  Include pictures and any materials needed for each station.
• Make a station or two a familiar activity such as a writing activity or reading log, so that students aren't met all period long with unfamiliar activities. Too much in one day may be overwhelming.
• If you can pull in a student support specialist (reading specialist, speech therapist, social worker, school psych, or even an administrator) you could create some more teacher-directed stations.
• If you want to do a teacher-directed station, create the rest of your stations to be VERY easily implemented, or you will spend the entire time repeating instructions.
• Lay the groundwork for what is expected by the end. 
• Train your students from the get-go.  Maybe even plan a few weeks of independent stations so that you can monitor their group work before you try to weave in a teacher-directed station.  You want your students to be able to work independently and be productive, but without guided instruction on this, the entire thing may fall apart before it even gets started!

Ideas for stations might be things like:

• reading an easily accessible article with a specific purpose
• vocabulary organizers using the text book or technology
• completing a writing activity
• playing a game (my husband, the music teacher, created a pretty impressive music card game that would be PERFECT in a station)
• a guided reading activity
• independent reading with a reading log
• an activity that requires students to reflect on work they have done or edit/revise somebody else's work (with specific parameters)
• a very easy kinesthetic activity or lab (with specific directions and purpose)
• puzzles related to the topic
• watching short video clips with a specific purpose

The idea of station teaching is daunting at first glance, but imagine the engagement as students move from activity to activity.  If you can't imagine it, ask a colleague to considering working on it with you.  We started to get crazy in our "oooooo, this could be awesome if . . . " conversations as we imagined two classrooms where stations were going on in both, and students traveled from room to room working on different activities.  It was at this point that we had to shut ourselves down because we knew we were moving too far too fast!  But there is potential for lots of neat stuff to happen here!  And the social aspect paired with the smaller blocks of time is just what the doctor (or reading specialist, in this case) ordered for our kiddos who are unmotivated and apathetic. 

Partner Reading in the Science Classroom - A Perfectly Packaged Lesson

Today I had the privilege of observing in a science classroom.  As a part of our school improvement team, I was trying out the idea of learning from colleagues through observation, and although classroom observation is a part of my job normally - my purpose was different today.  I went in with the plan to learn how my colleague implemented partner reading in her classroom.  What I got was a lot more than that!  I wish you all could have been there, but since you can't, I'll do my best to explain what I saw today and give my thoughts about it.

I should preface this blog by telling you that the day before, the sixth graders participated in an activity involving gathering information on different types of alternative energy from posters around the room and stating some opinions about them.  A perfect way to pique the interest of  middle schoolers - ask them to tell you what they think.  So today, their teacher referenced this activity at the beginning of the lesson and then asked students to set up a notes sheet outline with spaces to gather information from their reading (she had a clear example on the board) and a paragraph frame (It was at this point that I became giddy with excitement - a CRISS strategy!!!).  What I loved about this task was that students had the background knowledge gathered from the group activity the day before AND now they were being given purpose for today by simply setting up notes and an exit slip!  Brilliant!  I also loved the fact that she remembered her strugglers and had copies of these things made for them.  She gave all of her students the option of using one of her copies, and I was shocked to see how few students actually requested the premade copies.  My guess was that, being January, those who were fully capable had been told long before that they were capable and had stopped asking for the adaptation.  The picture to the right shows the frame that their teacher used.  The note taking outline was nothing more than a list of important vocabulary words.  Simple and effective.

After setting up their notes and their paragraph frames, the sixth graders were given a quick demonstration of the partner reading activity that they had obviously practiced over and over - it was basically a "read and say something" strategy from Project CRISS.  Their teacher referenced a poster that she had off on the side wall (see picture to the left) that had clear directions for the activity.  After going over directions, she then asked for a volunteer to help demonstrate the practice.  She had chosen a piece of text from an alternative source (not the text book) that was a little over one page long and very well organized - a manageable piece of text for a short reading period.  Her volunteer was given the option of being partner one or two.  He chose partner two, of course.  After that she reminded the class that they were all going to pretend to be partner two while she read, and she reminded them of the expectations listed under the second step on the poster.  As she read, I watched them all, and probably all but two were tracking the text with a pen or their finger! They were following along, just like the poster said to do! Once she finished reading the short paragraph, she asked her partner to tell the main idea of the paragraph. She asked a few questions to lead him to the right answer, and then she pointed out that having a conversation while deciding on the main idea is okay.  Then her partner read, and they repeated the exercise.  I am not convinced that she even had to do this demonstration, as it seemed like the kids really knew what was expected, but it was nice to see the strategy modeled first before seeing the kids in action. 

Finally, the sixth graders were told that after they were done reading, they should fill out the paragraph frame while waiting for the rest of the class to finish their reading.  They immediately got to work.  Let me just tell you - one hundred percent of those sixth grade students were actively engaged in the reading activity!  One hundred percent!  While most of the class worked independently, their teacher moved from group to group, stopping to work with the kiddos who received photocopies of the note taking sheet earlier.  She knew which kids needed support, and she focused on giving them support while they read.  The actual reading took maybe fifteen minutes for most of the class.  Some took longer, but she had structured the activity to allow her to continue working with the strugglers while the rest of the class moved on to the paragraph frame.  It was lovely to watch. 

Why did it work?  Well, I can give you my two cents on it and let you make your own decisions.  First off, the teacher's classroom management was obviously impeccable.  The kids knew expectations, and she never sat DOWN!  She was on her feet the entire period circling the room.  Even if a kid DID want to do something goofy, there was no time before she was around the room again.  Second, the students had their interest piqued from the activity the day before, so they were already somewhat invested in the topic.  Third, they knew what they were doing from the beginning.  She set this up when she had them set up their notes, look at the board for the agenda, and write out their paragraph frame.  They also were given explicit instructions, had a poster for support, had the option for differentiated note taking, AND had a demonstration of the reading activity.  Finally (and most important from a reading specialist standpoint), they were given time to work together in an intimate setting - so there was very little chance for even our most shy of shy kiddos to hide.  She also encouraged her students to help each other out with tough vocabulary, which I think was important.  It was a one-on-one activity, and nobody was more important than anybody else.  All important = all engaged.

Afterwards, she and I chatted for a few minutes, and she was disappointed that she hadn't gotten to go over the notes with the kids.  She had prepared phrase cards to be taped on to the board on the notes page to guide students through filling in their prepared notes sheets from the beginning of the period.  Another wonderful idea.  Of course, my mind started going further and expanding on this activity, but I'll save that for another blog.

For now, let me just say that I was glad to have had the experience of going in to observe.  It is rare that I go into a classroom with the sole purpose to observe and learn from the teacher.  My purpose is usually support of struggling readers or observe these readers to help the teacher support them more - and through THAT I generally bring back something I, myself, have learned from this teacher.  This time was different, and I can't say I was surprised one bit at the quality of instruction these students were getting.  Bravo to this sixth grade teacher, and lucky us for having this gem in our building!

Vocabulary Unit 7 - NSA Spied on Gamers

Here is a link to the article I used for this unit.  Enjoy!

Unit 7 Vocabulary Plan
Unit 7 Answer Key to crossword puzzle and Jeopardy game
Jeopardy Game

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.

Advocating for our Strugglers and Teaching Them to Do the Same for Themselves

Since I began really digging into this vocabulary issue, my eyes are opening to the idea that we are not just talking about the typical reading struggles, but a much more serious deficit in oral vocabulary.  So where do I start?  That has been my question all week, and if you read last week's blog on expressive and receptive vocabulary, you know why. And now that we have established that the issue is no longer just about reading but about speaking and listening - we ALL get to participate!

I had the chance to pull out four more students for vocabulary screening tests over this past week.  Because I've been so busy, I only completed two.  I plan to pull the other two next week to finish that testing before I bring their scores to our Tier 2/3 team.

One student has been on the fence with me since she was in sixth grade.  Her progress was minimal, at best, and yet I felt like when I made more contact with her she seemed to do better than when I left her alone.  We worked hard during her sixth grade year to move over the humps of phonics and fluency.  Our seventh grade hurdle was finding reading material that she would actually READ.  Oh, this was ridiculous!  I will forever remember this girl as one of my most difficult in terms of matching her with a book, but in some way we ended up hooking her up with the Miki Falls series by Mark Crilley (which she inhaled) and then branched her out bit by bit.  Currently, she is an eighth grader and has gotten her hands on the Perfect Chemistry series by Simone Elkeles (on of my all-time FAVORITE love stories, because I'm kind of a love story lunatic).  Although we do not house this series in our middle school library, our eighth grade girls (and some boys) always seem to end up with it in their hands before year-end.  Simone has been so kind as to send me a stack of very cool posters (autographed by her) with pics of the (adorable) three main characters.  When I have a kiddo who is THIS into that series, I always award them a poster when they finish it.  It's a motivator for our girls, anyway. I digress.  Anyway, I ran the vocab screener on this student.  She fell within the two middle quartiles.  Relatively average, although when I looked at her scores, the range seemed low, but I'm not familiar enough with the testing to make that determination, so I'm going to have our speech path take a gander at the numbers as well to help me interpret them and make the best use of the data.  This student, however, I know has some major motivation issues.  I just need to figure out the source.  For right now, she goes into my "not scary" pile for vocabulary screeners.

I had a request from a science teacher to move another student who has come up as a concern. She's a good student.  Quiet.  Hard working.  Grades are okay.  Normally, she wouldn't be one that would rise to the top of our "concerns" pile, but I've been digging around for kiddos, and her name surfaced due to lack of progress in the READ180 program and a concern that she needed support in science and social studies.  So I screened her.  Her numbers came up at close to the bottom of the middle two quartiles.  Low.  Hers went into the "scary" pile.  I've got at least one more that will go in there once I finish her testing because her receptive testing was at the bottom of the average range, and her expressive seems like it is going to be much, much lower.

Our speech pathologist got me thinking a lot last week when we discussed these kiddos.  I usually have strategies in my back pocket for a majority of reading issues, concerns, and supports, but I've got empty pockets on this one.  The idea that I could be working with small groups of kiddos who are potentially tens of thousands of words behind their on-grade-level peers scares me so much!  It's like looking at our kitchen and trying to figure out where to start cleaning it after a Lambert Thanksgiving! The situation is daunting, at best.

But one thing our speech path said stuck out to me.  It was the idea that we need to teach these students to advocate for themselves because self-advocacy will help them immediately, whereas vocabulary-building will come with lots of time and work.  In other words, we need to teach them to ask for clarification.  Because we are working with eleven to fourteen-year-olds (and an occasional fifteen or sixteen-year-old), they need some "right now" strategies.  Much easier said than done.  Here are the immediate setbacks of this idea:

• Most of the kiddos I pull out for testing don't have a clue that they need support.  This is just life for them, and they don't get that things would be a whole heck-of-a-lot easier if somebody would open up their brain and pour in a Webster's Dictionary.  This is that whole fixed versus growth mindset.  It is cultural.  How do we bring our students who are currently in this fixed mindset (thinking that this is just the way things are) to a growth mindset where they feel like they can make some changes to their situation and feel successful more often?
• Many of the students I'm identifying are ELL.  If you remember from my blog over the summer on reaching our social students, we are looking at a variety of cultures sitting in front of us daily, and those who come from a more collectivist culture are taught not to bring attention to themselves in class - which includes asking for clarification.  What we are now asking these students to do is go against everything they've been taught socially by their parents so that they can succeed academically.  Not an easy request!  It's family-first for many of these kids, which means what I teach them about helping themselves may fall upon deaf ears if it goes against what Mom and/or Dad has taught.
• This is middle school, and asking for clarification is uncool.  If you're caught looking even remotely interested in academics, there is a stigma attached to your efforts.  Asking questions is often out of the question.  

So in an effort to approach this with a growth mindset myself, I went hunting for some things I can do as a reading specialist to start working with some of these kiddos (and their teachers).  My search is most definitely NOT over. This is just the beginning as I start scratching the surface on my increasing pile of students who lack receptive and expressive vocabulary.  Here are some goals I've set for myself for 2014.

• Identify groups of students who would benefit from small group "self-advocacy" and "oral vocabulary building" instruction. This is going to require a lot of work on my part because each time I give the test, it takes twenty to thirty minutes to administer.  For one student.  
• Identify appropriate times in the school day for this small group instruction (Working with social studies teachers to use social studies material as a springboard for this instruction is one idea that I have discussed with our district reading coordinator).
• Reach out to teachers with specific student names and specific data to illustrate the need to be sensitive to the way instruction is given in the classroom setting.
• Give teachers specific strategies and behaviors that they can begin using in the classroom to better support our increasing numbers of students who have fallen into this linguistic abyss (for example, rewording directions even if nobody asks for clarification or creating a visual or demonstration of the directions aside from just giving them orally).
• Continue to look for researched strategies to use for older students.  There's a lot of research there on building expressive and receptive vocabulary with preschoolers and younger elementary kiddos, but once they get into the middle levels, the research and strategies taper off.  To me, its scary.  
• And you have the motivation piece to factor in - because, by this age, many of them are feeling pretty unsuccessful, and to ask them to stick their necks out and try again is asking a LOT.  What can we do to motivate them?  I need more motivation strategies!
• Buy stock in Kleenex because I feel like I'm going to be doing a lot of crying over all of this in the next year.

So there you have it.  Nothing.  Not a strategy that is even close to useful, I'm afraid.  Just a lot of unanswered questions and vague goals.  But my direction this week is more clear than it was last week, and by next week I am hoping to hone in on some strategies that I can start whipping out at you so that YOU have some ideas in your pocket you can use.  So stay tuned as I detective my way through some of your kiddos to figure out what their issues are.  I figure if I dig far enough eventually I'm going to uncover something we can use!

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 . . .