Intervention for Struggling ELL Readers
2. Reading: Early Literacy Basics
Quality reading instruction is grounded in research with a strong evidence-base. Reading is a complex process which is highly correlated with the subject’s affect and experience. A student’s linguistic and cultural background can influence his perception, motivation and performance on school-related tasks, particularly those which involve language. Uncovering details of a student’s culture becomes inherent in the learning process.
There are a number of factors that influence early literacy development (Gollnick & Chinn, 2002). They include:
- Spiritual and religious beliefs, holidays and custom
s - Geography, urban or rural
- Age of parents
- Socioeconomic status
- Disability
- Migration and time of arrival
- Ethnicity and Race
- Gender Identity
- Language
These factors are more salient when children are infants, before they begin formal schooling, particularly given that they have experienced limited exposure to the outside world. Consider the case of a single parent family entrenched in poverty. The surviving parent must work several jobs to meet the economic demands of the household and consequently becomes exhausted by the end of the day, leaving little time or energy for reading and interacting with others present in the household. When school finally begins, the child has not been around books and therefore does not know how to use them. Teachers of early childhood may observe students who rip, throw or step on reading materials even before they are actually taught to read.
Becoming culturally sensitive is imperative to professional practice, particularly during the early years. Young children are forming their initial impressions of adults and peers alike, and thus they require constant modeling and instruction to meet sequential milestones which underscore the emergence of literacy.
Oral and Written Language Instruction
Reading comprehension is a complicated process, and teaching it can be equally as complicated. Much of this involves the use of declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge and conditional knowledge (Duffy, 1993). Teachers should start with direct instruction and then use guided practice to reach the child’s zone of proximal development (Vgotsky, 1934/1986). Eventually, students begin to perform some learning tasks more independently.
Effective reading comprehension strategies encompass four categories in primary education:
- strategies substantiated by research and widely used
- strategies substantiated by research but not widely used
- those not substantiated by research but widely used
- instruction not widely researched or widely used but potentially promising (Stahl, 2004)
Below are some examples of primary grade strategies substantiated by research, all of which will be discussed in more detail throughout this course. Materials to support these strategies are also available in the Course Objectives | Research | Materials folder.
- Guided/instructed retelling
- Story maps with teacher generated questions
- Question/answer relationships
- Reciprocal teaching
Other strategies found to be effective but underused (Stahl, 2004) include:
- Activation of Prior Knowledge
- Text Talk
- Directed Reading/Thinking Activities
- Literature Webbing
- Visual Literacy Training
- Video
Stahl (2004) also mentioned these techniques, widely used but not well-researched:
- Selection of main idea
- K-W-L
- Picture Walk
Primary students’ listening abilities have been proven to increase when teachers use these strategies (Morrow, 1984):
- Retelling and questioning strategies.
- Questions prior to reading and after the reading of a story - pre-reading, and post-reading.
- Students told to tell stories around story grammar conventions using story mapping.
Low achievers may respond to hands-on activities as a helpful tool for listening (Morrow, 1984). These are:
- Five finger retelling
- Each finger used as an element in the story, such a plot, character, plot
- Finger visuals or posters