Beyond Word Calling: Important Approaches To Teaching Multilingual Learners To Be Fluent Readers
by Sarah Said
We are going into another school year that is unique to what many of us saw as “normal”. As we begin to think about our practices for supporting multilingual learners in fluent reading, many of us may have seen the struggle of multilingual learners to connect the dots between fluency and comprehension more now than in the past. I will say it: the data we collect at the beginning of the year may look “cringy” to us, particularly in reading fluency. By cringy, I mean we see an illusion of learning loss. But please, do not let that “cringy data” pull you into past practices of using basels and leveled readers to teach reading fluency by teaching students how to just decode words. As we become teachers of language, we have to support reading fluency, but from a linguistics standpoint we need to teach the students we serve to do more than just become “word callers”. On top of being able to decode words, our language learners need to be able to comprehend the vocabulary of what they are reading and understand the prosody (tone or expression) of the text they are reading.
Why do Fluency and Vocabulary Acquisition Go Hand in Hand?
As my colleague Justin Endicott, Lead ELA Community Coach at Open Up Education Resources and 4th grade teacher has said, “Fluency is the door to vocabulary acquisition and the development of core knowledge.” What he means is that when students are fluent, they can read core texts and develop their vocabulary as well as content knowledge. Now, for students who speak English as their first language, they, along with their peers who aren’t second language learners, will need some building of background knowledge on vocabulary prior to reading the text. We just need to be more intentional about building background knowledge with multilingual learners.
For multilingual learners, we need to dig deeper into the piece of taking time to pre-teach the content vocabulary prior to teaching students to decode words in a text. The way that we teach this may differ depending on the context and types of language learners in our classroom. In a transitional bilingual setting, we may take time to frontload the language being read in the home language or even teach cognates and the pronunciations of the cognates. For language learners who are towards exiting a multilingual program, it may require some classroom discussion of what each word means. The SIOP Model, developed by Echievarria, Vogt and Short emphasizes the importance of “Building Background Knowledge” as a component of the model.
In the book, The Knowledge Gap, by Natalie Wexler, she emphasizes the importance of providing students with experiences in science and social studies in order to increase their content vocabulary and ability to read. In our classrooms, we can do this by not teaching fluency solely through leveled readers or basels or word lists we are asking students to blindly decode. Instead, we should provide students with multiple complex texts on the same topics that will help them continue to connect the dots in their reading with fluency and comprehension.
How Do We Support Multilingual Learners in Understanding the Prosody of the Text?
For any reader, we need to be able to help them learn how to decode a text but read with expression and understand the tone of a text. The language learners we support learn best in applying four domains of language: reading, listening, speaking and writing as they learn the science of reading in a new language. For language learners, what the SIOP model refers to as Comprehensible Input can support students in being able to read fluently with meaning. When students have language models in their teachers and peers that will model tone, expression and usage of punctuation, this will help their processing of how reading fluency works in the English language. In the past, I have supported language learners through co-teaching in the classroom. When I have a group of students with mixed abilities in language model the reading for each other then read that same text multiple times in that small group, it does support the listening, reading and speaking domains of language.
Also, whole group close reading instruction of short text where students learn the emphasis on punctuation as they read as well as the tone of the language helps students be able to read a text fluently. Continuous exposure to the same complex text will deepen their understanding of how language is structured and how it works. Also, having read a complex text multiple times will build the confidence in a language learner’s ability to read fluently.
Look, there is a time and a place for structured phonics and word work. But, you have to make time for teaching fluency within complex text and content reading. Do you want to spend your life blindly reading word lists or stories from a book with bad drawings that don’t make sense? No. So, why would the students you serve want to do the same. In thinking about teaching fluency to language learners, think about the approaches I mentioned as an equitable way to support students to increase their reading fluency skills with dignity and accuracy.
To Further Your Learning:
Citations:
Vogt, M. E., Echevarría, J., & Short, D. (2010). The SIOP model for teaching English-language arts to English learners. Boston: Pearson.
Wexler, N. (2019). The knowledge gap: the hidden cause of America's broken education system--and how to fix it. New York: Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.