Introduction
The teacher’s initial pedagogical decision is to match students’ abilities with the difficulty levels of materials. This is as true for literacy as it is for every kind of instructional program. As discussed in the first chapter, there are hundreds of reading programs; selecting the right one or designing a unique program for a student depends on many factors. While findings of research are not unequivocal in supporting certain kinds of instruction, they do suggest that there is reason to teach certain kinds of skills. Results of research surveys of the National Reading Panel, the National Literacy Panel, the Partnership for Reading, and other research will be considered in the design of the instructional strategies described and dis-cussed in this book. The first consideration concerns teachers’ models of reading and instruction.
Reading Models: Bottom-Up versus Top-Down versus Interactive
There is considerable controversy concerning the appropriate model of reading.
It is important to be aware of models because they determine what a reading teacher believes about instruction and subsequently does in the classroom. The pre-dominant paradigm or model involves the teaching of skills. Advocates of the skills approach believe that students learn to read and comprehend by acquiring a large set of skills in a particular sequence. Basal readers are designed on this principle.
Skills advocates believe meaning is in the print. This view is also referred to as the bottom-up model. Most teachers believe that skills should be taught (see Gunderson, 1991). Indeed, most ESL teachers appear to believe students should be taught skills such as phonics and letter–sound relationships.
The top-down theorists believe that meaning resides in the heads of readers, not in print. They believe students should be asked to read meaningful material.
Through the act of reading they acquire such basic skills as phonics. These theor-ists have not actually produced top-down reading programs. Meaningful reading material may be good books or students’ own dictated LEA stories. Teachers would never directly teach the “ch” spelling correspondence, for example, as they do in the skills-based program.
A third view of reading is that it is “interactive.” This model suggests that readers use both bottom-up and top-down information as they read. No one has suggested 36
what an interactive reading program would be. Finally, the “holistic” school of thought has proponents who believe students should write and read as soon as they enter school. Most of these teachers are offended by the idea that students should be directly taught a skill. They are convinced, rather, that students will come to learn such skills through meaningful manipulation of language. Some subtle differences in teaching approaches exist between whole-language teachers who believe in the completely independent model and those who believe in implicit modeling (see Chapter 4).
A teacher’s model has definite effects on what that teacher does in the classroom.
It is vital for all teachers, and indeed for all potential teachers, to determine what their view of reading is. This is best done in a small group or individually and includes brainstorming answers to the following: “How should students be taught to read?” or “To learn to read, students must ———.” An item analysis of brain-stormed ideas reveals an individual’s viewpoint. If, on the one hand, the list is overwhelmingly made up of items such as “Students must learn phonics, word recognition, names of the letters of the alphabet, prefixes, affixes, punctuation, spelling, and antonyms,” then that individual has a skills-based viewpoint and, most likely, believes students should be directly taught skills. If the list contains such items as “meaningful reading, student-created reading material, word recognition in context, active prediction during reading,” then the individual has a top-down notion of reading and will involve students in activities that are meaningful. If, on the other hand, the list contains a mixture of the two, then the individual may have an interactive viewpoint. Further, those who believe that all language activities should be taught together, and that students will learn to read by writing, are members of the holistic school of thought about language learning. A teacher’s model determines the kinds of activities that teacher designs for his or her students.
Indeed, the reader of this text will select those activities that fall within the parameters of a particular model. On the other hand, it is also true that teachers sometimes abandon their own instructional models as a result of strong pressure from other teachers, administrators, and/or politicians. It is this author’s experi-ence, however, that such programs are seldom successful.
As was noted in the previous chapter, teaching students to read in their mother tongue may be preferable to teaching them in English; few mainstream teachers are prepared to teach them these skills, especially in classrooms where four or more first languages (L1s) are represented. The prevailing methodology appears to include them in reading instruction in elementary school and to let them “sink or swim” in secondary school. Teaching approach is also affected by the overall percentage of ESL students in a class (Gunderson, Eddy, & Carrigan, submitted for publication b). Indeed, upwards of 60 percent of classrooms were more like EFL than ESL classrooms. In essence, these researchers found that there can, in fact, be too many ESL (ELL) students in a class to continue standard ESL instructional practices. Teachers in these high ESL classrooms must change their instruction to account for the lack of English models available to their students. Adults, on the other hand, appear to be taught English using teacher-developed programs. A number are also involved in online, cyberspace-based programs.
ESL reading instruction is, in many respects, a more complicated concern than reading instruction for native English speakers. Generally, teachers of native English speakers can assess students’ reading abilities and assign them to an appropriate program—one that is either skills based, whole language, LEA, or some other integrated reading/language arts program, depending on the teachers’ beliefs and the school system they are in. The ESL teacher’s task, however, is not so simple. There are several factors to consider: 1) the students’ first language (L1) literacy background, 2) their second language (L2) proficiency, 3) their L2 reading ability, 4) the cultural and age appropriateness of the L2 materials, 5) students’ reasons for learning to read English relative to their age, 6) their purposes for reading, 7) the difficulty level of the material to be read, and 8) the overall percentage of ESL students in the class. A 55-year-old illiterate Burmese student needing to learn enough survival reading skills to get a job has different needs and purposes than 12-year-old Burmese students who have had six or seven years of schooling in reading their own language and who are enrolled in an elementary school where they need to be able to read and comprehend English-language textbooks.
The difficulty is to establish a systematic, research-based approach to designing appropriate literacy programs for a wide variety of human beings who differ dramatically in age, intellectual development, motivation, literacy background, experience, and language aptitude. This is no easy task. The purpose of the follow-ing discussion is to map out just such an approach. First, it is necessary to talk about the acquisition of English.
Language Acquisition
First-Language Acquisition—English
Human beings are not born with a language. However, it is well established that they are normally born with the ability to learn a language. Indeed, babies are born ready to learn any language. Chomsky (1975) referred to what he calls the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) to explain how human beings are equipped to learn language. The language they learn is usually the one spoken by their parents. There also appear to be developmental differences that are roughly related to age. Children do not learn, for instance, to use past-tense verbs accurately before they learn to use present-tense verbs in English (Clark & Clark, 1977). A number of researchers have investigated the acquisition of English in very young children.
The one truly interesting finding related to the purpose of this book is that parents turn out to be outstandingly good language teachers.
North American children begin to produce their first words in English somewhere between 12 and 20 months on average (Bates et al., 1977; Clark & Clark, 1977). The present progressive “ing” form is the first lexical form that native English speakers seem to develop (Brown, 1973). By the time they are about 6 or 7 years old they are fairly competent in understanding and producing complex sentences and are able to communicate well with their peers and the important adults in their worlds. By the time they are about 6 years old, most English-speaking children have well-established and fairly extensive vocabularies. That these young human beings
have acquired their language abilities is due, to a large extent, to their parents’
outstanding teaching approaches.
Brown (1973) carefully observed early mother–child communicative inter-actions and found a number of interesting features. Children began producing one-word utterances at about 18 months. These early one-word utterances were observed to be holophrastic in that they meant more than was evident from their surface structures. The child who said “more” actually meant something like “I want some more milk.” Mothers did not simply repeat what the child said, but responded with something like “Does baby want more milk?” The relationships between mothers and children were supportive. The child produced an utterance and the mother responded with an expansion that provided the correct models without overt and critical correction. Magnificent teaching interactions continue as the child begins to produce simple sentences and different grammatical forms. So, for instance, if the child says, “I goed to the park yesterday,” mothers usually res-pond by saying something like “Yes, you went to the park yesterday.” The mothers’
expanded and elaborated forms provide examples of the “correct” sentences (Bates, 1976; Bates et al., 1977; Brown, 1973; Clark & Clark, 1977). The product of this masterful parent–child synergy is a child who can understand and produce fairly complex language, including relatively appropriate vocabulary, syntax, and pragmatics, by about age 6 to 7. It is often at about 6 or 7 years of age that children begin to go to school, where they encounter the task of learning to read and write, and teachers who are nowhere near as good at teaching language as their parents.
Gunderson (2007) found that immigrant students from very different first languages and first cultures were reported to have begun to say single words and simple sentences in their first languages at about the same ages as native English speakers. This finding in itself is quite extraordinary. However, they had begun to read at significantly different ages that related to when they actually began school.
He concluded that reading instruction begins at a culturally relative age and that parents appear to largely get out of the language teaching business, which, he con-cludes, is an unfortunate state of affairs since they are such good language teachers.
As was noted in the previous chapter, vocabulary control is important for authors designing reading instructional texts because they assume that the words they should introduce are already known to native English speakers. The same cannot be said of second language learners. Indeed, the student who is learning English may differ from her English-speaking classmates in her knowledge of vocabulary, syntax (grammar), semantics (word meaning), pragmatics, literacy and cultural background knowledge, and sociolinguistic or socially embedded meaning making. A second language learner may not comprehend connected discourse because she does not have the experiential background knowledge to allow her to do so.
Learning or Acquiring English as a Second or Additional Language
It has been argued that there is a difference between acquiring and learning a language. This view is referred to as the “acquisition/learning hypothesis” (Krashen
& Terrell, 1983). Language acquisition occurs naturally, usually at home within the
context of a family. Learning language often is more formal and usually occurs in school. Reading instruction is a difficult undertaking because learners vary in so many ways from the native English speaker. However, there is evidence that second-language learners learn English in much the same way as native speakers. For instance, present-tense verbs are learned before past-tense verbs. This has been referred to as the “natural order hypothesis” (Krashen, 1982). Gunderson (2007) found solid evidence supporting this view. Krashen also developed the notion of comprehensible input.
The notion of comprehensible input is that learners must be able to understand information before they can learn. Piaget (1973) referred to the notion of moderate novelty, which is essentially the same idea. Krashen (1982) argues that the success of a language program depends on the provision of comprehensible input. Com-prehensible input is a relative term, however. It varies among different human beings depending upon their background. The difficulty with packaged instruc-tional programs is that they are designed to match the needs of human beings who do not always exist: “average” learners. And additionally, language learning is more complex for the second-language learner because in addition to sequence, there appear to be two basic kinds of language.
Cummins (1981) proposed that there were two kinds of language proficiencies to be learned: “basic interpersonal communicative skill” (BICS), the language of ordinary conversation or “the manifestation of language proficiency in everyday communicative contexts” (Cummins, 1984, p. 137); and “cognitive academic language proficiency” (CALP), the language of instruction and academic texts. It has been suggested these labels might lead to a misinterpretation of the com-plexities they seek to describe (Edelsky et al., 1983; Rivera, 1984) and imply a deficit model of language. Edelsky (1990) likens CALP to “test-wiseness” and developed an additional acronym, SIN, “skill in instructional nonsense” (p. 65). Cummins (2000) provides strong support for continued use of the terms and concepts, and the two labels have generally come to represent two categories of proficiency: that associated with face-to-face conversation (BICS) and that associated with learning in the context-reduced cognitively demanding oral and written environment of the classroom (CALP) (Cummins, 1981; Swain, 1981; Cummins and Swain, 1983).
Older students use knowledge of academic material and concepts gained studying L1 to help them in L2 and the acquisition of L2 occurs faster. So, the child who has learned to read in a first language has skills that can be transferred to the task of learning to read English. Aukerman (2007) argues, on the basis of the results of her study of one primary-level child, that CALP is not really context-free in primary classrooms. The difficulty, however, is that primary-level curricula are extremely contextual in that teachers normally try to provide as much scaffolding as possible.
This author has also argued that the Cummins model is static and that the under-lying relationships are really relative to individual students’ backgrounds, motivations, skills, and interests. This will be explained in some detail in what follows.
Second-Language Literacy: Some Principles
The potential number of variables a teacher should or could consider in planning an instructional program for a single human being is immense. Planning gets more complex when those human beings come to a classroom speaking a language other than the language of instruction. Indeed, students who speak a first language that is different from the language of instruction who have learned to read their L1s are different from those who have not learned to read L1. Young L1 non-readers are different from older non-readers for various important reasons. Immigrant ESL students are different in many important ways from native-born ESL students.
Gunderson (2007) found that some immigrant students do enter their new countries with some English literacy skills. However, those who arrive with some English skills are significantly behind their grade levels in English reading ability.
Indeed, the older immigrants who had some English skills were as much as seven or eight years behind their grade levels in reading comprehension. The National Reading Panel also reported that comprehension was usually significantly lower in ESL students than in native English speakers. The purpose here is to reduce the number of issues a teacher must consider to be able to design appropriate reading instructional programs to match the needs and abilities of human beings who differ so greatly in so many ways.
BICS, CALP, COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT, AND INSTRUCTIONAL HEURISTICS
Cummins (various dates) argued that language learning occurs in different con-texts. Some contexts provide substantial cues to the learner. Usually these contexts are informal and involve face-to-face interactions. Learners are able to comprehend in context-embedded situations because the input is more comprehensible. The context is filled with multiple cues that help the learner. Body language, intona-tion, and simple direct communications contribute to a learner’s understanding.
Figure 2.1 shows these relationships. In it the context axis varies from embedded to reduced (disembedded). The second axis represents cognitive demand, some-times referred to as difficulty. The informational material in a lecture or a chapter on phenomenological epistemologies is usually cognitively more demanding than a narrative of a trip to the zoo. Cummins hypothesized that BICS occurred in context-embedded, cognitively undemanding situations (quadrant A), while CALP occurred in context-reduced cognitively demanding situations (quadrant D). The difficulty with this model is that it is static. The informativeness of context and cognitive demand vary from individual to individual and also within an individual depending upon a particular task and a whole lot of other individual variables.
Aukerman (2007) suggested that CALP was more embedded in context than Cummins proposed. The difficulty with this view, however, is that primary-level classes are highly social environments in which teachers provide scaffolding in significant ways. Instruction is a significant variable that affects CALP in direct ways.
Comprehensible input is also a relative term. There are many different variables that affect the degree to which a particular task is cognitively demanding or com-prehensible for some individuals and not for others. Teenage learners who want
to get a driver’s license are highly motivated to read the driver’s license guide and will often be more successful reading it than they will be at trying to read social studies material at a comparable reading level. Learners interested in particular subjects such as dinosaurs or jet planes will find such material less cognitively demanding than comparable reading material on community resources. Compre-hensibility and cognitive demand are relative, not static. The difficulty is to make relative judgments about individual learners—an especially difficult task for teachers with 30 or 40 students in their classrooms at one time.
Instructional Matrices
This author has worked with second-language learners since the 1960s and has developed the following Two-Factor ELL Instructional Matrices based on theory and research to help guide the design and implementation of literacy programs.
The instructional heuristics presented in the following pages are based on extensive teaching practice and work with teachers. The number of potential background variables is huge. The instructional matrices represent a systematic reduction of variables into two that are very powerful. They also have support from the research of the National Literacy Panel (August & Shanahan, 2006; Gunderson, 2007).
Literacy Background and English Level
The following matrices were developed in 1989 on the basis of intuition and experience in classrooms in Chinese-majority schools, as a Title I reading teacher
Cognitively demanding Cognitively undemanding
D Reduced
C Context
B Embedded
A Context
Figure 2.1 Context and Cognitive Demand
in a Spanish–English bilingual school in California, and as a teacher-educator work-ing with teachers in schools with many ESL students. Over the years they have served teachers well as instructional guides. However, originally they were not, strictly speaking, supported by research. Since 1991, however, this author has con-ducted long-term research involving thousands of immigrant students (see Gunderson, 2000a, 2004, 2007). This research explored the relationships existing among about 150 variables, including developmental, language, family, and literacy variables. There is research to support the foundations of the heuristics.
The research involved approximately 25,000 immigrant students whose families were interviewed following a protocol that included items concerning such issues as individual development, literacy learning background, first and second language interactions, school history, English study, and health history. Both children and parents were encouraged to respond, and interviews were conducted in English when possible. However, for families unable to be interviewed in English, inter-preters were hired who were native speakers of the family’s first language and generally knew the customs and cultural background of the families. Following the interviews, students’ English skills were assessed using various standardized and holistic instruments, beginning with an individual oral language assessment.
The oral assessment begins with the assessor asking simple questions in an effort to begin to understand the student’s English ability. Items include:
1. What’s your name?
2. How old are you?
3. Where are you from?
4. What did your mother do in ———?
5. What did your father do in ———?
6. Do you have any brothers or sisters? Tell me about them.
7. What is your favorite food?
Students’ responses begin to inform the assessor about the students’ English ability.
The following items were designed to discover specific information about different kinds of English knowledge.
1. Tell me the days of the week.
2. What day was yesterday?
3. What day will tomorrow be?
The student is asked to count from one to as high as possible, and then to name numbers shown in random order. Eleven basic colors are shown and students are asked to name them. Reciting the alphabet is followed by the recognition and naming of letters at random. Nineteen different body parts are shown in pictures, and students are asked to name them, followed by the naming of six different school items such as a pencil and crayons. These items generally require students to have a basic English vocabulary. The second portion of the oral assessment focused on English structure.