Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners and Students with Learning Disabilities

In his article, Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners and Students with Learning Disabilities, John Carr synthesized research on effective instruction for general education students, English Language Learners (ELLs) and students with learning disabilities (LDs). Of serious consideration is the fact that little research exists on supporting ELLs with LDs. His effective strategies include:

• Cues
• KWL
• Visuals
• Think-Pair-Share
• Think Alouds
• Summarization

This paper supports much of the research I have completed in this area. Small groups, summarization and visuals have been recommended in every piece of research I have read so far. Cues and activating prior knowledge (KWL) are also frequently mentioned in the research as effective.

Carr does suggest a scenario in which a teacher uses the strategies. This is a nice way to showcase how to incorporate the strategies into general class instruction. I will take a stab at doing so as well.

In a fifth grade science class students are beginning a study of matter. The teacher has printed skeletal notes and a booklet entitled matter. Class opens with him asking students to tell what they know about matter and writes them down in the first column of a KWL chart. Students are instructed to read the introduction to the book and are asked to think-pair-share what ideas from their KWL are supported by the reading and where in the reading it is supported. The chart is annotated with their learnings. Then he models reading the first subsection, Elements, using a Think Aloud approach. Students are again asked to think-pair-share about what elements they know. The illustrated periodic table (visual) in the room is pointed out and each listed element is pointed out. Students are asked to read the next section out loud. He models filling in the skeletal notes. When it comes to identifying the features of liquid he pours some water out of his water bottle into his hand. This cues the idea that liquids have no definitive shape in a visual manner. At the end of class the KWL class is amended and students are asked to write a 20 word summary of what they learned.

This would support all learners not a select few. We can do this for all our learners, especially ELLs with LDs.

Strategies for Teaching Reading to English Language Learners with Learning Disabilities

In Strategies for Teaching Reading to English Language Learners with Learning Disabilities, Cheryll Duquette and Mary Land describe two effective approaches. They discuss research and briefly describe RTI or tiered learning, reciprocal teaching and Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) as ways to meet the needs of English Language Learners (ELLs).

Response to Intervention (RTI) or a tiered approach is recommended based on research with primary students. In RTI students are exposed to primary instruction. Those who fail to make adequate progress are advanced to Tier 2 interventions, small group instruction delivered for 50 minutes per day every day. Those who fail to make adequate progress are advanced to tier three interventions which are individualized and sometimes occur under the umbrella of special education.

Second tier interventions focused on vocabulary, phonics, spelling and decodeable text. It utilized visuals, gestures, direct instruction, balanced literacy (reading text, alphabetics, writing, word study), and elaborations of responses. In order to develop oracy ( the ability to express oneself fluently and grammatically), the research recommended Read-Alouds with the following steps: overview, focus on key vocabulary, read portion to the students looking at comprehension, reread focusing on identified key vocabulary, summarize, question and summarize, ongoing links with vocabulary on a daily basis. While the study recommending this approach for ELLs with LD is very small, this structure embodies elements of good instruction.

Reciprocal instruction has been addressed in some of my previous blogs here, here, and here, among others. It is a comprehension strategy that has shown promise in developing skills in LD students as well as for the general population. This article cites research supporting the use of reciprocal teaching with middle school students. It involves teaching four strategies- prediction, summarization, questioning, and clarification- in small group settings. Small group instruction has been advocated for ELLs because it provides lots of opportunity to communicate and listen to modeling of language.

PALS is a program that has research supporting its use in intermediate elementary and middle school levels. It is a reciprocal program used in the whole class. Strong students are paired with weaker students. Students serve as both a tutee and tutor in a cycle. For five minutes, stronger students begin reading aloud to partner with the partner listening for errors. Then the weaker partner retells the passage with the other partner prompting. Next the pair engage in paragraph shrinking: read for five minutes and summarize in 10 words or less. Third is a prediction relay in which  pairs alternate predicting content, read half a page, prediction checking and paragraph shrinkage. Similar to Reciprocal teaching, this approach uses summarization (a Marzano identified highly effective teaching strategy) and peers (an effective approach with ELLs).

What this really demonstrates is the lack of depth in research for ELLs with LDs. It also suggests that peer discussion, summarization and direct instruction are critical component of instruction for this group. The fortunate thing is that these are important elements of good instruction.

A guide to learning disabilities for the ESL classroom

LDOnline offers an interesting resource for working with English Language Learners (ELLs) with Learning Disabilities (LDs) by Christine Root entitled A Guide to Learning Disabilities for the ESL Classroom Practitioner. This article highlights the dearth of high quality research for ELLs with LDs, and urges research into best practices to better meet the needs of the students.

After mentioning the challenge of identifying LDs in the ELL population, she lists categories of difficulty (word retrieval, selective attention mechanisms, visual association confusions, and limited concept manipulation and inner language skills) and the incumbent symptoms of those categories. This list is extremely useful for helping pin-point areas of concern. If a student exhibits limited skill at hypothesis generation and testing, appreciation of if-then relationships and generalization you should look at concept manipulation and inner language. If there are challenges with if-then relationships, tendencies toward being excessively attentive to irrelevant details and inferential reasoning, you probably are working with visual association confusions. If you know these are the challenges, it will help you look at the other symptoms to see if they are present as well. This listing is more comprehensive a learning disability listing than any I have seen in a long time.

From a classroom standpoint, they offer 15 ideas for teachers to help students learn better. These include:

1. extra time: assignments, quizzes, tests take longer when students are navigating the language and the content
2. alternative format tests- oral or computer- What format is the student most comfortable in)
3. presenting information with graphic and/or sensory media- make it real to help teach the academic vocabulary and the content
4. combining auditory and visual stimuli- similar to 3. Help with vocabulary load while providing content
5. using a word processor to reduce the need to rewrite in revision- if language is a problem, then reducing the need to reproduce it provides an opportunity to gain extra time (#1)
6. repetition with the SAME LANGUAGE- to help learn the language
7. breaking tasks down- prevent information and language overload
8. pre-discussion, pre-writing, pre-reading activities- allow to pre-teach vocabulary so that there is less to learn in a session. Anytime you try to learn two or more things at once you reduce your ability to do either. Think of the challenge with multitasking.
9. reduce distractions- allow students to focus
10. Be explicit, structured and concrete- good instruction is good instruction
11. make connections between the individual and the material- build a scaffold on which to hang the content
12. cluster material by category- again this helps build schema- areas of similarity and language upon which to anchor learning
13. frequent notebook checks- make sure they get the notes and are keeping up with assignments
14. balance weaknesses with strengths- give an area to feel good. All students will need to rely on their strengths in order to succeed. An auditory learner can use audiobooks and a student with a strength in math can use that sequential information patterning in history.
15. inventory students to enhance metacognition and showcase strengths- this helps with knowing how to focus attention. It also allows teachers to know what students think are areas they can be successful.

Many of these are just plain good teaching, especially for students who struggle.

The Learning Disabilities Association of America similarly has presented a page of Successful Strategies for Teaching Students with Learning Disabilities that includes direct instruction ( #10), strategy instruction and multisensory approach (#3 and 4).

English language learners with learning disabiliti

Dr. Elsa Cardenas-Hagan was interviewed for Colorin Colorado, a bilingual website to support families and schools. Her interview entitled English Language Learners with Learning Disabilities begins to unpack the challenges of teaching our English Language Learners (ELL's) when they have the compounding problem of a learning disability.

The first thing she addresses is the difficulty of identifying if an ELL has a disability. Initially upon entering the American education system, the student should be screened to identify current skills. This establishes a baseline. Then instruction in the classroom should be adapted to include strategies to target ELL students. If the student does not make progress, then they should be evaluated for a disability. She highlights that the gold standard of evaluation is to complete it in both the native language AND English so that the evaluator can understand skills of the child in both languages. This is important because students will have a learning disability in both native and new languages. Dr. Hagan also points out that the tests must be culturally sensitive, reliable and valid. While this is most doable in Spanish, the most common, non-English language spoken in schools, it may be very difficult in other languages that we encounter with less frequency. Often tests are not available in native languages so that we must extrapolate results- comparing students who are given a translated test and students who took the test in their native language, English.

One major strategy that she supports is to develop language skills- both academic and social. Students need to talk and listen in both their native language and English. Then similarities and differences between the two languages can be highlighted. Cognates, words that share a common etymology, can be used to help enhance vocabulary. For example the Spanish word, abandonado, or the French word, abandonner, means abandon in English. Unfortunately cognates are most abundant between European languages and English than between languages from other regions of the world. The website http://laowaichinese.net/cognate-coincidences.htm identifies typhoon = táifēng as an English to Chinese pairing, but such examples are few and far between. Parents need to be encouraged to develop language- oral language in their home language is important.

Another strategy she highlighted to develop vocabulary was good vocabulary instruction: visuals, hands on activities, repetition, rehearsal, practice, explicit teaching and lots of modeling. These are not vocabulary tools that are solely ELL enhancers, but useful for vocabulary development across the board.  After initial explicit instruction, it can take any student 7-12 practices to learn a vocabulary word in context. A student with learning disabilities may need 30 or more practices. Put the ELL and LD together and you need LOTS of practice. This practice needs to occur in a comfortable and safe environment. If a student is afraid of being teased, overwhelmed with work load or stress, or not feeling safe, this practice will become less likely to occur and less likely to be valuable.

General education teachers need to coordinate with the team providing support: teachers of ELLs, special ed teachers, paraprofessionals, speech pathologists and anyone else need to provide instruction that compliments each other. Conferences between staff is essential.

A general ed teacher needs to differentiate instruction. Yes, this idea is a fad of the year, as it were, but it is true. ELL's benefit from peer assisted learning. Small groups or partner work allows lots of practice of communication and models to occur. In order for this to be effective, they need to teach group roles and routines. Students learning the vocabulary of English need pictures and/or video to anchor meaning of words, even common words that we take for granted that students would learn easily. This is in part true because of cultural differences in word meanings. She pointed out that as an ELL growing up, her grandmother would rub an egg over her face to bring good luck. The egg was not connected to scrambled eggs.

Finally Dr. Hagan emphasized the role of the parent in school. Many parents who do not speak English fluently or who come from another culture, have different ideas of the role of the parent in their child's education. Educational communities need to identify what will appeal to parents, offer trainings, and understand cultural sensitivities. Ideas of how parents can support their children included:

• telling stories
• looking at pictures in books and perhaps predicting what the story is going to be about
• adult literacy classes
• going to the library to attend programs and check out books
• incorporating home language in the language of school

These can be done by all parents, even parents who are not literate themselves. It is also important that we honor home culture. Perhaps bridges can be built by community mentors who provide models of how to support children and their education.

She summed up her discussion with three big points. One, we need to look at each child as an individual. While many of these suggestions work for children, finding the formula of success for each one involves different mixes. Two, we need to monitor progress and how children respond to interventions. If children are not responding we need to make changes. Three, there is limited research on ELLs with disabilities. We need to pursue how best to identify needs and interventions to meet the child's needs.

I thought that the majority of the webcast focused more on ELL in general rather than on specifics of those with learning disabilities. That being said, the information was valid for all ELLs so not useless. My quest for specific strategies geared toward working with ELLs with LD will continue.

Literacy coaching

 Becoming a literacy coach was not ever on my radar. I considered reading too complex to really understand much less teach well. Two decades later, however, I have done research, found mentors and classes, and worked with students trying to demystify reading for kids and feel like I have a bit of a clue. Fortunately people I work with believe I do as well and I have been called upon to work with other staff members around reading. In some ways this is exciting, others a bit terrifying. I still think it is a miracle that as many people learn to read without too much trouble. Reading is an exceedingly complex task. The brain goes through huge work to accomplish it. There are many places where things can go wrong. Successful and repeated reading actually changes the brain. When things go awry I am not surprised. The tricky part is to figure out where things started to break down and begin remediation there. As I embark on a new school year,one of my goals is to increase my skills around coaching. Anyone who knows me, knows that this will entail deep research and reflection. I hope you follow my journey and learn as well. Please feel free to add your insights and wisdom. Together we grow faster.

Toward my pursuit of developing my skills, I am reading materials about coaching. The Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse published Do's and Don'ts for Literacy Coaches: Advice from the Field written by Rita Bean and Diane DeFord. This short white paper highlights some interesting ideas.

 

The Do's list includes:

• Introduce yourself and your role
• Work with all teachers
• Work first to establish a relationship of trust
• Work with your administrator
• Recognize- and appreciate- differences in teachers and how they work
• Recognize your own beliefs and attitudes about teaching and learning
• Establish priorities
• Let the data lead
• Be a learner
• Document your work

 

The Don'ts list includes:

• Don't evaluate teachers
• Don't fall into the trap of acting like the "expert"
• Don't jump right in and expect immediate change
• Don't be invisible
• Don't avoid the tough issues
• Don't sweat the small stuff

 

 

In light of the many readings I've done this year about leadership and how critical trust is to team building, I want to think about that do. This article does a good job about spelling out some ways to build trust. They include listening, being positive and following through. Personally I am focusing on listening. My loud and frenetic upbringing encourages me to jump in before the speaker is done. Dr. Phil, a guilty pleasure of mine, criticized a guest for speaking too quickly because she did not have time to process his statement. I am guilty of this as well. I am going to work on talking less in my interactions so that I can really think about what is being said. I drive a lot during my work day and use that time to reflect on how a lesson went. I need to put more effort into reflecting in the moment so that I can better process what is being discussed. This also models reflection, an important goal of coaching as well.

 

We'll see how it works.

 

 

 

Assignments Matter

Eleanor Doughterty wrote Assignments Matter: Making the Connections that Help Students Meet Standards for ASCD in 2012. Her overriding theme is that there is a difference between assignments, activities and assessments. The purpose of assignments is to create an environment for learning whereas an activity is "merely doing" (p. 23). It seems like her assignments are tasks that students need to participate in learning and thinking in order to complete. It appears she views activities as fairly useless and she does not discuss assessments.

In order to present robust and rigorous assignments that promote learning, she sees teacher collaboration as essential. She sees time as the number one impediment to completing assignments that present rigorous tasks that work toward teaching the CCSS. Time is required to deeply understand the standards and develop assignments that involve real world basis. In some ways her ideas appear to be more about essential questions than anything else. One example she provides is

What is the proper role of the individual in response to a disaster? After reading passages from the Dalai Lama, John Donne, Marcus Aurelius and William Stafford on individual responsibility, write a letter to a younger student that addresses the question and supports your position with evidence from the texts. (p. 23)

When you look at this assignment, it is the result of  a series of tasks the teacher will guide the students through in order to complete the culminating activity: scaffold reading comprehension tasks through each passage, discussion about responsibility, perhaps interviews or video viewing of people after a disaster, instruction in letter writing and composition might all be required. Yes, this assignment requires lots of instruction and could be robust, but it is very time consuming.

People refer to the Common Core standards as being substantially reduced in content, but assignments like this require perhaps a month of instruction. Content might still need to be reduced in order to accomplish this goal. At the end of the book she highlights a middle school program that instituted a program called Rapid Transit (p. 149-150). The students were significantly behind expectations and experienced high rates of failure in high school before the implementation of the program. Rapid Transit highlighted literacy and math skills and sidelined all but the major concepts in other subjects. The students were able to make remarkable progress in ELA and math, but at what cost? Students were denied access to content that build background to high school and life. They likely missed out on many activities that were exciting for students- rich science experiments, interesting stories about the history of our country and geography, perhaps even the arts, music and PE. It is an interesting trade off.

The other thing that seems to missing from Ms. Dougherty's program of focus on assignments is a focus on fluency. While ELA goals of reading deeply and communicating effectively  are permeating the curriculum across the board, there is also a focus on fluency with certain skills. I am concerned that her poo pooing of "activities" reduces opportunity for fluency. The book is significantly ELA focused but seems to ignore the idea that many of our students have reading fluency issues. These students need us to engage in activities that focus on reading fluency- rereading with a focus on prosody, listening while reading, and reading with a thought to speed and accuracy. She would probably defend her position saying that teachers could embed the instruction within other "bigger" tasks, and perhaps she is correct. Without mentioning fluency based skills, however, I fear that this text will encourage ignoring them.

One admirable key feature is her idea that anchor assignments are important. I live in New York. We have a long tradition of assessing students and releasing the assessments (our Regents testing program started in 1860). These tests have tasks that are anchors. They standardize expectations across the state. Teachers use old questions and activities to prepare students for the rigors of the exam. Done well, the summative test was the easiest test students experienced in their year. Anchor assignments provide for a set of expectations. They showcase what students should be able to do, what their writing should look like. This is exactly what our testing program has provided.

This book is strikingly lacking in examples of her ideas. She suggests locations to look for assignments, how to build and effective rubric and some possible solutions for dealing with logistic concerns, but these are usually lacking in detail that would assist one with implementing her ideas. In some ways it almost seems as if her goal in writing the book is to engage her or another consultant.

While I agree that rigorous tasks are important, teacher collaboration is essential to effective instruction of students and working to improve skill sets of teachers and students is important, we need to be cognizant of creating rich experiences in language that do not demoralize our students with disabilities. A dyslexic student faced with reading and writing tasks in every class needs tremendous support. Managing this is an agonizing process as electives are eliminated and graduation is postponed. We need to be careful to meet the needs of all our students. Not all students are going to college. Students need soft skills like resilience, time management, organization and initiative in order to be successful. We need to embed these skills throughout our curriculum and recognize their accomplishment. For students who struggle with executive function skills, we need to spend as much time detailing them as how to teach how to factor quadratic equations and finding the volume of complex polyhedrons. We need to develop underlying fluency to facilitate abilities in content areas. There is no quick fix or single solution to the problem of education. We need to look at each school, classroom and student individually and develop programs of study that apply to them.

Learning and Memory strategies

I found The Source for Learning & Memory Strategies by Regina G. Richards in a free pile and picked it up. Although it is more than a decade old and the fields of neuroscience and learning are a rapidly blossoming field, the book proved to be valuable. The first part of the book is three chapters about the brain and learning. Ms. Richards goes over major brain parts that impact learning, how memories are made, memory problems and memory facilitators. Although the current state of science has a much more nuanced understanding, this information is accurate and accessible for the lay person. The second part of the book is a series of chapters arranged by subject area including a rich variety of strategies for learning. Many of these are hashed out in other sources but the compilation is useful.

Her description of memory is as follows:

• sensory memory- fleeting (less than 20 seconds), heavily filtered by attention, meaning and patterns and emotion. The vast majority of our sensory input is filtered out without recognition. People with ADHD have issues with this filtering function.
• short-term memory/ working memory- this is where we manipulate information and includes the following roles:
• holding an idea in mind while developing, elaborating, clarifying or using it
• recalling from long term memory while holding some information in short-term memory
• holding together in memory the components of a task while completing that task
• keeping together a series of new pieces of information so that they remain meaningful
• holding a long-term plan while thinking about a short-range need. p. 23

She does not mention the Halstead length which refers to the amount of information that you can put into those Miller defined plus or minus seven chunks. (Halstead was a computer program studying programmer success who discovered that people with greater Halstead lengths could tackle greater problems.)

• Long term memory- contains several formats- episodic, sematic (fact), procedural, classical and priming. Different types of memories are stored differently- your trip to Disneyland is in a different format than the multiplication tables which is different from the wince you make before someone scrapes their fingernails on a chalkboard or the how to hit a baseball or how to anticipate what will happen in a Cinderella archetype story.
• Retrieval- how to get things out.

This format explains how breakdowns in memory and learning occur. A student can have an excellent memory for mathematical processes but a terrible memory for people's names or even English vocabulary. Figuring out specifically where the breakdown occurs is critical to teaching students to manage their memory system effectively.

Throughout this section she models how to use techniques to enhance memory. A sweet device to illustrate her point.

One technique that I really appreciated was her use of kinesthetic activities. In college I heard a lot about using kinesthetic approaches but very few examples of them. She repeated refers to using a mini-tramp to help encode memories. This involves jumping on the tramp while chanting, singing, or repeating information to be recalled. It brought to mind latitude and longitude jumping jacks that I have had students do: Latitude= arms to side and legs spread, longitude= arms above head and feet together while chanting the appropriate term to reinforce what direction the lines go. It really works. She also emphasized singing or chanting information to encode it in more places in the brain and to cue recall. Teaching the Wilson reading system, I have had kids stuck on what sound t makes and merely putting my thumb in the air is enough of a cue to get them unstuck.

 Another key idea is that we put things into memory based on their similarities to what we know but retrieve them based on differences. That is why we have easily confused words, terms and concepts. Students understand they are related but do not get how they are different. If a trapezoid and a rhombus both have a set of parallel sides and sides that slope- how do I know which one I am talking about? A teacher needs to demonstrate how new material is similar to what is known to get it into memory. Then they need to examine how it is different from other related concepts so that the proper ideas are recalled when needed.