Mixing Memory and Desire: A Family Literacy Event

Faust, M. (2004). Mixing Memory and Desire: A Family Literacy Event. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 4/12, 47:7, 565-572. Retrieved from http://www.reading.org/General/Default.aspx.

Salient Points:

• "When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning how to see. We are not given the world: We make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection" (Sacks. 1995. as cited in Faust. 2004. p. 565). This quote means that our world exists in how we personally see it. We create our own memories and experiences and organize our perceptions into categories that can later be recalled. 
• The author wants to see how people's memories work and use that to his advantage in language and literacy classrooms. He went about answering these questions by interviewing his grandmother and recording what she said using video and audio technology. Next, they visited some of the places she mentioned in her stories. Then he and his older daughter transcribed it onto the computer in a digital story format, using audio and video from the interviews and photos from their road trip. 
• The author keeps going back to Hilts (1995) and his study on memory in human beings. Memories are constantly changing and being remolded, so that when you tell a story from your personal history, you reshape it in the act of storytelling, so that fits your current needs. Hilts says, "The central feature of memory is its malleability. Memory is, at the end, a  site of endless construction...in response to one's current, and most urgent needs" (Hilts. 1995. p. 224. as cited in Faust. 2004. p. 566). 
• People are constantly making stories with their memories and exercise their brain when they recall them to others. For example, the author's grandmother enjoyed being able to communicate her life's story to others and liked having a space to perform her life's story. The family learned not just about her life, but learned something about themselves and their situation in life. As Faust (2004) says, "Our lives might unfold differently as a result of what we are learning, not only about GG, but also about one another through this event" (p. 568).  
• "Among the various effects of this moment was the disruption of the logical boundaries separating past, present, and future" (Faust. 2004. p. 569). The author and his family thought differently about their lives, after learning about the past. For example, Faust's father and older daughter thought about how much technology has changed their lives for them and how simpler things were in the turn of the century and early twentieth century. A connection between the past and present was made and new possibilities were created for the future, as well. 
• "The work of memory provides an opportunity to shape our identity according to what we hope for ourselves, and the resulting configuration of memory and desire reveals the character each of us is in the process of becoming" (Faust. 2004. p. 570). We control our memories and shape them to our own ideals, so that they reveal not only who we are, but what we hope to be. When we tell our personal stories, we are hoping that others will see us how we want to be seen. 

Implications:

• Faust (2004) says that "as students begin to see their own life history as a composition through memory that is subject to constant revision, it is possible to imagine a process approach to reading and writing that makes more sense to them. Activities that require students to pay attention to and craft their own memories can be directed toward helping them become more thoughtful readers and writers in other contexts"(p. 570).  
• Faust provides various digital storytelling projects teachers can use in their classrooms. They are multiple perspectives on individual history, family history, national and world history, and literary reading. Students interview each other, their families, and members of the community to learn about each other, the different types of families, and historical events in the community. They can also use this approach to recall events in literature in literary groups. 
• Students can then create digital stories and projects to present what they have found. This is a skill that they can use later in college and in life to present to others information about themselves and other topics of research. 
• Teachers can use digital storytelling to make students recall events in their lives and in their schooling better. I know that when I was a student, doing a project about a topic made me remember the details of that topic better than studying for a test. It required close examination of the subject, but was more enjoyable than just studying for an exam. It is almost like a study group--each person brings to the table a different perspective as they each remember different details about the topic, whether it is an event in history or a story in literature. 
• One of my favorite projects in elementary school was interviewing a relative or someone in the community who was alive and old enough to remember what happened during the Depression and World War II. For me, that was my grandparents, who were first generation Americans. For others, they interviewed Holocaust survivors. I really learned a lot of details that were not covered in the textbooks. 
• When I was older, I interviewed my grandfather about his life with my Bubbe, using audiotapes to transcribe his words. Then I wrote it up in the style of a first-person autobiography, with some fiction stylistics thrown in, so that it looked like a piece of historical fiction. I gave it the rough copy for his 90th birthday. But now that I have learned more tools of multimedia, I think I might make a digital copy of it for posterity. 

      As for the article, I liked this article, because it brought back memories of when I interviewed my grandparents on separate occasions. Bridging the gap between school and family makes a class more personal for students. Children and adults get some real enjoyment out of the project and it furthers the learning process. Memories are stories and they are constantly changing. I also thought that the article did great job talking about teaching implications, which was relevant to me, a budding teaching candidate. Since English Language learners have a wealth of different experiences, digital storytelling projects as well as literacy events can really help them open up and not be intimidated about the curriculum and the language. They will feel more comfortable in their new school after they get to share their stories. Finally, literacy circles can really help them learn the language and material more efficiently.

Digital Storytelling: Bridging Old and New

McLellan, H. (2006). Digital Storytelling: Bridging Old and New. Educational Technology, Sept.-Oct. 2006, 26-31.

Salient Points:

• Digital storytelling is when you tell a story using various forms of technology to reach more people. The first digital storyteller was Dana Atchley, a professional storyteller, who, in the 1980s, when computers first came out, started creating digital stories using family photographs, movies, images, and stories using technology and multimedia. He coined the term "digital storytelling." Eventually, in the 1990s, he and other theater friends create the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkley, California.
• Over half of today's teens use some form of technology to communicate and tell others about their lives. They are indadvertedly telling digital stories through social networking sites, blogs, Youtube and other video sharing sites, etc.
• "The premise of digital storytelling is very simple. It is designed to help people tell stories from their own lives that are meaningful to them and to their audience using media to add power and resonance, and to create a permanent record. Digital storytelling is aligned with the importance of capturing personal, family, and organizational memories" (27). 
• Digital storytelling is different than digital spectacle, because during the spectacle, whether it's a multimedia formatted opera, circus, or presentation, the audience members are only spectators. Digital storytelling is interactive with its audience members and connects to them emotionally, which is a very effective way of communication. 
• "Good stories make you feel you've been through a satisfying, complete experience. Stories are a form of "expert system"for remembering and integrating what we learn" (28). 
• Digital storytelling can be used across the curriculum and subjects. Many universities and public schools teach digital storytelling techniques to their students to help them communicate and collaborate on projects. 
• From personal stories, to digital archives, to memorial stories and avocational stories (stories that come from victims of domestic violence and other traumatic experiences), digital storytelling 
• Today, there are many forms of digital storytelling, from applications on the iPad and other Apple products to Blogger, the current most popular blogging website,  to Facebook and Tumblr. People tell stories with photos, words, etc. 

Implications: 

• Teachers can use different forms of technology in their classrooms to reach today's diverse student population, most of who have connections to digital media. They can bridge gaps between different learning levels and cultures that populate their classrooms. Many students respond better to technology than traditional methods of teaching. 
• Teachers will be able to manage their classroom better, because many students feel more comfortable opening up and telling their stories in a digital form. Lessons can be more interactive and engaging.
• Teachers can use digital storytelling to get students to become aware of the challenges they face. Then they can use digital storytelling media to tell their stories and help solve problems in the community. 
• Digital stories are a great way for students to express their frustrations they may feel in school, especially English Language Learners, who often feel that the other mainstream students do not understand them and their situation. They can tell their personal stories to the other students in their class.
• Sometimes students have experiences that are difficult to cope with, such as what is happening in current events. For example, they may have trouble today with the economy, racism, death, etc. These problems can affect their learning and a great way to help them cope with such problems is by making digital story. Xtranormal is an example of one therapeutic digital storytelling tool. 

      This article was useful, but I would have liked to see more of a connection to English Language Learners. How can we use digital storytelling media to help English Language Learners? Over the course of the semester, many digital media tools have been presented to me, but I did not see any mention of it in this article, although its focus was not necessarily on ESL. I just think that since there are so many ELLs in schools today, the author might have addressed them with respect to digital storytelling.

English L2 Fluency

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 10

Salient Points:

How do we get our learners to acquire automaticity to be come fluent readers and expert decision makers?

Comprehensive reading instruction leads to reading improvement and changes in brain function. It creates linguistic awareness, knowledge of the alphabetic principle, fluency, and reading comprehension. We need to give a balanced approach of bottom-up and top-down strategies.

Listening comprehension: The first step is segmentation skills and practicing sounding out words without worrying about mistakes in pronunciation. Teachers should provide feedback on the phoneme-grapheme connection.

Fluency: automaticity should be the goal for reading instruction and not oral fluency. Oral fluency tests used as a measure for assessment is not always the best case for ELLs. They need to be assessed against each other and not against native speakers.

Oral fluency: Oral fluency is more difficult than silent reading. ELLs need the cultural background and world knowledge to understand syntax and words, and bottom-level letters and sounds. They need to learn the knowledge of English and basic and common vocabulary. They also need to be taught about punctuation. Too often, ELLs struggle with punctuation, as is evident in the run-on sentences in their writing and their irregular patterns of speech. Teaching them punctuation will help solve those problems.

Some strategies to think about are:

• word callers--reading word by word is counterproductive. Readers should read phrase by phrase.
• eye movement--readers should minimize regressive eye moments and whispering (subvocalization). This will only slow them down.
• Teachers should allow wait time. They can also ignore omitted words or substituted words if the meaning is intact. They should then model to-down strategies to help fix the problem.
• Reading tasks should cover intensive practice with the passage with repeated exposure to it. The students will become familiar with the text and be more comfortable reading aloud.
• Teachers should teach about reading rate and phrasing (chunking).

Implications:

• If teachers want to teach fluency, they should not focus on perfect pronunciation in the beginning. They should get their students to start reading at a faster rate and not subvocalize as much.

• Students should focus on learning phrasing, intonation and stress. To achieve these skills, teachers can teach reading strategies such as chunking and paying attention to punctuation.

• Choral reading can help students practice oral fluency and it will lower the affective filter of the low-level readers, as they can hear more advanced students read and practice along with them. Teachers should focus on lowering the affective filter and making the oral reading environment comfortable for their students.

• Good oral fluency can attribute to good silent reading fluency as well. "It may also be the case that oral reading fluency contributes to general oral fluency in speaking; the better one can read out loud, the better one can use intonation, pronunciation, and proper rate in speech" (pp. 174).

• Teachers must revise their assessments and advocate on behalf of their ELLs to the administrators. ELLs are unfairly compared to native speakers, however their learning processes are different than native speakers'. There is some interference that causes struggle.

Vocabulary Acquisition

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 9

Salient Points:

How do teachers teach vocabulary with reading comprehension? There are bottom-up and top-down strategies. The top down strategies comprehension include:

• looking at the headings or summaries making predictions
• skimming for the gist
• scanning for important information, etc.

Word learning strategies include:

• providing background knowledge to create context for new words
• pre-reading practice
• vocabulary journals
• finding textual cues
• the cognate strategy
• morphological rules
• collocations

Skipping unknown words--There are three assumptions of reading instruction:

1. ELL L2 readers can compensate for lack of specific language knowledge with background knowledge.
2. Readers don't have to understand everything in a text to achieve adequate comprehension.
3. Vocabulary learning takes up too much time in a lesson. Teachers assume readers will "get it" the more they read.

Reading for short term task only allows for a short-term memory of words. It is detrimental to long-term vocabulary building.

There are some learner variables in vocabulary acquisition: the ability to repute new words easily and using probabilistic reasoning and analogy to know spelling patterns.

The phonological loop is when a word is heard, creating a phonological image. The loop consists of two parts--a knowledge based called a phonological store and a rehearsal base that refreshes representations that disappear from short-term memory. Active word processors attempt to pronounce words and start up the phonological store.

Lexical variables in vocabulary acquisition are:

1. acoustic similarity where words with acoustic differences confuse the phonological loop in the ELL L2 learner
2. word length, which affects storage and retention in the phonological loop
3. pronounceability where more pronounceable words are easier to learn
4. orthography: l1 orthography can help in reading the L2, because of overlap between two systems, although this is only if the orthographies are similar.

Nouns are easier to learn than verbs. Transparent languages make connections between the L1 and L2 more easily, even with opaque parts of speech. Probabilistic reasoning can identify parts of speech.

Words can e formed in many ways: borrowing from other languages, compounding (common in English), acronyms and abbreviations, back formations and clipping, conversion, and blending.

Word meaning can be taught in many ways: metaphors (denotations), reasoning by analogy, polysemy (metaphors that are so common they lose special status as a figure of speech), and homonymy.

There are many word learning strategies including repetition and the key word strategy (associating unknown word with L1 word by means of a mediating word (bread is pan in Spanish, and bread is made in a pan). However, the keyword strategy does not always work.

Implications:

• There are a variety of ways to teach vocabulary and teachers should get creative and make it a fun process. They can teach the top-down strategies, because they are useful for reading comprehension, but also teaching the bottom up strategies and straight vocabulary activities are also useful.

• The old assumption of skipping a word you do not know will not work for ELLs (and native speaking readers). They can use top down strategies to help, but they can also use vocabulary building strategies as well. For example, they can keep a vocabulary journal (with pictures) of all the words they do not know, a definition, the sentences where they found them in the text, and their own sentences.

• It is true that with extensive exposure to reading, readers will acquire more vocabulary, but there still needs to be direct instruction in vocabulary, and teachers can teach their students what to do before they read the text, during their reading, and after they finish reading the text.

• We as teachers want to make our students word conscious and excited about words. If they are excited about words, they will want to read more. We want to create voracious readers who enjoy discovering new worlds and new vocabulary.

• Often times, ELLs can get discouraged, because they do not know a lot of the vocabulary in the assigned texts from their mainstream classes. As ESL/EFL teachers, we can help them build a decent vocabulary set that they can use in their future classes. We can make reading more accessible and not so daunting.

• We have to be advocates for our students and collaborate with the mainstream teachers. They need to know that vocabulary is important and that they should not brush it aside.

English Morphophonemic Writing

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 8

Salient Points:

There is no real definition of a word. For this reason, linguists talk about morphemes. Morphemes have three parts:

1. the form, or "a unit of language that usually consists of a sequence of sounds" (pp. 122).
2. meaning--grammatical meaning or meaning with content.
3. minimal form that can be broken down into smaller meaningful units.

There are several kinds of morphemes as well:

1. free morphemes--words themselves, like "sun" or "moon."
2. bound morphemes--morphemes that are attached to other free or bound morphemes, such as words with prefixes or suffixes, like "undo" or "comical."
3. derivational morphemes--a new word created from a base word and prefixes or suffixes are added, such as "careless" or "carelessness." They also change the part of speech of the base word.
4. bound roots--a root that has to have a prefix or a suffix and cannot stand alone, such as "precept" and "supervise."
5. inflectional morphemes--a bound morpheme that "adds additional grammatical information or inflections to a word, without creating a new word" (pp. 124), such as the "-ed" ending or "s" ending. The part of speech does not usually change and the inflectional morpheme in English is always a suffix.

Sometimes pronunciation changes with morpheme changes. This is called assimilation, because the mouth is trying to make it easier to say. It makes speaking the word more efficient. The kinds of assimilation are palatalization (suppress to suppression), velar softening (electric to electricity), vowel laxing (divine to divinity), stress change with vowel reduction (when vowels are reduced to a schwa--grammar to grammatical), and stem changes (receive to reception).

Our writing system has both morphemes and phonemes, making it morphophonemic. It represents the sounds and the consistency of morphemes. Why do we have spellings like "physics" and not "fiziks?" Why do have two letters for the /k/ sound? Why does "ph"=/f/? Why does the "s" in physics sound like /z/? The problems with the English writing system is in writing and spelling, not reading. "The expert reader can read grammar, definite, or misspell with no difficulty" (pp. 129). Native English speakers build up a morphological storage in their brains of all kinds of morphemes and phonemes. They develop word recognition from their semantic memory. They then use words in their semantic memory to figure out the meaning of new words. However, this can be difficult for ELLs, because they do not have this automatic processing of patterns. Some ELLs do not use the grapheme to phoneme strategy at all (phonological processing) and instead use a meaning-based strategy. There may be some morphological interference between the L1 and the L2.

Pg. 133-134--Not all language follow the same morphological patterns. There are four types of morphology:

isolating (Chinese)--(segmentable morphemes) one segmentable morpheme per word or words

fusional (Spanish)--(nonsegmentable morphemes) more than one morpheme per word and the morphemes canon be broken down into parts

polysynthetic (Tuscarora)--(nonsegmentable morphemes) words can be made up of many morphemes, but the individual morphemes are difficult to separate

agglutinating (Turkish)--(segmentable morphemes) many morphemes and easy to segment the morphemes within a word.

Implications:

• We as teachers must be experts at English morphology, so that we can better understand how to teach the language as well as understand the struggle of some students, who make experience interference with their language and English.
• We can also know the four types of morphology, so that we can understand how to teach the variety of ELLs in our classrooms. For example, if we know that Spanish (a fusional language) has multiple inflectional verb ends and gender subject-verb-object agreements, we can understand any mistakes they may make. If we know that Hebrew or Arabic has infixed morphological changes, than we can teach them about the prefixes and suffixes in English.
• We as teachers must teach the morphological patterns in English, and the different pronunciations.
• We must also teach how writing is morphophonemic and that the spellings themselves are pronounced differently than they look. Even these different spellings have patterns that we can teach. We want to reduce the cognitive load on our students, so teaching them the consistencies in English morphology can do that. It will also lower the affective filter of our students.

Approach to Phonics

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 7

Salient Points:

There are many approaches to teaching phonics.

Synthetic method: phonics generalizations. It is deductive and taught using clever rules. Teachers use worksheets and blending. However, this method is involves learning about a language rather than acquiring it.

Linguistic method: learning key spelling patterns. It did not provide early readers with motivation and did not emphasize meaning as the purpose to reading. Teachers use nonsensical words or silly stories.

Smart phonics: both phonics and whole language. Expert readers use resigning by analogy and contextual info in the form of frames. They store knowledge of typical rimes and onsets, morphemes, and syllables that show consistent spelling patterns. They also apply chunking of a graphic image and obtain a storage of chunked info on frames. They have a reduced memory load because of this chunking ability and can understand words better. The smart phonics method uses rhyming games and rhyming books.

Ehri (1998) has four stages in the acquisition of expert English L1 reading, which are:

1. The Pre-Alphabetic Stage: Readers connect the graphs on the page to the phonemes in their heads.
2. The Partial Alphabetic Stage: readers use knowledge of consonants, such as the rime and and the onset of work.
3. The Full Alphabetic Stage: Readers have a good knowledge base of the probabilities of the words and can read accurately and automatically. They can see the separate sounds and tap them out.
4. The Consolidated Alphabetic Stage: Readers have a large knowledge base of graphemic and phonemic patterns and use frames to soon out words. They blend graphemes together and read more fluidly.

Implications:

We as teachers must give our students practice in using an analogy to frame strategy (patterns) so they can sound out words correctly. ELLs can have a storage of frames (patterns) in their head that they can use to help them sound out difficult words. If we know the different first stages of reading, we must create differentiated reading activities in our classrooms.

We also have to model reading strategies such as tapping out words and play games with our students--anything that has them practicing oral language such as making up rhymes, singing songs, or using the Benchmark Method.

The Benchmark Method can be used by having a wall of pattern words, where the students break up the unknown word into syllables and onsets and rimes. They find words on the wall that have similar patterns to the different syllables, onsets and rimes.

We can also have our students read aloud, but it must be in a supportive environment. Sometimes it is helpful for the students to practice silently by themselves before their turn comes up. They can listen to a book on tape and read silently with it or low-level students can be paired with high-level students practice reading together. The high level reader starts reading and the low-level reader waits a little and then starts reading. The low level reader can hear the high level reader and try to match their pronunciations with them (shadowing). This also works with choral reading, where low-level readers can hear how words should be pronounced.

Approach to Spelling

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 6

Salient Points:

Pg. 88--"To use the strategy of probabilistic reasoning in reading, readers need to learn the probabilities that certain graphemes will represent certain phonemes." This quote applies to phonics in kindergarten.

There are also raw probabilities of graphemes, and they are "information from statistical analyses of a written text and its pronunciation" (pg. 89).

Pg. 89 Chart--The language processing strategies for consonants are as follows:

Phonological processing strategies feed into probabilistic reasoning and adjusting probabilities, which feed into orthographic processing strategies, which feed into lexical processing strategies. The latter two are used in processing the text.

The knowledge Base for Language is knowledge that a grapheme is associated with a phoneme, which in the case of consonants means:

b=/b/ (almost always)

bb=/b/ (always)

c followed by a, o, or u =/k/ (usually)

Spelling versus reading rates: the reading rule is quite regular, but the spelling rule may be more difficult to apply. The reading rules are matching incoming graphemes to abstract mental units to access words and meanings.

Probabilistic reasoning with vowels is less useful than with consonants, because vowels are less predictable. Transparent languages have an easy transfer of orthographies than opaque languages. Still, English has strange graphemes. Students need to read in and outside of school for the transfer to happen. They need direct instruction in phonics and accurate listening discrimination activities. Secondarily they need pronunciation activities. They also need visuals of recoding of graphemes to phonemes.

Implications:

We as teachers still need to teach phonics. We need to instruct our students on recoding graphemes into phonemes and show spelling patterns. They can use these patterns, or raw probabilities to predict the spelling of words in writing and decode/recode in reading.

We must also take into account the different writing (and spelling) systems of our students. This means: (Pg. 100-101)

• Learners from a logographic writing system will have to start at the beginning. These learners will require a lot of direct instruction and activities to develop their writing and reading abilities.

• However, readers from an alphabetic writing system, even a Roman alphabetic writing system, may not be used to the strange graphemes in English. These readers will also require some direct instruction in the strange graphemes of English.

• Readers from transparent languages will probably have an easier time than readers from opaque languages, because it is a one-to-one grapheme to phoneme process.

Processing Letters

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 5

Salient Points:

Carrel (1993) interpreted Goodman's 1973 idea "sampling the text" to think of reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game. The reader does not need to use textual clues. He or she can use graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic glues to guess or predict meaning form the text. They predict meaning by using language cues in the text.

This is important, because it means the teachers in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s focused on top-down reading strategies. They felt that teaching background information and reading comprehension skills were more important than teaching bottom-up reading strategies.

However, sampling a text is not really guessing and it also does not pertain to the reading process of beginner, intermediate, or ELL readers. If teachers focus too much on the top-down reading strategies, they will forget to teach the foundations (bottom-up strategies) of reading.

One of the basic components of reading a text is focusing on graphs and graphemes, which are mental symbols of writing. There are two kinds of graphemes:

• simple graphemes:

1. single graphemes: one grapheme to represent the phoneme, i.e. /t/, /d/, /f/, /s/, etc.
2. double graphemes: digraphs, or two graphemes together to represent one phoneme, i.e. "ch", "sh", "ph," "th", et

• compound graphemes: simple graphemes double, i.e. "tt", "gg", "nn", "ck", etc.
• complex graphemes: one grapheme to represent a sequence of two phonemes, i.e. "x".

Readers need to develop graphemic knowledge and processing strategies such as identifying and writing the alphabet (alphabetic principle), and eye movements (saccades) and eye fixation. They also need to practice selective fixating and projecting their focus more on consonants than vowels, and content words. Finally, they need to learn high frequency words.

Implications:

• We as teachers need to teach both top-down and bottom-up reading strategies, or the foundations of reading.
• Speaking of the foundations, we can teach the different types of graphemes that go with the alphabet and the alphabetic principle.
• Readers must not only learn about graphemes, but also about the correct eye movements and fixations.
• In the beginning, children look at pictures. They do not have a pattern of eye movement or eye fixation. When they start to read, we as teachers have to teach them how to move their eyes across a page and follow text. We also have to teach our students selective fixation on the important parts of words and the important parts of the text, such as content words.
• It also is a imperative that students learn high frequency words and sight words.

Listening Skills in Reading

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 4

Salient Points:

Phonics (phonemic processing) is the phonemic to graphemic awareness, or the ability to match sounds and letters. Good listeners will be good readers. Earlier in life, English is acquired, but children still need to practice accurate pronunciation. They need lots of aural and oral focused lessons, so they can discriminate between two different sounds. English has twelve vowel sounds, a lot more than the assumed five. Letter identification is called decoding and forming an abstract mental image that is matched with the letters is called recoding. When a child hears a word, the child "hears" it in his or her mind.

When a child first starts to read, they go through a process known as subvocalizing, which is silently saying the words as they read them. Oral reading is not effective for comprehension. It only suffices to improving pronunciation. Children are too focused on correct pronunciation that they lose focus on the story itself.

Phones are the sounds produced in speech. An individual's speech is called his or her voice print. There are two types of sounds in letters--voiceless (no vibrations in the vocal chords) and voiced (vibration in the vocal chords). Oral sounds happen when air passes through the mouth and nasal sounds happen when air passes through the noise. Vowel sounds depend on the tongue position.

Some Facts about Words:

• A phoneme is an abstract symbol that is not produced.
• Allophones are the same as a phonemes, but are pronounced differently.
• Suprasegmental features of the word are the stress and intonation.
• When talking about suprasegmental features of a language, Spanish is syllable timed and English depends on phrasal stress.

ELLs need to be aware of the phonemes (phonemic awareness), but they do not need to pronounce them perfectly. They just need to be able to discriminate between sounds. They can acquire phonemic awareness with games, nursery songs and rhymes, Dr. Seuss, etc. They can also clap out the different syllables.

Implications:

We as ESL/EFL teachers need to know all the little details of our language, English, in order to teach it. If we know all the details and how they relate or differ to other languages, we can figure out the best ways to teach it to ELLs of various languages. For example, if we know that Spanish speakers rely on syllables, we can teach them about the phrasal components of English and about stress and intonation. If we know about voiced and voiceless sounds, we can teach pronunciation a little bit better and help struggling students. For example, Japanese speakers have trouble with the letter "r," especially when it is in a blend with another consonant like "dr." This struggle is actually similar to native English speakers, who pronounce the "r" in that blend as a "w." We can teach lessons that deal with this problem and get a lot of aural and oral practice in.

Another thing we as teachers can take out of this chapter is that we cannot assume that students know how to read if they can pronounce all the words. That is just decoding. Of course we want our students to be able to do that, but we must all teach reading comprehension. When I was an EFL teacher, I used to have my students read aloud a lot, which is fine, because in the country where I was teaching, pronunciation and the desire to speak English without a foreign accent was a priority. But this lesson did not teach reading comprehension. My employers made the incorrect assumption about decoding. Now that I know the theory, if I ever encounter a school like that again, I can teach the administration the true nature of reading.

Low-Level Transfer of Reading Strategies

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 3

Salient Points:

There is psycholinguistic evidence for differences in L1 and L2 reading. Each writing system provide the mind with different tasks to perform, so the mind develops different strategies to work with the different input. For example, one of these strategies is reading left to right or vice-versa.

For logographic writing systems, reading is like processing pictures. Readers try to access the meaning of the word first. Reading logograms require utilizing different processes than reading alphabetic words. The same goes for reading syllabic writing systems--reading syllabic systems also utilizes different processes.

For alphabetic systems, there comes a whole new set of problems. For example, readers of consonantal alphabetic languages might rely on consonants too much with other alphabets. Readers of transparent and opaque alphabetic languages depend on phonological processes such as recoding and may have trouble with alphabetic systems opposite to their own (transparent vs. opaque systems). Readers are influenced by orthography.

In brain activation studies, it was found that Chinese readers activate the right side of the brain and left middle frontal part, which is the visual and spatial part of the brain. Chinese readers rely on semantics and syllable processing. Japanese learners use phonemic processes over phonological processes. English learners use more phonology and less meaning-based processes.

We know three things about the brain:

1. The right side and left middle frontal parts of the brain are used for visual and spatial processing.
2. The left middle frontal cortex is used for syllabic processing.
3. Te left inferior prefrontal gyrus is used for phonemic processing.

Implications:

If we acknowledge the different reading processing strategies different language learners use, we as teachers can help our students learn how to read more efficiently. We know the different parts of the brain that are used with various writing systems and we know that some languages use meaning-based processes or phonemic processes. We need to teach them the phonological processes that accompany reading in English. For example, English separates onsets and rimes. At least now we can understand why some students have a more difficult time learning English than other students. Therefore, some ELLs will need more direct instruction in these processes than others.

Writing Systems

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 2

Salient Points:

Writing is symbolic and indirect. Technology is writing because it increases human control of communication and knowledge. There are three types of writing systems: logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic.

Logographic writing systems are independent of spoken language and are topical, or meaning-based languages. They have characters or symbols--Mandarin or numbers are two examples.

Syllabic writing systems also have symbols, but theses symbols have one symbol representing one sequence of sounds. These sequences of sounds or whole parts cannot be broken down to represent consonants or vowels. They can only represent syllables. Korean and Japanese katakana are two examples.

Alphabetic writings systems have one symbol representing one sound. These writing systems are uniquely related to spoken language. There are many different types of alphabetic writing systems, from consonantal (Hebrew and Arabic)and transparent (Spanish and Greek), to opaque (English, French, and Russian). Transparent writing systems have a one-to-one correspondence between consonant and vowel sounds and opaque writing systems do not.

English is so opaque because of all the influences it has had from other languages and the constant changes it has acquired over the years in sounds and spelling.

Implications:

We as teachers need to take into account the various writing systems of our ELLs and note the similarities (i.e. cognates) and differences they have in relation to English. Some of our students may have an easier time than others. We must be patient and creative with our students. Just as there will be a variety of languages in our classroom, so must there be a variety of activities and teaching methods. Our job is to identify the different learning styles and see what works and what does not work for our students. Only then will we best be able to guide them in their second language acquisition.

The Expert Decision Maker

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 1

Salient Points:

There are two types of reading strategies: top down and bottom up. The top-down approach involves processing strategies and knowledge bases--developing cultural and world knowledge and using cognitive processing strategies. The bottom-up strategies involve learning precise bits of knowledge about language and writing--processing strategies that decipher the symbols and the parts of the language. In other words, top-down straggles involve the whole language and bottom-up strategies involve the parts of language.

There has been a debate about which strategy to use and the answer is a balanced approach of both. However, the use of either depends of the reading level of the language learner. There are five stages of reading.

Stage 0--Pre-readers can recognize letters and write their own names. They're just learning how to hold a book and guess what a story is. They use mainly top-down strategies to focus on the comprehension of the story.

Stage 1--Emergent readers can decode and recode, but they're preoccupied with low-level skills.

Stage 2--Stage 2 readers have automatic bottom-up processing strategies and start using top-down processes to infer meaning.

Stage 3, 4, 5--These readers have automatic bottom-up and top-down processing strategies. Stage 3 readers use reading to acquire knowledge and want to learn new vocabulary. Stage 4 readers are usually high-school level. Stage 5 readers are college-level and reading is their primary method of learning. They can analyze and critique subjects with reading.

It's hard for ELLs to guess and subconsciously learn how to read a second language. Reading is an expert decision making system. It is like a computer program that uses symbolic processing strategies and rules stored in a knowledge base to make decisions about something.

• ELLs have a hard time being expert decision makers because they have an incomplete knowledge base of English grammar, vocabulary, and background knowledge.
• There can be interference between the primary language (L1) and the second language (L2). The L1 may have different writing systems, which could cause even more problems.
• ELLs are missing the low-level English reading strategies and need direct instruction to help them catch up to their native-English speaking peers.

Implications:

1. We as teachers have to teach both bottom-up and top-down processing strategies to our students. We need to teach the parts of the language (phonics, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, etc.) and the whole language (reading comprehension). Only then will our students become expert decision makers.
2. Since we now know the various reading levels that belong to native English speakers, we can use those five levels in evaluating our ELLs.
3. If we know the problems ELLs face coming into our classrooms, we can use this knowledge to help us teach them in a more efficient manner. For example, there may be interference of the L1 in learning the L2.
4. We as teachers must also teach background knowledge--especially cultural knowledge--and try to use multicultural texts in our classrooms. We can also teach them how the English language works, especially if their native language is very opaque. We also cannot assume anything about our students.