No one disputes the benefits of extensive reading (ER) for students of English. There is a substantial body of evidence supporting using graded readers as an effective way of exposing students to comprehensible input, through which they can acquire not only vocabulary and fluent reading skills but also grammar and oral fluency. Here are just some of the language improvements that ER can make, and the relevant studies.
Gains in reading proficiency (Elley and Manghubai, 1981; Mason and Krashen, 1997; Suk, 2017)
Gains in writing proficiency (Elley and Manghubai, 1981; Mermelstein, 2015)
Gains in vocabulary (Pitts et al., 1999; Hafiz and Tudor, 1990)
Gains in oral skills (Cho and Krashen, 1994)
Gains in positive affect (Cho and Krashen, 1994; Rodrigo, 1995)
Expanded grammar knowledge (Aka, 2018)
Overwhelming, isn’t it? Of course, we might reasonably expect that reading extensively would improve reading skills, but the interesting thing is that ER seems to improve pretty much every aspect of language acquisition. Stephen Krashen, in The Power of Reading, claims: “Reading is good for you. The research supports a stronger conclusion, however: Reading is the only way… we become good readers, develop a good writing style, an adequate vocabulary, advanced grammar, and the only way to become good spellers” (1993). The accumulation of evidence amounts to what Waring (2009) has called “the inescapable case for extensive reading” (p. 93), and has made Grabe (2009) ask the question: how much evidence is needed to make the case for extensive reading?
The Missing Link?
Despite all this evidence, though, the fact is that ER is still noticeably missing from many English language classrooms. So what can we do as teachers to incorporate ER into our teaching programs? How do we motivate students and teachers to really unlock the full potential of ER? In our book Extensive Reading: The Role of Motivation, Jez Uden and I propose that motivation is the missing link between the research and the classroom. We suggest a motivational reading cycle based on beliefs, values, and goals.
Beliefs, we say, include, among others, learners’ need to believe they can read successfully, that they must have appropriately leveled materials, and that the materials must be interesting. Learners should have plenty of choice of reading material, and they need positive and encouraging feedback.
Values include the idea that collaborative tasks related to the reading materials are necessary for enhancing social relatedness and maintaining situational reading interest. Students need to feel like valued and respected members of a reading community, and the benefits of an extensive reading approach need to be clearly understood by teachers and learners as well as other interested stakeholders. Above all, reading materials should be relevant to learners’ interests, needs, and/or knowledge.
Goals need to be clear and tangible, realistic and achievable. Short-term goals are likely to result in higher motivation. Students should feel motivated by setting their own reading goals and be supported by their teachers.
Motivational Reading Cycle
Building on these basic ideas, our proposed motivational reading cycle shows the four phases necessary to make ER successful in your classroom:
Create the right reading environment
Generate initial reading motivation
Maintain and protect reading motivation
Encourage positive retrospective evaluation
As Dornyei (2001) suggests, to generate motivation, certain preconditions need to be in place. Firstly, we need to create the right reading environment. For teachers, this means creating a supportive and cohesive environment in the classroom that encourages learners and makes them feel like valued members of a reading community. They need to find out what types of books their learners enjoy reading in order to provide comprehensible materials that will help trigger and maintain their interest. Teachers also need to project enthusiasm and share their passion for reading and become role models. Outside of the classroom, learners need to do all they can to create their own ideal reading environments and consider all potential distractions. For example, they could find a quiet room in the house, turn off their phones, have some snacks to hand, and immerse themselves in a good book.
The next part of the reading cycle focuses on generating reading motivation by enhancing and developing learners’ beliefs and values. Once learners know they can read successfully in the second language (belief) and have a reason to do it (value), they require situations that spark interest, create curiosity, and encourage them toward second language literature. By creating a positive and enthusiastic environment, providing appropriately leveled and interesting materials, and allowing plenty of choice, teachers can help learners feel inspired to find a book that interests them.
The third phase of the cycle focuses on maintaining and protecting reading motivation. Setting goals helps drive learners forward and provides the energy needed to complete a task. It is also an essential component for later feedback and evaluation. While some learners prefer to read on their own without any external influences, others may require or enjoy more motivational support and collaboration through projects and group work.
Collaborative tasks could be as simple as having learners discuss the books they are reading or much more elaborate, as in the case of readers’ theatres, where learners assume the roles of the characters in the books and produce a performance. Activities during this phase are likely to vary greatly depending on the reading contexts and the learners themselves, but as long as the motivation is maintained, the cycle can continue.
The fourth phase of the cycle presents an opportunity to provide positive retrospective evaluation through encouraging feedback. This stage helps clarify what learners need to do in order to achieve their reading goals. It also feeds into and helps develop learners’ self-regulatory processes. Regardless of whether goals have been met or not, the feedback stage should enable the learner to feel capable of further progress and maintain their reading motivation. In cases where reading goals have not been met, the feedback stage explores reasons for lack of achievement; it can help learners select more appropriately leveled reading materials and set more realistic goals, and it can help with creating better reading conditions.
The feedback is then further analyzed through more self-regulatory processes before learners enter the initial stage of the cycle again. Enthusiastic teachers can trigger interest by providing situations that help learners discover exciting new titles and that allow for plenty of choice. Feedback helps learners who have had to reset overambitious goals gain renewed belief in the opportunities for successful reading, while learners who are enjoying reading and achieving their goals can become excited at the prospect of further enhancing their knowledge or losing themselves once again within the next chapter of their book.
Activities
Of the almost 60 activities in our book, I’ve chosen four, one from each of these categories, to try out.
A. Create the right reading environment: What do I think I’ll learn? Key idea: Get students interested in what they’re going to read.
Review types of reading goals, e.g., being able to read quickly, understand well, read with enjoyment, etc.
Ask students to look at the front cover, title, and blurb of their new graded reader. Individually, they complete the handout below. Elicit examples first. Monitor and assist as necessary.
Put students into groups of three to share what they’ve written.
Take feedback from the groups and discuss.
Finish by telling students to keep their worksheets and their goals safe. When they’ve finished their book, they will review them and check how they did compared to their predictions and their goals.
Handout: Look at your new graded reader and complete this handout.
How much do you expect to enjoy this reader?
How much new vocabulary would you like to learn?
What do you expect to learn about the world, or about a specific place or person?
Are you expecting any difficulties in reading it?
How do you expect to feel about your English when you’ve finished it?
Write down your three reading goals.
B. Generate initial reading motivation: Don’t give too much away! Key idea: Students motivate other students to read. (Each student has read a different book.)
Before students discuss the books they’ve just read, ask them to write some notes about the following:
Genre
Brief description of the main characters
Where the story is set
How the story begins
An interesting/exciting scene in the book (not the final scene!)
A personal connection they had with the story
Any deeper meaningful issues in the book
Put the students into pairs or small groups and ask them to discuss their books with each other.
Take feedback on which books students would like to read next.
C. Maintain and protect reading motivation: The six-book challenge Key idea: Challenge students to read. Include competition. Present the class with a selection of books, ensuring they are easy enough for all students to read. Ask the class to look through the selection and decide on six books they want to be included in the reading challenge. Put the students into small teams. Once the students have begun reading their individual books, they should discuss what they have read within their teams each week in class. Teachers should monitor the discussions to ensure the students are actually reading the books. The winning team is the first group whose members have all read each of the six books.
D. Encourage positive retrospective evaluation: What I learned Key idea: Students reflect on what they’ve learned by reading.
Ask students to take out the handout they filled in before: What do I think I’ll learn? (See Section A.)
Individually, students check their notes and write about what they learned in the handout below. Encourage them to compare their before and after ideas.
Put students into groups of three to share their findings.
Take selective feedback and discuss. Did they achieve their goals?
Handout:
How much did you enjoy this reader?
How much new vocabulary did you learn?
What did you learn about the world, or about a specific place or person?
Did you experience any difficulties in reading it?
How do you feel about your English after finishing it?
As I wrote at the beginning of this article, no one argues with the fact that ER is good for language learning. Since the evidence for the power of extensive reading is so overwhelming, I believe that we owe it to our students to study the ways in which we can increase motivation to make it an integral part of our teaching programs. Let’s really make full use of its power in our classrooms.
References Dornyei, Z. (2001). Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grabe, W. (2009). Reading a Second Language: Moving from Theory to Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Krashen, S. (1993). The Power of Reading. Leather, S., and Uden, J. (2021). Extensive Reading: The Role of Motivation. Routledge. Waring, R. (2009), in A. Cirocki (ed.), Extensive Reading in English Language Teaching.
Sue Leather is a writer and ELT educator based in Vancouver. She is an expert on extensive reading, having written over 35 original graded readers for a number of publishers. She won the Learner Literature Award twice, for Dead Cold (Cambridge University Press) and Ask a Friend (Stand for Readers), and was nominated a further two times, for The Big Picture and The Way Home (both Cambridge University Press). Extensive Reading: The Role of Motivation came out in 2021. You can find all her books on her Amazon author page. Contact her at [email protected] or www.sueleather.com.
Sub Saharan Africa ranks among the regions in the world where education exclusion is the highest. In fact, according to UNESCO Information Statistics: “Over one-fifth of children between the ages of about 6 and 11 are out of school, followed by one-third of youth between the ages of about 12 and 14.”. This situation is likely to get worse as the area’s youth population is growing, creating even more demand for schooling. French, being the main official language, is taught from primary school to university level whereas English lessons start in middle school in public schools. Many private institutions, however, start it at elementary school, so paying students get an advantage over their peers in the public sector. The situation is also complicated by the fact that many teachers are either undertrained or untrained, not having had any pre- or in service career training. This exacerbates the divide between well-off areas and poorer remote areas where students can’t access English instruction and, if they do, it’s at very low levels due mainly to their instructors’ lack of training. This is clearly out of line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), mainly SDG4, the education goal which advocates that ; “All people, irrespective of sex, age, race, color, ethnicity, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property or birth, as well as persons with disabilities, migrants, indigenous peoples, and children and youth, especially those in vulnerable situations or other status, should have access to inclusive, equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities.”
In our Francophone areas, privileged kids get an advantage over many of their peers living in underprivileged areas with overcrowded classrooms, sometimes exceeding one hundred students per classroom. To tackle this issue, we’re going to analyze the challenges faced by teachers whose students face a language divide and then, we’re going to try and suggest some ways to remedy this issue through the use of programs, trainings, and registrations of teachers to English teachers associations (TAs). Both at local and international levels, membership of TESOL International could reduce this language divide, or better, eliminate it.
Undertrained and Untrained Teachers Historically, the English language wasn’t widely used in Francophone West Africa, so most partners and donors competed to send local students or teachers abroad for immersion training programs in the US or UK. Now, as English doesn’t need any more promotion, with many people using it in their jobs, most partners no longer feel the need to invest in teacher training. On top of which, most budgets have been cut because of recurrent economic crises hitting the world, including our development partners. Pre-service centers train very few student teachers even though there’s a big teacher shortage. In-service training isn’t taken seriously by the authorities and some teachers, as it’s not mandatory. There’s also rampant recruitment of untrained teachers whose English proficiency is very low. Another significant hurdle is the inaccessibility of relevant and updated ELT materials, adequate curriculum, textbooks, and exam prep training. Finally, there is the issue of overcrowded classes with many classrooms having more than a hundred students and temporary shelters being used as classrooms in some areas. Most students cannot afford to buy textbooks or the resources that would help them follow the classes correctly: « Many excellent resource books have been written for EFL teachers, but most of them include a lot of activities which rely on certain facilities being readily available. Teachers in developing countries won’t have access to video machines, OHPs or cassette recorders. The nearest photocopier could be many miles away. In some countries, teachers might not have a blackboard or even a classroom. »(Marsland, B, 1998)
Training Opportunities with the Access Program Aware of the disparity existing between schools, the US State Department Access program stepped in and tried to come to the help of students in their last two years of Middle School : “The English Access Microscholarship Program (Access) provides a foundation of English language skills to bright, economically disadvantaged students, primarily between the ages of 13 to 20, in their home countries. Access programs give participants English skills that may lead to better jobs and educational prospects. Participants also gain the ability to compete for and participate in future exchanges and study in the United States” . In reality, this program only targets students aged between 14 and 16, and it is restricted to underprivileged areas, offering extra English classes to students once or twice a week and everyday during the spring or Christmas break. Not only does the program empower students who may be eligible for the exchange programs of the US State Department, but it also trains its teachers and provides them a lot of teaching resources, professional development opportunities and documents.
The Crucial Role of Teacher Associations There is also the role of English Teacher Associations (TA) creating suitable environments for professional developments through their activities with their Ministry of Education or with partners such as US RELOs and the British Council. In many cases, Teacher Associations support professional development opportunities by organizing workshops, conventions, English Language Days, symposiums, and recently, webinars and online trainings. The deficit of training can’t entirely be resolved by these structures, but at least, they help teachers know about the latest techniques and methods in the ELT field, give them opportunities to fully practice speaking English with its various facets, enable them to develop professionally with the help of experts, trainers, seasoned teachers, and develop exchanges with local and international peers. For instance, TAs in Senegal and Mali, frequently organize events and sometimes invite experts and ELT practitioners to come and share their experiences with teachers.
Though TAs can support teachers efficiently, the other great issue is that many teachers aren’t members of their TAs for various reasons ranging from being unaware of their benefits to teachers reluctancy to pay membership fees. Some simple problems make it extremely difficult for teachers to become members of international organizations such as TESOL International Association. A case in point is the fact that many teachers can’t pay with an ATM card, and membership fees aren’t low enough to allow the majority to join TESOL. The sad reality is that with the difference of standards of living, it’s almost impossible for most teachers to become members of TESOL International Association because whenever US dollars are converted into local currencies, the amount becomes extremely high and inaccessible for teachers. The same applies to the books and resources sold by TESOL and similar organizations. Underprivileged areas are left behind as prices are extremely high for teacher’s in low income countries. Even if efforts have been made to encourage members in low income countries outside the US through the global membership platform, there still remains a lot to be done to make TESOL and other associations more inclusive, more diverse and less US-centered. In that respect, investigating about other payment modes used in the rest of the world could help solve the issue. However, TESOL’s Diversity Equity Inclusion and Access (DEIA) initiative states ;
TESOL promotes equitable representation, engagement and broad access to professional opportunities for all and works to eliminate any kind of discrimination including, but not limited to, language background, race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion and belief, age, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, culture, appearance, or geographic location
It would be beneficial for TESOL to organize and host a major event every two to four years outside of the US in places where large numbers of teachers aren’t able to join TESOL or don’t even know of its existence. It may even be possible for TESOL to have all its newsletters published by its various Interest Sections reach all parts of the world through a sponsorship that could be made effective by all our partners through its DEIA initiative. Due to the scarcity of training opportunities, all the TESOL webinars also could reach many more teachers who would use online resources to access relevant and updated ELT materials.
Conclusion In line with its DEIA, it seems logical for TESOL to make additional efforts to support the rest of the world even if COVID made international efforts difficult both financially and structurally. The reality is that there are large groups of teachers around the world yearning for guidance, training, resources, and professional development. TESOL’s leadership could help teachers advance professionally. Organizing events, such as symposiums, conferences, or webinars, in underprivileged areas may not be profitable but they do provide an opportunity to advertise the association, provide resources, foster collaboration, and consequently, create a more diverse and sustainable organization.
Fulbright Exchange Teacher, Dr. Mawa Samb is currently a teacher trainer and instructor. He is also a consultant for the Lauder Institute Immersion Program of Pennsylvania University, WAEMU Baccalaureate and the British Council. He also teaches at Ecole Superieure Polytechnique de Dakar in the IT Department. Former ATES President, he is currently serving on the TESOL International Assocation Board of Directors (2021-2024) and won the 2016 TESOL Best Practicing Teacher Award.
Imagine you are trying to build strength. You go to the gym every day, lift weights, and then come home to rest and recover. The next day, you are back at the gym for another round of weightlifting. For the past two weeks, you have only been able to do ten reps with 60 pounds at the bench press, but your goal is to lift 100 pounds. What is the best way of getting to your goal of lifting 100 pounds?
Option A: Keep trying to lift 100 pounds until one day you are hopefully able to do so;
Option B: Try lifting 61–62 pounds next time you go to the gym and then increase the weight each week by two pounds;
Option C: Try lifting 80–81 pounds next time you go to the gym and then increase the weight each week by five pounds;
Option D: Keep lifting 60 pounds every time and hope you can lift 100 pounds someday.
Most of us would agree that the best way to achieve a goal—whether building strength, as in the example above, or improving language proficiency—is by pushing our limits little by little (option B above). If we do not push our limits at all (option D), no growth or development will take place. If we push too hard (options A and C), we will be disappointed that we cannot do it and will lose motivation. In the same manner, a juggler doesn’t learn to juggle five balls before first being able to juggle three and then four. And the only way to learn to juggle four balls is by being able to juggle three and then attempting to juggle four. Mistakes will happen, but with practice, patience, and the support of the foundational skills previously learned while juggling three balls, that juggler will eventually be able to juggle four balls, getting them closer to their goal of five.
Making Progress in Learning a Language
A notion that has had a significant impact in the fields of psychology, sociology, and applied linguistics is that of the zone of proximal development (a.k.a. ZPD), first presented by Vygotsky in 1978 as a component of his theory of learning and development. As originally proposed, the ZPD indicates “the distance between the actual development level (of the learner) as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). Since its proposal, the core idea around ZPD has been applied to many different areas. One area in which the concept of ZPD needs to be better understood and absorbed by practitioners is the area of world language instruction and especially that of assessment.
All of us have likely met language teachers who constantly give their students tasks that are either too easy or too hard to complete. In other words, they do not really know how to adapt the lessons to the varied proficiency levels of their students or how to select exercises and tasks that will push the boundaries of their knowledge just a little further. They struggle with selecting activities that are within each student’s zone of proximal development. These would be tasks that are slightly above each student’s ability level (i.e., an intermediate-high level task for an intermediate-mid level student).
However, the idea that progress takes place when students are exposed to slightly more difficult tasks than they are capable of easily completing has been extensively researched and promoted in the applied linguistics literature. We see it, for example, in the Lexile framework, which promotes that the Lexile measure of a reading text be slightly above a student’s Lexile reading measure for the student to learn new words and structures in a scaffolded context. We see it in Krashen’s input hypothesis (1985), in which he defends the idea that acquisition takes place when input is slightly beyond a language speaker’s current level of competence (a.k.a., i+1).
Finally, we see it in the research into reading comprehension, which suggests that readers are still able to comprehend a text when about 2% to 5% of the words are unknown (Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010; Nation, 2006; van Zeeland and Schmitt, 2012) and that this should be a target to aim for. The 95% to 98% of words that are known act as the scaffolding necessary for readers to infer the meaning of and gradually learn the unknown 2% to 5% of words. This is another example of i+1 in practice in our field.
Part of being a good language teacher is knowing how to adapt the content of our instruction to push students just the right amount so that they can improve their language proficiency by being continually exposed to language materials and language use scenarios that are just slightly above their current levels of ability. When we adapt, the students adapt, and so do their language skills.
Adaptive Language Tests?
Let’s imagine we have 100 language learners at various levels of reading proficiency in French, ranging from novice-low to advanced-high, but we do not know what each learner’s level is. Our task is to create an assessment that measures their reading proficiency in French. There are many ways to develop an assessment for that purpose, including:
Option A: Create a paper-and-pencil or computerized test with several reading questions at each level (e.g., ACTFL levels from novice-low to advanced-high). Then, have all test takers, regardless of their actual proficiency, take the entire test, which is the same for everyone. At the end, see how many questions they got correct and assign a proficiency level to each test taker. Option B: Create a computerized test that has several reading questions at each level from novice-low to advanced-high. Then, have each test taker take a few intermediate-level questions at first (the expected average ability of the group). For those test takers who fail to correctly answer most of the initial intermediate-level questions, show them novice-level questions and let them attempt to answer those. Accordingly, for those who do succeed in correctly answering most of the intermediate-level questions, show them advanced-level questions instead.
I hope most of the readers will agree that assessment method B above will tend to be shorter and will lead to less frustration or boredom than assessment method A. After all, if test takers can successfully answer intermediate-level questions, why ask them to answer a series of novice-level questions? Not only would that make the test longer and more boring for these test takers, but it could in fact decrease the level of precision of the assessment instrument. If I have seen a juggler successfully juggling six balls on a few occasions, do I need to see them successfully juggling four to be highly confident they can juggle four balls? The answer is no. We know their juggling ability is at least six balls. And the reason we can safely say so in this case is because juggling ability is a unitary construct, just like reading proficiency in a language, which follows determined developmental stages.
A well-known fact of Rasch measurement, a measurement framework commonly employed in developing language assessments (Ockey, 2021), is that the measurement precision of a question (i.e., the amount of statistical information provided by a question given a specific examinee) increases the closer the level of the question is to the level of the test taker. This is, for example, the psychometric framework employed in developing computer-adaptive tests (CATs), which are tests capable of adapting in real time to the estimated proficiency level of each individual test taker.
By not having all test takers take the same exact, linear, fixed-form test, a CAT has the potential to increase the precision and efficiency of the measurement while also providing for a much more pleasant test-taking experience for each test taker. As Schultz, Whitney, and Zickar (2014) note, CATs “can be both more effective and more efficient” when compared to fixed-form tests. This is because tests in which items are better targeted to the level of each test taker can afford to be shorter than their fixed-form counterparts without compromising the precision of the measurement (and, in most cases, improving it).
CATs can come in a variety of flavors, with the two most employed in language testing being adaptivity at the item level and adaptivity at the stage level. In the former, all test takers take the same initial item. After they respond to that item, the computer then chooses a subsequent item for each test taker that is close to their currently estimated proficiency. That process is repeated until the system is confident of the test taker’s proficiency level. In the latter method, called a multistage computer adaptive test (MsCAT), the test adapts at the stage level instead. All test takers take the same initial group of items. Depending on each test taker’s responses to that initial group of items, the system then chooses the next group of items that is close to their currently estimated proficiency.
Whether a language testing developer decides to implement an item-adaptive or stage-adaptive test is a matter of available human and computational resources, knowledge of the subject, and personal preference.
However, one thing is certain: in this day and age, there are few good reasons why a test developer may want to deliver a linear, fixed-form computer test of language proficiency that emulates a decades-old pen-and-paper test that does not adapt in real time to the level of the test takers.
Now, back to our strength-building analogy. Let’s say you are now a personal trainer (teacher) helping a group of 20 people (students) of varied abilities build their strength (improve their language proficiency). If you do not know where they currently stand, how would you go about assessing their current abilities (their current proficiency levels) in an efficient and effective manner in order to put together a comprehensive and targeted program for each one of them, making sure not to hurt them during the process?
References Krashen, S. (1985). The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. London: Longman. Laufer, B., and Ravenhorst-Kalovski, G. C. (2010). “Lexical Threshold Revisited: Lexical text coverage, learners’ vocabulary size and reading comprehension.” Reading in a Foreign Language, 22, 15–30. Lund, R. J. (1991). “A Comparison of Second Language Listening and Reading Comprehension.” Modern Language Journal, 75, 196–204. Nation, I. (2006). “How Large a Vocabulary Is Needed for Reading and Listening?” Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59–82. Ockey, G. J. (2021). “Item Response Theory and Many-Facet Rasch Measurement.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language Testing (pp. 462–476). Routledge. Schultz, K. S., Whitney, D. J., and Zickar, M. J. (2014). Measurement Theory in Action (2nd ed.). Hove, Sussex: Taylor & Francis. Van Zeeland, H., and Schmitt, N. (2012). “Lexical Coverage in L1 and L2 Listening Comprehension: The same or different from reading comprehension?” Applied Linguistics. doi:10.1093/applin/ams074. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Victor D. O. Santos, PhD, is director of assessment and research for Avant Assessment. His PhD dissertation (Iowa State University, 2017) was on the topic of assessing students’ academic vocabulary breadth by means of computer-adaptive assessment. Dr. Santos has served as a reviewer for several academic journals in the areas of language learning and assessment.
Whether you are a school or district administrator, a coach or fellow educator, you must have encountered a colleague who felt lost when assigned to teach English learners, overwhelmed by the challenge of addressing these students’ needs within the context of the general education classroom. English learners are an ever-growing subgroup of the US student population. There is growing consensus that students who need to develop English language proficiency should no longer be perceived as the sole responsibility of specially trained and certified faculty, often referred to as English as a second language (ESL), English language development (ELD), English learner (EL), or more recently multilingual learner (ML) specialists. Researchers and advocates agree that English learners belong to the entire school community and that all educators are charged with their academic, linguistic, and social–emotional development (Kibler et al., 2015).
Teacher collaboration is an important dimension of teacher effectiveness, as emphasized by Dion Burns and Linda Darling-Hammond (2014) when they claimed that “more than any other policy area, actions that support collaborative learning among teachers appear to hold promise for improving the quality of teaching” (p. v). We recognize that there are many ways to provide professional learning opportunities to all K–12 teachers who regularly encounter ELs in their classrooms and agree that teacher collaboration must be a top choice.
In this article, we shift our focus to present an emerging trend: the much-desired opportunity for two-way teacher capacity building and collaborative coaching through co-teaching in classes that integrate both content and language learning for the sake of ELs (or for all students). While collaborating teachers often share a range of common skills, through the sustained collaboration necessary in preparation for and during the intentional implementation of co-taught classes, the two professionals combine their expertise; thus, co-teaching becomes a job-embedded, ongoing professional learning opportunity in the form of collaborative coaching (see Table 1 for a summary of the partnering teachers’ distinct knowledge and skills). When teachers work together in an ongoing fashion, they are afforded a platform for sharing their understanding of the curriculum and the students they jointly teach, while at the same time supporting each other in growing new pedagogical, cross-cultural, and other competencies.
What Is Co-Teaching for ELs?
We define co-teaching for ELs as a collaborative delivery of instruction that involves two teachers (one elementary grade-level or secondary content teacher and one ELD/ESL specialist) who, through intentional planning, integrate content, language, and literacy development goals; who jointly plan learning experiences that are rigorous but carefully scaffolded for all learners in their class; and who engage in collaborative formative and summative assessments. The ultimate goal is student integration (rather than segregation) and, through a comprehensive system of scaffolds, to provide access to grade-appropriate curriculum and instruction for ELs on all language proficiency levels to ensure their success.
For co-teaching to work, teachers must engage in a complete instructional cycle of collaboration, which consists of four interrelated phases: collaborative planning, instruction, assessment, and reflection (a similar cycle has been very well documented by special education colleagues and researchers alike). Co-planning is a nonnegotiable; if co-teaching teams do not engage in authentic and sustained planning together, at best they will just be sharing the physical space with the students segregated as “your kids” and “my kids.” In that case, the class may come to have one real teacher and one helper, resulting in limited impact both on student and teacher professional learning. Co-teachers working together must also regularly co-assess their students’ progress and reflect on all their students’ content, language, and literacy development as well as the effectiveness of the collaborative partnership.
Coaching with a Language Focus
Coaching with a specific focus on second language acquisition and language or literacy development for ELs has received limited attention thus far. Ari Sherries (2010) offers an overview of coaching teachers within “second language, foreign language, and lingua franca settings” (p. 1), reminding us that many K–12 educators may lack the sufficient background knowledge and skills to address the diverse academic, linguistic, cultural, and social–emotional needs of English learners. As such, he suggests that most K–12 classroom and content-area teachers benefit from coaching and mentoring originating either from peers or designated coaches and mentors. When such professional learning opportunities provide regular possibilities for coaches or mentors to engage in the coaching cycle, teacher learning increases and impact on student learning is also enhanced. If coaching is to target enhanced instruction for ELs or academic language learners (ALLs), participating teachers typically focus on language and literacy learning in addition to content instruction.
Traditional Coaching Cycle
According to one school of thought on coaching, teachers engage with their coaches in a coaching cycle that may consist of the following steps:
The teacher shares her lesson plan with her coach.
The coach offers pre-observation feedback by email or in person.
The coach observes the lesson.
The teacher receives feedback on the lesson.
Due to the frequently cited limitations of coaching staff, each teacher may only participate in this cycle periodically, once a week or even as rarely as once every six weeks. Therefore, within the traditional framework, coaches face many challenges to producing meaningful change. They not only must tap in to their instructional and content expertise, but they also need to foster respect, confidence, and trust, using appropriate communication skills to negotiate what is sometimes a fine line between what teachers and students need, what administrators want, and what policy often mandates, within a limited frame of time. Other professional learning opportunities often augment coaching, such as workshops, courses, professional learning community meetings, collegial circles, book studies, or even intervisitations. But as Ben Jensen and his colleagues (2016) also remind us, teachers learn “not simply from reading and observing others work, but from combining these passive activities with active collaboration and learning-by-doing” (p. 8).
Peer Coaching Combined with Co-Teaching
The traditional coaching cycle has received a major overhaul within the context of co-taught, integrated K–12 classes (both at the elementary level and in core secondary courses), where English language development and literacy learning are systematically intertwined with core content learning. A unique approach that we have been supporting in the past few years acknowledges that co-teaching for ELs is much more than co-delivering instruction, offering targeted intervention, reducing the teacher–student ratio, or even placing a language and literacy expert in the classroom to support a certain group of kids. Instead, when implemented with fidelity, it is a continual reciprocal coaching opportunity that inherently lends itself to teachers engaging in collaborative (peer) coaching via structured, recurring professional interactions (co-planning, co-assessing, and reflection).
In our observations, high-functioning co-teacher teams examine the curriculum through two lenses and design unit plans and daily lesson plans by purposefully addressing the following: what is academically or cognitively demanding in the grade-appropriate content to be presented, and what is linguistically demanding for all students at all language proficiency levels. At the same time, co-teachers also maximize the naturally presented learning opportunity: ELD/ESL specialists learn about the grade-level content standards and the age-appropriate knowledge and skills all students need to master, whereas the classroom teachers learn to better respond to ELs’ and ALLs’ linguistic and literacy development needs.
Three Paths to Collaborative Coaching
Collaboration and co-teaching for the sake of ELs vary greatly from state to state, district to district, and even classroom to classroom within the same school. We have found three overarching paths that are emerging as practices in support of combining co-teaching as a delivery model for ELD/ESL services and for reducing student segregation with ongoing professional learning that is relevant, interactive, and sustained over time.
The first path is the most commonly emerging practice, according to which co-teaching becomes an avenue for two-way learning in school districts across the nation. For example, in Haymarket, Virginia, Sara Conant and her colleagues are combining co-teaching with coaching as follows:
At Goshen Post Elementary, we have moved to co-teaching models of instruction to maximize the efforts of our EL teachers. We are utilizing peer coaching in our collaborative planning times to grow our practice schoolwide. We are also having quarterly meetings with the co-teaching teams and will set aside time to learn from each other about what is going well and areas where we feel we need support. For peer coaching to be effective, relationships must be established so both parties feel a sense of trust and respect within the partnership. Peer coaching has the power to be an effective form of professional development in that one’s peer knows the strengths and struggles within the classroom. These partnerships are non-evaluative so partners may be more open to giving and receiving feedback.
The second path recognizes the complex roles and responsibilities ELD/ESL teachers hold, as they frequently serve as in-house experts on second language acquisition, language and literacy development, culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy, and so on. With such a comprehensive knowledge base and skill set, some districts have started to redefine the ELD/ESL teachers’ primary function as language coaches or language development coaches. As such, these educators support student learning as well as offer peer support to their colleagues on an ongoing basis. Jackie Griffin, language development coach in Country Meadows Elementary, Kildeer School District 96, Illinois, describes herself and her experiences as follows:
A language development coach (LDC) shares responsibility with the classroom teacher for helping students achieve high levels of growth in both language and academics. The LDC and the classroom teacher work together to strategically plan for and teach students based on their needs. When planning with the classroom teacher, the LDC moves in and out of three fluid roles: consultant, collaborator, or coach. With the consultant role, the LDC may hold the knowledge and the classroom teacher is the learner, or vice versa. In the collaborator role, both partners hold the knowledge and learn from each other, and in the coaching role, the LDC asks thought-provoking questions to assist the teacher in making decisions that will impact student learning and long-term capacity building.
After joint planning, LDCs and classroom teachers co-teach and then reflect on how their instruction impacted student learning. The LDC also has the opportunity to demonstrate strategies that are best for all students so they are used even when the LDC is not in the room. The LDC, in turn, learns content and strategies from the classroom teacher and can bring that knowledge to others in the building. A third path signifies professional partnership building across grade levels, classrooms, and school buildings. For example, three elementary teachers—Allyson Caudill (ESL), Ashley Blackley (G1), and John Cox (G2)—in Wake County Public Schools, Raleigh, North Carolina, engage in a unique three-way partnership in which Allyson is co-teaching with both Ashley and John. They have formed the Ready, Set, Co-Teach team (@readysetcoteach on Twitter, and www.readysetcoteach.com). The team recently discussed their experiences with integrated professional learning through co-teaching and sustained collaboration (Caudill et al., 2018) and gave several examples of how they learn from each other. They also open their classrooms, which serve as lab classes, for other co-teaching teams to come for intervisitations. They summarize:
When teachers face obstacles or need more information or advice on how to more effectively do their job, they first turn to their colleagues. We look at schools as communities of diverse experts. The school counselor is an expert on mediation, classroom teachers are experts in their content areas, ESL teachers are language specialists, and technology teachers are computer experts. Co-teaching provides a unique opportunity for two experts to come together, share their expertise, and learn from and support one another.
By being in the same classroom, observing and teaching together, co-teachers inadvertently serve as each other’s coaches. There have been plenty of times that John has coached us through using new technology, Ashley has modeled reading best practices for us, and Allyson has opened our eyes to new ways of scaffolding for language learners. One thing we have found is the learning never stops! We are always challenging each other and pushing each other out of our comfort zones. The best part is we get to do it together and we are all better for it.
How Do We Know It Works?
Joellen Killion (2018) suggests “two logical beginning points are assessing the overall quality of professional learning and evaluating the impact of existing programs of professional learning” (p. 205). Collaborative coaching combined with co-teaching has been growing, and successful experiences have been reported across the nation. Brigitte Pittarelli, ESOL teacher in Binghamton City Schools, New York, captured it best when she described both the process and the outcome of her experiences:
While planning with my co-teacher, I guide her on what words to look at within the context of the material, how to shelter and scaffold the learning, and how to structure the lessons from beginning, middle, and end. During our instructional time in front of all students, I offer tidbits of reasons why each support strategy is essential and explain further how it supports a particular EL in the group. I guide her learning by helping her make connections about the essential language objective. I briefly offer reasoning during the co-teaching while students are engaged in turn-and-talk or cooperative pairing tasks, or even when students are thinking about a question we posed and are given the proper wait time. Co-teaching has transformed both of our teaching. It has given me a lens into the general education classroom, and my co-teacher better understands ELD instruction. Our partnership is a true marriage. Our students all excel within this scenario! I am very excited because the general education teachers are starting to see the value of the sheltering techniques (scaffolds and strategies), lesson designs, and alignment of English language development with English language arts standards and curriculum. They are realizing that the techniques we use for ELD instruction and SIOP structure are good for ALL children. It has been an eye-opening experience not only for the general education teacher but for me as well. I never realized that ALL students in essence are academic language learners.
In our field-based research, we have noted that teacher collaboration may be recognized as a vehicle for ongoing, site-based professional development through mentoring (for novice teachers), peer coaching (for midcareer teachers), and establishing teacher leadership roles (for more experienced teachers). Here, we hope to have made a compelling case that co-teaching may also serve as a pathway to collaborative coaching that recognizes each participating teacher’s expertise and allows for day-to-day professional learning.
References Burns, D., and Darling-Hammond, L. (2014). Teaching around the World: What Can TALIS Tell Us? Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/teaching-around-world-what-can-talis-tell-us_3.pdf Caudill, A., Blackley, A., and Cox, J. (2018). “Co-teaching as Integrated Professional Development.” Ready, Set, Co-Teach. www.readysetcoteach.com/co-teaching-as-integrated-professional-development Honigsfeld, A., and Dove, M. G. (2019). Collaborating for English Learners: A Foundational Guide to Integrated Practices. Corwin Press. Jensen, B., Sonnemann, J., Hull-Roberts, K., and Hunter, A. (2016). Beyond PD: Teacher Professional Learning in High-Performing Systems. National Center on Education and the Economy. Kibler, A. K., Walqui, A., and Bunch, G. C. (2015). “Transformational Opportunities: Language and literacy instruction for English language learners in the Common Core era in the United States.” TESOL Journal, 6, 9–35. Killion, J. (2018). Assessing Impact: Evaluating Professional Learning (3rd ed.). Corwin Press. McFarland, J., Hussar, B., Debrey, C., Snyder, T., Wang, X., Wilkinson-Flicker, S., Gebrekristos, S., Zhang, J., Rathbun, A., Barmer, A., Bullock Mann, F., and Hinz, S. (2017). The Condition of Education 2017. National Center for Education Statistics, US Department of Education. Sherris, A. (2010). “Coaching Language Teachers.” CAL Digest. www.cal.org/siop/pdfs/digests/coaching-language-teachers.pdf
Andrea Honigsfeld, EdD, is professor of TESOL at Molloy University, Rockville Centre, New York, and an author-consultant with over 25 books published on topics primarily related to collaboration and co-teaching, language and literacy development, and equity for multilingual learners. Maria G. Dove, EdD, is a professor in the School of Education and Human Services at Molloy College. Dr. Dove has published several articles and book chapters on collaborative practices, differentiated instruction, instructional leadership, and the education of English language learners. Their latest book is Co-planning: Five Essential Practices to Integrated Curriculum and Instruction (Corwin, 2022). Follow them on Twitter at @andreahonigsfel and @MariaGDove.
The legislature adopted House Concurrent Resolution 130 (HCR 130), which recognizes and apologizes for the damage caused by Act 57, a law passed shortly after the US’ displacement of the Hawaiian monarchy. Under Act 57—also known as the Laws of the Republic of Hawai’i 1896—English was declared as the only language to be used in the territory’s public school system, an action whose effects on the Indigenous Hawaiian language can be seen to this day.
“Due to Act 57, many students were punished for speaking ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i [the native-language term for the Hawaiian language] at school, and the number of Hawaiian language speakers collapsed from nearly 40,000 in 1896 to a mere 2,000 in 1978,” reads HCR 130. The resolution was published in a bilingual format, with a Hawaiian-language translation of the text alongside the English version.
Upon initial contact with Europeans, the Hawaiian language was the main language spoken on the islands of Hawai’i. European missionaries and native Hawaiian speakers developed a written form of the language just a couple of decades after the two groups came into contact, helping to cement the language’s role in Hawaiian society at the time. By 1834, nearly all Hawaiians were literate in the language and all education was conducted in Hawaiian.
The language was soon to decline, however, after the Kingdom of Hawai’i was overthrown and US forces came to power. Although the Hawaiian language was not officially banned, students were frequently punished for speaking it in school, and the number of native speakers sharply decreased through the following century. Additionally, immigration to Hawai’i from the mainland US and other countries made the language—and the Indigenous people native to the islands—a minority within the country, a factor that many believe contributed to the language’s decline.
It wasn’t until nearly 100 years after the US annexed Hawai’i that people in power would begin to recognize the value of the Hawaiian language. In the 1980s, immersion schools focused on teaching children in Hawai’ian became popular as Act 57 was finally repealed. As a result, the number of Hawaiian speakers has steadily risen since the ‘80s, with the state’s Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism estimating that a little over 18,000 people speak the language fluently.
“The ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i was excluded from Hawai’i’s public schools for 90 years and would not be heard in official instruction for four generations,” reads the recently adopted resolution. Andrew Warner
At the end of last month, the Nicaraguan government asked the parliament to close the Nicaraguan Academy of the Language (Academia de la Lengua de Nicaragua), which was founded 94 years ago, and accused another 82 nonprofit organizations of breaking the law for not declaring themselves as “foreign agents,” according to official announcements from the government, led by Daniel Ortega.
The Nicaraguan Academy of the Language, based in Managua, was created in August 1928 by a group of seven intellectuals with the mission of protecting and promoting the Spanish language. On the academy’s shield appears its motto, a verse by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío: En espíritu unidos, en espíritu y ansias y lengua. (“In spirit united, in spirit and yearning and language.”) Among the reasons for closing the NGOs are “failing to comply with the registration as a foreign agent; not reporting their financial reports and not promoting transparency in the use of funds; not knowing the execution of the same and whether they were in accordance with the objectives and purposes for which they were granted legal personality.”
“It is unheard of. It is an institution that enjoys the respect of the whole world. This can only be understood by the regime’s policy of not leaving any space for any organization, be it cultural or for the promotion of human rights,” novelist and Cervantes Prize winner Sergio Ramirez told the ABC newspaper.
“This is the only case in the world of a language academy that has been closed ‘manu militari.’ This has not even happened in Cuba,” added the novelist, who has been living in exile in Spain since October, when an arrest warrant was issued against him.
“The Nicaraguan Academy of the Language has had legal status since 1928!!!! And now they come out with that it has not fulfilled the requirements and that they will suspend the legal status of an academy that is apolitical by nature. Not even Somoza did it,” exiled writer and academy member Gioconda Belli denounced on Twitter.
The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) expressed “deep concern” about the possible closure, stating that it “will deprive the Central American corporation of legal personality and cause its disappearance after 94 years of fruitful existence at the service of the greatest cultural value of the nation.”
“The RAE, which defends the freedoms of thought, expression, and association as the first values of any system of coexistence, strongly supports and vindicates the legitimate right of the Academia Nicaragüense de la Lengua to serve its fellow citizens,” concludes the statement.
American Printing House for the Blind (APH) is celebrating the launch of a completely redesigned Louis website and updated search interface. Named after Louis Braille, the Louis Database is a free, national service designed to make it possible for schools, families, and adults to quickly locate information on accessible textbooks and other materials available across the U.S. with just one search.
“We wanted to make the website faster, easier to navigate, more user friendly, and completely accessible for our users,” said Nicole Gaines, Director of APH Resources Services. “Our goal is to provide our users with the most accurate, up-to-date information about the availability of accessible educational materials.”
The database contains information about over 240,000 accessible books from 75 agencies. The unified search option in Louis, which includes partners Bookshare, Learning Ally and the NIMAC, brings the total number of materials to over 1.1 million. Formats found in Louis include braille, large print, audio, and a range of accessible digital formats.
Louis is designed to make it easy to locate accessible materials and it also supports the national community of braille transcribers by helping them avoid duplication of effort. Louis not only provides information about available materials but also about braille materials that are in progress by transcribing agencies, including APH. This allows agencies to focus their transcription efforts on books not already available or in the pipeline at another organization, making limited resources to go further and, ultimately, more titles available to users.
The new Louis website provides filters and advanced search features designed to help the searcher find exactly the accessible materials they need. Searches can be limited by grade or age range, language, and format, including braille, large print, efiles, and audio/sound. A new advanced search is also available in the site. These new tools provide a robust search interface for the materials from Louis’ contributing agencies and from our unified search partners. The new Louis website also provides a redesigned search for the AMP database and for the catalog for the APH Library, including the AFB Migel Memorial Collection.
The new site will also allow customers to add digital and hard copy APH textbooks listed in Louis to the shopping cart and purchase them through the APH website. The hope is that users have a streamlined shopping experience for textbooks found in Louis and other products offered on www.APH.org.
Chinese language and cultural studies will be offered as an undergraduate degree course for the first time at the University of Liberia and other colleges in the West African country, which came to being in the early 19th century as a project of the American Colonization Society on the basis that Black people would face better prospects in Africa than in the US. Before the American Civil War, more than 15,000 freed and free-born Black people emigrated from the US to Liberia.
Liberia was the first African republic to proclaim its independence in 1847 and English is the official language, but over 20 indigenous languages are spoken across the country.
The Confucius Institute at the state-owned University of Liberia, the first in West Africa, has been offering certificate and diploma courses in Chinese language and cultural studies since 2008, but not as an undergraduate major.
Speaking at a Chinese language proficiency competition in the capital Monrovia, Julius Sarwolo Nelson, president of the university, said it takes pride in being the “backbone” of Chinese language education in Liberia and West Africa, adding that its Confucius Institute has enrolled over 21,000 students in its certificate and diploma programs.
“This partnership with the Confucius Institute goes beyond our borders. And we are encouraging everyone, especially Liberians, to learn the Chinese language,” said Nelson, adding that learning Chinese is very important for better cooperation and exchanges between the two countries.
Chinese ambassador to Liberia Ren Yisheng said peace and benevolence are traditional values that are deeply rooted in the hearts of the Chinese people, and that is why the Chinese language is a key that opens the door to understanding these values, such as the Confucian teaching of “harmony without uniformity.”
“Language is a bond that connects people together through time and space. In recent years, enthusiasm for learning the Chinese language has been growing worldwide, and more and more Liberian friends are joining the ranks of Chinese learners,” said Ren. Liberia’s Confucius Institute held its 21st Chinese Bridge Chinese proficiency competition for foreign college students last month, with Clarence S. Johnson emerging as the winner to represent Liberia at the global final in China.
The theme of the 21st Chinese Bridge competition is “One world, one family: Building a bridge of friendship between China and Liberia.” The ambassador remarked that in recent years, President Xi Jinping has proposed the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind, together with the Belt and Road Initiative and the Global Development Initiative. He pointed out that these visions help to foster a new type of security and coexistence with common development that replaces confrontation.
As the world undergoes profound changes and multipolarity, economic globalization, and cultural diversity gain momentum, Ambassador Ren said he believes that only if the world is seen as one family can a community be built with “a shared future for mankind, and a more secure and brighter future can be created for the world.”
Last month, directors from the Cervantes Institute (Spanish), the Ramón Llull Institute (Catalan), the Etxepare Euskal Institutua (Basque), and the Galician Culture Council (Gallego) met in Santiago de Compostela to assess progress since the first collaboration agreement between the four entities, signed two years ago. During the meeting, they discussed several common projects to promote the linguistic diversity of Spain and its multicultural richness, including the production of a biannual report on the situation of the languages of Spain, developing literary translation programs, and holding a traveling exhibition.
Preparation of the biannual report, which will cover the position of Spanish and Spain’s co-official languages, will begin in the coming months with the creation of a working group. This report will make it easier to compare statistics across all of the languages, to be more proactive.
During the meeting at the headquarters of the Galician Culture Council, other initiatives were agreed, including the presentation of a traveling intercultural and multidisciplinary exhibition presenting contemporary creative works in Gallego, Basque, Catalan, and Spanish and the specification of a process to facilitate contemporary literary translation between the different languages.
The meeting was also a good opportunity to weigh up the success of the initiatives carried out during these first two years of the four-year collaboration agreement signed in 2020. During this period, activities have been carried out such as the celebration of the European Day of Languages (in Berlin in 2020 and in Naples in 2021), participation in international meetings, and numerous initiatives through the headquarters of the Cervantes Institute around the world.
The goal of the agreement is the joint promotion of linguistic diversity and cultural plurality among the four entities.
Dreaming of Words had its world premiere at the International Mother Language Day celebrations organized by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and the Ministry of Education (India) in partnership with UNESCO.
This documentary film is about 84-year-old Njattyela Sreedharan, an Indian grade school dropout who compiled a dictionary connecting four major Dravidian languages. Traveling across India and doing extensive research, he spent 25 years making the multilingual dictionary. This unique dictionary offers a comparative study of Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu. Dreaming of Words traces Sreedharan’s life, work, love for languages, and struggles to get the dictionary published. The film also explores the linguistic and cultural diversity in India. The film was an official selection at the DC South Asian Film Festival, RapidLion Film Festival, and Micheaux Film Festival. It won the Kerala State Television Award for Best Educational Documentary.
It has been screened at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association and the annual conference of the Linguistic Society of America. The trailer can be viewed at https://youtu.be/yh450c0u0Ag.
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