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Reading Is the Answer

COVID-19 Impacts Children’s Literacy
For the past year and a half, instead of heading to the school bus stop and socializing before classes, students across the globe walked over to a device and turned it on to access their virtual classrooms. It was, to say the least, an adjustment for everyone.

The disruption to in-person learning led to losses for students. According to a study from the nonprofit assessment organization NWEA, students across the board lost percentile points in reading and math during the 2020–2021 school year, with Black and Latino students experiencing larger declines than White and Asian students.1 Initiatives designed to stem these losses were critically important.

Beginning in early 2020, the restrictions in response to the COVID-19 crisis required administrators and educators to make dramatic adjustments to almost every aspect of education in order to provide a continuum of learning. It also required Herculean efforts from parents, families, caregivers, and students.

In the face of rapidly changing parameters, Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) and other youth-serving organizations across the nation had to pivot to accommodate the needs of their constituents. As it became clear that in-person learning was not safe, many organizations—including nonprofits, academic clubs, and public libraries—moved their programming to online platforms. Despite the learning curves, the results were instructive and remarkable.

Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) Reacts
For nearly six decades, RIF has been working in communities, interfacing with educators and students, delivering free books for children to build their home libraries. Since 1966, RIF has been able to work hand in hand with communities to bring joy and excitement to children’s faces as they choose books to take home and keep. When most schools shuttered their doors for the school year and after it became clear that in-person events were no longer safe, RIF had to cancel book distributions, the cornerstone of their flagship program, Books for Ownership, that allows kids to browse a wide selection of books and take several home for free. Knowing that it was critical for kids to have access to books, the staff at RIF had to figure out a safe way to deliver books with social distancing guidelines in place.

Working with their partners, RIF devised plans to deliver books as a part of homework pickup programs and meal distributions. Instead of school librarians displaying books on tables for kids to select, heroic volunteers prepared and packaged books in bags that could be safely handed over to families as they waited in their cars.

Whereas students had typically enjoyed celebratory events with read-alouds to make their book choices, activities were pivoted to virtual events. While book browsing and choice had to be sacrificed, RIF concurrently highlighted the availability of their digital library, Skybrary, through free trials and continued to offer free reading resources on its book resource website, RIF.org/Literacy-Central.

RIF also conducted a national survey to direct its response and strategy for the ongoing children’s literacy challenges of the pandemic and created content and programming to address the learning losses of the 2020–2021 school year. Nearly 1,000 respondents including teachers, parents, and caregivers took the survey, which found that 96% of respondents were worried about both the decline in children’s reading motivation and the need to provide reading resources and support to parents and caregivers to encourage reading at home. Economic discrepancies were also highlighted: students lost precious access to books through school and the library, and many were isolated without home libraries.

One teacher said, “I feel like many of my students do not have access to books or the tools to enable them to read at home. I’m worried that I am losing my students who loved borrowing materials from our school library and do not have that ability and now they are losing interest.”

The survey findings were clear: there is a critical need to reinspire and re-engage children while providing tools to parents and caregivers so they can support reading. To specifically address this need, in the fall of 2021, RIF will launch Rally to Read 100, an engaging reading initiative that includes a pledge to read 100 books for classrooms across the country by Read Across America Day in March 2022 and a giveaway of 10,000 books to 100 schools.

Rally to Read will bring students and teachers together for six months of reading fun. With free resources available to everyone, teachers and their students will be able to attend monthly virtual read-alouds with notable authors and illustrators, access free book- and theme-related activities, and celebrate on Read Across America Day with a virtual culminating event.

Access to books in print is important, too (especially since many kids are digitally exhausted), so Rally to Read is an initiative that complements rather than replaces RIF’s Books for Ownership book distributions, which they are looking forward to reinstating as students return to classrooms this fall.

National Literacy Organizations Pivot
Ensuring continuity of reading and learning at a time when it is unsafe to gather has been a significant challenge for every literacy organization over the past 18 months. Everyone has had to shift, whether the shift was for the staff and volunteers, the readers, or both.

With most schools going virtual, shifting to virtual delivery for supplemental programs presented its own hurdles. How could libraries deliver something online that would match the energy of a group of kids in a circle on a bright carpet in their local library? How could a Saturday reading program, staffed entirely by volunteers, be compelling enough online to inspire kids to sign on over the weekend?

Libraries Adapt, Online
Just like niche reading programs, library systems across the country, both large and small, scrambled to offer story times and other programming for children online. Librarians gamely offered up virtual activities from their basements, dining rooms, and living rooms, which they’d transformed into library nooks with bookcases, tables, and music stands. One librarian in Virginia took young readers on a tour of her garden; another, in Maryland, introduced her dog, who always ran into the frame for the song “Open Them, Shut Them.”

From the very start of the pandemic, the Public Library Association was working to take a critical look at their services and to innovate ways to pivot. According to their survey spanning March 24–April 1, 2020, 98% of libraries had closed their buildings and 61% were adding virtual programming.2 In Montgomery County, Maryland, the library offered story times and other activities for children every day, including weekends, and sometimes multiple times a day. Participants could choose to turn their cameras on or leave them off, but children were greeted by name and unmuted for group goodbyes. It was profoundly generous and critically important for keeping kids engaged with books and libraries.

Students and Volunteers Stay Connected
Reading All-Stars (RAS), a literacy program from the nonprofit creative writing organization 826DC, was designed to support one-on-one meetings between volunteer mentors and elementary school students. On Saturday mornings, up until March 2020, volunteers met their reading buddies in the cafeteria and then split off to read in pairs for two hours.

Both the students and the volunteers were dedicated and engaged, showing up in the rain and snow, and on beautiful spring days too, to read and write together. When the pandemic hit, no one knew how the experience could translate online. “The program is focused on creating a positive space for learning and reading, and we wanted to figure out a way to maintain that connection with students and families during this really stressful time,” Kalli Krumpos, RAS coordinator, said. The all-volunteer coordinators started getting the word out to students and volunteers that they would use a virtual platform to continue to meet, breaking out into private sessions for paired reading. A few new rules had to be put in place—two volunteers per student, shorter sessions—but every Saturday, week after week, volunteers signed on and kids joined minutes later. There were some bumps—a lost connection here, a distracting sibling in the background there—but, according to Ms. Krumpos, “It was a bright spot in a dark time and shows what real community can do. We now know that, when we need it, this model works.”

More Ready Than Ever
The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a crisis on many fronts. It has been scary, heartbreaking, and challenging. But it has also allowed for meaningful preparation for educators and policymakers to help them meet the needs of all students at all times. This pandemic has shown us that, ready or not, we can and must pivot to meet all children’s needs. While in-person interactions are deeply important for children, we now know that we can make a difference for millions of students when we pivot and adjust, even when maintaining engagement suddenly requires passing reading materials through a car window or sharing a lively read-aloud online.

Whether providing a literacy event presented entirely online, a virtual space for students to meet volunteer reading buddies, or story times direct from a librarian’s house, organizations got creative during the pandemic and will surely take the best parts of their new programming into the future, pandemic or not.

Help kids enjoy reading! Share a story time | Gift a book | Donate to an organization

Links
1. www.nwea.org/content/uploads/2021/07/Learning-during-COVID-19-Reading-and-math-achievement-in-the-2020-2021-school-year.research-brief-1.pdf
2. https://www.ala.org/pla/sites/ala.org.pla/files/content/advocacy/covid-19/PLA-Libraries-Respond-Survey_Aggregate-Results_FINAL2.pdf

Alicia Levi currently serves as president and CEO of Reading Is Fundamental. Prior, Alicia served as vice president of education for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Before joining PBS, Alicia served as vice president of educational publishing at Discovery Education and, earlier, managed the University of Maryland College Park’s Educational Access Channel.

Jeanette Edelstein is an educator dedicated to making learning fun for students of all ages. She has taught in middle and high schools and currently focuses on K–12 curriculum and instruction. She holds a master’s degree in education from the University of Colorado.

Is Planning Key to Task-Based Learning?

There is a general assumption by researchers and educators that learning after performing an action—i.e., enactment—creates better memory of the action, as compared to reading about it, hearing about it, or observing someone else performing it. There is also evidence that enactment encoding leads to better memory for simple actions than does verbal learning (Engelkamp, 1998). In language learning, enactment has also been explicitly shown to help recall of phrases (Engelkamp and Cohen, 1991; Golly-Haring and Engelkamp, 2003; Hornstein and Mulligan, 2004). To bring enactment into the language classroom, task-based language teaching (TBLT) was introduced as a way for learners to practice language through real-life tasks, but does this type of practice help linguistic performance?

Any linguistic performance in a second language (L2) puts competing demands and pressure on working memory, which is a limited-capacity system. Several studies have shown that giving L2 learners the opportunity to plan before they speak or write results in significant gains in fluency and complexity (Ortega, 1999; Wendel, 1997; Yuan and Ellis, 2003; Meraji, 2011). Planning time is hypothesized to be beneficial because otherwise when a task increases in complexity, focus on form is no longer the priority of the L2 speaker, and they abandon accuracy for focus on meaning (Skehan, 1998). If an L2 speaker focuses more on one aspect of performance, such as accuracy, the other dimensions may be reduced and suffer in their development (Kuiken and Vedder, 2007).

There are two types of planning that can be used by the L2 learner, pretask planning and on-line planning. Pretask planning allows people to practice or prepare something before completing the task. On-line planning is “the process by which speakers attend carefully to the formulation stage during speech planning and engage in pre-production and post-production monitoring of their speech acts” (Yuan and Ellis, 2003, p. 6). Here, we’re asking whether or not implementing a learning-by-doing pedagogy would allow L2 learners to practice appropriate forms and understand language in context more thoroughly so that during cognitively demanding situations, like testing or real life, they are still able to focus on form and not abandon it for meaning. Since planning often leads to improvement in performance, some of the real-time processing load could be lessened by having practiced and prepared beforehand (Meraji, 2011).

Spoken language is interesting to study because it is dynamic and fluid in nature, changing based on context, interlocutor relationship, and naturally while a nonnative speaker continues to learn the language. For these reasons, nonnative speakers rely heavily on on-line processing during oral communication, and so their complexity, accuracy, and fluency can fluctuate substantially when they are not under communicative pressure (Foster et al., 2000). To help reduce cognitive load and heighten familiarity, learning by doing may provide the additional practice L2 speakers need to perform better under pressure. The study outlined in this article aims to tackle the question of whether or not combining learning by doing with on-line planning has a positive effect during communicative pressure situations.

Learning by Doing
Learning by doing can be defined as performing an action in an educational context (Steffens et al., 2015). Educational leaders have embraced this with styles like TBLT and portfolio-based language assessment (PBLA), because of the general assumption that learning by doing creates better memories of an event or action.

There are three types of memory that have been analyzed in relation to this type of learning: memory for actions, recognition, and free recall. Memory for actions forces participants to process task-relevant features and then recall the action words later; recognition generally requires participants to recognize words they have learned before; and free recall asks participants to list what they can remember without prompts (Steffens et al., 2015). One explanation for why memory for actions is so strong may be because enactment encoding provides additional memory markers (Engelkamp, 1998). Using a multimodel approach to learning can strengthen the established memory and aid longer-term retrieval as well (Steffens et al., 2015).

Completing a classroom task that replicates a real-life situation provides L2 learners with a safe place to practice and to carry out pretask planning, as it is often classified in second language acquisition (SLA). When students are in the classroom and practicing the language, they are receiving feedback from the instructor and input from their environment and the people they are interacting with. In a typical classroom setting there may be a lot of learning by viewing and listening to the instructor, but learning by doing has been shown to improve memory for actions and recognition (Steffens et al., 2015; Engelkamp, 1998; Golly-Haring and Engelkamp, 2003). The other type of planning, and likely the most common in oral production, is termed on-line planning. On-line planning occurs in the moment, when people are forced to self-correct and choose words, possibly through translation. It has been shown that oral on-line planning increases accuracy and complexity of spoken language, but that it has little effect on fluency (Yuan and Ellis, 2003). It has also been shown that pretask planning improves fluency, as mentioned above (Ellis and Yuan, 2004). On-line planning happens as a person speaks, and fluency is often sacrificed (De Larios et al., 2001; Yuan and Ellis, 2003).

However, what happens when we pair pretask planning—learning by doing—with on-line planning? Does this lead to positive effects in syntactic complexity, accuracy, and fluency? If students are given the opportunity to practice a task in class before evaluation, then, given previous research, they should increase in all three areas, with no given area disadvantaged.

Syntactic Complexity
Syntactic complexity considers the number of criteria a learner has to apply in order to reach the correct form. For example, if conjugation of the simple past tense in language A contains more steps to arrive at the correct form than language B, then the simple past tense is considered more complex to learn in language A. Another factor to consider in complexity is salience, or the frequency with which the form occurs, therefore influencing how difficult it may be to learn (Spada and Tomita, 2010). A learner’s first language also contributes to the difficulty in learning another language and the features it contains. Complexity can additionally be defined by a pedagogical perspective, as identified by teachers. A grammatical form may be evaluated as easy or difficult to learn by observing how long it takes learners to use the form correctly (Spada and Tomita, 2010). Most teachers consider forms that take students longer to be more difficult and may spend additional time reviewing them in the classroom.

Syntactic complexity is usually measured on a scale in which sentence length and linguistic units used are analyzed. These units are not only measured individually but as a whole in the phrase they appear within, with a closer look at coordinating structures and subordinating clauses.

Complexity from a linguistic perspective is determined by whether the language feature “has many or few transformations, is marked or unmarked, and is typologically similar or different from the first language” (Spada and Tomita, 2010, p. 267), and so the complexity of sentences produced may be directly linked to linguistic complexity and not related to salience, as argued by Daughty and Williams (1998).

Accuracy
Accuracy can be the forgotten element of language production, as L2 learners prioritize meaning over form when new grammar is learned, their attentional limits are reached, or they are in a stressful environment. If learners are focusing more on other aspects of production, like complexity or fluency, then accuracy will suffer (Kuiken and Vedder, 2007). This concept is not foreign to teachers in a classroom, who often watch students “forget” something they already know when trying to apply a new rule. It is well accepted that prioritization of one aspect of language production will hinder the development of other areas (Kuiken and Vedder, 2007).

Researchers in SLA generally want to know how task complexity affects accuracy because it is assumed that attentional resources are limited, so increasing task complexity reduces the resources allocated to focusing on form. Accuracy may be additionally challenging to measure in a test context, as the testing environment itself encourages people to focus on form and speakers will pay attention to their accuracy in order to score well on the test (Wigglesworth, 1997). In this case, researchers should consider other environments or ways to measure accuracy so that learners are not only focused on form at the time of production.

Fluency
Fluency refers to the flow someone has when producing a language. This flow may be steady and easy, as when two native speakers converse, or it may be broken and slow, like new learners communicating. Lower-level learners generally spend more time focusing on form (accuracy) and so fluency is sacrificed (De Larios et al., 2001), whereas more proficient learners do not have to dedicate as much thought to form and can therefore speak more fluently, so the natural rhythm of the target language is heard. It should be of no surprise, then, that when learners have a chance to plan before a production task, they are able to produce more fluent work with more cohesive ideas.

SLA research on fluency has examined spoken fluency and written fluency, alongside pretask planning and what effects it has on fluency. Ellis and Yuan (2004) found that participants in the pretask planning group scored higher in fluency than the on-line planning and no planning groups. They found that their pretask planning group was able to prioritize their understanding of the pictures, organize their stories, and plan content before having to write and, in doing so, were able to focus on form during their writing time (Ellis and Yuan, 2004). Meraji (2011) found that fluency was also positively affected by planning when a task was instructional or argumentative.

Crookes (1989) and Foster and Skehan (1996) have shown as well that pretask planning can have a positive effect on fluency for oral production, and from their study in 2003, Yuan and Ellis found that pretask planning led to greater output and a greater complexity in the speech produced.

The Study
Building on the work from Yuan and Ellis (2003) and Ellis (2009), the study proposes pretask planning as a time to actually complete a similar task before assessment and then the natural use of on-line planning during task performance. It is important that the pretask planning and on-line planning tasks are similar because another variable that lessens cognitive load is familiarity— Foster (2020) and Lynch and Maclean (2000) showed that pretask planning can take the form of task rehearsal or repetition. This study builds on Ellis’s (2009) work, in which speakers were shown to exploit on-line planning time the most in interactive tasks, and draws on concepts that have informed the use of PBLA in Canada. It requires students to practice a real-world task in the classroom and then perform a similar task during the evaluation. For example, if students practice answering interview questions, then the evaluation would be a mock job interview.

Second language learners would have a chance to practice a task in class as part of a regular lesson and then be assessed on the same task at a later time. Given the advantages to learning by doing in memory recall, the psycholinguistic principles of improving recall in the central executive and examining how having performed a task previously modifies task performance at time of evaluation should also be considered.

The researcher would work in coordination with second language teachers to develop tasks that could be used in their classrooms to help students practice real-world situations. A comparison of student syntactic complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) between the practice of the task and the application (testing) of the task would be examined by the researcher to see if learning by doing, having the pretask planning time, had a positive or negative effect on CAF. It is anticipated that having planning time before a task will have a positive effect on all parts of CAF.

Research Gap
SLA research is still investigating which types of instruction aid which types of linguistic ability. Are there certain methodologies which better serve as delivery vehicles for certain language features? It is my hope that this research idea will provide a starting place for others to extend the results to listening, reading, and writing to continue better informing curriculums as to how to best approach material development and delivery. The findings of this study may also carry into instructor training, as a greater understanding of how learning by doing can help adult learners in their linguistic development is still needed in the field.

Ultimately future studies, like the one outlined in this article, intend to support the use of pretask planning before performance by expanding on the research by Ellis (2009) and TBLT research. This paper was also written with the intention to remind educators of Doughty and Long’s (2003) call to researchers, which is to provide more evidence to develop functional foreign language curriculum without sacrificing any given dimension of the language and to harmonize the way languages are taught by revealing more about how they are learned.

References available at www.languagemagazine.com/references-sarah-langridge.

Sarah Langridge, MEd, is an edtech development coordinator at Carleton University in Canada and an ESL instructor. Her research interests lie in improving adult education curriculums. She has an upcoming chapter in the Supercharger Ventures EdTech Book (2021). She can be reached at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.

Testing with Sensitivity

1. How have school shutdowns changed the way educators view student assessments?

With everything teachers were asked to do during the transition to remote learning, they had little time to dedicate to assessment. They were focused on connecting with students and promoting students’ well-being—the most important work educators do.

While most teachers did eventually find ways to effectively assess students over the past year, we are entering a new school year during which we will need to determine the impacts of the shutdown on each student. Therefore, we are seeing a renewed spotlight on assessment, particularly classroom formative assessment, as educators look to identify what students learned and retained. Educators want and need the insights they get through assessment so they can best meet students where they are and give them the support they need early and often.

2. What are the most popular alternatives to traditional testing?

Teachers are some of the most innovative people on the planet, and they know there are countless alternatives to traditional testing. The most popular alternatives seem to be formative or actionable forms of assessment, as well as the more authentic assessments like project- or performance-based assessment (i.e., using portfolios to gather and analyze student work).

Formative assessments are used by teachers in the classroom to quickly identify student levels of understanding so that teachers can immediately target students for interventions. But one thing we don’t emphasize enough is that these classroom formatives give educators insights to evaluate their own instructional efficacy— they are one of the key tools through which teachers can actually use data to adjust and improve instructional practices. I get really excited when I see teachers implementing multiple assessment strategies, including formative assessments as well as authentic forms of assessment, to allow their students to demonstrate their learning and to better understand their students’ needs.

3. How do educators believe we can make testing more appropriate for minorities?

When we talk about making tests more appropriate for minority students, what we are really asking educators to do is to completely rethink the entire purpose of testing. Too often a test is that thing we do at the end of a unit, semester, or year of study. It’s used as a means of putting a score in the gradebook or for compliance and accountability.

Shifting away from traditional “testing” to a more balanced approach to assessment means we get a better understanding of the individual student when it matters most, allowing us to make learning more personal to them through differentiated instruction and interventions. And multiple assessment strategies allow students to differentiate how they demonstrate their mastery and find the ways that work best for them.

4. What are the best ways to help students stressed by assessments?

The best way to help students stressed by assessment is to first adopt assessment practices that are designed not just to measure student learning but to inform and drive it. We should be using assessments as a starting place, not a finish line.

If you think back to when you were in school, a test usually represented your last chance to demonstrate understanding of what your teacher expected you to learn. If you did poorly or failed, that was it; you missed out, your grade suffered, and the teacher moved on to the next concept or chapter in the book. This practice hasn’t changed much in many classrooms and it creates stress and unknowable anxiety for students.

I have always believed that if teachers solicit data from students, especially in the form of a test, they have a moral obligation to use that information to directly benefit that student. In other words, once we know what a student knows and doesn’t know, the work of helping struggling students begins.

It’s important that students today understand the goal of assessment is simply for teachers to better understand exactly where they are so they can help them grow. When we, the educators, place more value on using assessments to help students learn, rather than as a summary of learning that results in a simple score in the gradebook, it will go a long way toward taking the stress out of assessment and embracing a growth mindset.

Trenton Goble is VP of K–12 product strategy at Instructure.

Choosing and Using Tests Effectively

Right now, educators are contemplating several questions as they strive to prepare students for the fall. This is particularly true when it comes to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their students.

As an educator you most likely face a tsunami of testing: federally required tests, state-mandated evaluations, district benchmarks, and interim assessments. Plus, there’s the formative assessments you need for determining whether students have mastered a concept or skill. And oftentimes there are overlapping purposes to these tests. But you can reduce testing redundancy with the following tip. Always ask yourself: what question is this data going to help me answer?

If you don’t know the answer to that question, don’t give the test. That’s because data that could help you may already be available elsewhere. If that’s the case, you could be spending that testing time on instruction.

Also, if you don’t know why you’re administering a certain assessment, you will likely not be able to quickly connect the results to your instruction or other relevant decision. So, you’ll have spent instructional time on a test, but you’ll be no better off than you were before. (Hopefully, this will save you some instructional time in the future.)

No matter what type of testing it is (e.g., a screener, progress monitoring, etc.), what’s important is the question that it’s going to help you answer and the quality (e.g., reliability and validity) of the test as an answer that question.

Of course, you won’t have much say when it comes to government-mandated tests (e.g., high-stakes state assessments), but understanding the question that state assessments are trying to answer (i.e., have they learned what they needed to learn for their grade level) will help in how you interpret the results or any decisions that are made with those results. But even states are thinking about alternatives to traditional summative assessments.

However, in this article, let’s discuss formative assessments (tests that inform instruction throughout the year). Some tests may even overlap with state assessments, so you’ll also be able to determine the current likelihood of students performing well on the high-stakes version.

Three Major Questions When Using Assessments: Especially in this Post ‘Remote Learning’ Era

To make effective use of the assessments that you do choose to employ, ask yourself an additional three major questions:

1. Where are my students in relation to where they “should be”?

You can think about this in terms of grade-level benchmarks or risk level. We know there’s been interrupted learning. You will be determining how and to what degree that has impacted individual students in relation to grade-level standards.

2. If they are behind, what are their areas of need?

Once you know which students are behind, you’ll need to know why and what their specific learning gaps are (a student could be struggling in more than one area). When this question is answered, you can start to build a profile of strengths and weaknesses that will tell you how intense the instruction needs to be and what to focus on during instruction. The answer to question one will help determine how intense the instruction needs to be to help close the gap, and the answers to question two will help determine what you focus on during that instruction.

3. What do we do about it?

If you’re testing just to check a box and say you tested, that is a waste of time, unless you do something with the data. And doing something with the data means determining how to close the learning gaps, whether that means adjusting your instruction focus, the intensity of instruction, or at a school/district level, the resources dedicated to certain areas.

Some questions that fall under the general umbrella question of what to do about learning gaps are the following:

• Do students need more time with the teacher so that they can be explicitly taught a particular skill?

• Is there a small group of students who all need support in the same area and can be grouped for instruction?

• Can you leverage a program that incorporates technology to be able to personalize instruction and provide guided practice or corrective feedback in certain areas? And can you leverage the data from the program to help inform your instruction?

The Final Questions

A powerful way to answer the questions in the previous section is by having formative assessments embedded within digital curriculum or products. For example, Lexia Learning’s Lexia Core5 Reading and Lexia PowerUp Literacy programs provide high-quality assessment data without teachers having to stop instruction time for tests.

Whatever formative assessment you use, the data should be simple to interpret and actionable to enable you to alter your instruction. You can take data-driven next steps to change a student’s trajectory.

Nowadays, there remains uncertainty around whether learning is going to be blended or in person. So, you need to consider whether your assessments can be administered remotely. That was a big challenge with state assessments during the last school year, and a lot of states canceled their assessments. Here are some final questions to consider in the era of remote learning:

• Can your assessment be given remotely?

• Can it be given to a large group of students remotely or do you have to do it one on one?

• Can you get that data quickly and remotely?

Once you have the assessment data and begin the task of addressing the learning gaps that occurred over the last year and a half, the programs you choose matter. Teachers need tools and resources based on the science of reading and efficacy around those resources in order to make a real difference. The questions above will help point you in the right direction.

Dr. Liz Brooke, CCC-SLP, is Lexia Learning’s chief learning officer and former director of interventions at the Florida Center for Reading Research.

House Offers Support to Seal of Bilingual Education

In what is being hailed as a major step forward for language education across the United States, the House of Representatives voted to approve the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Sept. 24. The act includes authorization for the Bilingual Education Seal and Teaching Act (BEST), and if approved by the Senate, the act would sanction federal support for the establishment of Seal of Biliteracy programs in school districts across the nation.

The BEST Act has strong support from the Joint National Committee for Languages-National Council for Languages and International Studies (JNCL-NCLIS), which sees the act as a means of establishing an education system that encourages linguistic diversity and uplifts its multilingual students by taking on an “asset-based approach” to educating students who do not speak English as a first language.

“Today’s House action is an incredible step toward a more equitable and positive focus on language learning in this country,” said Amanda Seewald, the president of the JNCL-NCLIS. “The BEST Act will empower our schools with the means to provide opportunities for all students to be recognized for their multilingualism.”

Kentucky most recently became the 45th state in the nation to establish its own Seal of Biliteracy program (coincidentally, on the same day that the House approved the NDAA). Seal of Biliteracy programs are instituted widely across the country and serve to award students who study and achieve a high level of proficiency in two or more languages.

The amendment to include the BEST Act was first introduced by Representative Julia Brownley (D-CA), whose home state was the first in the country to officially adopt the Seal of Biliteracy program. According to Brownley, this amendment was met with wide bipartisan support, indicating good news for the bill’s future in the Senate. In order for the NDAA to become law, the Senate must vote to approve it; Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) is the BEST Act’s lead sponsor, according to the JNCL-NCLIS.

“This asset-based approach to multilingualism is the key to our ability to compete in a global economy and is vital to our national security,” Seewald said. JNCL-NCLIS thanks Rep. Brownley for her leadership and we are grateful for the support of her fellow House members for voting in favor of this important legislation. We look forward to the Senate ratifying the House approved version of the NDAA.”

Sep. 26-Oct. 3 is National Teach Spanish Week

September 26 marks the beginning of National Teach Spanish Week (NTSW). NTSW, which coincides with Hispanic American Heritage Month, was first launched by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) in 2019 as “National Teach Spanish Day.” This year, the one-day celebration has been extended to one week due to popular demand.

In an August 30 press release, the AATSP stated that purpose of NTSW is “to promote the teaching of Spanish as a profession, to call attention to the current Spanish teacher shortage nationwide, and to emphasize the importance of Spanish as a world language. We encourage teachers to discuss with their students the influence of the Spanish language and culture worldwide and the many opportunities that their knowledge of Spanish can provide them.”

To celebrate NTSW, the AATSP offers the following suggestions:

Share a classroom tip or inspirational video

  • Spanish Pre-K, K-12 Spanish teachers, graduate students, college/university professors, administrators, pre-service and retired teachers have been encouraged to participate! 
  • Videos will be shared to celebrate National Teach Spanish Week on the AATSP website and social media.
  • Videos can be played for your personal viewing pleasure or shared with students in the classroom.

Apply for Professional Development Scholarship for Annual Conference in Puerto

  • Your chance to be awarded a $2,000 scholarship to the 104th AATSP Annual Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico!
  • Scholarships will support reimbursable conference expenses (e.g., airfare, hotel, conference registration).
  • One scholarship is designated for an educator in Higher Education and the other scholarship will be awarded to a Pre-K-12 teacher.
  • Scholarship Application Deadline: Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 11:59pm (Central Time).
  • Please click here to read Scholarship Application Guidelines (PDF).

Attend an AATSP Advocacy Leadership and Governmental Relations Task Force Meeting

  • Martha Vásquez (AATSP Past President) and Israel F. Herrera (2018 AATSP Outstanding Teacher of the Year 4-year College) are the co-chairs of the committee.
  • This meeting will introduce the goals of the task force and engage in conversation about potential advocacy strategies and future events.
  • We want to hear what your chapter and state are doing for Spanish and Portuguese!
  • ZOOM meeting will take place on Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 6:00pm (Eastern Time).

Join the webinar “Incorporating Afro-Latino Culture in Spanish and Portuguese classrooms

  • Hosted by Kim Haas of the PBS series Afro-Latino Travels with Kim Haas, and notable AATSP Spanish teachers Haydee Taylor-Arnold and Jenniffer Saldaña Whyte.
  • The webinar will take place on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 7:00pm (Eastern Time).
  • To download a Certificate of Attendance for the webinar, click here (PDF).
  • Share the webinar flyer on social media!

For more activities and ideas, visit https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.aatsp.org/resource/resmgr/nationalteachspanishweek/more_activities_and_ideas_fo.pdf.

COVID’s Literacy Fallout

The metaphor “summer slide” has been used for decades to describe the essential skills that children lose over the summer when they’re out of school. Though this term was popular before 2020, unfortunately it is now the least of many parents’ concerns. Over the past year and a half, everyone has experienced twists and turns like no others through a pandemic that exposed the world’s strengths and weaknesses. One of the biggest transitions that occurred within the COVID-19 pandemic while everyone was finding their “new normal” was the shift to remote/distance learning.

When children became aware of the transition to remote learning and the possibility of no school, many cheered and celebrated, but when COVID-19 forced over a billion children out of classrooms, often with little or no resources at home, the excitement came to an end. The world’s never-ending struggle to achieve higher literacy rates has been an uphill battle for centuries, and the pandemic became its biggest enemy. With literacy rates already trickling downward prior to the pandemic, remote learning was of little help to much of the world’s youth population. Andrew Kay, CEO of the World Literacy Foundation, stated that over “770 million people in the globe can’t read or write a single word and a further two billion people struggle to read a sentence” (World Literacy Foundation, 2020). With existing literacy gaps as large as this, the pandemic only caused a downward spiral to the lives of children and their futures.

Without crucial literacy skills, children might never be able to reach their full potential and may suffer the consequences of unemployment, poverty, starvation, and many more lifelong problems. When students were sent home from in-person school to learn remotely, educational gaps became greater than ever. With so many who cannot afford Wi-Fi and have no resources to log on to virtual class, and with the varied quality of online classes, the consequences were inevitable; there was not much teachers—the modern-day heroes—could do.

Stanford University published a study on oral reading fluency (ORF) that found that “students in general did not develop any reading skills during the spring—growth stalled when schooling was interrupted and remained stagnant throughout the summer,” according to Ben Domingue, professor at Stanford University. Despite literacy rates creeping up soon afterward, “the growth was not robust enough to make up from the gaps in the spring,” illustrating life-altering changes that these children would never know occurred (Domingue 1). The ORF study also discovered that students’ reading fluency in second and third grade was now approximately 30% behind what would be expected in a typical year.

A multitude of studies are being done on the children affected by the pandemic. A new study from the UN Cultural Agency reveals that “more than 100 million more children than expected are falling behind the minimum proficiency level in reading due to COVID-related school closures” (United Nations, 2021). Learning losses during this pandemic have unfortunately been extremely high, potentially limiting students in the future. A tweet by UNESCO reports that one year into the pandemic, two in three students worldwide were still affected by full or partial school closures. Schooling has been disrupted permanently, and a return to prepandemic states, according to One Year into COVID, might take a decade. Whether it was the unavailable resources, the curricula set that were not able to be fully effectuated online, the lack of focus in students, or the issues accessing or connecting to the internet, the world, and most importantly the young learners of the world, suffered.

Even before the crisis, millions of children and adults were suffering, but at least in-person school was able to help children. Adults had fewer resources, and during the pandemic, “90% of 49 adult literacy programs were either fully or partially suspended during the lockdown” (UNESCO, 2020). Both students and their parents have experienced anxiety and financial and mental pressure during this “literacy slide.” Teachers strived to keep their students attentive, focused, and in class, but the demands of such a pandemic were never anticipated. As a result, the pandemic has left students without access to learning and parents having to decide between teaching their kids or working to support the family.

The Digital Divide 
Even in the U.S., children in the lower income category were definitely hurt the most. Whether it was not having the resources, such as a computer, to connect to virtual class, or not having the ability to pay for Wi-Fi, many struggled to learn remotely. In rural areas, internet connectivity is not always an option, and even where it is available, it can be priced out of reach for many. “Broadband service can cost up to $349.95 a month in California, and up to $299.95 in parts of Alaska, Kentucky, and Virginia,” according to data on BroadBandNow.com (Richards et al., 2021). Even when districts supplied the children with devices, many would break, causing further struggle. In Virginia, only about half the state’s 252,000 public school students could get online, because many did not have internet access or the devices to be able to learn remotely (Richards et al., 2021). According to a report in USA Today, the number of Black children who met literacy benchmarks dropped by 14% to a low of 31%, and for Latino students, it dropped 12% to 30% (Stein, 2020).

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the differences between students who are able to afford resources and are supported to read and those who are not. Fortunately, organizations like Save the Children, which documented that 500 million of the poorest and most vulnerable children have no access to distance learning, have started efforts to help these learners slowly regain what they have lost in a number of countries (Gallagher, 2020).

The pandemic has been a long and hard road with a distant end in sight. It has caused worldwide distress and a new type of disadvantage for children. No longer is the summer slide the area to fear; it is the literacy slide that went on despite teachers’ efforts to make remote school similar to prepandemic school. Though the pandemic was a hard time for all, the ones truly affected, and set on a path to an unsteady, unclear future, were the world’s marginalized children.

References
United Nations (2021). “100 Million More Children Fail Basic Reading Skills Because of COVID-19,” UN News, news. https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/03/1088392.

Gallagher, Bianca (2020). “Keeping Literacy Alive during COVID-19,” Save the Children, www.savethechildren.net/blog/keeping-literacy-alive-during-COVID-19.

OECD (2021), The State of School Education: One Year into the COVID Pandemic, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/201dde84-en.

UNESCO (2020). “Literacy Teaching and Learning in the COVID-19 Crisis and beyond at Heart of the International Literacy Day,” en.unesco.org/news/literacy-teaching-and-learning-COVID-19-crisis-and-beyond-heart-international-literacy-day.

Richards, Erin, Elinor Aspegren, and Erin Mansfield (2021). “A Year into the Pandemic, Thousands of Students Still Can’t Get Reliable WiFi for School. The Digital Divide Remains Worse than Ever,” USA Today, www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2021/02/04/COVID-online-school-broadband-internet-laptops/3930744001.

Stein, Perry (2020). “In D.C., Achievement Gap Widens, Early Literacy Progress Declines during Pandemic, Data Show,” Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/data-indicate-worsening-early-literacy-progress-and-widening-achievement-gap-among-district-students/2020/10/30/bebe2914-1a25-11eb-82db-60b15c874105_story.html.

World Literacy Foundation (2020). “Pandemic Causing Catastrophic Rise in Illiteracy, Hidden Rates of COVID 19 Being Revealed,” www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pandemic-causing-catastrophic-rise-in-illiteracy-hidden-rates-of-COVID-19-being-revealed-301125061.html.

Lauren Page is in tenth grade at Ransom Everglades School, Miami, Florida. She has a passion for helping children and started her 501c(3) foundation Page by Page, which has delivered over 300,000 books within the community to underserved schools and children, when in second grade. www.pagebypage.us

California Commits to Literacy Target and Bets on Biliteracy

California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond has announced an initiative to ensure that not only will every student learn to read by third grade by the year 2026, but that the effort will also include a biliteracy milestone for dual-language learners.

Thurmond is creating a task force to bring together practitioners, advocates, researchers, foundation partners, thought leaders, students, parents, and other experts to identify key strategies for advancing this goal. Efforts are underway in the California Department of Education (CDE) to build out a task force structure and membership, as well as establish when the task force will meet and details on the types of questions they will be tackling.

On the legislative side, California Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D-Oakland) has agreed to sponsor legislation to advance the initiative. The legislation, to be formally introduced in 2022, will be informed by recommendations that come out of the task force and could include providing resources for advancing literacy and biliteracy goals through professional learning to teach reading, family engagement strategies, and methods for getting books in the hands of students and their families, among others. Thurmond anticipates that the legislation will lay out a multifaceted strategy that considers issues of readiness, chronic absenteeism, needs of students with disabilities and multilingual learners, early education, and socioeconomic factors that impact a student’s ability to learn to read.

“I look forward to working closely with you all in the coming weeks and months on improving childhood literacy and biliteracy,” said Bonta during the press conference. “Literacy for every child in California has been a lifelong passion for me, and, quite frankly, it is what I believe to be the surest path toward justice and a true democracy in our state and in this country. I applaud Superintendent Thurmond for this targeted campaign. It is a bold, aggressive agenda. I’m on board and willing to make sure that we have the ability to provide legislation that is going to be meaningful and focus on implementation and making this a reality for every single child in this state. Literacy is the key to equity; it forms the foundation of our educational capacity and achievement, and we are going to fight together for literacy, equity, and justice moving forward.”

“We already know that when students learn to read, they can read to learn anything, and that this is a gateway skill that can carry them to any point in their life, career, and in their journey,” Thurmond said. “We also know that when students don’t learn to read by third grade, they are at greater risk to drop out of school, and they are at greater risk to end up in the criminal justice system. From my standpoint, this is a strategy that is about many things: helping children learn to read, but also putting them on a path that can create success for them. Our students can learn and overcome obstacles, but we have to give them the resources to do that, and now is clearly the time to advance this.”

Thurmond repeated the words of California Association for Bilingual Education’s CEO Jan Gustafson-Corea, “Every one of our students can learn to read and write in two languages, and do so in a way that meets important grade-level standards,” before she offered the association’s support for the plan: “The breadth and depth of this state plan supports the vision of biliteracy and literacy development in English and target instructional languages such as Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean and many others. Biliteracy & literacy development means that we will honor and support the vision of students learning to read and write in the target language and apply their L1 skills to reading and writing successfully in English. It is a win-win situation!”

Other participants in the press conference shared their personal stories and encouraged statewide support for literacy and biliteracy for all students regardless of their social and economic background.

“California has to work together to prioritize that early care learning of its youngest children,” said Jackie Thu-Huong Wong, chief deputy director of First 5 California. “We believe that early targeted literacy interventions can improve outcomes for an entire generation of Californian’s children, and we are so grateful and look forward to working with Superintendent Thurmond and the team to make literacy a reality for all California kids.”

Assemblymember Jim Frazier (D-Fairfield), liaison to the state’s Advisory Commission on Special Education, shared a heartfelt and personal story of his own childhood battle overcoming dyslexia. “It was embarrassing, humiliating, and I was always being called stupid or lazy,” he said. “I’m hopeful that we can take this role and this task force going forward to make so many differences in people’s lives—not only the societal changes and benefits, but also the economic prosperity of people’s education is the way to success, and I am looking forward to being a part of this and creating new paths.”

“This has been an incredibly challenging year for our students, our educators, and their families,” E. Toby Boyd, president of the California Teachers Association, said. “The pandemic has shined a light on the challenges that our schools and communities face in serving the six million students in our system. I, along with my 310,000 educators, are ready to work with Superintendent Thurmond, Assemblymembers Bonta and Frazier, and the members of the task force to develop thoughtful strategies and policies for our youngest learners and also for the future of California public education.”

Thurmond encouraged those interested in participating in this new literacy effort or who wish to learn more to email [email protected]. Thurmond also called for efforts to get books in the hands of as many students and families as possible.

An archived broadcast of the full press conference with American Sign Language interpretation service can be viewed on the CDE Facebook page.

June 2021 Internet Edition

Gestures Can Help Vocabulary Learning

Language educators may find that incorporating gestures or other types of movements in their vocabulary lessons improves learning outcomes, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The study, conducted by researchers at Germany’s Dresden University of Technology, explored the ways in which stimulating the brain’s motor cortex impacts the acquisition of new vocabulary.

“Many often-used teaching methods for learning new foreign language vocabulary rely on only audio or visual information, such as studying written word lists,” said Brian Mathias, the primary author of the study. “Our findings shed light on why learning techniques that integrate the body’s motor system typically outperform these other learning strategies.”

During a series of training sessions held over four consecutive days, the participants in the study were instructed to perform gestures while studying a series of new words in a foreign language, associating each new word with a semantically-related gesture of some sort. After they completed the initial trainings, the subjects then performed a task in which they were asked to translate the new words into their native language; during this translation task, the researchers also employed repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in order to interfere with activity in the motor cortex.

rTMS is a method of brain stimulation frequently used by neuroscience researchers, which involves using magnetic pulses to stimulate an electrical current in a targeted region of the brain. In this case, the researchers targeted a region of the brain involved in motion control (i.e., the motor cortex) to see how this would affect their performance on the translation task; the researchers found that when they interfered with activity in the motor cortex, the subjects’ struggled the translate the words which they had associated with specific gestures in the original training. These results indicate that gestures could be a useful tool for language instructors to incorporate into their teaching of new vocabulary items.

The researchers note that this effect was seen regardless of whether the new vocabulary item was a tangible, concrete noun or a more abstract one—this suggests that even if a gesture is not clearly connected to the meaning of the vocabulary word (as in say, a charades-type situation), gestures may help students to strengthen their acquisition of new vocabulary.

“Behavioral performance in vocabulary translation following sensorimotor-enriched training is supported at least in part by representations in the motor cortex,” the study concludes. “The translation of recently-acquired L2 words may therefore rely not only on auditory information stored in memory or modality-independent L2 representations, but also on the sensorimotor context in which the words have been experienced.”

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