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Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Instruction Are NOT the Way We Learn to Read

An appropriate way to honor Kenneth Goodman is to describe a presentation I gave recently as a guest lecturer in a class at the University of Southern California. I began by telling the students (mostly first-year grad students) that I wanted to teach them a new word, one that I use in conversation all the time because it has so much snob appeal: zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is German for spirit (Geist) of the times (Zeit). It refers to an idea that is widely accepted and representative of a large number of people in a profession. The zeitgeist in reading education is, of course, phonics, and the current belief that children don’t read well because they don’t know phonics. Phonics dominates the zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist also includes phonics’ partner in crime, phonemic awareness.

I presented the case AGAINST phonemic awareness and the case AGAINST systematic phonics instruction, then discussed how language acquisition and literacy development happen and why prediction is the core of both. And yes, why they use the same process, quoting Ken Goodman’s phrase “learning to read is natural” and why his term the “psycholinguistic guessing game” is so accurate.

Supporters of phonics claim that learning to read is not natural and it must be taught. They assume that in order for children to learn to read we must first teach them that words are made up of separate sounds: we need to teach them “phonemic awareness.” Phonemic awareness instruction is of two kinds: segmentation, knowing how to break up a word into its component parts, and blending, combining sounds in words.

I presented the case against phonemic awareness training by reviewing research that claims to show that phonemic awareness instruction works—that is, it results in better reading. It doesn’t. In my review, I found that children who had phonemic awareness training did not clearly do better on reading tests than those who didn’t have it. In fact, I found only six studies of the impact of phonemic awareness instruction on reading. The only two publications that claimed victory for phonemic awareness had a small number of subjects, and in one case the language involved was Hebrew, not English. I published my results (Krashen, 2001a). The response of the National Reading Panel (Ehri, Shanahan, and Nunes, 2002), champions of phonemic awareness instruction, was that if we had more studies the results might be different.

But there is more: studies show that children improve in phonemic awareness without instruction (Krashen, 2003) and that children who have low phonemic awareness often learn to read and write very well, especially when they find texts that really interest them (Krashen, 2001b).

The current zeitgeist is that we understand texts by decoding print—that is, by using the rules of phonics to pronounce the words we see. We do this all in our minds. We then “listen” to our mental pronunciations of the words and understand what we “hear” in our mind’s ear. To do this, children need to study and learn the rules of phonics. The favored approach is phonemic awareness training followed by “systematic intensive phonics,” teaching ALL the rules of phonics in a strict order to all students.

A major problem with systematic intensive phonics is that the rules are often very complex. Expert researchers and even teachers don’t know all the rules, students don’t learn all the rules, and different programs teach different rules.

I found a good example of a complex rule in Goodman’s Phonic Facts, p. 41: the b at the end of comb is not pronounced, it is silent. In my presentation I asked the students, all graduate students and excellent readers, if they knew the rule. Only a few did (b is silent after m at the ends of words). I then asked them how to pronounce combing and combination and asked them why b is silent in combing but is pronounced in combination. Nobody had any idea. But they could pronounce both words. Here are the rules (again, I learned them from reading Phonics Facts): b stays silent when the ending has a grammatical function; otherwise, we pronounce it.

Also, many rules don’t work very well; they have numerous exceptions. Clymer (1963) investigated 45 phonic generalizations that applied to words included in four basal series. The well-known rule “when two vowels go walking, the first does the talking” (when two vowels appear side by side, the long sound of the first is heard and the second is silent, as in bead) worked in only 45% of cases in which words had vowels back to back. Other rules did just as poorly.

Frank Smith, in Understanding Reading, pointed out that a considerable number of phonics rules are “unreliable… there are too many alternatives and exceptions… 300 ways in which letters and sounds can be related” (p. 41). He also pointed out another problem with systematic phonics teaching: different phonics programs teach different rules. Clearly, straightforward rules of phonics can be consciously learned by most students, but most of our knowledge of phonics is acquired via reading.

Even when rules are consciously learned, do they do us any good? Not much. Elaine Garan has concluded that phonics study pays off when reading tests only ask children to read lists of words out of context. Phonics knowledge does not contribute to comprehension. Other studies confirm this (Krashen, 2009).

If Not through Phonics, Then How?
The best hypothesis is what Goodman (1967) has called the psycholinguistics guessing game. We learn to read by understanding what is on the page. This is the way we acquire language in general. We make predictions based on (1) our knowledge of the world, (2) our knowledge of the language, and (3) what we have heard/read already.

We don’t have to teach students to predict or urge them to predict. Frank Smith (2004) points out that we are predicting all the time, and our predictions are usually correct, which is why we are so rarely surprised. Successful prediction helps us get through the day.

If our prediction is correct (confirmed) according to what we hear and read, we understand. If what we understand through hearing or reading contains unacquired aspects of language, we may start to acquire the form and meaning of these items, a little at a time. As Goodman has pointed out, we learn to read as we are making sense of print.

Of course, if Goodman and Smith are right, it is a multitrillion-dollar disaster for the textbook industry. I’m afraid intensive phonics phans are going to have to find another way of making a living.

Clymer, T. (1963). “The Utility of Phonic Generalizations in the Primary Grades.” Reading Teacher, 29, 333–342.

Ehri, L., Shanahan, T. and Nunes, S. (2002). “Response to Krashen.” Reading Research Quarterly 37(2), 128–129.

Goodman, K. (1967). “Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game.” Journal of the Reading Specialist 6, 126–135.

Goodman, K. (1993). Phonics Phacts. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Krashen, S. (2001a). “Does ‘Pure’ Phonemic Awareness Training Affect Reading Comprehension?” Perceptual and Motor Skills 93, 356–358. www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/pure_pa_and_rc.pdf

Krashen, S. (2001b). “Low PA Can Read OK.” Practically Primary, 6(3), 17–20. www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/low_pa_read_ok.pdf

Krashen, S. (2003). “The Unbearable Coolness of Phonemic Awareness.” Language Magazine, 2(8), 13–18. www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/2003_unbearable_coolness_of_pa.pdf

Krashen, S. (2009). “Does Intensive Decoding Instruction Contribute to Reading Comprehension?” Knowledge Quest, 37(4), 72–74. www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/decoding_&_comprehension.pdf

Smith, F. (2004). Understanding Reading. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

*Kenneth Goodman passed away on March 12, 2020. This paper was written as part of a memorial to Kenneth Goodman, December 12, 2020.

Stephen Krashen is professor emeritus, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California.

Creating Contentment

In our media-saturated environment of ubiquitous devices, streaming video, and the pressure to keep up with instant messages and social media, students are often portrayed as mindless consumers of popular culture. But even the casual observer of social media platforms from Tik Tok to YouTube to Instagram will see that K–12 students are often at the helm of creating and sharing content that influences trends in popular culture.

Coupled with the realities of this shifting landscape, an increasingly diverse student population throughout the U.S. is faced with a static literary canon within English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms that continues to prioritize white, Eurocentric texts. Much research has delineated the kinds of harm this lack of representation perpetuates for all students, but particularly for racially and linguistically minoritized students who continue to be marginalized by curriculum. While the new social reality has highlighted the need for media literacy in classrooms, the static nature of the curriculum, or what counts as essential knowledge for schooling, is a significant barrier to sufficiently preparing students to critically and substantively engage with media and popular culture. Teaching students to be critical media consumers and producers demands a more expansive approach to English language arts that helps students develop the critical thinking, reasoned judgment, self-reflection, and respect for their “audience.” These social-emotional benefits of critical media literacy bring greater relevance to the curriculum and allow students to see their role in a civic society and, ultimately, as powerful change agents.

To this end, the National Council of Teachers of English’s Squire Office of Policy Research recently published a policy brief to address the urgency in expanding literacy instruction to ensure students are prepared to thrive in a world that is increasingly diverse and influenced by digital media. This article outlines key research and recommendations from the brief, Critical Media Literacy and Popular Culture in ELA Classrooms (https://ncte.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SquireOfficePolicyBrief_CriticalMediaLiteracy_April2021.pdf).

The digital is not a place. Studying media literacy and critical media literacy does not mean gazing at an alternate space from the world students inhabit in schools. Rather, digital media requires educators and students alike to look critically at our digitally mediated lives.

Critical media literacy gives students the skills to question not just the information they encounter, but the platforms where they consume and interact with content. How do platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, or Instagram shape, abet, and suppress viewpoints and ideologies? How are participants filtered, moderated, and influenced as they write on a social media platform like Twitter? How are forms of content moderation and video monetization shaping the consumptive habits across the vast and growing body of media on YouTube?

Alongside these new directions, how is our data held in “the cloud?” This popular concept conveys a billowing mass containing our information always available and ever present. And yet, the cloud is not. Accessing media from the seeming digital ether is the wizardry of plucking content that users and companies store on servers housed somewhere else; the cloud, as it were, is just someone else’s computer, raising questions around privacy, surveillance, and the cost of convenience.

We know that student engagement with popular culture and media in the ELA classroom is richest when it encompasses both analysis of existing texts and the composition of new ones. As Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share note in The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education, when young people become literacy creators in addition to consumers, they gain a deeper grasp of various modes of expression and the necessary skills to contribute to ongoing creative conversations.

Such creation is crucial not only for students’ growth as scholars, but also for their development as civic leaders. In today’s multimodal literacy landscape, it is easier than ever before to provide students with opportunities to express themselves creatively and civically. Before the advent of web 2.0 technologies, the publication and dissemination of texts was much more dependent upon gatekeepers (e.g., media conglomerates, publishing companies), which meant that even when students had the tools to create their own media, they encountered barriers to sharing that media beyond a classroom or local community audience.

Twenty-five years after the New London Group urged educators and researchers to explore the then newly emerging contexts on which to critically “design social futures” in the burgeoning globalized, participatory era, the range of tools that youth can use to share their unique perspectives has grown exponentially. Literacy educators can be leaders in supporting youth as they craft and curate their voices–and build social-emotional skills that hone their thinking and expression–if they are ready to think beyond the classroom walls and engage with the wider public. Leveraging media and popular culture in the ELA classroom should no longer focus only on helping young people consume and analyze the texts that surround them; it must support them to compose new texts, disseminate them to the world, and invent new expressive forms for the purpose of building expansive and just social futures.

Wariness about the privacy of student data and the risks involved in connecting with a broader public beyond the school perimeter remain, which can stifle broader efforts to cultivate and share youth media. Many of the most intensive and engaged opportunities for youth expression are facilitated through community organizations. YR Media, a national network of youth journalists based in Oakland, California, produces online content and develops apps by and for young people, as does the Black Youth Project in Chicago, Illinois. New York City’s Global Action Project supports youth with making media to amplify and engage in movements for social justice. Such organizations offer models that literacy educators can take up in their classroom contexts to foster youth creation in ways that support them to not only master the media tools of today, but also to invent the new tools and forms of expression of tomorrow. The brief offers the following recommendations for educators to put critical media literacy into practice:

Integrate a wide range of media and popular culture into standards-based literacy instruction.

This includes:
Assessing the background knowledge students hold around media and popular culture. Since students are surrounded by digital media and popular culture, integrating it into instruction must take into account how they already make meaning of these, and their relationship to the literacies of media and popular culture as crucial entry points for instruction.

Developing multimodal text sets and unit plans. Media and popular culture abound with texts that engage with complex themes and language on par with (and often beyond) any novel in the traditional ELA canon. Twenty years into the 21st century, it is essential that teachers explore this range of texts and integrate them in a robust manner into their instruction. They are supported in these efforts by skills-based standards, including the Common Core.

Committing to critical analysis and racial literacy. Robust and meaningful engagement with media and popular culture will inevitably surface a wide range of controversial social issues. Instead of avoiding discussions about challenging topics, teachers should lean into them with students to hone their critical media literacy skills. Before doing so, however, teachers need to examine their own knowledge and biases and ensure that they develop norms, protocols, and strategies that prepare students to have inclusive, antiracist dialogues.

Build capacity to engage in pedagogies that support youth voice and creativity.

This includes:
Using formative and summative assessments that go beyond the five-paragraph essay. Engaging students in consumption of media and popular culture in the classroom must also include a commitment to supporting students to express their learning through a variety of multimodal forms. Essays are just one way for students to express what they know and think; teachers should encourage and make possible a variety of modes through which students can demonstrate learning creatively, including digital media formats.

Providing authentic venues for youth media production and dissemination. Digital media platforms have dismantled traditional gatekeepers when it comes to sharing student voices, and as a result, there is no longer any reason for student learning to remain within the classroom walls. Teachers should seek authentic and meaningful outlets for students to raise their voices and share their media production in community and digital spaces.

References
Baldridge, B. (2019). Reclaiming community: Race and the uncertain future of youth work. Stanford University Press.

Caraballo, L., & Lyiscott, J. (2018). Collaborative inquiry: Youth, social action, and critical qualitative research. Action Research, 18(2), 1–18.

Cohen, C., & Kahne, J. (2012). Participatory politics: New media and youth political action. Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network.

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Bergin & Garvey.

Garcia, A., Levinson, A., & Gargroetzi, E. (2020). “Dear future president of the United States”: Analyzing youth civic writing within the 2016 Letters to the Next President Project. American Educational Research Journal, 57(3), 1159–1202.

Jocson, K. (Ed.). (2013). Cultural transformations: Youth and the pedagogies of possibility. Harvard University Press.

Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2019). The critical media literacy guide: Engaging media and transforming education. Brill.

Mirra, N., Morrell, E., & Filipiak, D. (2018). From digital consumption to digital invention: Toward a new critical theory of multiliteracies. Theory into Practice, 57(1), 12–19.

Morrell, E., Dueñas, R., Garcia, V., & López, J. (2013). Critical media pedagogy: Teaching for achievement in city schools. Teachers College Press. New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92.

Noble, S. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press.

Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. Penguin.

Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.

Zote, J. (2020, January 07). 55 critical social media statistics to fuel your 2020 strategy. Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-statistics/

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

Jamila Lyiscott, a.k.a ‘Dr. J,’ is an assistant professor of Social Justice Education at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is founding co-director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research and co-editor-in-chief of Equity & Excellence in Education Journal. Her TED Talk, 3 Ways to Speak English, was viewed over 4.6 million times.

Antero Garcia, Ph.D., studies how technology and gaming shape youth learning, literacy practices, and civic identities. Based on his research, Antero co-designed the Critical Design and Gaming School–a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. His recent book is Good Reception: Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Media in a Los Angeles High School.

Nicole Mirra is an assistant professor of Urban Teacher Education at Rutgers University. She previously taught English Language Arts at public high schools in New York City and Los Angeles. She helped coordinate the UCLA Council of Youth Research. She advocates for teacher leadership and critical digital literacy as a Connected Learning Ambassador for the National Writing Project.

Balancing in Sync

Inequalities. Growing failing rates. Achievement gaps. Learning loss. The concerns I had for students falling into the student categories of the “haves” and “have nots” as we headed further and further into this pandemic driven shutdown was alarming and continued to weigh heavily on my planning and teaching.

While some of my colleagues continued to operate and assess students through “academic triage,” a phrase I use to describe the panicked teacher that is desperately trying to breathe life into their virtual classroom using whatever methods or procedures they had in their physical classroom, I was looking for a different approach.

I needed a response plan that made sense and that’s when I realized I needed some deep teaching self-reflection and assessment data, a practice often seen in Professional Learning Communities (PLC), and I found that differentiated instruction is key to operating on a blended or synchronous and asynchronous learning model.

I am a secondary teacher working with high school English students in a Title 1 public high school with 75% free and reduced-lunch. These students are part of most homes with families where both parents work and multiple siblings live. The ability to get computers or other types of devices for learning in the hands of students, was just the beginning of a long list of obstacles. Luckily, my district addressed this issue immediately with an offer of 1:1 devices, but it wouldn’t be until the end of the first semester, where I could see more and more obstacles in the way of learning for both my students and myself.

At the start of the new school year, my district announced that our students would be learning in an 80-minute block schedule that meets on alternating days by period. Friday’s were designated as a common planning day for staff and students to attend all their periods for 35-minutes. Students were broken into two groups: distance learning and blended learning. The distance learning students would be learning from home all year, regardless of announcements of return from the county or state. The blended learning students would be able to return to school, should such a day come, in two separate cohorts; cohort A and cohort B. Regardless, we were all teaching distance learning.

When the terms “synchronous and asynchronous” were introduced as the instructional approach to our new distance learning model, I scratched my head and immediately tried to visualize those terms and what they looked like in my new online classroom. Synchronous was deemed the live instruction you offered your students in the first 40-minutes of that 80-minute block schedule and asynchronous is the term used for independent work students could do in the second half of the same 80-minute block or independently and away from the live classroom. We used to call that “homework” but with virtual learning, isn’t it all just homework? My district asked teachers to try and put an equal amount of planning into both synchronous and asynchronous time, but that’s where the challenge is, I think, for most teachers.

My first semester of trying to implement the asynchronous and synchronous to 80-minute fidelity revealed so much more than I had anticipated…Unreliable or lagging Wi-Fi, the responsibility to care for other family members in the home, the lack of support available at home to help students learn or get organized, and the insurmountable distractions continued to interrupt the teaching and learning that was supposed to be happening in the classroom.

Over the winter break, I decided to take inventory and really evaluate the make-up and demographics of my classroom. Before we returned, I candidly asked my students to tell me what their academic goals were for the preceding year. At my school, English 10 honors face an impasse; they either continue to the Advanced Placement (AP) Language course, or they move on to the standard 11 College Prep (CP) English course. Then, I looked at their academic achievement from the first semester. I decided to use both pieces of information to build four differentiated learning groups in each of my periods. I teach three periods of English 10 honors, so that was 12 small groups based on their academic goals and past achievement. My thought was this… “distance learning is hard for most. Just like my classroom when we’re in-person I know better. Differentiated instruction means I’ve accepted that learning isn’t a one size fits all approach. I don’t see how distance learning makes that idea any different just because we are learning virtually.”

For the second semester, I planned and laid out a new detailed syllabus full of new units driven by my students’ interests and communicated the goals and skills needed to be successful. However, this syllabus clearly pointed out that their tasks and goals were not only broken up week by week, but I had redefined and used the “synchronous” and “asynchronous” terms to describe how we were going to be successful.

For my new approach to work, I had to respond to the need to address my more critical students first and then reevaluate where my higher-level students were currently achieving and either keep them moving forward or enhance the rigor of their learning. One big takeaway from the first semester was the need to be in two places at once. It sounds ridiculous, but with technology pounding on our educational door is it all that far-fetched?

I decided that I needed to dig deep into using more online platforms like Google Classroom, the Google Suite of docs, sheets, and forms, EdPuzzle, Kami, and Zoom videos because they were the beginning to the answers I was looking for. Prior to distance learning and pandemic driven education, I had already implemented Google Classroom into my teaching. It was a great place to announce assignments and an easy turn-in system that eliminated the use of printers and enhanced the communication in my classroom. I was grateful when we went into stay at home orders with that little technological nugget already in place. My district began offering Kami, as a way for documents being used on Google Classroom with students, to be opened and manipulated–either by each student individually or as a class. I use it for annotating in small groups (synchronously) or as an independent assignment (asynchronously).

I use EdPuzzle for quick reviews on Friday or as an asynchronous activity. Whenever I need to deliver instruction in a direct teaching model, Zoom is my go-to for live teaching, but I also use it to record myself and create instructional videos that I can easily share on Google Classroom. This was key to embracing more asynchronous teaching. I always offer it as weekly or independent work. This approach addressed the distracted students, the student with multiple responsibilities at home, and the sketchy and lagging Wi-Fi issues. Students could now pause, rewatch, fast-forward, and rewind my instruction. I think most teachers would agree we wish we could do that in a live classroom. Instead, we use non-verbal cues and student classroom behavior to gauge whether or not they are following along. We watch them take-notes, and do quick call-on’s to check for understanding, but some of that–if not all, has disappeared for us through spotty Wi-Fi connections, blacked out screens, and elements out of our control because students are learning from home. Finally, I turned my Zoom room chat box into the hub of my assessment practices. I love the “chat with the host only” feature. I propose a question, and they respond. But the biggest change to my approach to teaching virtually was the synchronous live teaching in the form of small differentiated instructional groups.

I’ll admit that it felt like I was going rogue from the district suggested curriculum, but I was confident that I had created material, considered engagement, and found a way to hit the same essential standard goals as my district’s curriculum. Some of the administrators at my district level have always encouraged teachers to be the “leaders of their own classroom” and they also have privately admitted, that the research into synchronous and asynchronous online learning are terms that they adopted when forced to take our whole district online that they believed all the teachers in our district could embrace and execute to the best of their ability. It’s for moments like this that I think administrators and policymakers need to trust teachers more. Most teachers who are passionate about teaching and involved in on-going professional development know what’s best for their students and how to help them, but I also know that some teachers feel better about intervening when they have a verbal or more official “green pass” to stray from curriculum expectations and practices before they’ll change what they’re doing or realize what they’re being asked to do isn’t working.” So, my solution for differentiated instruction during an 80 minute block of synchronous and asynchronous learning time was to divide and conquer. I teach 16 of my students in two small groups synchronously each day, while the other 16 are learning asynchronously–then the next day, they switch. The whole week goes on like this until Friday, when we all come together for review or assessment. I needed my first-semester failures and view of obstacles to force me to consider this out-of-the-box approach.

Teaching online with my new approach in place is such a different experience. First and foremost, ALL of their cameras are on; that’s a huge win right there. Second, the live synchronous small groups are more discussion-based. The answer to catching my critical cases and encouraging my proficient and beyond proficient students could both be addressed. Together, we tackle the material that is harder to do independently—this is the stuff that requires my close direct instruction and modeled behavior. In English 10 honors, my goals are to help my students be successful with skills in reading, comprehending, annotating, summarizing, analyzing, and responding to a variety of genres of writing from historical diary and journal entries, feature articles, news commentaries, creative media, like advertisements, and speeches. Asynchronously, my students access the documents that are more grade-level appropriate and practice the same skills each week. The rigor comes when after four weeks, I change the genre on them, but the skills they are practicing don’t change. They continue to receive feedback from me, and they continue to feel successful. But synchronously, we tackle the historical diaries and journal entries because they come with more lessons and learning in accessibility. The language and approach to tackling these pieces is challenging. If I were in my classroom, I could walk around, observe their annotations, look at their notes in the margin, do some quick check-in’s, but again, all of that is lost with online learning. As a small synchronous group, they can’t hide from me. I recoup some of what has been lost in a sea of black screens and a view of ceiling fans I just couldn’t compete with before I made the change.

Just in the first four weeks, I notice that I spend more time with my upper-level students exploring historical context and analyzing what is written, but with my lower-level students, we spend more time defining terms, filling in more historical context, and flushing out more critical thinking ideas and discussion. Ironically, I have gained so much more time because there are fewer of them to check in with.

Recently, I literally watched my small group of students annotate a piece of historical informational text on the screen. We all went to Google Classroom and opened the document in Kami. One by one, you could see their little circle icons show up at the bottom of the screen which indicated they had been successful in launching the document. As the teacher, I knew they were with me. I assigned them each a highlighting color and instructed them to take turns and go in order so they weren’t highlighting over each other. I asked them to highlight a sentence from the text. Once they were done highlighting, they were instructed to give a thumbs up in the camera to signal the next student that it was their turn and then they were told to put their rationale in the chat box explaining how the sentence helps them meet their annotation goals. I could check for understanding, and assess their skills far quicker in 40-minutes than I could have ever done with 32, mostly, black screens in 80 minutes. In fact, because of my small group organization, I got 16 assessments and feedback completed in one period. The demonstration of skills they show during our synchronous time helps drive my assessment practices on Friday when we’re all together. I have come to value the Zoom chat box more than I could ever imagine.

The balance and approach to differentiated instruction in a synchronous and asynchronous model is working. It took about two weeks for my students to understand and adjust to the new schedule, but once they got it, they got it, and from what they have said, most of them like the flexibility, and one-on-one time with me. There’s less screen time and thereby less Zoom fatigue. The technology issues we had where my LIVE teaching was missed because of Wi-Fi glitches and pauses isn’t as big of a factor anymore. Their screens are on, and I have more accountability from them. They unmute themselves and take part in the discussion. I’m able to model a skill and check for understanding quickly. They participate in annotating live on the screen at the same time, and I seem to get more out of them, energy-wise, than I ever did when they were all together.

The idea for how to structure the small group synchronous learning came after I noticed that the one-on-one time during my mandated office hours was a huge success for those students who came to see me. Just like anything in education, when you see student success among a small group of students you wonder, “could that work for everyone?” I took a leap of faith. If there was ever a moment to consider ALL academic options to be successful teaching virtually while answering the call of concern about achievement gaps, it’s right now.

Annette Deming, MA, M.Ed., CJE is the 2020 Associated Chino Teachers union (ACT) Secondary Teacher of the Year for the Chino Valley Unified School District, CA. This is her 8th year teaching and teaches English, journalism, and advises the yearbook. She is also the 2017 recipient of the Rising Star Award issued by the Journalism Education Association (JEA). She has assisted her district and teaching colleagues with curriculum development, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), and implementation of standards-based grading.

She will be leading the Assessment and Accountability team for their upcoming Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) accreditation and evaluation in the upcoming school year.

Shortening Distances

This past year added a new layer to the challenges that language teachers perennially confront with the pivot to online learning. In this article, I will share a semester-long project that took place in fall 2020 that addressed some of the primary challenges that face world language instructors. My examples come from the Portuguese-language classroom, but they can be useful for teachers of other world languages with diverse, international cultures such as Spanish and French.

Rather than creating additional barriers, technology can be integrated into a course to enhance student learning in a mixed-level class so that all students are empowered as producers of knowledge. Students join the language classroom having different experiences with the target language and varying levels of proficiency. A challenge for the instructor is to maintain a low affective filter so that even the most timid and insecure of students can produce language and thrive in class. In the Southern California Portuguese classroom, the student body includes heritage learners, Spanish speakers, and students who may have studied Portuguese at different institutions, and as a result, the instructor needs to take into account what these different experiences bring to the classroom as resources and how to support different learners. Tools like Flipgrid and Blogger can increase student engagement online.

For teachers of world languages, a persistent challenge is presenting the world to our students when so many of us feel at home and familiar in one national or regional context while lacking mastery in the other cultures that speak the languages we teach. This is certainly true for Portuguese, which boasts official language status in countries spanning four continents. Indeed, it seems as if the only thing that the countries of the Lusophone world share is that Portuguese colonization impacted the landscape and the people, forever changing their trajectories. As a teacher of Brazilian Portuguese, I often wrestle with how best to integrate authentic materials and foster cultural competency from other Lusophone contexts without falling into the seductive culture-capsule lesson, in which students learn a fascinating tidbit from the target culture but without transformative or meaningful engagement.

Taking both of these challenges into account, I designed a project through which my students and I would learn more about the Lusophone world while engaging with poetry and music. At the initial planning stages, I did not know that this project would open up my classroom to a world beyond our university and that my students would learn directly from cultural producers from all over the Lusophone world as well as diplomats based in California.

In the context of pandemic-era instruction, the first semester in Intermediate Portuguese was taught remotely via Zoom, while content was made available to students via Canvas. Students and I met twice a week for 75-minute Zoom sessions. During the remote meetings, I facilitated instruction using an integrated skills approach. For select class meetings, we focused on the cultural component of the course: the Canções project.

The initial goals of the project were to 1) integrate music into the course to answer student demand for more exposure to music; 2) explore the concept of lusofonia and the diverse places on the planet where Portuguese is spoken; and 3) create speaking activities through which students could record themselves using audio and video, which I find encourages their participation in speaking more than a live discussion via video chat. To address the first two goals, I selected an album that introduces lusofonia through the sounds and words of speakers from across cultures, Canções para Abreviar Distâncias by Portugal-based Brazilian singer Isabella Bretz. The concept behind Bretz’s album lent itself perfectly to the project as each song showcases lyrics from poetry from all of the cultures from the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa—CPLP) to celebrate the lyricism and music of the Portuguese-speaking world.

The project reached a new level when I contacted the artist via social media. I sent her an initial message saying she would receive an email about a project I was designing around the materials from her album and requested permission to use Canções para Abreviar Distâncias. She replied quickly, and we chatted via Zoom shortly thereafter. She told me she was from Minas Gerais, Brazil, but lives in Cascais, Portugal, and that she had been in touch with several of the selected poems’ authors. As we continued talking about how to integrate her experience as a Brazilian living abroad and her experiences in other Portuguese-speaking countries, I learned she had many stories she could share with me and my students. As Isabella became more interested in learning about my ideas for the semester-long project, I realized she was the perfect “expert” for the initial phase.

At the beginning of the semester, Isabella visited my class via Zoom. She spoke and answered questions submitted by the students about her creative process of converting poems by living Lusophone writers into songs and developing her connections with the Portuguese-speaking world. Using video chat also allowed the class to welcome her more than once. At their final presentations, she joined us again so we could shorten the distance between San Diego and Cascais, in Portugal.

One objective of the project was to provide students with additional opportunities to practice their communication skills via audio and video and receive peer feedback, as well as personalized instructor feedback on oral production and pronunciation. To this end, I selected an application called Flipgrid, which is a video discussion tool that allows students to record their own video replies to a given prompt. This edtech tool offers accessibility features such as an immersive reader, and it can be integrated with Canvas, which allowed my students to log in and access their tech tools on the same learning management system they use for all of their classes. Once students had created their accounts on Flipgrid, they could access the prompts and start replying via video. The first part of the task was to recite the poem assigned to each Flipgrid.

For instance, students completing the Flipgrid about Brazil had to recite Adélia Prado’s poem after completing a fill-in-the-blank activity that was part of a previous listening-comprehension activity. After that, they had to answer two questions related to the poem itself and one expansion question about the possible reasons behind Bretz’s choice of the poem. For example: “Why do you think the singer Isabella Bretz chose this poem, ‘Alvará de Demolição’, to sing?” Once students had posted their recordings, their classmates had to listen to them and comment or ask questions, very much like one would do in a written discussion forum.

My role as their instructor was to facilitate the discussion forums and provide individual feedback. As a result of this continuous practice, students reported having improved fluency and pronunciation as well as vocabulary development and cultural awareness. In addition, students experienced an increased sense of community and collaboration, which resulted in retention of students, as over 60% continued studying Portuguese the following semester.

In fact, this summer I had a conversation with one of the students in that course, and she reported to me that she and another student in that class are currently meeting up in person twice a week to practice Portuguese. I believe that speaks volumes to the kind of bond that developed among them. It seems the project brought them closer together, forming friendships that are going beyond the limits of a Zoom learning environment.

In addition to Flipgrid, students also used Blogger to present their projects. A blogging platform that is free to access, Blogger is ranked among the easiest to use. The final project of the semester was to create a cultural product based on what students had learned about the Lusophone world as they learned the language. Students had the chance to further their understanding of cultural aspects that went beyond an author’s work and fame. They also learned where they lived, how their careers unfolded, and how their life experiences influenced their literary production. In the end, it was a win–win situation: the students learned about the CPLP, about the authors and their countries of origin and their histories, and how Portuguese had come to be an official language there. From my perspective, I have developed a deeper interest in the cultures of the CPLP. This experience allowed me to broaden my understanding and appreciation for those cultures, and I also networked and connected with outstanding representatives from those nations.

With the support of the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at San Diego State University, I planned an event in honor of World Portuguese Language Day, the UNESCO-observed holiday that takes place on May 5, to cap off the academic year and add another level of engagement with the Lusophone world for students.

The live Zoom event included the participation of the consul of Brazil, Ambassador Márcia Loureiro, and the consul of Portugal, Maria João Lopes Cardoso, who both spoke on the important role of language and area studies programs in their missions here in the U.S. With the help of Isabella, we invited several of the poets who wrote the lyrics of the songs from Canções para Abreviar Distâncias to speak on the topic of lusofonia, and we broadcasted Isabella performing her songs. To showcase the importance of Portuguese at our campus, faculty, staff, and students spoke on their experiences with the language and what Portuguese means to them.

My students also performed a reading of the poem “Língua Portuguesa,” by Olavo Bilac. All of these elements were combined into in a live Zoom event where students could listen to different accents of Portuguese speakers and see how a whole Lusophone world is within their reach, from the people on campus who speak Portuguese to artists and diplomats from the Lusophone world who were willing to join us to celebrate. In sum, the event was a high-impact learning experience as well as a way to enjoy ourselves and listen to music together at the end of an unprecedented academic year.

The final phase was possible due to the contacts Isabella had with the living poets whose work she showcased in her songs. I contacted some of them via email and social media and talked to them about the project.

My personal and professional goal was to foster new international connections and network with them as new projects may emerge. In addition to learning considerably about the CPLP through these cultural ambassadors, I have developed relationships with real-life representatives of the Portuguese-speaking world, opening the doors to learning more about their cultures, careers, and histories.

While this project had several moving parts and counted on collaboration with others, it can be reformulated and replicated for other target languages and institutional contexts. In the same way that Isabella’s music aims to shorten distances, our teaching can also shorten distances when we experiment with technology and take risks, just as we encourage our students to. We can reach out to artists and diplomats, even if initiating those contacts make us nervous or we feel shy. The rewards for us and for our students far outweigh the risks.

Cássia De Abreu, MA, teaches Portuguese as a foreign language at San Diego State University, UC San Diego, and Southwestern College in San Diego, California.

Learning from Long Shadows

My decade-long involvement in shadowing projects across the country has taught me that the average percentage of time that multilingual learners (MLLs) are speaking is often 5–10%. This is in contrast to what researchers like Pauline Gibbons (2015) tell us—that MLLs should be spending at least 30% of their school day in academic talk. This deafening silence has also affected virtual classrooms, where our MLLs are typically invisible and all students may have few speaking opportunities. Additionally, five major lessons learned after ten years of shadowing include the following:

• Shadowing is not a panacea—there must be a plan to disrupt silence and engage MLLs after shadowing.

• Each educator must experience shadowing themselves—although it might be “faster” to have a smaller group of educators shadow and share their results, the power of shadowing is really in each educator experiencing a day in the life of an MLL for themselves. This may take more time, but it is well worth it.

• Systemic change means an ongoing focus on MLLs—since shadowing is not a panacea, there must be a sustained professional learning focus on meeting the needs of MLLs. In this way, it is often not enough to conduct one year of shadowing, but instead shadowing must be carried out for different purposes.

• Shadowing can be used with a variety of student groups—although this particular process was initially created to be used with MLLs, other student groups can also be shadowed. For example, in Rialto Unified School District, standard English learners as well as students dually identified as MLL and SPED were also shadowed. Data can then be compared across student groups to determine next steps with each group.

• Shadowing can also be used for progress monitoring—shadowing can continue to be used often after the first baseline shadowing project is conducted. After professional development is provided, participants can go back in to shadow and see if the professional development has taken effect in the classroom.

This article will further unpack some of the major lessons learned, as well as guide the reader through the power and steps of the shadowing process. Additionally, major changes to shadowing in a virtual setting will be described.

Focus of Shadowing
During shadowing, we focus on the speaking and listening experiences of MLLs, as these are often the two most underdeveloped domains of language taught in classrooms. This is in contrast to the fact that speaking is the foundation of literacy for MLLs. Similarly, James Britton (1983) suggests that “Reading and writing float on a sea of talk.” Additionally, and strategically, speaking is a scaffold for writing and listening is a scaffold for reading. For these reasons alone, we should intentionally embed talk and active listening in our classrooms. After all, the person doing the most talking is doing the most learning. There are many benefits to classroom talk for MLLs, and some of them include:

• They hear more language—from a variety of sources and not just the teacher when MLLs are placed in pairs and groups to practice classroom discourse.

• They speak more language—a small group or pair represents a safer community where language risks can happen.

• They understand more language—MLLs benefit from being paired with a linguistic model who can explain things more effectively.

• They ask more questions—MLLs are more likely to ask for clarification, especially when in small groups or pairs.

• They are more comfortable about speaking—small and well-structured groups can represent a safe community and are sometimes similar culturally to an MLL’s home, which might be more collective than individualistic.

Shadowing in a Virtual Setting
Shadowing can assist systems in refocusing their attention onto MLLs, as well as disrupting silence, whether that be in a virtual or on-the-ground setting. Over the past year, I have pivoted shadowing projects in virtual settings with several options that can continue to assist educators with monitoring their MLLs’ progress in academic speaking and listening. Some of these options include:

• Record your own lesson in Zoom or your LMS, select one of your own MLL students, and complete the shadowing protocol at every five-minute interval.

• Shadow one of your own MLL students during a breakout or group session.

• Obtain a substitute teacher and shadow virtually in someone else’s classroom. This is what typically happens with onthe-ground shadowing as well.

• Shadow using the Jeff Zwiers videos (use all nine videos and take down activity at the beginning and end of each). Please note that these are exemplar videos, so you will have a slightly skewed shadowing experience with them. www.jeffzwiers.org/videos

Debriefing the Shadowing Experience
Ideally, a group of teachers engages in the shadowing experience and then shares a debrief in which they analyze the results and determine next steps from the data. The quantitative data that is collected during shadowing is coded in a manner that informs the group of who is doing the most talking and listening. The comments section (or qualitative data) can be analyzed to find themes and patterns from the observations. Such data analysis discussions can assist school systems with setting incremental goals around student talk in the classroom setting. For example, after a shadowing training at the Orange County Office of Education in Southern California, Anaheim Union High School District decided to set a districtwide goal of 30% student talk across all schools. After setting such goals, educators can then use shadowing for progress monitoring at least once a year, to continue to see if the goal that has been set is being met following ongoing professional development.

Educator Reflections after Shadowing
After shadowing multilingual learners, educators often use words like frustrating, insightful, cold, and enlightening to describe the experience. Such reflections often become the catalyst for change and a way to disrupt silence on behalf of MLLs. I like to describe the entire shadowing process as a “day in the life of a multilingual learner,” in which educators can experience both the assets and needs of this group of students. Through the shadowing experience, educators monitor the academic speaking and listening experiences of multilingual learners and often come to the realization that they themselves do far more of the talking than their students.

Figure 1: Shadowing Reflection Wordle

Creating a Plan after Shadowing
After the data collection portion of the shadowing experience, it is essential that school systems have a plan for disrupting silence systemically with their MLLs. My Shadowing Multilingual Learners book outlines three research-based strategies that teachers can begin to use to create more student talk in their classrooms. These strategies are think–pair–share 2.0, the Frayer model, and reciprocal teaching. As part of the professional development provided and outlined in the book, shown in Figure 2, teachers incrementally begin to try out each of the strategies with their MLLs, so that both they and their MLLs become comfortable with classroom talk. Each strategy is taught one at a time across the three-day series, with sessions one month apart, so that teachers can practice and become comfortable using each of the strategies. Teachers also bring student work samples from each of the strategies to days two and three of the training series, in order to analyze and reflect upon how each strategy was implemented and received by students. Next steps for refinement with each strategy are then shared before additional strategies are introduced.

Figure 2: Three-Day Shadowing Series

As we begin to reopen schools, I encourage systems to use the shadowing process and series to understand the specific assets and needs that MLLs may have after their schooling has been interrupted by the traumatic experiences of the pandemic. Through careful observation and data collection, our MLLs will show us where gaps in opportunity may have occurred. By analyzing data, educators and school systems can devise explicit next steps to quickly meet the specific needs of their MLLs. For more information on how to shadow, please see Shadowing Multilingual Learners (Corwin, 2021).

References
Gibbons, P. (2015). Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning: Teaching Second Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Soto, I. (2021). Shadowing Multilingual Learners. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Dr. Ivannia Soto is professor of education and director of graduate programs at Whittier College, where she specializes in language acquisition, systemic reform for English language learners (ELLs), and urban education. She began her career in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), where she taught English and English language development to a population of 99.9% Latinos who either were or had been multilingual learners. Before becoming a professor, Dr. Soto also served LAUSD as a literacy coach and as district office and county office administrator.

She has presented on literacy and language topics at various conferences, including the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE), the California Association for Bilingual Association (CABE), the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and the National Urban Education Conference. As a consultant, Soto has worked with Stanford University’s School Redesign Network (SRN), WestEd, and CABE, as well as a variety of districts and county offices in California, providing technical assistance for systemic reform for ELLs and Title III. Recently, Soto also directed a CABE bilingual teacher and administrator program across California.

Dr. Soto has authored and co-authored twelve books, including The Literacy Gaps: Building Bridges for ELLs and SELs; ELL Shadowing as a Catalyst for Change, which was recognized by Education Trust-West as a promising practice for ELLs in 2018; From Spoken to Written Language with ELLs; the Academic English Mastery four-book series; the Common Core Companion Book Series for English Language Development four-book series; Breaking Down the Wall: Essential Shifts for English Learners’ Success; and Supporting Cultural and Linguistic Diversity: A Framework for Responsive Schooling. Together, the books tell a story of how to equitably engage and include ELLs by ensuring that they gain voice and an academic identity in the classroom setting. Soto is executive director of the Institute for Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching (ICLRT) at Whittier College, whose mission is to promote relevant research and develop academic resources for ELLs and standard English learners (SELs) via linguistically and culturally responsive teaching practices.

Realia for Radical Teaching

Chasing the Gingerbread Man around the halls of my elementary school was the experience that made me fall in love with reading. Our class had just finished a book about him, and all of a sudden, there he was, inviting us to chase him. Looking back, it’s clear how much my teachers cared about us; it must have taken some cajoling and coordination to get a colleague to dress up in that silly costume and get chased by dozens of kindergarteners. But it brought the book to life. Realia is an unbeatable tool of pedagogy for language teachers. It grounds lessons in the physical experience. My favorite memories of learning were field trips, messy lab experiments, and conversations with playmates. Realia can even be a tool of radical pedagogy through critical artifactual literacy. Realia is a category, while artifacts are specific instances. The epistemology of artifacts, whether digital footprints, physical spaces, or palpable phenomena, can provide a linguistic bridge for conceptualizing words, thoughts, and ideas that can transform the educational experience.

One example of this in action is the way that digital classrooms embody and perform language differently from physical ones. As educators balance the rapidly evolving technology of learning with classical pedagogy, we can harness artifacts as a familiar terra firma. Artifactual critical literacy “is an approach that combines a focus on objects, and the stories attached to them, with an understanding of how different stories have different purchase in particular locations” (Pahl and Rowsell, 2011, p. 129). In today’s classroom, these techniques can highlight and even disrupt power structures, propelling the kind of sophisticated and nuanced discussions every educator hopes for.

A digital space can still be analyzed and questioned; what emojis are you using in the chat box to gauge engagement? How do you model professionalism when your screen is an intimate look into your personal homelife? These are conversations we’ve been having over the last year, and they offer a glimpse into what the future of education could look like.

If you’re in an educational rut, stuck because you want to be a transformative teacher with impactful lessons but completely overwhelmed with the weight of bureaucratic expectations or the transition to virtual learning, a reframe of the situation might help. When we talk about the science of knowledge transference, we know that learning is multifaceted. Play, storytelling, and hands-on experience are some of the best tools of pedagogy because they feel natural. Play helps children make sense of their surroundings (Larson and Marsh, 2014). Storytelling itself can be activism because it encourages nontraditional discourse in the classroom (Anzaldua, 1987). And using artifacts can “anchor students in their own learning process, making them active investigators for, instead of passive receivers of, information” (McKoy, 2010, p. 73). For example, when I wanted my students to feel more comfortable sharing their short stories, I got crafty. I puffed up brown paper lunch sacks and added construction paper fire logs and flames, and then I bought a pack of marshmallows for students to skewer and “roast” while they shared their stories around the campfire. It was nostalgic, which is why I had higher engagement and participation than ever. My experience with artifactual critical literacy comes from the perspective of autoethnography. As a doctor of education, I used this methodology to sculpt my nontraditional dissertation, where I argued that storytelling is a tool of radical pedagogy that enables decolonization and improvement of one’s teaching practices. I’ve used it in workshops geared toward young writers at Voces at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, as well as in a University of Connecticut conference for teachers in that awkward caterpillar stage we call preservice. That’s what is so powerful about this “show and tell” concept: it can be used for every age, because every person can benefit from it. But selecting artifacts is a skill; there is a framework for choosing realia that propels conversation and paradigm shifts.

First, begin with the end in mind (Wiggins and McTighe, 2008). What do you want students to get out of the lesson or unit? Using backwards design can help us figure out the best tools for the job. For instance, if the goal is to practice new vocabulary, we can set up the classroom with objects that invite conversation. But if the goal is to dig deep and make personal connections with the material, we might ask students to bring in an object that symbolizes a theme of the unit we’re working on. Best practices are not slapdash; teaching is a performance that needs quite a bit of forethought so that it goes off without a hitch.

There are a few guidelines for helping students analyze artifacts, including digital footprints and physical spaces, as a springboard for multimodality in their literacy. Educators can choose to focus on the five senses, which is more approachable for younger children, or go deeper by asking about function, modes of expression, or even what an object says about power relations. Modeling how to critically engage with artifacts through interrogating and examining is key so that objects don’t simply become props in the classroom, regardless of the guidelines you choose.

Here are some practical ways to engage in this methodology in the classroom, be it higher education or the early years. Incorporating artifacts and realia can look like:

• A hook to a lesson. Objects can ground or frame our goals for the day, introduce a concept or topic, or inspire an investigation. In Montessori and Reggio Emilia spheres, this is called an invitation to play (Hall, 2010). One example I used when I taught Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) was starting the unit with some simple tortillas, which are heavily symbolic in the novel.

• A way to highlight commonalities, categories, or cultural bridges. Objects can foster a sense of familiarity, which encourages learners to make connections between their lives and their schoolwork. They can also help students categorize new, unfamiliar objects based on shared traits. This technique is called scaffolding (Vygotsky, 1986). By grouping a washing board with an iron, a clothespin, and a box of laundry soap in one Great Depression-era lesson, I gave the students context so that they were able to deduce what the washing board might have been used for. We segued into talking about how much a washerwoman might make, which led to a lesson on how to budget where we roleplayed as workers in a 1930s small town.

• An anchor for communication. We’ve all had those days where we feel recalcitrant, sheepish, or even mutinous because of outside factors. Using realia can give students support, stability, and confidence on these hard days. The heritage of the Metis Tribe talking stick holds cultural significance and value as an anti-colonial action of resilience and honoring storytelling for the Mi’kmaq people (Williams, 2020). In the same way, teachers can brainstorm how to appropriately and mindfully recreate the ritual of this by using a signifying object that empowers the person holding it to share their story.

• A performance. Acting out how to use a device, pantomiming gestures, or using an object to build tension or surprise students can all be effective ways of reaching students who might otherwise be bored or unengaged (Horning, 1979). A teacher might come to school in a costume that intrigues, delights, or bewilders students. Care must, of course, be taken to avoid the perception of immaturity or juvenile curriculum at the high school or college level.

• Scaffolding for an article or story. When the curriculum skips over the unfamiliar, it does a disservice to students. Articles, stories, and all forms of communication can be explored in more depth when students become familiar with the setting, items, or subjects. For example, when I taught rhetoric using a 1920 Hemingway article on cooking, I brought in a heavy glass bottle that he describes using to roll out some dough for a pie. It enriched the experience because students who had never baked a pie suddenly understood the subtleties involved. They were also able to take their comprehension a step further; comparing Hemingway’s technique to a traditional rolling pin helped them critique the gendered layer to his writing. My students critiqued why Hemingway was so opposed to the ubiquity of the rolling pin and why he championed using the more masculine liquor bottle in pie-baking.

• A way to learn new vocabulary. In one school in Spain, students made multimodal, bilingual self-portraits that formed a museum of work that was itself “a metaphor of the culturally sustaining pedagogy” (Villacañas de Castro et al., 2021, p. 69). This lesson taught them words for materials and action verbs that described their artistic techniques, but it also allowed them to foster a sense of pride and an opportunity to socialize about their work, which in and of itself is a language-rich activity.

• A tool of social justice. Lessons become more impactful for students when they can respectfully experience historical events. Seeing the stocks that a criminal might have been locked into during a lesson on the idiom “laughing stock” will certainly make an impact, perhaps even leading to a conversation on humanity and prison abolition. Policy makers can recognize the myriad ways a professional educator might apply these concepts; this work is almost certainly happening in schools around the world already, but having the research and vocabulary to describe critical artifactual literacy can help to legitimize it and build it as a skill of pedagogy.

References
Anaya, R. (1972). Bless Me, Ultima. Grand Central Publishing.

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute.

Hall, K. (2010). Loris Malaguzzi and the Reggio Emilia Experience. Continuum International Publishing Group.

Horning, A. (1979). “Teaching as Performance.” Journal of General Education, 31(3), 185–194. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27796766.

Larson, J., and Marsh, J. (2014). Making Literacy Real: Theories and Practices for Learning and Teaching. SAGE Publications.

McKoy, K. (2010). “Realia: It’s not just about field trips anymore.” Social Education, 74(2), 73–112.

Pahl, K & Rowsell, J (2011) Artifactual Critical Literacy: A New Perspective for Literacy Education Berkeley Review of Education. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6s0491j5

Varga-Dobai, K. (2015). “Responding to Literature through Storytelling, Artifacts and Multigenre Writing Practices: Explorations of cultures and self.” Literacy, 49(2), 77–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12032.

Villacañas de Castro, L., Cano Bodi, V., Hortelano Montejano, A., Giner Real, C., Gómez Pons, I., Mesas Tomás, B., Sanz Martínez, C., and Tortosa Gozálvez, C. (2021). “Matter, Literacy, and English Language Teaching in an Underprivileged School in Spain.” TESOL Quarterly, 55(1), 54–79. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.572.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and Language (A. Kozulin, ed., trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Williams, T. (2020). “Passing the Talking Stick: Resilience-Making through Storytelling.” Girlhood Studies, 13(2), 134–136. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2020.130212.

Dr. Bunny McFadden is a language arts educator who focuses on decolonizing pedagogy through autoethnography. She has been published in SIETAR and the Journal of Sustainability Education, in addition to holding conference talks with organizations such as the Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar. She has an upcoming chapter in the book It Takes a Village: Academic Mothers (2023). Her website is docbunny.com.

Tips for Launching a District-Wide Phonics Program

Over the course of a few years here at Lumpkin County Schools, our leadership team began to realize that literacy was a root cause of many challenges in our district. We serve a large proportion of economically disadvantaged students, as well as a significant percentage of English language learners (ELLs). It was important to see all of our students growing in terms of their reading ability, but due to the low numbers, we often couldn’t sustain the cost of a pull-out program. In the end, we launched a district-wide phonics initiative that meets the needs of both diverse learners and teachers. Here are a few keys that helped us create and implement a plan to address literacy issues in all of our grades and schools.

Understand Students’ Circumstances
There are so many factors that can contribute to a student’s challenges. Is it their home life? Are they hungry? Are they worried about why mom didn’t come home last night?

If kids are worried about issues like that, they may not have a ton of energy left over to focus on instruction or phonics practice. We have to know their strengths and weaknesses and the circumstances that helped create them so that we can help in the appropriate ways. We have to know our students and develop a relationship with each of them to break down barriers. It is important to know not only a student’s name but what he or she is interested in as well. Developing a school community where all students are valued and appreciated is important. We have to have a heart for these kids first before we can dive into any kind of instruction.

Get the Whole District Involved Early
Our literacy initiative was born from our in-house leadership teams, which included teachers from elementary, middle, and high schools. Teachers and administrators in every school were participating in the Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement (GLISI), a program that helps to bring about change in school districts. This was an initiative that our superintendent began in his first year in our organization. District and school leaders first attended to understand the process. Then we began to bring teachers on board as an important piece of our strategic plan. As they went through the program, they were looking to identify root causes of the challenges we were seeing.

We were not surprised when we continued to see literacy popping up as a common challenge, but in these meetings with teacher leaders and administrators from across grade levels, it became clear that literacy was an issue in every grade. As we continued talking with our educators throughout the district, phonics kept coming up over and over again.

We heard our teachers say things like, “You know, this student is reading by sight, not breaking down words. When they get to a word that they don’t know, they can’t break it apart. They can’t build upon previous skills because they don’t have the phonics skills.”

Focus on the Root, but Treat the Whole Plant
It was a given for us that our phonics program would be focused within grades K–5. It just makes sense to focus literacy efforts on young kids so they don’t have issues as they continue through school. We first chose to focus upstream to ensure our younger learners acquire the foundational skills so when they arrive in middle and high school, they will be able to read at levels needed to complete their work across subjects.

However, poor phonics skills had been identified in our middle and high schools as a critical issue to be addressed. We chose a partner, Reading Horizons, to support educators at all grades with their structured literacy and phonics-based curriculum for students who were behind or at risk in our middle schools and even high schools.

Middle and high school teachers are often not excited or prepared to teach phonics, but the population of students who need help at this level is pretty small. The online software provided a great deal of instruction and support for the students who did need it.

It has also been effective in strengthening the English abilities of our students who speak other languages but still have very limited English proficiency. We are participating in a research study to verify this effect, and we also look forward to state assessment scores to compare to previous years.

Offer Teachers Focused PD
Our initial goal with our phonics program was for teachers to become experts in the direct instruction piece. All elementary teachers were trained extensively, and we continued with coaches throughout the first two years of instruction. Coaches observed teachers and provided feedback. They also worked with grade levels to review important concepts and provide expert advice.

We are also currently training members of our own staff to become coaches to continue the process in upcoming years. They will be able to train new teachers and work with current teachers to strengthen the program. We also offered teachers videos supplied by Reading Horizons that illustrated each lesson, so they were able to watch someone modeling the lesson they were going to give. This has been a game changer. Our teachers can go to a website and watch someone teach the material they’re presenting tomorrow to refresh their knowledge.

Give Teachers Options
Especially when it comes to technology, we believe in giving teachers options. Technology can be incredibly helpful, but sometimes it can get in the way too, and that line isn’t the same from teacher to teacher.

For example, some teachers choose to use the assessment tool within the software, while others prefer to give students paper-and-pencil assessments, which assess the same items and skills, just in a different format. For teachers who are comfortable with technology, it’s nice to have a streamlined setup from assessment to differentiation. Teachers using the paper-and-pencil approach can still figure out where they need to focus with each student, and that’s more important than pushing the right buttons in a piece of software.

Launching a district-wide phonics initiative can seem like a daunting challenge, but by empowering our staff with ongoing support and high-quality structured literacy tools, we were able to manage it together.

Jennifer Moss is the director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment at Lumpkin County Schools in Georgia. She can be reached at [email protected].

Grade Expectations

A week before spring break, I had a conversation with a student about language learning. Since I was a language learner myself, the student asked me for tips on learning a second language. Instead of sharing some tips for improving English learning, I shared my story on language learning. In the past, my goal was to be an expert in a language, but now my goal is to admit what I don’t know and be more honest than I used to be. If I rated my language-learning goal from zero to ten, I would say my past self’s goal was a ten, nine, or 8.5. However, my present self has learned to manage with a score of around five.

The middle point of five may be the best score for me, but why not try to achieve a score of ten? Here is my answer: what would I do after achieving ten? I could choose to stop because I’ve achieved my goal. If life is about reaching the finishing line, ten is the best score and it is the goal of my life. However, if I view my life as a journey without a destination, I need to learn to manage to maintain a score of five. Having the goal of reaching a score of five is a new perspective for me to see my life as being constantly on a journey.

The original goal of achieving ten is rooted in my pursuit of perfection or expertise in learning a language. However, I leave myself with two doubts: the criteria of being the expert/perfect, and the attitude of language learning. When I say an English teacher needs to be an expert in the English language, I lead to the unanswered question of how I measure my own performance. For some reason, the criteria are based on comparison. I am an English teacher because I passed the English teaching certification exam, comparing myself on the certification criteria. When teaching in class, I know more than my students in a language, so I am an expert to them. I can achieve a score of eight, nine, or ten because of how my language ability is compared to others’. My attitude toward language learning developed based on that comparison. It’s about reaching the finishing line and competing against standards or other language learners. That attitude taught me to be a fighter whose goal was to win the final battle and enjoy the triumph. Do I love the language I learn or teach? I would say “yes” because of the success I’ve achieved. But what if I didn’t achieve the goal—would I still love the language? Or if someone told me that it was impossible to know everything in a language, would I choose to learn it? If I assess my love of a language based on competition itself, seeing others who are inferior to me, I will only love it when it gives me the happiness of triumph. For example, my students admire me because I am skilled in English. Such an attitude requires more than a passion for learning a language. It demands the stimulus from winning a competition.

Now, let’s remove the finishing line and imagine that learning a language is a journey with an unknown destination. Life is a balance between knowing and unknowing. Happiness is built upon the movement of all sorts of emotions, including joy and sadness. Loving a language is not about the outcome of learning it, like finding a job, getting attention from others, or winning a competition, the result; rather, it is about the language itself, the process of learning. I have a new goal for myself, which is to manage at around a median score of five. I still want to be an expert in teaching English. This expert is different from the previous one in that he values the curiosity and honesty in language learning instead of valuing competition and the big ego who boasts that he knows everything.

Five is the midpoint of the scale from zero to ten. I chose it as the goal of my language learning and teaching because my goal is to influence my students’ attitude to learning a language and how to perceive love. Learning a language is a journey with an unknown destination, sometimes without destiny. Committing to the unknown leads a curious mind to explore, which is a learning attitude that influences other language learners. On the other hand, I learn a language simply because I enjoy the moment of learning it. I am grateful to have all kinds of emotions, regardless of being happy or sad. I believe love works the same. I choose to love a language, or a person, not because of any positive outcome or reward. I love learning languages because the moment I learn the language, I connect more with people.

“Now, I chose to be honest,” I shared during the conversation. “I forgot the meaning of the word bewilder in reading class. I told my students I forgot what it means, and I said I needed to google its meaning.” Even though I consider myself a skilled language learner, I am still learning. My growth does not end here, and like my students, I will continue to use outside resources to help hone my skill. I hope to teach my students that their goals are achievable and that we all have an equal playing field on which to learn languages.

Yu Zhou is a sixth-grade English teacher in Dallas, Texas. He has a passion for teaching reading and writing. During his free time, he enjoys traveling and exploring the cultural values of different languages.

Mary Simon is Canada’s First Indigenous Governor General

Indigenous leader Mary Simon is the first Indigenous person to serve as Canada’s governor general. The largely ceremonial role acts as the federal Canadian representative of the Canadian monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. Simon, who has been an advocate for Inuit rights, has been appointed following a national scandal over the devastating discovery of mass graves at government-funded boarding schools.

Simon is bilingual in English and Inuktitut and has served as the ambassador to Denmark and as president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Canada’s national Inuit organization. In a speech addressing the public, she spoke in her first language, Inuktitut, and said her “historic” nomination was “an important step forward on the long path toward reconciliation” and toward “building a more inclusive and just Canadian society.”

“We are honored to have Ms. Simon as Canada’s first Indigenous governor general,” Trudeau said. The queen’s Twitter account said she had approved the appointment on the prime minister’s recommendation.

English on the Rise in Singapore

It’s no secret that English is the most widely spoken language on the planet—with a native speaker population of 370 million and a learner population of 1.5 billion worldwide, the language remains on an upward trend, oftentimes at the cost of linguistic diversity in regions that have historically had high levels of multilingualism. For example, in Papua New Guinea, home to nearly 900 Indigenous languages, English and Tok Pisin, an English-based creole, have pushed Indigenous languages to the fringes of society among younger generations.

Now it appears that the trend of declining multilingualism in favor of English has reached another country with high levels of linguistic diversity: Singapore. Census data from the city-state was released in mid-June, showing that English is now the predominant language in the country—that is, a plurality (48.3% of residents) of the highly multilingual city-state use English as their primary language.

The ten-year period from 2010 to 2020 shows a large shift in Singapore’s linguistic dynamic—while a plurality of Singaporeans (35.6%) spoke Mandarin Chinese at home in 2010, the percentage of Mandarin Chinese-speaking Singaporeans has decreased to just 29.9%. Other Chinese dialects like Cantonese and Hakka declined even more dramatically, from 14.3% in 2010 to 8.7% in 2020. On the other hand, English, which was the second most widely used language in Singaporean households in 2010, has seen a significant increase in household usage: in 2010, just 32.3% of Singaporeans used English as their primary language at home, but now nearly half the city-state uses it.

English is one of the country’s four official languages, alongside Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tami (the latter two both saw declines in usage as well)—English has historically been considered the lingua franca among Singaporeans from differing cultural backgrounds, but the 2020 Census is the first time such a sharp contrast in language use has been documented in Singapore’s recent history. Malay is considered to be the city-state’s national language, due to the fact that the Malay people are recognized in the constitution as being indigenous to the region; however, Malay has not been a primary language for most of the population for many years.

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