Young children from low-income New York City families—many of them Black and Latinx—face continued disadvantages resulting from lower-quality preschools despite the mayor’s program to close racial disparities in early learning, says a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
Early childhood education centers enrolling larger shares of white or Asian American children continue to improve in quality, on average, signaled by stronger teaching practices, richer learning activities and better facilities, according to the report. In contrast, pre-K programs that mainly serve Black or Latinx children have shown static or declining quality since 2014.
That gap could significantly impede efforts to recover from learning losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, said Berkeley co-author Bruce Fuller, an expert in U.S. education policy.
“Preschool can remedy the pandemic’s terrible drag on children’s early social and mental growth, but only when families hit hardest by COVID gain access to high-quality pre-K education,” Fuller said. “If quality is tilted toward well-off children, that will simply exacerbate disparities in early learning.”
The report, “Pre-K Quality Stalls in New York City,” is focused on the nation’s biggest urban center, but it offers an instructive — and cautionary — tale for educators and parents across the nation.
Early childhood education has the potential to address learning disparities caused by poverty, but success is more likely if disadvantaged children attend high-quality programs. And that will be especially true as the nation’s educators and families begin efforts to recover from the “lost year” resulting from the closure of many preschools during the pandemic.
Existing achievement gaps grow worse
Before Mayor Bill de Blasio’s election in 2013, public preschool had been provided to about half of young children in New York City. Other families had to find a program on their own, with affluent families able to enroll their preschoolers in expensive private programs.
In his mayoral campaign, de Blasio promised to make public pre-kindergarten programs available to everyone. That policy was seen as a way to reduce the education gaps that separate children from rich and poor families.
The Berkeley researchers traced changes in the quality of 1,273 pre-K programs during the initial six years of de Blasio’s “Pre-K for All” initiative, drawing on the city’s repeated observations of classrooms. Quality levels of pre-K sites were then compared among different neighborhoods and the demographic features of children served.
Drawing on data from the city Department of Education’s on-site monitoring of pre-K sites, the researchers found that programs located in the poorest one-fourth of city census tracts were of lower quality than programs in economically better-off neighborhoods.
The magnitude of these disparities was significant, with many pre-K sites in low-income areas registering substandard levels of quality. Those gaps are linked to rates of early learning, the researchers said, with the development of young students in the lower-quality preschools trailing the average 4-year-old by three to five months.
Researchers detected similar disparities among pre-K sites enrolling greater shares of Black or Latinx children in New York City — often located in the Bronx or the Lower East Side — relative to programs mainly serving white or Asian American children in parts of Brooklyn and Queens.
A separate team based at Princeton University has replicated this pattern of racial disparity in the quality of the city’s Pre-K for All program for a single school year, 2017-2018. The new findings from Berkeley show that these prior inequities in preschool quality grew even wider between 2014 and 2019.
The Berkeley study was released as educators nationwide scramble to address the pandemic-driven delays of a lost year that now jeopardize the vitality and growth of preschool-age children.
“We know that children’s learning curves flattened or fell during the COVID-induced shutdown of public schools,” the study says. “This year of lost learning appears to have worsened already wide gaps in student achievement, with some children falling two years behind.”
Why does pre-K quality lag?
Berkeley researchers traced changes in quality levels starting in 2014 and through the start of the COVID-19 shutdown of hundreds of New York early education programs. They found that broad early gains in average pre-K quality — whether programs are hosted by city schools or community organizations — had slowed by 2017.
Within that finding, however, was a clear split: Pre-K programs serving larger shares of white or Asian American children have shown marked gains in quality since 2014, while sites serving large percentages of Black children remain unchanged or have declined slightly in quality, researchers said.
“This raises the specter—despite the mayor’s admirable intentions—that his program hardens, rather than narrows, racial disparities in children’s early growth,” said Fuller. “How can this pre-K entitlement narrow inequities in early learning when quality tilts toward better off families?”
De Blasio has taken recent steps to boost preschool quality. For example, his administration has defunded low-quality programs that fail to improve over time. On the plus side, researchers discovered sharp gains in quality among 37 pre-K centers directly run by the city’s Department of Education.
The researchers said much remains to be learned about why pre-Ks lag behind, on average, when enrolling large shares of Black or Latinx children.
“We are not arguing that pre-K programs in the poorest neighborhoods lack the capacity to improve,” said Berkeley Ph.D. student Talia Leibovitz, the study’s co-author. She pointed to “variation in teacher experience, low wages, uneven instructional materials and cramped pre-K facilities in public housing” as factors that may undercut the quality of early childhood education programs.
“This maldistribution of pre-K quality resembles quality disparities currently seen across the city’s racially segregated public schools,” Leibovitz said.
There is an old adage that says a picture is worth a thousand words. Compelling photographs have captured the highs and lows of a century’s worth of historical events as well as the everyday experiences of ordinary people. Photographs of universal human experiences solicit lots of spoken language and emotions. Think about how often sharing photos with friends prompts peals of laughter or tears as we recall a shared experience. Stories pour forth and we end up building on each other’s memories. Now think about the value of sharing a photo in terms of the volume of language it generates. A great photograph can foster a deluge of observations and insights. As it does so, those viewing the photo talk with one another and add details. English and dual language learners can benefit from the language elicited through the use of photographs to spark discussion. We call this instructional practice see it/say it.
Narrative Learning in Children
Children as young as three begin to tell stories, whether real or imagined, as part of their language development. While these are initially fairly simple in structure and often tied to a single event, they soon begin to take on new dimensions, especially as the children are exposed to the narrative structures used in picture books and films. These narratives get longer, and by the age of nine or so the child will include a conclusion or an ending point (Cortazzi and Jin, 2007). Their language progression gives them the words to elaborate, especially connecting words (so, because, but, then) to show “chains of chronological events and causation” (p. 652). Words such as these are further coupled with narrative devices such as flashbacks and foreshadowing. In this way the development of language skills runs parallel to increasingly sophisticated narrative skills. A coordinated investment in both can amplify the development of each, as the child is simultaneously “learning narrative and learning through narrative” (p. 653).
See It/Say It
The see it/say it instructional strategy links the benefits of spontaneous dialogue through the use of images with the language development associated with narrative learning. Students are presented with photographs selected by the teacher that are likely to prompt observation and speculation. For example, co-author Sara Ortega, a fourth-grade teacher, used three photographs with a group of four students during a designated English language development lesson. The first was a photograph of a toddler who had covered herself from head to toe in the white paint her parents had been using to paint a wall in their living room. The second was a photograph of an orca leaping out of the water just as a penguin was launching itself off a cliff—dangerously close to the orca’s open jaws. The third was a photograph of two primates sitting on the back of a motorbike that they appeared to be operating. Ms. Ortega begins by setting up the learning intentions for the task and reinforcing the relevance, noting that “you become a better reader and writer when you practice your speaking and listening.” Her overall goal, she states to her students, is for them to use words such as because, and, but, and so to connect ideas together. She also provides them with sentence frames to use to scaffold their language.
Observing. Ms. Ortega begins by inviting her students to comment on what they are seeing in the first photograph. When one student says, “I see there is, like, paint in the floor with the form of the… the… little kid feet,” the teacher expands her language form. “You’re right, when you look closely you can see the form of her footprint. Her little feet have left paint on the floor.” In doing so, she is modeling accurate syntactic and semantic structures to build on the student’s observation.
Inviting speculation. A goal of see it/say it is to foster reasoning skills while equipping students with the language for reasoning. Ms. Ortega’s stated purpose of using connecting words is intended to create an avenue for students to engage in more complex language production. The storytelling element of this instructional activity requires students to go beyond description by considering the story as an episode. All good stories include a setting, characters, a plot, and a sequence of events that propel the narrative. In addition, the story may include internal or external emotions of the character and the identification of a problem and a solution. These story grammars are taught to children beginning in preschool and are integral to listening and reading comprehension, as well as written composition.
The story grammar elements of narrative don’t reside as separate units but instead are woven together through the use of causal chains in storytelling. The story elements are linked by interconnected events that tie together a character’s goals with their actions and outcomes (Ma et al., 2017). The photograph is a single image of an evolving story, and students must construct a plausible story using their imaginations, observations, and experiences.
Ms. Ortega invites speculation and therefore gives permission to move from a literal description to narrative learning. She asks them, “What do you think happened five minutes before this picture was taken?” Again, she offers sentence frames for them to use as possible supports but also assures them that they do not need to confine themselves to those structures. One sentence frame is Before this picture was taken, _. One student asks, “Is it… before… is it before is forward?” and the teacher clarifies that “before is back in time.” The student then uses a different sentence frame, saying, “The little girl and her mom, like, were painting something, then the mom went somewhere. Then the… then the little kid, like, started trying to paint and she got all painted.” Several times during her speculation, she makes a gesture that mimics using a paint roller on a vertical surface. “So maybe the mom left the room as she was painting?” says Ms. Ortega.
Now another student builds on these ideas. “I think the dad wa… wa… was in the stairs and painting and then where the dad go and the little girl want to paint, too, and she paint herself.” Now the teacher restates his intended causal link using the language to do so—“So you think she’s trying to paint like her dad?”—echoing the student’s suggestion of the little girl’s possible goal.
Co-constructing a story. The students are beginning to construct a story with one another. A third student joins in and begins to talk about what he believes happened five minutes after the picture was taken. This narrative move further builds the causal chain for the group by introducing speculation about possible outcomes. “I think what happened five minutes after is, um, she probably took, like… a shower to clean the paint off?” One student has not yet participated in the group’s co-construction, so Ms. Ortega invites her to add. “Um… the parents… were painting the walls and then they decided to take a break and the little girl wanted to paint like them too so she painted herself.”
This student is now consolidating the ideas floated by her classmates. Ms. Ortega laughs. “And her parents walk in and they see this and what do you think happens after?” The student smiles and says, “Um, she probably laugh or get a little mad?” Ms. Ortega remarks that it’s hard to get mad when a small child does something like this.
The teacher uses a similar sequence with the other two pictures, repeating the rounds of observation, speculation, and co-construction.
Reflection. Near the end of this 15-minute language development lesson, the teacher closes with a “time to look at ourselves in the mirror and do some reflecting” about the use of connected words, the stated purpose of the lesson. She asks them to consider the four targeted connecting words—because, and, but, and so—and their use of them when speaking. She sends them a link to a poll and the students respond that the ones they feel most comfortable using are because and and; they feel less comfortable with but and so.
Conclusion
Language learners are bubbling with ideas but don’t always have the words to fully express them. The use of compelling images can be a bridge to invite students to engage in narrative learning while at the same time offering a psychologically safe space for speculation. Sources for compelling photographs abound, from National Geographic’s “Photo of the Day“ to the New York Times’ feature “What’s Going On in This Picture?“, which offers intriguing photos from their collection that have been stripped of their captions. Let pictures unlock students’ imaginations as you equip them with language.
References
Cortazzi, M., and Jin, L. (2007). “Narrative Learning, EAL and Metacognitive Development.” Early Child Development & Care, 177(6/7), 645–660. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430701379074 Ma, S., Anderson, R. C., Morris, J. A., Nguyen-Jahiel, K., Yi, S., Lin, T.-J., Zhang, J., Miller, B. W., Jadallah, M., Scott, T., Sun, J., Grabow, K., and Latawiec, B. M. (2017). “Instructional Influences on English Language Learners’ Storytelling.” Learning & Instruction, 49, 64–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2016.12.004
Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher are professors of educational leadership at San Diego State University and teacher leaders at Health Sciences High. Sarah Ortega is a fourth-grade teacher in Chula Vista, CA. Click here to view the video that accompanies this article.
The body of research known as science of reading (SoR) is widely acknowledged among experts as both theoretically and empirically superior to other conceptions of literacy development (Rayner et al., 2001; Kilpatrick, 2015; Seidenberg, 2017). However, there is still some debate as to whether SoR can be universally applied. That is, can SoR-based theories and research effectively inform instruction in, for example, a dual language classroom or a school with a large percentage of emergent bilinguals?
Guilamo (2021) maintains that “emergent bilinguals and dual language students learn how to read differently than monolingual English-speaking students.” As a result, she urges bilingual and ESL educators to draw from a more eclectic blend of reading research, which incorporates among other things the three-cuing system (MSV) alongside SoR’s more code-centered approach. Although salient differences certainly exist in reading development across different languages, an important question to consider is whether this fact warrants the eclectic mixing of seemingly contradictory theories, or whether SoR has sufficient reach to account for the reading development of all students regardless of context or language. A more extensive dive into the science reveals SoR’s scope to be far more encompassing than critics admit.
Before widening our SoR lens, let’s meet Lilia (pseudonym), a first-grade student in an English–Spanish dual language program. Lilia, having extensive literacy experience in Spanish, her native language, came to kindergarten already reading many open syllables (e.g., ma, se, bi, tu) and quickly progressed to reading CVCV words such as mesa and lava, along with several high-frequency words (e.g., voy, puedo, gusta, etc.). A little more than halfway through first grade, she has now grasped the alphabetic principle and is reading many texts that contain three- and even four-syllable words both fluently and with adequate comprehension. Although her reading is not yet as advanced in English, she has progressed enough to read most one-syllable words with vowel teams (e.g., train, learn) as well as words with the silent -e (e.g., tape). She is currently working on decoding one- and two-syllable words with inflectional endings such as trainer and learned.
During a reading assessment, her teacher observes Lilia reading the sentence “The egg jumped” as “The egg hum-ped.” How might we explain this error?
I have asked hundreds of bilingual and ESL educators across the country this question. They typically comment on how Lilia is using her knowledge of Spanish phonics to decode in English because the letter j is pronounced as /h/ in Spanish. Although this is an accurate analysis of Lilia’s reading behavior, it is nonetheless incomplete.
Here is where drawing from the extensive theoretical and empirical work in SoR proves beneficial. SoR researchers agree that when beginning readers are learning to read, regardless of the language, they are faced with three problems: the availability, consistency, and granularity of spelling–sound correspondences (Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). The availability problem reflects how some phonological units are less psychologically accessible than others to nonreaders. Psychologically speaking, syllables are more available or apparent than onsets and rimes, which in turn are more apparent than phonemes (Stanovich, Cunningham, and Kramer, 1984). Teachers regularly experience this when a beginning reader practices the skill of tracking printed words in a sentence such as “I see the monkey” and the student’s finger ends up where there is no print. This occurs because the word monkey has two syllables, and the student has not yet learned to distinguish between the most prominent oral unit, the syllable, and the most prominent visual unit, the word (Mesmer and Williams, 2015).
The consistency problem refers to the fact that some letter sequences have multiple pronunciations and some sounds have multiple spellings (Seidenberg and McClelland, 1989). However, there are some languages such as Spanish and German that are considered shallow or transparent, which means the grapheme–phoneme mappings are highly consistent. This explains why our bilingual student Lilia frequently reads the -ed ending in jumped as /ĕd/, as if it were one of the more consistent grapheme–phoneme mappings in Spanish, instead of producing the phoneme /t/, which is one of English’s many inconsistent mappings.
The last problem to solve for beginning readers, and perhaps the most overlooked by educators, is that of granularity. To understand this problem, it’s important to recognize that the grain size used by a language’s writing system to facilitate access to its phonological system matters; the bigger the grain size, the more orthographic units a reader will need to learn. This is due to the simple fact that there are more words than there are syllables, more syllables than rimes, more rimes than graphemes, and more graphemes than letters (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). In English for example, the grain-size with the most consistency is onset and rime (e.g., mind, kind, find). Skilled readers of English come to depend on these consistent rime units to facilitate automatic and effortless word recognition. However, because onset and rime is a relatively large sublexical unit, there is a considerable amount of mappings to learn. Spanish, a more transparent orthography, shows much greater consistency at the letter-sound level, and because there are substantially less letters in comparison to onset and rimes, the task of learning these mappings is considerably easier. Furthermore, due to its simpler syllabic structure, researchers posit that the syllable is the most psychologically salient sublexical unit in Spanish (Alvarez, Carreiras, & Perea, 2004). Equipped with the abovementioned theoretical knowledge, we are now able to analyze Lilia’s reading more comprehensively. In decoding the word jumped as hum-ped, Lilia is not only utilizing her knowledge of letter-sound correspondences in Spanish to decode in English, but she is also utilizing the most prominent sublexical unit in Spanish–the syllable. As a result, she reads the word jumped in English as if she were reading a word like “usted” in Spanish, with an equivalent syllabic structure—”us-ted.”
The good news for Lilia is that her knowledge that letters and letter patterns represent speech coupled with her advanced word recognition skills in Spanish will aid her substantially as she continues her journey to become biliterate (Koda, 2008). However, it doesn’t follow from this that relying on the three-cuing system approach (i.e., guessing from context) or limiting instruction to only the letter–sound correspondences that are more ambiguous in English will benefit her.
In addition to focusing on specific differences at the letter or grapheme level, teachers should also consider at what grain size students are processing words. In Lilia’s case, some explicit work with onset and rime within one- and two- syllable words with inflectional endings would likely prove beneficial. Ultimately, Lilia stills needs to develop the ability to automatically and effortlessly recognize words, and internalizing the appropriate grain size in which to analyze new words with similar structures, among other things, is key to her progress. It should not be lost on the reader that said work is directly related to the decoding or word-recognition piece in the simple view of reading (Gough and Tunmer, 1986), which is the staple formulation of SoR.
Of course, word recognition is not sufficient. Lilia must also continue to develop language comprehension, the second variable in the simple view. This includes vocabulary knowledge, language structures, cultural and other content knowledge, reading-specific background knowledge, and more (Duke and Cartwright, 2021). Luckily for Lilia, much of the abovementioned knowledge, along with some components under the umbrella of word recognition—e.g., certain aspects of phonological awareness—transfer across languages (Cummins, 2012; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005).
My intent in using Lilia’s reading as an example is to demonstrate that the scientific study of reading among bilinguals and students learning to read in another language is well within the scope of SoR. As such, you may wonder why pockets of opposition to SoR persist, particularly among experts in bilingual/ESL education. It is to this question our attention will now turn.
Toward a Universal Science of Reading Despite the numerous theories under the SoR umbrella, there exists a consensus among SoR researchers regarding the universal aspects involved in reading. The most important reading universal is often referred to as the language constraint. This states that writing is a notational system for language; that is, there is no writing system used in the world today that bypasses language to represent meaning directly. Therefore, learning to read can be accurately described as learning the hidden connections between a particular language system and the written system of that language (Perfetti, 2003; Perfetti and Harris, 2013).
In Lilia’s reading, the language constraint is evident in her appropriation of the most prominent language unit in Spanish, the syllable, to read words in English, which are most consistently mapped using a different grain size, onset and rime. As Lilia gains experience with English both through acquiring more of the language and attending carefully to print (not guessing from context), her brain will begin to deal more efficiently with the unique demands of the English writing system.
Yet some language researchers and experts in the field of bilingualism and ESL education reject attempts to unify complex phenomena such as language acquisition or reading under general principles or universal theories (Garcia, Flores, and Spotti, 2016). The roots of such opposition can be traced back to postmodernism, a school of thought that critiques scientific universals as attempts to control the narrative and subjugate more local forms of knowing. Foucault (1970), perhaps the best-known postmodernist, wrote frequently about how scientific knowledge, such as that of institutions like modern medicine, should not be given priority over more local forms of knowledge, like that of patients.
Similarly in the field of language planning, Pennycook and Makoni (2005) critique modern linguists’ attempts to extract universal principles and deep structures thought to underlie the human ability to acquire and use language. Instead, they prioritize “everyday understandings of language,” which are inherently more local and contextualized (p. 146).
Historically, however, progress in the quest to acquire scientific knowledge has been achieved not by deconstructing institutional knowledge into more heterogenous or local ways of knowing but rather by unifying explanations of complex phenomena under far-reaching explanatory theories (Deutsch, 2011). Consider for example Aristotle’s heterogenous concept of physics, in which rocks fall to the earth and fire rises to the sky because of each element’s unique “nature.” Galileo, and subsequently Newton, disproved this theory by introducing mathematical laws of nature that hold regardless of the element or its location in the universe; hence, Newton’s universal theory of gravitation.
Of course, the science of reading is quite distinct from physics, and even more distinct from the science of teaching reading (Seidenberg and Kearns, 2020). For the latter, contextual knowledge is imperative. Learning never occurs in a vacuum. As educators, we would be irresponsible to ignore the fact that learning is influenced by a myriad of environmental factors. However, when we shift our focus to how science explains cognitive processes such as language acquisition or reading, we momentarily shed these local/contextual restraints in service of discovering deeper explanatory principles that hold across all learners. Yes, it is true that our brains are affected, and to a certain degree structured and restructured, through exposure to environmental stimulus; however, our brains are not infinitely malleable (Pinker, 2001). We are all born with certain innate circuitry, or universal constraints, which we employ to interpret the world in which we live. The fact that this innate circuitry is necessarily involved in the process of learning to read implores reading scientists to ask themselves what might unite us on the road to skilled reading development. Educators should ask themselves the same question, and in doing so seriously consider how SoR’s findings may translate into better instructional practices for all learners.
Of course, as Share (2021) reminds us, SoR theories fall well short of providing a complete or universal explanation of reading. Scientists still have much to learn about reading because they still have much to learn about the human brain. Nevertheless, if history is any indication, the trajectory of progress will likely proceed through more local or contextualized theories of reading giving way to more universal ones, not the other way around.
From the instructional perspective, it’s uncontroversial that educators should be attuned to both the sociocultural context and local factors within the learning environment; yet it is just as important to understand what unifies learners. In the case of reading, this appears to be certain cognitive processes and constraints involved in learning to read words automatically and effortlessly in any language. With so much division already present in our world today, it’s nice to know we all still have something in common.
David Burns has worked as an ESL/bilingual teacher and coach in Puerto Rico and in various public schools across the U.S. He currently serves as director of language and literacy development for a national learning organization dedicated to improving academic outcomes for K–12 students.
A new study published in Cognition suggests that infants may have more advanced linguistic understanding than previously believed. Conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Edinburgh and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the study looks at how children aged 11-12 months old processed multi-word sequences—phrases like “clap your hands,” for instance. The results showed that children are indeed sensitive to multi-word utterances, thus challenging the commonly held understanding of language acquisition that children progress from understanding and producing single words to phrases and then to sentences.
“Previous research has shown that young infants recognize many common words. But this is the first study that shows that infants extract and store more than just single words from everyday speech,” said Dr. Barbora Skarabela, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh who led the study.
In an experiment with 36 infants, the researchers sought to assess whether or not the infants processed common three word sequences (as in the “clap your hands” example above) differently from less common ones like “take your hands,” for instance. The researchers used a central fixation paradigm—a testing method that analyzes infants’ attention by assessing their looking behavior in response to certain sounds—and found that the 23 of the 36 infants paid more attention to the high-frequency phrases than the low-frequency ones.
These results suggest that infants learn multi-word sequences alongside individual words, a finding that hadn’t been previously explored much. Even before children make their first single-word utterances, they are capable of processing the multi-word utterances they come across in their environment. “This provides the first evidence that infants at the cusp of one-word production are already sensitive to the frequency of multi-word sequences, and suggests they represent linguistic units of varying sizes from early on, raising the need to evaluate knowledge of both words and larger sequences during development,” the paper reads.
“This suggests that when children learn language, they build on linguistic units of varying sizes, including multi-word sequences, and not just single words as we often assume,” Dr. Skarabela said. “This may explain why adults learning a second language, who tend to rely on individual words, often fall short of reaching native-like proficiency in the way they string words together into phrases and sentences.”
In the fifth part of “Rumi in the Language Classroom”, we will explore one of the Rumi’s stories in the collection “Masnavi-e-Manavi” called The Lion Without Head and Tail. This is the story of a champion who wanted to tattoo a lion on his shoulder. When the tattooist started, the champion cried out in pain and asked what the tattooist was doing. The tattooist replied that he was doing what the champion requested. The champion asked what part of the lion was being tattooed, and the tattooist replied its tail. The champion said that the tattoo doesn’t need that part. This scenario repeated, and any part of the lion the tattooist began to tattoo, the champion shouted and asked not to. The tattooist got angry and said, “nobody has seen a lion without head and tail”.
The story beautifully illuminates the pain behind development in the world. To me, the champion portrays teachers who would like to promote in their careers but they do not want to take the pain of it. The tattoo is a metaphor for professional development and the tattoo artist is a teacher educator. If we consider tattoo as professional development, different organs of the lion are the activities teachers do to develop professionally such as certification courses, attending conferences, and peer observation (Richards & Farrell, 2005), to name a few. The teachers who do not have the perseverance for doing the tasks do not deserve to have a beautiful tattoo. As nobody has seen a lion without a head and tail (or a tattoo without pain), nobody has seen professional development without certification, studying, etc.
My own DELTA experience was a prime example of the pain in the professional development procedure. Around 45 days, 10 observations, 6 teaching practices with more than 8000 words for their lesson plans and background assignments, critical reflections, and many other tasks made DELTA Module 2 a backbreaking experience. In addition to these difficulties, the high price of the course especially for the candidates from some countries with a high rate of currency exchange like Iran made the experience more challenging. Considering all these pains, most teachers decide not to do it and some trainees give it up during the course.
All in all, the professional development components such as attending conferences, lesson planning, reading, and the like need time, money, and energy. But it should be borne in mind that “no pain, no gain”.
References
Richards, J. C., & Farrell, T. S. C. (2005). Professional development for language teachers: Strategies for teacher learning. Cambridge University Press.
A new bill in the California State Assembly could change the way educators work with and accommodate the unique needs of dual language learners (DLLs) enrolled in the state’s preschool system. California Assembly Member Luz Rivera has introduced Assembly Bill 1363, which would create a new definition of DLLs in an effort to take a more asset-based approach to early childhood education for DLLs, rather than defining students by limited English proficiency.
“Right now if you look at the current statute, (DLLs) are referred to as ‘limited English-speaking proficient,’” says Xilonin Cruz-Gonzalez, deputy director of Californians Together, which has been rallying support for AB-1363. “That language, we have moved far away from at the K-12 level and so this would not only create a definition of what a DLL is, but the really important part is that it’s creating a definition that’s focused on the assets of the students.”
The bill, introduced in February, was recently re-referred to the Committee on Education. The bill defines the term DLL to refer to any child from birth to the age of five years old who is learning two or more languages at a time, or who is continuing to develop their native language while learning a second language such as English. Cruz-Gonzalez explains that this new language serves to define DLLs according to their linguistic strengths, rather than adhering to the current deficit-based and English-centric definition. The new definition emphasizes the fact that educators can work to refine a DLL’s skills in both languages.
“We’re really thinking about these students as DLLs with the potential of becoming biliterate if we support their language skills,” Cruz-Gonzalez says.
In addition to redefining the way early childhood educators and administrators look at DLLs, the bill also paves the way for the state to begin collecting more thorough data on how many DLLs are enrolled in the state’s preschool programs. Currently, Cruz-Gonzalez says the state doesn’t really have a good way of tracking and reporting such data, making it difficult to accommodate students as they move through the education system. The data collected would also include information on the language composition of the staff of a given preschool program.
“It’s really important for us as a state to understand how many of these students are getting access to these programs and for the provider to have knowledge about these students if they have a second language coming in because then they are able to support these students in their learning,” added Cruz-Gonzalez.
Swing Education, a staffing application for substitute teachers, is now accepting nominations for its third annual Substitute Teacher Hall of Fame. The Substitute Teacher Hall of Fame recognizes substitute teachers across the nation for their outstanding work and notable contributions to the communities they serve.
“From remote to hybrid to in-person teaching, substitute teachers have played such a vital and supportive role during every phase of this challenging school year,” said Mike Teng, CEO of Swing Education. “The Substitute Teacher Hall of Fame will highlight three of these truly exemplary educators who continue to make a real difference and go above and beyond for their students, yet so often don’t get the recognition they deserve.”
Swing Education will select three inductees, each of whom will receive $500 cash, $250 for professional development or school supplies, and a commemorative plaque. Nominations are due by April 25 and inductees will be announced May 7.
Eligibility Requirements:
1. Live in the United States
2. Have at least one year of K-12 classroom teaching experience
3. Have subbed at least one day in a K-12 district, charter or private school in the 2020-2021 academic year
4. Students, parents, administrators and current or former educators (including substitute teachers) can submit nominations
Study abroad programs are a mainstay of university language departments all over the world—and for good reason, too. Studying abroad—even for a relatively short period of time—can allow students to significantly improve their fluency and vocabulary, according to a new study published in Applied Linguistics that investigates the ways in which language learners can build their speaking abilities through study abroad programs.
In this study, the researchers focus on four measures of linguistic development: complexity, accuracy, fluency, and lexis. Previous research has shown that students who study abroad tend to improve their fluency (i.e., the speed and fluidity with which a learner speaks) and lexis (i.e., the vocabulary used), but show less improvement in terms of complexity and accuracy. However, much of this previous research done on studying abroad and its effects on a student’s linguistic skills has largely focused on short-term programs with beginner learners; the current study aimed to look at whether or not similar trends could be found in more advanced learners. The study focused on data from third-year university students majoring in French and Spanish who studied abroad in France, Spain, and Mexico for a full academic year. Researchers collected data before, during, and after the study abroad program to get a thorough overview of how the students’ L2 skills improved during their time abroad. They also collected data on the students’ abilities after the study abroad period had ended, to assess how the return to classroom learning might affect their skills.
The study’s findings on fluency and lexis development largely fall in line with previous findings—however, because the researchers collected large amounts of spoken data during the study abroad program, the current study was able to get a more fine-tuned look at how quickly this improvement occurs. Fluency and lexis improved quite rapidly—within the first couple of months of the program, the students’ scores in these measures improved significantly, and this improvement was maintained throughout and after the duration of the program.
“The informal interactions typically afforded during study abroad are largely, though not exclusively, communicatively driven and meaning-focused, indicating that this context likely prioritizes fluent over accurate and complex production,” the paper reads. Researchers also found that learners’ complexity and accuracy improved more after returning to classroom instruction—they attribute this to the fact that accurate production is more heavily emphasized in classrooms than it is in the casual, conversational setting used in more spontaneous speech. “A further lesson is the importance of supporting study abroad participants upon their return, so that the linguistic gains made while time abroad can be retained or further developed with instruction and opportunities for informal language practice,” the paper reads. The researchers stress the fact that advanced learners may benefit more from studying abroad than beginners due to the fact that they already have a large body of linguistic knowledge to draw upon and automatize while practicing with native speakers.
Each year on April 30, libraries, schools, parks, and community organizations across the nation observe El día de los niños, El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day). This year is no exception as El día de los niños, El día de los libros, also known as Día, celebrates its 25th anniversary.
Conceived of in 1996, Día is the brainchild of renowned children’s book author Pat Mora. The idea came to her after learning about the annual Mexican tradition of celebrating El día del niño (the Day of the Child). El día del niño was an outgrowth of the first “World Conference for the Well-being of Children” held in Switzerland in 1925.
In a 1996 interview, Mora said, “As a mom I knew that children often ask, ‘Why do we have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and not Children’s Day?’ As a reader, I wanted (and want) to foster bookjoy. Ah ha, I thought. What if we link a celebration of children with literacy, an issue central to the well-being of children?”
Despite the fact that this year’s anniversary celebrations may be modified in order to comply with social distancing guidelines, Pat Mora remains optimistic that schools and families will find creative ways to commemorate the occasion.
“Although this is a challenging year for the world and our country, I have great faith that families, schools, libraries and literacy organizations will generously and creatively inspire our children to be readers. An easy April 30th celebration idea is Triple Treat for the 25th: excite our children to read a book, draw a poster and enjoy a treat,” says Mora.
Additionally, several organizations including the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association have published a toolkit for children and families. The downloadable Día Family Book Club Toolkit is available at http://dia.ala.org/sites/default/files/resources/Dia13_Toolkit_print_0%20%281%29_0.pdf.
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