Young People Become Better Readers

¶ … young people become better readers and writers represents a timely and valuable enterprise, since these skills contribute to virtually all successful academic outcomes. These issues are especially important for English language learners (ELLs) who bring varying degrees of fluency to the classroom. To gain some fresh insights in these areas of education, this paper provides a series of reactions to several questions concerning literacy instruction in general and ELLs in particular. A summary of the research and important findings are presented in the conclusion.

Explain purposes of testing and how they relate to literacy instruction.

Testing students is commonly used by educators to periodically gauge student progress with the assigned coursework and to evaluate their performance on testing instruments compared to their cohorts. Such assessments can be informal or formal, as well as proprietary or locally developed. In sum, testing "is a measure of student achievement administered several times during the school year" (Starkman, 2006, p. 40).

How can the teacher use assessment data to make instructional decisions?

Student assessment data is like any other type of feedback. If students generally demonstrate that they have failed to attain satisfactory proficiency in a certain subject area through assessment, teachers can identify opportunities to address these deficiencies through remedial or supplemental instruction. According to Starkman (2006), "What all of these formative assessment do, in one form or another, is provide useful information to both teacher and student. Although the information often arrives instantly, the benefits are seen over time" (p. 41).

What is the value of information obtained through direct measures for the analytic process of differentiating instruction?

It is axiomatic that in order to improve something it must first be measured, and this is certainly the case with direct measures of student performance.

What are some caveats of informal literacy assessments?

The U.S. Department of Education recommends performing these five key functions regarding literacy assessments:

A.

Get the right data. Assessments should be valid, reliable, and interpretable.

B.

Get the data right. Data should be gathered and disaggregated accurately.

C.

Get the data right away. Reports should be made available as quickly as possible.

D.

Get the data the right way. Data should be assessed electronically to provide for easy viewing at the classroom, school, and district levels -- by grade, by subgroup, by course, by class, by staff member, and by individual student.

E.

Get the right data management. A single, centralized interface should be used for the most efficient data management (Starkman, 2006, p. 42).

Other educators have weighed in on this subject as well. According to Kendall and Khuon (2005), informal literacy assessments can follow the steps below:

A.

Determine priorities and decide whether to assess students' use of all strategies at the beginning or to assess only the strategy that will be studied.

B.

Set goals. They need to be high, worthwhile, and standards based, but still appropriate for these students at this time in this instructional environment. For example, for older students at the beginning levels of English, assessment may show little if any use of strategies.

C.

Delivery of the lesson plan.

D.

Evaluate student learning in light of the goals and the instruction.

E.

Provide timely and meaningful feedback to students.

F.

Based on initial assessment, establish new goals.

The use of this approach provides ELL educators with timely assessment information concerning their young learners (Kendall & Khuon, 2005).

How would you assess oral language development and phonemic awareness? What are some strategies for teaching these two at the secondary level?

According to educators with the Rhode Island Reading First Application, oral language development and phonemic awareness can be assessed by testing students' ability "to notice, think about, and work with individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken language" (2012, p. 11). The level of phonemic awareness that is identified can be used as an accurate predictor of future reading abilities as well as potential problems with word-level reading (Allor, 2002). In this regard, Allor advises that, "Studies have clearly demonstrated that phonemic awareness instruction results in improved phonemic awareness skills, more rapid response to beginning reading instruction, and improved subsequent reading development" (2002, p. 48). At the secondary level, experimental manipulations of phonemic awareness through direct training have been shown to have a positive effect on subsequent growth of reading accuracy (Dickinson & Neuman, 2006).

Explain how reading and writing are mutually supportive process and how writers gain valuable knowledge about reading.

People tend to learn how to writer better by extensively reading what others have written and examining how it was written and the relationship between reading and writing is well established. In this regard, Gest and Gest (2005) report that, "Skilled reading is most likely to develop among students with strong oral language skills (vocabulary and syntax), an understanding of the sound-structure of oral language (phonemic awareness), and an understanding of the alphabetic principle (the rules that translate sounds into print and vice versa)" (p. 25). In fact, it is difficult to become a better writer without reading what others write. According to Gest and Gest, "Tutoring programs that focus on these key developmental skills and that are implemented by specially trained teachers can raise scores on early reading tasks by 1 to 2 or more standard deviation units" (2005, p. 25).

What is the relationship between writing instruction and writing assessment?

Writing assessments can be used to assess writing levels for new students; however, it is important for current writing assessments to be aligned with the content of the writing instruction being provided in the classroom (O'Neill, Moore & Huot, 2009). The use of assessments also serves to introduce students to the supporting value system that is involved, which in this instance the importance of good writing skills (Haswell, 2001). According to Haswell, "The test initiates a momentum of student energy whereby they are initiated into a world where critical engagement with writing is a goal. The classroom instruction reinforces the goal by providing both opportunities for improving writing proficiency and additional performance assessments" (2001, p. 84).

It should be noted, though, that writing assessments in general lend themselves to being pigeonholed into a narrow set of standards that may not accurately reflect the writing abilities of ELL students (Peterson & Botelho, 2007). Moreover, both approaches to assessing ELL writing, analytic scoring and holistic scoring, with the former being based on the individual elements of writing, while the latter is focused on the impression of the writing in its entirety (Peterson & Botelho, 2007).

The relationship between writing instruction and writing assessment, then, is more complex than it first appears because these methods of assessment fail to gauge the work in its appropriate context. In this regard, Peterson and Botelho emphasize that, "The underlying assumption about student writing is that writing is a socially and culturally neutral outcome of students' thinking. These tools do not look at the social contexts in which the writing is created, nor at the influence of the teachers' social and cultural views on their assessment of the writing" (p. 30).

How can assessing and teaching ELLs' writing differ from their non-ELL counterparts?

Writing accuracy among ELLs may be affected by unfamiliarity with the appropriate syntax that is required. Nevertheless, ELL writings provide evidence as to students' abilities to use and understand the English language. For this purpose, portfolios and personal histories or autobiographies have been identified as useful ways to assess English language learners' writing ability (Norman & Spencer, 2005). It is important for ELL educators, though, to use a variety of assessment methods to "to evaluate how students think aloud, use schema (make connections), infer, ask questions, determine what is important in text, monitor comprehension, visualize and create mental images, synthesize, and retell text" (Kendall & Khuon, 2005, p. 21). In addition, educators can help ELL students improve their writing skills by selecting appropriate genres for their intended audiences. According to Peterson and Botelho (2007), "Teachers support students as they choose the genre that best achieves their purpose for the intended audience. Those genres may include dramatic performances or the use of digital technology or multimedia, as well as print genres" (p. 29).