WK3 | Reading Reflection Response

Chapter 3 - Page 76

“Also, don’t be surprised to find a variety of formats and wording across different sets of standards: standards documents are not standardized!”

This quotation comes from a passage about curriculum standards. Curriculum academic standards are designed to make sure that all students, regardless of where they are attending school, have a consistent base of knowledge of a given subject matter. Standards are structured in a way that explain what the students must “know and be able to do within a certain context” (from “Unpacking Academic Standards” by Let’s TEACH https://youtu.be/-USpAIMm2oU?si=XTZ7kv5gjs2IUSuu )

This quotation is making the point that individual standards documents are not aligned in terms of how they are set up.

I find 2 things very strange about the standards documents.

First, what this quotation illustrates seems to be an obvious and easily solvable problem. Each document of standards is created by its own body of authors, which leads to wildly different structures and formats across the different disciplines. Considering what these documents are designed for, it would seem as though creating a framework for how each document should be structured may make sense. If just aligning the graphic design of each document would improve the cross-readability. When I look up a standard for a lesson using the California VAPA standards, and then I try to also align it with a section of the California ELD standards, there is absolutely no pivot point from which to make an association from one document to the other. I can’t even imagine what this is like for teachers of multiple subjects. It would be much easier to read these enormously complex documents if they had a consistent design and structure.

The other thing that I find confusing that I have not heard a good explanation for, is the question of why there are curriculum standards. I believe I understand what the standards are intended to accomplish, but I do not understand why. It is not obvious to me that teaching students the same content everywhere in the United States is a solution for anything. Some explanations that are sometimes offered are that it helps students become college-ready, it prepares them to succeed on standardized tests, and will help them be successful in college. This seems only to make sense from the perspective of math and reading skills that are found on standardized tests.

If you compare 2 history classes, where one class is focussed on ancient global history and the other is focussed on the history of a specific place, such as China. Supposing that the 2 groups of students never learn about the content in the other class before graduating high school. The lack of overlap in content instruction 1.) does not mean that either group of students are prevented from learning general concepts that come up during the study of history as a subject. 2.) Neither group of students will be aware of historical content from places that neither group has studied. The subject of History has more content than any single individual could possibly consume in a lifetime of study, so any focus chosen by a grade school curriculum will have to be selective at best. The same is true of the music standards. The music standards are much more generally written, because it is known that students will be learning to play different instruments and will therefore have different experiences. It is not clear to me what are the benefits of narrowing the focus of study across every classroom in the United States. If a student in classroom A studies only South Indian Carnatic Music on the Mridangam, and a student in classroom B studies only the music of Bach played on the Marimba, who will be the more successful musician? This is of course folly to assume one narrow angle on a subject will lead to success and another will not.

Chapter 3 - Page 90

“For example, if most students in the class speak the same native language with varying levels of English, they may tend to use the home language instead of English. If so, you may choose to encourage some English during the group times, but not require it exclusively.”

This quotation comes from a section explaining the concept of Group Work. There are 2 categories of group work that are not mutually exclusive; collaborative groups and cooperative learning. Collaborative groups refer to groups of students that are assigned to work together to complete a task. Cooperative Learning refers to when a heterogenous group of learners is established so that the students can assist one another. These concepts may simultaneously be referring to the same group of students.

The quote comes from a paragraph that is suggesting that there are different circumstances in which the group discussions may be required to occur in English (or L2 language) as opposed to exclusively in the students’ native language (L1). But it also may be ideal to allow a combination of L1 and L2, depending on the capacity of the students to comprehend in the L2 language.

This reflects a question that I asked during my fieldwork observations from last week. I noticed that some of the students were interacting in Spanish (L1) during group work. I asked the teacher if she recommended or required anything with regards to this. She said that she did not require them to interact with one another in Spanish (L1), but they were required to answer out loud to the class (if called on) in English (L2).

This particular group of students is very fluent in BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills). They have no trouble speaking to each other or to adults in conversational English. The level of this particular class is considered to be very high and these students are expected to test out of the ELD designated classes soon. It does seem to make sense that allowing them to connect with one another socially in their native language would be ok, considering this. They would be building relationships with one another and can feel comfortable speaking about the material being presented with different language that it is presented in, which may actually help to scaffold the instruction.

The obvious downside is that if a student does not understand the English instruction provided by the teacher, and the students do not explain it well in Spanish, then the instruction might be missed. It does not seem like this problem is occurring in this case, however.

Chapter 29 - Pg 196 - Language Focus Lessons

“Language Focus lessons are appropriate whenever a teacher identifies a mispronunciation or misuse of language that occurs consistently.” … “However, it is important with young students, or those just beginning to risk oral communication, that the lesson not be allowed to interfere with communication”

This quote comes from the chapter about Language Focus Lessons. Language Focus Lessons are lessons that are about the content of subject matter, but are focussed instead on the language that is used for that particular lesson. These are particularly useful for discussing vocabulary, pronunciation, and learning to use vocabulary words in a particular context.

The book indicates that you may decide to plan a language focus lesson when you hear a student or group of students misusing, mispronouncing, or misunderstanding a word or a phrase. This quotation seems to be cautioning against breaking the flow of the student’s efforts to make a correction or mini-lesson. It is not ideal to pivot your focus from the moment that you hear an error to dive into a Language Focus Lesson, but rather to plan and prepare one for the future.

This is a very relatable concept for me. When I am teaching music for a group of students, there is often a particular concept or idea that one or more students will struggle with. This might be a concept that I assumed didn’t need to be covered, or was already covered, however inadequately, as a part of my lesson. I usually will pivot in the moment to reiterating the concept in a novel way for all the students in case there are others that need assistance as well. I find this to be a useful tactic because it helps address a concept when it is top of mind for the students, and also prevents them from learning something in an incorrect way.

I can certainly appreciate what the book is advising, however. If I have a student that is struggling to do anything at all, and they are suddenly having a successful moment and are able to perform a passage, I’m not going to take that moment and critique their technique or focus on some minutia. I will, instead, take the moment to let them play for a bit and honestly, have a little fun. If the students are not having fun playing music, then all of my lessons will ultimately fail.

Chapter 25 - Pg 177 - Preview/Review

“Preview/review is a teaching strategy usually associated with bilingual classrooms where a teacher or an instructional Aid gives a preview of the lesson in the students' home languages. The lesson is then taught in English, and the material is reviewed in the home language to ensure content understanding.”

This is the introduction to the chapter on the Preview/Review teaching strategy. This strategy, as the quote indicates, is ideal for bilingual classrooms, but can also be used with English-only classrooms as well. Where a bilingual teacher may simply speak about the lesson in the students native language (L1), the English-only teacher may choose to use realia, objects, or other media to prop up their introduction to the lesson, and subsequently to create a review activity at the end of the lesson.

This teaching strategy is very exciting to me. I wish that I had the opportunity to teach in a dual-language immersion classroom where this could be an everyday occurrence. I can think of many ways that this could be expanded to use the students of opposing L1’s help each other describe things in their respective L2’s.

For instance, if I’m going to do a lesson on time signatures, I will need to explain some basic mathematical-musical concepts, such as the relative lengths of different note values, and how they are related to allotted space established by time signatures. This would be easy to describe bi-lingually, because most of the musical terminology are cognates, or just universal, and most of the descriptions would involve comparative words, such as “more/less” “longer/shorter” etc.

This would be a very excited lesson for me to run, and I hope to have the opportunity to do this one day.

Jack C. Richards on Communicative Competence - Part 1 of 2

https://youtu.be/SwMii_YtEOw?feature=shared

“Supposing I wanted you to get me a glass of water, I could say please get me a glass of water I could say could I have a glass of water I suppose I could also say what is wanted by me is for you to get me a glass of water”

This example comes from a video which explains the distinction between linguistic competence and communicative competence. Linguistic competence is the study of the mechanics of language, including the grammatical rules, the vocabulary, and sentence structure, whereas communicative competence is the ability to leverage linguistic knowledge to express oneself within cultural contexts.

Immediately after this quote appears, Jack C. Richards goes on to explain:
“That Latter sentence doesn’t sound natural, but it is linguistically correct, following the rules of English, but it is not something that people would typically say.”

The example is interesting because it is probably a very unlikely example. It is more often the case that with negative transfer, ELL learners may carry over grammatical conventions from their native language, and would produce a sentence in English that is not grammatically correct. It is certainly much easier to imagine realistic examples of people speaking in this way instead of grammatically correct sentences that show a lack of communicative competence.

Just as an L1 English speaker might say “Me gusta este rosa coche”, the L1 Spanish speaker might say “I like this car pink” (as opposed to “me gusta este coche rosa” or “I like this pink car”). In both cases these are understandable forms of the language, but the native speakers would never utter these particular phrases. It seems far less probable that a speaker would say something that evidences linguistic competence yet also demonstrates a lack of communicative competence, although I suppose it is not impossible. I just can’t think of any realistic examples of a sentence that fits this profile that a language learner might utter.

Fostering Literacy Development in English Language Learners

https://www.colorincolorado.org/article/fostering-literacy-development-english-language-learners

“Much of the research on phonological awareness and phonological transfer suggests that overall, bilingual children may have more highly developed metalinguistic skills than monolingual children”

This quotation comes in the context of this article explaining the importance of English language learners to continue to grow their fluency and skills in their L1 Native language. The article spends quite a bit of time explaining how fluency in a child’s native language (L1) is beneficial and a good predictor of success in their secondary language.

This quote explains how children that are bilingual have better metalinguistic skills than monolingual children. Metalinguistic skills refer to the ability of an individual to think about and discuss the functional aspects of language. It makes sense that children who are not yet fluent and studying a language would have a better grasp on these type of concepts than children who are fluent and perhaps not studying the bones of their language, and are instead focused on more discursive topics.

Interestingly, at the very beginning of this section, there is the following quote:

“There is not enough evidence to recommend definitively that overall literacy instruction should be confined to either L1 or L2.”

Yet with the information we can gather from this article, it is clear that bilingual students have an advantage on metalinguistic skills. This seems to be evidence enough to say it is beneficial for students to become bilingual, and receive instruction in L1 AND L2. Extrapolating from that idea, we can say that there is at least some evidence that instruction should not be confined to either L1 or L2.

This is yet another bean on the scale in favor of dual-language instruction, as far as I can tell.

Bilingualism and morphological awareness: a study with children from general education and Spanish-English dual language programs

Pg 105

“Results from the Spanish measures showed that after having attended the dual-language programme for four and a half years, the English-speaking children did not perform on par with their Spanish-speaking peers on the measures of morphologically simple vocabulary, including high-frequency and low-frequency words as well as Spanish-English cognates. This finding is consistent with previous research showing that while it is likely for Spanish-speaking children in dual-language programmes to become proficient in English around grade three, the same trend has not been observed with English-speaking children developing proficiency in Spanish at the same juncture.”

This study assesses students in a dual-language immersion program on their proficiency with morphologically complex (MC) words. This quote summarizes some of the findings of the study by noting that there was not parity between the native English speakers and the native Spanish speakers' skills with morphologically simple words. The Spanish speakers seemed to have an advantage in this regard.

The paper goes on to say, however, that neither group did well when it came to Morphologically complex words in Spanish.

These findings are fascinating because they subvert expectations around dual-language learning. The study does not account for the difference in outcome that it observed, so we are unfortunately left to speculate.

My first intuition was to review what kinds of classes are taught in what language:
Math instruction was in English, but students who met the grade-level standard were enriched through Spanish math instruction. Music and physical education were exclusively taught in English, while art was always taught in Spanish. The content areas of science and social studies alternated between Spanish and English depending upon the grade level; at the fourth grade level, both subjects were taught in English. The teachers from the general education and dual-language programmes met weekly to ensure consistency of the curriculum across the programmes.

So to summarize:
Math, Science, Social Studies= English/Spanish, depending on certain factors.
Music= English
PE= English
Art= English

There are some unknowns here, but if we assume that for each individual, the division of English and Spanish instruction was somewhat equal for Math, Science and Social Studies, there is obviously still additional English instruction for each individual from Music, Art, and PE classes. So it seems like students are receiving more instruction in English than in Spanish on the whole.

Also considering that the country that this study is occurring in is an English-speaking country (USA), there may be additional exposure to English outside of the classroom, or during extracurricular activities.

Because of this difference, it is perhaps possible that native Spanish speakers are getting more exposure to their L2 than the native English speakers. Maybe this is to account for the advantage that the Spanish speakers had with Morphologically simple words, and the disadvantage that both groups had with morphologically complex words. I am, of course, just guessing.

Later on in the paper, they state that the study has some limitation in this regard:

Finally, caution should be taken in over-generalising the findings from the present study. Dual-language programmes may vary considerably in terms of curricular decisions, teacher qualifications and division of languages and model implementa- tion. In our study, the schools used a 50/50 model where each class had about the same number of native-speaking children of each language, literacy was taught in both languages throughout the programme, and both languages were used equally as the language of instruction for all other subject areas. Future research should explore how metalinguistic awareness develops differently across programmes using different models.

Effects of L1 morphological type on L2 morphological awareness

Pg 787

"More importantly, the Turkish group significantly outperformed the native English group in the morphological relatedness task even without accounting for English proficiency."

This quote is found in the abstract section of the paper, and it is one of the most fascinating findings from this study. This study compares morphological awareness transfer between L1 and L2 where L2 is English and L1 is either Turkish or Chinese against a control group of native English speakers. The crux of the comparison is that Chinese is a morphologically simple language and Turkish is morphologically complex.

The quote indicates that a native speaker of a morphologically complex language such as Turkish has an incredible advantage to understanding morphology in any language.

Morphological awareness can be a predictor of success with language fluency and overall literacy. (as evidenced in Dongbo Zhan’s paper: “Monolingual reading research has shown that morphological awareness is a significant independent contributor to development of literacy skills in morphophonemic English (e.g., Carlisle, 2000; Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006)” ) Although this would be quite impractical, it would seem that teaching all children to be fluent Turkish speakers would give them an advantage in morphological awareness, and overall literacy. Of course this would be very difficult to actually implement outside of a Turkish-speaking society.

Given that Chinese is an enormously complex language, there are certainly some advantages to being fluent in this language. The paper “Linguistic distance effect on cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness” by DONGBO ZHAN explores this a little bit but with an emphasis on morphology. I would still like to see additional studies about what other kinds of advantages native Chinese speakers have over other native L1’s when it comes to learning English as a second language.

Linguistic distance effect on cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness

Pg 937

“Morphological awareness is morphological awareness.”

This hilariously succinct quote summarizes the findings of this study. They go on to state more clearly:

In other words, although derivation is very limited in Chinese, once children have developed insights into this morphological process, they may naturally utilize these insights for analysis of the structure of English derived words. Previous research (e.g., Ku & Anderson, 2003) has shown that the low productivity of derivation in Chinese does not prevent children from developing some insights into this particular morphological process, although these insights clearly lag behind those related to compounding.

The key focus of this paper is to determine how well derivation and compounding skills are transferred by native Chinese speakers (L1) to their secondary language of English (L2). The results indicate that both skills transfer well, but due to the fact Chinese has little derivation, the compounding awareness skill more pronounced.

Derivation is the awareness of a base word and how this base affects the meaning of the affixed word. (happy: unhappily, happiness)

Compound awareness is the ability to distinguish between the linear structure of words where one serves as a modifier for another. (bee grass vs. grass bee).

This analysis portion makes it clear that the results of this paper contradict or are in conflict with outcomes from previous studies.

Speaking about the lack of contribution of L1’s morphological awareness to L2’s lexical inference, they state:
Yet, a finding similar to ours has not surfaced in previous research, either because researchers were not interested in testing indirect effects or the method they used (i.e., conventional regression analysis) constrained them from doing so.

Later on, they speculated: “A close look at the preceding studies, however, suggests that the discrepancy of findings regarding whether there was a direct contribution of morphological awareness in one language to reading development in another language might be attributable to how relevant variables were statistically controlled in these studies.”

And finally: “Because the linguistic distance effect on morphological awareness transfer as found in this study was based on the similarities and variations in morphological structure of Chinese and English, the pattern may not necessarily hold for learners with L1s that share and contrast morphologically with English in different ways.”

It is hard to parse what this may mean for ELL instruction in the classroom, but perhaps we can assume that there will be different effects on an individual's capacity to learn English depending which language they are fluent in natively. This study found that relevant language structures for learning English do transfer despite the large distance between the two languages, and this is probably the most important point to keep in mind.

Morphological awareness: Just “more phonological”? The roles of morphological and phonological awareness in reading development

Pg 236

“Morphological awareness made a significant contribution to reading development, even 3 years after the original measures were taken, and this relationship survived controls of phonological awareness and verbal and nonverbal intelligence.”

This quotation is from the “CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER RESEARCH” section of the paper. They state clearly that morphological awareness had not yet been attributed as a contributing factor to reading comprehension as phonological awareness had, and their longitudinal study was able to prove that it indeed was.

The authors summarize this nicely:
In general, these results suggest that children continue to bring a host of skills, including those based on phonology and morphology, to the reading task.

We should indeed be providing instruction that is based on both morphology and phonology to support reading comprehension in our students.