Category: Life

Reyhner (1986) studied the representation, in number of appearances and in the accuracy and realism of those appearances, of Native American students in basal readers, the reading textbooks used with young readers. A review of the literature showed that Native American students are more engaged and comprehend more when the reading materials represented their culture accurately. It was important that the representations of Native Americans include not only historical representations, but also depict Native Americans as a living culture in modern times.

The material for this study (Reyhner, 1986) was taken from textbooks and basal readers implemented statewide in states over 5 million residents. Textbooks for first, third, and fifth graders were analyzed. There were 8 books chosen to analyze, the 4 most used, and of the 15 series that qualified, the 4 least used. This decision is not explained or justified. They did not differentiate the differences in Native American representation form the most used and least used books among the 15 that qualified. Random samples of 25% of the stories in each of the 8 books were analyzed for six categories of realism identified as important by experts in the field. These included a broad range of ages, conflict between characters, aggression involving children, the presence of basic life situations, negative emotions, and intellectual activities.

Of the 203 stories analyzed, only 16 had Native American characters (Reyhner, 1986). Only one story was found in the first grade books, six in the third grade books, and the rest (nine stories) were found in fifth grade texts. Most of them were found to represent modern Indian culture. There was not a broad range of tribes represented, most represented southwestern tribes. No coastal tribes (Atlantic or Pacific) were represented, and the Plains Indians only had representation in one story. Most stories were fairly realistic.

Most of the stories had rural settings, instead of urban settings (only 2 stories) (Reyhner, 1986). It was found that some of the stories had stereotypical aspects. For example, in one story about the production of pottery, the purpose for making the bowls was to sell them to the tourists instead of making them to maintain tradition. This depicts Native American’s in a way that makes their traditions about catering to white culture instead of showing the spiritual or traditional importance for these people in making their art. In another story, the illustrations depict terrain (mountains and rivers) that were not accurate to the lands that Hopi Indians lived in. Another story, about ballerina Maria Tall Chief, left out any aspects of her culture or heritage other than her name.

When the study analyzed the other stories as well, it was found that there were seven times as many white characters and twice as many African American characters as Native American characters (Reyhner, 1986). This may make sense when you compare the population of White, Black, and Native American students. But the fact is that if students comprehend more when they are reading about characters that are like themselves, then white students will have a much higher proportion of the literature that is easy to comprehend than minority students will. The authors suggested that it is important to supplement the basal readers with trade books that represent Native American student’s culture, especially tribe specific books if possible.

To summarize, Fry and Johnson (1973) and Stage, et al. (2001) both found that socioeconomic status may be a higher risk factor than race for many Native American students. Reyhner (1986) found a real lack of authentic Native American characters in texts, and recommended teachers use a variety of trade books that represent Native American culture, especially tribe specific works.

Effective Methods for Teaching African American Students  Charity, Scarborough, and Griffin, (2004) explored whether familiarity with

School English, or a Standard English Dialect, affected reading achievement in the early grades. The study was conducted with 252 students spread across three different cities, Cleveland, Ohio, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Washington D.C. All students were African American and between kindergarten and 2^nd grade. There was a roughly even gender split. This sample was taken from schools that were both low performing and low income. In New Orleans and Cleveland, one hundred percent of the students qualified for free and reduced lunch and in Washington D.C. ninety four percent qualified. Students were selected in a random sample from grades K, 1, and 2 in each of the schools.

The study (Charity et al., 2004) evaluated the participants in one on one sessions lasting fifteen to thirty minutes in April, May, or June in the 2000-2001 school year.

They were tested for reading achievement using the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests- Revised. These tests assessed word identification, the phonological decoding pseudo- words, and comprehension. Students were then assessed on their ability to imitate School English. To determine this ability, students were asked to repeat sentences in a story in the same way the tester pronounced them. The story was designed to have elements that were pronounced differently in African American English and School English. The study was looking for a relationship between the students’ two test scores, and whether their familiarity or unfamiliarity with School English affected word identification, phonologically decoding pseudo-words, and comprehension. The examiners also asked comprehension and recall questions about the story the children had repeated. They were scored for grammar, phonological items, and memory in the story they had read.

The study (Charity et al., 2004) found that more imitations of School English occurred in the grammatical category (m=61.6, SD=22.6) than with phonological examples (m=50.8, SD=19.9). Results showed that children in New Orleans had less familiarity with School English than children in other cities. They hypothesized that in the South most people exhibit some language characteristics outside of Standard English, that have more in common with African American English. For example, the dialect may differ phonologically from Standard English, in terms of the reduction of the final consonant cluster from a consonant blend to only one of the consonants being pronounced, and a final s being deleted from plural words.

Kindergarten and 1^st grade students’ test scores on phonological and grammatical imitation were correlated with the reading test scores on word identification, phonologically decoding pseudo-words, and comprehension (rs=.42 to .59) (Charity et al., 2004). In second grade, this correlation was not significant for phonological tests (rs=.08 to .29), but familiarity with School English was correlated to grammatical imitation (rs=.34 to .49). The results showed there was not a strong correlation between the familiarity with school English and story recall for any of the three grades (Charity et al., p. 1348).

According to this study (Charity et al., 2004), students’ familiarity with School English will affect the way they use grammar or phonetically decode and pronounce words, but that no matter how they pronounce words, and no matter their familiarity with School English, they will still comprehend what happened in the story, and be able to retell it.

Fry and Johnson (1973) explored the relationship between oral reading fluency and reading achievement in a group of Native American subjects. Subjects for the study included 69 students. Forty five attended public schools and 24 attended a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in a nearby city. Both Schools were in Arizona. Students were Native Americans from the Pima Maricopa tribe.

The students were assessed using the Lorge- Thorndike Intelligence Test and the Metropolitan Achievement Test (Fry & Johnson, 1973). Students were separated into above average and below average groups based on these scores. Students were then asked to respond to 20 pictures to get a language proficiency sample. The amount of and difficulty of words produced by the students in response to these stimuli were recorded and analyzed to provide a score. Students who produced at least 30 Communication Units were included in the study, leaving 52 subjects. Then to control for sex, 10 more students were eliminated from analysis, leaving 42 students, 21 males and 21 females.

All students were in second grade.

For males, there was not a relationship between IQ and oral language scores, but there was a connection with female Native American students (Fry & Johnson, 1973).

It was also shown that males often needed fewer pictures to score at least 30 communication units. The above average group used more complex sentences. Below average students used more simple structures more often. This was also true for conjoining verbs.

The study (Fry & Johnson, 1973) showed that the above and below average readers did not differ very much in reading achievement, above average scoring a median of 2.1 on the exams and below average readers just three tenths of a point less, at 1.8 median for the group. It also showed that there were more above average students in the public school than the tribal school, but acknowledged that could be due to the difference in socioeconomic status rather than the schools, since attendees of the BIA school did have lower income in general than those attending the public school. A factor not considered in this analysis is the possibility that traditional Native American people may be less verbal than in mainstream culture. This is not a rule, but a trend that has been observed. Students taught by teachers who expect them to be more verbal will indeed produce more communication units than students in a tribal school, where verbal communication is not as highly stressed. The test given also may have not been a setting students at a tribal school would be verbal about; where as other activities might elicit more dialogue from them. It would depend on how their schooling is structured, but classroom practices are not covered by the study.

The study is hard to generalize to Native American students in other settings, due to the small study size, and the inclusion of only one tribal group, when there are over 200 Native American tribes in the country.

Stage, Sheppard, Davidson, and Browning (2001) studied students’ oral reading fluency. Since many students are referred to special education because of difficulties with reading, these researchers found it important to study early predictors of reading difficulty in students, so interventions can be implemented. Since knowledge of the alphabet has been shown to be a predictor of future achievement in reading, researchers used this to study its predictive value for a culturally diverse sample.

This study included 59 subjects (Stage et al., 2001). Seventy percent were Native American, 18% Hispanic, and 12% Caucasian. Students were followed throughout their kindergarten year. Most students were low income, 70% received free or reduced lunch. They attended a rural school in Washington State. There was an almost even gender split, with 47% of the students as male and 53% as female.

The study (Stage et al., 2001) focused on students’ familiarity with the alphabetic principle, that is, knowledge of letter names and phoneme grapheme relationships. The study investigated the connection of this knowledge in kindergarten to the development of oral reading fluency in the first grade. The researchers used Hierarchical linear modeling to create growth curves for different factors influence on oral reading fluency.

Students were asked to identify upper and lowercase letters that were randomly ordered (interrater reliability was 99%), and also using the same sheets, were asked to identify the sounds each letter made (interrater reliability was 98%) (Stage et al., 2001). They were also tested using curriculum based measurements of oral reading fluency.

These measures were taken in October, January, March, and May.

Kindergarteners received the normal curriculum used in the district, which included “print awareness, letter name knowledge, and letter sound knowledge.

Specifically, each letter name and its corresponding sound were taught in sequence….instruction was delivered in small groups of 4 students/ session” (Stage, et al., 2001, p. 229). In first grade, students learned phonological awareness and phonics rules.

It was shown that all students improved in oral reading fluency over the year (Stage et al., 2001). Kindergarten sound fluency and letter naming fluency predicted this growth. For sound fluency, t=2.98 (p<.01) and letter naming fluency t= 2.32(p<.05).

Letter naming fluency most strongly predicted first grade oral reading fluency. No differences were found on the basis of race in oral reading fluency.

The study concludes that letter naming may be an even stronger predictor of at risk students than letter sound identification (Stage et al., 2001). Students who can name letters already have a start on the letter sounds, since they are apparent in letter names for most letters. Also, familiarity with the alphabet may indicate pre-reading experiences with preschool or with family, who has taken the time to expose the child to literacy and teach them the alphabet. The study also concludes that race had little to do with performance, though socioeconomic status did, and may be a stronger risk factor overall. The researchers conclude that low SES students with difficulty in letter naming should receive early intervention to strengthen letter naming fluency in order to ensure they do not fall behind peers in first grade and beyond.

‘A dangling modifier is a phrase (or clause) out of place, as a weed is a plant out of place, making a mess of the garden.’

This is one of the most commonly encountered errors in editing: the dangling modifier. As Treddinick suggests, it truly does make a mess of writing. This article explores the dangling participle — a dangling modifier that begins with a participle — and discusses strategies for avoiding it in your writing.

Here are some problematic dangling modifiers to get us started:

• Tony drove home with his vegetables, following a police car.
• Laying eggs, Lucy chased the hen out of the coup.
• Enjoying views from the balcony, the birds sang a sweet morning song to me.

We will come back to these later in the article. To begin, let us remind ourselves about participles and learn about participle phrases.

What is a Participle Phrase?

We know from our earlier article, ‘Understanding Verb Forms — Part Three’, that present participles end in ‘ing’. They are verbs that describe a continuous action (‘dreaming’, ‘eating’, ‘walking’, ‘frying’, ‘typing’ etc.)

A participle phrase is a group of words — containing a participle — that modifies a sentence’s subject. In the earlier examples, the participle phrases have been italicized. Here are some more:

• After massaging her temples, Sarah felt relief from her headache.
• Washing the dishes, Albert felt a sense of satisfaction.
• Lying on the deck, the children gazed at the stars.

Each of these italicized participle phrases modifies the subject that comes directly after it (i.e. Sarah, Albert and the children, respectively). The participle phrases describe what these subjects are doing.

The Dangling Participle

When a participle phrase ‘dangles’ it means that the modifier is out of place or too far away from its subject. As a result, meaning is obscured.

Mark Treddinick confesses to his own dangling modifier, ‘I saw an eastern quoll last night, looking out my kitchen window’. Does he mean the eastern quoll was in his kitchen, looking out the window? Alternatively, does he mean that he was looking out the window, and saw an eastern quoll?

He probably means the latter, but the modifier, ‘looking out the window’, and dangles too far from the subject (‘I’) he intends it to modify. Instead, it has attached itself to the closest noun in the sentence (‘the eastern quoll’), leading to confusion.

Let us reconsider the problematic examples we gave at the beginning of the article. See how each of these participle phrases dangles too far away from the subject it intends to modify, with amusing results:

• Tony drove home with his vegetables, following a police car.
• Laying eggs, Lucy chased the hen out of the coup.
• Enjoying views from the balcony, the birds sang a sweet morning song to me.

Who is following the police car, Tony or his vegetables? Is Lucy laying eggs, or was she chasing a hen who was laying eggs? Are the birds enjoying a view from the balcony, or is the speaker?

Correcting Dangling Participles

These examples can be corrected by bringing the participle phrase closer to the subject they are intended to modify — Tony, the hen, and me, respectively. For some of these sentences, it’s a matter of reversing the order, for others it’s a matter of containing the participle phrase within commas as an aside:

• Following a police car, Tony drove home with his vegetables.
• Lucy chased the hen, who was laying eggs, out of the coup.
• While enjoying views from the balcony, I listened to the birds’ sweet morning song.

We hope this article has introduced dangling modifiers. Remember, a dangling modifier attaches itself to the wrong noun in a sentence and creates confusion. To check these, make sure your modifying participle phrases are right beside the noun you intend it to modify.

In a case study by Ruan (2003), three kindergarten age bilingual Chinese girls were studied to determine what the literacy experiences of these children were, and how the literacy instruction for these Chinese children in specific related to the teacher’s cultural beliefs. All the parents in these cases had jobs that required higher education.

Two of the girls were born in America and one was an immigrant. The study took place in a Midwestern town in a class where most of the students were white, and was taught by a white teacher.

The researcher (Ruan, 2003) acted as an observer and as an aide who spoke to the three girls in Chinese. She wanted to observe how the teacher interacted with different children, and especially notice how she treated the three Chinese girls. She found that the Chinese girls did not participate in whole group interactions unless they had to, for example, as in a situation where each person was expected to contribute something. The researcher attributed this to the fact that in the Chinese culture, children are discouraged from sharing information with adults.

In this classroom, the teacher only helped students who asked for it. Students who remained quiet and did not make their needs known were not given help, even if they needed it. In one instance, the Chinese immigrant did not know what to do, and did not solicit help. She ended up copying from another child. According to the author, many Chinese children experience shame when they do not understand, and this might contribute to the student having remained silent when the she did not understand the directions. Since the Chinese students were not assertive about getting their needs met, they did not receive the help they needed. The teacher stated that she tried to be color and culture blind, and see no differences in abilities and learning modalities between her Chinese students and her white students (Ruan, 2003).

There were some aspects of this study that were problematic for a reader. First, the results (Ruan, 2003) were from the researcher’s observation and interviews only, and could be susceptible to bias, especially in the observations. As a Chinese woman herself, the researcher could have experienced these types of assumptions as a student and already had the idea of what her study would find. Her strong connection to the experience of Chinese children in school may have biased her toward something that is a sensitive subject. For example, each field note that is included in the study observes that the Chinese children did not participate in the class discussion. But there is no indication of how many of the other students did or did not participate, so it could be that there were other students who did not participate either. It seems like the author is attempting to be more convincing in her argument by making it seem that it was just these students who were not engaged, and omitting the participation data on students of other ethnicities.

The confirmability of the study is present in the form of tape recorded interviews that were coded. These could be checked by interested parties. The observation notes could be reviewed by an outside party, but since there were no other observers, there is no way to check the reliability of these observations.

McBride-Chang and Ho (2005) studied the development of phonological awareness and reading ability in Chinese students, in Hong Kong, who were learning both Chinese and English simultaneously.

The subjects were tested during their first year of a three year kindergarten program, and in their third year (McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005). Their ages were about three and about five at the two testing times. Ninety children comprised the sample. There were 34 females and 56 males. All were in the same school. Most were middle and upper middle class. The native language of all the subjects was Cantonese.

The study (McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005) was interested in phonological awareness because in English, the language consists of blending letters for each sound, while in Chinese the smallest unit of sound is the syllable. There are different characters for all the syllables, while English uses the same letters to make many sounds. Since a review of the literature showed that student’s phonological awareness most often comes from their native language and transfers to their second language, the researchers were interested in how this would work in languages with different phonological structures.

In the classrooms, students were not taught to decode English words, but rather they read the whole word, sometimes called word attack (McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005). They would look at the word and say it, and try to remember it that way. This is more similar to the use of a character than breaking a word down into individual phonemes. In the two years that elapsed between testing time one and testing time two, students were expected to learn “approximately 150 to 200 Chinese characters and… [be able to] read some short phrases and sentences in Chinese. In addition, K3 [students in their third year of kindergarten] children can recognize about 50 to 80 isolated English words but few phrases or sentences” (McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005, p. 124).

In order for assessments to match over languages, students were asked to do a syllable deletion task instead of a phoneme deletion task, because in Chinese they would have to delete an entire syllable (McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005). For this, compound words with one syllable words were used, such as hotdog. At the first testing time, students were tested individually, but at time two they were tested in groups of 30, and then interviewed individually. The tests of English ability were only given at time two, because the students had had no English instruction before the first testing time. Students were assessed on several measures, including Chinese vocabulary, ability to identify the English alphabet, English words, and Chinese characters, ability to delete syllables, ability to hold a series of numbers in their verbal memory, quickly recalling names of pictured items, and the accuracy of students invented spelling in English.

The study (McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005) found that the students ability in reading Chinese and reading English at time two was not related in any way to the English phonological assessments from time one. Chinese phonological skills were stronger predictors of ability. Even English word identification was better predicted by the Chinese character identification at the first testing time. Basically, the skills in the first language were stronger predictors of success in both languages than skills in the second language predicting success in that same language.

The findings of this study (McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005) are dependable, as they concur with other studies that have shown students use the phonological skills from their first language to process and learn a second language, and that the ability to read in the second language is based on phonological awareness in language one. The study could be confirmed, because the information and results are provided. The study could be transferable to understanding other schools in China that teach both Cantonese and English, but I am not sure how well they can be transferred to a mixed ethnicity classroom, or even an ESL class taught in English in America. The study includes aspects that could inform teaching reading in a multicultural classroom, but the setting of the study and purpose for learning English were different, so it can’t be applied specifically to the question of this paper.

Steffensen, Goetz, and Cheng, (1999) explored the impact of cultural background and imagery when subjects read in their native language and in a second language, in this case English. The sample in this case consisted of much older individuals than is the focus of this paper, but there are some aspects than can be generalized to second language learners of all ages.

The study (Steffensen, et al., 1999) cites a review of the literature showing the importance of cultural background on reading comprehension and enjoyment. They state that when reading, people “comprehend more and give more appropriate elaborations to texts based on their own culture; they comprehend less and intrude inappropriate information form their on culture, with distortions of the content, when reading a text based on an unfamiliar culture” (Steffensen, et al., 1999, p. 302). They also suggest that emotional reactions to texts can keep students interested in reading in their second language. Because often students need much practice in reading in a language to become proficient, it is important that students are motivated to read, which interest and emotional response promote.

The basis for the study (Steffensen, et al., 1999) is the idea that when reading, there is a dual coding process that makes not only a linguistic representation of the words, but also makes mental images of what is being read. These can be visual (most often) but also can be auditory, olfactory, tactile, and even relating to the way something tastes. An example given is “when the sight of a dog elicits the name of the animal, or when the word dog elicits an image of a favorite pet” (Steffensen, et al., 1999, p. 304). The question here is: how do these nonverbal images occur in first language and second language readers?

The sample (Steffensen, et al., 1999) included 24 people who spoke Chinese as a first language, most (21) spoke Mandarin. All were graduate students who attended universities in the Midwest. They had been in the United States from one to five years, and had been speaking English for at least ten. Most subjects were 25 or older. 12 subjects were men, and 12 were women. This sample is highly educated, was more familiar with English than many beginning bilingual readers, but their reading behaviors are educative nonetheless.

The participants (Steffensen, et al., 1999) were randomly assigned either the Chinese or the English group. They were asked to read a letter which described a train trip in China. This is the main mode of transportation there and many people had strong feelings about the topic.  All but one of the subjects had had extensive personal experience with the system, and the one who did not felt it was exaggerated while all the others verified it with strong emotions. The letter was written in Chinese, translated into English, then retranslated back into Chinese and compared to the original version to make sure it had been translated into English properly. Instructions were given, and responses taken, in the language the students read in.

Results included the finding that students in both languages reported about the same number of images, number of emotional responses, and type of emotional responses (Steffensen, et al., 1999).  They found that for both groups, the majority of responses were related to one specific piece of the text, 75% for English speakers and 77% for the Chinese. It took students reading in English almost twice as long, on average, to complete the passage. Chinese readers’ mean was 4.73 minutes, while English readers had a mean of 8.9 minutes. This indicated that students who do not read well, no matter if they are ESL or not, may be just as successful at comprehending when reading if given enough time. It shows that high levels of “fluency” are not necessary for students to understand and be engaged in texts.

When the subjects (Steffensen, et al., 1999) were asked to describe their emotional responses, most of them were related to the text (just under 60%), or closely related with background knowledge of the situation (approximately 40% for both groups). There were only a few variations that did not make sense given the text.

Because the English group took more time to read, they were able to focus on the meaning and create the visual images that might not be possible if they were rushed through the text.

The researchers conclude “texts that elicit emotional responses from their readers and a high level of imagery in several modalities are likely to result in increased engagement” (Steffensen, et al., p. 319). I wonder here why no group was given a text that perhaps they did not have a background for, to see what the mental images and emotional responses would be to that. There is nothing to compare it to here, and the conclusion that texts that elicit emotional response increase engagement cannot be internally valid if readers cannot compare the engagement in reading different types of texts, only one was used here.

In summary, Ruan (2003) showed that in some situations, Chinese American students are not assertive about getting their needs met, and so don’t receive the help they need. McBride-Chang and Ho (2005) found that skills in the native language of students are stronger predictors of success in a second language. Also, they found that the character system is more comparable to using the syllable as the smallest unit of sound, so students may not be able to segment words into individual phonemes. Steffensen, et al. (1999) found that subjects reading in a second language got as much of an emotional response, and comprehended as much, as those reading in their native tongue even though they may have taken longer to complete a reading.

Gilliam, Gerla, and Wright (2004) also searched out strategies to help Hispanic students succeed in school. They recognized the importance of a parent’s involvement on a student’s literacy development. They conducted a study that investigated how to involve low income parents who had not been successful in school themselves in the literacy experiences of their children. Many parents want to help their children be more successful than they were, but do not know how. Classes for parents of kindergarten students were conducted to help them help their child succeed in reading.

The Texas Literacy Council showed that 40% of the minority families in the state were illiterate. It also “noted that many parents wanted to help their children, but they simply were not knowledgeable enough to provide the necessary assistance” (Gilliam et al., 2004, p. 227). These researchers decided to take on a project to help show minority parents what they could do to help their children’s literacy development through a series of classes.

The study (Gilliam et al., 2004) was conducted in an elementary school in a Southwestern city. The school was located in one of the most low income areas of the city. It served a high number of low SES and minority students. The participants were the parents of 20 kindergarten students. Eighty percent of the parents were Hispanic, 15% were African American, and five percent were Caucasian. Each parent was paid ten dollars for each session they came to and $25 at the end of the series if they had come to all the meetings. Childcare was provided by university students during all sessions for not only the kindergarten children of participants, but also their siblings.

To understand more about who the people who would want to participate in these classes were, a survey was given (Gilliam et. al., 2004). It showed that 100% of the families thought reading was important, and 65% said they read to their child daily.

Upon further interviews, the researchers found that some of the information given on these surveys was exaggerated. Perhaps parents did value reading and so exaggerated the amount they read together as a family because they did not want to look bad.

There were 10 sessions of the program, all held in the school library (Gilliam et al., 2004). The first night the school librarian showed how to check out books and the resources available, and after that session and all the rest of them, parents stayed after with their children and checked out books. The bookmobile from the public library also came and parents received library cards and bookmobile schedules. Other sessions included “storytelling in the home…choosing when, how, and what to read to children…using puppets in reading and storytelling…making and using literacy games… [and] reading and writing poetry”( Gilliam et al., 2004, p. 231).

In interviews conducted after the classes were complete (during the 10^th session), 100% of parents said that their children asked to be read to much more often after the end of the sessions than before (Gilliam et al., 2004). Half of the families described turning off the television in order to read as a family, and all reported they were being purposeful to make time to read together as a family. The researchers contribute this success to their program, but also the students could have been exposed to literacy at school and may have wanted to read more anyway, an outside factor that was not acknowledged in the results. The researchers also report that parents stated they felt better about their parenting, but do not give a percentage.  In fact there are three results where no number or percentage is given as to the amount of parents who agreed with the statement. The other two were that kindergarten students and even some younger siblings were pretending to read to the parents, a result of familiarity with text and the concept of what reading is, and parents feeling there was more bonding occurring between them and their child.

The fact that no percentages are reported for these aspects makes me think that perhaps there was not a high number who did agree, or else it would have been reported. This is deceitful and takes away from the credibility of the study.

The findings are dependable in some ways, but they do not relate the information to the children’s performance in school so we cannot measure if it had a difference there, which makes it difficult to apply to the query of this paper.  All we can see is that families were bonding, not that it helped the children in school. Credibility was also an issue, in that the researchers dismissed the findings of the preliminary survey as exaggerated, and neglected to report numbers of subjects agreeing with a statement on three different occasions. If they told readers how the survey was exaggerated, or how they knew it had been, that would have been more credible. And if researchers had reported percentages of the results, positive or negative, on each of their findings, they would be more convincing. There were definitely problems with the reporting, and a lack of proof that the program worked to enhance school performance.

Lane, Menzies, Munton, Von Duering, and English (2005) looked at the effect of literacy intervention on a student’s social skills, in class and with peers. One student was followed for the case study. The subject was a male kindergartener who was 5 years old. He was classified as at risk by the school in both literacy and behavior. He was able to identify letters at mid year, but his word attack skills were low.

The intervention provided was small group work with two other kindergarteners (Lane et al., 2005). The literacy specialist for the school worked with them three to four times a week for 30 minutes each week for nine weeks. The curriculum used was the Phonics Chapter Books Program. It included independent readings and explicit phonics instruction, as well as work in phonemic awareness, phoneme grapheme correspondence, sight words, reading, and dictation.

Data was collected by research assistants from the college who were trained by researchers (Lane et al., 2005). Phonological awareness was tested by onset fluency, where students must identify the first sound in a word. The ability to name letters was also tested. The student had to name randomly ordered letters, both in upper and lower cases. These skills were assessed DIBELS subtests.

The college students also assessed the subject’s inappropriate behaviors in class and in social situations (Lane et al., 2005). It was found to decrease drastically in both settings. The study showed increases in phonemic awareness correlated with a decrease in disruptive behavior. The subject also rated it as a positive experience, and said he wished the classes would not have ended when they did.

The researchers (Lane et al., 2005) recognize their own limitations in the fact that the use of only one participant detracts form external validity. Also, the skills were only tested and there was no data collected on how he applied these skills in his regular classroom. We might more fully understand the development of this young boy if we understood how he was able to participate in the regular literacy instruction after the intervention. It is hard to say that with only one student if the results are reliable, and would be repeatable with another student who had the same issues. Perhaps for this boy his misbehavior was a reaction to feeling incompetent. Other students may act up for different reasons, and so intervention linguistically would not affect their behavior patterns.

Pollard-Durodola, Cedillo, and Denton (2004) studied the strategies that are used to teach phonemic awareness and early word reading in Spanish. Since English has a deep orthography (where the rules for pronunciation of letters vary) and Spanish has a shallow orthography, where most letters are pronounced the same in any situation (Pollard-Durodola et al., 2004). Thus, findings from English language studies may not be generalizable to Spanish speaking students. This study set out to find out how phonemic, syllabic, or whole word recognition strategies were used in Spanish speaking classrooms to teach beginning reading.

Research has shown that Spanish vowel sounds are more consistently pronounced than English, and are more of a focus of early instruction (Pollard-Durodola et al., 2004). There is also a stronger focus on the syllable as the unit of sound, versus the phoneme as the common focus in English reading instruction. There is also more focus on onset and rime in English reading instruction than in Spanish.

Pollard-Durodola et al. (2004) conducted a case study of two bilingual kindergarten teachers who taught their students in Spanish. The focus was on what reading strategies were used, how they changed over the year as students became more proficient, and how instruction differed for low, medium, and high ability readers.

Teachers were videotaped and the tapes were analyzed. Field notes were also taken, as well as interviews with the teachers conducted. Students were assessed using the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery Revised Spanish Form word attack subtest at the end of the year.

Subjects were from the classes of these two teachers (Pollard-Durodola et al., 2004). Teachers had classes just over 20 students, but self identified three high lever readers, three low level students, and four average students to participate in the study, making a total of 20 students to participate in the analysis. The school was in a Southwestern city. Just under 76% of students in the district were low SES, marked by the receipt of free lunches. No information is given on the SES of students in the study.

Each class included whole group literacy instruction and small groups that were leveled by ability (Pollard-Durodola et al., 2004). From the videotapes, different types of instruction were identified and grouped. Drawing attention to specific phonemes, attempting to recognize the word as a whole, focus on onset and rime, drawing attention to a syllable, and a nonspecific strategy where the teacher simply said no or asked the student to try again were the strategies identified. Inter-rater reliability for categorization of strategies ranged from 74% to 83% between the two teachers.

At the beginning of the year, there tended to be a stronger emphasis on sounding out phonetically, as well as syllabication and word attack (Pollard-Durodola et al., 2004). As the year progressed, there was less emphasis on phonemes and more on whole words. There was also a stronger emphasis on whole words with advanced readers. One teacher used the segmentation of words only 30% of the time with advanced students, and 76% of the time with low level students at the beginning of the year. The second teacher used sounding out 25% of the time with advanced readers, 43 % of the time with middle level readers, and 18% of the time with low level students. This differs from teacher one, low level students in this class used sight word identification 53% of the time, much more often than the first class. Toward the end of the year, there was less emphasis on sounding out, the teacher said try again or told the students the word more often than at the beginning of the year, perhaps trying to promote whole word recognition to a greater extent. The second teacher used word level identification 70% of the time at mid year, and 84% of the time at the end of the year. Both classrooms moved from use of phoneme and syllable sounds to an emphasis on whole word recognition over the course of the year. They both used smaller units of sound to sound out words in lower level groups than in higher level groups, where the word was the focus rather than its parts.

In interviews, teachers did not self identify this tendency to use whole word recognition strategies to the extent they actually implemented it in their teaching (Pollard- Durodola et al., 2004). There was a list of words the district wanted all students to know, and one teacher identified with trying to teach these words, but the other did not recognize the use of this strategy and talked about sounding words out with phonemes and syllables. They recognized the use of phonemic units for struggling readers to help break down words into their phonological parts.  It was found that both classes of students were above average on the word attack assessment at the end of the year.

The results included the fact that even sight word recognition may depend on knowledge of the alphabet, to quickly identify sounds in a word (Pollard-Durodola et al., 2004). The emphasis on this part of reading development may not need to be as strong in a language where rules are more general. The emphasis on phonemic units rather than whole words for the less proficient readers may indicate their need for more focus on the alphabetic principle than more advanced readers. The study showed that teachers often encouraged students to read at the word level, but when mistakes were made, resorted to syllabic and phonemic units to correct mistakes.

A critique of Pollard-Durodola et al.’s study (2004) may be that it did not include any information on the English portions of the program. It indicated that both teachers were bilingual. Perhaps there was not instruction in English at all, but indicating that the teachers were bilingual and the schools were in the United States, one might assume that there were portions in English.

In summary, Carlisle and Beeman (2000) showed that students who were taught in their native language were just as strong in English reading and writing, and stronger in reading and writing in their native language, than students who were taught in English. Pollard-Durodola et al. (2004) showed that, in classrooms that use Spanish as the language of instruction, there is a tendency to use more whole word recognition strategies than breaking a word down into phonemes.

Denton, et al. (2004) showed that when students were tutored with read well, it improved only context free reading and did not help students with comprehension.

Chappe et al. (2002) also discovered that students of all language backgrounds could find success in decoding with explicit, systematic phonics instruction, though comprehension was not addressed. Barone (2003) found that less students ended the year below grade level in second grade when their study had been a whole language approach, rather than more ending below grade level in first grade and kindergarten when the focus was on phonics.

De la Colina et al. (2001) showed that students who were highly motivated to read improved more than students who weren’t motivated, regardless of ability level. When Gilliam et al. (2004) conducted classes to involve parents in reading with their children, 100% of families reported reading more together.

Barone (2003) conducted a multi-case study in order to find out what teaching methods were most effective for low income students in a school with a majority of English Language learners. The researcher chose 16 students in a sample of opportunity. She chose the first children to arrive for their assessments with the kindergarten teacher on the first week of school.  She attempted to include an even number of boys and girls by refraining from recruiting students of the sex she had too many of, until the sexes were even. She had the assistance of a bilingual English-Spanish speaking aide in recruiting children of Spanish speaking parents.

Of the 16 subjects selected, 3 dropped out of the study (Barone, 2003). This left the researchers with 6 boys and 7 girls. Ten of the children chosen were learning English as a second language. Nine of these children spoke Spanish, and 1 spoke Tagalog. Three of the chosen students spoke English as their first language. The inclusion of these students in the study seems unnecessary, as there were no recommendations made for their literary needs, even though of the 3 students that finished second grade below grade level in reading, 2 were native English speakers. The researcher also notes that 3 of the children attended preschool, but does not connect this information with their later performance in reading. The information seems unnecessary to include in the study if it is not going to be connected to the conclusion.

The school the children attended (Barone, 2003) had a high population of English as a second language students. Of the 600 students who attended the school, 60% were not native English speakers and 85% of the students here Hispanic. Eighty percent of the student body received free or reduced lunch. The school was in a medium sized school district in a Western city.

There were 17 teachers who participated in the study (Barone, 2003). Three kindergarten teachers, eight first grade teachers, and six second grade teachers. Only one of the seventeen teachers was male. Only one of the teachers was fluent in English and Spanish. In kindergarten, one teacher taught a morning and afternoon session, and two teachers shared a morning and an afternoon session, alternating days so the students had a different teacher every other day. The first and second grade teachers all taught in pairs, so one large class would have two teachers. Unfortunately, no information was given about class sizes. The teachers were provided with professional development in literacy weekly.

The study (Barone, 2003) was conducted by observing in classrooms and interviewing students and teachers, as well as collecting student work and assessments. The end of the year interviews were tape recorded, but the others were not. The notes for the other interviews were made after the interview. The researcher does not explain why only some of the interviews were tape recorded or why no record was made of the beginning of the year or mid year interviews while they were occurring. This makes the ability to confirm the research difficult, since no notes were made during the interview and they were not taped. The children were interviewed about their second grade literacy experiences at the end of that year, interviews lasting about 5 minutes. These interviews with the students could have been conducted more than once, perhaps at the end of each school year. Also, children may have a hard time remembering retrospectively their literacy experiences over the entire year, and more complete assessments of the children’s feelings about their literacy experiences could have come from interviews even once or twice during the year as well as at the end.

The researcher (Barone, 2003) and a doctoral student took field notes simultaneously in the same classroom and compared notes until their observations were 90% similar in their recording of teaching and learning activities, then they observed in different classes. The children were observed once a week in their classrooms during reading instruction. Kindergarteners were observed for an entire half day session, while first and second graders were observed during their reading block. One full day at the beginning and one at the end of the year was spent in each child’s classroom to identify how reading and writing were incorporated into the rest of the curriculum, if that is enough to accurately assess that. Depending on scheduling or where the class is at in a unit, it is possible that they might be doing less or more embedded literacy instruction than is the norm for the room. From these literacy block and full day interviews, a literacy profile was created for each student. These literacy profiles were shared with the teachers for accuracy, and for additional information. This could be problematic, because a teacher’s own view of their instruction could be biased, and it is the job of the researcher to see with a clear view what is occurring. Interviewing the teacher’s about what literacy activities were happening would be acceptable, but having them check the researchers impartial observations for validity could lead to the information collected not being impartial after all.

A literacy profile was compiled for each grade in Barone’s study (2003). Kindergarten classrooms varied in the method of literacy instruction. One classroom had a focus on phonemic awareness, reading aloud, and attempts at book discussions in English. Since the children struggled with the English discussions, the book readings and discussions were discontinued by November in favor of whole group phonics activities.

The other classroom, which had a different teacher every other day, had vastly different expectations with each different teacher. One teacher read to the students but did not encourage discussion, and did not read any of the books a second time. The other teacher spent a lot of time having the children memorize how to spell their names and completing phonics worksheets. The phonics principles were not applied to the books that were read aloud. Neither classroom provided opportunity to practice conversational or academic English. Many children talked in their small groups in Spanish. There was little support bridging home language to school language. Only 4 of the kindergarteners had a rudimentary understanding of the phoneme grapheme relationship at the end of the year, and 2 of the children could not write their name

There are some concerns about the Barone’s (2003) reporting here. She states that only 4 of the 13 kindergarteners “…had a rudimentary understanding of sound/symbol relationships at the end of the year” (p. 984). Later on the same page she summarizes “…the majority of the focal children left with very rudimentary knowledge of the alphabetic principle and little understanding of books” (p. 984). 4 of 13 is not a majority in any sense of the word, and reporting it this way makes readers question the credibility of the rest of the information reported.

The First Grade Classrooms included in Barone’s (2003) study had a major curricular emphasis on phonics and decoding. The teachers said in interviews that they believed students needed a foundation in phonics to gain the skills for reading. Children were grouped in small ability groups for instruction, but all students completed the same worksheet packets, which were not leveled for ability or English proficiency. All teachers read to the students each day, and leveled texts were available to the students. One of the classrooms was very different. Students in this classroom copied sentences form the board instead of composing sentences, and there were no leveled texts in the classroom library. Three of the 4 focal children in this room qualified for Reading Recovery, a tutoring program, and a total of 3 from the three other classrooms combined qualified.

The emphasis on phonemic awareness, decoding, and phonics gives children skills in those areas, but there was little attention paid to comprehension, vocabulary, or writing in any of the classrooms. By the end of first grade, all children were able to independently read texts and write short stories. Three children were above grade level, while 3 more exceeded the schools expectations but were still in the first grade range.

One child was at grade level, and 6 were below grade level. Of the 4 who had finished kindergarten with knowledge of grapheme phoneme correspondence, only 1 finished first below grade level.

Second Grade consisted of a more whole language approach, with a greater focus on meaning than on decoding (Barone, 2003). During, Daily Oral Language, students corrected sentences and discussed errors. Teachers read aloud and students discussed books. The students were in leveled reading groups and leveled texts were used. The focus of the reading was on meaning and reactions to plot and character. Students used Venn Diagrams and KWL(know, want to know, and learned) charts to help with understanding texts. Students wrote their own stories and books, on topics of their own choosing. Classroom discussions incorporated Think Pair Share, which helped students less proficient in English have a chance to talk their thoughts over so they felt comfortable articulating them in the large group. In one classroom, students were encouraged to make connections between their native language and English. Students were praised for native language abilities. The teachers this year helped students have academic conversations with each other, which teachers in previous years had not attempted or had given up on. At the end of the year, 8 children were at grade level, 2 children were above grade level, and only 3 were below grade level. Five of the children who ended first grade below grade level ended second grade at grade level. The focus on meaning may have made the difference for them.

The researcher (Barone, 2003) does not address the possibility that decoding does not work well for students who do not understand the words they are decoding. Students who do not know the meaning of an English word cannot comprehend its meaning by decoding alone, but this is not addressed as a reason the meaning based approach succeeded. Barone also does not address the possibility that the student’s background in phonics could have been the reason they succeeded in second grade. She concludes …after the emphasis on letter knowledge in kindergarten and phonics in first grade, the teachers in second grade utilized a more balanced approach to literacy that included shared, guided, and independent reading. This more complex curriculum enriched students’ literacy learning. (p. 1014).

She had followed two of the students, Sandra and Julio, more closely than the other students through the two years. Julio never comprehended the alphabetic principle or phonics, and he ended the second grade below grade level. Sandra on the other hand had struggled at first but in first grade began to comprehend decoding and phonics. She ended the year only slightly below grade level. In second grade she skyrocketed and ended the year beyond grade level. The omission of the possibility that her background in phonics set her up for success in a literature based classroom discounts the role phonics may have played in Sandra’s success. By saying that the second grade’s meaning based approach worked better than phonics, the researcher does not consider that a background in decoding may indeed be necessary for that approach to work.  Since Julio did not have the background and did not succeed in a whole language classroom, and Sandra did have the phonics background and went on to succeed, this is a possibility that should have been considered.

There were some credibility problems throughout the study (Barone, 2003). Some conclusions did not seem to fit with the data, and some important possibilities were omitted  Some have already been reviewed, but additionally, the researcher concludes that the lack of connection to the students’ home language in kindergarten caused the students achievement problems. But she does not address the fact that half of the English speaking students finished kindergarten below grade level. If these students also failed to thrive in the environment, then there were obviously more reasons for a lack of success than language, since their home language was the same as what was spoken at school. It seems like she wanted to draw that conclusion and ignored this fact to do so. Also, at the end of second grade 1 Spanish and 2 English speaking students were below grade level. So perhaps the differences in achievement have little to do with language at all, but with natural abilities and learning styles, or other variables.

The researcher’s (Barone, 2003) numbers again do not match when she states that two children maintained status as above grade level from kindergarten through second grade, Heidee and Eric, but when you look at her chart on the next page, Eric was not above grade level in first grade. Only Heidee was above grade level all three years.

The researcher (Barone, 2003) concludes that teachers can change the literacy achievement of students by valuing their language and encouraging academic discussion. Also, a teacher’s attitude and teaching methods can take a student who is on track to continue failing and move them onto a path of success. While it is true that significantly more students ended second grade at or above grade level in reading and writing, it made no difference for Julio, who continued to fail even in a whole language classroom.

Additionally, the researcher states “the results of this study showed no clear pattern of literacy development for children learning English as a new language” (p. 1014), and on the same page states “schools and teachers can change achievement patterns of students in reading, even after first grade” (p. 1014). A critical reader may ask, if there is no pattern, how can the study show that the pattern can be changed?

Gunn, Smolkowski, Biglan, Black, and Blair, (2005) studied the effects of supplemental reading instruction on struggling Hispanic and non Hispanic readers over a period of four years. Subjects were chosen from 14 schools in four Oregon communities. From a population of 4,004 students, 359 families were recruited after an assessment of reading difficulties or social skills problems. 60 subjects dropped out of the study for various reasons. 299 participants, 159 of whom were Hispanic and 140 of whom were not Hispanic, completed the study. There were 161 boys in the study and 138 girls.

There were 51 kindergartners, 87 first graders, 90 second graders, and 71 third graders. The information about ethnicity and language use came from parent interviews. 94% of Hispanic students were from Mexico, the rest from Central America or other Latin American countries. 9% of the Hispanic students were born in the United States and 85% were born in Mexico. Eighty four percent of the Hispanic families spoke only or mostly Spanish at home. Parents were paid to participate in the study (Gunn et al. 2005), $30 to complete a parent questionnaire at the end of each year, and $15 for providing information on the social behavior of their children at the beginning of the study, the end of year two, and the end of year four.

Subtests of the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of achievement and the Walker- McConnell Test of Social Skills were given to the subjects (Gunn et al. 2005). Students in each social skills category were grouped in matched pairs by ethnicity, starting with the pair of least skilled readers, then assigned randomly to a condition: either intervention was provided or not. Supplemental instruction was provided 30 minutes daily, as well as parent training and social skill intervention for students in the experimental group.

Half the students received 6 months of supplemental reading instruction in the first year of the study, and received supplemental instruction for the entirety of the second year (Gunn et al. 2005). At the beginning of the first year, all students were assessed using the Woodcock Johnson Tests of Achievement, and then were again assessed at the end of the year for 4 years. Assessors were not aware of the children’s membership in control or intervention groups. Supplemental instruction was only provided for the first two years, but testing continued to assess if there were long term effects of the supplemental instruction.

Students were pulled for supplemental instruction during times that did not interfere with classroom instruction (Gunn et al. 2005). The instruction was conducted in their home rooms. Nine instructional assistants worked with the students in small groups of two to three. For supplemental instruction, Reading Mastery was used for first or second grade students. The program consists of phonemic awareness, phoneme and grapheme correspondence, and decoding. Corrective Reading was used when the students reached third and fourth grades. This program is for older students who do not have the primary skills. It covers the same components as Reading Mastery, with topics interesting to older students, and moves at a faster rate. No information was given as to the program used with kindergarten intervention subjects. These groups usually spent five to seven minutes on phonics, 10-15 on word reading and spelling, and the rest of the session on reading passages to build fluency and accuracy.

Contingencies for Learning Academic and Social Skills and Dina Dinosaurs Social Skills and Problem-Solving Curriculum were used to help students in the intervention group improve their social skills (Gunn et al. 2005). These programs are designed to reinforce positive behaviors and help children reduce inappropriate behavior.

Gunn et al. (2005), concluded that intervention students gained much faster (p=.0052) than controls, who started at the same place at T1. Though at T3 there was not a significant difference between groups (p=.0887), the students letter- word identification did grow faster than control group ( p=.0092). At T5 (the end of the fourth year), showed that even two years after the end of intervention, these students were still significantly ahead of the control group in word attack (p=.0346). The group was no longer improving at a greater rate than the control group (p=.5461), but they still scored above the control group on the assessment.

Word attack scores showed that students in the intervention group performed significantly better (p= .0013) at T3 than students in the control group (Gunn et al. 2005). At T5, there was not a significant difference between the groups (p= .8274). Control groups were actually increasing at a higher rate (t=8.40, p<.0001) than intervention students (t= -4.23, p<.0001). There was a significant difference in the rate of improvement between ethnic groups.  Hispanic students scores started off lower than their non Hispanic counterparts. Results showed that non-Hispanic students in the experimental group improved at a greater rate (p<.0001) than non-Hispanic control groups, and Hispanic students with the same treatment improved even more quickly (p=.0228) than their matched pair. This phenomenon faded at T3, where there was not a significant difference between races (p=.0954).

For oral fluency, students in the intervention group improved at a faster rate than the control group (p=.0129) (Gunn et al. 2005). At T3, the difference in abilities between groups was significant (p=.0356). At T5 the difference was even greater (p=.0144). “…Intervetnion students at T1 read less than 2 cwpm faster than controls, but by T5, they read almost 14 CWPM faster” (Biglan et al., 2005. 78.)

The study (Gunn et al. 2005) concludes that the results showed that intervention helped for all students on word attack and comprehension. On word attack, Hispanic and non-Hispanic students both improved more than their matched pair in the control group, even though the slopes started to come together at T5. Hispanic students improved faster than non-Hispanic students. At the final assessment (T5), at the end of four years and two years after the end of the intervention) “students differed by condition on letter-word identification (d=0.25), oral reading fluency (d=0.29), and reading comprehension (d=0.29)” (Gunn et al. 2005, p. 82)

The study (Gunn et al. 2005) shows that intervention in small groups can affect the reading achievement of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic students who struggle with reading. Though Hispanic students started at a lower level (possibly because less than 15% spoke English at home), they improved at greater rates than their non-Hispanic counterparts. This is not only due to their increased familiarity with English, as the control group also became more familiar with the language during this period. The researchers suggest that it is helpful to provide supplemental instructions in reading English even before the students are proficient speaking it.

Paying the subjects to participate may have helped the researchers with their study, but brings questions into the reliability of the information. The parents may just be doing it for the money and not because they care about accuracy. Parents who have children with poor social skills or low levels of reading achievement may feel ashamed and not want to be honest, and so fill out a survey dishonestly trying to make their child look more competent than they are. They might not want to subject their family to scrutiny, and be participating just to get the money. No information was given as to the socioeconomic status of the participants.

Intervention in comprehension was not provided. If reading is the making of meaning, then this was a major omission on the part of the researchers. The researchers (Gunn et al. 2005) tested on comprehension, but comprehension strategies were not part of the intervention treatment. Testing for something that was not made part of the control is not reliable. The reader does not know what may have caused these changes. Though intervention students improved more from T1 to T3 (p= 0357 at T3) Control and intervention students improved at the same rate from T3 to T5 (p=.3703). This could be expected for something that there was no specific intervention addressing. It seems control and intervention groups may have differed on this because of a phonic ability to read the words, and thus have a chance to comprehend them, but once the control group caught up in that sense there were no strategies taught that would have kept the intervention group ahead of controls. There was also no extra help in the intervention in vocabulary, but it was tested for as well. Intervention subjects scored only slightly better (p=.0446) at T3 and even less so at T5 (p=.0571.)

In a multiple regression analysis, it was shown that three of the CFE subtests (initial, ending, and rhyming sounds) “accounted for 25% of the variance in reading fluency in Spanish and 20% of the variance in English reading fluency” in first and second grade (Riccio et al., 2001, p. 596). For older students (third through fifth grades), these numbers were lower, at 17% for Spanish and 14% for English.

The study (Riccio et al., 2001) found that the ability to identify initial and final phonemes and rhyming sounds, and to delete phonemes on the CTE Spanish test was related to both Spanish and English fluency.

One challenge to the reliability of this study (Riccio et al., 2001) could be it’s use of the CFE, the Conciencia Fonologica en Espanol. The test was created for the study, and it was a pilot version. Though great care was put into the creation of the assessment tool, it is possible that there were flaws we might not see in a small scale study. It should be tested for reliability and revised. It is important for these assessments to be developed, but it may have affected the results of the study.

Chiappe, Siegel, and Wade-Woolley (2002) investigated the development of literacy skills for ESL students of a variety of ethnicities. The authors (Chiappe et al., 2002) cited important differences in the phonemic structures of different languages, as well as differences in the syntax of the languages that can cause confusion for ESL students learning to read. Until students have learned the phonemic rules for a new language, they are interpreting everything they hear in terms of their native language.

When there are factors that do not match, many things may be missed or misconstrued. Also, the power to predict words in a sentence is diminished when students are not familiar with syntax. It is suggested that this language barrier may delay the development of English reading abilities in ESL students and put them behind their native English speaking peers. This study sought to find what the effects these literacy skills had on the reading performance in kindergarten and first grade.

A total of 858 subjects, students from the North Vancouver (Canada) school district, coming from 30 different schools completed the study. (Chiappe et al., 2002). Most of the students lived in middle class areas. The sample included 727 students who spoke English as their native language, and 131more who were learning English as a second language and spoke other languages with their families. Of these ESL students, 38 spoke Chinese, 23 spoke Farsi, Korean, Japanese, and Spanish all had seven speakers, and Tagalog had 6 speakers. There were also several other languages spoken by between 1 and 3 students, “Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Kurdish, Norwegian, Polish, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbocroatian, and Swedish” (Chiappe et al., 2002, p. 374). Obviously, the classrooms were very linguistically diverse in this sample.

The classrooms in the schools included both systematic phonics instruction and an emphasis on phonological awareness (Chiappe et al., 2002). Extra help was given to at risk students in these areas. Most teachers in the district also used whole language activities, including “journal writing, Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) time, leveled books, read alouds, the use of big books, lively discussions, alphabet songs, and cloze activities to foster growth in literacy and oral language skills”( Chiappe et al., 2002, p. 374). Because special ESL classes are not available until students are older in this district, all the children in the study were in classes with English speaking children in English only classrooms.

Children were tested at the beginning of kindergarten using several different assessments (Chiappe et al., 2002). They were tested using the Wide Range Achievement Test-3 to test letter recognition of capital letters and words that ranged in difficulty. They were also given an exam to identify all 26 lowercase letters in random order, and then asked to spell their names and a few simple words. Students were also examined on their ability to reproduce pseudo words using the Sound Mimicry subtest of the GFW Sound Symbol Test.

Phonological awareness was assessed in four different ways, using subtests of the Phonological Awareness Test (Chiappe et al., 2002). First, a rhyme detection assessment from the where students picked a word that rhymed with the first word, then the Syllable Identification exam that asked students to identify the last syllable. The Phoneme Identification subtest asked students to say the last sound, or phoneme, instead of the whole syllable. Lastly, children were asked to delete a phoneme from a word with the Phoneme Deletion subtest.

Children were also assessed on their ability to do word retrieval, where they were not asked to read at all but rather were shown pictures of objects and had to say the name for them (Chiappe et al., 2002). There is no information given on whether the ESL students were allowed to say the word in their native tongue, this information was left out by the researcher. Though a subject might know the word for something in their own language and be able to retrieve the word from their memory banks, they might not know the word for it in English. It would provide more clarity if the researcher gave this information. I assume they were allowed to respond only in English, and in such case, obviously this assessment would not be one in which students who do not know English would find as much success as they would in their native language.

To assess the students’ familiarity with English syntax, a sentence with a missing word was read and students were asked to provide a word that fit (Chiappe et al., 2002). Students were also asked to repeat sentences to assess their verbal short term memory.

Finally, students were given pictures of signs and logos to assess their familiarity with environmental print.

First grade students were tested on decoding and spelling, as well as other measures using subtests of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (Chiappe et al., 2002). These included word attack for pseudowords and common and uncommon word identification. Students were also asked to spell ten real words and ten pseudowords.

Any phonetically plausible combinations of phonemes were accepted for the pseudowords, so multiple letter patterns were accepted as correct, as long as there was a precedent. First grade students were also assessed on pseudoword repetition, phoneme deletion and substitution, awareness of English syntax, and verbal short-term memory.

Children were tested at the beginning of kindergarten (in October and November), and in March and April of their first grade year (Chiappe et al., 2002). Kindergarten examinations lasted about 30 minutes, and for 40 minutes in first grade. Children were separated into at risk and not at risk for reading failure groups in each category of native English speakers and ESL students.

The study (Chiappe et al., 2002) found that in kindergarten “the interaction between language group and reading skill was… significant, F(1, 831)= 2.23, p<.05, indicating that differences between At-Risk and Not-At-Risk children were greater for NS [native English speakers] than ESL children” (Ciappe et al., 2002, p. 380). In comparing the two groups, ESL children struggled more with the rhyme identification assessments, f=11.64, p<.001. Overall, there was not a huge difference between English speaking and ESL students in the ability to process phonemically in English. There were greater differences in at risk and not at risk students than the language groups in phonemic awareness.

The native speaking children performed better on oral cloze tasks (repeating deleted words) than ESL learners (f=7.71, p<.001) (Chiappe et al., 2002). Though the results were not statistically significant, English speaking students were able to use their short term memory to repeat more of a sentence than ESL students. Perhaps because they were more able to rely on syntax, they were more able to remember the sentences as more than a meaningless string of sounds, which may have been the case for students with little proficiency in English.

In first grade reading scores and pseudoword repetition, it was found that language was not a significant factor (Chiappe et al., 2002). The only thing that would predict the reading performance in first grade from kindergarten would be membership in at risk or not at risk groups. Native English speakers did perform better than ESL student on the oral cloze measure, just as they had in kindergarten. It was statistically significant, f=50.80, p<.001. The study also found that the difference between at risk and not at risk group was more for students in the ESL group. Additionally, ESL students performed worse than their counterparts on remembering and repeating sentences, though the result was not statistically significant.

Between the two grades, ESL students grew more than native speaking counterparts (f=5082, p<.05) in reading skills (Chiappe et al., 2002). The researchers note they were still slower at word retrieval, which was the test where the students were asked to say a word for an illustration.

Native speaking children scored higher on providing a missing word (oral cloze) than ESL students (f=34.04, p<.001) (Chiappe et al., 2002). The differences between ESL and native English speakers were larger in first grade than they were in kindergarten. The study also found that native English students were stronger in their short term verbal memory, but that both groups grew at a similar rate. The study found that for ESL learners, phonological skills and letter knowledge in kindergarten, but not verbal memory, were related to the ability to read and decode individual words in first grade.

The study also reports ESL students caught up to native speakers in phonological processing, but not on syntactic awareness and short term memory of words (Chiappe et al., 2002). In fact, the gap actually increased between the two assessments for ability to use English syntax, showing that ESL students did not grow as fast as native English speakers.

The researchers (Chiappe et al., 2002) cite that “ESL students were decoding at the same level as their NS peers despite differences in their oral language skills” (Ciappe et al., 2002, p. 394). The final conclusion (Chiappe et al., 2002) was that students of all language backgrounds can find success in decoding with explicit and systematic instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness.

The researchers state “these results suggest that systematic and explicit instruction in phonological awareness and phonics will benefit children from diverse language backgrounds” (Chiappe et al., 2002, p. 393). The validity of this statement could be challenged, as there was a balanced classroom approach that included other methods to teach literacy as well, which may have been more helpful in teaching students reading skills. Just because phonics was used, there were many other methods as well, and there is nothing presented to prove that the improvements were not based on the story reading, silent reading time, or other whole language activities that were said to be present in the classrooms. It could also be argued that the researchers have seemed to neglect reading comprehension in their study.  The ability to decode is important in learning to read, but it is incomplete without the ability to understand what had been read. The decision not to assess on any comprehension skills is a disappointing omission by the researchers.

There are a large number of Hispanic students in schools today that are learning English, with Spanish as their native language. Some school districts have Bilingual education programs, as did the district in the Carlisle and Beeman’s (2000) study.

Denton, Anthony, Parker and Hasbrouk, (2004) also investigated strategies that work in bilingual programs. They attempted to discover whether the Read Well or Read Naturally programs helped bilingual students in three different areas: word identification in lists, word attack (phonemic decoding), and passage comprehension.

The participants in the study were 93 students ranging from the 2^nd to the 5^th grade in five different schools in one Texas district (Denton, et al., 2004). All the students were learning English as a second language (ESL). All the participants in the study were Hispanic and spoke Spanish as their first language. Participants in the study included 48 males and 45 females. The students were in bilingual classrooms. The school used a transitional bilingual program, so in second grade the teachers used mostly Spanish as the language of instruction, and by the time the children reached 5th grade, the language of instruction was predominantly English, with instruction gradually shifting to English over the elementary years.

Students’ pretest scores on the word attack subtest of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test- Revised placed them into one of two groups (Denton, et al., 2004). These groups were emergent decoding and established decoding in English. The students were placed in matched pairs based on these test results. There was an attempt to have the pairs be from the same classroom if possible. 1 comparison/control group for Read Well and 1 for Read Naturally groups consisted of the matched pairs of students. There were 2 experimental groups that studied with either Read Well or Read Naturally. These programs were not compared with each other, but with their own comparison group. Due to attrition, nineteen of the students who finished the study were in the Read Well treatment group and fourteen were in the Read Well comparison group. Thirty-two were in the Read Naturally treatment and twenty eight were in the Read Naturally comparison.

The students in the treatment groups received tutoring with undergraduate university students using either the Read Well or Read Naturally program. They were tutored three times per week for 40 minutes each session over a ten week period. There was some individual tutoring, and some students were in small groups of two, three, or four.

Groups were formed based on scheduling constraints within the school.

The Read Well program was found to help with students’ decoding, but not with comprehension in comparison to the control group (Denton, et al., 2004). The tutoring focused on the parts of pronunciation that are different in Spanish and English, so the students could use their prior knowledge of the Spanish language to learn how the languages differed. Students who were tutored with Read Well gained 4.06 points on average in decoding. Only context free reading was improved. Word identification was the only factor that showed statistically significant gains (f=5.70, p=.023). Word attack showed a mean gain of 5.16, though the comparison group gained 2.35, and in comprehension thee mean gain for the treatment group was 1.58, only .01 more than the control group. After completing tutoring with this program, students were able to read English words in that they could pronounce them fluently, but they could not understand what they meant.

Using the Read Naturally program, there was no significant difference from the control group on any of the criteria. Word attack had a mean gain of -.22, and word identification had a mean gain of only 1.12 (comparison group gained 1.75, more than the treatment). The highest gain for this group was only a 2.13 point improvement for the treatment group on passage comprehension (the control group also improved .71 of a point on the same measure).

One problem with the internal validity of this study is that the way groups were chosen was not elaborated beyond the constraint of scheduling within the schools.

Students groups varied greatly; from six students who received one on one tutoring to groups of two, three, and four students. I would say that a student who is tutored for 40 minutes one on one will have a much greater amount of progress than a student who receives 40 minutes of instruction in a group of four. The tutor can not attend to the child’s individual needs as much in a larger group. Also, there is no information given as to the tutoring group size for the two experimental treatments. Did Read Well and Read Naturally treatments have similar student to teacher ratios? Additionally, there was no information given on what students were missing in class to participate in the treatment. Were they missing the literacy block in their classroom? This could have had an effect on why, in some instances, the control groups surpassed the treatment groups in their mean gain in scores on the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests.

De la Colina, Parker, Hasbrouck, and Lara-Alecio, (2001) also explored the use of Read Naturally on students learning to read in Spanish. Their subjects were in a school district in Texas that provided bilingual instruction for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, in an attempt to transition them into English speaking and reading. This is done out of the belief that students learn to read in a second language more easily if they are fluent in their first language.

A review of the literature showed the researchers (De la Colina et al., 2001) that aspects that improved English speaking children’s ability to read with automaticity were rereading the same passages, modeling by a teacher, and the students’ ability to monitor their own progress.

Materials from the Read Naturally program were translated for the students (De la Colina et al., 2001). The program entails students repeatedly reading the same passage, listening to tapes of the passage and reading along, and then notifying the teacher when they are ready to test.

Subjects for the study included first and second graders from four different classrooms (De la Colina et al., 2001). All students chosen had to be able to read between 30 and 60 words per minute in Spanish, or be able to read between 50 and 100 sight words to qualify for the study.

Students were split into three groups, one received instruction for a 12 week period, one received instruction for 10, and the last received instruction for only eight weeks (De la Colina et al., 2001). Each group met three days per week for 45 minutes. Small groups, mixed by engagement level as well as classroom assignment (to control for teacher affects) were formed to receive the intervention. One problem with this design may be that the groups were staggered so the first group started two weeks before the second, and in another two weeks the third group started. The researchers admit that students in the later groups may have gotten competitive and worked harder in order to catch up to the growth of their peers who started first. A way to fix this problem could be to simply start all the groups at the same time, and stop instruction for the shorter term groups earlier. Instead of starting the eight week treatment on week four, start them on week one and terminate their treatment at week eight.

Students’ engagement level was determined by the number of stories they read each week (De la Colina et al., 2001). This was not a reflection of reading level, because lower level stories were simpler and shorter, so they could be read faster. Highly engaged readers read a mean of 5.8 readings per week, and low level readers read only a mean of 2.6. These groups were both comprised of both high and low reading level groups.

Results of the study found that highly engaged students improved much more than lower engaged students, regardless of the amount of weeks they were tutored for (De la Colina et al., 2001). Two of the lowly engaged groups performed worse as the intervention went on. For the 12 week intervention, low engagement students did not have any statistically relevant improvement. The improvements that were made were somewhat modest, and could have been due to the regular classroom teaching and were similar to progress that may have occurred, even without the intervention (De la Colina et al., 2001). Ten of the 12 groups did improve over the course of the study, and those who were highly engaged improved between two and four times as much as students who were less engaged.

I find that this study (De la Colina et al., 2001) to be transferable to the extent that a student’s engagement, regardless of language, may affect their progress. I think the results are not as credible as they could be. The design was flawed by the effects of students working hard to catch up to their classmates, and the fact that the length of time intervention was received provided little difference is not explained. It is possible that floor effects in the ability of the program to help students improve caused the similarity of results among groups, and this should have been attended to.

Riccio et al. (2001) also worked with students learning to read in Spanish. They recognized the importance of phonological awareness in beginning reading acquisition, and the goal of the study was to investigate correlations between phonological awareness and Spanish and English reading ability.

Participants for the study (Riccio et al., 2001) attended three different Texas elementary schools. The school district had a bilingual education program. One hundred and forty nine participants were recruited, including 71 girls and 78 boys. All of these children were classified by their parents as Hispanic. The ages of subjects ranged from 5 to 11 years, they attended kindergarten through fifth grade. The majority (126) of the subjects were in bilingual classrooms, while 6 children moved back and forth between bilingual and English only classrooms during their day, and 17 were in classrooms conducted entirely in English.

Examiners who administered the tests to students were all bilingual (Riccio et al., 2001). Four measures were found to be especially important, and subtests from the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processes (CTOPP) were used to measure English phonological awareness in initial sound matching, ending sound matching, rhyming, and deletion. The Conciencia Fonologica en Espanol (CFE) was created by the researchers and reviewed by a panel of experts in the bilingual education field and bilingual Hispanics from different cultural groups. This test also measured the ability to distinguish and match initial and ending sounds, identify words that do and do not rhyme, and the ability to delete phonemes. Students were also asked to read a short passage for one minute in each language. The Spanish version came from Read Naturally, and a doctoral student/translator translated it into English. The report did not clarify if the students received a different passage or the same translated passage in each language.

Having the same passage would have affected the results, because whichever one the students read first, they would be familiar with the content, even if the second time it was in another language. The background knowledge is there the second time and it is easier to guess the word.

Wiencek, Cipielewski, Vazzano, and Sturken, (1998) investigated the literacy activities and teaching methods that prepared low income students for success in first grade. A morning and an afternoon group of kindergarteners were included in the study. The two classes were taught by two different teachers who shared the same classroom in a Midwestern school district. The morning class had 23 students and was mostly Caucasian, with 1 African American student, and had 1 special education student who was mainstreamed into the class. The afternoon class was attended by 21 children, and consisted of mostly Caucasian students with 2 African American students. The morning class had a majority of children who came from middle class income level families. The afternoon class was considered more low income. This socioeconomic status division was caused by bussing and children attending school with children from their own neighborhoods. No information on the gender of the students was given.

The researchers (Wiencek et al.,1998) observed the types of literacy activities going on in each class. They described these activities, the social context in which they were enacted, the presence or absence of scaffolding, and teacher and student roles. Data was collected one day a week by observations and its resulting field notes. Teacher assignments and student work were also collected. This data was collected by one of the researchers and two graduate research assistants. The study states that in several instances, the researcher and student assistant collected data at the same time to validate their observations. The report only says on several occasions data was collected simultaneously and does not give data for how often that happened or if the notes were similar when it did. This information is important for the reader to assess the validity of the observations, and it is omitted here. Quantitative research was collected by assessments of alphabet recognition, concepts of print, phonological awareness, and ability to read. The names of the assessments were not included. This information was collected by all the researchers in October and in April, at the beginning and the end of the study.

The literacy activities that occurred were often not those that emergent literacy research suggests are essential to early learning in this area (Wiencek et al.,1998). The study found that many of the literacy activities in the two classrooms were more appropriate for upper class students who had more experiences with literacy at home. Children who came from low income homes often needed more time to explore books and concepts about print, as well as work with phonemic awareness and phoneme grapheme correspondence. They found that many children had limited small group or one on one teacher interaction, and had little chance for teacher scaffolding. In this method, the teachers found that the students who demonstrated higher levels of ability at the beginning of the study (who were often children of middle income families) kept their high ability, but the students who had came in low did not catch up to these students.

They compared this to a rich get richer and poor get poorer situation, where those who can read get better at it and those who cannot find it difficult to ever catch up.

The district and teachers supported a developmentally appropriate view on early education, wherein students will learn literacy when they are ready (Wiencek et al.,1998). This approach leaves out literacy activities which are equally important in other views of literacy acquisition.  For example, emergent literacy research shows it is important to do a variety of literacy activities, including active engagement, development of phonological awareness and alphabetic awareness, and encouraging an interest in reading and books. “Developmental appropriateness is often a [sic] like a trap for lower socioeconomic children who need opportunities to explore and develop knowledge of literary concepts and written language” (Wiencek et al., 1998, p 11). Since the teachers planned together and their teaching styles were not analyzed in the results, there was little chance for comparison between the 2 classes. The design makes the ability to transfer study to other classrooms possible. Perhaps comparing one of these classrooms with one that did incorporate the Emergent Literacy principles might have been more illuminating as to strategies that work for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds.

The study (Wiencek et al.,1998) also does not address the possibility that because kindergarten is optional in this district, some of the emergent literacy skills that are taught in kindergarten in most districts may indeed be covered in first grade in this district. If children do not have to go to kindergarten, the first grade teachers probably will not expect them to know all that teachers in a district that requires kindergarten would.

To summarize, Craig et al. (2003) showed that with proper intervention, such as state funded preschools for low income students, social class should not make a difference in reading achievement. Wiencek et al. (1998) showed that many literacy activities in the kindergarten classrooms studied were more beneficial to middle income students than low income students, who need more support in exploring books and concepts about print that they might not receive at home.

Effective Methods for Teaching Hispanic Students

Carlisle and Beeman (2000) studied the effect of the language of instruction on the literacy acquisition of students for whom English was a second language. The researchers studied two first grade classrooms during successive years at the same school. Because the school was shifting its bilingual language policy from teaching mostly in English (eighty percent English and twenty percent Spanish), to mostly in Spanish(eighty percent Spanish and twenty percent English), the researchers were able to study 2 successive years of first graders, one in the predominantly English program and the next year in the predominantly Spanish program. The English Instruction (EI) group consisted of 17 children, 9 boys and 8 girls. The Spanish Instruction (SI) group had 17 children, 9 boys and 8 girls. Most of the families in both groups spoke predominantly Spanish at home, and 80% qualified for the free lunch program for low SES children.

After receiving instruction in Spanish or English, the students were evaluated on Spanish listening, Spanish reading, English listening, and English reading using subtests of the Woodcock Johnson Psycho Educational Battery in Spanish and English and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Carlisle & Beeman, 2000). There were also nonstandard measures to assess listening and reading comprehension and writing skills. The researchers also used literature in Spanish and in English by the same author, then used a short multiple choice and fill in the blank test to assess comprehension.

For the EI class, English listening was significantly correlated with Spanish listening (r=.53, p<.05), but English and Spanish reading were not significantly related (r=.26) (Carlisle & Beeman, 2000). For the SI class, the correlations were not significant (p=.35 for English and Spanish listening, p=.16 for English and Spanish reading). The SI class was as strong as the EI class on measures of English reading and writing but was significantly stronger for measures of Spanish reading and writing. The researchers found that instruction in Spanish made a significant contribution to the development of Spanish reading comprehension (Carlisle & Beeman, 2000, p.346).

The EI students performed better in the oral language of their language of instruction, but this did not transfer to written language (Carlisle & Beeman, 2000). The hypothesis was that the children taught in English did not develop strong reading skills. The study did not share a reason for the differences in reading skills, simply stating that if they could not decode the words, comprehension strategies were useless. The study did not address the possibility that if children did not know English well, decoding words would not make a difference if the child did not know them in the first place, or that when learning a new language, oral language comprehension comes before writing.

Since the children did not get writing instruction in the language they already knew, their development in this area may have been suspended until they gained proficiency in English enough to comprehend the written part. Children who learned to read in Spanish did not have this hurdle to overcome in their reading development, and were able to start decoding familiar words earlier. There was no significant difference between SI and EI for English writing, but in Spanish writing, the SI group performed better than the EI group.

The study lacks reliability in that there were different teachers teaching the SI and EI groups. This may have impacted students’ abilities, even more than the language of instruction. A teacher’s approach, expectations, abilities, and influence could have been enough to affect the results given the small sample. Perhaps if the study was expanded to have many teachers for Spanish and English instruction, that would be less of a factor.

But with only two classrooms, a lot of the difference could be attributed to the effect of the teacher. There was more than one variable in this case, not just the language of instruction, but also the purveyor of instruction.