Kate Harris

Welcome to the conversations podcast. My name is Kate Harris, and I am the EAL/D Education Advisor for K to 6 with the New South Wales Department of Education. Today I am joined by Luke Nolan, and Luke is one of the EAL/D education leaders working in Metropolitan South and West Operational Directorate. Welcome, Luke.

Luke Nolan

Thanks, Kate. Great to be here.

Kate Harris

I'm really excited to talk to you today about reading, because reading is quite a complex process for any student and particularly for our EAL/D learners, as they're learning to read in a language that might not be their native tongue. So can you tell me, what do we know about learning to read in an additional language?

Luke Nolan

Great question, Kate. So going back to a word you used reading is complex. So it's a combination of skills and strategies, and it's more than just comprehending meaning from text. It includes not only decoding but understanding the concepts, making connections between the text and your prior knowledge and the world, knowing how to use the information and being critically aware as well at the same time. So it's not just cognitive, its cultural and social as well. Now there's a couple of good models of reading up on the Department of Education, Literacy and Numeracy website. The first is the simple view, and that one is exactly what it sounds like. It's simple but very useful. Simple view breaks reading down into two parts and says that reading is made up of language comprehension, which you can think of that as being like listening, speaking and listening comprehension, comprehension of oral language. And that's how they usually assess that and decoding. So that's a sight word recognition and breaking the code of the print. There's also Scarborough’s reading rope, which breaks those two down into a bit more detail, language, comprehension and decoding. So language comprehension can be seen as made up of background knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, language structures, verbal reasoning and literacy knowledge. Now a lot of those things are developed in us as English as a first language readers before we come to the written text. So that's something that's important to understand in terms of starting point for reading a bit later on. There's also decoding made up of phonological awareness, decoding spelling sight recognition. So they're the two models we have of reading for everyone as far as reading for students who are EAL/D students.

It's even more complex because these students are coming with linguistic resources from already knowing at least one language. Now that can be, in some cases, a hindrance to them because they might have different language systems in their first language and, for example, pronoun referencing and articles and verb tenses might be difficult to learn in English because of that, that's a field called interference. But the exciting thing for us to think about, I think, is this phenomenon of transfer. So transfer is when students draw on their knowledge and experiences from their first language to help them read in English. And that can take place if they have some reading experience in their first language, which not always the case, but it's important to find this out about the students so they can transfer skills such as prediction, monitoring the understanding of a text, understanding that characters and sounds are connected together so all of those things don't necessarily happen automatically. But there is definitely evidence showing that those skills can transfer from their first language to English. Now, the other thing to remember about the EAL/D students with their reading is that they have two languages working at the same time when they read, so their home language never completely switches off. They will get faster and more fluent as they get more exposure to text. But what they're doing essentially is reading using a two-language processing system. So this affects their reading rate, their word recognition, their speed of syntactic processing, which is working out the grammar of sentences. And their comprehension is all going to needs, especially for students at the beginning and emerging phases. They're going to need a bit more time to engage with reading activities.

Kate Harris

And I guess Luke that makes sense because if they're taking in the words in English and they're thinking about them, they might be transferring it into their home language, trying to make meaning out of it there and then link that meaning back to English before they then produce something. And so it would take that additional time, particularly for those beginning and emerging students.

Luke Nolan

Yeah that's right, Kate, and that's a really good way to put it. And what you just explained that process of working with the two languages at the same time actually leads to one of the other benefits we can think about, which is that EAL/D students sometimes can have higher levels of meta cognitive and meta linguistic awareness, so because they are engaged in that process of dealing with the two languages at the same time, they may have a higher level of consciousness of how they learn to read, of what works for them and how to deal with comprehension processes and comprehension problems. And they can sometimes have to deal with language in a way that's more explicit. So they might be use to that and they might have that as an advantage that you can draw on as a teacher. Now the other thing that I think a lot of people would often think of first as a feature of EAL/D reading is that they obviously have very different starting points to students who are not EAL/D. So as we know, EAL/D students can enter the schooling system anywhere along the line, just even thinking about kindergarten students. So a kindergarten student who is not EAL/D will have typically a vocabulary of about 5000 or so words that they've experienced over the course of five years, four or five years. And they have all of these language structures and vocabulary internalised. So it's sort of implicit knowledge that I don't really need to think about, but they can use it automatically. And for EAL/D students, they don't have to, they don't have that resource, and depending on what year they enter, that gap of four or 5000 words might be even larger. So that's something we have to give thought to when we're teaching EAL/D students and helping them. They definitely need a really strong focus on vocabulary just tier two and tier three vocabulary, obviously for academic purposes. But they also often need support with tier one words as well.

Kate Harris

And I think that's a really important point that you raise Luke because often these students may have a whole lot of vocabulary in their home language. But when they're learning English, they do have those different starting points and being able to support them to create those links between home language and English so that they can then become more proficient readers in English is a really important thing that teachers need to be able to support students to do.

Luke Nolan

Yeah, definitely, definitely and that's what I would always say as the first consideration for EAL/D students for teaching them. If you're thinking about how to make that effective, think about using the home language as a resource because they may already have an understanding of the content concepts you're trying to teach. And they've already got a lot of vocabulary and language experience in their first language, and tapping into that is really important. It can be a powerful resource for their learning.

Kate Harris

So following on and thinking about teaching, what would effective reading instruction look like for our EAL/D learners?

Luke Nolan

Okay, so effective reading instruction falls under the umbrella of effective EAL/D instruction in general. Now that needs to be responsive. So you've got to be basing what you're doing on a good understanding of the students and their backgrounds, and where they come from, you've got to be giving education that's high challenge and high support. Really, for it to be engaging for them, it has to be socially and cognitively appropriate. I've found that students respond really well when you find just the right thing for them that interests them and leads to them being motivated in reading. Now that's really important and motivation aspect, and it comes from being challenged and having your ability levels recognised and what you really want to aim for is having the students reading extensively, independently. So in order to do that you've got to motivate them and that's why high challenge is support. But it's important but at the same time you'll need the highest support because of the reasons we've discussed about the differences in the languages. Now the other thing you need to do is use oral language, build that up as much as possible and use talking to learn and support EAL/D reading programs in schools with professional development are led by EAL/D specialists who really have this specialised knowledge in all of the things we're talking about today, plus more in terms of the language structures, the pedagogy and how to teach EAL/D students. Now what it all comes down to, if you want your students reading results to improve, you need to ask your students to read a lot. They need to read often and they need to read for well-defined purposes, so that includes scaffolded reading in class, rereading texts to build fluency and extensive reading or wide reading, like I mentioned.

Students should enjoy reading, so it's up to us to engineer that. And we also really need to give very careful consideration to the texts that we select. So what this comes down to at one level is vocabulary. Now we can think about this idea of coverage. Text coverage means the amount of vocabulary that you need to know in order to comprehend the text comfortably and that is pretty much agreed upon by most researchers is about 98%. So if you think about that, what it means is that to understand a text independently and therefore to enjoy it and get something out of it for independent reading, you need to know maybe there'll be one or two words out of 50 words that you don't understand. So really having an effective way of assessing this and then determining texts that are right reading level for students is important. When we work with students with reading, we also need to engage in what's called deliberate practise, and that takes place when students understand what their aims are and focus on practising their skills to a point of mastery. And the aim of practise when you're working with reading is to develop automaticity in the skill. So you want the students to understand exactly what they need to be doing, what the strategy is, what the skills are that they're employing and whether they are on the right track. And that comes down to effective formative feedback as well. Now there's two more points that I would say are really important for supporting EAL/D learners with reading. One is to develop them as strategic readers, and that means they need to be aware of how they're using strategies for a purpose to address different challenges that they come across.

Now we're going to a bit more depth about this in a moment, but it's more useful to think about developing strategic readers than about teaching the strategies themselves. So a strategic reader needs to be someone who can choose the appropriate strategy to address a challenge that they come across, not someone who knows just one or two strategies.

Kate Harris

And I think that's a really great point that you've made there Luke because we can teach students a whole lot of strategies, but it's the next step of them knowing when to use those strategies to be able to overcome those problems, which actually makes them better readers.

Luke Nolan

Yeah, that's right they need to be flexible and adaptable, and so they're choosing from a toolkit. And that's what we do as confident, non EAL/D readers. Well, I can speak for myself there, but we do this sometimes, not even consciously we'll select a number of different strategies for a reading purpose. But for EAL/D students, these things need to be made explicit. Now something that's a fundamental to teaching strategies is that you need to remember, fluency and comprehension really go hand in hand. So it's no use teaching strategies with texts that are beyond the student's ability level to comprehend sufficiently. So we really need to work on literal comprehension and fluency and then choose texts that are challenging but just at the right level of challenge. The last point is that for EAL/D students, you need to really think about structuring your lessons around a pre, during and post reading framework. So think about before reading, activating the background knowledge or activating their scheme we could call it, and that will help them to understand the text because they can use that then consciously themselves as a deliberate strategy later on when they're working independently. But when you're working with the whole group, what you want to do is build a shared field of knowledge that you can draw upon as you're reading the text so that things will make sense for the students. Now, while you're reading, you want to make sure that you're using some thinking aloud strategies. And that really puts you in the position of being the expert who is aware of the way that we read and is able to articulate that and make that clear and explicit for the students so that they can use that as a model and then gradually become independent users of those strategies.

So part of that involves naming the particular strategies that you're using could be as simple as when you're reading something together, saying, Oh, look, I got to the end of this sentence, but I'm not sure if I understood this word and just backtracking, and then you're just showing that you're monitoring your comprehension, you’re thinking about the fact that you didn't understand something, then you're using some strategies to fix it up. That's kind of a really simple example, but that's the sort of thing that we need to do is think about the processes that are going on in our own heads and make that, make that clear for the students. After reading you want to be using, it depends on the purpose that you're reading for. But some strategies can include things like summarising, using graphic organisers, rereading the text for different purposes and that's where you get a lot of good recycling of the vocabulary.

Kate Harris

You just shared with us lots of really interesting ways to ensure that the reading instruction for EAL/D students would be effective and something that you touched on there was helping students to become strategic readers, and you've mentioned a few things that we can do. But is there anything else that we can do to be able to help our students to become strategic readers?

Luke Nolan

Yeah, definitely. So first it's important to be clear about what's a strategy and how that's different from other things, like skills for example. So before when I talked about the simple view of reading, ah, and the reading rope, a lot of those were skills. Skills are things that are typically pretty automatic, like word recognition for example it can be considered a skill. Strategies are ways that we, procedures that readers used to help understand text. So for skilled readers, strategies can often become automatic, and we can use different strategies for different purposes without even thinking about it. And like I said before, it's about being flexible and coordinating different strategies together efficiently in a context. Now, strategies can be as simple as something like skipping a word that we don't understand. So if I get to a word I don't understand, it's not a big deal. I'll just keep going. And later on, I'll look it up if I need to. But otherwise, knowing that that information is not going to be, like what I've done is quickly evaluated how important is it for me to understand this word? If it's not, I'll move on, right so that that's the kind of executive function of making this split-second evaluative decision on the importance of something and knowing that you don't need to understand every single word. So that's one simple strategy that I'm sure everyone uses. Other strategies might include rereading to get the gist of a meeting or mentally summarising a story. If you read something funny in the news and you want to tell your friends later, you might just quickly summarise that in your head.

You might have heard of other strategies by sort of more formal terms, such as previewing and predicting, connecting to background knowledge, evaluating text structure, visualising, inferencing, monitoring, generating and answering questions, identifying main ideas, supporting detail summarising. Okay, the list goes on. You might be familiar with the Super Six, so I know that's popular in primary schools as a way of codifying some of those strategies, and they're all definitely good things to keep in mind. But it's not like there's a finite list of strategies, an example that I read recently of how strategies are used that's worth thinking about is for newspapers. So imagine reading a newspaper or the news online. It's probably more likely in these times, so you'd read the front page, and when you read the front page, you're skimming and using some general comprehension strategies you might be searching for keywords for a particular story. If you find that there's an interesting story for you, you might quickly check the length of the article, read a few paragraphs for comprehension, skim the remainder of the article and make a mental summary of important parts. So I've just given a quick explanation of someone who's used about five or six different strategies in an informal situation to achieve this overall purpose. If you're reading for a different purpose, for example if you were checking your social media feed or you were trying to learn something new from a textbook that was technical and unfamiliar. You'd use a different set of strategies. So, really, that goes back to when you're teaching strategies, being really clear about the purpose of the strategy and the context in which you're using it, and why that strategy is appropriate and they're conversations that you need to have with the students in order to build up their self-regulation and their independence in using this.

Kate Harris

I think those conversations with students are really important because that's how they understand the why and the purpose, whereas if you're just showing them strategies but not unpacking why they are the most effective or could be the most useful in particular situations that's where you're missing that next step in the learning.

Luke Nolan

Yeah, yeah definitely. And that really um, when you start applying the strategies together in small group settings, so you're getting the students to work collaboratively. They can then look at a reading task together and identify and reach a consensus on the strategies that may be most appropriate for that task and then justify them. And that's a really good way of building, um, like we said before their flexibility, their meta cognitive awareness and so that they can then later do that independently and structuring that all in a way so it's supported with oral language. Now the teaching of strategies has some really good support from the research. In the podcast description we'll have a few links that you can explore later on if you're interested in about a bit more detail about some of this, so there's quite a lot of evidence that there are large effect sizes of strategy instruction in relation to improving reading comprehension. That's something that's important to know first off. These benefits for comprehension can be seen fairly quickly with short periods of explicit instruction and longer or more intensive strategy instruction does not necessarily lead to better results, but obviously this depends on the context. There's no magic strategy, and it's better to teach a number of strategies and engage in what we were talking about before getting the students to think about using them flexibly than it is to teach just one strategy or strategies end like this rigid lock step structure. So multiple strategy instruction is better. And like I said before, there's a certain minimum level of fluency that's required for strategy instruction to be effective.

So if you're working with students who really need to have their literal comprehension and fluency developed, you need to attend to that before you're going to find any benefits from strategy instruction. One of the ways you can do that if you're working with a curriculum text that you need to work with and it's beyond the levels of the students is through preparing them to read it and scaffolding the text and using multiple readings and message abundance to build their understanding of the concepts and their familiarity with the context concepts in the text and the language. So after you've read it a few times and you've done a lot of scaffolding, even a very challenging text, you can bring it to the point where you can apply strategies to it. Here are a few tips for teaching strategies effectively, so first of all, you should always have a clear purpose for learning in anything but particularly when you're teaching reading strategies. So when we read, we always read for a purpose. Often a number of different purposes and research around quality EAL/D emphasises the importance of a clear purpose for learning. You always need to make sure the students know what's the purpose for reading the text. What strategies will we use? So you need to name the strategies and why are these strategies appropriate for this purpose? So that's quite a high order, and to begin with, you're going to need to model that, but eventually you want to have the handover and students taking that up independently. The second tip is to use challenging texts, so strategy instruction is not so useful when you're working with texts that are too easy simply because in order for a strategy to be meaningful the text has to present a significant challenge that necessitates the strategy.

So something that I'm most familiar with from my background is working with stage six students preparing them in English EAL/D for sitting the HSC examination in English. Now that's a really very, very challenging task when they have to respond to unseen texts in paper one, and they have to read text that are out of context and connect it to some of their background knowledge. But often they're not aware of a lot of the context that the text has been pulled from. So working with those students really requires drilling in particular strategies such as identifying text structure, activating background knowledge, using mnemonics to memorise different ways of applying strategies. And that's all going back to the idea of challenging texts. Now they're, they're very, very challenging texts. A third tip for teaching strategies is teach explicitly. For some students, see for example, I never remember I don't remember ever being taught reading strategies at school. Maybe I was, but I just forgot. But I don't think it was a feature of my schooling but still going back to the newspaper example. They're all things that I do automatically and when I read that I thought, yes actually I do all those things, I preview, predict, summarise, skim. Um and I suspect a lot of us would deploy them automatically and have developed them incidentally. For EAL/D students, the strategies need to be taught explicitly, so you need to model them, you need to name them, and you need to provide multiple opportunities for students to practise them as well. And the final point under teach explicitly is really you need to discuss with the students what the justification is for using a strategy and why it's appropriate for the context, so that discussion is an opportunity to use oral language.

You need to have a really rich oral language programme to support reading for EAL/D students and having students working in pairs or groups. Or there's a way of using a way of combining strategy instruction called reciprocal teaching uh, in which students combine, they work in groups and they combine clarification, summarization, prediction, question generation together. Last but not least on my list of tips for developing strategic readers is you have to be using formative assessment all the way along making sure you're teaching is responsive and planning for handover. So you want to be using assessment as learning and having the students identify the strategies and assess their own ability for using those strategies. And that's going back to that idea of developing their meta cognitive skills from earlier. And you want the students to become self-regulating and meta cognitively aware. What you want to be doing is constantly ensuring that you're aware of what level of students are working at and how to scaffold for them. To sum up I’ll just go through those main points again. So always have a clear purpose for learning for the strategies and for reading. Use challenging texts, teach explicitly, use oral language and use formative assessment and plan for handover. And they are some good tips for teaching students to become strategic readers, not just teaching strategies. That's the key takeaway there.

Kate Harris

It's a great set of tips that you provided us with today, Luke. If people want to find out more, where could they go?

Luke Nolan

If you are only going to look up one thing, the most important and useful, I would say, would be the new South Wales Centre for Effective Reading Comprehension Handbook. That's fantastic. It includes a lot of connection to theory, and it's very practical and includes a lot of resources and advice. You can also find the Department of Education, literacy, numeracy, improving reading comprehension documents. And if you really want to go into detail about EAL/D reading, there's a book recently republished by William Grade called Teaching and Researching Reading. There are plenty of other things out there, but they are some of the ones that I've engaged with recently and found quite worthwhile.

Kate Harris

Thanks so much, Luke. I think you've given us a lot to think about. I think you've also reinforced what we said at the beginning that reading is a complex process and there's so many different parts to it. But it is very important that we think about how it is that we're teaching our EAL/D students to read and making sure that we're aiming to make them become strategic readers and those tips that you provided, I'm sure lots of teachers will find really helpful. So thank you for joining me today.

Luke Nolan

It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Kate Harris

And thanks everyone for listening to the EAL/D conversations podcast.

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