Raylene Park

Welcome to the EAL/D Conversations podcast. My name is Raylene Park. I'm the EAL/D Education Advisor for K- 6 with the NSW Department of Education. Today, I'm joined by Luke Nolan, EAL/D Education Leader. Welcome, Luke.

Luke Nolan

Thanks Raylene. Great to be here.

Raylene Park

Today, we're going to be talking about reading guides and how this can be effective for EAL/D learners. Could you please explain what are reading guides and why they can be so effective, especially for EAL/D learners?

Luke Nolan

So a reading guide is a structured set of prompts that guide students engagement with the text. Now they can be used across subjects in high school, primary school and intensive English centres. Anytime you're reading a text with students in any subject.

There are benefits to reading guides for all students, but especially for those learning English as an additional or other language. These benefits include providing a clear purpose for reading and rereading a text. When they're designed well, they can include tiered differentiation supporting students at different levels of ability and they can also use explicit the explicit teaching strategy of chunking and sequencing is a good one to connect with because it's a way of breaking up information and presenting it to students in a scaffolded sequence in manageable parts, but I think one of the most important benefits of three level guides, especially for EAL/D learners, is that they can make thinking visible and scaffold rich talk around the text and we know how important oral language and dialogic pedagogy are for EAL/D learners. So using a three level guide can provide a context for the teacher to apprentice students into academic ways of thinking and communicating about a text.

Raylene Park

Thanks, Luke, that really highlights the power of reading guides, particularly for EAL/D learners. Building on that idea of making thinking visible and setting a clear purpose for reading, how can teachers effectively design and use an anticipation guide in their classrooms?

Luke Nolan

So an anticipation guide is a small number of statements you probably want about five or six statements that the teacher provides to students before reading the text. Students discuss their opinions and their responses to these statements before reading and then after reading, they revisit those statements as a stimulus for further discussion. So like I said, when you're designing, you want a small number of statements about key concepts from the text you want to focus on quality rather than quantity.

A good statement is written in an accessible way, ideally connected to a student's background knowledge and therefore engaging and linked to key concepts. So that's where you need to look for in your syllabus, outcomes and content. What are the essential ideas that you're connecting with and good statements are best when they are thought provoking. So you were looking for statements that are counterintuitive, that might challenge assumptions or address common misconceptions about a topic.

So I've spoken about how to design an anticipation guide once you've designed your guide, when you use the anticipation guide, you want to think about structuring this as a before, during and after reading activity. Before reading, students will discuss the statements with the partner. So this is sort of provides some similar benefits to a think pair share and they will talk about any differences of opinion and if you ask students at this point to reach a consensus on the statements, that can be a good thing to do because you're promoting them thinking and negotiating meaning between each other. So this stage provides a context for students to verbalise their reasoning, give justification, and engage with some concepts and vocabulary from the text before they actually do any readings. So this can be part of your building the field. You might have already done activities like this as a kind of opinion gap, and in that sense when the students are discussing their statements, there's a really authentic context for agreeing and disagreeing with each other, building on each other's ideas and like I said, supporting as supporting their own opinions with justification. These are all aspects of communication that you might need to explicitly model and guide the students in.

Now, after reading the text, students revisit the statements and review their responses. So this is where you really model and support deliberate, intentional rereading for a specific purpose to look for, highlight evidence that can
confrim or challenges responses, and then to use that to support discussion. And you're thinking about what new insights came out of this reading, how students opinions may have changed and how they reflect on that information and use it. And this is a good stage at which to support students metacognition or their awareness of their own thinking about their thinking as they read, have they changed their minds based on evidence? Have they rethought some assumptions that may have been challenged and how are they really interacting with that reading?

Raylene Park

That’s really helpful, especially the way anticipation guides support purposeful rereading, discussion, and metacognition. You’ve explained how teachers can activate thinking before students read. Building on that, how can teachers design and use a three-level reading guide to support students’ thinking during and after reading?

Luke Nolan

So three level reading guide is similar to an anticipation guide in the sense that you're looking at a series of statements that you can use before after reading, and to support intentional rereading for a purpose.

So the difference is that you're providing statements at three levels, literal, inferential and applied. You may be familiar with other terms here, for example here, hidden and head and there are various other words used for the applied level such as are interpretive or analytical. In any case, you're thinking about three levels where literal is locating information directly in the text. Inferential is making connections within the text, and with background knowledge. And applied is using higher order thinking generalising, analysing, evaluating, taking a critical stance and using the information from the text.

So when we design a three level guide, the first step is to analyse the text to identify the ideas connected with syllabus outcomes and concepts. This is really important to ensure that you're starting with that high challenge and then designing in high support.

Then you want to write your statements, so start by writing a small number of applied higher order true false statements. It's important to do this first in order to identify the essential ideas and really focus on those for the task, and this is where there's often a real benefit when working with a co teaching partnership and using this as something that you might do in co-planning. Because the constraint of crafting a limited number of statements can really help you to identify key ideas and develop teacher clarity in terms of learning goals. So after writing your applied level statements, write your literal and inferential level statements.

And the trick here is to make sure that those three levels are interconnected, so the information from the literal level should support the inferences and the information from the inferences should support the applied level and this is where it's a real light bulb moment I think sometimes. Because when we teach literal comprehension, it is often most effective if that is done with a thought to how that information is going to be used for inference and analysis.

So having that connection between the three levels will scaffold the students and it will support you as a teacher in making visible the ways that information is used and put together to make inferences. And then used for higher order thinking. So when you're writing the statements, you don't want to be stuck in following a strict order. You can go back and forth between those three levels. You may need to redesign statements at an earlier level, then move back and forth. Just remember that a key design role here is to make sure that the statements are interconnected and as far as possible, design your statements so that they're in accessible language.

So I've spoken about designing a three level guide. Once your guide's ready to use, think about using this as part of a reading sequence of learning, so do what you would normally do in terms of building the field, orienting students to the text.

And using any other activities before, during and after reading. When you do use the guide, support students to read the statements and explain the three levels of meaning you need to be explicit about that and what students are doing, because that's one of the real benefits in terms of making the thinking processes and the reading skills and strategies explicit.

So you want to read the text together, model how to respond to the statements, demonstrate how to read the statement, how to locate information in the text. You may wish to highlight or annotate the information and how to use evidence from the text to justify your response.

So students after reading will reread the text and they will mark each statement as true or false and highlight information that supports the answers. Now it's important to remember that this follows similar guidelines to the anticipation guide in terms of being a very useful resource to scaffold, group paired and small group work by the students to communicate together before, during and after reading the text.

So after reading, students discuss their responses. You might structure that as a partner talk first, then a small group, and then a teacher led class discussion. And at each stage it can be useful to ask groups to reach a consensus supported by evidence from the text. And this puts a little this instruction to reach a consensus puts a little bit of constructive pressure on students to clarify their thinking and communicate and negotiate effectively with each other.

So I just want to also at this point talk a little bit more about the three levels and why that's a useful way to think when we design for EAL/D learners. So this way of designing connects to what we know about explicit teaching for EAL/D learners and the importance of using effective questioning based on where students are at in their English language proficiency.

One key benefit of the three level guide is that provides for very intentional support of literal comprehension, while also scaffolding higher order thinking. And this helps us to address one of our biggest challenges as teachers when teaching reading, which is that of course students are at a vastly different often levels of proficiency in breeding and in English language. Now the ACARA EAL/D overview and advice tells us that EAL/D students in beginning and emerging phases should start with literal questions supported by visuals and students in developing and consolidating should have a strong literal understanding before moving on to inferential questions. However, curriculum demands often require inferential comprehension and higher order thinking, so this puts us in a bit of a challenging situation. How do we support students when they're not at the stage.

They can independently make inferences because they are still working at the literal level. And the answer to that, of course, is scaffolding with awareness of where the students are at and modelling and guiding for the students, using dialogue to make our thinking visible, or in other words, thinking aloud together with the students as we engage with the text.

So this supports students who are making inferences already, as they can engage with and give extended contributions with the levels 2 and 3 but it also supports students who are working on the literal comprehension level because they are supported with the literal information and they are being gradually prentices into those ways of reading and thinking at the higher levels. And just a little more on literal comprehension. So we don't want to underestimate how challenging literal comprehension can be. If we think about Scarborough reading rope, for example, literal comprehension requires coordination of knowledge, including vocabulary, background, knowledge, language structures and literacy knowledge. So it's definitely not just literal comprehension, it is complex, and it's often not easy for students and designing effective support for literal comprehension requires careful thought. As EAL/D specialists, I'm sure this is something that everyone is nodding the head to and it's something that is very essential, and especially for those beginning and emerging phase students. Another point on this is that the lines between those 3 levels are not always strictly defined, and it really depends on the learner. So a given statement or question might be literal for one student, but for a different student if they don't have the vocabulary or background knowledge, the question might require them to make some inferences. So keep that in mind, but still, we're designing at those three levels.

Raylene Park

That makes a lot of sense, especially the way the three levels allow teachers to balance high challenge with high support. So thinking about the reality of classrooms, how can teachers adapt these guides across different contexts to meet the diverse needs of their students?

Luke Nolan

So like I said earlier this these strategies have benefits for all students. So when we consider how we design and use this for all students, remember to always ensure that students have sufficient background knowledge to comprehend and engage with the statements and with the text. And like I said, combine this activity with other prereading activities to build the field. You want to use the modelling and guiding of each step. So like I said before as well, make thinking make the strategies very clear by thinking aloud and remember to use gradual release of responsibility so students gradually develop more independence. Use varied, purposeful groupings you might need to provide more or less support for collaboration and communication between students and provide plenty of contingent scaffolding. Something to think about is combining these strategies with other strategies. For example, you could create a jigsaw rating or expert groups activity where each expert group learns about a different subtopic and they engage with their own three level guide to do that. I've found this quite successful myself. And when you do that, you can use the benefits of the jigsaw reading or expert group activity to provide some students with differentiated texts or with more or less targeted contingent scaffolding.

Now also think about the potential of these activities in terms of building towards writing, and that's where we would go into a different topic and think about using notes from these responses to scaffold joint constructions. Now for EAL/D learners, you can vary the text that you use. Of course we don't need to think about this as just reading from the page. We can design three level visual response guides responding to a visual text might be a spoken text that they're responding to. So think about the different modes include message abundancy of course, and think about possibly providing adapted or differentiated texts. You could vary the length of the text, obviously, and it's always a good idea to think about how you might leverage students home language when discussing and formulating the ideas, and there's plenty of opportunity in those group discussion stages of this activity. Now if you're working with earlier years in primary and or you're working with students who are not going to be able to read the statements themselves or that will be too much load for them. You could still use this as a way of designing your own think aloud that you might use to accompany a joint reading and then deliver the questions orally.

If you have students who require extension, you have high potential gifted students, or you just want to provide some students with an extension. You could ask students to create their own three level statements and I think that would be a really powerful formative assessment opportunity and it would really help you to see students, real depth of understanding of those different levels of comprehension.

Raylene Park

My last question for today's episode is where can teachers find out more information?

Luke Nolan

So for anticipation guides, a good place to start might be Reading Rockets, which has a good web page on anticipation guides. There are some templates and videos and examples from primary school. It's not EAL/D specific, but has some quite illustrative examples and is worth a look, even though it's for primary school, the same principles of design would apply for high school as well. For more of a high school example, check out the. New Zealand Ministry of Education English as a second or other language reading strategies web page.

There's a good explanation with a video showing three level guides in action, used with a senior class. Now in terms of building your own understanding or supporting ongoing professional learning of others you work with. With the EAL/D pedagogy that really connects with these strategies, I'd recommend looking at the Department of Education, Multicultural Education Web page. And there are some excellent resources there for building understanding of related concepts that I've referred to today. So you could take a look at the EAL/D pedagogy guides, including the ones on designed in scaffolding, building the field message abundancy, and the mode continuum. And you could look at the advice on explicit teaching for teachers of EAL/D learners or the EAL/D elaborations to the reading rope.

Raylene Park

That's great. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and expertise around reading guides. I'm sure teachers of EAL/D learners will appreciate this and we hope it sparks further reflection and conversation in schools. Thanks again for joining us today.

Luke Nolan

Thanks very much. It was a pleasure.