Take-Aways from Puebla

My Puebla institute ended on Friday night with mariachis and way too much food, but I am still tingling with the excitement of a week with such wonderful people and a refreshing combination of research and humanity.

Not-quite-complete group photo of institute participants.

Of the research we read and heard about in our program sessions, I want to share three main take-aways:

1) Classification of "struggling readers." This was an article that Kathy Escamilla published with Susan Hopewell. First of all, I love how the staff of the Literacy Squared program use the term "emerging bilingual" instead of "English language learner," thereby normalizing bilingualism/biliteracy as an end goal instead of English proficiency. The article critiques the method of comparing emerging bilingual students against their monolingual peers when identifying struggling readers. This faulty identification leads to huge numbers of emerging bilinguals to be classified as low-performing and targeted for English reading interventions that can waste money and unnecessarily worry parents.

2) Phonemic awareness instruction. Compared to English, Spanish has what is known as a "transparent orthography." This means that letters generally only produce one sound and vice versa, although there are some exceptions. In the US, we dedicate a lot of instructional time, especially in the early grades, to the explicit instruction of phonemic awareness, the ability to break words into small sound parts or phonemes. In Mexico, teachers spend more time on writing and reading comprehension and generally do not teach phonemic awareness. In dual language schools, however, there is a big push to have parallel structures in English and Spanish instruction, so Spanish teachers frequently end up teaching phonemic awareness. This article suggests that students will actually transfer their phonemic awareness abilities from English to Spanish, so Spanish teachers' time would be better spent working on other skills.

3) Writing. Dr. Sandra Butivilofsky led two session on biliterate writing trajectories in which got to analyze writing samples from a student in English and Spanish throughout her 5 years in elementary school. We saw how students - especially in early stages of writing development - tend implement the same strategies across languages. She shared new research about the effects of first language reading and writing skills on second language literacy. We also tried out a rubric for analyzing how students elements of one language were reflected in the other in students' writing at a word, sentence, and discourse level. It was by far my favorite session, but I'm still trying to process all the new information.

4th grade team - our group of program participants and local teachers