In this journal I have been asked how I support the learning of reading and writing in my classes.  Although this is the main focus of most of our ESOL classes, I must admit I had to think a while to figure out the answer to this question for myself.  As I have explained in earlier journals, in H. County, we have an ESOL curriculum, but it is a little out of date and teachers generally don’t pay much attention to it.  Even though I have personally read it, I cannot easily quote from it to answer this question.  I can name some of the standards it offers, but I cannot easily explain how it proposes we teach reading and writing.

            Our county has certain standards regarding literacy learning.  For example, it says that students in ESOL I and II must learn to be able to employ reading strategies such as skimming and scanning.  It says that they must be able to identify main ideas.  They must be able to write brief constructed responses (paragraphs) and extended constructed responses (essays).  I could continue, but I don’t think that it would really answer the question.  Those are goals that relate to literacy, but how do the teachers support those goals?

My impression is that every ESOL teacher in my school is working in their own way to support those goals, and occasionally meeting to confer on how to teach literacy to our ESOL students.  It is not necessarily a sign of disorganization that they don’t all confer on one unified and explicit plan.  In each class, and in each individual case or student, each individual teacher must often figure out what is best.  Often, what is best in one situation is not best in another.  ESOL teaching involves a great deal of interactive decision making.  Having one central plan dictated to us all would not necessarily help make us more effective.  Most of the teachers in my school, including myself, seem to feel that it is in everybody’s best interest that we make our instructional decisions for ourselves.  This is not to say that each teacher acts in a vacuum however.  We all spend a great deal of time discussing our problems, situations, choices, and results, often even asking each other for advice or even agreeing to coordinate our actions. 

            Perhaps that main reason why it is so difficult to create some standard curriculum or even a standard approach all teachers can follow is that our students often come to us with varying literacy levels.  In fact, we sometimes have students who speak very fluently but cannot read or write at all.  In other cases, we have students who can read and write well but cannot speak or listen well.  Each of these situations calls for different approaches.  Let me not forget to mention the importance of taking into account each student’s cultural and language background, educational background, learning styles, interests, needs, and abilities.  Accommodating such a heterogeneous group of learners calls for a flexible approach to instruction that tries to give something to everyone. 

Firstly, the many students who lag far behind others in literacy have to be taken care of.  Strangely enough, these students are not always newcomers, in fact, we have had some marginally literate students who had spent as much as two years in American public schools before coming to us and beginning to learn reading and writing.  This is best illustrated by the example of Alberto.  Although he spent two years in Miami public schools, he can only use capital letters when he writes and sometimes doesn’t even recognize certain lower case letters when he’s reading.  Alberto, like many of my students, has very strong speaking skills and is very evasive during instruction, probably because he feels embarrassed about his lack of literacy skills.  There are different cases however.  For example, some of these marginally literate students are actually not ESL learners at all but are actually World English speakers (e.g. English speakers of Englishes native to countries such as Jamaica or Cameroon).  In other cases, they are learning disabled students who haven’t gotten the attention they needed because they ESOL. 

Students such as these, who lag very far behind, are often given special time with an instructional assistant who helps them.  I am very fortunate to have two excellent instructional assistants (I often suspect that they teach better than I do).  This type of support is so indispensable.  Having instructional assistants who give special, one-on-one instruction to these special cases while I teach the rest takes a lot of the pressure off me to accommodate every possible literacy level at once.  Furthermore, since my class focuses on reading and writing so much, it is probably better that they receive individualized instruction that better meets their needs, than to be placed in a course that is so far beyond them that they get very little out of it. 

This individualized instruction is especially important for speakers of World Englishes and for learning disabled students.  When speakers of World Englishes are treated as if they are learning English for the first time and producing incorrect or unacceptable English, it sets a detrimental mood for instruction by showing disrespect for the form of English they already know and showing disrespect for their English speaking cultural heritage.  Instruction can be adapted to teach them literacy faster by scaffolding their reading and writing on their strong speaking and listening skills and helping them to learn the difference between their colorful and complete English and the standard written form commonly that is used in the United States.  Likewise, learning disabled students also benefit from individualized instruction.  In fact, they are often at an extreme disadvantage when expected to learn like others do.  With help they can be taught how to cope with their differences and overcome their disabilities. 

Besides the extreme cases in which students have little or no literacy and are pulled out, those students with lower literacy levels who are still included in my classes have to be taken into account.  This is done by giving the whole class a wide variety of meaningful ways to experience the written form of the language in various contexts. 

For example, knowing that some of my students might not be able to write well on their own, I try to support their production instead of just expecting them to do it.  For example, I sometimes let them do the talking and I write on the board or an OHP for them.  In this way, they can see their speech turned into written words.  If I want them to write a whole paragraph, I might start by showing them how to turn a question or a topic into a topic sentence.  Once they have made a statement, I help them to get ideas about a question or topic.  I guide them through the brainstorming process and discuss the various ways in which statements can be supported (e.g. facts, descriptions, reasons, experiences, examples).  This often boarders on a language experience activity because I am often doing the writing for them.  Seeing their own ideas turned into good writing helps them to realize that the only obstacle between them and a good piece of writing is the act of using the pencil.  They get to see that they have it in them.  Also, getting to see what they are saying put into writing helps them learn how to read.  This cooproduced text is a meaningful and comprehensible form of written input that they pay attention to and can learn from.  This invariably helps low level readers as well as challenged writers. 

Similar to the routine listed above, I write a lot of what we talk about on the board during discussions.  Knowing that they cannot easily take notes and participate at the same time I often take breaks in the discussion to give the students some time to copy the model into their notes.  For low level writers, the value of copying is often underestimated.  Copying is usually not done as an activity in High School because it is considered mindless.  I believe it is not mindless if they are copying sentences that came from their own contributions during a discussion.  It is also not mindless if they can use these notes to write something such as a response to a question as homework.  I have seen some low level writers write very successful paragraphs simply by turning the sentences on the board into a paragraph.  As for the higher level learners, they have the option of producing a different paragraph and not using the models I have given them.  This helps me to accommodate a wide range of literacy levels in my class.

As you can see, I place a high value on models for supporting learners.  As a language learner, I benefited a lot from models and I have also found that while models and copying are stigmatized in the United States, language learners from outside the United States prefer to have them.  I see them as a very relevant source of input and the act of copying as a potential reason to attend to the input.  Sometimes students can follow models to produce writing of their own creation that they would not be able to produce otherwise.  For example, if I offer them a model essay that tells three things that I dislike about the diet in the U.S., they can write their own essay using the same organization and grammar, only substituting the examples.  In other case students can use the models I give them for activities that involve copying or imitation but are still fun and challenging.  For example, they can cooperate in groups to write what they hear dictated to them.  I sometimes even let a student read out loud for the dictation.  Student-student dictation can even be set up like a relay race in which one student must read a model on one side of the room and without notes take it piece by piece in her memory to her teammate on the other side of the room and dictate it to her.  In the end, when they read the original and compare it to their own version, they often notice certain differences.  Sometimes they even ask me about unknown words that caused them trouble.  I believe this facilitates acquisition to learners of literacy levels.

Writing different genre and registers also seems to help in a number of ways.  For example, instead of just having them do academic writing all the time, I sometimes ask them to write poems or even songs.  From this, I have found a way for students who normally dislike or neglect writing assignments to write enthusiastically.  When given alternatives to academic writing, the underachievers often do best of all.  They are productive and seem so proud of what they have done.  They share work with each other and read their work out loud.  This may be due to the fact that alternatives to academic writing such as poetry and lyrics accommodate students who are less visual and more rhythmic or musical in nature. 

For similar reasons, I also like to give freewriting assignments.  I tell them that they can write any way they feel.  They don’t have to worry about grammar and spelling.  They don’t have to use standard American English.  This helps them overcome their fear of writing and helps them learn to accept themselves as legitimate members of “the literacy club”.  Once they have learned to relax and produce, they can learn to meet conventions of standard or formal writing.  Giving opportunities to write unhindered is essential, students must learn to willingly produce first, otherwise there is really no hope of them ever reaching the second goal of producing accurately.  It is also important for the World English speakers to be allowed to write as they speak so they can develop a feeling for how the written and the spoken word are connected, and develop confidence and fluency in their writing from a sense of ownership. 

Teaching students to be better readers also helps them to become better writers  For example, when students are taught to locate sentences that express main ideas, or find statements and their support, they eventually understand how their own writing needs to be organized and supported.  Other skill activities such as finding definitions in a textbook helps them realize things about textbook conventions.  They can learn for example, that the definition to a strange new word written in bold can usually be found very near by and that the writer doesn’t expect the reader to already know the word but instead intends to teach it.  This involves grammar too.  From activities as simple as locating definitions, the students’ attention can be drawn to forms such as appositives and relative clauses.  Likewise, they can inductively learn that proper nouns are capitalized when they search for the names of people and places in a text.

One of the ways I support my students’ reading is by having them read aloud.  I must admit, when I first saw other High School ESOL teachers doing this, I felt it was of questionable value.  I had always been told that reading aloud was counter to teaching effective reading skills.  But, when I saw students who normally speak quite fluently struggling to read aloud, I could tell that it created a good opportunity to coach them in the action of reading.  Perhaps like emergent readers in early grades, they were benefiting from learning how the written words corresponded to the spoken language.  I could also tell what words and structures were causing trouble simply by listening to them.  I also noticed that they were more likely to ask questions about the text after having had trouble reading aloud.

To make sure that I am not reinforcing a linear style of reading by only reading aloud, I also teach global reading.  One way to do so is to teach students ways to interact with the text as a whole.  We practice previewing and making predictions based on a view of the whole text.  We practice strategies such as skimming and scanning in which they jump around a text.  These strategies help the students become more fluent and effective as readers. 

One way to teach reading that offers something for everybody is to use routines such as KWL, ReQuest, or Reciprocal reading instruction.  In these methods the teacher gradually turns over the role of reading teacher to the students, giving them more responsibility to monitor their own reading.  Students read and then ask each other questions.  The act of asking others questions gives them a chance to clarify and discuss any parts that are unclear while also giving them a meaningful and active way to interact with the text.  The students like being given the responsibility and when put in smaller groups it tends to lead them towards productive peer tutoring of their less literate neighbors.  This student controlled interaction gives students the opportunity to each contribute according to their level.  Some students make very simple question with obvious answers, while some make questions that involve stronger reading skills.

Since vocabulary is crucial to reading and writing fluency, I take time to teach and reinforce the vocabulary from what they read.  This can be fun sometimes.  I try to save some time in a lesson to have them play games with the vocabulary they have learned or at least have them use the word in a sentence to “ticket out” at the end of the class.  Besides reinforcing vocabulary with games, it is also necessary to reinforce vocabulary from readings with meaningful speaking and writing activities.  Actually have some content is good for this.  If they read something very interesting and then discuss it, then they are likely to use and remember the new words.  Likewise if they write a response to what they have read, they will have more opportunities to experiment with the new words.

            I have mentioned many ways in which my classes support literacy acquisition, but there are still many important aspects of literacy instruction that are missing from my classes.  I would like to bring these into my class.  For example, I don’t think that students are getting enough support with their reading and writing in the content classes.  Besides that, I have not given them any opportunities to publish their work or at least put it on display.  I already use portfolio assessment but it doesn’t seem to make sense to my students if there is no audience.  Publishing makes the writing process make more sense.  It gives them a reason to strive for perfection or be more audience centered.  It can also give them pride and confidence.  Besides publishing, I also would like to do regular journals, perhaps even dialogue journals.  My students need as many chances to build fluency as possible and this will work well for both high level and low level learners.  Dialogue journals would help them learn that writing is communication and thereby become more reader centered.  For the same reason, I would like to have them do work on email and chatlines.  They could contact people from other places and use reading and writing to interactively gather information for some project.  My inability use computers for email and chatlines is part of greater disappointment with our lack of access to computers.

Despite what we are lacking and what I strive for, I am quite pleased with what we do.  I know of a few students who arrived at our school only recently and arrived illiterate but now read and write passably well.  This makes me proud of what we do.  I don’t think any students are slipping through the cracks at my school.  I just wish we could offer more.