Research-Based Practices for ELL Literacy Instruction

Structured literacy works for English language learners, emergent bilinguals, multilinguals, whatever the term that you use. It works. We have a body of evidence. The first body and meta-analysis was in 2006. Another one was in 2017 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, really promoting the educational success of these students learning English as an additional language. And it also reviewed written language in addition to reading. All of that is there for us. And it's been decades of research, now about 30 years, so getting close to 30 years.

And I really have to thank Dr. Reid Lyon. He came to our community and our teachers said, he was giving a presentation, they said, "But what about students who are English learners, learning English as an additional language?" And he went back to Congress and got the first $30 million appropriated to really develop these national teams and everybody had to work together so that we could be on the fast track,  to really learn: Who are these students? What are their backgrounds? What are their language backgrounds, their literacy backgrounds? How do we develop English as an additional language, or how does it look in dual-language classrooms? How much focus of time is necessary? And then what about students who don't seem to be responding as well? What about them? How much intensity do we need? How does that look in an integrated, comprehensive fashion?

Once we were able to conduct the research and Dr. Diane August and Dr. Tim Shanahan put together, did a meta-analysis looking at only students who were learning English as an additional language and saying, "Hmm, what do we know? Do those five components of literacy work for these students?" Yes, yes. Phonological awareness, phonics, building reading fluency  and vocabulary and comprehension, that works, but you have to make adjustments to your instruction. And those adjustments include connecting those cross-language connections, bringing that into the fold, not doing business as usual, but capitalizing on the assets that our students bring. They have a language, they have sounds in their language, they have symbols that represent that and how much of that can apply to learning English as a second language and English as second language literacy. So that's what we know.

The other thing that we know is when students have the opportunity to fully develop that home language and have home language literacy, then they will do better in English than if they didn't have that opportunity.  However, the majority of our students are in “English as an additional language” classrooms. So even if they're in those classrooms, what we know are there some specific features like those cross-language features, like thinking about language and meaning as we're doing each of those components of literacy. That's our job. We need to be the language and literacy experts in every classroom.