2022 Literacy Symposium:    Culturally and Linguistically  Responsive Literacy Strand

There are 5 million English learners attending public schools today. Every educator must therefore understand how to design and implement Structured Literacy among this diverse population of students.  This session will address the evidence-based practices for incorporating intentional oral language strategies within Structured Literacy lessons. 

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs), educators, and other practitioners have consistently noted the diagnostic challenge observed when attempting to distinguish between the typical linguistic variation of African American English (AAE) speakers, the clinical indicators of language disorder and language delay based on the impact of being reared in poverty. We will discuss evidence-based assessment and treatment practices that practitioners can utilize when working with speakers of AAE and other non-mainstream dialects. 

Culturally responsive interventions should be used to support Black students in schools. This session will discuss how to make cultural adaptations for interventions using Bernal‚ (1995) Ecological Validity Framework. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss cultural considerations when selecting/planning reading interventions, identify cultural adaptions to evidence-based reading interventions, and describe how cultural adaptions propel equity in schools. . 

In this session, we will compare and contrast the sound inventories of Spanish and English to understand emergent bilinguals' phonological development.  We will also explore the implications of these similarities and differences for phonemic awareness, decoding, and encoding instruction for Spanish-English emergent bilinguals. (k-12) 

In this session, we will review the research findings related to morphological awareness in Spanish-English bilingual learners.  We will also review evidence-based instructional practices for developing cross-linguistic morphological awareness in Spanish-English bilinguals, with the goal of enhancing emergent bilinguals' vocabulary knowledge and language comprehension. (3-12) 

A team from Easterly Parkway Elementary in State College, PA will share its journey to student literacy success through Enhancing Core Reading Instruction (ECRI). The team will share the past, present, and future of our transition to systematic and explicit instruction. A discussion and review of data including how our diverse community of learners are benefiting from the newly formed MTSS processes 

Digital education programs implemented during COVID-19 school closures continue to be used in the classroom as a complement to teachers’ instruction. . While digital learning reports may not suggest explicit instructional techniques, data from the programs can inform instructional method selection and efforts to differentiate instruction. This interactive presentation will take you on a journey of considering early literacy assessment findings, using the “Assessment of Literacy and Language”; analyzing early literacy content in digital programs, using WORD Force; and leveraging those findings as well as student performance data to generate ideas for early literacy classroom instruction.