What helps emergent billinguals learn to read?

Reading instruction for billingual students should be explicit and strategic. Similar to writing instruction, positive billingual reading instruction is postive reading instruction for all. Some core preactices in best serving billinguals as we build literacy are leveraging a student's L1, building strong oral language, building strong comprehension strategies and tools, utilizing culturally relevant texts, classroom community, scafolding, and consistent feedback and assesment.

Phonics

The relationship between sounds and letters- and how letters are represented in an oral language.

Strategies for Bilingual Students:

Teaching explicit sound and symbol relationships. Explicitly discussing differences and similaries between home language and English. This is especially important for building on a student's knowlege of positive, negative, and zero transfer. Using visual aids and devices as students work through trickier phonics patterns.

Phonemic Awareness

The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.

Strategies for Bilingual Students:

Extra emphasis on listening and speaking. Being familiar with positive, negtative, and zero transfer in a student's home language- and how that may apply to their phonemic awareness as they naviagte English.

Fluency

The ability to read texts accurately and quickly.

Strategies for Billingual Students:

Recognizing that fluency is tricky for MLL students to navigate- as it may reflect a lack of background knowledge, limited vocabulary, not just a lack of decoding ability. Strategies like chorale reading and repeated readings help mitigate some of these concerns for MLL students.

Vocabulary

The knowledge of word meanings.

Strategies for Billingual Students:

Having a strong understanding of Tier 1, 2, and 3 vocabulary. Teaching high frequency (Tier 1) words explicitly. Including visuals, gestures, and context for MLL students. This is especially important as you transition to Tier 2 and 3 words. It is also important to teach multiple meanings and morphology to MLL students.

Comprehension

The ability to understand, remember, and think about what was read.

Strategies for Billingual Students:

Building background knowledge that can connect to a student's specific life experiences. Using strategies like graphic organizers, visual supports, and strategic questioning.

Oral Language

Speaking and listening skills that support all literacy areas.

Strategies for Billingual Students:

Understanding that oral language is the foundation of all literacy development. Providing students lots of oppurtunities for structured talks and conversations. Utilizing students home languages as assets in this process.

Role of Home Language

Home language plays a huge role in how emerging billinguals learn to read and write. It is important to understand facets of a student's home lanugage- so that you can understand how things like positive transfer, negative transfer, and zero transfer play into their abilities as they become literate in English. A student who speaks Spanish at home will have a different time learning English than a student who speaks Chinese at home. Understanding these differences is crucial to creating instruction that is differentiated for unique student populations.

Activity Idea #1

The use of audiobooks can be very beneficial to MLL students. Audiobooks are not to be used as a passive activity, but as they read along with books and a recording. This can help build orthograhic mapping between graphemes and phonemes, and help students work on pronounication.

Activity Idea #2

Creating individualized activity packs is a perfect activity for newcomer students, when they cannot follow along in a lesson. They can be individualized to a student's needs, and can include things like matching games, flash cards, and games.

Activity #3

Partner reading activites support both students in the process (when pairings are done correctly) and create a sense of community in the classroom.

Sources:

Colorín Colorado. (n.d.). Being bilingual is a superpower: Workshop activities. https://www.colorincolorado.org/being-bilingual-superpower-workshop-activities

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