FAQs

This is the most frequently asked question by those interested in the TRANSLATE instructional approach. Our response is that yes, if you speak only English, you can use TRANSLATE to support the English reading comprehension of your students who speak languages other than English (LOTE). Doing so, however, will take some time as you learn to use TRANSLATE. We have found that as teachers try out using the TRANSLATE approach, they begin to notice what to pay attention to and how to talk to their students about their languages. One teacher we worked with told us the following:

Erica: Well I have – I’m solely fluent in English and you can – you don’t have to be fluent to teach students the strategies. I mean I feel like I’m a prime example of that you don’t have to speak the first language, or even speak a different language to know what is this is [about].

This is a common challenge. Here, we provide two suggestions for supporting more universal and equitable participation:

1. Adapt the format: We suggest that students can be supported by adapting the format, that is moving from whole class to small groups of 4 – 5 students. Groups should be heterogeneous and linguistically diverse unless the activity specifies otherwise. In small groups, give students a few minutes to discuss the question in their small group before sharing their answers with the whole class. You might circulate, helping students build on each other’s answers and respond to each other using TRANSLATE Talk Roles. 

Why? Small groups help all students participate, particularly if everyone is accountable for the work. Small group work gives students the opportunity to discuss their answers before sharing with the whole class. Students develop deeper comprehension skills, understand different perspectives, and develop arguments and points of view.

2. Support language production: We suggest the use of TRANSLATE Talk Roles to support more universal participation. These are useful roles that can be used by educators and students to support extended talk. Phrases are provided for each role with the goal of moving towards dialogism and away from models in which all students make use of single sentence frame, limiting opportunities for discussion.

Why? TRANSLATE Talk Roles help students build and communicate higher order thinking skills. Teacher modeling is helpful. Students should be taught how to listen to each other and how to use the stems explicitly. 

We recognize that in many classrooms, educators are teaching students with different levels of comfort reading in English. The goal is for as many students as possible to participate in all TRANSLATE lessons using the structures and supports in place throughout the curriculum. Phonics lessons are integrated throughout the first 6 cycles to provide instruction and practice on word reading skills. However, if you have students who have no knowledge of the English alphabet, consonant sounds or short vowel sounds, then these students may require a more intensive phonics-based intervention during the Building Background and Fluency lessons or prior to participating in the TRANSLATE curriculum.

The fluency passages are designed at four levels spanning kindergarten to grade 6. All levels include a selection of the cycle’s focus vocabulary words and recently taught vowel patterns and affixes. As the level increases, passages become longer and students will encounter a higher proportion of challenging vowel patterns and multisyllabic words, as well as increased complexity of sentence structure and vocabulary. Lexile level, grade level and word count for each level are outlined in the table below. We view Lexile levels as useful for placement but acknowledge that students can readily read passages at a range of passage levels as a factor of their familiarity with the text topic and language. Passage levels are, therefore, only a guideline, and we invite educators to utilize teacher knowledge in assigning students to their respective passage levels each week.

Students can be assigned to fluency levels initially on the basis of data available from prior assessments- running records, phonics inventories administered by educators, or district-administered standardized measures, etc. Depending on the data source, align student passage levels to their instructional grade level or use their percentile rank to estimate a passage level starting point. For example, if a student is scoring in the 25th percentile or below on a grade level assessment, start by assigning them to the passage level 2-3 grade levels below their current grade level. When using other data, ensure that you listen to students’ reading during the first cycle and check their fluency tracker to determine if the placement level is appropriate.

Second, for teachers using the NYC Schools Foundational Unit, data from students’ performances on this unit’s fluency activities can inform placement. Placement decisions should be made before starting Cycle 1 so that passage levels and partners can be assigned. For teachers completing the Foundational Unit, you should use the reading rate data collected during fluency passage reading as well as the observations of how well students are performing on activities related to various vowel patterns and multisyllabic word reading.

Check students’ Words Per Minute (WPM) charts. These are self- reported, but WPMs are one source of data. In order to move passage levels, a student should be reading ~130 WPM with some expression and phrasing and show an understanding of the text through verbal or written responses. Students are not responsible for recording accuracy, so teachers should check that students with high WPM rates are maintaining accuracy during reading as well. Taking all of these aspects of their passage reading into account is important and can indicate areas of reading that need more support. If a student can read at the appropriate rate but is not yet able to comprehend at that rate or read accurately at that rate, they need continued practice and support reading at that passage level. You should circulate as students read their passages. If you have questions about a specific student, listen to that student on a particular day.

Teachers should choose fluency partners in order to be sure that a more-fluent and less-fluent reader are paired. When students read two different passages about the same topic or theme, they will learn more background knowledge. Partner students with stronger fluency skills with less-skilled students; less-skilled students will be exposed to higher level texts when their partners read, and more fluent students will develop stronger fluency skills by helping a peer. Students should develop a trusting, working relationship with their partners and will keep the same partner for the unit’s duration. However, if a partnership isn’t working, please reassign students to different partnerships.

Feel free to add your own comprehension tasks, vocabulary or word analysis activities to the curriculum. You may want to give students who finish faster than the others additional tasks such as coming up with an alternative title for the passage, or a question for the author, or an additional question for their partner.

A piece of the lesson that focuses on a specific grammatical element of the English language. The goal is to teach language forms and their functions by examining how language ‘works’ in authentic print, and to enable students to use this language in their own communication. In this piece of the lesson, educators engage students in examining how a word, phrase or discourse structure serves to support a communicative goal of the writer. This could, for example, involve looking at the ways writers use nouns derived from other words to talk about a process (to experiment→ the experiment→ experimentation), or examining how words are used to connect ideas in text (connective words like, ‘however’, ‘therefore’). Additional routines for comprehending and navigating text are also taught in these lessons, and serve to support students to manage the language of print strategically. For example, students are taught to track multiple mentions of the same person or idea in a text, which is a routine that can be applied to future texts.

Teachers using TRANSLATE have found that if their students use other writing systems such as Arabic script or Chinese characters that they can transliterate them into the Roman alphabet. For younger children, and even some older students, engaging in this activity has the double advantage of promoting phonological processing or hearing and learning how sounds are combined into words. A great deal of research shows that a strong command of phonological awareness is associated with better reading comprehension. One of our participating teachers had this to say:

Katy: I still don’t know anything about Arabic. I do not know anything about Arabic. But since they can turn it into English letters and sound it out, I can kind of like this much understand what you are saying. It was good because if they just start talking, I have no idea where the word breaks are or anything; it’s just all terrible. But if they write it down and they can space out the words, you know that there is emphasis enough that they understand that they are different and I can at least make them go back and say, you know, “What is this part? Is that how you spell that word? What does this word mean?”

Because TRANSLATE is designed to be used in cooperative learning groups, we have found that there is typically at least one or more students who are able to write in the language other than English. We have seen students make use of what they know about writing in English transfer those understandings to other languages, particularly Spanish. This kind of learning is not the focus of TRANSLATE but we see it as an unintended positive outcome and at times it is highly motivating to students.

This occasionally happens in classrooms. In these instances, we asked the student in question to translate a textual segment on his or her own and then explain it to a speaker of another language. In our case, it was a speaker of Portuguese who compared his translation to a Spanish speaker’s translation. Questions such as how does your translation show the differences between your language and English? What was difficult to translate? How did you resolve the problem? These approaches are not substitutes for having a partner who speaks the same language but we have found that students can still have a meaningful learning experience.

We ask teachers to use their best judgment concerning who works well with whom for this decision. By taking into account their dialect, their literacy abilities, and their English proficiency, student pairing is typically successful. Of course, as in any cooperative learning activity, grouping decisions need to be evaluated regularly to make sure that students work well with one another.

We have worked with students who because of their limited proficiency in their heritage language did not want to participate in our TRANSLATE approach. There are, however, multiple valid ways to participate in TRANSLATE. Students can be provided with the option to translate text into text speak or another dialect of English. Some students with diminishing proficiency in their non-English language want to participate to strengthen their bilingualism.

Teachers have told us that this was a concern they had before participating in TRANSLATE. After teaching a few lessons they informed us that it was obvious to them when students got off task because of their tone, affect, interaction with materials etc. In other words this is something that teachers develop a sense for as they interact with students.