The Promise of Guided Reading for SLIFE (and the need for critically examining the assumptions made in the literature)

Since SLIFE are English Language Learners, teachers who want to successfully direct their learning must become familiar with strategies for teaching adolescent ESL students.  This task can be overwhelming at first, because the ESL literature is so deep and varied.  Over time, however, some common themes and strategies emerge from these different sources.   Some common examples would be to focus on students’past learning experiences, academic knowledge, content area literacy, and vocabulary acquisition.

Unfortunately, the literature often assumes that ESL students have first language literacy skills, while most SLIFE do not.  A recent article by Montero, Newmaster & Ledger (2014), describes how this disconnect can result in the use of practices that do not fully meet the needs of SLIFE:

"Most secondary teachers are unprepared for the foundational print literacy needs of many adolescent refugees. Secondary ESL teachers have generally been trained in traditional ESL pedagogical practices, which largely assume dominant language literacy abilities. ESL pedagogies that focus on content area and/or general language development are not meeting the academic needs of adolescent refugees with limited print literacy abilities." 

 The rest of the article goes on to describe how the use of a guided reading program can produce impressive literacy gains with SLIFE.  It is worth reading the article in full to get a sense of how such a program might work.  I found their observations and recommendations to be consistent with my own experiences with teaching SLIFE, and I felt encouraged to continue to work toward the implementation of similar strategies my own school.

That being said, this article restates some common assumptions about SLIFE that I have seen in other articles but which do not match my students.  One assumption is that SLIFE tend to be refugees for whom the interruptions in education are a past event.  A second is that the goal of the education of SLIFE is to integrate them into our society.  A third is that they will be placed in separate ESL/ELD programs.  Many of SLIFE I see in Southern Alberta, by contrast, are Low German Mennonites who have ongoing interruptions in education, seek to maintain a degree of distinctness/separateness from the broader society, and/or are enrolled in integrated programs.

In a way, then, my reservations about this article, and about much of the SLIFE literature, are similar to the criticisms that these authors make of the ESL literature in general.  It is not so much the recommendations are wrong as that the assumptions are too broad.  When one's own circumstances do not match those assumptions, one has to be careful about uncritically adopting the recommended strategies.  One may need to be more eclectic and draw strategies from a variety of sources.

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Kristiina Montero, M., Newmaster, S. & Ledger, S. (2014). Exploring Early Reading Instructional Strategies to Advance the Print Literacy Development of Adolescent SLIFE. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58(1), 59–69. doi: 10.1002/jaal.318
Obtained from: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jaal.318/pdf

"But Don't They Cheat A Lot?"

I was taken aback by the question at first.  In a recent conversation with a colleague at a professional development session, I was describing the students in my Mennonite outreach high school and how we use a lot of distance learning materials with them.  I mentioned how we have used those resources to provide flexible educational programs for students with irregular attendance.  "But don't they cheat a lot?" she asked.  She explained that this had been her experience with ELL students doing independent module work.  She probably said more than that (I think she mentioned something about "copying"), but I stopped listening because we were still in the middle of a session and I was reeling from on onslaught of conflicting emotions.  I felt anger and a need to defend my students; I also felt confusion and a desire for her to clarify what she meant; part of me even empathized with her because I had experienced that same frustration as a teacher.

But I didn't express any of that aloud.  Instead, I leaned over and said that I choose to frame the issue differently.  I said that many of my students are very pragmatic learners and that the completion of the modules seems to them to be the obvious concrete goal.  They tend to use whatever means they have to meet that goal.  I said that I felt that it was my job as the teacher to help them to appreciate that mastery of the learning outcomes is the more important goal.  I didn't get to say much more than that because our presenter was carrying on with the session, and I don't know if I got my point across, but I did see her nod her head as she leaned back into her chair.

I don't know my colleague's ELL students personally, and I don't want to presume too much about their actions or intentions.  What I do know is that it is pretty easy to misinterpret the intentions of those who differ from us culturally.  A crucial insight for teachers of SLIFE, for example, is that our own education paradigms are often very different from theirs.  According to SLIFE researchers Andrea DeCapua and Helaine Marshall, we tend to assume that the goals of K-12 instruction are to produce an independent learner and to prepare that learner for life after schooling, and that the learner brings along an urge to compete and excel as an individual.  We also tend to assume that students come with age-appropriate preparation for literacy development academic tasks.  SLIFE, on the other hand, often come from cultural backgrounds where the preference is for oral communication and information sharing, pragmatic learning with immediate relevance, and working together and sharing responsibility.  They may not come with the literacy skills or with academic thinking skills needed to read and answer text-based distance learning modules independently.  They can easily get focused on the concrete, pragmatic task of completing the modules rather than the more abstract goal of learning concepts.  What we interpret as cheating (i.e. an immoral act of deception) might be motivated more by a pragmatic orientation combined with a reliance on oral information-sharing and presumption of collective responsibility.

It is not hard to see how such differences in assumptions could lead to misunderstandings.  Let us not forget that SLIFE are also constantly facing these misunderstandings and are likely misinterpreting us and our intentions as well.  The cultural dissonance that they experience as they struggle to navigate these differences can seriously interfere with learning and discourage them from attending school.  They need teachers who are willing to question assumptions and meet them halfway.

Do High School English Learners’ Previous Formal Schooling Backgrounds Affect Their English Proficiency Gains?

One of the most frustrating things about the current state of the SLIFE literature is the scarcity of quantitative studies on the subject.  That is why I was so excited when I came across this Slideshare of a presentation given by Christopher Browder at the "Understanding Language Learning Among Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE )" colloquium at the AAAL 2014 Convention, Portland, Oregon last March.  Christopher has collected and analyzed data about the English proficiency gains and academic achievement of 199 adolescent English Language Learners along with a variety of risk factors and protective factors which might have influenced their learning.  Included in these risk factors were those related to limited formal education.

In this presentation, Browder focuses on the relationship between high school students' previous formal schooling backgrounds and their gains on English Proficiency tests.  His analysis suggests that SLIFE tended to have lower English proficiency later on because they had arrived with lower English proficiency, not because of slower rates of learning English.  In fact, students’ grade-relative years of schooling was not significantly associated with English gains.  He did find, however, that arriving with lower academic skills, as indicated by their math skills and first language (L1) literacy, was significantly associated with lower English gains.  He recommends giving math and L1 literacy tests during intake of new English Language Learners because these results will be more reliable predictors of their rate of English learning than their grades completed of school prior to intake.

These findings supported my suspicion that the quantity of a student's prior education is often less important to their future academic success than the quality of that instruction.  Many of the students that I have worked with over the years have had several years of education through home or church-run programs that are not directed primarily towards preparing students for secondary or post secondary academics.  If they did spend time the in public education systems in Canada or the United States, it was often fragmented by frequent moves or characterized by emphasis on skill remediation.  Despite having attended school for the expected number of years, they have not received the education needed to be successful at higher level academic tasks.  It was good to know that this pattern was not specific to my (mostly Low German Mennonite) students.  It raised my curiosity as to what other findings may have come out of this research.

This Slideshare presentation  really piqued my interest, and so I tracked down Christopher's email address to ask him if this research had been published.  He generously sent me a copy of his write-up from the AAAL conference (which is available online behind a pay-wall) as well as a write-up for a presentation he made at the 2013 LESLLA symposium (which was not yet available online at the time of this blog post).  He also shared his PhD dissertation (which is available online through ProQuest).  There is a lot more in these documents than what I have discussed above, and I believe that some of his findings are very significant to the field.  I will be be sharing them here as I get the chance.

New DeCapua and Marshall article

The February 2015 edition of Principal Leadership features an excellent article by Andrea DeCapua and Helaine Marshall entitled, Promoting Achievement for ELLs with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education: A Culturally Responsive Approach.  DeCapua and Marshall have collaborated on several books and articles about SLIFE in the past and are two of the leading authors on the subject. This article summarizes several of the key themes from their books into a single, concise article.  It provides a good introduction to the topic for those who are just getting into it and a good reminder for those of us who are more familiar with their work.

SLIFE Beyond the Horizon: Blog Reboot

This blog began in the fall of 2013 as a private forum for the members of a community of practice focused on the meeting the needs of students with limited or interrupted formal education. Along the way, a variety of resources and strategies were gathered and organized to help the members of the community of practice.

That community of practice has since disbanded, but the collected body of information remains, and as the blog creator and administrator I felt it appropriate to share the collection.  I have continued to add to it when I have time (which doesn't happen very often), and to reorganize and refine the content found here.  It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a comprehensive guide to teaching SLIFE, but it provides a lot of links and suggestions for further investigation.  Very little of what you find in the tabs above is original, but instead they provide a summary of the recommendations of others, along with references to the original sources for you to investigate.  There are many resources and strategies listed here that I have yet to try personally, and their inclusion here does not represent a personal endorsement.  Over time, however, I hope to try them and weed them out and perhaps even add in a few of my own ideas.

In the meantime, while the old discussion posts and conversations have been deleted, I hope to be posting updates from the literature in their place.  I continue to seek out new articles and research on this topic and to reflect on them in light of my own practice.  This blog gives me a place to document those reflections and curate those articles.  If this blog primarily serves that purpose for me alone, it will be enough.  If, however, you have stumbled upon this blog and find the content useful in your own practice, all the better.  If you know of other content which is relevant to the education of SLIFE and which you feel should be included here, please let me know.  Feel free as well to add your comments and suggestions below.