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