all students are language learners: the imagine learning language advantage · 2019-10-09 ·...

1The Imagine Learning Language Advantage™

Dr. Noelle Carter, Chief Academic Officer

The Imagine Learning Language Advantage™

All Students Are Language Learners:

We need language to do just about everything […] Millions of bright and capable students around the world struggle in school and even give up because they lack the abilities to use language in ways that are expected in academic settings.”(Zwiers, 2014, p. 1, emphasis added)

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The Imagine Learning Language Advantage™

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All students are academic language learners (August & Shanahan, 2006, p. 33), and the Imagine Learning Language Advantage™ is a theory of action that promotes rigorous and equitable development of language, unlocking learning across all subjects and transforming students into stronger and more confident learners.

For young children and adolescents alike, academic success means having command of academic language—an essential tool for reading, writing, and critical thinking” (Lesaux, Galloway, & Marietta, 2016, p. 19). Developing capacity with academic language allows all students to grow in their reading, mathematics, science, social studies, and literature content knowledge. As students gain access to new learning, academic language gives them the further advantage of being able to engage in academic discourse, to explain, expand, challenge, analyze, and synthesize information with their peers, to own learning more deeply and communicate learning with others.


Language Is an Asset that All Students Bring to the Classroom As students enter the classroom, they bring a wide variety of language assets with them. Some-times these assets are literal languages. For example, in 2015, the Census Bureau reported at least 350 different languages being spoken in U.S. homes (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015). Nearly four million English learner (EL) students in the U.S. speak Spanish (OELA, 2018). More than 2,500 native-speaking students were represented in the 2015–2016 school year.

In addition to the diversity of their home languages, all students bring a variety of depth in their experience with language. How many words a child learns, how much experience a child has with text, how much language complexity a child is exposed to both orally and in text makes a significant impact on their ability to develop literacy. One study showed that “[…]by the age of three, children from low-income homes hear thirty million less words than children from more affluent families” (Shing & Yuan, 2017, Abstract). It’s a sobering thought that, according to a 2014 survey, nearly half of children under the age of eighteen live in lower-income circumstances. According to the National Center for Children of Poverty (2016), 44% of children lived in either poor or near-poor households. With significantly less language experience, students who are, in Zwiers’ (2014) words, “bright and capable,” come to school with challenges that many never have the opportunity to overcome (p. 1).

Another language asset students bring to school is their background knowledge: the tools they use to make sense of their learning experiences in school. While some students have more rich and varied experiences than others, all bring useful cultural experiences with them that experienced educators recognize as an asset for new learning (August & Shanahan, 2006, p. 10).


English Learners Are Uniquely Poised for Language AdvantagesA critical piece of the Imagine Learning Language Advantage is that it sees students’ cultural and linguistic diversity from an assets-based perspective. In other words, the programs see students’ native language as a help, rather than a hindrance, to their English and academic language learning, thus avoiding what Lily Wong Fillmore (1991), Professor Emerita in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, saw:

Language-minority children are aware that they are different …. They have only to turn on the television and they can see that they are different in language, in appearance, and in behavior, and they come to regard these differences as undesirable. (p. 342)

Imagine Learning’s Language Advantage utilizes these children’s difference as a desirable asset. The Imagine Learning programs are carefully structured to avoid a pitfall Wong Fillmore pointed out: “All too often, English becomes their language of choice long before they know [their native language] well enough to express themselves fully in that language, and they use it both in school and at home” (p. 334).

The Imagine Learning Language Advantage encourages these students to become fluent in both their home language and English, as this common underlying proficiency boosts their ability to become fluent in academic language. As Mohr, Juth, Kohlmeier, and Schreiber (2018) write:

[N]euroscientists have confirmed that the bilingual brain evidences certain strengths compared to monolingual brains with respect to specific language and more general functions. For example, bilinguals exhibit comparatively improved working memory and more flexibility using strategies in various situations (Adescope et al. 2010; Nayak et al. 1990). (p. 13)

Knowing two languages is an asset to learning academic language, and Imagine Learning believes that both languages should be maintained. Cummins (2000) reports, “If a student’s second language is English, then focusing on English exclusively will prohibit advanced development of the first language. This situation is known as subtractive bilingualism” (p. 37).

If educators view language diversity (literal, cultural, and developmental) with an assets-based lens, they will be prepared to accelerate language growth. The research is clear that if students can acquire a second language without relinquishing the first, they will have advantages. Additive biliteracy “has the more positive effect on academic achievement, as the learner is able to acquire a high level of proficiency in both languages” (Gollnick & Chinn, 2017, p. 161).

Bilingual students exhibit comparatively improved working memory and more flexibility using strategies in various situations.

4 ©2019 Imagine Learning, Inc.

Promoting Advanced Literacy for All Students

Figure 1: Letter practice involves seeing, saying, associating with a concrete noun example (Elephant), and tracing the letter.

Figure 2: Blending involves graphemes (written letters), letter sounds, and visual tracking of the motion from discrete phonemes to blended phonemes in the smooth decoding of a word.

As students become readers, they succeed in developing foundational literacy skills when exposed to:

[E]xplicit, systematic, and intense instruction in phonological awareness, letter-sound correspondences, and decoding skills; lessons that are carefully sequenced and scaffolded; frequent opportunities for students to practice skills and to receive corrective feedback; and a high degree of emotional support, encouragement, and positive reinforcement from caring adults. It is also helpful to promote pleasure reading. (Nippold, 2016, p. 35)

But providing explicit, systematic, and intense instruction is a complex task for a teacher in a diverse classroom. As Tomlinson (2006) points out, “In a differentiated classroom, the teacher proactively plans and carries out varied approaches to content, processes, and product in anticipation of and response to student differences in readiness, interest, and learning needs” (p.10).

It can be daunting to implement such a multi-variant process on a daily basis with diverse students. Fortunately, Imagine Learning’s personalized language and literacy software provides a means for scaffolding and individualizing the sequence of content. Following a placement test, the program helps students begin their reading development at their just-right placement point. Building on Tomlinson’s findings, the Imagine Learning Smart Sequencer then provides dynamically sequenced content, shores up unfinished learning, and adjusts content for each curriculum area throughout the student’s experience.


Figure 3: Peer modeling of the reading structure: points and reasons.

Figure 4: Students submit written constructed responses to their reading.

As August and Shanahan (2006) argue, both English-first and language-minority students benefit by “focusing instruction on key components, such as phonemic awareness, decoding, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing,” which is why it is so essential that students start in the right place (p. 16).

Learning to work deeply with letter sounds, names, and orthography gives students a great start on their path to reading. However, further along their learning journey, they will need to work with decoding skills and fluency practice. This step cannot be perfunctory. Students need explicit instruction and sufficient practice to build the strong foundation that leads to independent reading and comprehension of more complex texts.

And, of course, learning to read, write, listen, and speak requires a partnership between a strong curriculum and the classroom teacher. The Imagine Learning Language Advantage provides an engaging, systematic, and personalized learning experience—but not just to practice skills learned in the classroom. Imagine Language & Literacy provides rich instructional content and actionable data to support classroom teachers in their integral role in the learning experience.


Figures 5 and 6: Explicit instruction combined with deeper exploration in multiple contexts develops rich general and domain-specific vocabulary.

Figures 7 and 8: Explicit instruction breaks apart and teaches difficult standards such as figurative or nonliteral language.

As students progress from foundational reading skills to more advanced comprehension strategies and text structures, the presence of careful, explicit teaching with scaffolds—including first language support in fifteen languages—is critical to building reading capacity.

Just as critical is the instructional sequence where learning is contextualized and sequenced in such a way that it prepares students for successful engagement with specific text.

While teaching reading skills and strategies is essential, more is needed. As August and Shanahan (2006) point out, “It is not enough to teach reading skills alone, but instruction must teach these component skills while fostering extensive oral English-language development” (p. 16). Answering this important double requirement, Imagine Learning has built a curriculum strand of oral language development that is independently sequenced from reading instruction and practice. With diverse backgrounds and needs, students should not all receive the same instruction. Students with more experience in basic and academic language spend more time in reading comprehension instruction and practice; they are also placed in more advanced oral language material.

Literacy and Language Across Four Domains To properly internalize their learning, students must not only listen to and read language, they must also speak and write it (Fisher & Frey, 2013). As Britton (1970) put it, reading “floats on a sea of talk” (p. 164). Both Imagine Language & Literacy and Imagine Reading provide opportunities to address each of these domains, giving students the chance to engage in activities such as echo reading, responding to text, defending their answers, and focusing on questions in small group academic discourse. “Research with students between the ages of six and fourteen shows that scaffolded classroom talk assists students to deepen their understanding of texts” (Mills, 2009, p. 325). Imagine Learning products provide opportunities for language development in both the receptive and productive domains.

Rigor Is Required for Growth Foundational literacy is broadly hierarchal. For example, students need to develop letter-sound correspondences before they can master stretch blending. However, as students grow older, they need to develop content knowledge as well as reading skills and strategies. At times, the disparity between a student’s age and their English language and/or reading skills causes them to be assigned to materials that are not on grade level and which do not promote deep understanding of content knowledge. As Shanahan, Fisher, and Frey (2012) point out, “easier work is less likely to make readers stronger. Teachers need to motivate students to keep trying especially when the level of work is increasing” (p. 62).

It is essential, as stated by the Council of the Great City Schools (2014), that “Districts … ensure that ELLs across all levels of language proficiency can access and fully engage with the more rigorous grade-level English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics standards called for in the Common Core and College and Career Ready standards” (p. 2).

How are teachers to provide rigorous grade-level materials for readers who might not be able to access grade-level text independently? Experienced teachers provide scaffolding to support older students as they access grade-appropriate text: an approach that benefits English-first and language-minority students equally as all these students are learners of academic English. “[S]tudents from English-only homes as well as ELs also struggle to understand the features of academic language: the sentence structures, text organization patterns, and common academic words and phrases (e.g., therefore, as a result) that are found in textbooks and other academic texts (Uccelli et al., 2015)” (Lesaux, Galloway, & Marietta, 2016, 31).

While the fiction and nonfiction reading selections in Imagine Reading are rigorous and on grade-level, students with a wide range of reading proficiencies and language backgrounds can access any text set and academic discussion from a third-grade to an eighth-grade level. Scaffolds are student-selected, allowing for a gradual release to independent reading (Fisher & Frey, 2008). The Imagine Learning programs prepare students for a successful reading experience by beginning each passage with an instructional video where peer tutors teach each other an important reading strategy and background knowledge for the text. Each passage provides reading support through professional narration from a diverse cast.

Strategic questions in a variety of formats and Depth of Knowledge (DOK) levels prompt the students to practice good reading strategies by prereading, checking for understanding, applying the main idea, and summarizing at the end. Photos, illustrations, an embedded Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary, and annotations for contextualized language and background concepts assist students in unlocking the text’s meaning.

Teachers need to motivate students to keep trying especially when the level of work is increasing.

Figures 9 and 10: Grade-level science and social studies topics are easier to access with strategic scaffolds.



Academic Discourse Must Be Taught

Figure 12: A project checklist for students follows direct instruction of the discussion and project protocols. The checklist follows the flow of the protocol to allow all students to take a turn as a small-group leader.

Figure 11: Lesson plans, printouts, and online tools support the teacher in leading meaningful language discussions with students that directly em-power students to unlock meaning in text sets.

“Research has shown that surprisingly little academic talk happens during class” (Zwiers, 2014, p. 260). Academic discourse goes deeper than just partners or small groups talking together. Students need to wrestle with ideas, defend them, negotiate and redefine their opinions as they work with others. Academic discourse can and should be explicitly taught and the Imagine Learning Language Advantage provides tools to help students engage in discourse in the classroom. Following are two examples from Imagine Reading where the teacher is provided with a general protocol and then with specific lesson plans and materials to facilitate discourse between the students. The materials provide the content of the lesson as well as instructional materials explicitly teaching students how to engage in academic discourse.

“In some cases, complex sentence structures are necessary to communicate the complexity of the information itself” (Shanahan, Fisher, & Frey, 2012, p. 59). Because students need to unpack complex text, Imagine Reading lesson plans use specific language study in Power Sentence Lessons to engage groups of students in unpacking complex text and deconstructing rigorous sentences from the text—all with the goal of mapping meaning to the sentence.

Teachers are often short on preparation time, and so the protocol for the routine is always the same while each lesson plan is specific to the target text. The variations of possible discussions are endless.

Once students have completed six thematically related texts that all explore a central focus question, they are invited to follow a protocol for identifying, sharing, debating, synthesizing, and creating as they respond to the focus question and create a group project to disseminate their group response. Focusing work around a connected text set is important “in order to practice sophisticated reading skills as well as the critical background knowledge required to engage in important conversations” (Lewis & Flynn, 2017, p. 23).


The Language of Math

Language is a key element of mathematics. While numbers are at the heart of computation, language is used to discuss the computation, its theory, various approaches and contexts, and so on. And the language of math is not just for English learners. As Molina (2012) states, “[T]he phrase ‘the problem with math is English’ applies to all students, not just those whose native language is not English. Language struggles are embedded in mathematics, which in many ways is its own language” (p.1).

Zahner, Velazques, Moschkovich, Vahey, and Lara-Meloy (2012) expand this assertion to say that:

[M]athematics teaching that promotes students’ conceptual understanding has two central features: 1) teachers and students explicitly attend to mathematical concepts, and 2) students wrestle with and make connections among important mathematical ideas. All teachers face a considerable challenge in balancing both of these features in their teaching, and prior research reveals that teachers in schools with high numbers of Latinos/as and language minority students often focus on procedural content (Gándara & Contreras, 2009). In contrast, recommendations for effective environments for students from non-dominant linguistic backgrounds emphasize that instruction should provide “abundant and diverse opportunities for speaking, listening, reading, and writing” and “encourage students to take risks, construct meaning, and seek reinterpretations of knowledge. (p. 434)

All students need to learn the language of math and language-minority students need even more opportunities to work with language.

Imagine Math supports conceptual understanding by providing visual and verbal models around problem solving in a sequence that builds from granular to more complex concepts in each lesson. Students are surrounded with language in written and audible format, both in English and Spanish.

Figure 13: Students are presented with a word problem and a visual representation.

Figure 14: Students are supported with concept- building supports when they review a topic for a second attempt.


Because it is so important that “students wrestle with and make connections among important mathematical ideas” (Zahner, et al., 2012, p. 434), Imagine Math includes journaling protocols and templates that students use to organize their thinking and explain their reasoning. This infusion of language production into mathematical processes reinforces that doing mathematics is as much about reasoning and discourse as it is about computation.

Figure 15: Animated explanations and other mini-lessons explain visually, verbally, and through written text.

Figure 16: Students have access to live, certified math teachers who dialogue with the students and use Talk Moves strategies (Chapin, O’Connor, & Anderson, 2013).

Figure 17: Various journaling templates help students to organize and explain their mathematical reasoning.


Language is a part of what allows for contextualized mathematical practices and real-world problem solving. Complex tasks like the one below apply the Imagine Learning Language Advantage by allowing students the opportunity to collaborate around a real-life synthesis of concept and computation.

Figure 18: Whether teachers use a copied page or a notebook, the math journaling protocol helps students to reason and communicate as they think about math.

Figure 19: In the application tasks from Imagine Math, students analyze, discuss, and use collaborative problem- solving strategies in real-world contexts.


Figures 20 and 21: Students in a kindergarten concept can learn about addition in English or in Spanish.

The Language of Math Isn’t Only English Whether supporting a student in a home language or a target language, having access to equitable materials is important. As Cummins and Swain (2016) assert, “The principle of first things first, argues for the development and maintenance of the first language in schools on the grounds that this will provide the essential psychological and sociological support for linguistic and academic learning in both languages” (p. 110). Not only do students perform better when they are culturally represented in the achievement narrative, but students learn more efficiently when they approach new concepts from a language of strength.

Providing materials in a first language is one way that the Imagine Learning Language Advantage springboards students into new concepts from their language of strength.

Students learn more efficiently when they approach new concepts from a language of strength.

Working Together to Achieve Equity “Regardless of students’ home language, all students are learners of academic language. And […] the ideal role for education is that it can serve as an equalizer and increase achievement for all students, regardless of race, income, class, and prior achievement[…]” (Shing & Yuan, 2017, p. 65).

Providing education that is rigorous, appropriately scaffolded, and centered on language develop-ment is not a small task. The Association for Latino Administrators and Superintendents (2019) advocated for equity by saying that “Actions to achieve equity require courageous leadership […] and access to educational programming, should no longer be a scarce commodity for all children throughout our country” (p. 1).

The Imagine Learning Language Advantage centers on language, honors diversity, and scaffolds up to provide equitable access for all students so that these “bright and capable” learners can achieve their full potential.

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References

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