Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Kate Winn: Hello to all you travelers out there on the road to evidence-based literacy instruction. I'm Kate Winn, classroom teacher and host of IDA Ontario's podcast Reading Road Trip. Welcome to the fifth episode of season three.
Before we get started, we would like to acknowledge that we are recording this podcast from the traditional land of the Mississauga Anishinaabe. We are grateful to live here and thank the generations of First Nations people for their care for and teachings about the earth. We also recognize the contributions of Métis, Inuit, and other Indigenous peoples in shaping our community and country.
Along with this acknowledgement, and in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, we'd like to amplify the work of an Indigenous artist. And this week we are sharing the picture book Encounter by Brittany Luby illustrated by Michaela Goade. two people navigate their differences with curiosity and openness in this stunning picture book that imagines the first meeting between an indigenous fisher and a European sailor. Based on an actual journal entry by French explorer Jacques Cartier from his first expedition to North America in July 1534, this story imagines the first encounter between a European sailor and a Stadaconan fisher. As the two navigate their differences, language, dress food with curiosity, the natural world around them notes their similarities. The seagull observes their like shadows, the mosquito notes their equally appealing blood. The mouse enjoys the crumbs both people leave behind. This story explores how encounters can create community and celebrates varying perspectives in the natural world. It is at once specific and universal. It's a story based on a primary document and historical research, but it is, in equal measure, beautifully imagined. It makes room for us to recognize our differences while celebrating our shared humanity. Debut author Brittany Luby's background in social justice and history brings a breathtaking depth of insight and understanding to this story, and Michaela Goade's expressive art brings equal life to the creatures and landscapes. An author's note outlines the historical context as well as situates the story in the present day.
Add this title to your home or classroom library today in each episode. This season we're also going to share a review for Reading Road Trip from the Apple podcasts app, and this week we want to thank the listener who kindly posted the following: I have spent my Monday mornings listening to Reading Road Trip. I have shared this podcast with fellow teachers and anyone who is interested in the science of reading. Every episode I learn something new. Thank you so much for putting in the time and effort to create the podcast. Thank you so much to that listener and everyone who leaves us a rating and or a review. Every single one is so appreciated. And now on with the show.
[00:02:55] Kate Winn: I am absolutely thrilled to introduce our guest this week on Reading Road trip. Claude Goldenberg is the Nomelini and Olivier professor of education emeritus at Stanford University. He received his AB in history from Princeton University and MA and PhD from the Graduate School of Education at UCLA. He has taught junior high school in San Antonio, Texas, and first grade in a bilingual elementary school in Los Angeles. A native of Argentina, his areas of research and publication centered on promoting academic achievement among language minority students, particularly those from Spanish speaking backgrounds. Goldenberg is co-author of Promoting Academic Achievement among English Learners: A Guide to the Research, and co-editor of Language and Literacy Development in bilingual settings. He currently works on promoting research, policy and practices to enhance literacy and academic development among students not yet proficient in English. And you are the perfect person to have here for our topic today on multilingual learners. Welcome Dr Claude Goldenberg.
[00:03:56] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Thank you, Kate. Thanks very much. I'm happy to be here.
[00:03:59] Kate Winn: We are going to jump in with asking you first because you yourself at one time were an English learner. Could you tell us just a little bit about that in your past?
[00:04:09] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Yeah. Well, as you know, I was born in Argentina and I came with my parents to the states when I was just three and a half.
It was supposed to be temporary. My father was a physician and he wanted to get some additional training as a gastroenterologist. So the idea was to spend two or three years here in the States, then go back to Argentina, who was probably going to take over my grandfather's practice. But one thing led to another and they decided to stay, mostly for professional reasons. It had nothing to do with the political turmoil that people associate with Argentina.
So we ended up staying. And when I started preschool, I knew no English whatsoever.
And then on into kindergarten, first grade, I just remember not knowing English and just kind of trying to figure things out, you know, I don't know how long that lasted. It seemed to me that by maybe 2nd, 3rd, 4th grade I had sort of figured it out, but I just became proficient in English. I do remember, though, I always was considered kind of exotic because I spoke Spanish and my parents spoke Spanish. And it was kind of weird from the standpoint of most of the kids that I went to school with. But so that was my experience.
[00:05:36] Kate Winn: Okay.
[00:05:36] Kate Winn: I love that you bring that perspective to this work that you do. I'd like to spend the next couple of minutes on something that we could spend the entire episode on, but I just want to sort of clarify and confirm a couple of things to set the stage for the rest of our conversation. So when we're talking about that body of research referred to as the science of reading, and I know you've got opinions on that one, too, but let's think first about our monolingual learners research. You know, that that is the base of the science of reading has not just been conducted with English learners. Right. In terms of monolingual learners, we're talking about a lot of different languages that this research is based on, correct?
[00:06:12] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: That's correct, yes. A lot of different languages and a lot of different first and second languages. It's not just monolingual speakers, and it's certainly not monolingual English speakers. I mean, there literally is a worldwide literature here to draw on.
[00:06:30] Kate Winn: Right. And. Yes. And so what I was going to ask next is, and when it comes to students who are learning English at school but speak another language at home, there is research on that as well. Right? In this whole science of reading body of knowledge.
[00:06:43] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Yes, that is correct.
[00:06:45] Kate Winn: Okay. So for anyone who says the science of reading is only about monolingual students, we can say that that is not correct and use that as our understanding moving forward.
[00:06:54] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: That is right. I tend not to be kind of definitive or unambiguous, ambiguous about things, because a lot of things are ambiguous, but that is unambiguously true. The research includes much more than just monolingual speakers and much more than monolingual English speakers.
[00:07:11] Kate Winn: All right, so the next question that I would like to delve into is about how the science applies to. In Ontario, we would use MLL, multilingual learners. That's a term I'll use even though I know there are other terms as well. It is my understanding that what is is considered a structured literacy approach can be beneficial for all students, including those students learning English at school. What are some of the elements of that structured literacy approach that will be the same and beneficial for both monolingual learners and multilingual learners?
[00:07:42] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Right. Well, there are a couple of elements to that that sometimes get overlooked. I mean, one important element is that, you know, there are basically two strands, two strands of skills. I'm sure you're familiar with the reading rope and the simple view. I'm sure your listeners are familiar with that. And, well, there are many, many details involved there. But the big picture is that there are two strands of skills that need to be learned and mastered to become an effective and proficient reader. There's the strand that involves becoming a proficient at recognizing words, word recognition. And then there is a strand that involves what's required for comprehension? Language comprehension, it requires language development, vocabulary, other aspects of language. It requires knowledge, knowledge development, knowledge acquisition, conceptual understanding. So those two strands are, say, foundational for learning to read. Now, structured literacy and people who are on the science of reading side of things tend to emphasize the first one, the word recognition part.
And we know from research that the most likely way that students will acquire important word recognition skills through a structured approach where you teach letter sound association, orthographic patterns, including the exceptions to orthographic patterns, in a structured, explicit, systematic, and cumulative way.
Now, there are no guarantees here, because the, the needs of students just vary enormously, and the extent to which some need more or less structured, systematic, explicit instruction. I mean, some individuals will need a lot of that. Some individuals will need really minimal amounts so that you kind of give them the clue, you tip them off, you give them the idea of the alphabetic principle, and then most of us are somewhere in between, somewhere in the middle. So that is uncontestable that you increase the likelihood that children, or anyone for that matter, will become a proficient reader. The chances are greatly increased if you use a systematic, explicit, and cumulative approach to the extent that it is needed.
But at the same time, while you're learning those word recognition skills using the structured approach, you also need to be developing your oral language. You need to be developing your body and stock of knowledge, of concepts, of understandings, because eventually, as you know, if you think back to the metaphor of the rope, eventually those word recognition skills are going to merge and intertwine with knowledge of language, vocabulary, background knowledge, language development. Those strands are going to intertwine somewhere around middle elementary school. Just a give you the timeframe. There's no particular window here. Second grade, third grade, fourth grade, it just depends. But at some point, those two strands will intertwine and then become increasingly tightly interlinked. And that's where proficient reading development develops. I mean, that's where it comes from. So it really is a matter of a common set of conceptual understandings of what's required for literacy development.
Before language is an issue, because you asked me about monolingual speakers, we're talking now about children who understand and speak, you know, absent developmental anomalies and delays, children who understand the words and the language that they're being taught to read through, words recognized and to decode and to be able to pick up off the page efficiently and fluently, which is an absolute requirement for proficient literacy. So that's the basic model that I think we should operate on. People call it a structured literacy approach. I mean, it is, because there's nothing happen. There shouldn't be anything haphazard about it. It should be systematic. You should make sure that more common and regular features of the language are, are learned and studied first of the written language, and then you get into exceptions and more complicated orthographic patterns. So it's got to be systematic, explicit, structured, and cumulative. So you have cumulative reviews as you proceed.
[00:12:29] Kate Winn: So just to follow up on the word recognition side first, so if we have students who are multilingual learners and they're learning, you know, English in addition to their home language, they would still benefit from explicit, systematic phonics instruction that would be beneficial for them. And I'm curious to ask you about phonemic awareness, too, because I have heard certain things about the actual awareness piece. Being able to segment, being able to blend, that sort of thing may transfer between languages, but there's also the issue of there being different phonemes themselves in different languages. So how does that phonemic awareness piece fit with our MLLs?
[00:13:03] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Right. Right. That's a very good question. And there are several sort of facets to it.
The relevance of phonemic awareness instruction dependent on the nature of the. Of the orthography of the writing system.
So English, which is a opaque, we call it opaque, non-transparent. It's complicated. There are lots of exceptions. There's seven, what, eight different syllable types. It's complicated to coin a phrase. In a language that is opaque, teaching phonemic awareness and teaching how to manipulate and understand how words can be broken down into constituent phonemes is important because of the complexity of the grapheme-phoneme relationships. The grapheme, common word for grapheme, is letter, as you know. But graphemes are actually more than letters because a grapheme can be three letters, right? If you think of through, through the grapheme, th stands for a single phoneme.
And then you have ough, which is what 1234 letters is a grapheme that stands for the sound of ooh and through.
So you have more than just one letter. A graphene can be more than just one letter. So we think in terms of graphene phoneme associations. And when they're complicated as they are in English, it's very important for learners to be able to segment the constituent phonemes that exist in a word so that they can then bind that. That's a term that the neuro linguists use. They can bind a particular phoneme, which is a sound to its written representation.
Letter letters, or let's just call them graphemes. You have to bind the phoneme that you hear to the grapheme that you see.
Now, in a less complicated orthography, like Spanish, which is transparent because it has almost not exactly perfect, but nearly 99% regularity. Vowels, for example, one vowel, one sound, there's no long, there's no schwa, there's no complicated mess to kind of make things difficult.
It's very transparent. So, based on research that we have, again, around the world with different languages that are transparent. And I actually did a study in Mexico, looking at the instruction in Spanish literacy. In Mexico, they don't teach phonemic awareness. And the reason they don't teach phonemic awareness is because of the transparency of the language.
So that once you learn the letter sound association, which is where Spanish literacy begins, a lot of people have the mistake that because Spanish is orthographically more syllabically based, that the syllable is the basic unit of teaching reading. It's not. It's the letter. But in this case, the letter and the phoneme and the phoneme and the grapheme are closely associated. There's no complicated relationships. So when children are taught to read in Spanish, they're first taught the vowels.
And then they're taught sequentially, vowel by vowel. Typically, it begins with the m.
Then it goes to the p, then it goes to the t. And children are taught how you combine a consonant with a vowel to form a syllable.
And then those syllables are combined to form words. But it begins at the individual vowel level. That is to say, the individual phoneme level. Because vowels are phonemes. Same thing with consonants. There are very, very few irregularities. So the conclusion from the study that I did some years ago, corroborated by studies with other transparent orthographies, is that you don't need to teach phonemic awareness. That kids just basically infer it without even calling it phonemic awareness.
Now, you do need phonemic awareness, but it doesn't have to be taught directly. And we found in our study that kids who had phonemic awareness early on that predicted success in reading. Right? I mean, phonological sensitivity really is a contributing factor to success in literacy and reading and word recognition and decoding. But in a transparent orthography, you don't need to teach it directly. Now, in English, whether you're a first language speaker or a second language speaker doesn't matter. Because of the complexity of orthography, you do need to pay attention to phonemic awareness. So you can't engage in that phoneme grapheme association, which the complicated graphemes in English kind of just mess up in order to sort of help the phonemic segmentation, which then you use to combine to bind with the graphemes, you need to do phonemic awareness instruction in English. Now, one interesting question that I don't have an answer to is if you learn to read in Spanish or any transparent orthography, and you do develop phonemic awareness, because we know that as kids learn to read in Spanish, they develop more phonemic awareness as a result of the instruction, reading instruction, not as a result of phonemic awareness instruction. If you develop phonemic awareness in Spanish, which we know transfers to a second language, are kids learning to read in Spanish, do they have a leg up? And you don't have to do as much phonemic awareness instruction when you teach them to read in, in English? That's a very plausible hypothesis. I don't really have a good answer for that, but it's something that some enterprising doctoral student or researcher out in your audience or maybe you, Kate, I don't know, might want to take up at some point and I'd be happy to consult.
[00:19:23] Kate Winn: That's a great question.
[00:19:24] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: That was a long-winded answer. I hope I answered your question.
[00:19:27] Kate Winn: No, that's good.
[00:19:27] Kate Winn: Yeah.
[00:19:27] Kate Winn: No, no, I was just curious about the phonemic awareness piece, and you answered that well. Thank you. So if we look now at the language comprehension side. So again, as I understand it, beneficial for monolingual learners, beneficial for multilingual learners. But I'm thinking here is where we might need to have something additional, something a bit different when English is not the home language. So what are sort of the differences? There are best practices for us educators working with these students and wanting to build that language comprehension piece.
[00:19:54] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Okay, well, so let's back up a bit, because your question is premised on the assumption that you need to worry about a second language when it comes to comprehension. That's not really true. You need to worry about second language learners when it comes to word recognition.
[00:20:10] Kate Winn: For the meaning of the words.
[00:20:12] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: That's exactly right.
[00:20:13] Kate Winn: Right.
[00:20:13] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: You know, we're familiar with the concept of orthographic mapping, you know, one of Linnea Ehri’s, many, many contributions to research and practice. Do I need to explain that a bit for your audience or can we explain? Sure.
[00:20:25] Kate Winn: Why don't you just quickly tell them. Yeah, these pieces of it.
[00:20:28] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Basically, we used to think that sight words were words that were so irregular that there was no point in trying to teach kids to decode them. And so you taught them as a unit. You saw them by sight because you memorized them kind of like a blob, right? It's a bunch of letters. Memorize this word because, like, the word sight, you know, you gotta memorize that because it's so irregular or I g h t comes much later in the phonemic curriculum. Well, Linnea Ehri has introduced a new, and I think, much more productive definition of what a sight word is.
She's taught us that a sight word is a word that is, that can be eminently decodable, but which is very inefficient, that every time you come across it, you have to decode it. So a sight word is a word where you see the letters, you hear the sounds in the word, you associate the letters with the sound or the grapheme with the phoneme, and then that association becomes associated with the meaning of the word.
Once you do that several times for a word, and again, some kids get it one or two, you know, one or two shots and it's in long term memory. Other kids require six, seven, eight more. It's just an individual difference variable, and it depends on how it's taught. So a lot of variables that go into whether it's a one shot learn or a 7810 times learn. But the basic idea is the same. You associate the. The learner associates the phoneme of the. The phonemes in the word with the graphemes in the word, and then that association becomes associated with the meaning of the words. Now, it's got to be part of your lexicon, it's got to be part of your vocabulary for you to be able to do that. But once that happens, that becomes a sight word and it becomes stored in long term memory. And one of the prerequisites for becoming a more efficient, pRoductive, skilled reader is to build a greater and greater bank of sight words.
Now, if you have irregular words, one of the interesting things that people don't realize that even irregular words have regular components. I use the word through, right, which is very irregular at the end, I think, in the rhyme. But if you look at the th, that's perfectly regular, although there is some variation there. Sometimes th is a hard and sometimes the sauce, that's a little more subtle, but it's regular. And then the r in between the th and the ough is regular. It's a regular er sound.
So there are regular elements even in, I think, I can't think of a single irregular word that doesn't have some kind of regular element. So you want to do the orthographic mapping concept as really the way the bulk of the words are learned to be read, and then once they're in long term memory, they're sight words, right? You don't have to go and decode them. So that's for, if you know the words, if you know the language. Now, think about it. For an English learner, an English learner is learning the orthography, the writing system, the sounds, the sound symbol associations, but they don't have a ready bank of lexical items. In other words, vocabulary words. They don't have a ready bank of familiarity with the sounds of the language. I mean, think about it. English learners. That's why they're called English learners or multilingual. We call them multilingual learners, but they're learning a second language. They're learning the sounds. What are you learning when you're learning a second language? The sounds of the language, the phonemes, how the language represents, communicates meaning, the semantic system, vocabulary, not just vocabulary, very important, but also the semantics. And there's discourse. There are other features. So what happens is that if you're a monolingual speaker, again, absent some developmental anomaly or some delay, you have a ready bank of knowledge, understanding, and familiarity with the oral sounds of the language and the meaning system of the language, what the words mean. Basically, if you're an English learner, you don't have that. You've got to not only learn the writing system, the orthography, what the letters represent, but you've got to learn the sounds that the letters represent, and you've got to learn the words what the words mean. So orthographic mapping cannot happen if you don't already, if you aren't already familiar with the sounds of the language and the meaning that the words carry. So you got to provide instruction in that. And the key idea that I think people need to understand, and we're talking about beginning and early literacy, although it extends later on. We can talk about that if you want.
But the key idea is that individuals who are learning the language in which they are learning to read need to be provided additional oral language support to support the literacy learning, oral language support that typically the speakers of the language English speakers don't need because they've already got the sounds, they've been speaking the language. Let's say it's English for five years.
As familiar as a five year old is with the sounds of English. The familiar as a five year old is with the meaning of the words that are used to teach reading skills. You don't have to teach those, but to English learners, you do have to teach them. Now, one other issue here is that English learners, or multilingual learners, come with different degrees of English proficiency. Some English learners come to kindergarten, first grade, knowing virtually no English.
Some come at, you know, at least an intermediate level so you don't have to provide the same degree of support to everyone. That's one of the many reasons it's important to know the skill level of your students, what's their level of English proficiency, how much additional support in the phonemes of language and the semantics of the language need to provide. But you can be sure that if you're learning to read in a language that you're simultaneously learning to speak and understand, you're going to need additional support in learning those parts of the language that you need to connect to the writing system, to the spelling system, otherwise, that orthographic mapping system process. And there's an analog in the brain, the different parts of the brain that need to be connected in the well known reading circuit or literacy circuit. That cannot happen unless you're provided a support. And we're talking really still in the word recognition strand.
It's not just comprehension, it's for word recognition, and then it gets more complicated and more things involved when comprehension comes along. And then other facets of language and deeper funds of knowledge are required to make sense of things. But it's the same basic principle. If you're learning to read in a language, you're simultaneously learning to speak and understand. You need instruction and other kinds of experiences that'll provide the oral language support, that'll support the literacy development. That's the key idea.
[00:28:06] Kate Winn: I love how you really made that point, that, yes, we've got the language comprehension that might be different or additional, what we need to do there, but that they need to understand what words mean in order to orthographically map them, to even have the word recognition piece. Yes, I think that that was really important to highlight. Thank you.
[00:28:22] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: And it's important. I mean, in thinking about this over the past couple years, I came to realize that there's a difference between decoding and word recognition. We tend to use those interchangeably, but they're not the same thing because you can actually decode something but not recognize the word, right? Think, do a morphological analysis of recognize, re, do it again, cognize, know, or understand. You can't recognize something if you hadn't cognized it before, if you weren't aware of, if you didn't know it, if you didn't understand it. So you can decode something and not recognize it. And that's what happens if multilingual learners are taught decoding and not, and teachers don't pay, or parents, for that matter, don't pay attention to the importance of recognition, not just decoding. Decoding I think of as the on-ramp toward recognition. And it's clear with multilingual learners, with kids who know the language, it's nearly invisible because once they can decode something, if it's a familiar word, they recognize it. Where it becomes apparent is when kids start decoding more irregular words like girl, for example, which comes later on.
I've seen kids like, they go, girl.
Oh, girl.
You see the difference between decoding and word recognition.
If you don't know the meaning of the word, you can't do that. Oh, girl. You just girl, girl. And you stop there.
[00:29:59] Kate Winn: Yeah. Well, that's great. I'd like to shift now into a few different hot topics around this area of multilingual learners. So the first one I want to ask you about has to do with universal screening, because here in Ontario, we had the Ontario Human Rights Commission, the Right to Read inquiry, all the recommendations that came out of it, including early reading screening for kindergarten through grade two. And we can do that beyond as well. But for k two and some critics of this recent reform believe that elements like the screeners are undesirable because they use a, quote, deficit lens, particularly when it comes to multilingual learners or perhaps students who speak different dialects of English. And you know that this is somehow not a good thing to be doing for these kids because of that. What are your thoughts on that?
[00:30:45] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Well, I'll tell you. I mean, I think that's a very unfortunate and harmful way to look at it.
I mean, I don't want to say it's almost kind of perverse that you look at it that way, because if you think about screening as a hunt for deficits, you know, it's kind of like, it's kind of like looking for ghosts under your bed. I'm, I mean, screening is to determine students strengths as well as their instructional needs.
I mean, that's the point of screening. You want to know what they know and you can build on and what they don't yet know that you need to pay attention to instructionally.
You know, you don't want to waste students time, or teachers, for that matter, teaching kids what they already know.
I'm sure you've seen lots of examples of that. I know I've seen. It makes me, one of the things that makes me craziest, you know, teachers a lot of times think they've had a very successful lesson when in fact they just taught kids stuff they already knew. They were just kind of going over stuff the kids knew and they responded. They were enthusiastic, which is great. You want to see response, you want to see enthusiasm, but are you wasting your time by basically going over?
So it's one thing to review knowing that you're reviewing. It's another thing to think you're teaching something new, but in fact you waste their time. So you want to think about screening as understanding what kids know so you don't waste your time and identifying where the gaps are, things they need to learn. If you want to call it a deficit, it's not a helpful way to think about it because we all have deficits. I mean, I've never known everything I need to know in order to go to my next stage of learning. I mean, I retired five years ago and I am learning like what I told you about the difference between decoding and word recognition.
That awareness came to me literally a couple of years ago when I was reading one of Linnea Ehri's articles. Was that a deficit? In my thinking? Yeah, if you want to call it that. But why? It's something I hadn't learned yet. So I think that's the way we need to think about it. Now. Having said all that, in defense of screening, the fact of the matter is a lot of times screening is used or contaminated by a view that it's a hunt for deficits. What can't they do? And that's, I think, largely a result of people not understanding the purpose of screening and not having a good system, like a good MTSS, you know, multi-tiered systems of support system where you have a structure in place and you have educators who are trained and understand the purpose of screening, how to do screening, what to do with the data, how to interpret it, how to then use that data in order to design more effective instruction for students.
Otherwise, if you don't have all those elements in place, you have screening data either misused or just ignored. There are times that screening is done and the report will be reported back to the teacher, I don't know, a month later, a week later, maybe never. And it's just a waste of time for everyone. So really using screening in a way that's productive for everyone involved requires having a system in place where screening plays a very specific role in the whole instructional enterprise. And people who understand, who are trained to collect those data, interpret those data and make the best use of those data to maximize learning and teaching to the extent possible. That's the only solution. Otherwise we have this confusion of things being conceptually criticized, like screening is bad because it implies a deficit hypothesis. Well, I think I've taken care of that. But we have that a lot like science of reading is interpreted incorrectly as phonics instruction. And so science of reading gets a bad name by people who say, no, it's more than phonics instruction. But you see sometimes bad implementations of good ideas and science of reading and screening, we go down the list, are too often examples of bad implementations of good ideas. And people confound the good idea with what they see in the bad implementation.
[00:35:19] Kate Winn: Thank you. Another one on screening. So I have read somewhere, and I don't think it was research research, but I think it was an expert sharing an opinion about.
[00:35:30] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: That's an important distinction. I'm glad you made that.
[00:35:32] Kate Winn: Yes. When somebody I trusted who said it, but I don't think it was actually like a research finding necessarily that when multilingual learning have their very first screener done in English before they have had any instruction yet. So like they've just, maybe they've come to Canada, they've come to the US, it's the beginning of year they're doing this screener. They haven't any English instruction to not necessarily overreact to the data you get for that very first screener when they haven't had any instruction yet. And in one way that makes sense to me, I'm thinking of my own class, just monolingual learners that I do a pre k screener, I use the Acadience PELI. And I can think of a couple of kids where beginning of year it was a zero on alphabet knowledge and it was a zero on phonemic awareness. So they came up red on, you know, those color coding well below benchmark. By mid year they were totally green because they had had that instruction. I didn't do anything special. It wasn't like I targeted it. It was just the tier one, whatever instruction. Cause I thought, okay, there are three or there four, because we're talking about pre-k. Let's just see, you know, how instruction goes by mid-year. And so it does make some sense to me that when kids have had absolutely no instruction. But I mean, again, I think there's sometimes that misconception too that if something comes up red, well, they've got dyslexia and we're getting them into special education and we're never going to do that. But what are your thoughts on sort of how to interpret a very first screener for a new English learner?
[00:36:54] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Yeah, no, that's a great point.
Let me just say at the outset that there are lots of people, many of whom I'm sure you know, who are really sort of expert in this and can talk with a great deal more sort of understanding and awareness. So I'll give you my best shot, but I would encourage you, maybe you already had them on your podcast, to contact them, and they can clear up whatever confusions I create.
But, you know, you raise a really good point, and I think the important thing that teachers need to understand is that if you're an English learner learning to read in English, and you come up red on some screening or anything for that matter, there are three possibilities. One is it's a language issue. You just are not sufficiently familiar with the language to engage in whatever the items are.
The other possibility is that there is some underlying issue, either short term memory or phonological sensitivity, which is a literacy issue more than an oral language issue.
And the third possibility, it's both. You can have both and those kids who don't really know the language well and have some underlying issue. In the states, we call them dual identified.
So those are the possibilities. So the first thing is, people need to understand the range of possibilities. The second thing, as you obviously do, you can't draw any hard conclusions from a first screener, no matter how red the results are. It's a screener, it's not a diagnostic tool. And that's one of the many bad implementation features that I was talking about a few minutes ago. People mistake screeners for dyslexia identifiers. You cannot identify dyslexia before instruction has happened because one of the operational definitions of dyslexia, it's a little bit of a backdoor approach. One of the operational definitions of dyslexia is not responsive to good instruction, to structured, systematic, explicit, you know, demystificate, demystifying instruction. Right. If they're not responding to that, that is an indicator of dyslexia. But you can't do that, certainly in the first screening, and that's completely preposterous. And most people I know say you can't even do it in kindergarten. It's way too early to assign a dyslexia label. Right. And that's one of the reasons screening gets a bad name. That's a primary feature of a bad implementation.
So those two kind of conceptual understandings, I think, are foundational, and then the operational question which you ask is, okay, well, how long do you wait?
What do you look for?
What are the signs that indicate this kid might really have a problem because of some neurological thing? You know, that reading circuit is just nothing coming online rather than, well, this kid just, and there's a range of years that it takes for, you know, kids, people in general, to master a second language. So there are two systems going on, and it's sometimes hard to separate what's going on.
So that's when you have, I think, some very fine grained distinction to make. And it's at that point that I would strongly recommend talking to someone like Elsa Cardenas Hagan, Lillian Duran, Doris Baker at the University of Texas in Austin, because Lillian in particular has been working on a measure here in California that is supposed to help us distinguish between the different kind of issues that kids who are English learners going on, whether it's a literacy issue or it's a language development issue.
Alison Bailey, another colleague at UCLA. So there are people who are really specializing in trying to disentangle these issues, and anything I would tell you would be derivative of what I've learned from them. So I would say you should go to the sources and they can, like I said, clear up whatever confusions. I've introduced some more great names for.
[00:41:35] Kate Winn: Our guest wish list. Thank you. This next question, I know some people are going to find a little controversial, but I have to ask you this because I once heard you say something really interesting. I think it was on a different podcast about culturally responsive teaching. And you said, quote, we found very little evidence that culturally relevant, culturally responsive teaching, culturally responsive pedagogy. And then you said, I say this kind of quaking in my boots, that the evidence for that is, at best, very weak. So can you explain what you meant by that?
[00:42:05] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Yeah, what I meant by quaking in my boots.
[00:42:09] Kate Winn: I figured out the quaking in my boots part. But what do you mean in terms of evidence for that? What did that refer to?
[00:42:15] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Right. Well, that was part of that conclusion comes from some work I did for the National Literacy Panel, been about, oh, gosh, over 20 years now with National Literacy Panel on Language Minority children and youth. Not to be confused with the national Reading panel, which was just about English speakers, monolingual English speakers learning to read. That's where those five pillars of effective reading instruction come from. So this is like a follow on study several years later called the National Literacy Panel. And I was tasked with reviewing the research on socio cultural factors in children's literacy development. And again, we pulled from a worldwide literature. I mean, it was heavily us based, but there were some from Africa, there were some from the UK, there were some from Canada, there were some from Australia with italian immigrants. I mean, there really is a much larger research base than just in the United States because the question was, you know, you can be a language minority student in any society. You just. The qualifications are you come from a home where a language other than the societal language is spoken. And that's the language that you speak, your home language, your first language, and you're learning the societal language when you go to school and you have to learn it before, after, during, while you're learning the academic curriculum. So there are language and Morty kids all over the world. It's not unique to North America.
So it's a kind of a complicated literature. It's very, shall we say, spotty. I won't say spotty. Diverse methodologically, there's some experiments, there's some qualitative research, there's some ethnographic, there's some case studies. And by the way, I mean, I'm methodologically ecumenical. My own dissertation was a qualitative, quasi ethnographic, well, anthropologists would shudder to hear me say ethnographic, but it was a qualitative, observational series of case studies. And I think there's value in all sorts of research, whether it's experimental, correlational. The question is, is it answering? Are you collecting data that will answer the question that you want to answer? And part of the problem that I found with this literature is that the culturally responsive, culturally sustaining, you know, they're all, you know, rattled off several labels for the same thing. Part of the problem is that most of the research doesn't look at student outcomes.
It doesn't even try to say, if you do this culturally responsive thing, then here's what you observe. They don't do it qualitatively, they don't do it experimentally, they don't do it correlationally.
It's noticeable for its absence any kind of outcome, and not just measure outcome, gauge outcome assessment in terms of student outcomes instead of student, in terms of student learning. There's very little of that.
So that's one thing. I mean, people cite all sorts of so called cultural research that support culturally responsive teaching, and you'd be amazed at how many of those studies just don't have any outcome. They're just presumed. They just look at whether the student comes from a home or is used to certain kind of interactions and then where the teacher conforms to them or accommodates to them.
And it's inferred, assumed that if that happens, it's good. And if it doesn't happen, it's a problem for kids learning. So that's the first thing to realize. That's one of the reasons such a weak research base.
Now, when there is data on outcomes, and again, it can be qualitative and quantitative, I make no differentiation here. Then what you find is that, first of all, one thing you find is that there are. There is a series of studies done in Africa where they. These are sort of experimental studies where they expose kids to stories that were either culturally familiar, you know, based on wherever they were. Some of these, I think, were Kenya, different parts. So they're folk tales that have language and sort of generic or genre elements that are familiar to the students. So they would expose them to stories that had familiar, culturally familiar materials and stories that were culturally unfamiliar. And they found that there was a difference, that culturally familiar stories had some advantage in student comprehension, which is, like, totally predictable as a whole literature and cognitive psychology, that you're more likely to comprehend something if it's familiar to you.
So no surprise there. The thing that was really interesting is that some of the same studies and some of the other ones that looked at other things found that when you compare student comprehension as a function of whether they read something where they were fluent in the language that they were reading in, in contrast to not being fluent in the language they were reading in, guess which students had the upper hand in comprehension? Right. Kids who read. And it turns out when you compared the effects of being familiar with the language in which you were reading, when you compare the effects of that to the effects of reading culturally familiar material, the effect of familiarity or proficiency in language you were reading was way outstripped the importance of reading culturally familiar material. Now, there are two conclusions to draw from this. One is, yeah, reading culturally familiar stories can aid comprehension, which, again, because of the large literature, does it have anything to do with culture? Just does it have anything to do with something as familiar?
But what is a far more potent variable or factor is your proficiency in the language that you're reading in.
So one of my concerns here is that we prioritize what actually has demonstrated impact on student reading comprehension.
And it's clear that proficiency in the language that you're reading in has a stronger impact on comprehension than cultural familiarity.
So there were those kinds of things. There was also one very, very good set of case studies that I read that was actually in UK with a Bengali student, a young child who was in a preschool, very multicultural, multilingual, and very, very kind of whole language ish. And so they were doing lots of things with a writing table. And so one of the activities the child engaged in, and there was some palpable evidence of her progressing in her writing skills, was she would go to the writing table and write stories. And you know what? She wrote stories. She wrote recipes.
Why did she write recipes? Because her favorite show was on the cooking channel.
Now, this has nothing to do with Bengali or punjabi culture.
It's a part of her lived experience in her home.
Watching the cooking channel was part of her culture. Her. It wasn't her natal culture, right. What we also always assume by culture, but as part of her lived experience. And that had a clear impact on her uptake when she went to the writing table, what she wrote about and the letters that she wrote about and what she engaged in for very productive kind of literacy activities. So it got me really the thinking that, you know, this notion of culturally appropriate - culture is such an amorphous and kind of vast topic.
We need to be thinking about the lived experience.
You know, we need to connect with children's lived experiences rather than sort of these sort of monolithic notions of culture, you know, holidays and celebrations. I mean, I've got nothing against learning those kinds of things. I think we all should learn certainly not just about our own culture tied in that, but other people's culture. So I'm all for multicultural education for you, me, for anyone, just because it makes you a more expansive, intellectually curious, culturally adapted human being. But we shouldn't overemphasize the importance of culturally responsive teaching because we run the risk of diminishing the importance of things with more demonstrable impact, such as teaching, teaching the skills, such as teaching the language that English learners need to learn in the language that they need to learn it. So that's my concern. And that's why when I can't remember, oh, I think it was. But I wrote an article in reading research quarterly that we have to balance is kind of a bad word in literacy, right, because of the balanced approach.
But we have to balance the salience or the priority we give to certain factors or instructional features in relationship to kind of their demonstrated impact on student outcomes. And what I've seen from the research is that the salience, the power of these cultural variables is very, very modest at best. What we found, Kate, was that the most noticeable impact we could find of cultural factors was it had a sort of an engagement or motivational impact. And that's not trivial, right. I don't for a minute diminish the importance of motivation and engagement, but if that's the impact you're having, you need to be aware of that. And you can't assume that because they're more engaged, they're actually learning more.
[00:53:10] Kate Winn: Right.
[00:53:11] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: And you engage. I mean, don't leave home without it. You need kids to be engaged. You need to participate. And to the extent that culturally appropriate or culturally familiar or culturally sustaining activities promote that kind of engagement, well, that's great. But don't stop there. Don't stop there because you can't assume that that by itself is actually going to lead to better literacy or better anything else.
[00:53:38] Kate Winn: Thank you for that one last heavy question, and then we'll wrap up on a lighter note. So I want to share a question that I was asked and the answer I gave, and I'm hoping that you might provide your expertise and tell me how I might have answered this question better. So I recently did a presentation in Alaska. It was a breakout session on fluency, so covered the whole gamut. And then an intervention teacher came up to me after and said that she's having trouble getting classroom teachers at her school, where they have a high population of Indigenous students, to see the value in reading rate. And because some of the students home languages, in some of those languages, speaking slowly. She didn't mention reading per se, but she said speaking slowly is a cultural norm. And they felt that somehow they were disrespecting that by measuring reading rate and trying to increase words correct per minute. So that was a new question for me, that whole cultural norm piece of it. I've done lots of PD before explaining the importance of rate to teachers, but I've never, you know, had that exact question come back at me. So what I said to this teacher was that first, of course, we would always honour and value home language, so we would never, you know, tell a student that they need to speak more quickly in their home language or there's anything wrong with the way they and their family communicate. Like, that's totally a given. But I said that she could perhaps talk to these teachers about the fact that because we are responsible for their success in English literacy and there's evidence to show the importance of, you know, orally reading at a certain rate in English for comprehension and things like that.
So I suggested maybe she share some of that information with. With teachers so that they would know that it's not either or honour the home language honor, you know, the family, the cultural norms, but also talk about what we know from science about if they're going to learn to read in English, what we know, you know, about the importance of rate. But I'm wondering, you know, what. What are your thoughts on that question, and what would you have said differently?
[00:55:33] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Well, first of all, I think what you said was perfectly appropriate. Right. So I have no problem. And that's. You're right. I mean, what you said is exactly right. I think what I would add, and I'm going to try to make this briefer than I normally do because I'd like to hear your take on my take. I think what I would add is that you can introduce the concept of fluency as a bridge to comprehension. And most bridges, unless they're one way bridges, they go both ways. So, as you suggested, fluency contributes to comprehension, is required for comprehension, but it also goes the other way. Fluency requires comprehension.
Now, you have to be thinking of fluency the way I'm thinking about it, which is not just rate. It's not just accuracy. It's not just, you know, reading fast, but fluency with appropriate prosody, with intonation, with appropriate rate. You know, if you're. You. If you're reading truly fluently, reading too fast is not appropriate. It's not. It's not fluent. It's, in fact, in some ways disfluent in an odd sort of way. So you want to be thinking about fluency going both ways. And one of the ways I've suggested to teachers to do this, and I tried to do this when I was teaching, was to use a prompt that I learned from reading recovery, which was read it like you're talking.
Read it like you're talking. And then there are techniques that can be used, like using reader's theater, right, where the text, the script is actually designed to be not only read, but memorized and spoken as it's really meaningful talk.
So to get to your point, I think it'd be perfectly appropriate to discuss, you know, to bring this up to teachers and then to bring it up with their students that fluency is sort of subjective.
And you know that because, you know, if you've ever heard two different versions of Macbeth or Hamlet, different actors interpreting. They read differently because they're interpreting it differently. Their cadence, their intonation, their inflection, maybe even the context in which they're talking changes, and that changes the meaning. So if you have, as in the case that you experienced a situation where culturally, students kind of talk more slowly, and there's actually a literature on this, as I'm sure you know, there are different associated with indigenous people, different cadence of speech. So you want to talk to kids about, okay, how, if you have this text, if you're speaking this, how would you speak it?
What would make sense to speak it? How. Now you can invoke the culture. You could say, what would it make sense in your culture? Personally, I don't think it's necessary, but you could. I mean, I don't want to disparage culture anyway, but you could say, what would make sense? How would it make sense to you? If you're speaking this line to your grandfather, your sister or your friend, how would you speak it to them? And you would approach fluency in that way, in a way that is presumably culturally sensitive, appropriate, taking into account the speech patterns of the Indigenous community, but at the same time, emphasizing. I mean, fluency is about meaning, communicating meaning. That's the central point. It's not just the more words you can kick out per minute, the better off you are. No, it's about communicating meaning. That's the essence of fluency. So that's what I would emphasize it. Open up the fluency issue in that way. So I know we only have maybe 30 seconds, but I'd love your thought. Can I just ask you. I know you're asking me the questions, but what do you think of that?
[00:59:32] Kate Winn: You can ask me, too. No, I think that's excellent, that, because that whole. You're right. And when I did the presentation, it was the three aspects of the whole, the definition of fluency. You've got your accuracy comes first. You've got your rate, you've got your prosody, right. So we did talk about all that, but I didn't weave that into my answer. So that is a really good, a really good point, a way to think about that, and, you know, speaking like you're talking and that sort of thing. And also, I think with teachers, too, making sure they understand that what we want to get to, you know, Hasbrouck and Tindal would say 50 75th percentile in terms of rate. Right. We don't want to make it about speed reading either. And maybe that could have been a misunderstanding there, too, that we do want it to sound like talking. We want it to sound, you know, have that, that expression and that sort of thing.
[01:00:12] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: So.
[01:00:12] Kate Winn: No, I appreciate that. If I'm ever asked that question again, I'll be ready to give an even better answer.
[01:00:17] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Well, good. Good.
[01:00:18] Kate Winn: The last thing, we only have a minute left. But I don't want to leave you without asking this question. Our podcast is of course, called Reading Road Trip. When I first emailed you, I got sort of an auto-reply and it said, you know, you might not reply for a while because you're busy doing some traveling and there are some links. Could you just really quickly give us a high level overview of your road trip journey and where people can find out more about that and we will link in the show notes.
[01:00:41] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: Okay. Yeah, I mean, I have the links. I retired from Stanford a few years ago and it's always been sort of my childhood dream to hit the road, you know, grow cross country. I'm going to tie it into reading because the seed for this came from Reading Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck when I was like twelve or 13 and I thought that was such a great idea and I've always had this fantasy of doing that. So I've taken cross country road trips. A couple years ago, the longest one I've taken was about 12,000 miles. And I went from California across Arizona, New Mexico, down along the Gulf coast, over to New Orleans, and I went up the Blues highway, Highway 61, from New Orleans, along the Mississippi river, up to Minnesota, and then across the Great Lakes and upstate New York. Then I went to see my mom in Maryland, and then I came back sort of on a diagonal path through West Virginia, Kansas. I mean, I've really learned a lot about US geography. That was the longest one I've done. I've cut back now because of global warming. I just feel guilty putting so much carbon in the air. So now I do hybrid trips. Like, I'm going, so I fly somewhere, do a gig or do a talk or do whatever I do, and then I'll rent a car and go for a more modest one. Like next month I'm going to North Carolina and, and then I'm going to rent a car and travel up to Virginia to see a former student and Maryland to see my mom and sister, and then drive down to Miami to do a gig there and then go to the keys. So I kind of combine, it's a great thing about being retired. I can do these things.
So that's what I'm doing. And I'd love for people to see my blog, some pictures and I, a couple other things. But thanks for asking. That was so, so fun. Yes.
[01:02:42] Kate Winn: No, I found it really interesting. I did check out your links and saw those pictures and maybe you'll have a road trip, bring you up to Canada at some point.
[01:02:48] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: I wouldn't discount that.
[01:02:52] Kate Winn: Well, let's hope so. That would be great. Dr Claude Goldenberg, thank you so much for being here with us for this episode of Reading Road Trip. It's been a pleasure.
[01:03:00] Dr. Claude Goldenberg: You're welcome. Thank you very much. It was my pleasure.
[01:03:05] Kate Winn: Show notes for this episode with all the links and information you need can be found at podcast.idaontario.com. and you have been listening to season three, episode five with Doctor Claude Goldenberg. And now it's time for that typical end of the podcast call to action. If you enjoyed this episode of Reading Road Trip, we'd love it if you could rate and or review it in your podcast app, as this is extremely helpful for a podcast and your review might even make it onto an episode. Of course we welcome any social media love you feel inspired to spread as well. Feel free to tag IDA Ontario and me. My handle is thismomloves on Twitter and Facebook and katethismomloves on Instagram. Make sure you're following the Reading Road Trip podcast in your app and watch.
[01:03:49] Kate Winn: For new episodes continuing every Monday throughout the summer.
[01:03:53] Kate Winn: We couldn't bring reading road trip to you without behind the scenes support from Katelyn Hanna, Brittany Hayes, and Melinda Jones. At IDA Ontario, I'm Kate Winn and along with my co producer, Dr Una Malcolm. We hope this episode of Reading Road Trip has made your path to evidence based literacy instruction just a little bit clearer and a lot more fun. Join us next time when we bring another fabulous guest along for the ride on Reading Road Trip.
