Practitioner research study of
The effectiveness of a program designed to train teachers to use more interaction in ESL literacy classrooms in terms of changing teachers’ attitudes toward teaching reading.
Learner participants
One-thousand four-hundred three ESL reading teachers from Texas community-education centers. The teachers were involved in the training as part of a statewide initiative to increase literacy and literacy levels. The program was implemented after nationwide studies indicated that nearly half of the people of the United States adult population read at the lowest two levels of literacy as designated by national standards. The teachers in this study were learning new techniques and theories about ESL teaching in order to improve their own practice. The participants ranged from professionally trained ESL teachers to teacher aides and community volunteers. How many?
Teacher participants
Three teacher trainers from a large Texas university with expertise in TESOL and communicative pedagogy. Ideologically, the teachers aligned themselves with literacy views that emphasize the need to move beyond functional literacy, or the ability to function in society, to critical literacy, or literacy for personal and cultural empowerment. They sought in their teacher education sessions to help teachers re-evaluate the nature of the student/teacher relationship and to make the literacy curriculum relevant to the social issues that students’ face.
Study Design
A needs assessment was sent to each educational center, and the teacher education workshops were modified to fit the needs as expressed by teachers at each center. Then the teacher educators held a professional development workshop. At the beginning of each workshop, participants were asked to rate their needs for help or new ideas on ten aspects of the critical literacy model using a Likert scale. The workshops were designed to be participatory and to involve group investigations and decision-making. To evaluate the overall effectiveness of the workshops, the researchers then asked the participants to rate the effectiveness of different aspects of the program on a Likert scale and to give comment on the most and least helpful aspects of the program. To gauge attitude shifts during the conference, the participants rated the same ten items related to critical literacy that they had examined at the beginning of the conference. This time, they were asked to indicate how useful they felt these concepts were to their own teaching.
Findings
In terms of the overall effectiveness of the teacher development workshops, the researchers found that the participants overall were very positive about the interactive nature of the workshop and were eager to apply this pedagogical model to their own teaching. Their comments on the workshops indicated increased understanding of the concept of critical literacy and the importance of a participatory approach to teaching ESL literacy to adults. In terms of the attitudinal shift, the researchers found that the participants overall rated the aspects of critical literacy much higher after participating in the workshops, which they interpret as evidence of the effectiveness of participatory workshops towards introducing teachers to literacy pedagogy.
Comments on the Study
All of the assessments in the study were completed immediately following participation in the workshops, so there is no evidence of long-term attitudinal shifts. Since all the data collected was self-report data on attitudes, there is no evidence that the workshops had any effect on the participants’ practice. Also, the use of statistics with their instruments is troubling. Comparing scores on one scale based on teachers’ estimates of their need to learn about a particular concept with their estimates of the usefulness of the conference is not a fair comparison to uncover attitudinal change. A teacher could find a concept very useful in practice, for example, but feel that he already sufficiently understands the concept. The differences between the Likert scale ratings of critical literacy concepts is as likely dues to reasons like this as to any attitudinal shift.
Finally, no evidence is presented of the effectiveness of the critical literacy model as a model for ESL literacy pedagogy. While the model is theoretically and socially appealing, there is no evidence that it is effective or that it is more effective for helping ESL speakers to read than any other pedagogical model. Without such evidence, it is hard to see why changing teacher attitudes toward literacy is a necessary or even positive step.
Implications for Practice
Teacher development practices can be more effective when they model the pedagogy that is advocated. There is a need for more understanding of literacy pedagogy, and many practitioners are eager for more information about teaching literacy.
Key Words
Teacher Education
Models of reading
Areas for Further Research
Research should be conducted on the impact of different literacy pedagogy models on learner attainment in literacy. Also, long-term investigations of the relationship between teacher understanding of pedagogy and teacher practices should be undertaken to evaluate the impact of teacher education.
Descriptive study of
The beliefs about L1 and L2 literacy of non-literate immigrants in an English speaking community and of their strategies to compensate for their lack of literacy in both their first language and in English.
Learner participants
Nine monolingual Spanish L1 adult immigrants in Toronto, Canada. Four of the nine participants had little or no literacy skills in Spanish; none were functionally literate in English.
Study Design
The researchers first summarized national-level census statistics about immigrant populations in Canada, their education levels, and implications about their literacy. They concluded that national-level statistics could only supply a surface understanding of immigrant populations and their literacy needs. To supplement the census findings, they interviewed nine Spanish monolinguals who were non-literate in English about their literacy needs and beliefs.
Findings
Speakers without English literacy skills used several strategies to function in society. These strategies included establishing relationships with neighbors, ESL classmates, or officials who could help them read or write letters or fill in forms or complete commercial transactions. Those without Spanish literacy skills used these same strategies for written communication in Spanish as well. They also relied more heavily on memory, memorizing subway or bus routes because they could not decode signs, or by memorizing product logos in order recognize bills or choose food at the stores.
All of the participants felt confident in their abilities to perform their jobs without being literate, usually because they could use visual cues to do their work. However, they felt that they were ineligible for promotions at work because of their limited ability.
The participants who were also illiterate in Spanish expressed dissatisfaction with their experiences in adult ESL courses. Many were ashamed of being illiterate. They could not participate in activities that involved reading and writing in English, and felt lost in grammar lessons. Because they could not write down new words or phrases, they could not retain as much or review at home, or efficiently use Spanish-English dictionaries.
The participants universally agreed that it was more important for them to become literate in Spanish than in English, and doubted that they could improve their English proficiency without first becoming literate in Spanish. They also felt that they could not be accepted by either the Spanish-speaking immigrant community or by their own children without gaining literacy.
Comments on the Study
Thorough, rich reporting and use of examples.
Implications for Practice
The focus on functional literacy (literacy skills needed on the job or in official transactions) perhaps is aimed at the areas of literacy for which learners can already compensate. Teaching personal literacy, such as letter or personal history writing, may be more relevant for adult ESL learners, especially those with low native language literacy.
The effectiveness of conventional ESL methods is constrained by learners’ level of literacy in their first language. Teachers should be aware of the special needs of non-literate learners.
Key Words
Pre-literate learners
Reading skills transfer
Areas for Further Research
Pedagogical approaches to help ESL learners compensate for L1 illiteracy should be identified and evaluated.
Experimental study of
The differences in intraword structural sensitivity of adult ESL learners from alphabetic and non-alphabetic L1 backgrounds, the differences between native and non-native speakers of English with respect to intraword sensitivity, and the extent to which intraword sensitivity affects ESL decoding ability. Intraword structural sensitivity refers to a reader’s ability to use both phonological and morphological information in processing words in print.
Learner Participants
The learners were forty beginning level ESL adults enrolled in an intensive English institute. Twenty participants were native speakers of Korean (a non-roman alphabetic language); twenty were native speakers of Chinese (a non-alphabetic language). All the participants had studied English in high school in the home countries and all had been in the United States for less than six months at the beginning of the study. The two groups completed the reading and listening sections of the TOEFL at the beginning of the study; there were no significant differences in their mean scores on either test.
Six native speaker university students also completed the tasks as an L1 reader control group.
Study Design
An orthographic acceptability judgment task was created using lists of frequent words. The letters of the words were rearranged to create non-words. Some of the non-words were legal (possible) letter strings in English, while others were illegal (impossible) letter strings in English. For example, a word like double could be rearranged to form the legal non-word boudel or the illegal non-word ebdluo. Non-words were divided into those that began with high frequency first letters in English (letters that often appear at the beginning of a word) and those that began with low frequency first letter in English. Thus, the non-words could be high-frequency legal, high-frequency illegal, low-frequency legal, or low-frequency illegal. Students were asked to judge whether the words were possible or not in English. Their answers would indicate their understanding of English intraword phonology and morphology.
Additionally, two decoding tasks were used. The first consisted of fifty legal non-words that the students were asked to read. The second was a homophone judgment test. The students were given thirty pairs of words. The first word of each pair was a high frequency English word. The second was a possible non-word (e.g., rain and rane). The students were asked to judge whether the non-words were homophones of the high frequency word.
Findings
Students from both groups were better able to discriminate between legal and illegal letter strings when they began with high-frequency letters. This indicates that L2 readers do develop sensitivity to the positional frequency of letters. The Korean speakers were better able to discriminate between legal and illegal sequences when the words began with low-frequency letters, which suggests that their L1 experience with an alphabetic language had helped them to refine their intraword structural sensitivity.
There were also differences between the native speakers of English and the ESL participants. The native speakers made similar judgments to those of the ESL speakers on the legal letter strings, but were far more consistently correct in judging illegal word strings. They made few errors in judging illegal word strings, while the ESL participants accepted around 45% of high-frequency and 40% of low-frequency illegal word sequences. This suggests that one factor distinguishing native and non-native readers is the ability to detect violations of orthographic constraints.
In terms of the affect of orthographic sensitivity on decoding, there were differences between the Chinese and Korean speakers. Whereas there was a significant correlation between intraword structural sensitivity (as measured by orthographic acceptability tests) and decoding performance (as measured by non-word and homophone tests) for the Korean speakers, there was no such correlation for the Chinese speakers. This suggests that Korean speakers utilize intraword sensitivity more than Chinese speakers in decoding. This could indicate that the Chinese speakers rely still on the L1 whole word processing strategies when reading in English, while Korean speakers rely on intraword processing strategies that they can transfer from their L1 reading experience.
Comments on the Study
The study is very well designed and controlled, and the analysis is careful and well explained. It should be remembered that this is a highly controlled laboratory experiment, and it is uncertain how the findings relate to reading in a more natural setting. Also, it is important to note that the experiment does not give any developmental information. We don’t know if Chinese speakers eventually begin to process written English more like Korean speakers do, and we don’t know if or when either group gains intraword sensitivity similar to that of the native speakers. More information on the morphosyntactic structure of Korean would be helpful in determining the affect of this factor for Korean speakers learning to read English. The fact that spoken Chinese uses tones to transmit the semantic aspects of language, whereas spoken English uses phonemes that are more or less mapped to graphemes in written English could also contribute to the difficulties Chinese speakers have with English intraword processing.
Implications for Practice
Intraword structural sensitivity affects text-processing abilities. Teachers should help beginning ESL students, especially those from non-alphabetic L1 backgrounds, to gain awareness of the phonological and morphological information embedded in English words.
Also, both L2 experience and L1 background affect students’ ESL decoding abilities. Teachers should be aware of L1 orthographic differences when teaching decoding strategies.
Key Words
Decoding
Bottom-up processing
Reading skills transfer
Areas for Further Research
This study could be replicated using learners at different proficiency levels, to see how the relationship between intraword structural sensitivity and decoding develops over time. This study could also be replicated keeping track of response times, to see if learners with alphabetic L1 backgrounds can make judgments more quickly than learners with non-alphabetic L1 backgrounds.
Descriptive study of
The progress of a Mexican immigrant student in a community-based adult ESL and family literacy program. While increasing individuals’ English proficiency can have a positive impact on their lives, it is likely that adding a family literacy emphasis to adult ESL can have a positive impact on an entire family. This research sought to evaluate the impact of such a program on one individual and his family.
Learner Participants
Rafael is a Mexican immigrant in his fifties who lives in a predominately Latino, low-income neighborhood. He and his wife are the parents of seven children, all under the age of fifteen. The researcher describes him as a caring, involved husband and father. Rafael works as a baker and attends ESL courses in a community ESL program run in a local library. He had limited formal education in his native language, but had achieved a reasonably high level of Spanish literacy. He wants to learn English to improve his family’s circumstances and his children’s future opportunities. He is described as an inquisitive student with a real desire to learn. At the beginning of the study, he had been studying in this particular program for five months.
Teacher Participants
The primary researcher in this study is one of the teachers at the community English center. This research was completed as part of her master’s degree in TESOL (the secondary researcher was her academic advisor). She approached this research because of her interest in family literacy and in increasing opportunities for Latino-Americans. She introduced family literacy to the class by exposing them to interesting children’s literature in the library, which they were encouraged to take home to share with their children.
Study Design
The case study followed Rafael’s progress over three months in the family literacy program. The researcher gathered information on his progress in English learning and in family literacy primarily through her observations of him in class, analysis of his writing samples, and personal interviews conducted in Spanish with a bilingual translator present. Data were triangulated with informal conversations with Rafael and his family, interviews with other teachers acquainted with Rafael, and Rafael’s test scores on the program’s placement test and on the Basic English Skills Test (BEST).
Findings
Rafael generally improved his English skills during the period of the case study. His writing samples progressively included fewer errors and more accurate self-corrections. Based on the interviews, it seemed that his listening comprehension skills also improved, and he gained several levels on the Basic English Skills Test. His comfort with reading in English and with reading to his children in English also improved. While at the beginning of the program, he expressed reluctance to read to his children in English, by the end of the program he and his children were engaged in reading together. During visits to his home, his children chose books for him to read to them, and continued to examine them after the reading ended. His children also accompanied him to the English classes at the library, choosing books that they wanted to take home and read together.
Comments on the Study
The study makes use of data gathered in multiple ways to give the reader a clear understanding of Rafael as a person and as an English learner. It contrasts with a fairly common stereotype of Latino immigrants as lazy or uninterested in learning English. It also gives clear examples of Rafael’s progress in improving his oral and written English and the impact of family literacy on his family.
However, it is important, as with all case studies, to remember that the data was collected on one person only, and should be generalized with caution. Also, three months is really quite a short amount of time to gather case study data. We do not know if the progress Rafael made continued beyond the study.
Implications for Practice
Including family literacy in ESL adult literacy curricula can help increase the exposure to reading that individuals and families receive. It is possible that this could have a long-term impact on the entire family.
Key Words
Family literacy
Community English
Areas for Further Research
This study could be extended over a longer period of time, following the progress of an individual and their family in family literacy over time. Also, quantitative research could be done to determine whether these results are typical of participants in family literacy programs.
Theoretical discussion of
The possibility of guessing the meaning of words from context. While researchers who work in top down processing often list guessing as a strategy that learners can use to overcome a lack of vocabulary, and while extensive reading enthusiasts counsel beginning students to guess the meaning of unknown words and continue reading, Laufer points out that this strategy is both insufficient, and also often inappropriate. Basing her arguments on linguistic analysis and on previous studies of vocabulary and reading, Laufer presents reasons why bottom-up processing skills like attention to vocabulary cannot be ignored.
Theory
Vocabulary studies have indicated that there is a threshold of vocabulary for second language reading. (See, for example Alderson, 1984; Coady, 1997). In order to comprehend a text and in order for learners to be able to transfer their first language reading strategies to the second language, they must be able to comprehend 95 to 98% of the words in a text. Some researchers believe that vocabulary knowledge is the single most important predictor of reading comprehension. Top-down processing researchers have contended that vocabulary knowledge is not as important as good top-down processing skills, which include guessing word meanings from context. This study examines several conditions that make guessing inappropriate, because readers are unlikely to arrive at an accurate enough meaning of a given word to allow for comprehension.
Findings
The author divides her argument into three categories: words that are unknown to the reader (the issue of vocabulary threshold), words the reader mistakenly thinks s/he knows (false cognates and others), and words a reader cannot guess the meaning of (the insufficiency of context).
When too many words in a passage are unknown, it is impossible for the reader to apply L1 reading strategies. For example, a reader cannot apply a “find the main idea” strategy if he does not understand the ideas in the text at all. Being able to apply such strategies is contingent on second language vocabulary knowledge. Additionally, human cognitive processing limitations restrict understanding of reading to texts in which most of the words are automatically understood. In other words, if a reader has to expend mental energy to understand many of the words, he will not have the cognitive capacity to pay attention to the overall meaning as well. This explains why learners who are dealing with difficult texts may be able to comprehend sentences without ever understanding the connection among sentences. In this case, a lack of vocabulary knowledge short-circuits reading comprehension.
Likewise, reading comprehension can short-circuit when learners think they know words that they really do not know. Examples of this sort of short circuit occur when students do not recognize false cognates or interpret idioms literally. They can also occur when students encounter words with deceptively transparent meaning or morphological structure. For example, a student might analyze shortcoming by analyzing the component words and arrive at a meaning like a short visit. Short-circuits may also occur when students do not recognize multiple meanings of a word, or when they confuse the meanings of words that are phonologically or orthographically similar. When students do not recognize that they do now know a word, they can invoke the wrong schema—thus, bottom-up processing skills can thwart the benefits of top-down processing.
Lastly, there are many conditions in which word meanings cannot be guessed. Laufer contends that words rarely occur in a sufficiently redundant context for meaning to be inferred from context. Also, if the student doesn’t know the words that provide contextual clues, he is unable to use the context for guessing word meaning. Guessing also can only work if the student is able to predict the meaning of the passage—if the student and the author have similar schema for the concept being described. If the author’s schema is unexpected by readers (possibly because of cultural differences), they are more likely to guess word meanings that fit with their own, rather than the author’s meaning.
Comments on the Study
Laufer’s typology is very useful for understanding why second language learners, especially at the beginning levels of literacy, are unable to apply their L1 reading strategies or the strategies their teachers teach. It is a clear argument against the complete reliance on extensive reading to help learners increase their vocabulary, and an reiteration of the importance of directing literacy learning, especially at the lower levels of proficiency, towards bottom-up processing skills like vocabulary learning and recognition.
Implications for Practice
While extensive reading is theoretically appealing, it may not be applicable especially for beginning students. Vocabulary development to the threshold level -- usually estimated at 3,000 words (Coady, 1997; Grabe & Stoller, 2002) -- is essential for students to be able to read in the second language.
Key Words
Vocabulary
Bottom-up processing
Predicting
Areas for Further Research
Researchers should examine the effectiveness of different vocabulary instructional methods and the possibility of incorporating these into adult ESL literacy instruction.
Descriptive study of
The process of determining whether or not ESL adult literacy students have learning disabilities and the effectiveness of a pull-out tutoring program for students with learning disabilities. For this research, a learning disability was defined as a life-long condition with presumed neurological origin that interferes in some way with development or expression of verbal abilities. There is little understanding of the effects of learning disabilities on second language development or on possible treatments for students with learning disabilities. Because both low English language proficiency and learning disabilities are reflected in verbal skills, it is often difficult to determine whether or not a student has a learning disability.
Learner Participants
The learners were adult ESL students from various ethnolinguistic backgrounds studying at a private English center in the United States. The majority of the students were middle-aged or older, and many of them had been forced to curtail their formal education in their native languages before coming to the United States. Two classes with a total of fifty students were chosen for the study. All of the students were assessed for possible learning disabilities, and thirteen were eventually selected for tutoring.
Teacher Participants
The classroom teachers were experienced ESL teachers who had been teaching in the English center for several years. The teachers were assisted by learning disabilities specialists from the Learning Disabilities Association, who helped design and implement the assessment measures and tutor the students presumed to have learning disabilities. The majority of the students spoke either Russian or Vietnamese, so translators from these languages were also brought in to assist assessment. A Hmong education assistant also participated as a translator for Hmong, Thai, and Laotian.
Study Design
The classes were tested at the beginning and end of the project. All the students completed a basic English skills test and a phonics inventory. They were also observed by their teachers and by a learning disabilities specialist. One of the classes also submitted a native-language writing sample and completed a learning styles inventory and an intelligence test. These were used to determine which students possibly had learning disabilities.
The students identified as having learning disabilities were pulled out of their classes twice a week for tutoring. The tutoring was similar to that commonly used with native speakers of English with reading disabilities such as dyslexia. It included extensive phonics training designed to improve students’ phonemic awareness and understanding of sound/symbol correspondences in English. The tutor used kinesthetic, auditory, and visual techniques to reinforce the teaching. The tutoring was sequential, and mastery was required to move to a new level.
At the end of the program, qualitative evaluations of the program were collected from the learning disabilities tutor, the teachers, and the students who had participated in the tutoring.
Findings
Some of the tests used in this study were deemed inappropriate by the English center staff for determining whether or not limited English proficient adults had learning disabilities. Tests that are normed with reference only to native speakers may not be able to discriminate between language difficulties and learning disabilities. One of the best measures for determining whether a student did or did not have a learning disability was the native-language writing sample and the educational histories given through interpreters. It was learned that some of the students, for example, had never had formal schooling. Their difficulties in the classroom were therefore more likely caused by difficulty adjusting to the academic structure than to any neurological disorder. Additional problems with identifying students with learning disabilities were prompted by cultural issues. Many students thought that having a learning disability was shameful and were reluctant to participate in tutoring. Some of the test results were also compromised because students shared answers with their friends to prevent their friends from failing and being stigmatized. The researchers found that the nature of learning disabilities and the system of testing needed to be explained carefully and sensitively in the students’ native languages.
The teacher and tutor evaluations of the program made it clear that working together had allowed all involved to benefit from each others’ expertise. The teachers learned many techniques that they had not been aware of for teaching phonemic awareness, which were especially helpful for working with the semi-literate students in the program. The tutors learned to embed language instruction in cultural instruction—the norm in ESL but not in other fields of language development. It also became obvious that commercially developed resources for working with students with learning disabilities were often inappropriate for the ESL population. Lessons that used more familiar vocabulary or that built on common ESL themes would be more useful.
The teachers did indicate that the students who had received tutoring made noticeable improvements in reading and writing, and post-tests indicated that tutored students had increased their reading proficiency during the program.
Comments on the Study
The study is a good first step in understanding how to identify and help adult ESL literacy students with learning disabilities. A better description of the learners who were presumed to have learning disabilities, as well as the criteria used to separate language deficiencies and learning disabilities would have been helpful to those researching and working in this field.
Implications for Practice
ESL teachers and learning disabilities specialists need to work closely together to integrate classroom language instruction and learning disabilities tutoring. Teachers and tutors need to be sensitive to cultural issues surrounding the identification and treatment of learning disabilities.
Key Words
Learning disabilities
Bottom-up processing
Areas for Further Research
ESL specific tests for identifying learning disabilities should be developed, as well as materials designed specifically for working with ESL students who have learning disabilities.
Experimental study of
The automaticity of decoding skills of ESL learners at different levels. The researchers wanted to know if more proficient readers would decode more automatically, and therefore be able to apply meaning-based strategies more than less proficient readers.
Learner Participants
The participants in this study were twenty native speakers of English who were university students and forty-four ESL students enrolled in an intensive English program IEP). The ESL students were mostly Japanese and had all received secondary school and some college education in their native language.
Study Design
The ESL participants were divided into two groups, beginning and advanced, based on their placement tests into the IEP. All of the participants were given two tasks: an oral reading and an oral cloze task. On the oral reading, each participant read two 225-word passages out loud. The native speakers were asked to count the number of lines in the passages as they read in order to increase the memory burden on them and thus to increase the number of errors they would produce. Errors were defined as anything that deviated from the written passage. Errors were classified as meaningful (errors that persevered the original meaning of the passage and conformed to English syntax) and unmeaningful (errors that changed the meaning of the passage or violated English syntax). Each of these categories was further divided into insertions, deletions, word-order changes, and substitutions, and all errors were coded as one of these.
For the cloze test, the participants were given the first two or three lines of a new passage and asked to read them out loud and then fill in the next word. The student was then given the correct response and the process was repeated for the following two or three lines. There were ten missing words; participant responses were coded as plausible or implausible based on the syntax and the meaning of the passage.
Findings
On the cloze test, the author’s prediction that more advanced readers would be better able to apply top down predicting strategies was affirmed. The native speakers performed significantly better on the cloze test than the advanced non-native speakers, who significantly outperformed the beginning non-native speakers.
However, on the oral reading miscue analysis a different pattern was found. The authors had predicted that more advanced readers would make a higher percentage of meaningful errors. In this, the native speakers had a significantly higher percentage of meaningful errors than did the non-native speakers. However, there was no significant difference between the beginning and advanced ESL students in the proportion of meaningful errors to total errors. While the advanced ESL students made fewer errors overall, they made the same percentage of unmeaningful errors. This is not the expected pattern if advanced speakers are making decoding more automatic, and therefore able to expend more resources toward interpretation.
The researchers conclude that the advanced level students were not restructuring the reading process to make second language reading more similar to first language reading. Like the beginning students, they were still focused on perfect phonological decoding. While their higher proficiency made this more possible, and they therefore made fewer overall errors, they were still not reading the way native speakers do. Native speakers make use of contextual clues and apply top-down processing. The researchers suggest that the advanced ESL readers need to restructure the reading process, taking their emphasis away from perfect decoding and increasing their application of top-down processing strategies.
Comments on the Study
The study presents interesting results and analysis of the differences between native and non-native speakers of English in their reading proficiency and behavior. It is an interesting application of reading models to actual data, and an interesting use of data to challenge and shape existing cognitive models of reading.
For purposes of clarity, it would have been better for the researchers to give more information about the proficiency level of the students involved, especially to give the reader more understanding of the gap in proficiency between the beginning and advanced ESL learners. If the gap is relatively small, for example, one could simply claim that the advanced group had improved, but not yet automatized the decoding process.
Implications for Practice
Even more advanced ESL students may not be able to transfer meaning-based first language reading strategies into the second language. Teachers may need to encourage good decoders to incorporate predicting strategies into their reading process. Direct instruction of predicting strategies may be necessary.
Key Words
Models of reading
Decoding
Top-down processing
Areas for Further Research
This research should be replicated among readers of different cultural groups, since strategy use has been linked to culture. Also, longitudinal research could investigate when the restructuring is likely to occur.
Descriptive study of
The impact of different workplace literacy programs on learners’ literacy beliefs and practices, on learner’s families, and on learners’ productivity on the job. Some of the literacy program sites included an ESL component, which will be discussed here.
Learner participants
The learners were ESL adult workers at various job sites in the United States. The jobs sites, all blue-collar industries such as automotive or manufacturing plants, had instituted on-site literacy programs for both ESL and native speakers in order to increase the functional literacy of their employees. Employees could choose to take part in the programs. Many did so with the hope that increasing their literacy in English would improve their chances of receiving promotions into positions that demanded greater literacy skills.
Study Design
In each workplace, a combination of group interviews and questionnaires were used to assess the impact of the program on the learners. A structured interview based on Lytle (1990) was used to investigate the impact of the literacy programs on learners’ beliefs, practices, processes, and plans. Job performance ratings and employer data on attendance and productivity were also considered.
Findings
After participation in workplace programs, ESL learners made qualitatively measured improvements on the quality of their reading and writing on the job. They also reported reading and writing more and with more confidence, as compared to ESL speakers who did not participate in the programs. They were observed to be more willing to ask questions at work as well, indicating that increasing their literacy skills increased their confidence in their spoken English as well. When questioned about their reading strategies, they reported using more sophisticated reading strategies than workers who did not participate in the program, and performed as well on a written test about job-related scenarios as did native English speakers enrolled in workplace GED classes. After participating in the classes, ESL workers were more likely to define themselves as literate, and were more likely than non-participants to include reading and continuing education as part of their future goals.
Comments on the Study
The study gathered an exhaustive amount of information about workplace literacy programs and showed positive results for workplace instruction for both native speakers and for ESL participants. It is not surprising that workplace literacy programs would be successful—on-site classes result in lower absenteeism and closely connecting language instruction with the workplace helps ensure that the instruction is immediately relevant to the students’ lives. While the highly functional nature of the literacy courses described here makes it unlikely that workplace instruction will lead to higher levels of literacy, they seem to be a good first step in the literacy process for ESL speakers. We need more information including comparisons with those English language who didn’t take the classes. We also need to know the English proficiency and literacy levels of the workers.
Implications for Practice
When possible, literacy instruction for ESL adults should have applications to their everyday lives. In this case, directing the instruction to the participants’ careers led to noticeable gains in literacy in limited time. Increasing participants’ levels of literacy and comfort in reading English, even in a limited frame like workplace literacy, may increase their dedication to their personal education.
Key Words
Workplace literacy
English for Specific Purposes
Areas for Further Research
This sort of research should be piloted in other industries, and among non-workplace related groups. For example, church-based ESL literacy programs might have similar success in introducing adult populations to reading. Future research should include pre- and post intervention assessment data on the learners L2 proficiency and literacy levels.