Beginning Reading, Bilingually
By Tina Athaide-Shannon

In many classrooms across North America teachers face the challenge of how to help the growing number of children who are not native English speakers. Happily, there are several strategies teachers can use for approaching beginning reading of English with second-language learners. The majority of strategies are easy to implement, and I've found they often benefit other struggling readers in the classroom.

1. A comprehension-centered curriculum. When we relate what we read or hear to our own experiences, our understanding greatly improves. Working with second-language learners, my goal is to expose them to meaningful curriculum. I provide students with as many opportunities as possible to read or hear texts, and then implement strategies that help them to further understand their meaning.
   • When planning my reading groups, I select books that have meaningful stories, rich vocabulary and engaging illustrations. I then preview the book with my students prior to reading it aloud. We scan each page, look at the illustrations, make predictions and discuss the text features (boldface print, headings, etc.) I then read the book to my second-language learners, having them follow along in the text. After the initial reading, we go back through the book and, using the illustrations as a guide, spend time discussing the story, identifying and naming items in the pictures and relating the text to the students' own experiences.

   • I've developed a book bank that contains books that are leveled by reading content and vocabulary. Students reread familiar books to build their fluency and sight word vocabulary. These books can also go home with the children.

2. A biliterate environment. If you think back to your kindergarten and first grade classrooms, you'll recall there were labels on everything: the door, the desk, the clock. Children love having a visual aid, making the words they see easier to remember.
   • My classroom labels are written in both English and the children's native languages. As the students' skills improve, I change the labels to English only.

   • I remove the labels and have the students match the words to the correct objects. The second-language student can easily be paired with an English-speaking student to complete this task.

3. Expanding language arts. Discussing, writing, acting out and reading are activities that we use when teaching language arts. Taking these skills and applying them to the other curricula areas like social studies and science helps make the learning meaningful for the second-language learner.
   • My students like to role-play events in history.

   • When possible, I show videos or films related to the content being presented in social studies or science.

   • I seek out books written at the beginning reading level that complement the information I'm teaching in science or social studies. For example, if teaching a unit about flower pollination, I'll find an emergent/beginning reader that discusses the same concept, but in a format that is easier to understand.

4. Reading to students. We're always stressing the benefits of reading aloud to students, and second-language learners are no exception. They need to hear the language structures, see the illustrations and talk about the content of the stories.
   • I assign an older student to act as a "buddy" to one of my students.

   • I ask a parent helper to read to my students.

   • I encourage the kids to listen to books on tape.

5. Writing with students. Having children write about what they've read or discussed provides them with an opportunity to practice the use of language structure while writing about something meaningful.
   • I begin by having the students dictate a sentence about something they've read or describing an illustration in one of their reading books. I write down the sentence to model spacing and structure, then have the students copy the sentence and add a sentence of their own.

6. Develop reading for meaning skills. Your second-language learners won't know all of the words he or she is reading in a passage. Constantly having to stop to ask about an unknown word breaks up their fluency, which results in a loss of comprehension. Teaching students predication and general passage comprehension will help them to guess at the meanings of unknown words and still maintain a sense of the meaning of the passage. Once the student comprehends the text, we return to the passage and focus on the unfamiliar words.
   • Develop cloze passages using text that the students have read or heard. Type the passage, deleting every fifth word after the complete sentence and replacing it with a blank. This gives students practice at predicting or inferring the words that should fill the blanks.

   • When reading the passage with my students, I ask open-ended questions that can be an-swered in many different ways. I ask the questions prior to reading the text and have the students discover by reading the text the accuracy of their answers. Sample questions are:

Implementing some or all of the strategies listed above will guarantee that you're setting your second-language learners on the path of reading, writing and understanding of the English language.

Tina Athaide-Shannon is a reading teacher in California and the author of Best Friends, Las Adventuras De Pran and At the Firehouse with Dad (BeBop Books).