Dr. Liza E. Martinez, Arizona Western College, San Luis, Arizona, USA

Just as one can be a life-long reader, one can also be a life-long teacher of reading. This is my case. Although I took reading courses in graduate school, they were mainly limited to native English speakers. The ESL reading course I took was beneficial, but it only provided a general overview. Therefore, most of what I learned about teaching ESL reading occurred in the classroom. I asked myself often: Was I correct in what I was doing?

Fortunately, while looking through TESOL’s website, I came across its Advanced Practitioner Program. As I read about it, I found that a teacher could pursue any content area in depth. I was interested in adult ESL reading, so I looked up the requirements. Then I contacted my department chair at Arizona Western College. Thanks to her support, the college agreed to pay for the course. I completed and submitted the application. After a short turn-around time, I was accepted into the self-paced program; I had 1 year to complete it. I also opted to have a mentor. Eleanor Henning, my TESOL contact, put me in contact with my mentor, Susan Gaer. I had six tasks I was expected to complete within a year. The first task was to create a timeline of my different assignments, which was then submitted to TESOL. Once I completed future tasks, I also had to complete aprofessional development report form. Both of these were submitted electronically. Once they were approved, I could move on to the next task.

Identifying the Sources

For my second task, I found books/symposia/articles related to my topic. Aside from identifying the sources, I needed to write a synopsis of each source along with a rationale. After I identified my sources, I sent them to my mentor. She recommended I look at a chapter from the book Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms (2nd edition) by Schoenbach, Greenleaf, and Murphy. In the end, my sources covered the following areas: extensive reading, reading standards, reading research, metacognition, being a strategic reader, fluency, asking questions, and the Reading Apprenticeship Framework.

Highlighting the Readings

At the outset, the readings appeared diverse. Nevertheless, they tended to overlap. What follows are highlights from the sources.

Extensive Reading

Extensive reading involves reading at the i-1 or independent level. Because there are no

formalized tests, there is not the stress of having to read for 100% accurate comprehension. Instead, graded readers, which are often coupled with extensive reading, offer ESL students the opportunity to read about topics that interest them. As a result, individuals might become hooked on reading, which leads them to become lifelong readers.

ESL Proficiency Standards

A panel consisting of experts in the areas of English language, college and career readiness, English language acquisition, and ESL have developed 10 English language proficiency standards for adult education. The standards focus on one of the four skills: listening, speaking, reading, or writing. Each standard is composed of five level descriptors. The English language proficiency standards enable students to work systematically toward developing the academic skills they will need to succeed in postsecondary and work-place settings.

Reading Research

ESL reading research indicates that learners who are highly literate in their first language and who have high levels of proficiency in their second language (L2) will more likely transfer their first language reading strategies to L2 reading. Students need knowledge of a minimum of 3,000 words to read independently. When it comes to learning new words, direct vocabulary instruction can improve reading comprehension, particularly when it is presented before a text is read. Finally, students should engage in oral reading, so they can practice English syntactic patterns, inflection, and prosody.

Metacognitive Strategy Instruction

Metacognitive strategy instruction consists of highlighting important information, previewing text for main ideas, rereading selected content, guessing the meaning of unknown words, and applying prior knowledge. Metacognitive strategy instruction may enhance the reading skills of adult ESL students with limited English and literacy skills.

Strategic Reader

Grabe (2009) defines a strategic reader “…as one who automatically and routinely applies combinations of effective and appropriate strategies depending on the reader’s goals, reading tasks, and strategic processing abilities” (p. 220). A sample of these strategies are skimming a text to predict what the text will be about, monitoring comprehension continually, relating the text to one’s prior knowledge, forming questions and finding answers in the text, and paying attention to grammatical structure to decipher the meaning of an unknown word.

Reading Fluency

Reading fluency is an essential component of reading comprehension; it is made up of automaticity, accuracy rate, and prosodic features. Fluency can be enhanced by having students listen to their teacher; students reading along with their teacher; choral reading; paired reading; echo reading; and buddy reading. Unfortunately, when it comes to word-reading fluency, overall reading rate, and extensive reading in L2, little research has been conducted.

Questioning

Questioning is used to gauge comprehension. For Nuttall (2005), there are six levels of questioning. The easiest is Type 1, which involves questions of literal comprehension (i.e., the answer is in the text). With midrange questions, such as Type 3, one asks questions of inference. Type 6 is the most difficult level, and it is concerned with making students aware of what they do when they are interpreting a text. Therefore, all questions are not equal. They run from easy to complex.

The Reading Apprenticeship Framework

The Reading Apprenticeship Framework uses scaffolding to complete complicated tasks. It has four overlapping dimensions: social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building. Metacognition lies at the intersection of these dimensions. Each dimension has numerous subsets, which use teacher-led activities. Therefore, teachers have room to decide which activities would work best with their students.

Concluding Thoughts for This Section

These sources provided me with new insights in the teaching of ESL reading. I found them to be interesting, insightful, and useful. All of them are important in creating a viable reading curriculum. Moreover, these sources served as the foundation for my future tasks.

Creating a Syllabus and Lesson Plans

For my third task, I used the demographics of my current students to help me design a 17-week ESL reading course. The students would be Hispanic adults who range in ages from 18–44; they are upper beginners. The ESL reading class would meet twice a week for a total of three credit hours. The textbook would be For Your Information 2: Reading and Vocabulary Skills (2nd edition) by Blanchard and Root. The book consists of six units. Each unit embarks on a theme, for example, food, travel, endangered animals, shopping, international tourist sites, and people with disabilities; in turn, each unit has three chapters. Before students read an article from the book, they are asked questions pertaining to the theme. This is followed by matching key vocabulary words with their definitions. Finally, students predict what they think the article will be about. After reading the article, students answer a series of comprehension and vocabulary exercises. These are then followed by an exercise on suffixes or prefixes. In addition, there are two fluency exercises to assess students’ reading rates and reading comprehension. These exercises come from Real Reading 1: Creating an Authentic Reading Experience, by Bonesteel.

I had the option to select three 1-hour lesson plans or a unit that would cover 3 hours. I decided to create the three separate lesson plans. My first lesson plan involved fluency and comprehension exercises based on the short story, “The Gift” by O. Henry. The second lesson was a biography on Albert Einstein. Students would scan the article for information. They would also answer a series of comprehension and vocabulary exercises. Finally, students would create a five-slide PowerPoint presentation about another scientist. For the third lesson, the article, “The History of Chocolate” was used. Students would scan for information, answer comprehension and vocabulary exercises, and, in groups, create a 25-word abstract about the article.

Practice Teaching

My fourth task involved practice teaching; this consisted of either being videotaped or having someone observe me teaching. I opted for the former; I chose one of the three lesson plans I created, “The History of Chocolate.” Prior to our class, I wrote a detailed script of what I would say since I only had 50 minutes to present my lesson. Two days before the taping, I gave my students consent forms; they all agreed to be videotaped. On the day of the lesson, the start went well; however, we hit a quagmire. Many students disagreed about the definition of one of the new vocabulary terms: treat. They thought treat was something you eat. Fortunately, one of the students explained that treat can be something to eat or something given to you like watching a movie rather than having grammar class. This experience showed that the teacher does not have all of the answers, and that’s fine. Students’ voices count.

The rest of the class smoothly. It culminated with groups creating a 25-word abstract about the article they had read. Within a 20-minute period, each group completed the 25-word abstract about the article, “The History of Chocolate” which was found in the textbook, For Your Information 2: Reading and Vocabulary Skills (2nd edition) by Blanchard and Root. The videotape was uploaded onto YouTube. A link with the lesson’s handout along with the professional development report form were submitted electronically.

Final Tasks and Concluding Thoughts

For my final two tasks, I was asked to complete two assignments. I could present at a local TESOL affiliate or at my college. I could also submit an article to TESOL Connections, the TESOL Resource Center, one of TESOL’s interest section newsletters, or the TESOL Blog. I chose to share what I presented at the Arizona Southwest Regional Conference, which was held on 10 March 2018. My presentation was on five reading comprehension strategies that can be used in any class; these came from the book on the Reading Apprenticeship Framework (Schoenbach, Greenleaf, & Murphy, 2012). My second choice was to submit to the TEIS newsletter.

Now that I have completed my program, what closing thoughts can I share?

Participating in the Advanced Practitioner Program was worthwhile. It gave me the opportunity to explore ESL reading more in-depth; I would not have done this on my own. The tasks took me out of my comfort zone, which was needed in order for me to grow as a teacher. In closing, if there is an area of ESL you would like to study in-depth, the TESOL Advanced Practitioner Program is for you.

References

Grabe, W. (2009). Becoming a strategic reader. In Reading in a second language: Moving from theory to practice (pp. 220–242). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Nuttall, C. (2005). Questioning. In Teaching reading skills in a foreign language (2nd ed., pp. 181–191). London, England: Macmillan.

Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., & Murphy, L. (2012). The reading apprenticeship framework. In Reading for understanding: How reading apprenticeship improves disciplinary learning in secondary and college classrooms (2nd ed., pp. 17–53). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Retrieved from https://www.wested.org/online_pubs/read-12-01-sample2.pdf