It happened about 17 years ago. I took home some decoding cards to prepare a lesson for ESOLI class. One of the pictures showed a watermelon with the letter S at the bottom. And there I was, staring at a watermelon like a deer in the headlights, trying to figure out the connection between the watermelon and the sound the letter S makes. The best I could come up with was S is for sweet and S for slice.”
My 10-year-old daughter (a native English speaker) ran up to me, looked at the picture, and said, “Mom, S is for seed!” She pointed at the picture and added, “This is called a seed!” Of course, I knew the word seed, but that word would never naturally occur to me, and I doubted any of my newcomers knew that word. They probably knew student, sleep, and Sonic, but …seed? Truth be told, I wondered if any of my students would find those cards truly helpful. I knew from personal experience as a language learner and a language teacher that learning to read as a secondary ML was different from learning to read as a native speaker of English or an elementary student.
The brilliance of the bilingual brain!
Sometimes, teachers are shocked by how quickly newcomers (especially secondary newcomers) can learn to read. It’s not magic! It’s called cross-linguistic transfer.
First of all, all older students (regardless of their educational background) have higher cognitive abilities than elementary students. Our cognition grows just like our feet, regardless of the path of life we walk. Therefore, secondary students will grasp the concepts and patterns faster. Secondly, newcomers with rich academic backgrounds and an established literacy in their first language (L1) do not start from ground zero. They can transfer many reading and decoding skills from their L1 to English. So, if you have an older student, pre-literate in English, do not despair! They will not need the entire year to learn to read – and yes, – you will see the brilliance of the bilingual brain in action!
In addition, for secondary learners, literacy in an L2 might take root simultaneously with oracy. For example, when I learned to decode in English, I could not speak or understand spoken English. I was in Grade 5 when the teacher introduced the sounds and the letters of the English alphabet. When I learned to decode in French during my second year at the university, I could not speak French at all. In both cases, my oracy was developing side-by-side with literacy, and both supported each other.
Therefore, oracy does not always come to our students more easily or before literacy. In fact, for secondary ELs, speaking English might be more difficult than reading English. And we cannot expect a certain level of oracy before westart teaching students to read!
What role does comprehension play?
The similarity between oracy and literacy lies in comprehension. Just as students need to know what the word means when they hear it spoken in order to understand a message, they also need to know what it means once they decode it during reading.
Gough & Tunmer (1986) factor Comprehension as a part of the Simple View of Reading formula, which states that reading is the product of comprehension and decoding.
R (Reading) = C (Comprehension) X D (Decoding)
Reading is not the sum of the two components! It is the product! You cannot ask which component is more important since both directly affect the product, and it means that if either of the multipliers equals zero, the product will result in a zero! For students to be considered proficient readers, both comprehension and decoding should have values greater than zero! (Parker, 2021).
This leads to the key difference between teaching native speakers of English to decode and teaching ELs to decode. By age five, native speakers would have an oral vocabulary developed enough to understand the books appropriate for that age. “Usually, young English speakers will know most of the language they are asked to read, so decoding allows them to go from print to pronunciation to meaning” (Shanahan, 2018).
This is a typical sequence for native speakers of English.
| I see the word. cat | I sound it out. | I know what it means!  |
For English learners, regardless of their age, the process has an additional step! Because their oral lexicon may not have all the necessary entries yet, once the word is decoded, there is no guarantee it is understood, so cracking the code of the printed word is not enough!
Oral and written comprehension is best supported with comprehensible input, or anything visual, such as pictures on the page or teacher’s gestures, and context. In this case, visuals are not a crutch for decoding. The visuals serve as the scaffolding for comprehension, and this is an important distinction!
In the sequence below, images are used to scaffold comprehension.
| I see the word. cat | I sound it out. | I don’t know what it means!  | I look at the picture or a visual clue to know what the word means. |
It’s critical not to confuse the appropriate usage of visuals for ELs with the infamous 3-cueing system, where one of the cues asks students to look at the picture and guess what the word says.
Phonics in the Secondary Classroom
Circa 2014, I had a few non–decoders in my first period (ESOLI), and for about two months, I took 10 minutes of every class to go over syllable types (one at a time), focusing on vowels. Vowels do not transfer as easily as consonants. English vowels are moody: compared to Russian, Spanish, or Italian, English vowels are unstable. They produce different sounds depending on the type of syllable. Conquering the major syllable types gets literacy off the ground pretty quickly!
Vertical Skills Academy (2022)
I had my students read over decoding drills that went with the vowel type we studied – first chorally as a class and then for speed with a partner. I called them the “sit-ups of reading.”
Drills are for decoding, not for comprehension. Reading drills are similar to learning to read sheet music and playing/singing scales. Nobody jumps from zero music literacy to playing a symphony. There is no meaning in moving your voice up and down except learning to decipher the symbol on a note sheet and hitting the right note. But as soon as you learn to read sheet music effortlessly, your brain won’t have to attend to that piece any longer, and you can focus on more exciting things – like producing a beautiful melody or reading a story!
So, how ’bout them phonics? In my opinion, a well-measured dose of phonics (not even all students will need it) helps secondary students acquire elements of English literacy that are difficult to acquire without instruction. And the most important thing (like with many good things) is not to overdo it!
References:
Hoover, W. A., & Tunmer, W. E. (2022). The Primacy of Science in Communicating Advances in the Science of Reading. Read Res Q, 57(2), 399–408. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.446
Parker, S. (2021). The Simple View of Reading: Still Conclusive after 36 Years. Teach Reading Logically: Synthetic Phonics. https://www.parkerphonics.com/post/the-simple-view-of-reading-still-conclusive-after-33-years
Shanahan, T. (2018). Teaching phonics to English learners. Shanahan on Literacy. https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/appropriate-beginning-reading-instruction-for-english-learners
Read 180 Practice.(2012). Read 180 Reading Skills and Strategies. Scholastic Inc.
Vertical Skills Academy. (2022, June 17). A closed syllable occurs in almost 50% of the words in the English language, with Open syllables occurring almost 30%. [Image Attached]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5859813037379337&id=974889392538417&rdid=V582GrUO9tmtMkJj#
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