 |
|
|
August 24, 2006 — One of the challenges facing teachers of children whose
first language is Spanish is figuring out if those who
need extra help learning to read are having trouble with
English, or if they have larger problems with literacy
development.
Thanks to a program developed at the University
of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, teachers
and kids can get the answers they need before it’s
too late to make a difference.
“We get calls every day from schools about how to assess students
who are English language learners,” said Curry School of Education
professor Marcia Invernizzi, primary author of the PALS
assessment program and Web-based resource she created 10 years
ago. PALS — the Phonological
Awareness Literacy Screening — is used throughout Virginia and in
more than 40 states and six countries.
PALS español, developed by Karen Ford, a bilingual reading researcher,
was piloted on a small scale last year and is being field-tested this fall
in several school districts in Colorado, Texas, New York, Oklahoma, Kansas
and Rhode Island, and locally in Virginia. The need for the program is
clear: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are almost 4 million
Hispanic children in this country, ages 5 to 9 — the ages children
are learning to read.
Ford concurs that “schools are clamoring for it,” the “it” being
a good assessment of early literacy development for children whose first
language is Spanish.
And now the U.S. Department of Education is working with a number of states,
including Virginia, to help them design effective testing programs for
students who are not proficient in English. The states have to come up
with plans for improving their assessment of these students.
“PALS español would distinguish between children not reading
well because their English isn’t adequate or because they have problems
in literacy development, which would show up in both languages,” said
Ford, who taught Spanish for 25 years.
Youngsters are often misdiagnosed as having a reading disability, she said,
when they simply haven’t learned English well enough yet. Ford commented
that PALS español would help younger students learn to read in English
more quickly and be better prepared for the third grade, when they have
to take the standardized tests required by the No Child Left Behind Act.
“
If we want the students to be proficient in English literacy, we need to
know about their Spanish literacy skills,” Invernizzi said. She and
Ford said that a child who has developed literacy skills in his or her
first language will transfer those skills to the next language.
The PALS assessment gives teachers specific information about what each
child knows about letters and sounds and where their weaknesses are. It
identifies children who will most likely fall behind in learning to read
and write. With the information the assessment provides, teachers have
the chance to gear lessons toward the needs of individual children, as
well as the group. Another PALS test also has been developed for preschool
children.
In Virginia, if children have not achieved a minimum level of English proficiency,
they are not required to participate in large-scale testing, including
PALS, and may not get the help they need. By the time they are proficient
enough to be assessed in English, it may be too late to provide the intervention.
“
It’s a huge equity issue,” said Invernizzi, the Henderson Professor
of Reading Education. Funding to develop the new screening tool has been
hard to find, she added.
“
Early identification and early intervention are key,” Ford said. “We
know through literacy research, if students don’t learn to read by
the third grade, they never become adept at it.”
She gives the example of a 7-year-old first grader who was unable to read
the easiest passage on the English PALS assessment. When he took PALS español,
he could read well in Spanish at the third-grade level. With more help
learning English, this child should be able to catch up to grade level
in English reading.
Pinpointing his problem could help keep him in school, currently a big
issue with Hispanic students. The national high school dropout rate for
Hispanic students is about 45 percent (compared to the overall national
average of 30 percent), according to a recent report from the EPE Research
Center, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
|
