Making holistic decisions within a monolingual law
February 26, 2024 Emily Zoeller
In the past few months, I have collaborated with state representatives, professors of literacy, multilingual leaders, and reading specialist candidates. We're all grappling with the same question: how can we carry out a multilingual perspective with new legislation that was written from a monolingual view? A close look at WI Act 20 reveals some affordances. This blog post explores how we might go about making decisions for students and student supports, focusing multilinguals (MLs).
Many Wisconsin MLs learn in dual language settings, where instruction is provided in both languages. Act 20 requires that any student who scores below 25% on a universal screener assessment in English (Section 16 . 118.016). Teachers of MLs learning in two languages recognize that this data reflects just one piece of the pie! So, we will want to make sure that when we look at assessment data, we are considering what students can do in both languages. The example to the left shows a quadrant chart for English and Spanish literacy data.
Teachers, ed leaders, or MTSS teams can begin by gathering screener data in both languages. What students have scored below 25% on screener assessment in both languages? What students are 25% below in just one language? Who are the students that are above 25% in both languages?
The intention of Act 20 is for students to get access to the intensive literacy support that they deserve, preventing further gaps. Students who are multilinguals will have different reading trajectories than students who are monolinguals. This is well-documented (Butvilofsky, et al., 2020; Escamilla et al., 2014; Zoeller & Garcia-Torres, 2023). So, for MLs who score below 25% on the English benchmark assessment, it's important to ask questions about why. The figure to the left shows some guiding questions we can ask for students who fall within each category.
There isn't a magic formula or flow chart that will answer all our questions. If there were, reading would be simple, and all kids would be proficient! Maybe AI will help us with cross-linguistic data alorithms and analyses down the road. Until then, teams can do their best to think through what types of support might be beneficial for students in each quadrant.
In my own experience leading an MTSS team at a dual language school, we started by considering students who were below benchmark in one language but not the other (quadrants B and C). For these students, we presumed that an intensive reading intervention might not be necessary. How many times do you remember learning to read? Usually, once! Students don't necessarily need to start from zero and follow a scope of reading intervention lessons that were intended for monolinguals. What they need instead is to capitalize on what they already know in one language and learn to apply that to their other language. This is where Transliteracy fits in!
Of course, they also need intentionally designed oral language development in the language they are still developing. This oral language development happens best when it is in conjunction with print and not separate (e.g. reading a story, discussing the story, analyzing language of the story, using that language in writing about the story, etc.). Oral language is taught in service of reading and writing on continuous text.
Prioritizing students with challenges in both languages, and a plug for bilingual intervention
In our approach, we prioritized students who exhibited challenges in both languages (quadrant A). Resources were finite, and we tried to make certain that these students received our most intensive supports available. This support - which we called Tier 3 - was provided in literacy. When deciding the language of intervention, we generally chose the student's "dominant" language. This is because the easiest path to student's literacy learning is in a language they already know.
Ideally, intervention happened bilingually. That means the intervention was designed to draw upon what the student knew in both languages. Sometimes the intervention happened 4 days in one language, with the 5th day applying what was learned to the other language. Sometimes the intervention was daily for 20 minutes and the last 5 minutes happened in the other language to teach for transfer. (For example, "In this lesson, we learned about solving words with blends in English... how can we use what we know to solve these types of words in a Spanish text?") In cases where the interventionist only spoke English, another teacher was aware of the focus and could "bridge" learning in the other language back in the classroom. Progress monitoring happened in both languages.
Not all our issues will be solved by holistic decision making! But, it is one way we can think about complying with the law and also applying a multilingual perspective for students who we aim to support in learning literacy in both languages. Also, with finite resources, we prioritize reading intervention for those who need help in literacy processing in both languages. Most important, we build on existing strengths.
References
Butvilofsky, S. A., Escamilla, K., Gumina, D., & Silva Diaz, E. (2020). Beyond monolingual reading assessments for emerging bilingual learners: expanding the understanding of biliteracy assessment through writing. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(1), 53-70. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.292
Escamilla, K., Hopewell, S., Butvilofsky, S., Sparrow, W., Soltero-González, L., Ruiz-Figueroa, O. & Escamilla, M. (2014). Biliteracy from the start: Literacy Squared in Action. Caslon.
Zoeller, E & Garcia-Torres, Y. (2023). “It makes me more aware of what I should be looking for”: Using holistic assessment to foster strength-based understanding of students’ biliteracy development. Literacy Theory, Methods, Research, and Practice, 73(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377231185123