So far we learned how to promote vocabulary development among emergent bilinguals, but this seems irrelevant without the knowledge of reading and writing development with English language learners. This page will be devoted to the many different ways to promote the development of reading and writing among emergent bilingual students and the importance of being able to do both while in an academic setting.

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Reading 

       One of the most crucial and important aspect to keep in mind while teaching reading to emergent bilinguals is that they simply do not learn reading the same way proficient English speakers learn to read. In the book, Foundations for Teaching English Language Learners: Research, Theory, Policy and Practice, Wayne E. Wright states that, “ ELLs need a balanced approach to literacy instruction that integrates reading, writing, listening, and speaking; that teaches reading skills and strategies within the context of meaningful, authentic communication; that is differentiated to meet the diverse language and literacy needs of students in the class” (Wright, 2015, p.192).  One way to do this this while in the classroom would be to have activities where the students are required to speak and thus engage in authentic communication and are then required to read or write or both. These will create bonds between the students by creating situations in which authentic communication is encourage while also improving the knowledge of your students. One thing to be aware of although, and something to make sure NOT to do is, not force your students to engage in any conversation if they are not ready and still within their silent period. A good thing to remember is that students are still learning a lot while observing and do not need to be talking to be engaged in the learning process.

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• An example of an activity to support students before they are reading is a real-aloud. This will support the student by giving them many examples of what fluent an inflectional reading sounds like as well as teaching them content knowledge and new vocabulary words.

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• An example of an activity to support students during their reading is shared reading. Shared reading allows teachers to teach important concepts of print demonstrate strategies that good readers use and involve students in a community reading setting. 

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• An example of an activity to support students after reading is narrow reading. The reason this helps after reading development is because it is a form of independent reading that entail reading several books on the same subject.

 

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        Also aligning with the common core goals is the importance of helping Emergent bilinguals access content-rich instruction for complex texts while being able to cite evidence from the text. This can be accomplished in many ways; one way specially is to have small group direction instruction with the Emergent bilingual students.

 

 

Writing

          Now that we have learned several activities on how to develop the reading of Emergent bilinguals the thing we need to touch on next is the development of writing among emergent bilinguals. Although we do not know everything about the development of writing among Emergent bilinguals, we do know something that can be helpful in promoting said development. Writing development has some similarities and some differences to reading development among ELLs. In the book, Foundations for Teaching English Language Learners: Research, Theory, Policy and Practice, Wayne E. Wright states that, “Both ELLs and proficient English speakers must learn the (English) alphabet, spelling, syntax for forming sentences and paragraphs, and conventions for writing specific genres. Both engage in literacy tasks in variety of social contexts and use writing to interact and develop interpersonal relationships” (Wright, 2015, p.223). Basically what is the same is that they both develop interpersonal relationships through meaningful interaction while developing reading and writing. The relationship between speaking writing goes as far as, whatever a student can speak they can write. Thus goes the other way around; a student cannot write whatever they cannot speak. This means that you should always provide students opportunities to speak about what they will write about before actually writing about it. There is also a similar relationship for reading and writing.

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            Another thing to note is the way a bilingual's first language can potential affect the learning process of writing in English. This is because knowledge of your first language will impact the amount of knowledge development in your second language. Wright defines this as Cross-Language transfer and describes it as the transfer between the First and Second Language (Wright, 2015, p.187).

 

 

• One activity that supports the development of writing among Emergent bilinguals is modeled writing. This helps because it is a nice model of what the process and final product of writing looks like and can also model the teachers thinking.

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• Another activity that supports the development of writing among Emergent bilinguals is Guided writing. This helps because it is a way for the student to be writing and developing skills while having the teacher guide the way that learning is going.

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• Another important thing to remember are supports. Supports are things that are around that will support the student while they are developing the knowledge of writing. Below is list of specific supports to have while developing the writing of Emergent bilingual students.

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Writing supports

                                    -Word walls (high frequency and/or sight words)

                                    -Thematic word charts or vocabulary word walls

                                                      -Personal word books

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References 

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Wright, W. E. (2015). Foundations for teaching English language learners: research, theory, policy, and practice (Second                       ed.). Philadelphia:Caslon Publishing.

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