LITERACY. It doesn’t mean just reading. Or writing. It also includes listening and speaking. Did I mention that it is an essential piece to ALL content areas? And human interaction in general? Plus it is what separates us from other life forms! The capacity for literacy is what makes humans unique, and – quite frankly – naturally brilliant.

Kindergartners at one of the happiest times of their day: when they get to choose what to read from our classroom library. You can see that two of the chosen books are class-made.

So what about BILITERACY? Is it different? Is it even more special? Does it encompass more? It is. It does. And as a teacher of English in a biliteracy program, I had (and am still continuing) to come to terms with changing how I teach literacy to embrace teaching for BI-literacy.

In fact, teaching for biliteracy has improved my literacy instruction.

I could write about this for days. Turns out I did.

In fact, I started to write this blog on all the different ways biliteracy has improved my literacy instruction, but it became pages and pages and pages long! So I’m going to break it up for you. You’re welcome. 🙂

My literacy improvement series blogs will post about every two weeks as follows:

1. Oracy Development: The Foundation (see below!)
2. Vocabulary: When and How
3. Phonics: Dictado and the Bridge
4. The myth of the “Literacy Block”
5. Language Experience Approach: Empowering our Writers and Readers

Oracy Development: The Foundation

Experts from across the fields (my most influential being literacy guru Marie Clay) will agree that oral language is the foundation to our literacy instruction. Oral language/oracy is the receptive and productive language that our learners develop as the basis of literacy development. It is the listening and speaking part of literacy and communication.

As I first began to shift my mindset regarding teaching for biliteracy (see 2/17/17 blog titled The Shift), there were some tweaks that I made to my students’ oral language experiences that enhanced their language production.

Oral language flows in my classroom. Not without hiccups, mind you, but it is expected and it flows like water from a spout – and sometimes like a gushing fire hose! Want to know why?

It all began with sentence prompts: for speaking! This has been the single most influential change in my oracy development instruction. I have long used sentence prompts for writing, but only since teaching for biliteracy did I see the value of prompts for speaking, besides those used in Accountable Talk and other social-emotional learning situations.

I am constantly helping my students form sentences to solve interpersonal conflicts.

“I feel _______ when you _____.”

“Please stop ______ because ______.”

These age-apropriate Accountable Talk sentence stems have helped my kindergarten and first grade students express their connections and respond to their classmates’ comments.

I model and coach and role-play and model again. But I had never thought about using simple sentence frames for my academic TALK until I began to teach for biliteracy.

The beauty of this enlightening shift from monoliteracy to biliteracy for me has been that much of what and how I teach now is beneficial to ALL learners, regardless of their home language or future languages. Best practices have a tendency to work for most learners, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t earn the term Best Practices!

The SIMPLE, yet effective, use of sentence prompts for oral language has turned partner talk into productive conversation, dramatic play into content application and reenactment, and text connections into solid comprehension. I am AMAZED at the oral language my 5-7 year olds are using in the classroom simply by the effective modeling and use of oral sentence prompts.

We are currently in our farm unit in Kindergarten. Students can practice oral language by reenacting Cows in the Kitchen by Doreen Cronin in dramatic play (using masks and the kitchen), using plastic animals and the barn to talk about where on the farm each animal resides (barn, pig sty, pasture, farmhouse, etc.), or “milking” our cardboard cow and talking with a partner about the process.

We use the Say Something Strategy all the time! It works in both fiction reading and nonfiction. Students respond to portions of text using one of a variety of sentence prompts. My first graders use the above three prompts naturally now. They will interrupt our interactive read alouds to share a thought! See Teaching For Biliteracy p. 95 for more information on this great strategy for reading comprehension.

With whom we talk also makes a difference. Our classrooms are the 50/50 TWI model, so about half of my students speak English at home and about half of my students speak Spanish at home. Because of this, partnering for oral language is a key component for oral language success. I consider it my monthly puzzle! How will I distribute my students at the carpet and at their tables (tables, not desks, to promote conversation) in two different partnerships (carpet Thinking Partner is different than table group Thinking Partner) while attending to priority seating, partnerships to avoid for social reasons, language proficiency, and overall academic proficiency? VERY CAREFULLY!

I mix it up, sometimes putting more emphasis on one criterion than another. But I always consider language proficiency, making sure one partner is stronger in English to model for and help the other partner in any oracy production opportunity.

Thinking Partners! When needing to decide quickly who will speak first, I tell my students, “Hand over hand!” I then state, “Partner with hands on top/bottom will speak first.” No more minutes wasted with figuring out who is taller, or whose birthday is closer, or whose hair is longer/shorter!

These thinking partners are ready with an idea. When they have an idea to share, they put their fingers together to show they are ready to share. This group has three students because one member’s regular partner was absent and they invited her to join.

Here, two thinking partners show that they are ready with several ideas to share! One partner has two ideas; the other has three. The number of fingers they are holding up represents the number of ideas they have shared with each other orally.

As Marie Clay wrote in Talking, Reading, and Writing, teachers of language and literacy must “understand that children learn language easily through conversation.” She challenges us to ask ourselves, “In what ways does your program create conversations with children that allow [oral language development] to happen?” (2004, p. 10)

To Ms. Clay I respectfully reply:

• Assigned Thinking Partners with respect to language proficiency (partnerships designed to promote linguistic collaboration and cooperation)
• Sentence prompts for speaking
• Modeling of language and sentence prompts
• Additional structured talk opportunities through dramatic play (and sometimes unstructured dramatic play opportunities for the development of social language)
• Book talks with significant pictorial and vocabulary support
• Help from language proficient peers through modeling and echoing
• Gradual release of responsibility of content vocabulary through Total Physical Response (more in a future blog!)

How about you? How would you answer Marie Clay with respect also to teaching for biliteracy?

Oracy development: Key to ANY program, whether bilingual or not, that is on the path to literacy.

Next up, how I improved my literacy instruction through vocabulary. One hint: Timing is everything! Come back and read more at the beginning of April!

References

Beeman, K. & Urow, C. (2013). Teaching for Biliteracy: Strengthening Bridges between Languages. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon Publishing.

Clay, M. M. (2004). Talking, reading, and writing. Journal of Reading Recovery, spring, 1-15.