Reading Strategies and Activities for ESL/ELL Classrooms

Welcome back to the fourth webinar in our series of teaching ESL ELLs in multi-level classrooms. My name is Brenda Huy Roses, and I am the ESL specialist from Thesis International. I have a bachelor's degree in Chinese and a master's in English, teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). I also have over 10 years of experience in teaching ESL in the classrooms, specifically with multi-levels.

In our past webinars, we talked about schema building and how you might build background with different activities for students on a specific topic. Last webinar, we talked about vocabulary activities that promote participation. This webinar, reading strategies and activities for ESL ELL classrooms, will focus on academic reading activities that you can use when teaching readings with content. You will also notice that there's a specific flow that we believe in and an integrated skills approach when we teach reading using writing, listening, and speaking activities.

So, when we talk about reading flow, we want to first start students by making connections to the topics. It is our job as teachers to help them make these connections to better understand the topic at hand. We, of course, then want to do preview and pre-reading, so meaning the students get the reading and do something with it first. We can then continue with a listening quiz or a cloze activity where students are practicing maybe listening fluency or maybe it's just their first time hearing the reading. We also believe in read-alongs, which can happen in many different ways, which we'll talk about shortly, and an activity called listening fact-finding. So, even though we're doing reading, we're also focusing on listening skills. There's then a lecture portion, of course, led by the teacher, and then our favorite part: activities.

So today, we're going to talk a lot about reading fluency and reading comprehension activities that you can do in your classrooms, hopefully even today or tomorrow, that will help promote fluency and comprehension with your students. Then we move on to graphic organizers, and then the students' least favorite part: assessment. We will talk about different ways you can give assessments, different types of questioning, and then we'll end with writing. All right, so for Making Connections, it is very important that we help students bring the outside world into the classroom. One way of doing that is talking about past events or maybe even current events. So here you could see—um, there's a newspaper—so they can look up the news or media through technology or even paper-based. But the idea is to get some information on past events. For example, the real Olympics just passed, and maybe you want to bring that information into the classroom because the topic is the Bird's Nest, China. So, although it is a world landmark, it was built for the Olympics. So you might make the connection with the real Olympics and some different athletes or maybe some athletes that won medals from the countries of the students, so they can bring that idea into the classroom. They can then even present current events or something that happened in the news. We do like them to research; however, sometimes research might not always be in English. Sometimes it is easier for students to research in their native languages to then talk about it in English.

The second example that we have is the word collage or a picture collage, as you can see here. So, with the idea of freedom, students may be learning about the Statue of Liberty. The reading is about the landmark, the Statue of Liberty, but the idea or central theme is about freedom. So here, students may be asked to collect pictures of things that represent freedom to them. So here you could see maybe a teenager, you know, can be online anytime they want with their friends or on their phone, maybe even drive or go to parties. So the idea here is they're putting some images of what they believe their freedoms are to then present to the class. So the teacher might be able to project their collage, and the student can then go up and speak about this. Keep in mind the reading is the Statue of Liberty with the idea of freedom. If you like to have any more ideas of schema building, we have our past webinar that you can check out—um, All About Schema Building—but we do want to make sure when you teach a reading, you do start out with some kind of schema-building activity.

We then, of course, want students to do a little bit of homework on their own. This could be in class or at home, but we want them to preview or pre-read a reading. So, just like when we talked about vocabulary in the past, we talked about students previewing lists first; it's the same thing with a reading. You want students to first read it over on their own. They may translate, they may annotate, they may write notes in English, in their own language, draw pictures, you know, whatever the case may be, but we do want them to have that first touch on the reading so that when the teacher is teaching it, they're not reading it for the first time. You can see here on the screen—um, you have a key with some different symbols you may want to use while annotating—that's a great idea. Um, another way is simply to have them annotate however they are most comfortable, or you might give them an assignment where they have to take notes from their reading. We always want the notes to be in their own language because if the notes are not, then you don't really know if they're understanding; the students don't really know if they're understanding; they're just simply copying. There's also outlining or Cornell notes, depending on what kind of note-taking skill you are working on in your classrooms today or in their mainstream classes. You can have them outline—um—and then again, do it in their own language and maybe not in full, complete sentences. All right, so that is one way of getting students to really just get ready for the reading coming up. Another way is through listening. For example, it's called an ESL cloze activity. I'm sure you're very—um—comfortable with this activity, but the one I want to present to you now is maybe some kind of audio that you've pre-recorded—um—and then some kind of fill-in-the-blank activity as a test. What you see here is a digital version; however, paper works just the same way. But the idea here is they're listening to the reading, so either the student is reading or the teacher is reading it out loud or a voice is recorded for them to listen to it digitally. But the idea is they're hearing the reading; they're then filling in the blanks with the words they hear. So what happens is while they're listening, they're decoding what they're listening for, which is a blank, and if they understand it, they're then typing it in or writing the word in. Here you can have an informal or even—sorry—a formal assessment of their speaking—of their not speaking, their listening—as well as maybe spelling, and to see specifically maybe they understood the word but couldn't spell it or they were totally off and they just guessed. Okay, but this is very useful because keep in mind sometimes students will not have done their homework, so this is the first time they're hearing the reading before you as a teacher teach it.

Next, we really do like to really work with audio. So, read-alongs are when they listen to the audio—this time not as a test—they're maybe listening to the audio over and over again, so they—they can see the words, they can hear the words, and then it just becomes this natural reading that will occur later on. They can also read along with the teacher. So if you don't have an audio recording, the teachers can, you know, read with them, and they could all read out loud, maybe choral reading with the class or different things like popcorn reading—um—and maybe they only read with the audio or read along with the teacher. The next one is about an activity that you can actually do while you lecture; it's called listening fact-finding. And really what they are doing is they're listening to find facts. So maybe you play an audio, and you have part of the reading up on the screen or on a piece of paper, and the students are listening to then take notes on what they understand. Now, when they take notes, again, images or pictures, they could do their own language or easy simple English or even verbatim, but the idea is they're taking notes for what they understand to then tell the teacher in class about what they've understood. So the idea here is they are talking about the reading, so the students can then share their knowledge for then the teacher to then lecture on the topic. What I love about this is it is instant informal assessment. So you can actually collect those papers at the end and see and compare how much they understood, or when you listen to them, you're going to hear maybe a low-level student just say words, a higher level some sentences, and in my class, I had some advanced students tell me the whole paragraph in their own words. So they basically paraphrased on the spot while writing it down. This is a form of active listening. Sometimes we, as teachers, we lecture, and we forget that we want to keep the students engaged. Students feel engaged when they're doing something while listening, when they're taking notes, when they're trying to listen to you to ask questions, or maybe you ask them questions. So, for lecture, when you do speak to them about the reading and explain it and unpack it, it's great to focus on vocabulary, great to focus on context clues, it's great to focus on—um—students' attention on phrases that you may be able to draw arrows to have them refer to different things in their reading. Teachers are very important when it comes to teaching a reading; it's really your knowledge that you are giving to them, but then also you want to see what students understand. So even within your lecture, practice asking them questions; have them write down the answer and then come back to it later, so that way it gives students ample opportunity to, you know, record their answer. This is called wait time in ESL. Wait time is hugely important for low-level students to feel like they can also be a part of what's going on in the classroom. One way I like to do lectures is I like to work backward, meaning I may look at the test or the critical reading questions at the end that I'm going to give the students to then make sure I cover those points within a lecture. This is very important for students to practice listening for because when they go to their history, their science, their mainstream classes, teachers lecture all the time, but they need to learn what to listen for because it's very important for that to later be in the test later on.

All right, so moving on, we are going to now focus on different activities. In this chart, you can see I've split up reading fluency and reading comprehension. So, reading fluency is about getting students to read without stopping, maybe working on pronunciation without hesitating and intonation. Reading comprehension is about what students understand about the reading. So, for example, for reading fluency, we spoke a lot about read-alouds. Here are some—um—other things you might try: popcorn reading. So it's not read-along, but it's read-aloud, so they're doing it on their own around the room, normal, you know, we always do that in class, and then maybe even reading circles. You might split them up by level or in just smaller groups so they can read to each other, but they are able to—um—you know, focus on this a little better. So here you could see we have voice recording. We really like students to do read-alouds and voice record so they can hear it themselves, but also so the teacher can hear it. The idea here is that when they are listening, they are able to figure out what mistakes they had or errors that they are constantly making and fix it next time. But it's useful for teachers, especially, to compare one week to 10 weeks later to maybe 20 weeks later to see how they're improving over time. You can do voice recording with different apps—um—on an iPad or a computer—um—or some outside websites to do voice recording. Our next one is a game called speed reading. This one is about how fast a student can read a sentence, and they want to increase or decrease the amount of time they're reading that sentence to become more fluent. So a teacher can have them prepare the whole reading for reading fluency and then choose randomly at that point a sentence for the student to read. The teacher can then time that student or give them 15 seconds; it really depends on how long the sentence is. So I like to time them the first time and see how long they take and then say, okay, if it was 15 seconds, next time you're going to do it in 12 seconds; give them 12 seconds; they try to complete that sentence again in 12, then 10, so they're reading it faster and faster, and then they thus become more fluent. Um, this is a really fun game for—um—the audience to really listen to because sometimes it becomes funny, or they learn the different strategies of how to do it when their turn comes up. "Listen to me read" is an activity that focuses on listening as well as writing, but also reading comprehension. So what happens is you partner your students so that one's a reader and one's a writer. So you're using that same reading that you're focusing on in class, and the student may read a sentence. So the student reads, and then the listener will then write what the student says. Now you can do this verbatim, or you can make it even harder and have them paraphrase, and in that way you are doing reading comprehension and then also listening fluency. So the idea is—sorry—listening comprehension and listening fluency. So what happens is the students are doing that, and they're competing against other partners to see who can get the most correct or get the most down in a certain amount of time. A lot of different ways to do this, but again, focusing on reading, listening, and then writing. Okay, the next activity is "read aloud in round." It should say "read aloud"—um—and "in round" is something that I wanted to—um—pause here and focus on a little bit more because I love this activity. My students get so engaged in this; they never want to stop. So what happens here is reading aloud and around; you have your—maybe your whole class doing this or you have your audience, and the idea is that one group goes up; they each read a word. So at the low level, you're obviously going to do one word; the next person does a word and so on and so forth. For example, you have—next—next student says, "to the living room," and then it goes in a circle. So this is just for fun, but if you were to make it a game, you might have the front group facing the audience, so these students right here are sitting; they're the audience, and the group goes up. As soon as they mess up a word, like mispronounce, then that whole group might sit down or just that one student. So the idea is to stay up at the front of the classroom the longest. My students, when we do this, they like to play the whole class period; they are pointing at their reading, concentrating so hard, trying to catch the mistakes because they want to be up next. They love this one, and it's called "in round." When you go to higher levels, so maybe at the intermediate or advanced level, you might do two or three words at a time or even whole sentences. So they would rotate after each sentence, but the idea is that they are switching off, so they do need to pay attention; the audience is also paying attention. So some other ideas that we have for "in round" are for reading comprehension: paraphrasing paragraphs as well as summarizing paragraphs. So paraphrasing paragraphs is obviously you would first need them to do paraphrasing. So let's talk about why paraphrasing is important. We need students—stud—to know how to paraphrase. Plagiarism is huge; they—students do it all the time, and they may not even know they're doing it. So we may ask a student, okay, I want you to research a topic on animals, do the panda, and they research panda, and then they write down everything they know about panda, but they pretty much just copy what they've researched. They don't know how to put it in their own words, maybe because they don't understand it or they don't have that capability of putting it into simple English. Paraphrasing is a skill you have to teach; you have to break it down and scaffold it. So when we paraphrase, you might model it first, do it sentence by sentence, or you may first give students a sentence to paraphrase, then maybe a couple sentences, then a paragraph. Never give them the whole reading and say, "Go paraphrase, good luck, see you later," because what you'll get is basically a copy of the reading. But if you can help them understand paraphrasing and practice the skill over time, when you ask them to do a report or a writing at the end of the unit, you will not get plagiarized papers because they will have the skill and the confidence to do this—um—in their classes. So late—at—at the beginning when I started this with my classes, I had multi-level; I would partner the high level to the low level, and then I would have them paraphrase together. Maybe the high level is the one explaining, and the low level is the one writing. In that way, they're both interacting, but with paraphrasing, it's a practice skill, so let's make it a little fun, right? So once they do the activity of paraphrasing, we want them to then speak about it. In that way, while they're speaking about it, they're still showing they have command over the topic. So when you do paraphrasing in a round, you would have the first person start; they could then decide to stop wherever they want; the next person will go. What I like to do is to make it even harder later on; the first person will go, and I'll say, "Stop," the next person needs to continue. Now keep in mind their paraphrases are all different, so they need to know the content very well to pick up where that last student left off. Now the same thing happens for summarizing paragraphs; it's the same idea. Summarizing is very hard for them also. A lot of times we, as teachers, say, "Go summarize the story, go summarize the reading," but the same thing happens just like paraphrasing; they end up copying some sentences from the beginning, some in the middle, some in the end, and you're like, "You just copied; that's not summarizing." So you need to—your summaries or this—the way of summarizing and help them understand how to put things in their own words to then make a summary that's more concise of what the reading is really about. Again, in round, it works the same way.

Moving on: questions and answers. Now this is something that's so easy to think about; it's a zero-prep for the teachers. The teachers have the reading; give it to the students; the students then make questions, and then, of course, the answers. Now we want to teach them the difference between multiple-choice questions, true/false, and multiple-answer, as well as—um—different questions that are open-ended, maybe with more thought. If they can make these questions and find those answers, it will make it a lot easier for them to answer questions the teacher or the test has later on. With this, students create the questions; they then create the answers; they submit it to the teacher, so then different games can occur. The teachers can ask the questions; the students can ask other students the questions, or you can make it a game with a PowerPoint where the question just comes up, and students are competing to answer it. "Hot Seat" is one of my favorite games to play when this comes up. This is where the students have their questions; one person goes up to the front of the class, maybe say it's a minute or a minute and a half or two minutes. So during that time period, this student needs to answer as many questions from the other students, so she is scoring points for her team, as many—getting points on as many of the questions that she can answer. So the idea is she's being tested, but these students are also interacting by asking the questions and also listening to the answers. If they understand the answers, you know, everybody's working with the same content. So that's called "Hot Seat" because this student is a little bit under pressure. A sequencing game. So when we do the sequencing game, the reason for this is because many readings, like for example, stories or narratives have a sequence, have a flow—um—we also have fact-based readings that also have a sequence. So the idea is students are able—need to be able to put the facts in an order. So you can give the students facts. So, for example, you can see here—"It plays in the yard," "Hi, my name is Maria," "I have a pet dog," "It is brown and black," "I live in a house on Orange Street"—the students need to put these sentences in the right order. So, for example, maybe you have—"Hi, my name is Maria" first, "I have a dog," which is here, and then it's brown and black, and then I say, "Oops, I live on Orange Street," should be here, so then you would move it down. So the idea that you are putting these sentences in order, but you can do it digitally, but I really like to get the students up, so I would bring all five of these students, give them a sentence, put them at the front of the class, and I would say to them, "You guys need to figure out how to put the sentence in order," so they would physically move with their paper in the right order. That's easy; they're able to talk to each other. A harder version is they have their paper; they then look at each other, and they just move down the line, and they can't talk to each other. Another way is you—you have the people holding the pages; the audience is the one that tells them to move, and they put them in the right order. You can always just scramble sentences, throw it on the—the table and have them sequence also, but there are a lot of different ways to do sequencing, but the number one reason why it is important is so that they can show you they understand the story. Let's bring back summarizing. You've done the sequencing; now have them write a summary from just those sequenced sentences; that's a way of scaffolding it, right? The last activity I'd like to cover is called "fact relay." It is a really fun activity from the childhood game of telephone where you whisper in—you know—the person's ear and you pass it down the line. So what happens here is these end students have a reading; the reading—they have the reading out there, and then they are looking for the first sentence; they're telling the students down the line—you know—the first sentence, then the team—the person—um—at the front with the writing utensil goes up, writes on the board, on a piece of paper, but exactly what they heard. Now you can always do it verbatim; you can do a paraphrase. For low levels, I really like to make myself a fact sheet, meaning everything I want the students to know or maybe only what I need them to know because they're low-level and put that on a sheet, and then they do it fact by fact. So after the student writes, that student's going to go to the back of the line to then start that next telephone chain. So it is a relay, but it's also a race, so they're trying to get as many facts up—at—at the front, whether it's on a paper, butcher paper, or on the board, but they're trying to get the most correct and at the fastest time. So it's both—after you play those different activities, we of course need to see in a little more formal way that the students have understood the information. So we like to use graphic organizers. They're very popular: T-charts, bubble maps, plot flow charts, Venn diagrams. You can see here that students can fill information in digitally or on paper, but the idea is then that they can speak about it. So remember that in a round, you can have them use a graphic organizer to retell a story in a round. Okay, thank you; stop; next person continue in a round. Okay—um—and you could also do jigsaw where students become an expert on specific information to then report it out to the students. Jigsaw has also done a different way where you're an expert, and then you're grouped up into maybe four; if there are four different items, you then teach that group—oh, sorry—you teach the group the same topic, and then you all go out in different groups to teach your topic to everyone else. Okay, that's another form of jigsaw, but again, graphic organizers is something you would collect, so students have written them down, and teachers can formally assess if they're understanding. But formal assessment always comes at the end. Right here you have your test. So you can do your test with multiple-choice, true/false, multiple-answer, sequencing, some different questions like "not you," which one is not true or which one is true about the passage; maybe if you were to come up with a different title, what would it be? Or maybe if you can make a different ending to the reading; these are all types of questions that are on high-stakes examinations. Open-ended is something that's a little bit harder, something that you need to teach students to answer and even come up with questions when they write them like we talked about earlier. But the ideas you might want them—them—to do: modify true and false or fill in some kind of table with a feeling, why they feel this way and how they resolved it; give reasons or why. You always want to do critical reading questions with students—um—this is really aligning to the Anchor Standards of Common Core or other types of standards. You want them to use evidence from the reading to prove something or they infer something, draw conclusions, and then give that evidence, maybe even talk about the author's point of view and answer questions based on images or media. So when we do assessment, we really want students to be tested on not just, you know, the simple types of questioning, but the higher-level critical reading questions. After that, we always want them to do some kind of writing practice activity or take—of course—take them through the writing process. Our next webinar is going to focus mainly on different types of writing activities and some of our favorites.

So that is the explicit flow of how we believe reading should be taught and practiced using an integrated skills approach and a specific flow with first schema building, later teach them vocabulary, have them preview, you obviously lecture because teachers are super important, do reading fluency, reading comprehension activities, and of course, assess them and end—then end with reading—writing—sorry—and with writing. So thank you for taking the time to join us. I hope this has been informative, and I'd love to hear back from teachers who have maybe used some activities—um—that we talked about in their classrooms. So for questions or comments, please email me at brrosas@thesisinternational.com. So B as in Brenda, R, O, S, A, S, at thesisintl.com. Please join us next time for—um—writing strategies and activities for ESL ELL classrooms.