Closing the Gap: Addressing the Vocabulary Needs of English-Language Learners in Bilingual and Mainstream Classrooms A study by; Carlo, M., August, D., McLaughlin, B., Dressler, C., Lippman, D., (2008) Presented by: Any K. Diaz

“ Gaps in reading performance between Anglo and Latino children are associated with gaps in vocabulary knowledge.”

Previous work suggest that “one major determinant of poor reading comprehension, for Latino children(Garcia, 1991; Nagy, 1997; Verhoeven, 1990) and for other lagging readers (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000), is low vocabulary.”

Purpose of the Study: Test the impact of an English Vocabulary enrichment intervention that combined direct word instruction in word-learning strategies on the word knowledge and reading comprehension abilities of ELL’s.

Intervention Design It was based by the answer of these key questions: Which words?- General purpose academic words. How to introduce the words?- Appropriate for and of interest to the reader. How often?- Several times, diverse contexts , varying tasks required for learners. What aspects of word knowledge to focus on?- Depth meaning, polysemy , morphological structure, cross-language relationships, spelling, and pronunciation. What instructional techniques?- Explicit instruction, Spanish translation, Collaborative work, and Word Wizard.

The topic used during the intervention was immigration. The curriculum drew readings from newspapers articles, diaries, immigrant’s personal experiences, historical and fictional accounts. Time of the Intervention: Participants: 15 weeks 254 bilingual and monolingual students from 9 Fifth grade classrooms in 4 schools from different states. California schools served a Mexican American population in bilingual and mainstream classrooms. Virginia and Massachusetts schools served a Puerto Rican and Dominican population in bilingual and mainstream classrooms. 142 English Language Learners (ELL) students 112 English Only (EO)Language students

Procedure: 10-12 target words introduced at the beginning of each week. Instruction time 30-45 minutes 4 days a week. Monday- The target words were given to the Spanish speakers, in Spanish, both written and audiotape versions. Tuesday- Whole group English text and target words introduction. Wednesday- Group work involving sentence context. Thursday- Activities that promotes word knowledge. Friday- Activities that promotes word analysis and not reinforce the learning of the target words. Assessments were given in the fall and spring of the academic year.

Results: The findings were as follow: Both ELL’s and EO’s fifth graders improve their performance in an equal degree. They gained knowledge that should support the efficiency of the incidental learning of novel words. They gained knowledge of the words that were explicitly taught. Both ELL’s and EO’s improve in reading comprehension outcomes.

Results: They also concluded that teaching vocabulary in an explicit way is effective for both ELL’s and EO’s. It depends on the strategies that the teacher use to instruct the vocabulary. Various examples were given: The use of games as Charades to manipulate and analyze word meaning. Word Wizard to heighten attention to words. To write and rewrite the target words several times. Repeat the novel words several times noting the word meaning in context.

Discussion: If a student is exposed to the correct vocabulary instruction, she/he will be successful in the learning of the written and the oral language . The ELL in the intervention equal the performance from those English-only speakers that were already exposed to the language. This mean that we as teachers need to evaluate at what level of English our students are and then instruct them from there. The study worked around the students needs. The topic used, the word selection, and the introduction of the words all were focused on the interest of the learner. That, with the appropriate guidance in morphology , meaning instruction, pronunciation and spelling, the vocabulary acquisition will be successful.