(Subtitle automatically generated) OK, thank you so much Lisbeth for that really kind introduction and also thank you everyone in Oslo for this invitation. It's really truly a delight.
To be here and deliver the plenary address.
I promise someday we will be there in person to meet all of you face to face and so thank you all for coming.
I'm gonna go right into my talk. UM, during my talk if there are, I will fly through some of my slides.
But Please note that I'm happy to come back to them in our discussion session and answer any questions that you might have.
So I'm going to start off today with talking about a current struggle that we have.
Probably actually the struggle is something we have with language, locally, nationally and globally. We are struggling to meet the needs of a changing population who live together with a variety of backgrounds, values and educational preparations. We are struggling to provide diverse people with the language and literacy skills.
Needed for full participation across contexts, school work home daily functional needs for reading. Finally, we are struggling to communicate and understand one another.
What have we been doing? And I said when I say, what have we been doing that we in this context is my research team and myself?
OK, we've been working with linguistically and culturally diverse people in the United States and around the world. Whether this work is in the courtroom with forensic linguistics in the hospital with.
Health literacy in the classroom, which is obvious. What we do there in the office and more. My focus in the last. I would say 10 years has been on action on making decisions informed by linguistic and language knowledge.
So today what I want to do is showcase some of my reading research that has informed Spanish language programs at the university in the United States and that has also informed local and global programs for refugees and immigrants. I'm going to showcase the evolution of.
This impact, rather than present any of the studies I've conducted in my research lab, in chronological order.
Yeah.
So my research it actually highlights UNESCO Central mission that literacy is a fundamental human right. Scientific research on foreign language and second language reading must transcend the walls of the research laboratory in order to impact everyday lives.
And my research tries or attempts to attend to this struggle locally in St. Louis, MO, where I permanently reside nationally in the United States of America and globally the world.
Yeah.
We also cannot talk about literacy today without mentioning pandemic literacy. Global discourse is dominated by specialized terms for COVID-19 from the fields of medicine and epidemiology that are transmitted through government briefings, teleconferences, and more.
Health literacy involves both the context in which health literacy demands are made and the skills that peak.
People, both the health care professionals and the patients and clients bring to that situation. Note here this bidirectional relationship in health literacy with the definition I borrow right it it. It emphasizes the role of health care professionals and their literacy, thereby literacy.
Multi literacy as well as the patients or clients.
Besides functional needs to read, why should we read in the second language? Well, the vast store of knowledge and culture that is preserved in authentic texts is invaluable to understanding others. What do I mean by authentic texts? By authentic texts.
I borrow the definition that Elizabeth Bernhardt Keiko CUDA, other renowned researchers in the field of second language reading news by authentic text I mean readings that were written for the native speaker by the native speaker.
OK, my agenda of second language reading research plays a role in fostering tolerance through understanding language and cultural differences.
Let's turn to my laboratory or any laboratories. Actually, insufficient attention has been given to the connections between the laboratory based research.
On 2nd in foreign language reading the classroom and our daily lives before 2007 from about 2000 to 2007, I supplied empirical evidence to answer pressing questions about the Spanish major in the United States.
Across different universities and on the scientific side, practically all the second language writing competent competencies have been contingent on variation, so that turns me to dissecting individual learner differences or what we call IDD, so some of my empirical investigations.
Determine specific cognitive, linguistic, and affective contributions to alter reading capabilities and in doing so, it helps we refine some of the existing models of L2 reading, which I'm going to talk about in a few minutes.
Eljer reading models and interactive model of L2 reading has to emphasize the interplay between two separate meaning systems.
Both the reader and the text and a lot of this research is mainly done with English as a foreign language. OK, a lot of it across the world is done with English as a foreign language most.
Of my research accounts for first language literacy knowledge.
And second language proficiency while examining static and transient variables across stages of language acquisition of Spanish. Remember, this is at the university level.
This is with you know, adolescents or mainly adults. OK, so adolescents and adults. People who have already mastered one or two languages.
OK.
Yeah.
Why did I choose to work with or do research on learners of Spanish at the university in the United States?
Well, mainly because that is the most widely studied languages. So with these learners of Spanish I have shown that as proficiency increases the influence of both background knowledge and.
Reader's gender decreased or disappeared completely OK, so the higher their level of proficiency, the influence of topic familiarity, or subject knowledge that they bring to before reading the text as well as the self reported gender.
These interactions disappeared completely the higher the stage of acquisition. My findings revealed that the interaction of readers gender and passage content does play a significant role at those intermediate levels of Spanish language instruction. That intermediate level is the level where students declare the major.
In the US, OK, this was not true at the advanced stages where passage content was more powerful than language or reading knowledge with as with the beginning and intermediate readers. But remember that as the reader develops.
Proficiency presides over the content of the text. The content of these authentic texts. OK, the findings across a number of studies identify gender as a moderator of both conceptual and practical importance for the intermediate levels of language instruction, you're probably wondering, like why am I interested in the reader's gender?
Right?
Well, I'm gonna get to that in a minute because findings across the studies indicate that as learners advanced in their language studies, gender differences in comprehension may also be a function of the type of assessment. OK?
Are we using multiple choice and we're using sentence completion and we're using written recall the type of assessment.
Also matters when we are examining the role of gender.
Gender is an important variable in L2 reading comprehension of Spanish, but we have to remember that we cannot isolate gender.
Gender doesn't speak alone, right? And you also have to remember that in all of my studies, participants or subjects in the experiments self reported gender. OK, I did not assign gender in any way.
The latest Modern Language Association report for languages in the United States.
Shows that language course enrollments in institutions of higher education in the USA reveals that enrollments in all languages have decreased since the prior report in 2009.
OK, this is a very for me. This is for me and for many this is a very sad reality.
It's the first time in recorded history since 1958 the enrollments in Spanish courses dropped across the US.
Data specifically reveals that Spanish continues to lead as one of the two most studied languages, followed by French OK, and it's interesting.
'cause at my own institution at Washington University in Saint Louis, we have more students choosing to study Chinese than we do Spanish. However, we have more.
Students majoring in Spanish than any other language. OK, these are interesting trends across the United States.
So if you look carefully at the database of research published in the past few years, you'll see that little attention has been given to gender based differences in the learning of languages in EU.
S Despite the apparent gender gap in Spanish classes, if you look at data even closer and if you look at some of Monica Chavez work.
You will see that the at in the introductory courses in the United States, UM.
Women outnumber men four to one. OK, so there are four women to every man in our language classroom enrolled at the university.
This gap between men and women broadens the higher the stage of acquisition. OK, and this is, and this is even more true. This is this is.
Even more obvious with Spanish, the Spanish language, so within the fields of science, math, engineering and technology, a female minority.
Is viewed as a problem, and clearly it is that has consistently been investigated with corresponding implications for school systems across EU.
S yet within the context of foreign language learning, the female majority is rarely viewed as a problem in the US. OK, I have to constantly.
Remind myself of the audience here.
OK, So what I did is I decided to because of this dearth in the database on gender no one.
Everybody kind of just stopped doing gender and said OK, we're done with that. We're going to move on to something else.
Well, clearly there still is a problem going on here, right? So I decided to revisit some of my prior datasets and took substance of these.
Data and I re examined those datasets so I actually re examined so I did a a big study on self assessment and readers ability to.
Accurately or inaccurately, self assess their reading knowledge, their reading comprehension abilities. And I used a criterion referenced instrument grounded in the dialing project.
From Europe and I worked with Doctor Vanderplank and Oxford and So what I ended up doing is I re examine that data 'cause we didn't look at gender, right?
So we examine that we examined that entire data set, and I found because we did not consider gender and we only included measures of achievement from an advanced course.
At the onset of the Spanish made.
And So what I wanted to do is ask, answer new research questions about the evolution of L2 vocabulary knowledge, L2 grammar knowledge, and L2 reading comprehension.
So I wanted to look at what happens as learners progress through stages of acquisition because a lot of the research we had done before really did focus on that level or that.
Stage where students declared the major instead of looking at what's going on with reading at the introductory and intermediate levels.
So the participants for that study were 235 university level learners of Spanish 51 came from the beginning level.
36 came from the intermediate level and 148 from the advance. If you look at this breakdown, you'll see at the enter at the beginning we had 29 women and then 22 men.
Then we went. Then we went to 24 women and 12 men, and then by the time they get to the stage where they are actually, they have declared the Spanish major.
We have 110 women in this study. In 38 men, and these studies consisted of all of the students who were enrolled in those courses.
That particular semester. OK, so the findings were really interesting. We found that grammar vocabulary in reading do not necessarily develop and advance in unison across these stages of acquisition, intermediate and advanced distributions of scores indicate that intermediate you can see here.
The intermediate students score as well as advanced students in grammar knowledge, right? Yeah, in vocabulary knowledge, I'm sorry, so the intermediate students score as well as the advanced students in vocabulary knowledge.
The finding for vocab with intermediate advance did not hold true for reading comprehension and grammar. Knowledge scores where there are distinctly separate curves for each of those levels of instruction.
By this, instead of throwing up all the stats to talk about this, I'll just tell you what it means. It means that intermediate and advanced students score.
Similarly on vocabulary but very different on the scores of grammar, knowledge and reading comprehension by level.
However, these scores were all significantly interrelated. They were significantly contributing to the overall reading picture, so such such relationships are also impacted by level of instruction and more specifically for those at the intermediate level of language instruction. Vocabulary knowledge has a stronger impact on reading comprehension.
That it did at the beginning or the advanced. OK, this illuminates vocabulary. Lexical acquisition, right, but it also illuminates that intermediate level learner.
OK.
Another select finding when I re examine that data set is that scores for beginners nearly reached the full range, particularly in reading comprehension.
So look at the degree of variation within these groups, right? So within this group the Group of beginning Intermediate advanced. We have all these degrees of variation with reading comprehension outcomes while for grammar.
Vocabulary knowledge the range of scores appears to be more constrained with the advanced learners. It's important to note that grammar knowledge has distinctly separate ranges of scores for levels of instruction. With sharpening two specific curves.
So what does all this mean? OK, the overall select finding was there is a larger difference that is present between beginning and intermediate levels of instruction, with all three with grammar.
Vocabulary and reading, then intermediate and advanced levels of instruction across skills OK.
Yeah.
Suppose to think about this for a second. Are our readers of Spanish in the US in this particular study, making the progress they should make?
Are they making the progress so that they can become lifelong readers of authentic texts of texts written by native speakers for native speakers?
No, they're not. Why is why? What's going on? So let's what do we do in our class? You know, let's connect this particular research to practice.
OK, we definitely see in in some of the graphs I just showed you, some of the figures we see how powerful and complex second language and foreign language meeting is. And practically all L2 meeting competencies are contingent on variation right within individuals across all stages of acquisition. We can't just say all intermediate learners did this.
All advanced did this. There's such a great degree of variation within these groups, so how do we attend to this? Do these degrees of variation within these stages of instruction? Uhm, you know. I only looked at grammar.
Vocabulary and reading, but there's so much more to it, and So what motivates me to continue this? What motivates me to go back in and re analyze some of these datasets?
Because I believe in the power of reading in all languages, reading authentic texts that capture the culture of the lives of everyday people, so that people have different backgrounds.
Nationalities and beliefs can appreciate and celebrate each other. The wider context from my reading research is on local education and national language policy. I want, and so I want to turn to some local initiatives that have been.
Grounded in some of the research that I just presented to you. But first I wanted to talk about the the different populations in EU.
S in what we call a multicultural society. First, we have our immigrants are newcomers and I borrow these definitions from ferdman and this is cited through so much literature and so I wanted to definitely.
Credit ferdman for this immigrants are newcomers with varying degrees in the first and second language.
Ethnic and cultural minorities language differences between home and school, but they might not be first generation right? They might have been.
They might be born in the US and foreign language learners. These are the groups the foreign language learners.
Number three there. That's the group of learners that I had primarily done my research with right. These are college and high school students who's most of the time.
English was their native language. Most of them had been educated in the English in the English language before attending the university.
Uh, my colleague Daleen hurting myself. We added a fourth group to this and these are refugees. And why is this group different than the rest? Because they do not choose to leave their home country.
Speaking of refugees, I wanted to bring up for you some very relevant facts that sort of ground some of the work I'm going to present next by the end of 2019, there were 79.5 million individuals who were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence or human rights violations.
This was an increase of 8.7 million people over the previous year.
World's forcibly displaced population remained at a record high, and when I use the term forcibly displaced population, I include the 226,000,000 refugees in the world.
This is the highest that had ever been seen before, and this was remember from the year 2009.
Team 45.7 million internally displaced people. These are people who are displaced within their own country and we had 4.2 million asylum seekers and I borrow this from UNHCR.
Let's take a look at my next graph and I and you're wondering why I bring up a 2014 because.
Back in 2014, we thought that the refugee crisis was said to be at historic proportions. We had never seen this before, right? But then if you look at this compared to 2019, the situation is only getting worse.
It is well documented that residents and educators are not always equipped with the skills necessary to meet the immediate language and literacy challenges of refugees and immigrants.
And how does my research attend to this? It's clear that weeding is part of the resettlement project or the resettlement process.
What I want to do is highlight some selected studies and connect them to stories and then go back to the the some of the research I presented earlier OK, and I want to focus on the needs of displaced people, so I'm going to showcase three different stories right now, and I say stories 'cause these are stories like some of this has not been empirically tested, but it was driven by some of the.
Research we did in my in my lab. I'm going to showcase programs for refugees and immigrants that embrace tenants of research on reading and really focus on the instructional practices for reading. As part of the resettlement process.
And I can't go on until I show you the aerial map of St. Louis, MO. OK, this shows the arch which is the gateway to the West.
OK, this is the popular icon, a symbol of St. Louis MO, and if you're wondering where this is, this is right in the middle of the United States, right?
Here is St. Louis, MO right there and I see this vest smiling 'cause she she she biked around Saint Louis and no.
Well, and I can't talk about Saint Louis or the US without talking about baseball, right? I mean, we when everybody thinks about St. Louis, MO, they think of the Saint Louis Cardinals baseball.
You're like OK, so Cindy, what does this have to do with reading it very much has a lot to do with reading and that is because.
Literally a mile and a half from this.
Very nice baseball stadium where everybody gathers regularly to cheer the Cardinals on is a school is an elementary school that has the largest population of non English speaking children in it. It's an elementary school called Oak Hill Elementary and I'm going to tell the story about 2000.
15 in 2016, when they had 55.4 African American students, 20% were white, 12% were Hispanic, and 11% were Bosnian other.
Approximately 80% of all Cal students were on free or reduced lunch. This blends with what Lisbeth and her colleagues were talking about earlier that we cannot.
We cannot talk about reading. We cannot talk about this research until we really recognize socioeconomic differences within our groups of learners that we are examining.
At that time in 2015 and 16, Oak Hill Elementary ranked 129th out of 169 Missouri public schools. OK, so the rankings were very low.
And the biggest issue with Oak Hill was that they had the lowest scores on the state. Test in language arts, reading and vocabulary, and the school was under threat to be closed down.
OK, they were going to be closing the doors, which meant all of these children who lived in that neighborhood would have to be bused out.
To other public schools away from their neighborhoods. OK, so they were UM.
Uh, the state of Missouri was threatening to lose their state accreditation.
Uh, if you look more closely at the language demographics of both hit Oak Hill, English is a second language for a third of all kills 320 students.
It's located in South Saint Louis in the Bravo neighborhood and at this school serves a very large Hispanic in Bosnian population. But that's not all among the languages students speak or Arabic.
Vietnamese Chinese in Pashtu 16 languages and all in the Saint Louis Elementary School.
And you're probably thinking, so why did I get connected to this? Well, Doctor Moore, the principle stated that it was frustrating because there is a wonderfully motivated team of teachers that come to work every day ready and willing to do their best by their students.
But they struggle to meet the unique talent at our school and I would be remiss if I did not mention.
That back in 2015, when we worked with this elementary school, there was not one certified English as a second language or English as a foreign language expert in the building. None of the teachers were incredible, but not one of them.
Had certification had attended courses on language acquisition, had had any kind of certification to teach students who used another language at home besides English.
So we decided to do a collaborative effort with them and build a reading program with the primary goal to actually get higher test scores on the state exam to maintain accreditation and bring this this school back right. So the reading team and I say team 'cause this was an effort with a lot of people.
Included the high school principal, Doctor Moreau. All of the teachers in the building who were incredible mice.
Myself and then a whole group of graduate and undergraduate students from Washoe who had attended my courses on second language reading and writing linguistics and language learning.
We grounded the implications for this school in the lab research we had conducted, uhm, but you have to remember, my research had been done with adults at the university who were already literate.
In one language. OK so.
So what we ended up doing is offering a series of professional development workshops that were grounded in research and theory.
OK, and we worked directly with these teachers and it's great to say that we did these professional developments on Saturdays when these teachers did not have to go to work. They weren't getting paid to attend these.
Professional development workshops at all, but they all showed up.
I stated teachers do not need to be fluent in these languages to serve these learners. OK, this was a huge issue.
The teachers felt like they needed to be fluent in the languages of their learners, and I said no, but you should be culturally and linguistically responsive, and that's where I knew I could come in and help.
All right, so one strategy we used and this actually blends with some of his best published research where she talks about the strategies that we should use to teach our learners to read. One strategy is make reading a social act in class instead of reading silently at home.
And then ask the students to write everything they remember from the given passage. The idea is to get them familiar with the idea that they will be responsible for generating output based on what they just read.
OK, Oh my.
OK.
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Asking me if they could refer or call me like during the work day, like when they when they came upon a problem in their classroom could they call me right then and I said, well, you can't call me 'cause I have to work but you could text me.
So they started these text exchanges with me during the work days and would ask me questions like should students be allowed to speak their native languages and I said.
Yes, students who are banned from using their native language may shut down at school. The teacher, one teacher said, should students just copy down the vocabulary words and I said no.
Research shows remote. Our rote copying does not benefit the students. We also showed teachers effective vocabulary games and busted some common language.
Let's we don't have to memorize long list of vocabulary words. We want students to acquire language, not to memorize it.
Learners have to do something with the new language. Attend to the language for meaning. OK, this is a picture showing Principal Morrow, who started a really great reading social club with their students.
Before and after school. So what did we find out from these two?
Teachers, well, the teachers really did feel that reading in a second language is merely a slowly bastardized version of doing the same task in their native language.
OK, and Bernard had postulated this in 1991 already by saying you know a lot of practitioners. A lot of teachers, a lot of professors believe that.
It's just really a slower version of what we're doing in our first language. OK, so.
Let's talk about that a little bit more is reading in another language. Simply replacing the behaviors we use when we're reading in our native language?
We look at this. I throw this out here. This is from 2005. These are from these are scores of student from students who are are all placed. They placed directly.
Into the most advanced levels of Spanish that you could at my university. OK, these students are highly literate in their first language to even get accepted at Washington University, they have to be literate. Very illiterate in English. OK, so look at the degree of variation within these reading scores.
OK, look at all of these degrees of variation so it shows right there that reading is definitely not just reading in another language.
It's not just a slower, bastardized version, but what you do in your first language. OK, if you look at this right here with advanced learners, these are students who are scoring right into the level where they get to begin the Spanish major.
Look at this degree of variation, OK?
Once again proving what Bernhard asserted years ago.
So breeding researchers have been answering some really big questions. We've been looking at what the contribution of L1 reading is to L2 reading and what the contribution of L2 language knowledge is to L2 reading, and we operationalize language knowledge by looking at vocabulary or lexical items and grammar or syntax.
So.
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Intact.
182
Right?
That equation is driven by studies across different languages, and it's important to note that these studies have been done with adolescents and adults.
OK.
Uhm, what then is going on in the remaining 50% of this equation, right? So one of the crucial goals in the last like 15 years with a lot of leading researchers across the whole US has been to explore that 50% of variance that remains unexplained. Clearly these would be transient factors, right? Interacting factors.
Uhm, we also needed to look at assessment. You know we can look at that whole equation, but in the end we also have to look at assessment and the methods we are using to test and then we should apply them to configurations of language programs. OK, so some of the areas that had been researched.
And that I have done for, and I have primarily focused on where metacognition interests background knowledge inserted adjunct questions.
Self assessment on L2 reading comprehension and I did these studies with learners of Spanish in the US.
But I also went out and did it with English as a foreign language learners in Argentina, Costa Rica, China and Malaysia.
And a few other countries, and so through a series of studies on interest, I used a multi component model of interest and reported that perceived interest accounts for 68% of the total sample variation.
The the three factors that were uniquely related to perceived interests were cohesion, engagement and ease of recollection. OK, this is critical when you think how we're going to apply this. I also did a series of studies where I looked at embedded agile collections within authentic text so.
Instead of simplifying or modifying the text, I wanted to keep them authentic, right? And so I examined the use of embedded adjunct questions. What and why questions within the text, and I found no significant effects of inserted adjunct questions.
For recall and multiple choice questions, and in fact.
Research my participants in my study scored higher when no adjuncts were inserted.
So we changed the type of inserted questions and we looked at elaborative interrogation questions, and again we found no effect with multiple choice questions.
OK, so we applied this to this phenomena at Oak Hill Elementary. OK, we applied these findings across interest with ease of recollection, perceived interest, and the findings for inserted adjuncts, and we applied this to Oak Hill Elementary and designed a whole bunch of readings.
That the learners could use online to prepare for the Missouri State test.
One advocate 1 clear connection is that we advocated for choices of topic selections that students should be able to choose what they want to read instead of always being assigned what they read.
So we created a library for the readers. We also taught the student the teachers how to activate relevant schemata, priority readings, so an emphasis on pre reading.
Activities instead of sending the students home to read at home alone, we started reading more as a social act.
But we really emphasized that pre reading process and and we did not interrupt the reading to check on comprehension. So we did this for a series of eight to 10 months actually and.
It's really exciting to report that all kills English language arts scores jumped. They stored from 12.6% proficient in 2014 to 32% proficient in 2015, and it's really great to say that the school is now fully accredited and the state of Missouri.
Has given them the budget to hire certified ESL teachers to work with their English language learners.
Principal Moro stated this is just a start. I think that's funny because it was a lot of work and she's like this is just the start.
This professional development gave teachers a better understanding of the current research and the best practices, and she says they started asking themselves how do I push my thinking about different languages and cultures? And this is a.
Uh.
Key statement I take from a 30 year teaching veteran she she had been at this school teaching for 30 years and she said all of our students, not just our English language learners, have benefited from these approaches.
We all have a lot of experience in the classroom, but it's important what the research says so we can be effective. What I show you right now.
This is a billboard, literally four blocks from the Cardinals baseball stadium that celebrates Oak Hill Elementary being fully accredited in our Saint Louis Public School system.
So.
The needs for local nationally in the USA and globally leads us to ask ourselves another question. Do all the refugees arrive with the ability to read and write in their native or their first language? OK, and this is when I started getting more involved with research globally with UNESCO doctor Giovanni Perotti.
They had for a nesco. Stated we want to provoke much critical reflection that is grounded in empirical data. From research on reading with adults but our refugee credit for a refugee crisis across the globe but especially in Latin America and this is.
'cause in Latin America the majority of refugees that were arriving first across borders were adults and a lot of them were not literate in their first language and so they were arriving without any means to read and write. And so I went down to Chile to the UNESCO.
Conference and I delivered a plenary on on.
And all kinds of different studies that I have had conducted and I worked with some of the local people in Santiago to establish some grounded work for these new arrivals. OK, unfortunately, and sadly enough, seven days after I got back Trump.
Announced the United States with pulling out of Ownest
Go and therefore we were not able to continue a lot of the research. It wasn't funded anymore and so we weren't allowed.
We weren't able to continue funded research. We continued our collaborations, of course, but without actually going to the countries and without actually working directly with the people, it's really hard to conduct this type of research.
And get a lot of this activity going, and that is all I'm going to say about that slide 'cause I know this is being recorded, so I will move on to the next one.
So starting two years ago we decided to go local again. I say we my entire research team of pH. D students and advanced undergraduates.
And visiting scholars and we were contacted by the International Institute of Saint Louis and told that it hosts a daily after school program.
Uh.
UMH where different students receive additional academic instruction and they also participate in recreational activities. A lot of these new Americans were from Afghanistan, El Salvador, Kuwait, Mexico in Uganda, and most of them when we tested.
Them we're reading at the 5th grade level or below we notice here I say public high school, right? These students were were in high school and most of them were reading at the 5th grade level in English, so this is really critical because in the state of Missouri students must make substantial gains in reading comprehension.
If they're going to earn their high school diploma before aging out of the educational system, so students in the state of Missouri, if they don't get their high school diploma by the time they are 21, they age out of the system and they no longer have the opportunity to ever get a high school diploma. The best they can get is a GED.
OK, so this was critical and so of course I continue to challenge the validity of the Missouri State reading test, right?
And the fairness of high stakes testing in general, especially for refugees. But I put these these issues aside and I put all my research on on testing and assessment aside and and help the teachers with some critical.
Things I told the teachers that oral proficiency does not correlate with the ability to read and we had a new goal which was to improve their reading and improve their in immediate academic progress in high school, OK?
So again, I had the whole team work with them and what we did is we developed a social reading program that employs online gaming to meet the individual needs of each student and boost comprehension and confidence.
And we we and what we did? Well, I had re analyzed data from a whole series of prior studies.
Where I also looked at individual learner differences where I looked at anxiety and self confidence and their relationships to multiple choice.
Yes, and and I found that the differences in comprehension, especially with reading, can be a function of the type of assessment that is used, but these students were required to take the traditional state mandated multiple choice reading tests, so I'm preaching to the choir here. When I say talk about the difficulties.
In assessing reading right? I mean reading is an observed skill. We don't know what's happening in our students minds. Reader doesn't naturally produce oral output.
While reading for us researchers to analyze it, so how could self assessment help? Well what we did is we used the criterion referenced self Assessment instrument which was grounded in the dialing in the European Common Portfolio project actually and we applied it to these learners at this local high school.
And, uhm, we grounded it in a prior study. We had done, UM, where we found that different skills all depend on each other. At the advanced levels, and we looked at these relationships between reading, listening, and writing.
And and instead of teaching reading as an isolated skill, we taught it as a social process where they were listening, reading and writing and and the next slide shows an actual picture of one of my PhD students who's working with one of the refugees in the high school. This particular refugee had been his education.
He had been interrupted for about four years, and so until he came to St. Louis, MO. He had been in refugee camps in another country until he was relocated and finally grounded in St. Louis, MO, and so he.
Was under a lot of pressure because he would have aged out of the system very soon and would never been able to get a high school diploma.
So this shows the NGA not just sitting down and reading with these learners, but she's going around while we employed this social online gaming and and attends to their.
Questions as individuals OK and during the reading process and so.
Come and then on the last note then uhm, I wanted to end just by talking about how I think it's really, really important for all of us as applied linguists, to continue to train our generations of scholars who are equipped with the necessary skills and applied linguistics to attend to real.
Problems so that we have some current impact. And on that note, uhm, I conclude and I wanted to say gracias obrigado and thank you in all the languages that you know.