Voces Digital Conference/Central States Conference

A confession: as a teacher, I feel like my well has run dry. There are only two more months left in my school year (last day of school for students is Wednesday, May 21), and if you are like me, you are dragging and are SO ready for things to be over. As a CI/ADI teacher, I hate this feeling, because I so want to continue giving understandable and engaging input to my students, but the reality is, I am TIRED and feel like I have nothing left to give.

This is why meaningful (note that word!) professional development is SO important for us as CI/ADI teachers, and recently I took part in two PDs, one online and one in-person. I attended the first evening's slate of sessions for Voces Digital's digital Spring into Reading conference, and then later that weekend I attended the Central States Conference on Teaching Foreign Language (CSCTFL). Both of these could not have come at a better time for me!!

I was only able to attend the first evening of the Voces Digital online conference, but there were some really good speakers that evening. Below are the videos from that evening:

•  "Free Voluntary Reading: Free to Read but Still Accountable?" by Margarita Perez Garcia
• "Engaging Students with Reading" by Eric Richards
• "Zero Prep Reading for True Beginners" by Mike Peto

All of the presentations were great! Although I had never seen Mike Peto present before, I had always heard great things about him - he did not disappoint!

Later that weekend, I attended my first Central States conference in Kansas City. This conference is nicknamed "The Friendly Conference," and indeed it was - much like my experience at Comprehensible Iowa last summer, Midwesterners indeed are friendly and hospitable! I had always heard that Central States always had a good slate of CI/ADI presentations, and indeed - it seemed like each session time had a CI/ADI presentation, and I did my best to attend as many as I could. Shout out to Mira Canion, Caitlyn McKinney, Valentina Correa, Carrie Toth, Jeremy Jordan, and Eric Richards for their sessions - you gave me so much to think about and to use in my curriculum. Mostly what I enjoyed was catching up/hanging out with other CI/ADI folks - people whom I primarily only see at conferences but we share such a deep mutual respect for each other. I needed definitely needed to be with folks all of whom we were on the same page pedagogically with CI/ADI. If you have the chance next year, attend Central States! I am seriously considering now submitting a proposal for next year's conference in Chicago.

Are you in need of some CI/ADI professional development? Check out my post on CI/ADI offerings for 2025, and get your cup refilled!

Hard Words Podcast - A Blog Post by Eric Richards

I am not one who listens to podcasts. Unless it is a podcast about the Brady Bunch or The Facts of Life, I probably will not listen to it (I am being 100% honest). HOWEVER, recently on his blog, Eric Richards wrote up a post about the podcast "Hard Words: Why aren't kids being taught to read?" Published in 2018 and produced by educational reporter/journalist Emily Hanford, this audio documentary details and questions the "whole language/cueing system approach" for teaching students how to read (instead of a phonics approach). As I said, I normally do not listen to educational podcasts, but THIS PODCAST WAS EYE-OPENING to me! I had heard of this particular reading method, but I had NO IDEA what it entailed or that it was not based on any scientific research. Yet, over these years I have noticed a decline in students' reading ability and literacy - I just chalked it up to students not reading as much, COVID years, etc. Now I was learning essentially it was due to how students were being taught to read. 

Due to such an overwhelming public reaction to her radio documentary. Hanford followed up with a podcast series called "Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong," and I have voraciously binge-listened to this over and over again in the past two weeks. Recently I asked my high school Language Arts colleagues about what they have witnessed over these years regarding student reading abilities, and many of them said the same thing: Many students today possess a false literacy. A large number are not actually reading the words at all but are just either good/bad guessers.

With Eric's permission, I am reprinting his blog post here, because not only do I think that it is that good, but he asks SO MANY good questions about how all of this applies to the world language classroom. 

I invite you to listen to the podcast "Hard Words: Why aren't kids being taught to read?" - Eric posts a link to it on his blog. Then I ask you to continue with the podcast series "Sold a Story," because it goes into much more depth. I feel a bit of a connection to the information presented in "Sold a Story," because my district Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) is mentioned in Episode 5 as one of biggest customers of the Heinemann publishing company (we are the 11th largest district in the nation), and Missy Purcell, a former balanced literacy trainer who became disillusioned with the cueing system of reading due to seeing it not addressing her own son's dyslexia and reading problems and is now a leading advocate against Reading Recovery, was a former teacher in GCPS. My district has now dropped the Reading Recovery program and has embraced the science of reading curriculum. 

I am not naïve or trying to oversimplify the solution that the teaching of phonics will solve student literacy or that we should spend all of our time on phonics instruction. We know that poverty plays a HUGE role in literacy. Yet, these reading issues were showing up just as much in upper-class, white districts, but students were able to afford to pay for reading tutors who then explicitly taught phonics to address their deficiencies (Listen to episodes 11, 12, and 13 about Steubenville and how the Success for All program transformed this high poverty district's entire school environment into becoming one of the top-scoring reading programs in Ohio). As schools, we also need to greatly increase students' background knowledge of words so that their brains can make mental connections with words which they read and to give them plenty of level-appropriate, compelling material to read at an early age. However, we need to realize that we are not giving most students a chance if they cannot read words first.

Below is Eric's original post - if you have any comments related to Eric's post below, please post on his blog so that he can respond:

Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read? – A Podcast

I wanted to share one of the more impactful podcasts that I listened to recently: “Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?”

The podcast can be found on many podcast platforms, including: Apple, Spotify and many more; simply do a search wherever you listen to podcasts and you’ll most likely find it.

Here is the link to the website, which includes the transcript, graphs, and pictures:
“Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?”

Although the podcast does not directly address L2 language acquisition and reading, I feel that it has implications for world language education.

Here are some takeaways from the podcast, which ultimately highlights how ineffective reading instruction (in the L1) affects student literacy in the U.S.

• Many American schools use ineffective reading instruction that hinders literacy development.
• According to decades of research, phonics-based instruction is crucial for teaching reading.
• Popular cueing systems, which encourage guessing words, lack scientific backing.
• Explicit teaching of sound-letter relationships is needed, because reading is not a natural process.
• Teacher preparation programs often neglect evidence-based reading strategies.
• Resistance to phonics stems from entrenched beliefs in the educational system & insufficient training.
• Scientific approaches benefit both native and additional language learners.
• Efforts are growing to realign reading instruction with cognitive science findings.

As I stated earlier, this was an impactful podcast for me. Not only because I see the reading struggles in my own classroom, but also because I want to know what the implications are for world language education.

In short, I have questions:

• What are the overall implications for world language education, especially reading and acquisition?
• If students struggle to read in their L1, how does it (specifically) affect their L2 literacy and acquisition?
• Will reading in their L2 help with literacy in their L1?
• Important: If reading is not an innate skill and explicit teaching of sound-letter connections is necessary, does this imply that we also need to explicitly teach reading/phonics in the L2?
• What implications does this have for FVR/SSR? If students struggle to read in their L1, what are they getting out of FVR/SSR?
• How does this information change/shape future world language teacher preparation and training?
  • Will there be resistance to any changes?

I had the chance to bounce some of my questions off language educators. (Our conversations have been great!) Now I would like to invite you to listen to the podcast and share your thoughts!

Please share any thoughts, feelings, experiences, and/or expertise that you have relating to this and world language education!

And if you can help answer any of my questions, it would be much appreciated!

I look forward to the conversation!

Interpretive Reading Comprehension Rubric

Recently in my Latin 1 classes, I gave them a sight reading comprehension assessment and graded it using a proficiency-based rubric created by Martina Bex and the Comprehensible Classroom. Because Martina's interpretive rubrics are on TPT(they are free!), I will only post a link here to her blog page which discusses how she uses them - her blog post has the actual link to that TPT page. 

I already have a blog post from a few years ago written about my experience doing a sight reading comprehension assessment, so I will share that here. However, let me sum up/recap what I did and the whys:

I gave students a short level-appropriate passage which they had never seen before but primarily used vocabulary which we had been targeting. This way then the reading was at least already 95% comprehensible (that is key!). Also, the sentence structures/patterns needed to reflect what they had seen - now was not the time to spring on them a different writing style since that was not what I was assessing! I only used a few words which needed to be glossed and did not overdo it (if a passage has too many glossed words, then it is not really readable/comprehensible since that disrupts reading flow). Why did I create a sight passage?

• It needed to be a sight passage of primarily known vocabulary, because this way I could tell if they had acquired these target words and could understand them in a new context.
• It also needed to be a sight passage of primarily known vocabulary in order to assess their reading comprehension skills. If I were to use an already-seen/known passage, that would not give me a true understanding of their proficiency, i.e., many students could fake their proficiency skills, because they already knew the passage ahead of time and could just answer from memory without ever reading the passage on the assessment.

For the record, I had ChatGPT create a framework of a story using the prompt, "Create a short story in 4th grade Latin using the words ___________________________. Repeat these words as much as possible. Do you understand?" Once ChatGPT created the story, I heavily edited it to fit my needs.

The rubric does address various depth of knowledge (DOK) reading comprehension questions, such as basic information, finer details about the plot, and inferring about the conclusion. As a result, the sight passage needed to have a basic plot but with underlying details to address, and a conclusion where an inference could be made about characters' motivation, choices, etc. All of the questions and answers were in English (see Martina Bex's blog post why reading comprehension should be addressed in English). 

I hope you will consider creating a sight-reading assessment and using the proficiency-based interpretive rubrics by Martina Bex!