A second grade teacher gathers students around a table for a reading lesson. The topic: hurricanes. The teacher攍et call her Ms. Jones攂egins by asking students the word for 渉urricane� in the languages they speak at home. She points out similarities between Spanish 丑耻谤补肠谩苍 and Haitian Creole 蝉颈办濒貌苍 and the English words 渉urricane� and 渃yclone.� Students share what they know about hurricanes from previous classroom reading and from their own lives.
Ms. Jones then distributes copies of the book What Are Hurricanes? She explains that this book includes many words攊ncluding 渉urricane潝that contain r-controlled vowels (vowels followed by the letter 渞,� creating a new sound).
She then distributes phonics cards and small whiteboards, asking students to practice writing words in the story with this letter pattern (storm, form, shore, far, hard). As students then take turns reading aloud, they pause to ask questions and to write down their thoughts on sticky notes (e.g., It looks like it will rain, but is it a hurricane?).
Ms. Jones multifaceted lesson is a master class in teaching early literacy, says Faythe Beauchemin, an assistant professor at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development.
淲hen children are learning to read, they should have it all.� Beauchemin says. 淭hey should be given effective and engaging opportunities to figure out the ways that words work, to develop their independence as readers, and they should know攔ight from the beginning攖hat they檙e reading for understanding.� She adds, 渓earning how to read should be set within meaningful, real-world contexts that allow children to feel powerful about their ways of using language.�
In the last decade, nearly every state in the United States has passed laws requiring school districts to adopt new reading curricula. Much of this legislation, Beauchemin says, overlooks the complexity of the reading process攑rimarily focusing on phonics in early literacy instruction while overlooking comprehension, vocabulary, and oral language development.
Assistant Professor Faythe Beauchemin
It also fails, she says, to consider the learning profiles of multilingual and immigrant students. Consequently, few elementary school teachers have the tools they need to provide the kind of multidimensional instruction Ms. Jones offers to her beginning readers.
淲e need to support teachers better,� Beauchemin says, and she working to do just that. Two of her latest projects攐ne that addresses the needs of multilingual readers and another that focuses on teaching early reading through the topic of climate change攁re aimed at creating instructional approaches and resources teachers can use to augment their curriculum and improve reading instruction.聽
Transforming instruction to support multilingual learners
Beauchemin and her colleague Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, professor of bilingual education at Brooklyn College, recently received funding from the Spencer Foundation to study how teachers can adapt reading instruction in today classrooms, which are increasingly linguistically diverse. Their project is based on a key principle, says Beauchemin: 淗ow we teach is determined by who we teach.�
In the United States, literacy curricula are designed to teach students to read and write in standardized English, but U.S. classrooms often include children who speak other languages and dialects at home, which significantly shapes the way they learn to read. Foundational reading curricula used in most school districts today overlook this reality, Beauchemin says, and teachers are struggling to handle the mismatch.
Frances Ahearn �98 teaching third grade Photo: Caitlin Cunningham
Beauchemin and Ascenzi-Moreno work will begin this fall, when they establish a research collective that will include teachers, literacy coaches, and principals from two settings: a Massachusetts elementary school where 76 percent of students are multilingual and a dual-language school in New York where 98 percent of students speak Spanish. The collective will meet virtually on a regular basis to discuss ways to support multilingual learners based on research they檝e done, articles they檝e read, and their own classroom experiences. Beauchemin and Ascenzi-Moreno will also observe the participating teachers in their classrooms.
At the end of the project, Beauchemin and Ascenzi-Moreno will translate what they檝e learned into widely accessible resources, such as open-access articles, a website, and TikTok and YouTube videos, so that teachers with linguistically diverse classrooms can look for ideas to implement in their own teaching. Based on their work with teachers in the research collective, they will also develop a new theory of change to best teach reading to multilingual students in today reading policy context.
淲hen children are learning to read, they should have it all. They should be given effective and engaging opportunities to figure out the ways that words work, to develop their independence as readers, and they should know攔ight from the beginning攖hat they檙e reading for understanding.�
擜ssistant Professor Faythe Beauchemin
What types of adaptations might they share? While the study is just beginning, Beauchemin previous research points to several possibilities. She has seen teachers make meaningful changes to their foundational reading lessons such as connecting words to their meanings through gestures, pictures, and objects students can touch and hold. She also watched teachers (like Ms. Jones) translate words and help students recognize cognates攚ords in different languages that are similar because they share common origins.聽
In addition, Beauchemin encourages the future teachers she educates to create 渓anguage files� with information about how a student home language differs from English in pronunciation, sentence structure, and other ways. Being aware of these differences helps a teacher recognize when a student English 渕istake� is a reflection of what the child already knows about how letters and words work in another language.
Beauchemin looks forward to gathering more ideas from her research collective and disseminating them to teachers across the country. 淲e want to empower teachers to act upon their commitments to children in their classrooms, particularly to multilingual and immigrant students whose language and literacy practices have too often been overlooked.�
Teaching reading through compelling, real-world topics
In another study, funded by Boston College Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, Beauchemin worked alongside first and second grade teachers to design reading instruction based on the real-world topic of climate change.
淩eading and writing shouldn檛 be taught in a vacuum,� Beauchemin says. 淚 always advocate for teaching early literacy within compelling interdisciplinary topics, like climate change, so that kids are reading and writing for a meaningful purpose.�
Students in the study read and discussed books about climate change and climate advocacy with their classmates. They wrote letters to their principal, asking permission to create an indoor hydroponic garden. After reading their principal approval letter together in class, they planted and grew their own healthy snacks. They wrote opinion pieces to teach peers in a neighboring classroom about the effects of climate change on animals.
Through these activities, the children developed a strong knowledge base about climate change, increased their listening and reading comprehension, and learned specialized vocabulary攚ords like 渁tmosphere,� 渃arbon,� and 減hytoplankton潝that they frequently used in classroom discussions.
淭his study provides evidence of the importance of anchoring early reading in meaning-making,� Beauchemin says. 淚t is crucial for all students as well as multilingual students who are learning an additional language.�
One of the reasons the climate lessons were so effective, says Brenda Luo, a doctoral student at Boston College who was part of Beauchemin research team, was that students found them compelling. 淭here was so much engagement and talk with the climate change work,� she says. 淭he students were just so excited to share what they were learning and how it connected to experiences they檝e had in their own lives.�
Curating climate books for teachers
During the study, Beauchemin noticed that while many children books on climate change exist, it hard for teachers to find them. So, with funding from the American Library Association, she spearheaded the creation of , a website that curates children books about climate change and helps teachers choose age-appropriate books for their teaching.
Luo helped create the website and says the design team worked hard to make the site 渢eacher centered.� Teachers can filter for books based on genre, instructional format (read-aloud, independent read, etc.), grade level, language, location, and a range of topics that appeal to students, including tsunamis, wildfires, sea turtles, recycling, solar power, and actions kids can take. The entry for each book also notes how the text relates to the topic of climate change, and many offer pictures and descriptions of the real-world events depicted in the books.
Beauchemin team recently launched social media pages to complement the website. She hopes these digital resources will help teachers develop engaging, interdisciplinary contexts for children as they learn to read and write.聽鈼�
FAST FACTS
One in five school-age children in the United States speaks a language other than English at home. The most common is Spanish, which more than 8 million U.S. children speak at home.
Source: United States Census Bureau
California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York require climate change instruction for students as early as first grade.
Sources: National Center for Science Education, E&E News/Politico, North American Association for Environment Education, New Jersey State Environmental Education Directory