**LANGUAGE**

Unidentified Speaker: Hi, we\'re going to begin now. First of all, just
a couple of quick announcements -- somebody asked about the age span and
how we are defining \"adolescent\" for adolescent literacy -- basically,
middle and high school. And I have to say when it comes to research, I
will say, \"You tell me what group you\'re studying and how it applies
to adolescent.\" But think middle and high school. The other question
was about the video -- the videotape, as I understand it, will be posted
in some manner -- will be posted on the NIFL, National Institute for
Literacy, website sometime in the near future, and that\'s
[www.nifl.gov](http://www.nifl.gov/) -- g-o-v. And I\'m going to turn
it, now that\'s I got your attention and got you quiet, I\'m going to
turn it over to Diane Paul-Brown from ASHA.

Diane Paul-Brown: Good morning, everybody. I am Diane Paul-Brown from
the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and I\'m director of
clinical issues in speech language pathology. ASHA is very proud to be a
co-sponsor of these adolescent literacy workshops. We strongly support
the joint effort to identify research gaps and plan a future research
and practice agenda.

The second reading model, language, is entitled as well as based on
language as the foundation of reading and writing. This comprehensive
systematic curriculum is research-based, applicable across settings and
grades, and the curriculum covers fundamental reading and language arts
strands in sequential steps. To talk about language today is Nancy
Eberhardt from Sopris West Educational Services. She\'ll provide the
overview of the model -- in 15 minutes or less -- not less -- and our
panelists are David Francis from the University of Houston, Wendy
Ranck-Buhr from San Diego City Schools, Jacqueline Bourassa from Rhode
Island State Department of Education. Go ahead, Nancy.

Nancy Eberhardt: Thank you, Diane, am I on here? Can you hear? I\'m not
going to use this mike. Thank you, I\'m humbled to be a part of this as
Kathy, I\'m sure, felt, to try to cover this in 15 minutes, but I\'m
going to move right into this and say that language, as the introduction
suggested, is a comprehensive literacy curriculum. As such, it covers
reading, writing, spelling, and the spoken part of our language, and
that\'s very important, because we\'re going to try to move forward all
aspects of literacy in a sort of simultaneous fashion.

I\'m going to try, in the next 15 minutes, to cover some of the basic
program practices. I\'m going to talk about how and where it\'s
implemented, some of the evaluation data, and, finally, some of our
thoughts about the potential future research. So let me begin by talking
about the overview of practices.

I think our goal is best summarized as saying, with the language
curriculum, that we want to move students who, despite their age, need
to move from literacy; that is, learning the fundamentals of being
literate, to being able to use it for literature or any other
application in real life in the classroom or outside the classroom.

It very much follows the developmental progression as outlined by Jean
Schall \[sp\], where we basically, with the adolescent population that
we\'re talking about, should be, by virtue of age and grade at the
reading-to-learn stage, but language is trying to deal with the fact
that despite that the students really are at those earlier decoding
stages. So how are we going to do that?

With this curriculum, we have -- and I should give credit where credit
is -- Dr. Jane Fell Greene had the idea that for this age population, it
was necessary to weave 18 strands of our language together at the same
time -- that if we just focus on those pertaining to reading or writing
separately would not work. So language is comprised of 18 strands, some
of them more familiar, such as phonology or text reading, but also
language covers strands such as figurative language -- we get into
talking about idioms early in the curriculum, even with words like
\"bat.\" They\'re simple words. On \"bat\" we can do that in Unit 1. And
we also deal with issues around syntax; that is, getting into the impact
that the order of words can make.

Each of these strands has behind it, if you will, a comprehensive scope
and sequence. Two of them that I\'d like to talk about for a second is
phonology, the other test reading. With phonology, and I know this is
very tiny, but just to give you an image of what we\'re doing here -- in
Level 1 we lay down the article principle establishing sound symbols.
The middle level, Level 2, focuses on the various syllable patterns, and
by Level 3, we\'re dealing with the less frequent but critically
important phonogram patterns, particularly for spelling. And while they
seem less important, they do have an impact, particularly on spelling.

In addition to laying down that decoding level, language is very
interested in moving the application of that into decodable connected
text. So for every unit within the 54 units of the curriculum, what we
have is a decodable reader that allows for practice. But one of the
things that we also have tried to do with this curriculum that we think
speaks to the need to make available additional reading material for
students is we have correlated all of the units using the DRP, degrees
of reading power readability formula, to allow us to move beyond the
decodable text to 17,500 titles by using a piece of software called
\"Booklink.\"

So, for example, if you look at Unit 13, which is rated DRP 41, what we
can do is find 188 books that are at that same readability level so we
can control for the difficulty level and move the students out into a
wide range of reading.

As you probably already concluded, language is set up on levels. They
are not at all related to grade level but rather to a body of
information about the structure of our language. A way to think about
the scope of this curriculum is that from the beginning of Level 1,
students are reading material that is about a first-grade level. By the
time we finish Level 3, we\'ve moved students at an instructional level
to a ninth-grade level. So if we work a year-per-year -- a year-end
level for a year in the curriculum, if that makes sense, we, in essence,
can cover a tremendous span of reading and writing and spelling in the
course of three years. Some students\' pacing, obviously, would need to
be different, and we can come back to that point in a minute.

Within the curriculum we have guides for the teachers to follow. The
left-hand side of every guide sets out the content; that is, what we\'re
going to try to teach the students. The left-hand \-- excuse me \-- the
right-hand side of the curriculum guide explains how to do that, and the
instructional activities that I listed there focus in on instructional
practices that we have selected, designed that we think are appropriate
for the age group that we\'re talking about. In addition to the fact
that we want them to be very conceptually driven, we know by this age
that the students are more capable of doing conceptual thinking and
organizing information \-- we use that. We use multi-sensory or,
particularly, the idea of moving and doing things to learn, because that
tends to keep our students more engaged; and, third, a critical variable
is that we emphasize the use of mastery learning.

Every curriculum guide provides instructional content. Of particular
significance here is keeping the vocabulary controlled according to what
we know the students can read and spell as we apply it to other
materials or other strands. An important piece of the guides is the use
of fluency builders so that we address head-on the idea of automaticity
and, very important in the curriculum is this component where we work on
tasks for mastery \-- this is the teacher\'s version of it. Students
have a comparable piece, or a corresponding piece, and this is important
for two reasons \-- from the teacher\'s point of view, this informs
instructions. From the student\'s point of view, we think that this is
what begins to turn the outlook on the student\'s ability to read
around, because students \-- each task is relatively small, looking at a
small amount of learning that they\'re being asked to do, and when they
see that their performance is improving, that tends to feed a
willingness to learn the next installment.

There is an assessment piece that runs throughout the curriculum at
every stage, placement, ongoing, and summative. The placement we feel is
critical in that it says we want to know what the students know, not
what we think they should know. So we start with where they are
functioning, not making an assumption because of their grade.

Formative is that mastery task piece that I just mentioned, critical to
the program, and the summative component moves the assessment to a
slightly higher level, where we ask the students to do more integration
and application of what they are learning, and the testing is done in a
standardized test format, and most of that is done in a multiple-choice
format.

As important as the content is in the curriculum, is the sequence of
steps that are the instructional underpinning of the curriculum. We go
from teaching the concept to \-- particularly in Level 1 \-- teaching
phonemic awareness so that we\'re \-- show students are tuning into the
sounds of the language, assigning the letter that goes with that,
immediately using the letter-sound associations to compose words to read
and spell. Immediately, at that point, going to the meaning behind the
words. We get into multiple meanings, idiomatic meanings, figurative use
of the language, and then we deal with connected text in several
different ways. We certainly think of connected text as being reading
connect text as in stories and beyond, but we also view connected text
as what the student is also producing. And then the English language
arts are some of the conventions that underlie that written language
that we have.

That sequence is what is the underpinning of the lesson sequence that we
use, and this is a min-version that I\'m sure you can\'t read, but trust
me when I say that the boxes across the top are those same steps. So
every lesson that students \-- that teachers are teaching every day
touch across each of those particular steps so that we\'re always
building in that very cumulative way and is very much a recycling
process of those steps.

Now, the strands are important, but if we kept the strands \-- separate
strands that the tapestry does not make \-- the richness of our
language. So one of the other strengths, we think, of the curriculum
structure is that we read those strands. So, for example, using the
words the students can read and spell, I can take that strand of
grammar, and we do, and we then apply it to do a number of things. We
can sort the words grammatically that we can read and spell, into nouns
and verbs. And you can see the application there to the point where we
then take those nouns and verbs that we know they can read and spell and
help them to build sentences \-- always building on what they know.

When we\'re doing that, we think that we strengthen the understanding of
the individual strands but, overall, our goal is to build this tapestry
of interrelated parts, and by its very structure, then, is helping us to
help students integrate and apply these skills and the content.

So how and where are we using language? Well, we use it predominantly
with three populations. This is the population that Dr. Greene had in
mind. They share a need for knowledge of the structure and function of
English. We are, indeed, all over the United States and what I\'d like
\-- and we do this through the use of professional development. It\'s a
continuum menu of options of five-days trainings through follow-up
coaching. The evaluation data that I\'d like to go through very quickly
\-- and I\'d like to say that at the end I have a slide that shows you
where you can contact folks to get the details on this \-- I\'d like to
touch upon a few of these quickly.

The first study that was done using the curriculum was published in 1996
but was actually done the first year the curriculum was designed with
adjudicated use. The results of that study showed that the \-- on the
grade oral reading test, both the comparison group and the language
group made significant growth, but the language group, which is the
bottom line, made 13 points growth versus 4.5-point growth that the
comparison group did. The reading gains in reading \-- the gains in
reading and spelling after 23 weeks of instruction in all areas, as you
can see, went up. I won\'t go through the particular details; we don\'t
have time.

Los Angeles County, which is taking this small-scale work that Jane did
with 45 students and bumping it up to 248 students, shared that
adjudicated use group but also expanded to others, as you can see. The
instructional configurations varied, but after 51 hours of instruction,
on average, what we saw and if you look at the second from the right
bar, the overall is 51 hours of instruction, seven months of growth was
achieved in contrast to the traditional instruction, which was at four
months\' growth.

On the Woodcock-Johnson, the same population, the Woodcock-Johnson Word
Attack, we see that there was 2.3 months\' growth for each month in
school which, if our goal is to accelerate the learning, we have to be
growing at better than a year-for-year or month-for-month. Disciplinary
referrals \-- this is another angle. From Alabama we can see that if you
follow the principle that you have to have the kids in school or in
class to be able to teach them, we need to keep them out of the
disciplinary or suspension mode, so you can see a drop from pre-language
to post-language. It was considerable for referrals \-- disciplinary
referrals in a similar kind of change for out-of-school suspension.

In Sacramento, this is another place where we were adopted for
implementation, where you heard some of the background on this community
earlier this morning. We had 550 students in two middle schools and high
school. Again, noting the diversity of the population, with 90 minutes a
day of language instruction, we saw gains across the board in
letter/word identification after one year of the curriculum. We saw
similar gains in three of the four grade levels for Word Attack, and we
saw also gains while still is at a lower level than we want, we see
gains in reading comprehension as well.

San Diego school system \-- in 1999-2000, we have a study that showed
over 1,300 students from 21 districts were part of a study, and to show
you the results here, which I think is what we\'re striving to do, is we
are seeing a reduction in the number of students in the under-20
percentile group and an increase from 6% to 20% in this over-30 segment.
That\'s the direction that we continue to hope to see.

The other indexes used in California \-- the Academic Performance Index
\-- which is a formula that they use to see how kids are learning and
still they\'re performing \-- in this same group of 1,300 students what
we saw is instead of a 21-point change from 376 to 397, which was what
was expected, they saw a jump to 455, which was, actually, instead of
21, a 79-point jump, which was significant in that it quadrupled the
expected performance.

In El Sol \[sp\], California, you\'ll notice a lot of application in
California because we, too, have been adopted as an intervention
curriculum there. Again, dealing with a diverse population, many of whom
are free and reduced lunch \-- of 345 students, we saw \-- they saw \--
and we benefit from \-- change in the Gray Oral Reading in both the
populations of seventh and eighth grades as well as ninth grades, and on
a group-administered test, I think important here to note is that when
we just aggregate the data and look at the ethnic groups, looking over
in the far-right column where the growth factor is \-- across the board
we\'re seeing growth \-- anything above zero suggests we\'re going at
better than the year-for-year school, and that\'s, again, one of our
major goals.

El Rancho High School \-- just had a chance to be there last week, and
\-- a school of almost 3,000 students, 95% of the population in the
community is Hispanic. You can read the other demographic details \--
they come in rated as the second-to-the-bottom API group in the state.
They had been using language with the ninth graders and what we\'re
seeing here is the growth in language and if you look at the entire
language group, you can see that it\'s about a 10-point jump in that
period of time. Reading, unfortunately, and this is something \-- one of
our questions \-- why not \-- did not replicate the same kind of growth,
and we\'re wondering why. We\'ll try to find out, but they, too, did a
comparison in terms now of \-- on the high school exit exam, and this
is, I think, a very important piece of information in the state of
California \-- what they saw was their ninth graders who took it last
year in preparation to take it as tenth graders, they had 55% of those
students passing the high school exit exam as compared to a comparable
group only had 32%. So, needless to say, they were proud \-- we\'re
proud for them, too.

O\'Leary Junior High School in Twin Falls, Idaho \-- moving to a
slightly different part of the country, only slightly, though \-- is the
30% free and reduced lunch, again, reading the demographics of the group
\-- 85 minutes of instruction. In four months of work using the Starr
\[sp\] Diagnostic Test, the red line would say that\'s the four-month
mark, that would be the sort of expected one month in school, one-month
progress. The language group exceeded that whereas the non-language \--
and, by the way, the non-language were parents who chose not to have
their students participate, so this was a real control group. They were
recommended for the instruction, and they chose not to \-- they did not
fare quite as well.

And Carroll \[sp\] Middle School, last but not least, of the 10 examples
here, is another school in which the vast majority of students are from
in free and reduced lunch programs. Of the over 800 students, 600 of
them were functioning below the 30th percentile and, again, on the
Academic Performance Index, which is a way for us to assess this, we\'ve
seen that in the first year they exceeded their expected growth by six
points, and they \-- by 13 points, the second year. So they\'re very
proud of that, and so are the students.

Future directions and research \-- we have a collection of them in terms
of implementation of the model ranging from instructional configuration
to optimal implementation models and what seems as \-- with whom this
works best. The effects of instruction \-- we\'re looking at the impact
of the language on the different components of the reading process; to
what extent does language generalize beyond the language classroom to
the mainstream education and beyond outside the classroom. We also are
looking at the question of does it sustain itself over time and,
finally, on this particular area, which of the various components
contribute most to the growth of the student.

> And last, but not least, teacher preparation \-- as one of the
> language trainers, this is part near and dear to my heart, and that is
> what training model brings the best results, the best implementation,
> and the best gains for our students.

Thank you.

\[applause\]

Diane Paul-Brown: Thank you very much, Nancy, and now we\'ll have our
panelists. OK, David Francis first.

David Francis: Thank you, and thank you for the presentation. We
received several papers, but there was actually more data presented here
today than we actually saw in the papers. So I\'m going to talk, but I
think, based on what I could gather from what was shown, actually, I
think a lot of the same comments will apply.

First, I want to start out by saying there are a number of compelling
features about this program that I think it\'s important to highlight
and, in particular, I would start with the fact that there\'s this
strong overall emphasis on language, and I think all of us who are
working in the area in early reading \-- my work is in early reading and
not so much in adolescent reading \-- who are working in early reading
feel that the need to introduce more language development and language
instruction for children right from the very start, and the fact that
this is an integrated component of this program and that it applies
throughout all grades \-- from grade one on up through grade 12 \-- is
really critical.

Another strength is the emphasis on writing and the integration of
writing activities with reading activities and literacy, in general.
That\'s a very strong component. One of the things that we notice when
we look at \-- I\'ll call it \"anecdotal evidence,\" because it\'s based
on summary statistics from districts around the country. If you look
sort of at student standardized test performance, those places that
emphasize writing in their literacy curriculum have higher reading
outcomes, and so this strong connection between reading and writing, I
think, is an important one. And the fact that this program is based on
building connections between reading, writing, and speaking is a
strength.

The integration \-- the attempt to integrate across these 18 different
strands of language, and to do this at multiple levels of instruction is
also very compelling, and the fact that assessments are used as a part
of the program both for placing students in the program and for
evaluating their progress through the program are, again, all very
compelling features.

And the fact that when you look at the levels or you look at the
activities that go on within each level, there is an emphasis that
includes skills as well as development of those skills and application
of those skills and the incorporation of sort of higher-level components
of comprehension and working with language; then using language to
understand text.

And then, finally, I would comment on the fact that the program itself
provides many opportunities to practice with materials that are
appropriate for the student in terms of the level at which the student
is currently at, and there is not a necessity that that level of
practice is the same across all 18 strands. And so a student may be at
one level in one strand, and then a quite higher level in another
strand, and the opportunities that they\'re getting in each strand are
actually appropriate to their level of performance in that strand.

I would have liked to have seen \-- and this is just a general comment
\-- a little bit more in the papers about how this actually gets carried
out at the classroom level, because there\'s discussion that this is a
classroom model, but then there is also mention that it\'s appropriate
for students scoring below the 30th percentile, and it\'s not clear \--
there\'s not really articulated in the paper exactly how this is
accomplished, and I know that one of the things that we encounter most
in our early reading studies, where there is substantially less
heterogeneity in student performance than in middle school is getting
teachers to group students for instruction and the complexity of getting
teachers to be able to do that well.

But given these strengths, I still think that there are \-- and I think
there are some concerns or questions that arise from the research, and,
in particular, I would summarize the evidence currently on the
effectiveness and the efficacy of this program as being weak in that
although there is some evidence to suggest that this program is
successful, when you look at the studies, it is hard to infer
unambiguously that the effects that you\'re seeing are due to the
program and not potentially other factors. And so while there\'s
evidence that we would want to move forward and investigate this
program, I think there are some concerns about the research itself and
things that could be addressed potentially.

I commented on the appropriateness and the usefulness of the assessments
and the fact that there are assessments incorporated into this program,
however, we don\'t find, in the materials that were submitted to us, any
evidence about the reliability and the validity of those assessments and
the success of the decisions that are made on the basis of those
assessments and, obviously, one of the things that you\'re doing is
using mastery on an assessment to determine whether or not the student
should go to the next level, knowledge about the validity and the
reliability of those mastery assessments would be important. Similarly,
knowledge of the liability and validity of the placement assessments
would be helpful for the instructor.

I commented that when we look at the studies that \-- I use the word \--
I describe them as \"weak.\" In the sense \-- what I would like to see
here is an \-- I think there are opportunities to engage and randomize
experiments that are not being taken advantage of. And I am not naïve, I
know how hard it is to do research in the schools; I know it is even
more difficult to do randomized experiments in schools, but one of the
components of this particular program, and I think it\'s also true of
corrective reading, and it\'s true of other whole-school models, is the
extensiveness of the professional development that needs to go on in
order to implement these programs well, and the lack of capacity that we
have within the profession to actually provide that professional
development to teachers for entire school districts at a fell swoop in a
given year. This creates the opportunity to roll out a program
systematically in a district in a way that actually controls who gets it
at what time. So by using random assignment of schools to the program in
a particular year, you can roll out the treatment, you roll out the
intervention program over a period of years, and actually have some
systematic data to look at in terms of the effectiveness of the program.
That\'s much better than trying to look at the effects by comparing
cohorts of children from one year to the next, and I\'ll talk a little
bit about that.

Before I do, though, I want to comment, too, that if we look at the \--
where the \-- this is also an issue about why I characterize the effects
as somewhat weak at this time is that although the program encompasses a
large number of activities that attempt to get at higher-level thinking
skills and application skills in literacy, the focus on the outcomes has
been much more at the skill level \-- and I don\'t know if that\'s
because that\'s where the effects are or if there weren\'t good
assessments of higher-level applications \-- but one of the things that
would be nice to see is what is the effect on higher-level comprehension
skills and higher-level working skills with literacy activities.

One opportunity that I think exists to do this potentially with existing
work is to compare how students do on the mastery assessments to look at
where students start out in the program and the level of mastery that
they achieve through the program, and then compare that to the gains
that they make on standardized test performance. We don\'t see those
connections, and I think there are data here that could be used to sort
of exploit these relationships.

I think, as John pointed out earlier this morning, we need to know a lot
more about the controls \-- about the control conditions. We need to
know a lot more about implementation and how implementation took place.
As we \-- the experience that I have in working with other programs is
that differences between programs are small, on average, and variability
within programs is large in terms of differences among students within a
given teacher\'s implementation and differences between teachers trying
to implement the same thing. And just looking at the averages at the end
of the year, we don\'t get any of the information. We really need to
look beyond classroom-level averages or even school-level averages.

Since I\'m running out of time, I want to jump to a comment about using
cohorts to make comparisons, and one of the things that we find in a
large percentage of the literature looking at effectiveness of school
models is comparisons of performance in the same grade from one year to
the next. How did the ninth graders do in 1999, and how did they do in
2000, and how did they do in 2001? The problem is that these are
different children. We really want to see how is the intervention
working for the individual children that are getting exposed to it.
Because the nature of the cohort changes from one year to the next, when
you compare the 1999 cohort to the 2000 cohort, there are other things
that differentiate those cohorts. It\'s not the case that there\'s
nothing going on in first through eighth grade or first through fifth
grade. So when you compare the sixth graders in one year to the sixth
grades in the next year, those students didn\'t have the same grade-one
to grade-five experience.

But the other thing that we can\'t do \-- there are certain kinds of
effects that we expect these programs to have that we can\'t actually
see when we look cohort-to-cohort, and, in particular, we heard earlier
this morning about the effects of a program on student self-efficacy for
reading and how that then leads to more reading. Well, unless you\'re
looking at gains made by individual students, you can\'t see those
relationships.

So I think I\'ll stop at that point. I have a few other comments, but I
think I\'ll stop and let Wendy take over.

Wendy Ranck-Buhr: Good morning. As I was reading through the various
studies that we had regarding the language program, there were
definitely some positive things that I would point out. One is the
support for teachers in this program. There are a lot of details for
teachers, which I think is important when we think about the knowledge
and skill that secondary teachers, as a general rule, bring to the
classroom in the area of teaching students how to read. However, a
caution about that is how do we begin to balance \-- or maybe it\'s a
question \-- how do we begin to balance something that is more
prescriptive and so detailed with teachers\' professional judgment so
that we don\'t further compound that problem of the intrinsic and
extrinsic motivation of students that John mentioned earlier this
morning?

I also applaud the efforts of the language program to expand their
reading options for students beyond just the decodable text with 17,000
titles using the degrees of reading power \-- however, a giant word of
caution in this regard for adolescent readers \-- I have a lot of
concerns in this area that leveled text coming from an elementary
perspective being used with adolescent readers may or may not be
appropriate in the same manner, and although I absolutely do not
disagree with the fact that every student needs to be in books that they
can read and as often as we can get them there, I have seen leveled text
used \-- misused \-- in so many different ways in high school classrooms
and middle school classrooms, that I think when we have programs, such
as language, that promote that, we have to be very careful that we
provide staff development for teachers and site administrators and
district-level administrators on appropriate uses of leveled text and I
think further research in that regard would definitely be beneficial.

Additionally, I think that the language program made some attempt at
getting a more complete picture of a reader via their summative and
formative assessments, but, again, with \-- I have some concerns about
limited data sources that are used in the models that we\'ve looked at
for student placement into these programs. A lot of them are using
standardized test data, which, for me, raises questions about time
issues for some students. If they\'re struggling with fluency, yes, they
ultimately do have to perform on standardized tests in many areas of
their life as adolescent readers, but are we matching them with the
needs appropriately by using only standardized assessments for
placement?

I think that leads to a larger research question that goes far beyond
the issue of the language program \-- how do we, as a group of
professionals interested in adolescent literacy, begin to create an
assessment structure from a systemic perspective not just for one
teacher in one classroom that captures the richness of the reading
process and also gives us a good picture of the myriad of growth
patterns that address readers present? I think at the heart of this
question becomes how good is good enough? And before I got up here to
speak, someone came up and said, \"How good is good enough,\" and we
started into this conversation about a problem we see often with
adolescent readers who are adequate decoders but more comprehenders, but
I think I\'m going to leave that one, maybe, to Jacqueline, in a little
bit.

Some of the questions that I had as I was looking through the research,
I would be very interested in seeing additional measures of growth to
determine the effectiveness of this program. Many of the assessments
that were used required very small amounts of reading of connected text
for students, and so that was a concern for me. I also was wondering
about the growth that was shown with some of these assessments \-- if
there was any carryover to other content areas.

I think with adolescent readers, particularly middle and high school,
where students go from class to class, if they\'re being supported in
effective ways by their English teacher when they go off to science and
social studies and math, they often don\'t have effective supports in
those classrooms, and so that is an area of concern I would want to look
and see how is what they\'re learning through the language program
carrying over into their other content areas.

The other thing that I didn\'t see enough in the papers that we were
given was more detail on the staff development that\'s connected to the
language program. We do use language in San Diego City Schools with our
special ed population, and I always have questions about staff
development because, as a general rule, as I started, secondary teachers
don\'t come with experience in teaching students how to read, and it
raises questions about the quality and quantity of the central training
that\'s mentioned within the program. Who is providing that training?
What are the knowledge and skills that they bring to bear on that that
allows them to answer questions that go beyond the scope of the
materials that are in front of them?

And, again, we have a capacity issue at secondary, at least in
California we do \-- maybe you don\'t in your state. But we have a
limited number of reading specialists at the secondary level, so when
you begin to look at trying to provide adequate support at the site
level, again, it goes to the issues of quality and quantity. In San
Diego City Schools we have a literacy coach in every school site K-12, a
literacy administrator in addition to that at every high school, but
those positions largely remain unfilled because teachers don\'t have the
knowledge and skills necessary to hold those positions. So, again, I
think that language is trying to address some of those issues, but it
becomes a capacity problem, particularly in the area of secondary
literacy.

And, finally, I was interested in knowing more about the knowledge and
skills of the teacher and the relationship to specific student
populations, which this program was showing some growth, again, on
certain measures. So those would be a few of the areas that I would be
interested in seeing further investigation.

\[applause\]

Jacqueline Bourassa: Good morning, I\'m Jackie Bourassa, and I represent
the American Federation of Teachers as well as the Rhode Island State
Department of Education. First of all, I\'d like to thank you for
inviting me to this important meeting. With 30 years of experience in a
school district, I feel that I bring the perspective of a practitioner,
and so as I raise my questions, many of which were raised by my esteemed
colleagues, I am sure you will see that my comments and questions are
not far off but many times articulated in another vernacular, so to
speak.

My comments and questions do come from the information that I was asked
to review, and I was happy to see that they mirror what\'s been outlined
as your future research. So let me begin.

In looking at the frequently asked questions sheet, it\'s stated that
all students with literacy delays can be placed in blended classes and
the expectation was that those blended class be about approximately 15
students for the efficiency of scheduling and teaching and learning and
funding, and I wondered if the blended classes \-- because it was never
clearly articulated to me \-- was made up of the students that you
articulated as the curriculum casualties, the English language learners,
and the students with learning disabilities. And given the goal as to
return these students to their regular classroom via accelerated
reading, how does the language model relate to the body of research on
cooperative learning and positive peer role models? And that was one of
the questions that really certainly stuck, in my mind, as being a
practitioner.

And, again, you articulated that it was first piloted during the 1994-95
school year with the adjudicated minority students. I can understand
that doing a follow-up study with a group \-- this group of students \--
might be problematic, however, has any work been done to research the
model\'s sustainability, and I think it\'s more to the point of what
David mentioned, is the demonstration of those sustained skills after
students have returned to their regular language arts classrooms, and
that seems to be a critical point for me, again, as a practitioner.

Another point that I would like to make is in the \-- and this actually
has to do with what Wendy mentioned as far as the professional
development and the six days of training \-- in light of the fact that
No Child Left Behind and gives quite an unprecedented amount of
attention to teacher quality and given the fact that we are looking at a
wide turnover, a large turnover, of teachers as they end to retired,
teacher content knowledge about reading and all its components, I think,
is a critical issue, and the Language First Alliance has articulately
described that for primary teachers, and it\'s my hope that something
comes in an articulation for adolescent learners comes from this
particular meeting.

But with respect for that, how does the six days of professional
development fill that content knowledge for teachers, and is there any
information that links this content knowledge to more effective teaching
and not just following the model\'s lesson plans? And somewhat related
to that is, given that part of my work in Rhode Island is in preparing
content area teachers, has there been any thought \-- and this is a plug
I\'m going to give to everyone today \-- has there been any thought in
developing a model that would meet the needs of adequate decoders who
are struggling comprehenders? Because in my work with college students
who are preparing to become content-area teachers, this is a huge issue,
and I don\'t think it\'s a huge issue that\'s just indigenous to Rhode
Island.

And how does \-- my last question, again, as a practitioner, how does
the language model fit into the standards-based environment that we are
facing in the schools today? Thank you.

\[applause\]

Diane Paul-Brown: Thanks to all our panelists and our speaker, and Nancy
would like to take a few moments to respond and then we\'ll open it up
for questions.

Nancy Eberhardt: I\'ve been feverishly writing as they\'ve been talking,
because so many of the points that have been raised to these questions
are ones that we covered while we were preparing to come here and, in
fact, when you start to look at your curriculum or the program with the
lens of how it\'s doing, it opens up some humbling questions for us. So
I think that \-- I thank you all for shedding that light.

There are a couple of things that I wanted to pick up on that, in the
speed of going through things, I did not mentioned, and I will, at some
point, talk with Dr. Francis more specifically, but some of the studies
that we showed at the speed we were going was unclear that there were
some that were cohort continued from year-to-year, and some that were
not. It\'s a very good observation/criticism of the way of presenting,
especially under such time.

A practical piece I wanted to speak to with regards to the DRP \--
utilization of DRP to find other reading material \-- one feature of the
software is that it organizes the titles by level \-- elementary,
middle, and high school \-- so, in fact, you can select that function,
and it helps to tailor that, to some degree. Our bigger problem with
that is that at the lower levels of reading material, there aren\'t a
lot of appropriate things, which is a recurring problem.

In response to that, the people who have put together Booklink are
continuing to build the repertoire of materials that are of high
interest, lower readability, because they know that the kids just need
that appropriate material, and we can\'t be putting infantile material
in front of adolescents and thinking it\'s OK. It\'s just not OK.

In terms of staff development, Wendy, I wanted to say that, again, in
the speed of time, we advocate very strongly the building of capacity at
the local level when we do our initial training for ongoing in-service.
To that end, we nurture developing local-area trainers as well as a
coaching model where there are teachers in the districts who go through
an additional training to become coaches. We are aware and, in fact,
very concerned about striking a balance in our training between
understanding how to use the materials, of which there are a lot, and
teaching the content that many of the secondary teachers have not
learned about the structure of the language \-- how do you get all that
in and have them walking and talking when they read the training at the
same time.

So we keep trying to find a practical balance and actually what we\'re
now doing is looking at how we can augment the content as in different
dimensions of the structure of our language so the teachers can go back
and learn that after the initial training when they\'re ready to absorb
a new piece, and that\'s a whole area that we are exploring now. We know
it needs to be done, we just can\'t do it all in that initial five-day
training.

Blended classrooms \-- in response to your question, just to put that
definition out there \-- the blending that\'s referred to that Jackie
was mentioning has to do with the blending of the different populations
who might find themselves in literacy trouble, and what we\'re talking
about here \-- grouping students according to their common learning need
as opposed to grouping them according to program line, such as putting
the second language learner, the English learner, the curriculum
casualty, and the special ed students, if they have a common learning
need as assessed by the placement process together. It speaks a little
bit to Dr. Francis\'s point about how can we group differently, how do
we organize schools differently, how do we rotate kids through groups,
et cetera, all of which we have tried to tackle within the training
model. It really does bump up to a larger issue that was mentioned
earlier today, which is the curriculum is only the beginning. The larger
systems to implement these things is really vital as well.

So thank you for letting me speak to those that I didn\'t get to and
hopefully that helped.

Diane Paul-Brown: We\'ll now open up the meeting to questions \-- if you
could please go to the microphone and state your name as well.

Gil Garcia: Gil Garcia \[sp\], U.S. Department of Education \-- now we
have Model B, the language model \-- earlier we had Model A. It\'s still
not clear to me who this population of adolescence is. The two models
seem to take an approach that, in my mind, at least, and in my immediate
experience with nephews and nieces who are in the adolescence age, when
I see them constantly on their cell phones; when I see them constantly
on the Internet; when I see them constantly using the computer; when
they tell me about their diaries online and their chat groups; when they
tell me about the games that they are into and the gaming scenarios that
they respond to; when they tell me about their cliques in school; their
groups and subgroups and micro-micro subgroups and what each does or
doesn\'t do; and when they talk to me sometimes in their coded language
or not-so-coded language \-- all in English \-- in some cases in
Spanish, in my case with my nephews and nieces \-- I look at them, and I
look at adolescents walking down the sidewalk, just this morning coming
to this hotel, and something doesn\'t mesh \-- the way that they
interact, what they are responding to, the stimuli that they are
creating and responding to in relation to these models. And it\'s not
just Model A and Model B, it just seems to be across the board what
we\'re expect them to do in the classroom, the almost screeching halt
that we expect them to experience every time that they walk on campus
and come into the classroom and, most especially, when they come into
the reading intervention model. Do you ever think about that?

\[applause\]

Nancy Eberhardt: Yes, I certainly do, and I think you\'re absolutely
right. I think you\'ve described the out-of-the-classroom use of
language and exchange and then the in-the-school Standard English that
we\'re trying to teach, and I think one of the things that is necessary
for dealing with the academic demands of the classroom and beyond. So
the short answer is yes. One of the things I think that this agenda
here, these two days, today and, for me, tomorrow as well, is to try to
understand how to make it relevant \-- as relevant as possible \-- for
the students that we\'re talking about, while still dealing with a set
of things they need to learn, a content that needs to be learned, that
may not be in sync with the kind of ongoing communication that our
adolescents do.

I\'m not sure if I\'m speaking to your question, but I think that, to
me, your question comes down to the relevant factor and what is this
discrepancy between the, if you will, on-the-street language and the
in-the-classroom language and how do we bridge that without moving the
motivation and interest for the students to do that?

Diane Paul-Brown: Barbara?

Nancy Eberhardt: I think somebody else would like to comment behind you.

Diane Paul-Brown: Oh, I\'m sorry.

David Francis: Gil, one of the things that I liked about the program in
terms of how it was described is just the opportunities for students to
engage in and use language in a lot of different forms and for the
teacher to provide input to that process. And so I thought that in terms
of this program for adolescents, because of its focus on communication
and language for communication and then literacy as a part of that
process, that it actually affords a lot of opportunities to do that kind
of thing, even though there is an emphasis on academic language, there
is a lot of opportunity for the students to interact and engage and to
express their ideas in writing. So I like that part of it.

Barbara Ehren: Barbara Ehren, University of Kansas Center for Research
and Learning \-- this really is a follow-up to this conversation, and I
guess not a criticism of the program because not every program can do
every thing, but I think the question we have to ask ourselves is what
is language? \[audio difficulties\] especially in terms of discourse
structures, et cetera, so that although this program is called language,
there probably are more aspects of language across the modalities of
listening, speaking, reading, and writing, that adolescents sorely need
to address for the number of different literacies that they have to
respond to in the real world.

Nancy Eberhardt: Yeah, I think that your point speaks to one of our
research questions that we have, and that is are there dimensions of our
language that we need to \-- based on additional knowledge that we\'re
gaining from this kind of a forum, that we need to address as well. I
think Jane Greene did not call it reading because it was more than
reading. She didn\'t call it writing, because it was more than writing,
but you are quite right, there are things that we know we can still \--
we can keep improving \-- we try to \-- each addition.

Jim Knight: Jim Knight, and I work the same place as Barbara. My main
work is professional development and do professional development to
introduce strategies in schools. We have a district-wide project that\'s
also replicated here in Baltimore in some of the schools. There seems to
be, I guess, a paradoxical kind of problem at the heart of this, and I
just wanted to throw it out and think about it over the day.

When you think about professionalism, Tom Skordik \[sp\] and other
people have talked about what distinguishes professionalism primarily is
the ability of the professional to make choices; to be decision-makers.
We go to a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher, if they\'re professionals,
because we want them to analyze a situation and use their discretion to
think through what they do. They\'re not working on an assembly line;
they\'re not people who are trained. They receive professional
development.

So choice is a critical issue in what a teacher does. At the same time,
in my experience doing professional developments across the country, I
find that a lot of teachers, particularly teachers who are teaching
reading who don\'t have a background in reading, really have a hard time
knowing how to do things like distinguish between a main idea, the
topic, and a detail, or other kinds of metacognitive things. They just
don\'t have the knowledge. Teaching \-- language arts teachers, I find a
lot of them really can\'t identify different sentence types and subjects
and verbs \-- what you would call \"core content knowledge.\" And I
think the power of scripted lessons is that they provide teachers with
the ability or lessons where you have the lesson plans all worked out,
where you give a lot of stuff ahead of time to teachers \-- as you give
teachers who don\'t have the knowledge of how to deal with it, how to
teach what needs to be taught. But when you do that, they are no longer
professionals. They\'re staff. They\'re getting staff development
because you\'re not allowing them choice. You\'re saying, \"This is the
way it\'s going to be taught,\" and there may be some degrees of choice
but fundamentally how they teach, they don\'t have a lot of choice \--
not like a professional.

So the question I ask is \-- are teachers professionals or not? And if
they\'re not, how do we deal with these things?

David Francis: Not being a teacher, I still want to address that
question, because you started out by saying that you work in
professional development, and teachers are professionals, and they are
in a developmental process. Some teachers are very far along in that
developmental process, some are very early on, and partly what you do
with professionals \-- when I get Ph.D. post-docs to come to work with
me to learn statistical analysis, they\'ve already had some training.
But their ability to use that is limited, and so I have to develop their
knowledge of that profession to make them better professionals; to make
them more informed professionals so that they can make their own
decisions and their own choices, and they can understand differences
between programs that ostensibly do the same thing. Now, this is just to
do a particular analysis not to try to teach individual students how to
read, where those students come in with very diverse backgrounds.

So \-- there is professional development that needs to happen for
teachers simply because they\'re at very different levels of knowledge
and understanding of the aspects of language and literacy that all
students need to be able to be successful. So I don\'t think it\'s
inconsistent to say that, in a particular school district, you\'re going
to implement a program at a particular point in time because that\'s
appropriate for you at that point in time with the ultimate goal being
that teachers do become independent decision-makers about what\'s best
for their particular students at a particular point in time.

\[applause\]

Nancy: I\'d like to speak to sort of the irony of your observation about
languages, while in that, the lesson plans that I showed you have just
been recently added after multiple years of the curriculum. And it was
not Dr. Greene\'s preference for years to have lesson plans. In fact, a
whole group of us took her down, kicking and screaming, last November
saying, \"This is what teachers keep telling us.\" So it is with some
regret that we went the route of having more of a prescription, but I
will say to you that if there is one single thing that we have done with
the curriculum and our continued effort to be responsive to what
teachers tell us in the staff development and implementation process,
these lesson plans have made people feel that they can now go do what
David was just saying a minute ago \-- that they now have a way of
trying to tackle this.

And it\'s interesting, that coming from the \-- best feedback for us has
come from teachers who were trained and have come back to a follow-up
and have now been given the lesson plans, and experienced teachers who
are wanting to make this curriculum work say, \"Now I have a jumping-off
point.\" So we\'ve avoided going down the path of scripting. We stopped
short of that by using the lesson plans to try to break out a unit of
study and to 10 days of lessons and set up a bit of a pacing for them
with the assurance that teachers should alter that according to their
understanding, the students\' understanding, and all those other
variables that would go on.

Your point is well taken. I consider teachers professional. I was not
sold on lesson plans initially, either, but given the response, I think
we\'ve made \-- at least, short term, a good decision.

Unidentified Speaker: \[off mike\]

Nancy Eberhardt: Yes, and it\'s one that we struggle with that balance.
We\'ve tried to find a sort of a helpful mid-point.

Wendy Ranck-Buhr: I wanted to comment on this conversation as well. I
think it goes to one of the first points that I brought up \-- this
balance of \-- because now we\'ve seen Model A and Model B, and both of
them are fairly prescriptive in nature, and I share the concern that we
lose the teacher voice when we go too far in that direction but that\'s
further compounded by the loss of the student voice when you go too far
in that direction.

\[applause\]

Diane Paul-Brown: Oh, I\'m sorry, if you could go to the mike, yes.

Marcia Sonnenberg: I\'ll go ahead, I\'ll go ahead. I\'m going to comment
on all of this, because we\'ve been involved in A or B \--

Diane Paul-Brown: \-- your name \--

Marsha Sonnenberg: \-- Marsha Sonnenberg from Fort Worth \-- for the
last four years. We started with three prescriptive things, and, like
you, we thought this was a problem. But what we found within a year,
within even a shorter time, we had many teachers who did not have
adequate training. And what we found was, they were saying to us, \"I
didn\'t know about how to teach reading. My gosh, after doing this
program and following these kinds of prescriptive items, I know now how
to teach reading.\"

So I guess, in a way, it served to be a little unprofessional, you know,
and yet now they feel far more professional. And in Texas, because
we\'re doing so many things with training, you know, you hear about it
up here, I\'m sure, that what we\'ve found is, when they go to the
trainings now, on literacy, they come away feeling very validated
because they\'d already learned it through the programs. So I guess \--
your point, Wendy, is well taken \-- the kids. And I\'ve got to make a
comment about what happened \-- Mr. Garcia, a while ago you made a
comment \-- when I go in the middle schools that were using A or B, the
APs, the assistant principals, come by and say, \"If we could just teach
the reading program every period, we\'d have no visits to the office.\"

So it evidently \-- evidently, it engages the students. Thank you.

Diane Paul-Brown: Can you make it, or do you want to just stand?

Unidentified Speaker: \[offmike\]

Diane Paul-Brown: Please give your name again.

Frances Bessler: Frances Bessler \[sp\] from Charlotte, North Carolina
\-- I\'d just like make a comment about the professionalism \-- first, I
don\'t think we can\'t absolutely say that doctors don\'t have scripts.
Thank goodness, they do, guided by research and what\'s effective, not
what they feel like.

\[applause\]

And, secondly, lawyers have a prescription based on precedents. And the
other thing is, the things that we hold up as examples of human
excellence \-- art, music, dance, sports \-- those things have
prescriptions, they have scripts, so to speak, and once we learn the
script, we can put it to use. So I think we all have choice, I think
there\'s a wide variety of choice depending on what profession you\'re
in, particularly the teaching profession, and I\'d like to ditto what
Marcia said. In Charlotte, we have 30% turnover of our teachers every
year. We have lateral entry teachers that had no education courses. So
we rely very heavily on what the research says is effective in using,
and that brings me to another question. Who is responsible for the
scientifically based reading research? Is it the program developer? Is
it the implementer? Is it the universities or a combination both? And I
think the Department of Education could probably give us some guidance
in how we would construct these models of scientifically based reading
research. Thank you.

\[applause\]

Diane Paul-Brown: This is going to have to be our last question, because
we\'ve got to get you out to eat.

Sandra Tattershall: I\'m Sandra Tattershall from the Language and
Learning Center in Kentucky. I\'ve been thinking about balancing
accommodation and direct instruction, and it seems to me this is what
we\'re talking about with teachers \-- how much do we accommodate their
lack of professionalism as you are defining it, while they\'re learning
to be professionals? But I still want to keep in there, the idea of
exploring how we teach directly to get these kids up to par but still
stimulate them in the ways that they\'re stimulated out of school by
accommodating them in the meantime? I don\'t think we know what the
balance is. I think it\'s one of the questions we need to ask.

Unidentified Speaker: Thank you. OK, I think we\'re at time. You\'re at
the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. There are a lot of food places, if you
just go outside and across the street to the Inner Harbor, there are a
bunch of shops, if you\'d rather shop than eat, but there is one whole
pavilion that\'s food, and just about anybody on the street can tell you
where it is. I can\'t, because I'm inside now, and I don\'t know what
direction it is. Please be back \-- we gave you a little over an hour,
that\'s because I figured we\'d be running late. We\'re actually right
on time. Please be back by the time that\'s on your agenda, because
we\'re going to start very promptly. Thanks a lot. Enjoy your lunch.

\[end of recording\]