PHONICS AND ADULT ENGLISH LEARNERS Abstract

This paper will discuss the current research on reading instruction using systematic phonics instruction and adult English language learners. Much research has been done to demonstrate the effectiveness of systematic phonics instruction for young English-speaking learners and several studies have been to demonstrate its effectiveness in improving young English language learners reading skills. Research has also determined that early intervention is key for both groups. While much is known about young learners reading development, little research has been done to address adult learners and a paucity of research exists that examines reading instruction for adult English second language learners. Of the five main skills identified for reading, phonemic awareness and phonics play essential roles in establishing a lasting, strong foundation to build fluency, comprehension and vocabulary. This study proposes an investigation of the effectiveness of using systematic phonics instruction in comparison to no phonics instruction for reading instruction for beginning adult English language learners.

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Systematic Phonics Instruction and Adult English Learners Reading is an essential skill that one must learn to fully participate in American society. For adult learners, English as a second language (ESL) and native English speakers alike, the goal for literacy may be based on many factors; from basic needs of travel, to work-related skills and various levels of education; the need for literacy skills is ever more essential in todays information-based society. Using information from the 2003 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS 2003) study and the 2003 IALS study (International Adult Literacy Survey) The Educational Testing Service (ETS) prepared their report A Human Capital Concern: The Literacy Proficiency of U.S. Immigrants. This report found that A majority of our nations 1665-year old foreign born demonstrate proficiencies in the lowest literacy level (Level 1) on each the NALS and IALS literacy scales while fewer than 10% performed in Levels 4 or 5, the highest two literacy levels. For both native English speakers and ESL learners Reading is among the most important of academic skills, affecting almost every aspect of a students learning. (Stuart 2008). According to the 2010 Census 12.5% of the U.S. population is immigrants, 52% of whom reported limited English proficiency. (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). In the ETS comparison analysis of immigrant literacy proficiency profiles in twenty of the richest countries, the United States ranked 18th. Of the Big 5 (Cena 2009) core areas identified for reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension) a strong foundation of phonemic awareness must be an important component in early instruction from which to build fluent

reading. The L2 learner brings with him/her the awareness of their own their L1 phonological system and requires an educational reading method that clearly defines the distinct phonological PHONICS AND ADULT ENGLISH LEARNERS 4

system of English, and presents this system with explicit, structured instruction. Systematic phonics instruction (SPI) teaches Systematically and sequentially the correspondences between graphemes and phonemes of the language and how to apply them to decode unfamiliar words by sounding out the letters and blending them.(Ehri 2001) The effectiveness of SPI for teaching young L1 English speakers to read has been soundly demonstrated and several studies demonstrate its effectiveness for young ESL learners. While there is little research on the patterns of literacy development of adults learning English, there is even less on best practices for teaching literacy to this population. (Burt et al. 2003) The purpose of this research proposal is to address this lack of research and investigate reading instruction for adult ESL learners, specifically the degree to which adult ESL learners can benefit from systematic phonics instruction in English. English has become the worlds lingua franca. In addition, recognizing the inferior immigrant literacy proficiency level of the United States, both beckon a need for more effective reading instruction. In todays global society, with ever-growing demands for English-language skills, how can instruction for adult ESL learners address reading in a more effective way? Can SPI be effectively incorporated into a balanced comprehensive approach to adult ESL reading instruction?

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Review of literature Learning to read is a complex endeavor that requires many skills. At the foundation of these skills is the phonological system of the language. The learner must acquire the phonological system of the language, phonemic awareness, and the visual code that represents that system, in English that code is the alphabet. When reading, the learner must then convert the code, the alphabet in print on the page into the sound system, grapheme-phoneme awareness. This grapheme-phoneme awareness is one of the Big 5 (Cena 2009) core areas of reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension) that must be processed and mastered for efficient reading. The phonological complexity of English and its inconsistent, unpredictable graphemephoneme mapping make English an exceptionally difficult language to read. English is the most inconsistent language in the world in terms of the consistency of letter-sound correspondences. (U. Goswami 2005). ESL learners whose first language has a simpler sound-to-symbol mapping may have a difficult time learning the English grapheme-phoneme system. The English language has a high inconsistency of symbol-to-sound mapping; 26 vowels map into over 40 phonemes of the language. In addition, the English languages unusually high occurrence of consonant blends and the frequently occurring consonant-vowel-consonant syllable structure of English are difficult for students whose L1 does not contain these complexities. While various approaches have been developed for English reading instruction, the two main approaches to reading instruction are whole-language (also referred to as whole-word) instruction and phonics instruction. Whole-language instruction teaches the reader to grasp or memorize the meaning of the whole word at once in a look-say approach (Ehri 2001), the

PHONICS AND ADULT ENGLISH LEARNERS focus is on the learner seeing the word as a whole rather than segmenting into phonemic

segments. Phonics instruction teaches reading in a bottom-up approach, through decoding and spelling, segmenting each letter and each sound, teaching letter-sound correspondences to build into recognizable words. There are several approaches to phonics instruction which vary in their approach from the individual grapheme segmenting of synthetic phonics such as /k/-/a/-/t/ for cat, to the segmenting larger subunits within words such as -ight as in light and ough as in tough and other programs which focus on word identification first and sound segments later. These approaches include analytic/analogy phonics, phonics in context, phonics through spelling, embedded phonics and synthetic phonics. This research proposal will focus on synthetic phonics (also referred to as systematic phonics instruction (SPI). Synthetic phonics programs teach children systematically and sequentially the correspondences between graphemes and phonemes of the language and how to apply them to decode unfamiliar words by sounding out the letters and blending them (Ehri 2001). A basic element of this type of bottom-up processing instruction is the identification of each sound and its corresponding grapheme, words are segmented into graphemes, sound-grapheme relationships are taught; phonological awareness and grapheme-phoneme sound instruction are the essential components of this training. When taught explicitly and systematically, the learner can decode and encode words with increasing complexity. These early literacy skills are operationally defined as the foundational skills that facilitate reading proficiency. (Arrellanes, 2009) Common sight words such as could, against, their that cannot be sounded out phonetically are memorized.

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Many studies have investigated the effectiveness of the two main approaches to reading instruction, whole language instruction and phonics instruction, primarily with young, normally progressing, English-speaking learners. In 1997, the National Reading Panel (NRP) conducted a meta-analysis of the existing research studies to evaluate the effectiveness of reading instruction approaches in the United States. Of the sixty-six studies evaluated, thirty-eight studies of phonemic awareness instruction were examined for effects on reading and spelling improvement. The review evaluated the effectiveness of systematic phonics instruction to learners and control groups who received no phonics or unsystematic phonics instruction. The results of this metaanalysis found that Systematic phonics instruction (SPI) helped children learn to read better than all forms of control group instruction, including whole language. And benefitted not only word reading and spelling but also text processing. And that The impact of phonics instruction lasted well beyond the end of training. (Ehri 1997) The NRP suggested that SPI should be implemented as part of literacy programs to teach beginning reading as well as to prevent and remediate reading difficulties. (Ehri 1997) The results also demonstrate that phonics instruction should begin early (kindergarten to first grade) for readers and should continue for two to three years phonics instruction improves reading ability more than non-phonics instruction not only among beginning readers but also among normally progressing readers above first grade and older readers with reading disabilities. (Ehri 1997) While thirty-eight studies were evaluated, only one (Stuart 1999, mentioned below) examined the effectiveness of explicit, systematic phonics instruction for beginning ESL students. This study found a significant improvement in reading in spelling but not in reading comprehension. While many studies have been done to show the effectiveness of SPI for reading instruction, most studies have examined young

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(kindergarten to first grade) readers. There were only seven comparisons involving older, normally progressing readers. (Ehri 1997) Students who experience difficulties reading also benefit from SPI and reading intervention programs have been developed to address these somewhat older populations. To evaluate the effectiveness of four of these reading programs currently used in American schools, Torgesen et al. (2007) compared the effectiveness of these SPI reading programs, developed for use with struggling readers, on word-level reading skills (phonemic decoding, fluency, accuracy) and reading comprehension. The SPI programs were Corrective Reading, Failure Free Reading, Spell Read Phonological Auditory Training, and The Wilson Reading System. This large-scale longitudinal study evaluated 779 third and fifth-grade, good and poor readers one and two years after intervention. The control groups received non-phonics reading instruction. The improvements were greatest for the third-grade SPI cohort, these improvements were found primarily in phonemic decoding, word reading accuracy and fluency, and in this study reading comprehension while for the fifth-grade SPI cohort the improvements were found in phonemic decoding. (Torgeson et al. 2007) This study found that the earlier the reading intervention the more significant the improvement results. In addition to behavioral evidence of the effectiveness of SPI on beginning English speaking readers, evidence of improvement in brain activation with SPI reading remediation has also been found. Using a subset of participants in the Torgeson 2006 study, Meyler et al. (2007) conducted a study to examine brain activation of twelve good and twentythree poor readers before and after intensive SPI using one of four methods: Corrective Reading, The Wilson Reading System, Failure Free Reading, The Spell Read Phonological Auditory

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Training Program. The study examined the students immediately after intervention and again one year after reading intervention. Remedial intervention in the form of SPI was found to have beneficial effects behaviorally as well as to improve brain function, which evidences changes in the neural systems that support reading, in poor readers. (Meyler et al. 2007) A consistent result emerging from these studies is that remedial treatment increases not only reading ability in impaired readers measured behaviorally, but also the activation in the left parieto-temporal cortex, as measured by functional neuroimaging techniques (Aylward et al, 2003;Eden et al. 2004; Shaywitz et al.,2004;Simos et al., Temple et al., 2003). Fifth-grade struggling readers were tested for brain activation prior to intervention, after 100h of instruction and one year after the instruction had ended. The results are interpreted as reflecting changes in the processes involved in word-level and sentence-level assembly. (Meyler et al. 2007) The Big 5 (Cena2009) core areas of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension are equally as important for ESL students as they are for English-speaking students. Fewer studies have investigated the effectiveness of SPI on ESL learners. There is strong empirical evidence indicating that systematic phonics instruction is beneficial to the development of phonological skills in EL1 children. In contrast, the ESL literature has only recently begun to investigate the connection between phonological awareness and early word identification skills in ESL children. (Cena, 2009) These children may have had little vocabulary or exposure to written English in their households therefore limited graphemephoneme awareness in English. These ESL learners bring with them the awareness of their L1 phonological system and have heightened levels of phonological awareness Thus, introducing reading through a programme of phonological awareness and letter-sound teaching should

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capitalise on the strengths of second language learners, whereas the now traditional holistic approaches emphasizing meaning would seem to focus on their potentially weakest area. (Stuart 1999). These holistic approaches, whole-language methods, assume a rich vocabulary and access to a strong sight word knowledge. Many of which the ESL leaners are deficient in. Few studies have examined the degree to which factors demonstrated to reduce literacy failure in EL1 populations might contribute to reading and writing success in young ESL learners. In the research concerned with EL1 learners, there is convergent evidence demonstrating that the risk of literacy failure can be reduced in young children through the provision of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. (Kwan 2006) To examine the benefits of systematic phonics instruction on the development of ESL learners reading and writing skills, phonological awareness and oral language proficiency, Kwan (2006) evaluated the effectiveness of SPI using The Jolly Phonics Method (a systematic phonics instruction method) with 240 kindergarteners, forty-five percent of whom were of ESL status. The treatment group students received either one or two years of Jolly Phonics instruction three to five times a week (from 15-30-minutes per session) for six to seven months during the school year. The control group received no SPI, instead they were taught reading in the regular kindergarten program that emphasized whole-language instruction. The results of this study found a significant benefit to the acquisition of literacy skills and phonemic awareness for all the children, English language speakers and the ESL students, who received Jolly Phonics SPI. The students encoding and decoding skills benefitted more from SPI than the control group that did not receive the SPI. (Kwan 2006) ESL children in this study who received two years of SPI significantly outperformed their EL1 and ESL counterparts in control classrooms on all measures of phoneme awareness as well as early word identification and

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spelling skills. (Kwan 2006) While the study showed significant improvement in phonemic awareness for the ESL students, it did not have a significant impact on the students oral language proficiency. This may suggest a comprehensive, balanced instructional approach to reading that includes not only SPI but effecting teaching methods aimed specifically at improving oral language proficiency as well for ESL learners. To investigate whether, with SPI, it is possible to accelerate phoneme segmentation skills and grapheme-phoneme awareness in ESL learners and whether these skills and awareness improve reading skills, Stuart (1999) conducted a study of 112 5-year olds, ninety-six of whom were ESL learners, a group often excluded from studies of reading instruction. The students were divided into two groups, one receiving SPI with The Jolly Phonics Method and one receiving a whole-word instruction with The Big Books Method over a twelve-week period. Teachers spent one hour each day on reading and writing either with the phonics method or the whole-word program. The results of this study Provide very strong additional support for the view that early, structured, focused and rapid teaching of phoneme segmentation and blending skills and of grapheme-phoneme correspondences does accelerate development of these skills and acquisition of this knowledge in 5-year olds. They extend this finding to children learning English as a second language who have initially very poor receptive vocabularies for English. (Stuart 1999) The longitudinal beneficial effects of SPI for these ESL learners was demonstrated. Stuarts 2004 follow-up study of these students found lasting influences of early phoneme awareness and phonics teaching on phoneme awareness, grapheme-phoneme correspondence knowledge, word reading and spelling. This study specifically aimed to assess whether the effects of SPI for ESL learners were longitudinal. The 1999 study was designed to assess ESL learners, a group

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that had typically been excluded from studies evaluating the effectiveness of SPI. Having found significant benefits for this ESL group, the study went on to follow-up with these students four years later to assess whether these improvements had been maintained. The study included an investigation of reading comprehension advantages for the SPI students. While the students in the SPI did better than the whole-language instruction students, On tests of phoneme segmentation, grapheme-phoneme correspondence knowledge, single-word reading and spelling and were likely to achieve higher levels in Key Stage 1 spelling SATs. They had also developed better sublexical processing skills, doing better on tests of non-word reading, showing larger regularity effects in word reading and being more likely to regularize unfamiliar exception words (Stuart 2004) however there were not advantages in reading accuracy or comprehension. Possibly the underdeveloped oral language abilities of the ESL children were delaying development of their ability to read and understand continuous text and/or to respond to openended questions. These suggestions are made tentatively and clearly further research is required in this area. (Stuart 2004) The author suggests that a balanced instructional approach to phonics, one that includes a focus on reading comprehension, be implemented with young ESL learners. Denton (2000) investigated the effectiveness of SPI on somewhat older learners: students in Grades 2 to 5. The students in this study were Spanish-English bilingual learners, Spanish was their native language. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of two reading intervention programs, an SPI program, Read Well, (RW) and a program that did not include SPI, Read Naturally, (RN) for Spanish-dominant ELLs. (Denton 2000) Students were divided into a treatment group (the RW group) and a control group (the RN group) for daily reading instruction, the interventions were given over a four-month period. The results of this study

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showed that the RW students improved their decoding skills, outperformed their classmates in the RN group in context-free word reading and in word-attack. (Denton 2000)The Treatment Group students made gains not only in their ability to read lists of words, but also in their ability to read connected text accurately. (Denton 2000) This improvement in word attack will enable the ESL reader to read with more fluency, with less time spent decoding word and more automatic processing of text that will lead to better comprehension. Students who speak English as a second language and are learning to read in English appear to benefit from systematic, explicit instruction in English phonology, with attention given to elements of English that differ from their native language. This study supports explicit instruction in English phonology for English language learners. The optimum balance of authentic practice for students at different levels of English literacy development should be investigated by future research. There is need for future study of optimal oral reading fluency levels for students who are learning to read in a second language. (Denton 2000) Less research has addressed reading instruction for adult ESL learners. To examine How adult English language learners learn to read, what methods have been found to facilitate the process and what research still needs to be done, (Burt et al., 2003) developed a search of literature on reading development for adult ESL language learners over the United States in the past 20 years. This literature suggests that a comprehensive, balanced approach should be developed that not only addresses the skills of phonological processing, vocabulary recognition, syntactic processing and schema activating, but also considers the differing purposes for the ESL learners literacy learning and considers the L1 literacy level of the learner. The levels for adult learners: preliterate, non-literate, semiliterate, non-alphabet literate, non-Roman alphabet literate

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and Roman alphabet literate should all be considered in adult ESL language instruction. (Burt et al. 2003) Teachers need to know learners L1 literacy levels in order to make informed decisions about the reading skills that they can help learners transfer to English and the reading strategies that they may need to teach in English. Even in cases in which there is relatively high L1 literacy, including knowledge about sound-symbol correspondence, certain skills may transfer and others may not unless there is direct instruction. (Burt et al. 2003) Of the models that have attempted to describe the reading process, Burt et al. suggest an interactive model, involving both bottom-up processing and top-down processing, as a viable process. An important primary component of the bottom-up model is phonemic awareness and graphemephoneme processing which enables the learner to use decoding skills to build syllables to words into comprehensible text. In suggesting implications for practice from the available research, Burt et al. suggest To what extent and in what ways can reading programs and strategies developed for children (e.g. explicit, systematic phonics instruction) be used effectively with adults? (Burt et al. 2003) The current research proposal seeks to address the above-mentioned question and to extend the available previous findings of the effectiveness in improving reading skills of SPI for L1 and young ESL learners to include adult ESL learners. Research questions 1) Will the reading skills: grapheme-phoneme correspondence knowledge, word-attack and spelling, of the treatment group improve as a result of adding SPI to an existing ESL curriculum as compared to the control group taught with whole-word instruction?

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2) Will the reading skill gains in correspondence knowledge, word-attack, and spelling for the treatment group and or the control group be maintained at a six-month delayed post-test? PHONICS AND ADULT ENGLISH LEARNERS Expected Results 21

The primary data for this study will include combined scores on the pre-test and post-test measures of grapheme-phoneme correspondence knowledge, word-attack and spelling of the WADE. The pretests and posttests will be given six months apart in the study. A follow-up study to assess the longitudinality of effects will be given six months after the end of the treatments. Research question #1:Will the reading skills: grapheme-phoneme correspondence knowledge, word-attack and spelling, of the treatment group improve as a result of adding SPI to an existing ESL curriculum as compared to the control group given whole-word instruction? SPI builds a strong foundation of grapheme-phoneme awareness which is a fundamental tool for decoding and encoding words. Much evidence exists to support phonics instruction for young English L1 learners (Chall 1993, Ehri 2001) and studies have extended this evidence for young ESL learners (Kwan 2006, Stuart 1999, Denton 2000), I expect the results of this study to show that similar improvements will be found with adult learners. Beginning adult ESL learners require these same foundational skills for reading. Adult learners literate in the Roman alphabet script bring with them existing grapheme-phoneme awareness skills that can be built upon, a structured program of SPI can define the system and regularity of the English language.

Research question #3: Will the gains in correspondence knowledge, word-attack, and spelling for the treatment group and or the control group be maintained at a six-month delayed post-test? Evidence of longitudinality of effectiveness was found in studies by Stuart (2004) and Lesaux (2003) and research by Chall (1993). I also expect the results to be longitudinal and that the improvements made in phoneme-grapheme awareness, word-attack, spelling and text PHONICS AND ADULT ENGLISH LEARNERS 22

comprehension by the students in the WRS will have lasting effects when post-tested six months after the end of the treatment period. I expect the reading skills of students in the WRS group will benefit from a strong foundation of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction and that those bottom-up skills will continue to support stronger word decoding, sentence processing and text comprehension. PHONICS AND ADULT ENGLISH LEARNERS Discussion The main goal of the research proposal is to investigate the effectiveness of SPI for reading instruction for adult ESL learners. The study will also shed light on the need for an appropriate, early model of reading instruction for these learners, a group typically excluded from previous studies. Given the paucity of research of reading instruction for this group, this study will extend the findings of the effectiveness of SPI for young native English speakers (Ehri 2001, Meyler et al. 2007, Torgeson 2007) and young ESL learners (Cena 2009,Stuart 1999,2004, Kwan 2006, Denton 2000, Leseaux 2003) to this adult group. Early SPI can provide these beginning adult learners with the same important foundational reading skills, which can have long-lasting effects on subsequent literacy skills, that it has been demonstrated to provide to 23

young learners. Reading can build second language vocabulary, conversational proficiency, and writing ability as well as reading proficiency. (Burt et al. 2003) How to incorporate the Big 5 (Cena 2009) core areas, and specifically, phonics instruction, into adult ESL reading instruction is an area of study that lacks research While there is little research on the patterns of literacy development of adults learning English, there is even less on the best practices for teaching literacy to this population. (Burt et al. 2003) The skill acquisition theory states that sequencing of presentation, practice and gradual automatization of procedural knowledge that required for learning to take place. SPI provides a combination of abstract rules and concrete examples to get learners past the declarative threshold into proceduralization. It is taught explicitly and systematically in stages that adhere to the stages of development of the skill acquisition theory. This has been demonstrated in findings of qualitative change in the cognitive mechanisms used to execute a PHONICS AND ADULT ENGLISH LEARNERS 24

reading comprehension task (Meyler et al. 2008). This study demonstrated the positive impact of intensive remedial instruction (SPI) on cortical activation in the left-parietal cortex, the area associated with reading remediation in earlier word-level studies, among struggling readers. (Meyler et al. 2008) These converging findings support the view that reading intervention promotes change in the neural systems that support skilled reading, and points to a similarity of impact across higher-and lower- level reading tasks. (Meyler et al. 2008). Additional research on the effectiveness of SPI, both behaviorally and neurologically, can provide needed additional data to test the skill acquisition theory Very little research in the field of second language learning has explicitly set out to gather data from second language learners in order to test (a specific variant of) skill acquisition theory. (VanPatten & Williams 2007, pg.102)

The Big 5 (Cena 2009) core areas of reading instruction must all be addressed for ESL instruction, this study will provide evidence that the SPI should be part of a balanced comprehensive approach to ESL instruction. Existing ESL programs that typically use a nonphonics instructional method for reading can incorporate an established SPI system into an existing curriculum. Many programs (such as The Wilson Reading System, Jolly Phonics, Read Well) provide commercially available training, instructor and student materials, prepared lesson plans and online support eliminating the need for development of a new program for an existing ESL program.

PHONICS AND ADULT ENGLISH LEARNERS References

Burt, M., Peyton, J.K., & Adams, R. (2003). Reading and adult English language learners: A review of the research. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Cena, Johanna. (2010). An investigation of the efficacy of a vocabulary intervention using vocabulary enhanced systematic and explicit teaching routines (VA SETR) on first grade Spanish readers' vocabulary development and reading comprehension. Published doctoral dissertation, University of Oregon.

Chall, Jeanne S. (1983) Learning to read :the great debate. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York.

Denton, Carolyn. (2001). The efficacy of two English reading interventions in a bilingual education program. Unpublished dissertation, Texas A&M University.

Educational Testing Service. (2000). A human capital concern: The literacy proficiency of U.S. immigrants.

Ehri, Linnea C; Nunes, Simone R; Stahl, Steven A; Willows, Dale M. (2001) Systematic phonics instruction helps students learn to read: evidence from the National Reading Panels meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research 71. 3, 393-447.

Goswami, Usha .(2005). Synthetic phonics and learning to read: A cross-language perspective. Educational Psychology in Practice 21. 4: 273-282.

Kwan, Archie. (2006). Impact of systematic phonics instruction on young children learning English as a second language. Published doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, Canada.

Lesaux, Nonie. (2003). The development of reading in children from diverse linguistic backgrounds: A 5-year longitudinal study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of British Columbia. Lesaux, Nonie K; Rupp, Andre A; Siegel, Linda S. (2007). Growth in reading skills of children from diverse linguistic backgrounds: finding from a 5-year longitudinal study. Journal of Educational Psychology 99. 4. Meyler, Ann; Keller, Timothy A; Cherkassky, Vladimir L; Gabrieli, John D E; Just, Marcel Adam. (2008). Modifying the brain activation of poor readers during sentence comprehension with extended remedial instruction: A longitudinal study of neuroplasticity. Neuropsychologia 46. 10, 2580-2592. National Center for Education Statistics. (2003). 2003 National assessment of adult literacy. National Center for Education Statistics. (2003). 2003 International adult literacy survey. A human capital concern: the literacy proficiency of U.S. immigrants.

Stuart, Morag. (1999). Getting ready for reading: early phoneme awareness and phonics teaching improves reading and spelling in inner-city second language learners. British Journal of Educational Psychology 69. 4, 587-605

Stuart, Morag. (2004). Getting ready for reading: a follow-up study of inner-city second language learners at the end of key stage I. British Journal of Educational Psychology 74. 1, 15-36. Terrazas Arellanes, F. E. (2009). The effects of the templates for direct and explicit Spanish instruction on English language learners reading outcomes. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oregon. Torgesen et al., (2006) National assessment of Title I, final report, volume II: Closing the reading gap: findings from a randomized trial of four reading interventions for striving readers. United States Census Bureau. (2010). 2010 Census. Washington, D.C. VanPatten & Williams (2007). Skill Acquisition Theory. Theories in Second Language Acquisition, An Introduction. (pp. 97-113). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Mawah, New Jersey.