A useful mash up of student MAP testing lexile scores, corresponding library books, and themed resource lists for the IB to boost language acquistion in IB schools.
I would start his post out with, “There are many ways to do this, but this is one way that works…” Literacy programs can be especially tricky since they do not fit in a traditional siloed course or do not always have a dedicated time slot or subject teacher assigned a in ‘charge’ of literacy. EAL learners can added to the complexity here since they will have additional needs than a standard student who is reading at grade level would not require. Additionaly, the IB would prefer an inclusive approach to providing for student learning needs and differentiation would also agree here.
Part One: You will need to have assessed your students in some (non-biased) preferable computer based way that can be correlated with two other data points. NWEA MAP has Reading tests which will give you a Lexile score and range for each student. You could also use reports from Raz-Kids which will provide you with a Fountas and Pinnell equivalent score and a lexile range. Teacher observations can be another data point, but I would advise EAL teachers to be careful here. Evidence based data would be better then just the feeling that a student has ‘low’ English by a subject teacher. Idealy, a WIDA test result could also inform you of the students reading ability. I would advocate for two computer based assessements with the possible third data point being from teachers with supporting evidence (triangulation!). However, four data points is even better if you have the set ups in place at your school. If you are hard up for data you could use the Lexile website to grade some texts for you and do a reading assessment with students. See the Lexile website here.
Part Two: You will need a library that is running Follett Destiny, a libray management system. This due to the fact that you can purchase Lexile and F&P score integration for books that are catalogue in your library. You will not get 100% coverage of all books, but most will have a lexile score or a F&P score. Picture books and graphic novels are the genres that are usually missing score data, but then again these books are natural scaffholded with their pictures or typically contain less written text than a regular book. In the examples below I will use a somewhat recent graphic novel that is very popular and has lexical information assocated with the book details in Follett Destiny.
Follett Destiny Links about Lexile and F&P Score integration
To quote from the Destiny Library Manager PDF….
Reading Program Services lets Destiny Library Manager users instantly enhance their library records with reading program information for Accelerated Reader®, Reading Counts!®, Lexile®, and Fountas & Pinnell. It helps schools in your district provide visibility and easy searching of books and materials that match students’ reading and comprehension levels. You’ll spend less time cataloging books, and your students will spend less time searching and more time reading! Typically, someone with site administrator or library administrator rights sets up the Reading Program Service.
Note, I would not share a students lexile range or score with them per se. You don’t want EAL students to have anxiety over a ‘low’ Lexile or F&P score. This really depends on the age of the student and the context of students reading the books. Here are some other useful links:
Part 3: After having assessed your students, you probably are well on your way to having student language profiles built for them and have identified what students will require more EAL support than others. From this point on you will have more options as to your next steps which also will depend on the goals of the specific EAL support for the student or the overall literacy program.
Preparing EAL students for an upcoming Unit of Inquiry.
In this senario you have the language profiles for each student and know their lexile ranges. Through grade level teaming or your PYP coordinator and meeting with the PYP homeroom teachers you know the subject topics that potentially the EAL students will be discussing and inquiring about in their upcoming unit (This can also be done with MYP and DP programs also just with different topics and subjects). As the EAL teacher you want to activiate the students background knowledge on the topic and have them aquire some of the core vocabulary in a releveant contextualized way to prepare them for the Unit.
The next step depends on the defined roles at the school. Previously, I have worked with a librarian to make the book lists for students. However, accounts and permissions can be changed in Follett Destiny, so with some training any PYP teacher could also be in charge of creating customized lists of books for their students that is themed to an upcomming Unit of Inquiry. Oops. getting ahead of myself. Follett Destiny has a functionality where each student account can have public or private ‘Resource Lists’ associated with them. This means that students or a librarian, or any teachers with the correct Follett Destiny account privalleges can create lists of books (hyperlinks) in link to each book detail page in Follett Destiny. With some simple Lexile range or F&P range searching within a general subject, you can easily create a reading list at a set level of English on a given IB Unit of Inquiry. Depending on the age of the students you can have students find and add their books to their own individualized resources lists or you can do it with them, or you can prepopulate resources lists for the students.
For simplicy, it is easiest to ‘turn on’ google single sign on in Follett Destiny (SSO) so that your students can sign in with a few clicks as long as they are signed into their school Google accounts. This is not as hard as it seems and a Follett Destiny rep. can help as well as their tech support. Having SSO functionality with allow your students to easily log in and then be able to add or remove books from their book lists, ditto for teachers or other users here too.
The above example is with a famous graphic novel called ‘Amulet’. A good choice for EAL learners in Japan since the story is written by a Japanese American with a the female protagonist around a theme of family and overcoming personal loss. Many connections can be made here with ‘Where We Are in Place and Time’ Unit of Inquiry. If I remember, I think there is mutliple occorance of time travel in some of the character’s personal histories. Pretty cool stuff for students to inquire about!
Useful links about Resource Lists for Follett Destiny
Resource Lists Follett Community
You can also do a similar exercise of having resource lists in Raz-Plus via the assignment fuctionality. This is a nice way to agument your physical library with lexcically graded eBooks that also have comprehension quizzes associated with them. A nice resource but perhaps more skewed to non-fiction books that in my experice are not as interesting at many of the physical books you can have in a well stocked library.
Part 4: Of course, you and your grade level team or your co-teachers do not want to have to create resources lists anew each academic year for all your Units of Inquiry. No worries. you can have multiple lists that can be display or hidden that you can reused over time. Book detail information can also be edited to have a special ‘IB’ subject categories such was WWAIPAT (Where We Are In Place And Time) that will then cross reference with any other books that you have categorized thusly. This is a bit more work to set up with your school librarian but can be something that is built out over time in conjuction with the literacy progam and supporing EAL learners.
