Research2Practice A Podcast Series of the Council for Exceptional Children EC Podcast #1 Cara Richards-Tutor, The Effectiveness of Reading Intervention for English Learners: A Research Synthesis, Exceptional Children, 48, pp. 144 169. Welcome to this Exceptional Children podcast. I'm Lorraine Sobson, publications manager for the Council for Exceptional Children. Today I'm speaking with Cara Richards-Tutor, a professor in the College of Education in California State University, Long Beach. Cara and her colleagues recently published an article in Exceptional Children entitled The Effectiveness of Reading Intervention for English Learners. Welcome, Cara! Thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to share more about our research. I really enjoyed your article, and my main question is why you focused on English learners rather than assess reading interventions for all students who struggle with literacy? That's a really good question, Lorraine. There's a few reasons why we chose to focus specifically on English learners. I think one of the biggest reasons is that despite what we know about effective interventions and interaction for students, there has consistently been an achievement gap between English learners and their monolingual peers. We cannot assume that interventions that work for monolingual students will be effective for English learners. We might hypothesize that that's true but we need to be testing those hypotheses. I think Janette Klingner said it really well in one of her publications. She said we need to understand for whom those interventions are effective and not make assumptions [that] they'll work for all students. Also, there have been several literature reviews of reading interventions for students who are monolingual. We actually cite several of these studies in our research manuscript. Solis, Edwards, Wanzek, and Wexler have all done very thorough reviews of the literature on reading interventions for students who are not English learners, and also there [were] a few reviews done several years ago that reviewed literature but that was really before [the] more rigorous design [of] our research. A lot of those reviews, interventions for English learners or instruction for English learners, were reviews of more qualitative research, and we could [not] say these are really the effective interventions or instructional practices, for English learners. At the same time, there's a huge demand from practitioners to be able to meet the need, and effectively teach English learners. IES the Institute of Educational Sciences has published a couple practice guides recently, and one of their main recommendations was that we provide explicit, small group instruction to struggling English learners. One of the things we wanted to do with this is really unpackage that a little bit more, because they come up with several instructional practices and don't get into the nitty-gritty of what those practices might specifically look like. What we wanted
to do is really look in more detail about those interventions and unpackage that for researchers but also for practitioners. You've established that there are different approaches for different types of students, and certainly, for English learners, they need different approaches. How did you decide which studies to include in your review, and why did you focus particularly on experimental studies? To select our studies we had three major criteria, and the first was that the study had to have English learners as participants, and those English learners had to be kindergarten through 12th grade. Also, those students had to be identified as at risk, or identified with a specific learning disability. We also required that the studies had their data aggregated for English learners if not all the participants were English learners, and so that was a little bit tricky. We ended up e-mailing several of the authors to get their specific data on English learners so that we could determine the effectiveness of the intervention, and provide this review. [In many schools you] have students who are English learners and non-english learners [together] in a classroom, and provide interventions for those students, and there might be a mix. We wanted to know specifically about these interventions. Where they effective for the particular group of English learners, not for the group as a whole? Because a lot of times it could be the case that it was more effective for the students who were monolingual, and not as effective for English learners. We wanted to be able to determine that. The third criteria we looked at for selecting our studies was that the study provided information about fidelity to the intervention, and so we wanted to know was the intervention delivered as it was intended. That has been something that has come out [when] IES looks at studies, and also in the Council for Exceptional Children in their determining evidence-based practices, or EBP. As far as our decision to include only experimental studies, we actually spent a lot of time as authors discussing this, and we came to the decision because we wanted to only include those studies which determined strong evidence of a causal relationship between the intervention and the outcome. We also only included studies that were peer reviewed, so that was also a criteria but not as an overall criteria with the randomized control trials or experimental design. We also started to look at single case design studies, and we mention this a little bit in this [article]. We didn't include them because it would just have been more difficult to do comparisons across types of study, and there is some disagreement in the field as to whether calculating an effect size is appropriate in single [case] design. We are working on a manuscript as a follow-up to this one that looks at single case design studies, and reviews those studies and the literature review as well. Right now, we have that available in a technical report. When you first started responding to that question, you mentioned that the studies that you looked at address intervention for students from kindergarten through high school.
What are the differences in outcomes and types of interventions for older English learners as opposed to younger ones? What are some general recommendations that you may have come up with regarding what approaches work best for different age groups? This question is really difficult to answer because we actually had very few studies that included older students and, actually, by older students, I'm talking about fourth grade and above. We had no studies that included high school students that met our criteria. In our single case design we found one that focused on high school students. This is obviously a huge gap in the literature, and then as far as understanding practices that are most effective for these students. Four out of our 12 studies included students at fourth grade or above, and two of those focused on students [in] sixth grade or above. Again, we have very limited information. One thing we noted is that for the interventions for older students despite the fact that they were more intensive and most of them were a longer duration [was] that they weren't as effective for these particular students. These students may need a lot more or perhaps different interventions than the ones we've looked at so far. One promising aspect of intervention is tailoring interventions to meet individual students needs at their level. In the study by Wanzek and Roberts, they did this. They tailored the intervention to meet individual students needs and the gaps that they had in their reading ability, or weak performance. This may hold the most promise for older, struggling readers, and this would also align nicely with the work that's coming out of the National Center for Intensive Intervention. As far as the younger students, what we learned from this and we have a pretty good understanding of it is effective intervention for foundational skills such as phonological awareness, phonics, and decoding, and even fluency. What we don't understand for younger students really is: What are those effective interventions that would also improve vocabulary and reading comprehension at this early grade in order to prevent more difficulties later? In this case, the Solari and Gerber study, they looked at kindergarten students, at developing the listening comprehension of those students. That seems to offer the same promise as far as teacher direction. Again, [although I haven t specifically mentioned] English learners, in all of this I'm speaking specifically about what we know for English learners, and what we don't know for English learners. I like what you were just mentioning about the study with recommendations of different types of intervention in early grades to develop listening comprehension as a basis for later acquisition. What other kind of interventions might help with content vocabulary acquisition? Did they look at that as well? Actually, what was surprising to us from our review was that there was not a lot of focus on vocabulary in these interventions. In some of them it was actually non-existent vocabulary instruction as a piece of the intervention. There is some work that's being done with monolingual students in development of vocabulary interventions, and my
colleagues on this article, Doris and Scott Baker, have a study they are currently conducting with their colleagues that looks at vocabulary intervention for English learners but it's not specifically geared towards students who might be at risk for learning disability or reading disability. It's slightly different. We don't have a lot of information about what would be effective interventions to improve vocabulary for these students, and it may be that intervention is really a place to just reinforce some of the vocabulary that's being developed in the classroom, and there we could develop those students content vocabulary like you mentioned, starting with very young students. It's very hard to have students learn more than a few words every week, and usually the words they learn are the ones we teach them that s not going to broaden their vocabulary very much. This has become an issue, as far as really getting a lot of bang for our buck, so to speak, with these interventions that just focus on vocabulary. We need to make sure particularly that there is a strong link between what's happening in the classrooms, or at Tier 1, and then what's happening in our Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions with all skills, but particularly vocabulary. That's very helpful. You've mentioned in passing English learners being at risk of learning, or reading disability. I know that the indicators for English learners that you've mentioned a couple of times are going to be different from monolingual learners. How did the studies tease out what was the learning or reading disability, and what might have been a language acquisition problem? Most of the studies didn't particularly look at identification of disability but were more focused on if the students were at risk for reading failure, and at that point possibly at risk for learning disability. Really, the focus was are these students having reading issues, and if they are let's give them intervention. All the studies used standardized tests or some kind of curriculum-based measurement that was reliable and valid for identifying risk. If the student had a learning disability, often times that was determined by the school or by the fact that the students also met these risk factors, and then the school had designated them as having a learning disability. That really didn't come out in this study. That's a big question that we don't have a lot of answers to, and I think that a caution we want to have with English learners, of course, is being careful that we don't over-identify these students because it really is an issue of language. The other caution is that we don't want to under-identify these students [if] they need intervention, and we are like, "Oh, wait. They need to just develop their language, and if they do then they will be okay," you know, they won't have reading problems. It becomes a very tricky situation. We really don't have all of those answers, or many of those answers. I think that as far as we were concerned in his particular, what [we were] just trying to understand [was] what are those effective processes for English learners regarding intervention. Can you then summarize, give us a cheat sheet or a list of what are the most effective practices?
Really, the only thing that was consistent across the studies was the method of delivery of the intervention. We found that, consistently, explicit, direct, systematic instruction was effective for English learners, and that's consistent with what we know to be effective for monolingual students who are also at risk for reading failure, learning disabilities. The other elements such as what is the particular content of the intervention, what is the group size look like, how long should the intervention be, who delivers the intervention? That varied greatly across our study, and so we really weren't able to come to specific conclusions about these individual variables. We don't have enough information yet from the research that's out there on these elements, and so, in our paper when we get to the future research, one thing we need to really pay attention to is we need more studies to understand this, and to determine which of the contents of these interventions look like. Should we target? Should we be focusing on multiple skills? Should we have three to five students? Can we have six to 10 students? Should we provide intervention 30 minutes for five days a week? Do we need it for 45 minutes, five days a week? Can we have an instructional assistant deliver the intervention? Do we need a special education teacher delivering the intervention? There's just not answers to these questions based on what we found in the literature and so, the only way to go in this field I think those questions are the questions that matter a lot to schools because they want to put their resources in the right places. If they know that they need to have a group size of three to five students, there s a lot more research that's going on [than with groups] of 10 students. I think as researchers we need to help them answer these questions so that they can best deliver intervention to English learners who are struggling. Future research might focus on this framework or method with the group size, the duration, and who delivers it, etc. You mentioned earlier that vocabulary instruction might also be an area of future research for this particular group of students. You've dealt with both the logistics of it, and then this one area of vocabulary. What other areas as you were doing your study did you think this would be another area that there's lacking and we need more information? I think we want to expand the idea of focusing on vocabulary to, really, how do we help them develop language a whole more broadly, not just vocabulary? This might also include things like listening comprehension more broadly by helping them develop language as they are developing these key skills that they need within intervention. Another thing that came out was the need to focus on the individual differences among English learners; there are multiple proficiency levels that English learners can be. Some of the students are at the beginning level, others are almost proficient. There may be some differences across those groups that we need to pay attention to even within the interventions here that were effective. We couldn't tease apart if it was more effective, or maybe it was only effective for those English learners who were at a higher proficiency level. We can't tell that from the data. There was one study by O'Connor and her colleagues that did look at English proficiency, and they didn't see any differences
across the proficiency levels with their intervention, which mostly focused on early reading, like just phonological awareness. With that skill, perhaps it doesn't matter what their proficiency is, but it seems to me and my colleagues that when they are looking at more complicated skills such as language, reading comprehension, vocabulary development that this will come into play. When we start looking at the effectiveness of intervention in these more complex skills we need to be paying attention to English proficiency. I like how you are highlighting the complexity of what is English proficiency, what is language versus vocabulary, and they aren t a homogeneous group of students by any means. There's huge areas of research that can still be done on this, but what kind of takeaways do practitioners have from your particular study? What kind of recommendations do you have for practice? We can definitely say that explicit and systematic instruction is effective for these students. For students who are struggling, who are at risk, who may already be identified as having learning disabilities, we know that is going to be an effective method for delivering intervention. I think we know the big reading ideas like phonological awareness, phonics or decoding fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension are the key areas of the interventions. Reading comprehension being more complex, particularly given the Common Core State Standards and the demands that students are going to have now with those standards. Those aren't changing. We could learn from these studies, and I think practitioners need to say we know this. We know these things, and I don't know exactly how long to deliver the intervention, or the precise group size that I need but I think the takeaways are about the content of the intervention, and the method in which we deliver it. Some of these other things are important I think for us as researchers to provide, to be able to get the answers to these questions, to help schools be more effective and efficient in delivering intervention but I think as practitioners these studies, the [ones we] review, provide a pretty good indication of the kinds of skills and the way that we should deliver intervention to effectively meet the needs of the English learners. Thank you so much for talking with me today, Cara. Thank you so much for having me today Lorraine. We are really excited to share about this research, and we are really about having this research published in Exceptional Children. Cara's article, The Effectiveness of Reading Intervention for English Learners, is published in Volume 82 of Exceptional Children. Exceptional Children is a publication of the Council for Exceptional Children. To learn more about CEC, visit cec.sped.org.