Preschool for ELLs: Language Learning and Assessment

Why is preschool so important for young English language learners? How do professional development and parent outreach fit in? Please join me for the Colorin Colorado Webcast, Preschool for English Language Learners.

[music] Hello, I’m Bethanne Patrick. Welcome to this Colorin Colorado Webcast, Preschool for English Language Learners. In this segment of our four part program, we’re going to discuss how young English language learners, or ELL’s, develop the language skills they need to succeed. Joining me is Doctor Rebecca Palacios, an educator who taught preschool for more than 30 years in Corpus Christi, Texas. Doctor Palacios is also a teacher mentor, a founding member and former Vice Chair of the National Board for Professionals Teachings Standards and a member of American Federation of Teachers, ELL Educator Cadre. Thank you for joining us, Becky.

Becky Palacios: Thank you. It’s my pleasure.

Bethanne Patrick: It’s wonderful to have you here. So first let’s talk about the big picture, why is a quality early education so important for young ELL’s and their future?

Becky Palacios: Well research has shown us that ELL’s are very successful, actually all preschool children are very successful when they are involved or enrolled in a high quality preschool program and when those programs are very well rounded, cover the curriculum, cover the children’s support and their language development and their social, emotional and physical development, along with a good parent partnership, they’re going to sustain that growth and gains throughout their school career.

Bethanne Patrick: Which is a wonderful thing so what kinds of language skills are young children likely to develop in a good preschool program?

Becky Palacios: Well they’re going to develop the basics that they’re going to need to be successful as they continue to learn to listen, speak, read and write in early childhood programs that provide a rich environment. The teachers know how to support those children, how to speak to them, how to ask leading questions, how to get them to practice their language in context.

Bethanne Patrick: Wonderful, I’d love to know more about the students who were in your dual language program. What kinds of language skills did they tend to have when they arrived in your classroom?

Becky Palacios: Well when my students came into the dual language program, they had a variety of entry skills in multiple languages. Basically when they came in, in my program, some were total Spanish speakers, some were total English speakers and some had a mix of bilingualism of English and Spanish together so it was upon my group and my teaching group to be able to assess those skills, to find out where they were, what they were learning and how to best give that curriculum planning and instruction to those students coming into the classroom.

Bethanne Patrick: Can you give us an example of the kind of thing that you would do to integrate those groups of children?

Becky Palacios: Well one of the things that we did, because it was a dual language program and they were coming to us with different types of language skills and different types of dominance in the languages, we would give them an informal assessment and we would see where their language proficiency was stronger. But we would also divide them up into their strengths so that they would also have, for example if those Spanish speakers were really dominante in Spanish, we would pair them up with English language learners and English speakers. That would give them an opportunity to learn from one another in peer kinds of models because when you have a dual language program you want to be able to have that 50/50 type of environment where you don’t have all Spanish speakers or all English speakers together so we try to support their learning that way.

Bethanne Patrick: How did the kids respond to learning in a bilingual environment?

Becky Palacios: Well it was very exciting, of course because the children were very responsive. If you have an environment that allows children to take risks in language, it’s different for adults, don’t want to look funny when we’re speaking and learning a new language. But children, if they know that they can come in and talk and play and learn language while they’re learning about their peers and their environment, it’s really so much easier for children to take those risks and to try to develop that second language learning, whether it’s the English or the Spanish.

Bethanne Patrick: Excellent so let’s talk about some of your favorite, fun activities that help kids to build language skills.

Becky Palacios: Well first of all, of course, you have to have a wonderful environment. You have to have materials in that environment that support the children’s play and creativity. So if you walked into my classroom, for example, you would see different learning centers, music, art, science, social studies, literacy and books in all of those different centers are available. We would have a water play center, a sand center, computer center and all those activities that the children can also have choices in selecting, are very important as they start to practice their language, learn from books and as we have shared types of reading together and they can go and practice that vocabulary in those centers. And the teachers’re very responsible for it when they set up that learning environment.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s something from the child’s point of view so let’s look at the topic from that, when young ELL’s arrive at preschool for the first time, what are they feeling and thinking?

Becky Palacios: Well first of all they’re all crying. [laughter] They walk in, and this is normal for any child who has that separation anxiety. This is their first step into school, whether they’re three years old or their four year olds. I always wear tennis shoes the first day of school, tennis shoes to run after them cause sometimes they’re gonna run after mom or dad as they drop them off to school, grandma or grandpa. So we had to really sustain an environment early on, even through the preregistration process, through an orientation process, that allowed children to come and explore the classroom early, before they were actually enrolled, so they would be comfortable in that environment.

Bethanne Patrick: What are the other social and emotional needs the staff needs to watch out for in these cases?

Becky Palacios: Well, we always had to prepare ourselves to be able to support them, to be able to nurture them, to be very warm, very inviting. You want to have activities that first few weeks of school with the staff knowing what those are so that they can come back. You want them to come back so you want to have engaging activities in the native language, in the language that they’re learning as well. Your staff has to be aware, from the school principle to the secretary to the nurse to the cafeteria manager and the workers that are in there to the PE department, the library, now the teachers, the peer professional, all are invested in children’s good academic foundation. And part of it is, my philosophy is a quote that says, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.

Bethanne Patrick: Exactly.

Becky Palacios: And so when those kids come in you have to be ready. You have to be exciting. You have to enthusiastic. You have to have a very print rich, wealthy type of environment when it comes to wealth of knowledge and wealth of understanding from the teacher’s point of view, to accept the child but accept the family as well into that classroom.

Bethanne Patrick: And here’s a good point to follow up with, what if they’re new to the country?

Becky Palacios: That’s really important to the teacher to know who those parents are, to be able to make a bridge and a connection. For example, if those parents were Chinese and they came to me and I couldn’t speak Chinese, I had to try and find a way to have someone else who knew the language, to come and interpret, to help me to understand, to have some kind of common knowledge of pictures or a very simple parent letter that allows us to bridge that communication piece with one another but to try to make that native language connection it’s very important at the beginning. And if it can’t be done, you have to find ways that you can do it through pictures, through short letters, that you can create that if you know that type of environment is going to be crucial for those parents, you need to have it prepared in advance.

Bethanne Patrick: I’ve heard of the silent period, what is that?

Becky Palacios: Well the silent period is when the children are enrolled in the classroom and as you’re teaching and as you’re providing examples and you’re working through curriculum and your instruction, those children are just there like sponges. They’re absorbing. And just because they’re not participating or answering those questions in the language, that doesn’t mean that they’re not learning. And so that silent period means they’re internalizing just the structures and the sounds of the new language.

Bethanne Patrick: Very interesting. In your program, what do the teachers, staff and administrators do to make students feel welcome?

Becky Palacios: Well we have quite a variety of activities. Of course one of the first things that we did after we realized that parents needed something other than just a meeting to remember so many details of the new program and maybe new schooling environment. Maybe some of these parents had never been in school before and never finished school, we created a very simple handbook. We took pictures of all the staff. We put them in the handbook. We talked about when do they eat? Basic things, about you know, basically Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you know how do they go to the restroom and when do they go and how can they go and what is the support for the food program, the lunch program? What do we do in case we have a problem? Who is the counselor? Who is the principle? How does the school function? How does it work? Because an American school may be very different from what they were used to so we try to bridge that with a little handbook, with an orientation meeting.

We also had throughout the year, to sustain parent’s knowledge of the school and school setting and things that they could do at home, we had orientation meetings throughout the year on different school subjects, art, music, science, social studies, math, reading and we had the parents come in and participate. We had family nights. Parents that worked during the day couldn’t come in you know during that daytime period, we had them at night. We try to structure different types of meetings at different times of the year.

Bethanne Patrick: And if bilingual language support isn’t an option, what are some strategies that staff can use to communicate with the ELL’s?

Becky Palacios: Well it all depends on how the program is structured. There’s a variety of programs for English language learners. One, which to me was a very strong model, is the dual language model, where you teach, you know 50/50 in the two languages or 90/10 in other languages, we’ll talk about later. There’s also a 50/50 model which is half and half, which is what I work in. There’s also a bilingual transition model where if the students are bilingual they are taught in their native language as they transition into the English learning. But there’s also an English language learner program, many parts of the country call them ESL programs, and those can vary. They can be pull out, they can be pull in, they can be different types of settings and the teacher in the classroom needs to know who those children are, identify where they are in their English language learning, provide a lot of pictures, a lot of scaffolds, which means that you’re going to do some modeling, some repetition, some things that you can manipulate and the children manipulate it while they’re learning and hearing the language. So there’s a lot of strategies for English language learners, which is a tougher model for children coming in because they have no native language support.

Bethanne Patrick: And you mentioned visuals a bit but how about gestures as well? Let’s talk about those two things.

Becky Palacios: Exactly, you can see my hands moving so I’m just very in tune with that. A lot of manipulatives and gestures and touching your face and talking about eyes or body, the main things that children learn at the very beginning, even as babies, in a native language. You know your body parts. You want to teach them eyes, nose, mouth, so gesturing, using models, using pictures, using technology, all those are important types of strategies that the teacher can use to help bridge that language support.

Bethanne Patrick: Excellent, what kind, let’s talk about assessments. What kinds of assessments will help the staff evaluate the young ELL’s language skills?

Becky Palacios: Well there’s different types of assessments. You can have formal assessments and you can have informal assessments. And many times those formal assessments come from either the state or the school district or even that local level that comes up with certain types of formal assessments and those can be in many forms. The others that we use in the classroom are more informal types of assessments, children’s drawings and their journal dictations and how they were maybe communicating at the beginning only if I’m teaching in Spanish, they were maybe only speaking in English because they were English monolingual speakers and I’m trying to teach them Spanish. So maybe at the very beginning of the year with this journal that lasts throughout the year, I can see them interspersing now, Spanish target language and Spanish uses I’m teaching them. So journals play an important role in children’s ability to draw and talk about what they draw and their language transitions.

Others are content assessments where you can look at your curriculum and your instruction and assess them directly what you taught them, cause we don’t want to pull any punches with kids and ask them questions about things they have not studied. So everything that I wrote, as far as assessments, came from the instruction that we had. You’ve heard about the backwards design where you teach with the end in mind so I knew that I would have to assess them on, let’s say, parts of a plant, or the colors, or how many letters they knew or whatever the skills are for that theme. Then the assessments came from what we were teaching and we could pull them one by one, we could do it in a group setting, they could do it by sorting or showing us and then they could start to verbalize.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s what I was going to ask you about, oral language assessments. How do you conduct those? What’s the best way?

Becky Palacios: And part of it is, is just pictures and the things that you’re working with already as the children, for example, are sorting colors into different sets, then we can talk about what those are. What color is this? ¿Qué color es? And you’re using the target vocabulary of that language that you’re working with so oral assessments have to have an authentic oral type of situation.

Bethanne Patrick: Excellent, excellent, what are the benefits of assessing language skills in the native language when it’s possible?

Becky Palacios: Well definitely you want to know how they’re growing cognitively because we know that if a child is coming in, for example a Spanish speaker coming in and you’re asking them critical, deep thinking questions in English they’re not ready to handle yet, then you know that you’re setting them up for failure in that assessment. So what we try to do is ask them the questions in that native language, deeper, cognitive thinking skill, whether they’re English speakers or Spanish speakers or whatever the language is, so that we know that they’re growing cognitively while they’re starting to learn the English.

So especially for English language learner programs, where the children basically are coming in from multiple countries with a native language and you’re bridging them to that English, if you can have English language support in very pictorial forms where they can demonstrate that in an oral proficiency. We know that the children are going to listen to the language first and are able to point or separate or gesture, is one of the first steps. The expressive is a little harder and that’s a deeper skill.

Bethanne Patrick: Well how can the information that you learn from the language assessment, guide the instruction in the classroom?

Becky Palacios: Well, when we know where they are language wise and where they are content wise, then we can continue to bridge that over time. Because we know that language learning doesn’t occur in one year or even in a few months, it’s over time. And one of the things that we want to remember is that assessment needs to happen over time. So if at this critical milestone of whatever this assessment may be, if they don’t get it that first time, then you know you have to continue to reassess that throughout the year and into the subsequent school years.

Bethanne Patrick: Some of the assessment tools and strategies that you found most helpful in classrooms, what are those?

Becky Palacios: Well, there’s a lot of different strategies that we use. I thought to me, in this day in age, technology was very powerful. Using an interactive white board was one of the things that I needed to do at the very beginning because I knew children were learning in multiple ways. So wrote a grant and was able to get interactive white boards for our three and four year old classrooms. And using those strategies and using them in ongoing assessment and you can see whether that child can move this picture over, or hear whether or not they got it, whether or not they can classify or organize or sort on a T-chart, different things that go with one another. All those types of assessment things are very important and the best type of assessment is the one that you’re actually showing as you’re working toward it.

Bethanne Patrick: You’ve been talking about this but let’s go through some other guidelines for assessing such young children.

Becky Palacios: Well it just depends on the program and the curriculum. We can assess them in their physical development. It’s not just the cognitive things but can they hop, can they jump, can they throw a ball, can they do those types of things. We have language assessments as well that we just talked about. We have content assessments that are important. We have social, emotional guidelines now that the country is very well aware of, is how children behave in social situations. So there’s a variety of assessments in different aspects of their children’s growth and development that we can look at.

Bethanne Patrick: Are there things that we shouldn’t be doing?

Becky Palacios: Well we know that at the three and four year old level, pencil paper tasks are not appropriate at that time. They’re not quite ready to bubble stuff in or look at things like that but they can do it in a really neat T-chart where you can put yarn out on the table and ask them to classify or sort and you break things up into groups and they can move things from one place to another. And all that is really good authentic assessment because it’s basically what’s going to be a pencil paper task later on, really there in a real, real situation for children.

Bethanne Patrick: Excellent, now how did you differentiate instruction for children who had different language levels?

Becky Palacios: Well it just depended on where they were so once we had a language assessment and whether we found out if they were receptive, which means that they understood the language but couldn’t quite speak it, articulate words or they were expressive and they could really just chatter on in that language that they were learning, then we could look at those different language levels whether they were you know preproduction, whether they were already in a production stage where they could really develop that language and I was able to pull books and activities and games and things like that where we could play and use that play, for example let’s say we took a matching game and we were able to find two things that were the same.

Let’s say they were insects and so learning about insects in a second language is really good because those cognits are very important in science in math for children and they’re able to transfer those words. Those words are basically the same, like “science” and “ciencia”. So when we were able to have children turn and flip those cards and match them up and able to name what those were, that gave them a really good, not only visual but a tactile work that they were able to do and also a matching, which you know, classifying things in their mind, whether these two things go together or not.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s so fantastic. I’d like to wrap up by turning to the big picture and the question of language instruction. It can become very controversial and political, as you know. How could a preschool program decide what kind of language instruction works best for their students?

Becky Palacios: And of course when we look at that and we look at programmatic issues, we need to see who those children are, who the families are. So if there’s a great abundance of especially in my situation there were a lot of Hispanic families moving in with a lot of Spanish, then a dual language program is going to be very rich because then it benefits populations of children whose families want them to learn the Spanish and are losing their heritage language. And we have that situation in our school where the parents and the grandparents say, I can no longer speak to my child. He’s learned only English but I want them to continue their native language, Spanish speaking ability and let’s do this dual language program cause it’s going to help everyone.

Some situations don’t work that way. You need to look at those English language learners coming in from, let’s say 30 different countries. So when you have that type of situation, diversity in your classroom, then an English language learner program is best, ESL program. There’re also terms where they can come in and use ELL strategies to teach those children and a lot of teachers are learning about that and one of the best resources that I found has been the Colorin Colorado website because as I go out and I work with teachers who are immersed in these type of situations and they’re saying, I don’t know what to do, the website is one of the most perfect things that they can find for multiple amounts of information when it comes to research, implementation, curriculum and resources.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s fantastic and how about the parents? Do you survey the parents as well?

Becky Palacios: We did when we initially started the program. The parents of course need to know what is going to be used for their child. Some parents were really adamant about saying you know what, I really want my child to learn only English, and that’s been one of the difficulties in explaining parents that you need to start them in the native language to be able to bridge them into their strong English learning component because once you have that strong base and that foundation in the home, then it’s much easier to transfer that. Like to use myself as an example, I learned both languages simultaneously at the home with grandparents supporting both languages so sometimes we’ll have that where you know the child is learning both languages and we have those opportunities at home. Whatever language the parents are using to support that is very important.

Bethanne Patrick: Thank you, Becky.

Becky Palacios: You’re welcome.

Bethanne Patrick: Thanks so much. That marks the end of this segment but not our discussion. Please join us for part two of this webcast when we’ll discuss curriculum and academics in ELL preschool programs. You can learn more about early literacy for English language learners and watch the other segments of this webcast, at www.colorincolorado.org.

[background music] Funding for this Colorin Colorado webcast is provided by the American Federation of Teachers with additional support from the National Council of La Raza.