6A—RTI Response

I was most surprised by the contradiction between the reading in Essential Linguistics (Freeman & Freeman, 2004) and the RTI Resources and Strategies by Karen Sabados about teaching and assessing phonics.  Freeman and Freeman (2004) were adamant about the need to teach and assess phonics skills in the context of real words and pieces of writing, yet Sabados suggested using DIBELS and emphasized the importance of assessing nonsense words.  I think as an ELL, it would be more challenging to pronounce the nonsense word in the correct language.  I was just thinking about the word able and how easy it would be to pronounce in either Spanish or English out of context.  For our last course, I also found much research that proves DIBELS does not accurately predict reading success and has a lot of corruption connected to it.

Although it makes a lot of sense now that I think about it, I was surprised at the difficulty in distinguishing between a learning disability and language barrier for ELL students.  It seems like the best way to tell is to assess how that student uses his or her first language.  Given the wide variety of languages that ELLs can speak, that could be challenging and equally challenging to know what proficiency should sound like for a student at a given level. 

What I learned is the importance of working together to help assess ELL students.  Parents need to be included for many reasons, but also because they can be helpful in assessing the students’ first language ability.  The school team also has to work together—ESL teacher, RtI team, classroom teacher and student.  There are so many factors that can influence a ELLs reading ability and all these people provide valuable knowledge to make the assessments and interventions the most effective.