View Content #22179

Jessica Seator is the AVID Coordinator at Hillsboro High School in Nashville, Tennessee.

As an Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) college readiness teacher/coordinator and a L2 Spanish teacher at an urban school with high levels of poverty, I am intimately aware of the relationship between educational access for students at low levels of socioeconomic development and literacy. Though teacher preparation programs tend to address these issues as they relate to L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition separately, I have found that educators are better prepared to increase access to high levels of education if they learn and consider how L1 and L2 strategies complement one another and can be used in concert. After all, even learners with high levels of fluency in the L1 may struggle in the L2 if they are unable to transfer their L1 literacy strategies to the L2. My experience implementing AVID’s framework for critical reading drove me to this realization.

The first step in AVID’s critical reading process is to help learners develop metacognitive strategies for reading. In this approach, learners begin by identifying key terms in a L1 source text. After teaching AVID, I soon realized that I could increase the cognitive rigor in my lower-level L2 classes by layering on this process to our previous reading activity of identifying cognates and using knowledge of linguistic patterns to decipher and predict meaning.  As a result, students began to collaborate to analyze texts for discerning key words based on context rather than other indicators. For example, when students were identifying key words in a L2 source text, they began to consider if every cognate in the text was essential to understanding to the main idea or if the students selected those words as a mere function of their familiarity. The same result came to pass with familiar and polysyllabic words; learners began to focus on whether or not these words were actually key terms or if the students were overemphasizing the importance of the words due to their apparent levels of complexity.

In my experience, I find most students fall into two types of text markers- “polka dot markers” versus “zebra stripe markers”. Students who tend to randomly select any word as a key word have papers that appear randomly polka dotted in bright highlighter.  Closer inspection might reveal students are choosing too many non-essential terms because they cannot determine which words should gain priority.  The other extreme pattern found with novice text markers is that they highlight entire phrases or sentences and thus create the appearance of zebra stripes across the text.  This tends to indicate confusion between identifying main idea and identifying familiar content.

In sum, conversations about text marking lay a foundation for reading critically and open opportunities for students at all levels of literacy to move beyond comprehension to textual analysis. While AVID’s critical reading curriculum delves much further than the identification of key words that what I have discussed here, the magic of the framework lies in the simplicity of asking students to proceed step-by-step from word-level analysis to textual analysis. With this approach, cognitive rigor becomes accessible in any language and at any level. Simply put, we can never solve the issue of access if we do not encourage students to take the first step.