New Teacher Tips: How to Develop Oral Proficiency with Early Literacy Instruction

Oral instruction has a specific function when it comes to bridging the gaps between word and text skills for the ESL and ELL students. In order to bring ELLs to the level of oral proficiency that is needed for acquiring word-text skills in a mainstream classroom, "extensive oral English development must be incorporated into successful literacy instruction" (August and Shanahan, 2006, p. 4). Therefore, ESL and ELL teachers should use oral instruction to teach text based skills.

According to current standards of mainstream instruction, ELL teachers are required to adapt their instruction based on the proficiency level (beginner, intermediate, or advanced) of the entering ELL student. Assuming that ELL students know the starting skills, teachers need to review elements of word, sound-letter correspondences, sentences, and the complex skill of fluently reading a paragraph or a text. The research of Spolsky also refers to the fact that individual language learners develop oral language or literacy later than reading proficiency. (Spolsky, 1989) "Oral language provides the foundation for literacy development (Genesee, Lindholm-Leary, Saunders, & Christian, 2005)" (Barone, p. 83). Moreover, the entering proficiency of students who enter ELL mainstream classes implies they have acquired proficiency in fluency in both reading and writing. ESL and ELL teachers should work with a wide range of oral proficiency objectives based on the ESL differential language acquisition component in instructional planning and the assessment of oral objectives. It makes sense, therefore, for an ESL teacher to collaborate early on with an ELL teacher on core oral and reading content objectives intended for both ESL and ELL students. Their collaborative work should bridge the gaps of reading instruction by targeting areas of fluency, vocabulary and comprehension of language proficiency levels.

Knowing students' oral abilities helps refine the knowledge needed for ESL/ELL teachers' collaboration as they target oral English proficiency objectives and implement instruction accordingly. "The National Research Council reported (Snow et al., 1998) that reading in English should be delayed until students have a small amount of oral English proficiency" (Barone, p. 108).

ESL and ELL teachers can use an oral proficiency scale to determine students' fluency in a variety of oral tasks such as reading word lists. ESL and ELL teachers collaborate on many different areas to meet the needs of their students. They can decide upon areas of meaning-based instruction as it affects their reading, oral, and written language goals and objectives. Using the theoretical knowledge of approach (i.e., the theory of the nature of language learning) and design, (i.e., defining and organizing the level of linguistic content to fit the age and linguistic abilities) ELL/ESL teachers can also work with global text approaches to generate practical ideas for text-building activities. More particularly, ESL students need additional word and sentence coverage using the core in order to bridge the gaps between word-text based skills.

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