Read-On STARTALK: Developing Reading Literacy in CFL Learners

Program Description

The Read-On STARTALK program has offered in-person teacher training workshops almost every summer from 2012 to 2023 at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

From 2012-2018 the program included teachers from elementary, middle school, high school, and college programs. In 2021, during the Covid years, the program was entirely on-line and included college and high school teachers. In 2023 the program involved on-line and in-person components and included middle school, high school, and college teachers.

Each year, participants learn research-supported approaches to reading literacy instruction and work in grade-level teams to develop thematically-based, student-centered teaching materials that integrate reading with the other communication skills of speaking, listening, and writing. The final products, thematic units differentiated by grade- and proficiency-level, following ACTFL's World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages (the “Standards”), are presented in this website by year.

The Read-On Approach

• Research to best-practices: We consult research on what successful readers know at different stages of literacy acquisition in Chinese and other languages to develop best practices in reading literacy instruction.
  
  
• Backward Design: We follow the principles of Backward Design, guiding our participants to identify learning objectives, to create assessment tasks that demonstrate evidence of learning, and then to design student-centered instructional tasks that help their students master each step of the reading literacy process.
  
  
• World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages: We incorporate ACTFL's Standards, guiding our participants to design lessons that integrate the different modes of spoken and written communication, and to include a focus on cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities.

Program Goals

• Collaboration across grade levels to develop research-informed best practices in character and text literacy instruction for CFL learners.
  
  
• Promotion of cooperation and articulation across grade levels.
  
  
• Development of Standards-based, student-centered, thematic units that incorporate character and text literacy instruction and practice at each of the four grade levels.
  
  
• Dissemination of these instructional units through websites hosted by professional organizations and educational institutions.
  
  

  The Steps to Reading Literacy and Yearly Program Focus

  Reading literacy involves the acquisition of lower- and higher-level skills and knowledge, each level building upon the skills and knowledge mastered at the levels below. Over the years, we have expanded our focus to include all of the major steps to reading literacy in Chinese. Here is the year-to-year program focus:

   

• 2012-2016: Character and Word literacy (focus on character structure and word spacing).
  
  
• 2017-2018: Character and Word literacy (focus on character structure and word spacing), Reading for literal and inferential comprehension.
  
  
• 2021: Character and Word literacy (word spacing, lexical compounding, morphological awareness), Syntactic awareness (phrase and sentence comprehension), Reading for literal and inferential comprehension and making evaluative judgements.
  
  
• 2023: Character and Word literacy (word spacing, lexical compounding, morphological awareness, Syntactic awareness (phrase and sentence comprehension), Text organization and cohesion (discourse awareness), Reading for literal and inferential comprehension and making evaluative judgements.