CPlan Intensive Reading - A Plan Overview

Plan -  Intensive Reading Intervention 

ESOL Principles

ESOL Online recommends that "Incorporating these seven ESOL principles into your planning will help your students to make both academic progress and language progress in all curriculum learning areas." In planning this intervention, I want to incorporate most, if not all, of these principles into this instruction of intensive reading. Table 1 below shows those 7 ESOL principles. Knowing my learner (principle 1) through all the measures I have used has led me to focus my teaching on areas of needs identified about them. Some outcomes (principles 2 & 3) are incorporated into the overview of my plan which will be shown in table 2 below. Principles 5 & 6 are incorporated as outcomes to be achieved in the instruction. There will be an attempt to put a focus on principle 7 throughout the implementation and practice of the plan.

Table 1: ESOL Principles
Principle 1 Know your learner	Principle 2  Identify the learning outcomes	Principle 3 Maintain the same learning outcomes to all learners	Principle 4 Make the abstract concrete
Principle 5 Provide multiple opportunities for authentic language use	Principle 6 Ensure a balance between receptive and productive language	Principle 7 Include opportunities for monitoring and self-evaluation

Plan Overview

Table 2 below shows an overview of the plan for intensive reading as an intervention in this inquiry. There is a focus on learning different text types and their features, deliberate vocabulary development, use of reading strategies to identify ideas and meanings in the texts, grammatical forms, and language skills and comprehension. All of these are domains of reading comprehension.    

Table 2: Overview of Plan for Intensive Reading Intervention
Text Types		Titles	Outcomes
Fiction	Myths & Legends	The Sons of Ma’afu	To acquire new English vocabulary To practice using reading strategies to understand ideas in the texts To learn the structure & features of this particular text type To develop listening and speaking skills through the reading interactive activities To practice writing as output activities (summarizing, character description, expressing opinion)
		Origin of Taro and  Authority in Samoa
	Narratives	Mata i Pusi When Love is Blind Sarah and her stepmother The old grandfather and his grandson	To acquire new English vocabulary To practice reading strategies To learn structure & features of text type (orientation, complication, resolution) To learn different aspects of a text (setting, plot,  characters, theme, language features) To identify evidence from text to support To practice writing as output activities (personal response)
	Explanation	Matariki	To acquire new English vocabulary To practice reading strategies (prediction, prior knowledge, summarizing) To identify main ideas in a text  To learn structure & features of text type To practice writing as output activities (explanation essay)
Creative	Poetry	How to listen Sparkle Fish How to listen I met a Dragon face to face	To acquire new English vocabulary To practice reading strategies (prediction, prior knowledge, visualization,summarizing) To identify main ideas in a text To acquire poetic devices (personification, onomatopoeia, key words, scanning,  summarizing) To practice writing as output activities (explanation essay, thematic essay)
Non-fiction	Explanation	ANZAC Typhoon 19 Natural Disaster Cyclones Climate Change	To acquire new English vocabulary To identify author’s purpose in a text To practice reading strategies (prediction, prior knowledge,visualization, graphic organizer, summarizing,) To identify main ideas in a text & learn information about relevant topics in their contexts To acquire poetic devices (personification, onomatopoeia, key words, scanning,  summarizing) To practice writing as output activities (explanation essay, narrative essay, express opinion)
	Autobiography	Martin Luther King	To acquire new English vocabulary To identify author’s purpose in a text To practice reading strategies (prediction, prior knowledge,visualization, graphic organizer, summarizing,) To identify main ideas in a text & learn information about relevant topics in their contexts

Other Features of the Instruction

Text Types

The results from the English Language Learning Progression (ELLP) show that learners in my inquiry group can only read stage 1 texts which are short texts with ideas presented in a simple sequence, containing simple and compound sentences with a variety of sentence beginnings. and usually no more than two clauses per sentence, use varied high-frequency words and some words that are lower frequency and topic-specific, and that are strongly supported by the context. Texts also have about three sentences per page and are well supported by illustrations.

I feel that learners should be exposed to what Krashen (1982, 1985) refers to  as comprehensible input (i + 1) which is input that is slightly beyond the current level of competence of the language learner. So if i is the language learner’s current level of competence in the second language, then i + 1 is the next immediate step along the development continuum. Therefore, if the goal is to assist the language learner progress in their task, it is essential to provide the student/learner with comprehensible input [i +1]. I feel that exposing learners to different text types or genres which are beyond the short simple text structures of ELLP stage 1 texts would be helpful in increasing the reading comprehension ability of the learners.

I also feel that exposing learners to different types of texts would be a good practice in preparing them for the PAT & STAR post-intervention reading assessments which might have some of these variety of text types assessed. Their knowledge and familiarity with these texts and their features might help increase their reading comprehension ability.

Listening, Speaking, Writing Activities

ESOL principle recommends a balance between receptive and productive language, so this will be incorporated as part of the instructional strategies in this practice. Learners indicated in the questionnaire that they prefer listening to the teacher reading to them rather than them reading out texts to the teacher. This strategy would be used in this instruction, and by doing that learners would practice listening. Speaking would be through some interactions about aspects of the texts, discussions of ideas and meanings, and questions asked. There would be writing activities as output follow-up tasks from reading activities.