Developing Reading Comprehension for Experienced Multilinguals

By Beth Skelton & Tan Huynh

I (Beth) was asked by a team of middle school teachers to model a literacy lesson in one of their 7th-grade classes. The goal was to help the class, comprised of 26 multilingual learners, develop skills to comprehend grade-level text. Nearly every student in the class had been labeled as “EL” for five or more years; they were all experienced multilinguals.?

The teachers had already tried several strategies designed to support these students including reading the texts aloud and simplifying them. While all of the students could decode most of the words in the assigned text, they struggled to understand the complex sentences. Therefore, I decided to try a collaborative reading protocol (Huynh & Skelton, 2023) during the model lesson. Before class, I prepared the text by chunking longer paragraphs and adding a few labeled visuals. The teachers purposefully partnered the students with a peer who spoke their same heritage language and had a similar literacy level.?

During the lesson, I asked the students to follow the collaborative reading protocol shown in the figure below. The partners worked together to make meaning of the text and annotate it. While students were reading with their classmates, the teachers observed different partnerships and noted how they were making meaning from the text.

After participating in this collaborative reading activity, the students in the class commented that they could understand the text better when they read the article in chunks and discussed it with a partner. After the class, the teachers shared their observational notes. They were amazed at how well the students could read and comprehend the chunks of text.?

This collaborative reading protocol process helps develop comprehension in several ways. Chunking the text encourages students to process a small set of details at a time rather than just summarizing at the end. Collaborating with a partner allows them to clarify unknown words or concepts, ask each other questions, and make meaning together. In turn, this develops students’ self-efficacy and their ability to comprehend texts when reading independently.?

When done successfully, this collaborative reading protocol integrates all language domains (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) in the service of comprehending text. Scaffolding reading for experienced multilinguals in this way creates the conditions for their success.