How Phonics Supports Learning Across 35 Languages in this HISD Middle School
How Phonics Supports Learning Across 35 Languages in this HISD Middle School
In the last four years, Houston ISD has sought to expand literacy by breaking it down to the basics.
Investments in curriculums like the evidence-based Science of Reading have yielded results, with thousands of more students meeting grade-level standards on standardized tests across subject matters. No matter a student’s age, equipping them with literacy fundamentals ensures that nobody falls through the cracks.
At Revere Middle School, explicit instruction on how letters sound and their relationship to each other serve a particular purpose: English-learning across 35 languages—many of which share little similarities with English.
With 64% of students classified as English-learners at the campus—higher than the district average of 37%—a single classroom might hold speakers of Pashto, Turkish, and Arabic. Because students may not share a primary language with their peers or teachers, phonetic instruction gives everybody a common means to communicate while they are immersed in English-language classes.
This approach has produced some of the strongest English-learner growth numbers in the district, staff say.
“If you stick with the process and you stick with the consistency and you pour into those students, by the end of the year, they will grow and they will spike,” said Brandon Brewington, the campus’ English Language Development Interventionist.
Meeting a Range of Needs
The use of reading interventions in HISD serves a wide range of students with accommodations, many of which would otherwise fall behind in all subjects without a foundation that could support high school or college-level reading.
The variance of needs are particularly true for English-learners at Revere Middle School who may have never had English instruction, Brewington said.
To close these wide comprehension gaps, literacy-based interventions are essential for students to continue attending grade-level classes. The campus uses a district-wide model known as Structured Linguistic Phonics (SLP) class, which explicitly demonstrates how mouth shapes form sounds and how letter combinations connect to form words, sentences, and readable text.
Sanaullah, a seventh-grade student in his second year at Revere Middle School, said that breaking down words into consonants and vowels during his SLP block made it easier to speak, write, and understand others.
"It helped us learn more and then speak better," Sanaullah said.
Students enrolled in SLP also participate in a “Pre-teach” block, where teachers preview the next day’s lesson objectives, including vocabulary and concepts. The goal is that these students will be more likely to participate in class the next day and put their learning into practice.
"Because they are prepared, they're able to answer the questions in the classroom," Assistant Principal Angela Williams said. "They're able to be more confident about what is taking place because they got it yesterday.”
Learning Within Context
For most of the school day at Revere Middle School, all students are placed in grade-level classes. For students with learning accommodations, including English-learners, tools are prepared by staff beforehand to help them with any comprehension gaps.
As the campus’ English Language Development Interventionists, Brewington and Selam Fofanah work with core subject teachers to provide these supports individualized to every student, which could include:
- Clear pictures and diagrams
- Breaking down of larger texts into smaller, more manageable pieces
- Providing fill-in-the-blank sentence starters to build speaking confidence
- Providing a word bank with definitions in a primary language and more accessible English terms
Brewington said that rather than requiring English-learning students to follow one-to-one translations for the duration of the lesson, which places an additional task on the student, these supports help learners use context, prior knowledge, and multiple modes of representation to find new ways to use English.
“Students can see a new concept and process it in their language, but also associate it with the English language,” Brewington said.
Community Connection
For students navigating a new language, a supportive community and empathetic staff plays a vital role in sustaining academic growth, Brewington said. The language development cultivated in Revere Middle School classrooms will impact the student’s trajectory for the rest of their lives.
"Being able to process the language, being able to read will absolutely set them up for opportunities in the future,” he said.
Brewington said the campus’ diverse staff is uniquely positioned to create relationships between the incoming family and the school. At any given time, no matter the language or dialect, there is a staff member that can communicate directly with students and families.
In a similar way, Principal Shani Wyllie said students are supportive of their peers, even across language barriers.
"They take care of each other and they understand everybody's at a different place in their learning and their development of their language, and so they're very helpful and caring and considerate,” she said.