Creating 'magic' for at–risk readers
Sometimes knowledge has an almost magical quality. When people learn a better way to do a familiar task, they can create something of value literally out of nothing.
Joyce Tardaguila-Harth has seen the magic happen firsthand. As a doctoral researcher in UF’s Department of Special Education, she launched a project that taught migrant farmworkers how to read to their children – with surprising and heartwarming results.
“I was really just looking for a good, unexplored topic for a dissertation,” Tardaguila-Harth said. “When I looked into it, it was a lot deeper and more powerful than I had imagined.”
When Tardaguila first became a special education teacher, she didn’t intend to focus on the issues of students who speak English as a second language. But as a non-native speaker herself – Tardaguila grew up in Puerto Rico and learned English at age 14 – she found herself becoming her school’s “go to” person for issues related to Spanish-speaking students.
In that role, Tardaguila-Harth encountered a problem that has confronted many teachers of students from migrant families. Migrant kids were entering kindergarten woefully unprepared to read. Spanish-language children’s books are often hard to come by in the United States, and poverty often keeps them out of the reach of migrant families. Many migrant workers have low levels of formal education, and are nervous even about reading in Spanish.
Tardaguila-Harth wondered if there was a way these parents could do better, even with the meager resources available to them.
“Even if you can’t read well, there are things you can do to teach your children,” she said. “You can teach them the sounds that the letters make, or teach them that words go from left to right.”
As a doctoral researcher, Tardaguila-Harth developed a curriculum for teaching migrant parents how to read to their kids –incorporating some of the reading techniques other researchers had observed in affluent households. Prior studies had shown that affluent parents are more likely to ask kids questions, prompt them to predict what will happen in a story, and review what was learned.
When she took her reading to migrant farmworkers in Alachua County, Tardaguila-Harth found a community of parents who wanted desperately to teach their kids both Spanish and English. Despite their low incomes, some parents had searched bargain bins and dollar stores to provide books for their children. The problem came when those parents – self-conscious about their own reading abilities – opened the books.
“They felt like they were on stage,” Tardaguila-Harth said. “Typically, a parent would stand there and read to a child out loud, from the beginning of the story to the end, without even showing the pictures to the kids. I remember one girl struggling to look over her mother’s shoulder as she read.”
Tardaquila-Harth explained the value of a more interactive reading style, and taught parents to ask question, wait for responses, and review.
Over just a few weeks, she saw impressive results.
“We tested the children before and after the intervention, and their spoken language skills improved dramatically – even in English,” she said.
Many of the children knew a bit of English before the study began, mostly from watching Spongebob Squarepants and other cartoons. But now the kids were talking back to Spongebob.
“Instead of just watching passively, they were saying, ‘oh, he has green pants,’ and making similar observations,” Tardaguila-Harth said. “They were using language more, and as a result, they were getting better at it.”
Tardaguila-Harth recalls visiting one home and finding a group of adult men squatting on the floor with children’s books, as a five-year-old child explained the text to them. It was something that wouldn’t have happened just a few weeks earlier.
“The interactions between the parents and the kids changed completely,” Tardaguila-Harth said. “The children were thrilled to be able to interact with their parents, and the parents were thrilled to be involved in the education of their kids.”
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