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"Can he make meaning of texts?" This question troubled teachers working with recent immigrant students. They used a wordless graphic novel and students' other available resources-their languages, their experiences, and their ability to engage each other in their inquiries-to make meaning with non-native English speakers.
It was the third week of our study on how wordless postmodern picturebooks support recent immigrant students as readers. We had been holding biweekly, after-school pláticas literarias or bilingual "literature discussions" with a group of six volunteer immigrant children from different classrooms within the same school. One day, while we were waiting for the children to arrive, Ms. McDonald (all participants' names are pseudonyms), one of the student's homeroom teachers, shared her concerns about Ryan, a child participant in our study, "Are you doing any kind of reading assessment in your study? He seems really lost in my classroom. I would like to know if he can make meaning of texts because he is silent in my class." She wondered about his level of participation in our group discussions and was unsure about his reading abilities in her integrated social studies and language arts class.
Her concerns surprised us because his participation in this after-school literacy project had been steadily increasing. In fact, by the time Ms. McDonald voiced her concerns, Ryan had become one of the most active participants in the group. In retrospect, Ms. McDonald's worries should not have surprised us: Ryan, a Spanish-speaker, had been in school in the United States for only three months, and Ms. McDonald, who was not bilingual, could not communicate with him effectively. Consequently, she had limited ways of assessing his reading. Ms. McDonald's ability to assess what Ryan could do was limited to his score of "pre-emergent" on the Arizona English Language Learners Assessment (AZELLA), his classroom assignments (required in English), and his limited participation in class.
Because our discussions of books with Ryan were bilingual, we had a better opportunity to learn about his comprehension of texts and about what he could do as a reader, so we shared our insights with Ms. McDonald. Through this article, we want to share some of these same insights with the many other teachers who are worried about the "Ryans" and other immigrant...