Well Read
Literacy development is a longtime passion of Georgia Southern University College of Education Professor Sally Brown. For the past several years, she has conducted research aimed at exploring ways to help elementary school students struggling to read, especially children learning English for the first time.
Brown spent 13 years in the classroom, teaching reading and writing to boys and girls from kindergarten through third grade. “I worked with English language learners that struggled, specifically, Spanish-speaking students,” said Brown. “I was bothered by the way other teachers treated them, so I became an advocate for immigrant students and their families.”
Instead of using traditional books or texts, Brown has introduced unique classroom approaches and tools, such as graphic novels and e-readers to help students grasp difficult English language concepts.
After receiving a grant from the National Council of Teachers of English, Brown began her research with a group of first graders using graphic novels as her primary instructional platform. Much like a comic strip, the genre uses colorful illustration, well-defined scenes and text placed inside speech bubbles, so that characters and action is apparent on the page.
Graphic novels differ from traditional books because of their limited word counts and abundance of pictures that aid a student’s interpretation of the story. They have become an innovative way to explore the reading, writing and thinking processes of young English language learners.
“Graphic novels present stories told through dialogue and can help kids that struggle with reading,” said Brown. “For these students—especially the English language learners—I saw a lot of benefits. For example, they were able to use the pictures to develop the context of the story. So, instead of using words to describe a setting, the students were able to look at the picture and recognize the location.
“These students were struggling with decoding text, which affects their comprehension. The graphic novels left space in their brains to focus on comprehension instead of decoding. Students often feel that a book is more manageable, just by having fewer words and more pictures on the page,” she said. Some of Brown’s other reading strategies included teaching students to look at punctuation marks, which helped them distinguish between the narrator and what a character is actually saying.
For the past two years, Brown has followed the same group of students. Throughout the process, she has found significant improvements in overall literacy and in technology development as well. The third graders have advanced from graphic novels to focus on digital works using Nook® e-readers as an emerging platform for learning.
“The students are reading about American heroes, and then creating stories on Meograph. They can add the images and use notes they have taken on the Nook® to create text and record audio,” she added. “One of my students uses Spanish as her first language. With the multi-modal features on the Nook®, she can tap on a photo and a word is repeated. For example, if there is a photo of a fish in a fish tank, she can tap on the photo and the word ‘fish’ is repeated in English. Not only does the student have the ability to learn English vocabulary, but also read and record their own voice reading the words.”
Brown anticipates her next phase of research will integrate poetry into literacy development. “The new grant I have applied for explores kinetic typography, which focuses on the ways students can use animation and movement to create meaning with poetry,” she said.