Barriers to ESL Reading Literacy Every Teacher Should Know

Teaching reading to ESL students can be more complex than teaching it to native English speakers for a variety of reasons. ESL students face challenges reading English that they don’t typically encounter with their native language because there are many different cognitive processes taking place when reading in a second language. For this reason, every ESL teacher should be familiar with the following 3 barriers that ESL students commonly may face when it comes to reading development and how to address them.

1. Anxiety Issues

Among ESL students, reading anxiety can be a major problem, and it can stem from many different sources. The most common reason that students experience reading anxiety is lack of confidence in their ability to read. When this is the case, the obvious solution is to help your students build up their confidence by providing them with support, appropriate materials, and plenty of praise when they do well.

Provide Scaffolding

The type of support you provide to them should be a scaffolded form, which means that you provide just enough assistance so they feel comfortable with reading while also giving them enough room to do some things on their own. Think of this support as similar to training wheels on a bike where the goal is to eventually remove the training wheels once a student’s reading confidence and skill set have grown.

Make Reading Easier

If students are struggling with a specific type of reading material, you can always introduce some lower-level materials that are easier to read as warm-ups, which can bring students out of their shells and reduce anxiety at the beginning of a lesson.

Foreign Language Anxiety

Another factor that can play a role in reading anxiety, specifically in ESL students, is a separate type of anxiety known as foreign language anxiety. This type of anxiety is not just based on a fear or hesitancy towards reading, but towards engaging with English (or any foreign language) itself.

To help counter this type of anxiety, there are many different strategies you might use, but one of the best is to provide students with a translation dictionary. This type of dictionary allows students to look up a word in English and see what it means in their own native language. This can reduce anxiety because students know that they have a cheat sheet or reference guide that they can turn to at any time.

It’s also very effective because it can generate more interest in reading materials in English. Translation dictionaries can sometimes be difficult to find or to provide to a whole classfull of students, so if you can’t get your school administrators or your students’ parents to help with sourcing these, you can show students how to translate words using apps if they have smartphones.

Although translation dictionaries can help with some aspects of reading anxiety, it’s still important that you provide support and appropriate reading materials.

2. Negative Attitude

For your students to engage with reading, they must have a positive attitude towards it. Sometimes students enter a course with a negative attitude towards reading or even the process of learning itself. Negative attitudes can affect both motivation and engagement, two essential factors in the reading process that are crucial for reading development to take place.

Simply put, your students can’t learn how to read if they’re disinterested in doing so. Although these negative attitudes may exist in some students, you as their teacher are in a position to turn those negative attitudes into positive ones.

One effective way to do this is to follow the S.M.I.L.E. model. This is a popular model many teachers use that can help you ensure that you’re doing everything possible to cultivate positive attitudes towards reading in your classroom.

The S.M.I.L.E model can be broken down as follows:

S – the ‘S’ stands for ‘sharing’, which means that reading should be something that students share with their peers, which can lead to greater interest and motivation. For this reason, reading activities should involve pairing or grouping students together when possible.

M – the ‘M’ represents ‘me’ or self-efficacy. Confidence in reading leads to greater engagement. So while it’s good to encourage students to share stories or reading activities with each other, you should also ensure that students are also learning to read on their own, which can be accomplished by assigning reading activities as homework.

I – for students to take reading seriously and put effort into it, they must understand that it’s important for their development. The ‘I’ stands for ‘importance’, and one way you can show this value to students is to present materials or scenarios to them where they are eager to read and must put in effort to do so.

L – The ‘L’ stands for ‘liking’, because students must like what they’re reading to learn how to be motivated towards reading. Using high-interest reading materials, such as comic books, is a good way to generate this type of interest in reading, even if you simply use these as warm-up materials.

E – the ‘E’ in this model stands for ‘engagement’, and this factor takes care of itself as long as you follow the other four values. As long as you’re motivating students by having them share, building up their confidence, showing them the value of reading, and providing materials that they’re interested in, engagement in reading will naturally follow.

3. Cognitive Differences

It’s a simple fact that humans are all different from each other in the way that we think and process information, even when we may have many similarities in this regard as well. This is something to always consider when teaching, because all of your students are unique from each other and they’ve all had different experiences in life that shape their cognitive abilities – not to mention the fact that other factors can influence their cognitive processing abilities, such as genetics and learning disabilities, including dyslexia.

So when you’re teaching students how to read and having all of them engage in your lessons, you should be prepared for instances where some students may struggle to understand something or may not develop target reading skills quite as quickly as others. Stopping a lesson to assist students individually can have a negative effect on the class as a whole because then you’re taking your teaching resources away from the class to focus them towards a single student.

There may be more than one student struggling with the same issue or not understanding the same thing. For this reason, you can use a method known as Response to Intervention, which helps students by identifying which ones need help without taking away resources from the class as a whole.

Carrying Out Response to Intervention

To execute the Response to Intervention method, you can separate students into three tiers and then concentrate your resources as follows:

Tier 1 – Initially, every student in your class is grouped as Tier 1. With Tier 1 students, everybody receives the same instruction from you because no struggling students have been identified yet. The instruction given for Tier 1 students would be the standard lessons that you would normally carry out.

Tier 2 – if any students in the Tier 1 group are struggling to understand something, you should then group these struggling students into their own group, which becomes Tier 2. Provide the remaining students in Tier 1 with a fun activity so that they can stay busy and engaged with learning while you focus more resources on Tier 2.

At this point you should be conducting a separate, more tailored approach with students in the Tier 2 group. Try to discover what students are struggling with, and if it’s something common among many students in this tier, you can cover it in more depth to get them all up to speed.

Tier 3 – if there are still some students in the Tier 2 group struggling to comprehend something, they are then considered to be Tier 3. At this point, your teaching instruction should become more individualized, where you work with each student individually to find out what they’re struggling with and to address this.

Always Consider the Thought Process

While all of the aforementioned strategies and methods listed here can help you in regard to teaching reading, you must always consider the thought processes of your students. Think about all of the factors that may be affecting how they look at a text and comprehend it.

As a final tip, you should always be on the lookout for linguistic interference, which are all the ways that a student’s first language can affect how they approach the learning of a second language. Many languages differ in their basic principles and grammar, so if you can become somewhat familiar with a student’s first language, this will help you better understand how they may interpret and understand English while reading.