By VP of Research Dr. Jack Dempsey & Dr. Kara Yarrington
In this blog series, we explore Cascade Reading as a language learning, reading comprehension, and writing tool across different languages. As of now, Cascade Reading operates in 5 languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German, with more on the way. Although this series will explore some challenges specific to a particular language, a likely theme to emerge is that Cascade Reading is poised to support language learning and literacy acquisition universally across languages.
In this second installment, we spoke with Dr. Kara Yarrington, a Teaching Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Challenges in Spanish Language Instruction
Dr. Yarrington has over a decade of experience teaching and leading Spanish courses at the University level. From her breadth of experience, she noted that the problem most students have, especially at lower levels, is with the production of Spanish. She noted, however, that the problems students face with production, like writing, often also transferred over to their reading skills.
For instance, Spanish is a “pro-drop” language, meaning you don’t always need to include the subject of the sentence if it is implied, like in the example below.
Yo hablo español. –> Hablo español. = [I] speak Spanish.
“For the lower levels, we had them identify the subject and the verb and they couldn’t identify what those terms meant. With Spanish being pro-drop, there’s sometimes not an overt subject, so they’d panic and not understand what the subject was.”
She further acknowledged that this kind of difficulty likely stemmed from a general lack of metalinguistic awareness, or knowledge of the structure of language and how it works, which led to other issues as well.
“The same thing with verbs. How can they conjugate a verb if they don’t know what a verb is? They can conjugate in an isolated task, but when asked to look at it holistically, they falter.”
Supporting Spanish Teaching with Cascade Reading
Research we’ve done at Cascade Reading in collaboration with the University of Illinois actually shows that students felt that they understood Spanish grammar better and could learn new words more easily when reading with the Cascade Format (see Figure above and read the full report here). After reviewing the results from that study and examining how the Cascade Format and the freely available web tools work, Dr. Yarrington could see several paths to how Cascade might help with learning Spanish, particularly when it came to reading. “What I would do is have them [the students] read for reading practice. By having that structure [from the Cascade Format], it would help them understand more. They could play around with the buttons [on the Cascade Explorer View] and figure out things like who was the subject of the sentence.” As an advocate for accessibility in education, she also pointed out how solutions for some are often advantageous for many. “If you’re helping some people, you’re helping all people. If Cascade Reading is helpful for 13 people, if it’s helping dyslexic people, it’s probably going to help others! I would have it be the default option.”
About the Instructor
Dr. Kara Yarrington is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she primarily teaches introductory and intermediate level Spanish courses. She is also the Director of the Introductory Spanish program. Her main research area is on the linguistic development of novice-level second language Spanish learners, primarily focusing on their oral development. She is also researching the influence of computer-mediated language learning through XR technologies.
