By VP of Research Dr. Jack Dempsey & Emily Hall
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 first installment, we spoke with Emily Hall, an English teacher and PhD student of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois.
Challenges in English Language Instruction
Emily has 8 years of English teaching experience, 7 of which was spent teaching English Language Arts to students in Kenya. During her time there, she served as literacy coordinator in addition to teaching students in elementary, middle, and high school grades. One of the most challenging aspects of her work was pinpointing how to support students experiencing persistent and reoccurring literacy problems, particularly with comprehension skills:
“There were lots of students with literacy-related disabilities (like Dyslexia), but [there were] many without “disabilities” who were poor comprehenders. I couldn’t really detect major fluency or decoding issues, so I went on a quest to figure out what was the problem there.”
One of the biggest problems she noted was that oral reading tasks were not sufficiently robust for detecting nuanced information that may reveal weaker fluency skills, so issues with comprehension that students faced were often not apparent from assessment scores alone. This is a story many ELA teachers across the nation are familiar with, as reading proficiency continues to drop or remain stagnant at the national level here in the states (see NAEP’s latest Report Card).
Another issue she brought up was figuring out where best to embed literacy instruction in everyday coursework. On one side, she noted that grammar instruction was a priority and did her best to make it meaningful and engaging, but the dilemma she faced was making sure students retained the concepts and applied them in their writing.
“You would be shocked by how many 7th graders don’t know what a preposition is.”
“Explicit instruction of parts of speech is part of instruction every year starting in third grade, and in some cases earlier. That’s the building blocks, just knowing the parts of speech. I think the way syntax and grammar instruction is taught is very isolated from text, and students would ask “why are we learning this?” [So,] we started adopting practices where writing and grammar instruction were embedded in the texts used in class. We would use “mentor sentence” strategies, where you take a sentence from a reading, analyze it, and then apply it to writing assignments.”
Supporting English Teaching with Cascade Reading
After sharing Cascade Reading with Emily, who was already familiar with its core principles and applications, she saw it as a powerful tool not just for reading comprehension, but specifically for teaching students how to write in middle school years.
“I would adopt this because it’s embedded in texts…You can focus on vocabulary, structure, and content all at once. [The Cascade Explorer View] has multiple layers that are all interconnected instead of fragmented instructions with a worksheet here and a worksheet there – that’s so isolated…I see it as an improvement for writing.”
Speaking specifically of ESL students, she also mentioned that explicit grammar instruction was particularly beneficial.
“A lot of our ESL students did better on grammar tasks because they enjoyed the rules-based approach.”
With Cascade Reading, the scaffolding of line breaks and indentations provide implicit cues to linguistic structure, but they also provide explicit cues, especially when augmented with the additional visualizations in the Cascade Explorer View like part-of-speech tagging, subject and predicate tagging, clause colorization, and more. From our conversation, it’s clear that students need 1) engaging texts, 2) embedded literacy instruction, and 3) additional supports for understanding basic metalinguistic concepts. Cascade Reading is poised to deliver on all these fronts by decreasing reading anxiety and increasing motivation to read, transforming any text into a different visual style while retaining the linguistic content, and providing additional layers of visual support for explicit pedagogical purposes via the Explorer View.
About the Teacher
Emily Hall is a PhD student in Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She integrates her experience as a literacy specialist and former ELA educator with the goal of making theoretical reading comprehension research more accessible to classroom teachers. Her work is driven by insights from her years in education. Her research examines the cognitive processes underlying reading comprehension, with a focus on what drives deep-level understanding of scientific texts. She uses eye tracking to study how reader engage with complex material in real time.
