Abstract:

Julie Dermody, a North Carolina teacher, says, “Making Sense provides explicit and concrete ways to teach students reading comprehension strategies within small-groups as they learn English.”

Citation: Kendall J. & Khuon, O. (2005). Making sense: Small group comprehension lessons for English Language Learners. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Full Text:

Juli Kendall & Outey Khuon
2005 (153 pp./paperback)
Stenhouse Publishers
ISBN: 1-57110-409-7
$18.50

Reviewed by Julie Dermody
Mary Scroggs Elementary School
Chapel Hill–Carrboro City Schools, NC

According to the National Clearinghouse for English Language
Acquisition, four states experienced a Latino population
growth of over 350% from 1992 to 2002, and Georgia and North
Carolina held the top two positions with increases of over
650%. According to a new study (released May 2005) by researchers
at the University of California-Davis, most teachers are
ill-prepared to meet the needs of the children struggling
to learn English in California's public schools. The researchers
found that teachers of English learners face unique challenges
and yet receive few tools and little professional development
geared to meeting the task.

Schools across the country are attempting to provide quality
reading instruction to children for whom English is not
their first language with a faculty that, for the most part,
has not had any specific training or staff development working
with English Language Learners. Making Sense addresses
this gap between lack of best practice knowledge and trying
to meet the literacy needs students who are often at different
levels of learning English.

Making Sense provides explicit and concrete ways
to teach students reading comprehension strategies within
small-groups as they learn English. Literacy Specialists
Kendall and Khuon teach in the Long Beach (CA) Unified School
District—one of the nation's most diverse systems.
In their experience, oral language development and reading
comprehension strategy instruction go hand in hand. By using
small groups to provide support, they feel that teachers
can best use their knowledge about how language is learned
to scaffold instruction.

The strategy lessons are divided into five sections based on the
English language proficiency of students:

• Preproduction lessons
• Early Production lessons
• Speech Emergence lessons
• Intermediate Fluency lessons
• Advanced Fluency lessons

Within each section, the 52 lessons provided are further divided
by age, "younger" and "older students," spanning kindergarten
through eighth grade; and by comprehension strategies (making
connections, asking questions, visualizing, inferring, determining
importance, and synthesizing.)

Each lesson follows a four-part teaching framework:

• Start Up/Connection – helping students build
background and use prior knowledge to connect to the lesson;

• Give Information – telling students
what they are going to learn and why they are learning
it, and then teaching them;

• Active Involvement – students practicing
what they are learning while the teacher checks for understanding
and monitors and adjusts instruction;

• Off-You-Go! – opportunities for further
practice with peers or independently.

What will teachers love the most about this book besides
the explicit lessons? It may be the descriptions of English
language learners of different ages at various stages of
learning English, or the various scaffolding supports provided
within each lesson (such as anchor charts, specific graphic
organizers, two-column charts, the synthesizing frame/pyramid).

I found I really liked the book suggestions for further strategy
work, found after each section, and the idea of using strategy
application notebooks for students to respond to lessons
and review prior strategy lessons. This book is one you
will refer to throughout the year as your English Language
Learners become more proficient in English.

After reading this book you'll be able to organize small-group
comprehension lessons, select genres and books that teach
specific strategies, use resources besides books (such as
concrete objects, cartoons, technology, music, field trips),
scaffold student learning, and make use of a variety of
assessment strategies. Best of all, the strategy lessons
can be done during your regular reading workshop, as a work
station, pull-out class, or after school.

After only six weeks of availability, and despite the publisher
allowing the entire book to be read online, the demand for
Making Sense necessitated a second printing. I'm
not surprised. This book deserves to have its place along
side Mosaic of Thought, Strategies that Work,
Reading with Meaning, On Solid Ground, and
Chris Tovani's books.

It's that good.

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