What can a teacher do when s/he know students are not learning to read as they should?

Plenty, it turns out.

Today is Labor Day, which means summer 2025 is over and school year 2025-26 has begun. It’s a perfect day to turn this Substack over to an extraordinary teacher I’ve had the privilege to get to know and watch teach.

Rafely Palacios helped lead a group of teachers in her Bay Area elementary school on a quest to improve literacy outcomes for their mostly Latino English Learner students. Some of the students were receiving bilingual instruction and learning to read in Spanish. Others were receiving English only instruction and learning to read in English. Regardless of language, Rafely (and many of her colleagues) knew, too many children were not getting off to a good start in learning to become literate in either language.

Here is Rafely’s story of what they did about it.

Happy Labor Day! It was for me.

What Works for English Learners: A Journey from Whole Language to Effective Reading Instruction

Rafely Palacios

Four years ago, when I started teaching second grade at John Muir Elementary in the San Francisco Unified School District, I was given an incomplete set of the Spanish version of Lucy Calkins' Units of Study. Like many schools in our district, we employed a version of the whole-language approach, which included guided reading, three-cueing, and the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System to track student progress.

However, during that first year, I noticed something troubling—my struggling students weren't making progress. Sounding out words was avoided; instead, they memorized entire words, used pictures to guess at meaning, and often couldn't tell me what they had just read. When they did attempt to sound out words, the process was slow, fragmented, and exhausting. It was clear they hadn't developed a solid foundation in using systematic word recognition skills.

This made me reflect on how I had learned to read in Spanish, my first language. I remembered learning letter sounds, practicing syllables, and doing timed fluency drills—practices I now recognize as core components of foundational skills instruction. It struck me as odd that none of this appeared anywhere in the curriculum I had been given.

Discovering the Science of Reading

Driven by concern and curiosity, I began exploring how children learn to read—and soon encountered the science of reading. It became evident that both the curriculum I was using and the methods I had learned in my teacher preparation program were not aligned with the prevailing scientific consensus on literacy acquisition.

I couldn’t accept the idea that “this is just how we’ve always done things.” My students deserve instruction grounded in research, and if the curriculum and materials provided weren’t evidence-based, I was determined to find better ones myself.

Because John Muir is a transitional bilingual school that follows a 90-10 model—where instruction begins predominantly in Spanish, as all students are native Spanish speakers—I knew I needed to find a phonics program designed explicitly for them. A translated curriculum or one built for Spanish immersion classrooms wouldn’t meet their needs. However, finding one proved to be challenging.

After several months of searching, I discovered Aprendo Leyendo—an evidence-based Spanish phonics program—and shared it with the teachers in our bilingual strand. We agreed that I would pilot the program at our site the following school year. As I used it in my classroom, my students began making noticeable gains within a few months, which sparked growing interest among my colleagues.

To support this momentum, I invited the curriculum developers from Argentina to provide in-person training and model lessons, which deepened our collective understanding and gave our team the confidence to adopt the program in grades K–2 for the following school year.

The English Literacy Challenge

While our Spanish phonics implementation transformed first-language reading outcomes, a new challenge emerged: English literacy scores remained stagnant. Although Aprendo Leyendo provided a strong L1 foundation, our English Learners (ELs) still needed explicit, structured English instruction tailored to their unique needs.

At the time, John Muir had adopted From Phonics to Reading (FPTR), a K-3 English phonics program. FPTR is research-based, meaning it incorporates principles drawn from reading research. However, it was not evidence-based—no rigorous studies had demonstrated that the program itself produces results. In fact, it had just been released that summer, and we purchased it sight unseen. While a case study has since reported positive results, merely four students (1.2% of the study population) were English Learners (Sadlier, 2022).

This raised an urgent question: Both ELs and English-only students need explicit, evidence-based foundational skills instruction, but what additional supports are most effective in helping ELs develop English reading skills?

Applying Lesson Study to Literacy

To explore this question, I led the San Francisco Unified School District’s first Lesson Study team focused on literacy. Our team brought together a dynamic and diverse group of educators, including our kindergarten teacher, first-grade Spanish biliteracy teacher, English reading interventionist, Instructional Reform Facilitator (IRF), art teacher, and me, the second-grade Spanish biliteracy teacher.

We had already witnessed our students thrive when given opportunities to engage in rich academic language, especially in mathematics. John Muir Elementary had embraced Teaching Through Problem-Solving (TTP) for years, an instructional approach that fosters rich mathematical discourse and strengthens academic language. However, TTP's transformative impact at Muir stems not only from the approach itself but also from how teachers collaborate around it through Lesson Study. This professional development cycle involves planning, teaching, observing, and reflecting on lessons together as a team.

For the past eight years, this sustained, teacher-driven process has enabled us to refine our practice, address challenges in real-time, and tailor instruction to meet the needs of our students. The result has been measurable gains in math achievement and academic language development, particularly among Black and Latinx students.

Building on this success, we decided to apply the Lesson Study model to literacy. Through our examination of students’ strengths—particularly their strong L1 skills and oral language—we developed a new line of inquiry: How can English phonics instruction be adapted to leverage multilingual learners’ existing language strengths? The underlying challenge was clear: Would we continue to settle for one-size-fits-all methods, or design instruction that truly reflected our students’ abilities? This question became the driving force behind our Lesson Study cycle.

In the sections that follow, I describe how we approached each of the cycle’s four steps.

Step 1: Study

We began by exploring various reading models. While familiar with Gough and Tunmer's Simple View of Reading (dating back to the 1980s), we sought a framework better suited for ELs. That's when we discovered Duke and Cartwright's Active View of Reading Model (2021), which offered a more comprehensive perspective.

During a meeting with Dr. Nell Duke, she highlighted the importance of graphophonological semantic flexibility (GSF), the ability to switch attention between decoding and meaning-making processes flexibly. She noted that multilingual learners may have advantages in this area because they regularly navigate between two language systems. Dr. Duke emphasized that when teachers simultaneously attend to decoding and comprehension in their instruction while engaging children in tasks that require conscious attention to both phonological and semantic features, this supports students' development of GSF, strengthening their reading skills in both their first and second language.

It is essential to recognize that meaning-making processes cannot supplant grapheme-phoneme mapping. While GSF involves flexibly coordinating decoding and comprehension, accurate decoding remains foundational and must come first. This distinguishes GSF from the outdated three-cueing approach, which encourages relying on context or pictures to guess words instead of decoding them. Effective instruction, especially for multilingual learners, must prioritize explicit decoding before building meaning-making flexibility.

We also studied Dr. Claude Goldenberg’s work, particularly his article “Reading Wars, Reading Science, and English Learners” (2020), which deepened our understanding of the critical role of oral language in literacy development. He explains that orthographic mapping first links a word’s spelling (orthography) to its pronunciation, and then attaches the word’s meaning, allowing it to be recognized automatically after repeated exposures. Although primarily a word recognition process, orthographic mapping supports comprehension when readers know the meanings of words. This decoding-vocabulary connection is why Goldenberg emphasizes that effective literacy instruction for emergent bilinguals requires explicit, systematic English Language Development (ELD) tightly integrated with reading.

ELD provides opportunities to develop oral language, build and expand academic vocabulary, and construct background knowledge—all while practicing new words in meaningful contexts that reinforce the orthographic mapping process. Supporting this integrated approach, Ehri and colleagues’ (2007) Reading Rescue intervention demonstrated that combining systematic decoding practice with explicit vocabulary instruction and guided comprehension questions significantly accelerated literacy development for second-language learners.

Step 2: Plan

Before starting our Lesson Study cycle, I had piloted the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI) curriculum during the 2023–24 school year. UFLI’s structured and explicit phonics instruction, combined with freely available and adaptable lesson materials, supported effective early reading development. It systematically develops foundational skills through a carefully sequenced progression from simple to complex letter-sound relationships. Each lesson contains eight instructional components, or “steps”: phonemic awareness, visual drill, auditory drill, blending drill, new concept, word work, irregular words, and connected text. These steps are distributed over a two-day cycle, with Skills 1–5 taught on Day 1 and Skills 5–8 revisited on Day 2.

While the two-day lesson structure effectively supports phonics instruction, it proved insufficient for our students, particularly in a Title I school where chronic absenteeism and the complex language demands faced by English learners required more targeted and sustained support. To address these challenges, we added a third instructional day. This day shifted the focus from decoding to meaning-making, giving students time to reinforce and extend their learning through targeted practice in vocabulary, fluency, and reading comprehension. Throughout, we continued integrating oral language development, cross-linguistic transfer, and targeted supports to deepen understanding in both English and Spanish.

Some routines were entirely new, such as daily vocabulary sessions and student reflections, while others were modifications of UFLI components to support English learners better. For example, during the Word Work component, I followed the UFLI procedure but added a contextual step: after a student manipulated letters (e.g., “spell cat, change /t/ to /p/”), they would describe their action (“I changed the t to a p”), the class would repeat the word, and then a student would use it in a sentence. This reinforced both decoding and meaning.

Similarly, each day began with a brief, 10-minute vocabulary routine in the morning, in which I pre-taught key words from the UFLI lessons, focusing on words that second language learners were unlikely to know, while skipping familiar words. If a word had multiple meanings, all relevant meanings were included. These vocabulary lessons were not part of the phonics block, which occurred later in the afternoon. While vocabulary instruction could typically occur during ELD, I chose to make this a whole-class routine because students were divided across different teachers during that time. This ensured that students had the background knowledge needed to connect decoding with meaning effectively.

None of the UFLI steps were removed. Some were simply modified to provide additional opportunities for oral language practice and to deepen understanding of the words students were reading and spelling. UFLI excels at promoting orthographic mapping, linking pronunciation to written symbols, and these modifications and added routines further supported long-term memory of words by emphasizing meaning, critical for students learning English as a second language.

Here is a visual representation of our proposed three-day lesson sequence. The words in black represent the standard UFLI lesson steps, while the words in blue indicate modifications we made to support English Learners. Words that appear entirely in blue denote brand-new routines we added. The third column, shown in green, represents the additional instructional day we incorporated to provide extended practice and support.

**Visual and Auditory Drills may take less time, as several sounds and graphemes transfer from Spanish to English. **

I am also including some images of the modifications:

● Phonemic Awareness

● Irregular words

● Vocabulary (new routine)

Step 3: Teach

After months of researching effective practices, piloting strategies in our classrooms, gathering student data, and refining our instruction, this work culminated in a research lesson day where we presented our findings to the John Muir community and visiting educators. Following the presentation, guests observed a modified Day 3 lesson in my classroom, which focused on the sound-spelling pattern o_e through review activities, partner dictation, and partner reading. These routines emphasized decoding, oral language development, and comprehension through collaborative student interactions. Observers documented their findings through structured notes and behavioral tracking, collecting evidence that would later inform our reflections in Step 4.

Step 4: Reflect

Following our public research lesson, we all gathered, along with Dr. Goldenberg, our expert commentator, to reflect on the instructional design, student learning, and implications for future practice.

A key takeaway from this lesson was the importance of maintaining focus during whole-group dictation. While the routine encourages rich student talk, it’s essential to keep that discourse aligned with the lesson objective. Dr. Goldenberg captured this succinctly: “Keep the focus on the focus”—a reminder not to spend too much time addressing unrelated spelling issues when the goal is to reinforce a specific pattern, like o_e, especially within the constraints of limited instructional time.

Dr. Goldenberg also underscored the role of the reading circuit—how decoding, word recognition, and meaning are interconnected. For ELs, he noted, meaning-making must be addressed frequently and intentionally. This reinforced the purpose of our third instructional day, where we built in structured opportunities for vocabulary, sentence work, and oral language to support both decoding and comprehension.

From a data perspective, we saw promising results. During partner reading with the decodable text, 18 out of 20 students read with 98% accuracy. Most pairs effectively offered peer support and coaching, though in many cases, coaching wasn’t needed because students were already reading with high accuracy. This indicated that our repeated practice with the sound-spelling pattern was effective.

Our dictation routine followed a structured three-step process:

1. Students independently wrote a seven-word sentence.

2. They collaborated with a partner to review and rewrite the sentence, while asking each other questions such as “Is the vowel short or long?”

3. Finally, the class reviewed the sentence together.

*Students with three or more errors are those with visual impairments that affect their access to print (e.g., partial sight)

To assess spelling retention, I administered the UFLI lesson dictation assessment the following day. Results were encouraging:

● 92% of students correctly spelled all words containing the o_e pattern: home, rope, vote, rode

● 84% of students spelled all words correctly: They rode to the junk shop.

Key Takeaways:

These results highlight the effectiveness of our three-day lesson structure, particularly Day 3, which reinforces learning through dictation, partner reading, discourse, and meaning-making. For English Learners, connecting decoding to comprehension isn’t optional—it’s essential. Our findings align with those of Vaughn et al. (2006), whose study, "Effectiveness of an English Intervention for First-Grade English Language Learners at Risk for Reading Problems," demonstrated that targeted, systematic English interventions can produce significant gains when language development and decoding are intentionally integrated. To support this, we developed routines that can be adapted across grades K–2.

The success of these routines hinges on one critical element: focused, purposeful student talk. Routines like dictation and partner reading only thrive when students understand what to notice and why, transforming these moments into powerful tools for building both phonics and language skills. This level of intentional discourse requires time, which brings us to an important consideration.

Some may question extending UFLI’s scope, but the increase is modest—six days instead of five for two lessons—and strategically planned. Many sound-spelling patterns, such as ch and most consonants, transfer quickly and require no additional time, allowing us to pace efficiently. While these lessons take longer, this is appropriate: learning to read and write in a language that is not one’s native language naturally requires more time. The added steps, modifications, and routines are purposeful responses to the needs of English learners.

Instructional time is valuable, yet ELs nationwide continue to struggle with reading comprehension, exposing a critical limitation in most phonics programs. These programs were not designed with ELs in mind, relying on translations or pictures instead of ensuring that students can bridge the gap between decoding and truly understanding what they read. Our approach directly addresses this gap, providing students with the tools and time they need to succeed.

The Path Forward

Reading comprehension, the ultimate goal of literacy, requires activating the complete reading circuit. We must seamlessly connect decoding, language, and meaning through powerful, intentional instruction that doesn't just teach students to sound out words but empowers them to read with understanding and purpose. As Maryanne Wolf describes in her Elbow Room framework, students need space and time to develop these interconnected reading circuits, allowing foundational skills and higher-level comprehension to grow together.

The question isn't whether our ELs can succeed… It's whether we'll give them the tools they need to build and, over time, perfect that reading circuit, and unlock their potential.

Here's what educators can do immediately: Examine your phonics curriculum, ELD instruction, reading program, and teaching practices through the lens of your English Learners' needs. Look for moments that help students connect meaning to the words they are learning to read and spell and adapt lessons and instruction to ensure these essential connections are made.

The choice is ours: Will we continue to use programs that leave English Learners behind, or commit to the research-based instruction they deserve? Let’s not settle. We have the knowledge and the tools; what we need now is the will to act.