What characteristics might the teachers at Washington Elementary look for in a reading approach?
Page 2: The Benefits of PALS
Because Washington Elementary has an academically diverse student body, the teachers are excited to discover that PALS is effective for students with learning disabilities, low-performing students without learning disabilities, average- and high-achieving readers, and English learners (ELs). They are also pleased to learn that PALS is an effective means of differentiating reading instruction. Unlike whole-group instruction—in which teachers have limited ability to tailor instruction to their students’ needs—peer-mediated instruction allows teachers to:
- Individualize reading material for each student pair
- Vary the instructional pace for each student pair
In other words, teachers have the ability to provide more individualized lessons to accommodate students with a wider range of instructional needs.
Research Shows
- Students who engaged in first-grade PALS outperformed those in the control group (i.e., in a non-PALS classroom) on phonological awareness, decoding, and word-recognition measures. This held true for students with disabilities; low-, high-, and average-achieving students; and students in middle-class and low-SES schools.
(Fuchs and Fuchs, 2005) - Bilingual Hispanic first-grade students who participated in PALS outperformed bilingual Hispanic students in control classrooms.
(Calhoon, Al Otaiba, Greenberg, King, & Avalos, 2006) - ELLs taking part in K-PALS performed better on measures of phonemic awareness and letter-sound recognition than did ELs who did not.
(McMaster, Kung, Han, & Cao, 2008)
Besides accommodating the needs of students of various academic abilities and actively including all students in reading activities, PALS boasts a number of additional benefits for teachers and students. Specifically, the approach:
- Is easily implemented
- Is cost-effective
- Accelerates student achievement in reading
- Encourages on-task behavior and student participation
- Allows students more opportunities to read
- Allows students to receive corrective feedback
- Is enjoyable
- Motivates students
- Promotes collaboration and positive social interaction between students
Two elementary teachers, Nichole Lawson and Stephanie Johnson, describe their own experiences with the benefits of PALS, including improved reading performance for ELLs.
Nichole Lawson
First-grade (and former kindergarten) teacher
Interdistrict Downtown School
Minneapolis, Minnesota
(time: 0:59)
Stephanie Johnson
Kindergarten teacher
Westwood Elementary School
Bloomington, Minnesota
(time: 1:12)
Transcript: Nichole Lawson
The benefits are phenomenal. I taught kindergarten for five years, and it wasn’t until the fifth year that I used PALS. And all of those four years prior I was working so hard to get them to recognize letters and sounds and sight words. And it was difficult, and the PALS just made it so easy. It was consistent. We did it four times a week, and they got it. It was like magic. The kindergarteners learned their letters and sounds, and they began reading. It made great gains with the kids that were behind, and even the kids that were at grade level soared as well. When I taught kindergarten, I taught a diverse group of students. One year I had eleven nations represented. A lot of ESL or ELL students were in my class, and to see them grow, that was what really made the difference for me for PALS. They came in speaking minimum English. By the end of the year, they were at grade level reading, and their English had improved quite a bit.
Transcript: Stephanie Johnson
The benefits of PALS that I’ve seen in my classroom is kindergarteners learning their letters and sounds. That is just really our number one way of teaching them their sounds. We do it four days a week, and it’s consistent. They know what to expect and it’s visual, auditoria, kinesthetic. There’s a small amount of teacher time, so they’re not sitting too long. And then they go off in their pairs and they’re learning from each other. One concern that I had is how this would affect my students who had English as a second language and how they would respond to that and how their peers who were English speakers would be able to teach this with them. And I was very surprised, especially after the first year of testing the children with their sounds. It was remarkable, the improvements that were made in our classroom amongst our students of all languages. And so I’ve been very impressed. I know that a lot of my colleagues in the district, who are concerned about that as well and who have now used it, have seen what a great difference K-PALS is making in the lives of students who are speaking more than one language.
For Your Information
Because PALS is easy for teachers to use and improves students’ reading skills, the U.S. Department of Education Program Effectiveness Panel has deemed it a “best practice.”
best practice
A distinction granted by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), a research division within the U.S. Department of Education, and similar organizations to teaching practices that research has proven to be effective.
