Overview

Reading in online and hybrid learning environments often happens privately. Students may complete an assigned article, chapter, or digital text without instructors being able to see how they approached the reading, where comprehension became difficult, what connections they made, or how their thinking changed. For multilingual learners, the reading process can involve additional layers of linguistic, cultural, and academic meaning-making that may remain equally invisible.

This interactive webinar explores durable reading practices that can help instructors, tutors, and other educators make students’ reading processes more visible while supporting deeper engagement with texts. Rather than centering instruction on a particular platform or application, the session focuses on reading practices that can transfer across technologies, courses, languages, and learning environments. The emphasis remains on reading itself: how readers enter a text, monitor understanding, make connections, interpret evidence, and leave a visible trace of their thinking.

Participants will examine a practical visible-reading routine that invites students to notice, question, connect, infer, locate evidence, and respond while engaging with a text. The routine can be adapted for learning-management systems, shared documents, digital annotation platforms, discussion boards, synchronous online meetings, tutoring sessions, or print-based reading. Participants will briefly experience the routine themselves and consider how its prompts could be revised for a text they already assign.

The webinar will also explore multilingual meaning-making as an academic resource. Multilingual readers may draw upon prior linguistic knowledge, cognates, disciplinary vocabulary, cultural knowledge, and cross-language connections while interpreting unfamiliar or complex texts. Participants will consider ways instructors can acknowledge and strategically incorporate these resources without reducing multilingual students to perceived language deficits. The goal is not to create a separate reading curriculum for multilingual students, but to design reading opportunities that recognize the knowledge and language resources students already bring.

A third focus will examine the relationship between reading and writing. Short written responses, annotations, evidence-based reflections, and synthesis statements can provide instructors with meaningful traces of students’ reading while helping students prepare for more complex academic writing. Writing, in this context, serves the central purpose of making reading and meaning-making visible rather than replacing reading as the focus of the session.

Participants will also consider collaborative reading practices for online environments, including structured peer response, guided discussion, and social annotation. Accessibility will remain integrated throughout the webinar, with attention to flexible participation, clear instructional structures, multiple ways of engaging with texts, and practices that recognize the varied linguistic, technological, and educational backgrounds students bring to online learning. These choices also support inclusive dialogue by providing more than one way for participants and students to contribute.

Grounded in scholarship from postsecondary reading, multilingual education, writing studies, online literacy instruction, and accessible course design, the webinar combines theory with practical application. Participants will respond to brief questions in the chat, analyze a sample reading task, experience one durable routine, and discuss applications to college courses, tutoring, writing centers, and other online or hybrid learning spaces. They will leave with a simple implementation framework: one text, one reading routine, and one visible trace of student thinking..

Participants will gain...

• A transferable framework for making students’ reading processes visible in online and hybrid environments.
• Practical strategies for supporting multilingual readers as they engage with complex academic texts.
• Approaches for using brief writing and annotation to reveal reading comprehension and meaning-making.
• Ideas for creating collaborative and accessible reading experiences without depending on one particular technology.
• A practical plan for adapting one durable reading routine to a text, course, tutoring session, or learning environment they already use.

Facilitator Biography

Yoimar Falcon is a multilingual educator, instructional leader, and literacy practitioner with more than two decades of experience in education across Canada and the United States. Fluent in Spanish, English, and French, she currently teaches dual-language Reading Language Arts and serves in a grade-level leadership role at International Leadership of Texas. Her professional work focuses on multilingual learners, reading development, student voice, culturally responsive instruction, and the transfer of effective learning practices across educational contexts.

Falcon is the founder of Building Literacy Bridges, an educational initiative focused on literacy, multilingual learning, student voice, and community engagement. Her professional contributions include educational writing, international collaboration, mentoring, professional presentations, and initiatives designed to amplify student voice and strengthen connections among language, learning, and community. Her work is grounded in the belief that students’ linguistic and cultural resources can serve as powerful foundations for meaning-making and academic growth.