ELL

Matthew Lynch published in Diversity, EdTech & Innovation, Equity

ELLs’ Achievement Is No Longer a Subgroup Issue

Meeting the unique learning needs of non-native English speakers must involve entire school communities, and not just the teachers who have ELLs in their classrooms.

By Gloria Rodriguez — 

The passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in December made important changes in accountability for English Language Learners (ELLs), one of the fastest-growing and lowest-performing subgroups of students in the United States. The new law shifted accountability for English learners from Title III, the section previously authorizing funding for language acquisition programs, to Title I, the program encompassing accountability for all student groups. What this means is that accountability for ELLs’ achievement no longer falls solely on schools with significant ELL enrollments. Instead, the new law holds all schools accountable for the education of non-native English speakers.

As a bilingual teacher, curriculum writer, professional developer, school administrator, and EL leadership specialist, I have worked to advance the needs of ELLs for over 30 years. I have spent my career supporting teachers and school leaders as they build more culturally and linguistically responsive classrooms and schools. As an advocate for ELLs and their families, I commend this federal recognition that ELLs’ achievement matters in all schools and districts. My experience working with schools across the country has shown that this work must be viewed systemically. Meeting the unique learning needs of non-native English speakers must involve entire school communities, and not just the teachers who have ELLs in their classrooms. Although teachers are often willing and committed to improve student learning, they cannot be expected to take on this critical challenge alone.

Professional development and training are often the primary methods schools and districts use to improve teachers’ practice. Efforts to improve instruction for ELLs often rely on these methods: Teachers may be offered professional development sessions on instructional strategies for ELLs, or they may be offered the chance to acquire additional certifications in ESL. While these offerings can be important steps towards improve classroom instruction, they may not include school leadership or others in the community who are critical for embedding essential school-wide practices that reach beyond specific instructional techniques. Improving educational outcomes for ELLs must also involve system-wide efforts to build more linguistically and culturally responsive environments. Unless professional development and training focusing on school leadership and the broader school community in creating these environments, educating ELLs will continue to be seen as a subgroup issue.

What, then, can we do to advance the systemic changes that lead to improved outcomes for ELLs? This work starts with school-wide attention to equity—closing the achievement gap between ELLs and their non-ELL peers. School communities must confront their achievement gaps head-on and recognize universal responsibility for closing them. In addition, school leadership and teachers alike must recognize the importance of building school communities that recognize their student populations in a meaningful way.

To create culturally and linguistically responsive schools, school leadership teams should:
1) Be knowledgeable about ELL education and practices such as ELL program planning, instructional practices, assessment, English language development, building ELL staff capacity, and family engagement.

2) Have a vision and system-wide strategy for the education of ELLs that is based on an understanding of the importance and features of quality instruction for ELLs.

3) Conduct ELL program reviews to ensure the services are responding to the current needs of the diverse student population. As the student population changes, the data should be analyzed and services should be revisited.

4) Advocate for a data system that tracks multiple measures of ELLs’ educational progress. The collection and analysis of the data on the characteristics, English proficiency level, program placement, and academic attainment of ELLs will ensure the success of students.

Effective schools need bold leaders who are willing to examine organizational, structural, instructional, and staffing issues behind the achievement of English language learners. Tailoring support to entire school communities—including school leaders and teachers—is essential to raising achievement for ELLs. Just as the ESSA now holds all schools accountable for this achievement, so must school leadership teams recognize that all adults in their buildings share ownership of the success of their students.

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Gloria Rodriguez is a former classroom teacher, resource teacher, administrator, and EL leadership education consultant. She is now a Senior Associate at PCG Education, where she heads up PCG’s consulting services focused on supporting schools and districts to better address the needs of English learners.

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Matthew Lynch published in OpEducation, Policy & Reform

Why is English so hard to learn?

Sean Sutherland, University of Westminster

The prime minister, David Cameron, wants more Muslim women in the UK to be taught English to reduce segregation between different linguistic communities and even limit the lure of extremism.

Most of us who have tried it probably feel that learning a new language is difficult, even if that new language is similar to our own. So how difficult is it to learn English and especially if your first language is quite different?

The difficulty of learning a new language will depend on how similar that language is to one you already know. Despite English speakers often rating certain languages as being particularly difficult – languages such as French, which indicate the gender of nouns with articles like le and la, and the Chinese writing system – there are similarities between these languages.

If you were to learn French you’d immediately recognise many words, because the English equivalents have French Latin roots, such as ballet or amiable. If you were to learn Chinese you’d find that its grammar is similar to English in many ways – for example each Chinese sentence has a subject, a predicate and an object (though an English speaker would most likely find learning French easier than Chinese).

The most difficulty arises when people learn English when they don’t have the advantage of sharing many borrowed words or grammatical patterns with English. This will include speakers of Arabic, Urdu and Bengali – three of the most common languages spoken by Muslim immigrants in Britain.

Baffling spellings

In my experience, the most common complaint language learners make about English is that the spelling of words often has little or nothing to do with their pronunciation. It’s easy enough to teach someone how to write the letter “a”, for example, but then they must be taught that its pronunciation changes in words like hat, hate and father. In oak it isn’t pronounced at all.

Compare this to the simplicity of Spanish, a language in which an “a” and other vowels rarely change pronunciation from word to word.

Laugh is pronounced larf but the similar-sounding half is not written haugh – but of course there are regional differences in accent too. Like the “l” in half, there are silent letters sprinkled throughout English words: the “k” in knife and knead, the “s” in island, the “p” in receipt, and so on.

A recent poem of unknown origin, a favourite of English language teachers who want to amuse their students, contains tongue twisters such as:

I take it you already know
of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
on hiccough, thorough, slough and through.

Another area of difficulty that learners of English often comment on is the prevalence of irregular past verbs in English. It’s simple enough to remember that the past tense of walk is
walked, shout is shouted and pick is picked.

But what about all the irregular verbs, like hit, read and think? For hit, the past tense looks and sounds the same as the present tense. For read, the past tense looks the same, but is pronounced differently. For think, the past tense thought involves substantial change to both the spelling and the pronunciation.

There’s not always a pattern to many of these irregular verbs. For verbs ending with “ink” we have “think/thought”, but another irregular pattern “drink/drank” and a regular pattern “wink/winked”. English has several hundred such irregular verbs for learners to look forward to memorising, and many of them are very frequently used: be, get, have, see, eat, and so on.

Being polite

A delicate difficulty concerns how English speakers show politeness. Some languages have quite clear ways for their users to do this. In French you can use the pronoun vous instead of tu to be polite.

Not as easy as it looks.
banlon1964/flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND

English only has you, so that doesn’t work. In Japanese you can substitute polite forms of words, so that although kuu, taberu and meshiagaru all mean “eat” in Japanese, the longer words are more polite.

In English we can use longer words: “Would you like to consume nourishment?” instead of “Would you like to eat?” – but it doesn’t sound polite, rather a bit awkward.

There are less obvious ways of marking politeness in English: use a question (“Could you pass the … ” instead of “Pass the …”), express some doubt (“I don’t suppose you could … ”) and apologise, even for small requests (“Sorry to bother you, but …”).

If subtleties aren’t mastered then otherwise-fluent learners of English (or any other language) – even if they don’t intend to be impolite – may unintentionally appear rude.

So spare a thought for those picking up an English textbook for the first time – mastering the quirks of the language is tough (pronounced tuff).

The Conversation

Sean Sutherland, Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, University of Westminster

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Matthew Lynch published in Parental Involvement, Policy & Reform, Teachers

How schools can help immigrant children to thrive

Jan Germen Janmaat, UCL Institute of Education

In view of the large influx of refugees from Syria and the growing concern about their integration in European societies, the launch of a new report on immigrant children in education systems could not be more timely.

The report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), noted reassuringly that there was no relation between the amount of immigrants in a country’s education system and a decline in education standards. It’s as if the OECD were pre-empting criticism from populist anti-immigrant politicians that the influx of Syrian refugees will be a disruption to western societies, and in particular a drain on schools.

The main focus of the report is actually on the performance gap between children of immigrant background and their non-immigrant peers and what schools can do to close it. Although the achievement gap has closed across the OECD – by a semester between 2003 and 2012 – on average, immigrant students still perform worse than their peers. The OECD gives some quite explicit advice to politicians if they are serious about enhancing the performance of these children: provide additional language instruction, arrange early childhood education, prevent segregation, don’t force them to repeat grades and eliminate the early streaming (also known as tracking) of children into different ability groups.

While the first two recommendations are uncontroversial, the last suggestion is politically sensitive as there are quite a few states who practice and cherish the tracking or streaming of children. In Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, different tracks coincide with different kinds of schools, while in England, ability grouping is organised within schools in what is called setting.

Provocatively the report said: “While ability grouping, grade repetition and tracking are harmful for all students, immigrant students are more likely to be affected by these practices.“ This is likely to raise some eyebrows, particularly among political parties advocating early tracking such as the Christian Democrats in Germany and the Conservatives in the UK.

Many education researchers have stressed that early tracking only reinforces achievement gaps, not only between immigrant and non-immigrant children but also between children of different social backgrounds. As early as 1974, the French sociologist Raymond Boudon noted that the more tracks a system has and the earlier these tracks start to branch out, the greater the inequality in educational performance and the more difficult it will be for children of modest backgrounds, including many immigrants, to do well in school. In this sense the OECD can be said to be a late convert to the cause of late selection – or comprehensive education as it is more widely known.

The report also noted that early tracking on the basis of ability amounts to social and ethnic sorting and so only adds to school social and ethnic segregation, which is an observation widely shared in academia.

Segregation and achievement

Segregation is also mentioned by the OECD as another factor contributing to the performance gap. This is based on the idea that large concentrations of immigrant children give rise to peer influences that reduce performance, irrespective of the individual social and ethnic background of children. In other words, when immigrant children are surrounded by peers of the same background in school, they are doubly disadvantaged, both in terms of their own background and in terms of the backgrounds of their classmates.

Language lessons for refugee children in Germany.
Ole Spata/EPA

In mixed settings, by contrast, they should be able to learn from their more privileged peers. Desegregated schools can thus help to compensate for the effect of family disadvantage. Again this theory is not new. In 1966 a famous report by American sociologist James Coleman noted that it makes a great difference who you go to school with. This report greatly reinforced the desegregation campaign that was set in motion by the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education US Supreme Court ruling declaring that de jure segregation was “inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional.

What’s best for immigrant children

There is more controversy among researchers, however, about whether segregation enhances achievement gaps. In 2005, American researchers Russell Rumberger and Gregory Palardy noted that when it comes to student achievement, the social composition of schools matters much more than the racial composition. Taking a closer look at social composition they found that several school characteristics, including teacher expectations of children, the amount of homework that students do, and the number of rigorous courses that students take, explain all of the effect of social composition.

This would imply that in theory immigrant children can perform just as well in segregated schools, provided they are exposed to the very same curriculum and teaching input as their peers in mixed schools. The question, however, is whether equalising these resources across schools can be achieved in practice – as they are so inextricably bound up with the social and ethnic mix of schools.

The OECD report deserves praise for letting the data speak and ignoring possible political pressures to revise the policy messages emanating from its findings on what works to close the achievement gap. It does not deal, however, with two relevant questions of quite a different nature: namely whether the policies it recommends can be adopted in the same way in countries with different educational cultures and whether they will produce the same results across the board. This debate – a hot topic among researchers – so far remains unresolved.

The Conversation

Jan Germen Janmaat, Reader in Comparative Social Science, Department of Lifelong and Comparative Education, UCL Institute of Education

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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