Learning the Language

A federal judge has ruled that bilingual education and English-as-a-second-language programs in Texas comply with federal law, according to an article published today in The Dallas Morning News. Hispanic civil rights groups—the League of United Latin American Citizens and the GI Forum—asked U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice last year to update a court order he had issued 35 years ago that required Texas to provide a better education for English-language learners. In yesterday's court ruling, he rejected their arguments that ELLs are receiving an inferior education in public schools, the article says.

By the way, Justice William Wayne Justice is the same U.S. district judge who ruled in the 1970s that undocumented immigrant children in Tyler, Texas, were entitled to receive a free K-12 education. Tyler Independent School District appealed the decision in the court case, Plyler v. Doe, but the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Judge Justice's decision. See my earlier post, "A Scholar's look at MALDEF's role in Plyler v. Doe."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a story of an educator who picked up an idea at a conference and copied it for some of the English-language learners he serves in his work. The idea is to give ELLs a certificate and honor them in a special way when their school districts officially reclassify them as fluent in English.

Mark R. Condit, a program manager for multilingual education for the San Joaquin County Office of Education in California, heard educators from the West Contra Costa Unified School District speak at a session of the California Association for Bilingual Education about how they honor English-language learners with a certificate and school assembly when they become fluent in English.

Mr. Condit then asked a vice principal in the Manteca Unified School District—one of 16 K-8 school districts served by the San Joaquin County Office of Education—what happens when children in that school system are reclassified as fluent in English. In a phone interview this month, Mr. Condit relayed to me that the vice principal said, "A lot of kids probably don't even know it happened. They get a paper in the file."

Manteca's Shasta and Nile Garden elementary schools were the pilot sites for Mr. Condit's efforts. He showed up at those schools last spring to present a certificate to children who were reclassified as fluent in English. Click here to see a sample certificate and here to see a photo of one of the presentations. A local newspaper provided coverage of the new program.

Curriculum Associates Inc. also provided the 26 children who got certificates with several educational resources, including a thesaurus, a writing and grammar handbook, and a calendar of home activities for parents to support children with literacy activities. Mr. Condit said he gathered by the children's smiles that they were pleased to be recognized. "It's important for them to be honored," he said. "It's a significant educational achievement."

In California, which has the most English-language learners of any state, about 9 percent of such children are reclassified each school year as fluent in English. See my earlier post, "A Report Looks at Reclassification in California."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's useful to look at the findings of a recent United States Government Accountability Office report and note how various groups of people of Asian heritage are faring in getting college and university degrees. Inside Higher Ed notes that it's important for educators not to assume that all Asian-American students are doing better in school than everyone else—and don't need any help. The report shows that 13 percent of Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong adults attain at least a 4-year degree while 68 percent of Asian Indian adults do so.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been out of the office reporting on children from migrant families in Pennsylvania, and I see that several of you have posted your reflections about who picks up the tab--and who should pick up the tab--for educating undocumented immigrants. See "Utah Asks Feds to Pay for Educating Undocumented Children."

The comment that got me thinking was posted by Barbara Acosta. She said: "If we think cutting services to immigrants will lower our taxes, then it would only be fair to pay a decent price for our T-shirts, bluejeans and lettuce so those families can make a decent living and remain in their homelands."

This struck a chord with me particularly because, on my reporting trip this week, I interviewed Gonzalo Cano, 21, who described what it was like to work as a mushroom picker on weekends and during the summer when he was 17 and had just moved from Mexico to Avondale, Pa., with his family. He noted that he reported to work at 3 a.m. to begin harvesting so that there would be time for other workers to package the mushrooms and drivers to transport them to a customer on the same day that they were picked. "The mushroom has to be fresh," he said.

I came to better appreciate mushroom pickers, some of whom are undocumented, and the value of fresh mushrooms after interviewing Mr. Cano. I wonder if some Americans with strong views that undocumented immigrants shouldn't get government services might soften some of those views if they heard the stories of undocumented families face-to-face.

A blog reader with the name of "Lilathe" provoked the blog comments by writing that "illegals do not pay taxes." Indeed, many undocumented immigrants do not pay income taxes, which is a sore point with critics of illegal immigration. But they do contribute to the economy and pay some taxes, such as sales taxes. Sharon Kayne, the communications director of New Mexico Voices for Children, points this out in her blog comments.

July 27 update: See this article, "Illegal Immigrants Filing Taxes More Than Ever," for an additional perspective.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I'm in danger of doing nothing in the next hour but reading a profile of Meskhetian Turks published by the Cultural Orientation Resource Center of the Center for Applied Linguistics. That profile and other shorter "Refugee Backgrounders" contain fascinating information about the history and culture of selected groups of people--such as Banyamulenge Tutsi from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who have been resettled in the United States this year and who I've never heard of. The profiles are a great resource for educators who are receiving these children in schools. I just learned about the reports through the Center for Applied Linguistics' newsletter.

I met a couple of Meskhetian Turks in the Harrisonburg, Va., schools this winter, which piqued my interest in their culture and resettlement experience in this country. According to the profile, from 2004 to mid 2006, 9,000 Meskhetian Turks from Russia were resettled in the United States, and 3,000 more were expected to be resettled here soon after that. The profile, written last year, talks about their educational history, such as how they were segregated into inferior schools in some villages in Russia, and their expectations for schooling in the United States. Some parents, for example, have been disappointed with the lack of rigor in their children's schools in the United States.

On a deeper level, the profile helped me to feel compassion for the Meskhetian Turks because of their history of facing discrimination and harsh treatment. I hope that they are feeling welcome in U.S. communities and schools.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

First, Utah lawmakers conducted an audit of how much it costs the state to educate undocumented children in K-12 public schools. Now they're using that audit to ask the federal government to cover the cost, which was between $54.9 million and $85.4 million in 2006, as reported by an Associated Press reporter and published in the Salt Lake Tribune and other newspapers last week.

Last year, New Mexico Voices for Children estimated in a report that state and local governments in New Mexico spent between $49 million and $67 million in educating undocumented children each year. While the Utah audit did not take into consideration the financial contributions of illegal immigrants to the state, the study by the New Mexico Voices for Children did. The New Mexico study found that undocumented immigrants cover the K-12 education cost for undocumented children in the taxes they pay each year.

I'm not aware of any report that provides reliable figures nationwide about this issue. The U.S. Government Accountability Office--then called the General Accounting Office--published a report in June 2004, "Illegal Alien Schoolchildren: Issues in Estimating State-by-State Costs," that concluded government information was "not sufficient to directly estimate the state-by-state costs of educating illegal alien schoolchildren."

(Personally, I wish the government would stop using that word "aliens" to refer to undocumented people. It makes me think lawmakers who started using that word must have watched too many movies about visitors from outer space.)

It seems that coming up with some solid figures nationally for both the costs of educating undocumented children and the financial contributions of undocumented immigrants would make a good research project for someone.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

I inquired about current research on English-language learners funded by the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education, and the staff sent me a list of 32 projects that are in the works. Some focus on ELLs exclusively, and others include large samples of such students.

I had no idea that the institute was paying for so many studies about these students and I wonder if at some point in my reporting about ELLs, I'll no longer read that high-quality research about instruction for them is scant. Here's the list of projects that the staff compiled. (The acronyms on the list are spelled out on the institute's home page.)

Interestingly, one study underway by researchers at Johns Hopkins University--scheduled for completion in 2008 and paid for with a grant of $5.4 million--seems designed to answer that on-going question of what kinds of programs are most effective for ELLs. It's called "Effects of Transitional Bilingual Education, Two-Way Bilingual, and Structured English Immersion Programs and the Literacy and Oracy of Spanish-Dominant Children." Another study I'm keeping an eye on is "Optimizing Educational Outcomes for English Language Learners," conducted by researchers from the University of Houston, Center for Applied Linguistics, and the University of Texas, Austin. It's also scheduled for completion in 2008.

See my earlier post about the institute's recent publication on research-based recommendations for ELLs, "Education Department's 'Practice Guide' Urges Data-Driven Instruction for ELLs." Here's a viewpoint from blogger edbizbuzz.com about that publication.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

New York was not one of the states I contacted when reporting for an article recently about how not many states are offering detailed guidance or workshops for school districts on how to write a curriculum for English-language learners. "States Lag in ELL Curriculum Guidance" was published July 5 on edweek.org.

A reader of the article thus sent me an e-mail to let me know that New York--like Florida and Massachusetts--provides advice on how to create curricula for ELLs. Terri Brady-Méndez, a specialist in programs for ELLs for the Eastern Suffolk Board of Cooperative Educational Services in Bellport, N.Y., informed me that since 2000 New York has published a series of documents about the teaching of language arts to ELLs, all of which contain information about designing curricula for them. The publications have sample lessons and descriptions of standards-based instruction. (Click on the three documents in the top row.)

She--along with a number of teachers and researchers from the state--was a contributor. I appreciate her filling us in.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Arizona policymakers are using a buzz phrase popular in education circles in saying the models for structured English immersion that school districts must implement this fall are "research-based." But a document released by the Arizona Department of Education citing research to back those models shows that, for some aspects of the models, the research base is scant. The document acknowledges that high-quality research in general about instruction for English-language learners is limited.

The state is calling for English-language learners, in their first year in U.S. schools, to receive four hours of instruction each day in a separate block of time for English-language development. But the document cites only one study that shows it's more effective for English-language learners to have a fixed block of time each day in which they focus on developing their English-language skills than not to have it. What's more, the document doesn't cite any research that tells how long that block of time should be. The document also doesn't cite any research telling why it makes sense for the state to favor English immersion over bilingual methods, which the state has done since Arizona voters passed a ballot measure in 2000 that curtailed bilingual education.

In a telephone interview last week, Tom Horne, the Arizona superintendent of public instruction, told me that a study by Joseph M. Guzman published in Education Next in the fall of 2002 supports the use of structured English immersion with ELLs. (One expert in the field says that study's use of data doesn't provide valid inferences on whether bilingual education or English immersion is better. See here.)

Arizona's requirement that school districts provide four hours of English-language development each day is contained in a law passed in the 2005-2006 school year, but most school districts didn't implement that law, according to Mr. Horne. He said some are providing ELLs with "as little as a half-hour" of such instruction per day.

But now, he said, a task force for ELLs has spelled out what those four hours of English instruction should look like. A June 21 memo to school district superintendents says ELLs at the two lowest levels of English proficiency should receive 45 minutes of oral English and conversation; an hour each of grammar, reading, and vocabulary; and 15 minutes of pre-writing instruction.

The Arizona Republic ran an article on July 14 telling more about the implementation of the policy.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Omaha, Neb., school district is reportedly about to join eight other public school districts in offering dual-language classes in Spanish and English for students from kindergarten through high school.

In dual-language programs, children who are dominant in English and children who are dominant in Spanish--or another language other than English--take classes together in both languages. A July 9 article in the Houston Chronicle tells how the Texas legislature approved a bill to create a six-year pilot project for dual-language programs in 10 Texas school districts.

Because I so frequently read news articles about schools starting up these kinds of programs, I was surprised to learn from a July 9 article in the Omaha World-Herald reporting on the expansion of dual-language classes in Omaha that so few school districts provide dual-language classes for a student's whole elementary and high school career.

The districts running K-12 dual-language programs in Spanish and English identified by Center for Applied Linguistics and cited in the Omaha newspaper are:

• Anchorage (Alaska) School District
• Arlington (Va.) Public Schools
• Chicago Public Schools
• Framingham (Mass.) Public Schools
• Houston Independent School District
• Saddleback Valley Unified School District; Laguna Hills, Calif.
• Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District; Santa Monica, Calif.
• Ysleta Independent School District; El Paso, Texas

A ninth school system--the San Francisco Unified School District--runs a program in Cantonese and English from kindergarten through high school. If the Center for Applied Linguistics has missed other districts out there offering dual-language classes for the full spectrum of grades, please tell readers and me about them.

See my earlier post summarizing a book about dual-language programs, "Two-Way Vision: How Four Schools Promote Bilingualism."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David J. Francis, a psychology professor at the University of Houston and the director of the National Research and Development Center for English Language Learners, has an interesting proposal for how accountability provisions for English-language learners could be improved in reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. I hear through my sources that congressional aides have invited at least one expert on assessment of ELLs into their offices this summer to hear advice on how to reauthorize the act--but I haven't heard if they've contacted Mr. Francis about his views.

Mr. Francis proposes that the accountability system for ELLs under the NCLB Act continue to incorporate both English-language-proficiency tests and content-area tests. But he says that more weight should be given to English-language-proficiency test scores when ELLs are new to the country and don't know much English. As they spend more time in the United States and become more proficient in the language, their test scores on academic content tests should be given more weight, he says.

Mr. Francis' proposal for a change in the federal education law--along with several others proposals for change--is described in a summary of a roundtable discussion on ELLs and the NCLB Act that was hosted by the Center on Education Policy in March. The summary of the meeting was posted this summer.

July 16 update: Diane August, a senior research scientist at the Center for Applied Linguistics, tells me she has discussed Dr. Francis' weighted-index proposal with the staff of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Dr. Francis told me in an e-mail message that he has participated in a conference call with congressional staff on the topic of reauthorization of provisions for ELLs in NCLB.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

A column that ran in the New York Times last week tells how Allison Rabenau, an English-as-a-second-language teacher in New York City, struggled over three school years to reduce the amount of time she spent both at the beginning and end of each school year "to prepare, administer, then score a standardized test for English fluency." One school year, she spent 12 weeks on testing matters.

Samuel G. Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University and the writer of the column, notes that Ms. Rabenau resigned this past school year from New York City's schools and expects to soon move to Bangkok, where she will teach at an international school.

A blogger who is an ESL teacher in New York City and read the column writes that New York's English-language proficiency test requires that he interview each of his students one by one for the oral section of the test. While he's tied up with the testing, the rest of his students end up doing "busy work," he says.

ESL teachers, are you having similar experiences to those of Ms. Rabenau and the blogger at nyceducator.com? How much time do you spend each school year on testing English-language learners with standardized English proficiency tests?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Educators should be very deliberate in teaching English-language learners how to read, and one effective way to do that is to test their reading progress frequently--and use the data to tailor instruction to them. That conclusion is contained in a research-based "practice guide" on ELLs published by the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education last week.

The authors of the guide, "Effective Literacy and English Language Instruction for English Learners in the Elementary Grades," say research evidence for data-driven instruction for English-language learners is "strong." Teachers need to be poised to provide intensive reading interventions for any ELLs having problems learning to read in English--they shouldn't wait around until their students can speak and understand English before testing them in beginning reading skills. In fact, ELLs at a high risk of having reading problems should have their progress monitored weekly or biweekly, according to the guide. (See my earlier post, "Report Shows Data-Based Instruction is the Way to Go," which summarizes findings from an EdSource report.)

What I like about the practice guide is that it spells out "possible roadblocks and solutions" to each of the report's five recommendations. For example, it says that some teachers feel it's unfair to use a test in English to measure a student's early reading skills if he or she doesn't yet know English. Not to worry, says the report, because students will be able to use their "phonemic awareness" from their native language to take such a test.

In November, I wrote an article noting that the researchers writing the practice guide had decided not to address whether it's best for schools to use bilingual education or English-only methods in teaching ELLs how to read. The preface of the guide cites some reasons why the researchers didn't take a position on this issue, including that it has already been the "subject of great debate and numerous reviews in the literature." Another reason cited is that "in most cases school administrators have little say on issues involving language of initial reading instruction."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've gotten to the part where several students are trapped in an elevator that is taking them down into the magma chamber of a volcano with inventions they prepared for a school science class. The students--who include Tron, from Vietnam, and Amira, from Morocco--are characters in a novel, The Eight Ball Club: Ocean of Fire. M.C. Pugin-Rodas, who has a master's degree in English as a second language and taught ESL in Virginia's public schools, published it this summer for secondary English-language learners and developing readers.

There's a bit too much classroom banter in the first two chapters for my taste. My interest increased when students started describing their various inventions in science class. I'll let you teachers, who know more about the needs of your students than I do, judge whether this book belongs in your classroom. The list price for the 140-page novel is $18.95. Teachers and school districts can receive a discount through a distributor, Reading Matters.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you have a large number of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Vietnamese students in your English-as-a-second-language classes, you might want to purchase the summer copy of MultiCultural Review (a single copy is $25) or find one in a library. The issue, which isn't free online, contains an article, "Asian ESL Students and Literacy Development," that tells about the learning styles of Asian students and summarizes some differences between several Asian languages and English. It's written by Peter Edwards, a professor of education at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Va., and Hui-Chin Yang, a professor of education at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

The article says "one characteristic of the Asian learning style is a teacher-centered, closure-oriented learning mode, leading Asian students to dislike ambiguity, uncertainty, or fuzziness." I recall how when I was an English teacher in China nearly two decades ago, I had a student who believed he could become fluent in English by learning all of the grammar rules for the language. To be able to connect with my Chinese students and build on what they already knew, I had to learn quite a lot about English grammar.

The comparisons between languages offer insight not commonly discussed in education journals. In the Korean language, disagreement is expressed more directly and forcefully than it is in American English. In Chinese, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs don't have suffixes. The word, "happy," for instance, can be used as several parts of speech without any change, while in English the word changes to "happily" or "happiness."

You teachers have a challenge to explain to students why English is the way it is, and it can't hurt to know where students might be helped or hindered by influences from their native languages. By the way, does anyone have a good explanation for why I need the word "does" in this question? I know from my own teaching experience that it's hard to come up with explanations for some of this stuff on one's feet.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Over the last few years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has succeeded in dramatically increasing the percentage of English-language learners who are reclassified as fluent in English each year, even though, on average, California school districts have not. One reason: Last school year the Los Angeles district dropped its requirement that for ELLs to be declared fluent in English, they had to reach an achievement bar in math.

The percentage of ELLs in Los Angeles who were reclassified as fluent in English during the past school year was 13.4 percent, up from 9.5 percent the previous year, and up from 2.1 percent during the 2002-03 school year. By contrast, since the 2002-03 school year, the reclassification rate on average for school districts across the state has increased to 9.2 percent, from 7.7 percent.

The district made several changes in the education of ELLs that helped to raise the reclassification rate, including giving professional development to almost all elementary-school teachers who have such students in their classrooms, according to Jesus F. Limon, the director of the language acquisition branch for Los Angeles Unified. Nearly 270,000 of the district's 701,000 students are ELLs.

School district officials decided to drop the math criteria for determining fluency because it was keeping so many ELLs from being reclassified, Mr. Limon told me in a phone interview today. "Our philosophy is we need to get them reclassified and into the mainstream program. If you track them into English-as-a-second-language [classes], they keep falling behind."

I first learned that ELLs' math skills were a factor in reclassification in Los Angeles several years ago when I wrote about how a much higher percentage of ELLs were scoring proficient in English on the California English Language Development Test each year than were being declared fluent in English back in their school districts. See my article on this topic from 2004.

The discrepancy still persists across California.

This summer the California Department of Education released results for the California English Language Development Test for this past school year and once again the percentage of ELLs scoring proficient on the test is MUCH HIGHER than the percentage of such students being reclassified as fluent in English. The Sacramento Bee makes this point and gives a tidy overview of students' results in a June 22 article. The article notes that 29 percent of English-language learners scored proficient on the test this past school year.

See my earlier post, "A Report Takes a Look at Reclassification in California."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)