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Long-Term ELs Part 2: Challenging the Status Quo through Systematic and Instructional Changes Needed to Prevent Long-Term ELs

Confianza: For Educators of Language Learners

by Janna X. Heiligenstein, Ph.D.

Janna, an Assistant Professor of Education at Fitchburg State University in MA, focuses on teacher preparation to work with culturally and linguistically diverse students as well as being the chair of the Educational Leadership and Management program, where her focus is to prepare future school and district leaders to be culturally competent and able to effect change for all students.  This is the first of a series of blogs about Long-Term English Learners.

In Part One  of our series, we’ve already covered what we know about who our long-term English learners (LTELs) are, and now it is time to examine our current systems with a focus on the services we provide for ELs to better understand how they contribute to the problem.

With limited resources, and in many places, underdeveloped or no bilingual instruction that starts in kindergarten, most instructional support that young Els receive is based on their level of English proficiency.  With a focus on providing the most ESL teacher support to beginning ELs, there are few resources left for those that are at higher proficiency levels or in the upper grades.  While research shows that “sink-or-swim” placement in general education classrooms with a teacher that is not prepared to facilitate language acquisition is extremely detrimental to EL success, this model seems appropriate.  However, when considered with the resulting limited services for ELs past the beginning stages and the placement in those same general education classrooms, only this time already being years behind their peers, it doesn’t look so good. This practice has major implications in the development of long-term ELs.

First, young ELs are pulled away from their English-speaking peers and placed with one language model, their ESL teacher.  We know that we acquire language through meaningful interactions with others, and with repetition across contexts, for different purposes, and with opportunities to practice.  Being with other beginners takes students away from their English-speaking peers and opportunities for meaningful interactions in content-area activities.  

Furthermore, the pull-out instruction that may happen with the ESL teacher may or may not be aligned to the content areas that the students are missing while being pulled, the ESL teacher may or may not have a strong background in literacy or the content areas that the students are missing, and when the students return to the classroom, they frequently come back in having missed a good portion of the learning opportunity that is happening as they enter, and so they end up sitting around, or doing some kind of “busy” work until the next portion of the day arrives.  Sometimes they are expected to complete what the other students have done or are doing, but without the benefit of the instruction, discussion and modeling the other students received.  This practice ensures that our beginning ELs grow further behind as the year progresses.   It also frequently results in students that are disengaged and frustrated in their classrooms, have higher behavioral issues, and consequently more referrals to special education.  Students gain social language in models like this, but frequently miss out on important content-area vocabulary and conceptual development.

In schools with no ESL support at all, beginning students achieve social language proficiency in 1-3 years when they are surrounded by their peers and engaged in the classroom, which reflects what we know about language acquisition in general.  Given this, why do we put most of our resources towards beginners and pull them out of the very environments that will support their early acquisition the best?  Why aren’t we targeting team teaching, collaboration and staff development for those general education teachers instead?

Once students have basic social English, we typically have them spend more time in their general education classrooms and allocate much less time with an ESL specialist.  Their classroom teachers are more comfortable having them in the class as they can communicate with them and as they reach an intermediate level, the students may sound much like their English-speaking peers.  However, assuming they arrived in kindergarten, they may now be in 2nd, 3rd or 4th grade and have missed significant chunks of content concepts and academic vocabulary.  I like to think of this missing knowledge as “swiss cheese.”  In my experience, my intermediate-llevel students had gained varying degrees of content area background and vocabulary, and I had to specifically assess their skills and knowledge and work on a plan to target each area in short 4-6 week sessions, grouping my students together that needed similar instruction and then re-assessing and regrouping to move on to the next area of need.  But if we don’t have ESL teachers assigned to give this time to the students, or if there is no time to collaborate and plan with the classroom teachers, the students frequently do not get the specific, targeted instruction that will move them on to the next level of proficiency, resulting in them falling further behind as they go through the following school years.  And if we leave this kind of support to our other specialists, the students frequently receive instruction that is designed for students identified with special learning needs, rather than instruction designed to target what the students missed while they were learning English and instruction that focuses on oral and academic language development as well as content area concepts.

Research shows that ELs who are in schools without early bilingual instruction and/or limited academic English support have a much higher chance of becoming a long-term EL.  Even in schools with a lot of support for beginning ELs, the focus on pulling the students for literacy and math, and the reduced amount of exposure to social studies and science and lack of integration results in ELs entering middle school missing key content and academic language knowledge.   Lack of or limited, targeted services for intermediate and higher level ELs in elementary schools also results in missed opportunities to gain important oral and academic language, especially in schools where the general education teachers are insufficiently prepared to support students in these areas.

Thank you to WIDA Consortium Executive Director, Tim Boals, for this program chart

What if we switched things around?

When I was hired as the bilingual education and ESL coordinator for the Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin, we faced this very same issue.  We had limited resources, but after examining our data, realized that the focus on pulling out and assigning most of our ESL teacher time on beginners was resulting in a number of ELD level 4 (intermediate) students in 8th grade who had attending our district schools since kindergarten.  We also had unacceptable drop-out rates, especially in certain language groups, and issues with over enrollment in special education services.  

Based on this data, we flipped things around.  We reallocated our ESL teachers to spend more time with our ELD level 3-5 students and moved our bilingual aides from generalized help around the school to specifically supporting our brand new ELs in their classrooms.  When possible, we consolidated our ELs so that the ESL teachers and bilingual aides had fewer environments and teachers to work with and started focusing on content-based and strong literacy instruction designed from an assessment of the needs of those students at ELD levels 3-5.  Now, I am not advocating not providing any services for beginning ELs, or not providing them with any literacy instruction, but rather a rearrangement in priorities for the limited ESL teacher time that most schools have.  We also began the move to implement bilingual programming in those schools with our largest groups of Spanish speaking students, (which is an entirely different article).  

Suffice it to say, it was a long, challenging process in the political climate we had, and we had our share of common issues, like finding certified bilingual teachers.  However, the switch from a beginner focused ESL model to one in which we provided trained bilingual assistants to work in classrooms with beginners and focused teacher instruction on specific language and content area development for more advanced students set us up for the next steps needed in our improvement efforts.

Curriculum Changes and Challenges

Here is where I typically get the most resistance from schools and districts.  I am going to argue that we need to get practical and use our common sense and really revisit our approach to curriculum.  The 500 page textbooks some districts are using for 1st and 2nd grade students are clearly not working in terms of promoting literacy skills, comprehension or even a basic love of reading.  Not to mention it is just ridiculous that we are using tools that almost weigh as much as the children.  The amount of money we spend on “programs” for ELs could be much better spent on staff development and appropriate personnel.  The programs of study (POS) that district curriculum folks have so kindly put together to help teachers address the standards have taken away teachers’ abilities to use their students’ own background knowledge to make connections those same standards, as well as their ability to design meaningful, differentiated assignments, assessments and activities using their professional knowledge.  The focus is now on what page to cover rather than finding what pushes the students buttons so we can engage them in learning.  How can we go back to programs of study that are “suggestions” rather than law?  How do we encourage our teachers to take their content area knowledge and allow for the flexibility of them matching the students’ interests and background knowledge to acquiring the competency set forth in the standards?  Who says we need to read this book or that?  If we are working on comprehension, can we do that with a text that is interesting to the student?  And the texts we choose---why not have texts at the appropriate levels for the students to choose from rather than just grabbing whatever is left in the bookroom?  This is a big discussion, but one worth advocating for!

Next Up:  Long-Term ELs Part 3:  Targeted staff development for different groups of teachers and staff to specifically address the needs of ELs at all stages of acquisition.

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