Long-term ELs: Part 4 Addressing the Needs of Long-term English Learners

A woman looking downwards.

by Janna Heiligenstein, Ph.D.

This is Part 4 in our series on Long-Term English Learners.  If you haven't read them all, start here with the first one in the series.

For a school system, there are many system changes you can make that will reduce or eliminate the issue of long-term English learners (LTELs) but change takes time.  In the meantime, what steps can you take right now to better the support and instruction that your current LTELs need to really become proficient and successful?

The year I earned my Ph.D., I wanted to prove that I could be a teacher again after years of being an administrator.  Things had changed so much since my teacher days and I felt like I needed to experience the current reality of what our teachers face each day in order to better lead as an administrator.  I also wanted to work in a place where the need for highly qualified teachers was great---and so my adventurous daughter and I packed up our things and moved from Wisconsin to South Carolina where I taught in two different high schools.  There I found out first-hand what Laurie Olsen refers to as an “ESL ghetto.” (2014, p.15) Students were randomly assigned to my classes; with no apparent regard for their English language development (ELD) levels, nor their grade. I had 14 year-old freshmen girls in with 19 year-old males, ELD level 5 students in with ELD level 1 newcomers, and all the former ELs would ask (demand might be a better word) to just hang out because they didn’t want to go to or weren’t successful in the general education classes.  One of my students couldn’t read in either English or Spanish even though he had been in the system for 5 years. My most successful student read at about a 7th grade level and had prior schooling before arriving in the US.  They were all in the same class. The curriculum was one of those packaged text series designed to drill grammar and random vocabulary into the students’ heads, and was totally isolated from the content of their other courses.  The previous year, the students had sent the teacher out (in tears) and rewired the ESL computers, bypassing the district’s technology security systems, and were playing XBOX live during class time. No one seemed to care about the success of these students and they certainly were not gaining academic English or content-area skills.  Everyone wrote them off, but clearly they had skills and knowledge we could build on.

Research tells us that our secondary schools are not usually set up to meet the needs of these types of students and that frequently teachers don’t even know they have ELs in their classrooms.  Either we don’t have the programs at all, or we provide isolated classrooms for beginners and dump the rest of the students that we deem need help into them. We need better ways to track EL progress and to identify the students that qualify as LTELs so that we can systematically address their needs.  Here are a few examples and suggestions to try.

1. Care and DO something about it!

What do I mean by care?  To me, it is the heart of teaching.  It’s all about relationships built on mutual respect and trust.  To me, it seemed that teachers had given up on these students at some point.  We need to care enough to fix that. Students that have not had much or any success over the years are not very trusting of our system or of us, and their engagement levels are low. Building relationships, getting to know our students, and offering them respect as individuals fully capable of contributing to their own learning and choosing paths for that learning creates the foundation for all other efforts.  

In South Carolina, I figured out quickly that the students were fans of soccer.  I bought a few, fun indoor soccer shoes that I wore each day (these got our conversations going and the students loved that I wore them each day) and I fully admitted to having questionable skills.  I started an after-school club for my students with only two rules: You couldn’t be under the influence of drugs or be pregnant to play with us. At first we had about 5-6 students. By spring, we filled three soccer fields, with many students who were not in my classes attending as well.  I got right out there with them and we had fun together. I connected with a few of the parents that were concerned about their daughters meeting us out there, a few others came to check out the crazy (female) teacher playing “futbol” with their children, and after a while, others brought us meals.  

By getting to know the students in this way, having fun with them, and meeting their families, I established a rapport that carried over into our classroom, and by welcoming other students in joining us, helped my students to make friends and find connections outside of their own small groups of peers. In addition, my two rules told them what other adults in their lives had not; I cared about them and their futures enough to discuss things like the crazy high rates of young teen pregnancies (indeed, it was cool to come to school and show off your ultrasounds around age 14), and the amount of drug use (the gangs swept through often as we were on the drug corridor of Interstate 95 between Miami and New York).   As a passionate alumnus, I also shared fun stories and videos of my university’s teams, and general college environment. We discussed what courses and grades they might need to go to college, and investigated the local options and technical schools in our area. This too showed them that I cared about their future (and I’m happy to say that two of my students have earned college degrees--it took them longer than most but they persevered and did it!) One of them used to send me his papers and asked for help in editing and with organization, years after I was no longer in South Carolina. I believe that without someone like me to show them the path and to believe in them, they wouldn’t have even thought to apply.  We need to systematize these kinds of practices to reach more students and show them their many options.

2. Combine these practices to set the stage:

  1. Set high expectations and share them with your students by involving them in reviewing data and setting goals.  

  2. Use student interests as a basis for literacy and other instruction

  3. Intertwine oral language development, vocabulary acquisition and academic language patterns into all instruction

This may sound like a no-brainer, but our walk has to match our talk.  I had all of the computers removed from my classroom with the exception of three of the ugliest (yet still functioning) ones, which we used for research or for completing assignments for other classes.  No more babysitting the students by having them sit for 90 minutes on a computer. I stood at my classroom door each day, blocking entry to those students not in my classes. They were disruptive, and once they got in, refused to leave.  I learned their names, but kindly turned them down each day as I explained that my class had serious learning to do and we didn’t have time to just hang out. I assessed all of my students and shared the results with them individually.

By incorporating student interests and rarely turning to the provided text and curriculum (which was inappropriate and boring,) my students learned how to read and write around topics of interest to them.  Using their interests and current pop culture allowed for meaningful opportunities to practice oral language and tie it to those literacy skills we were learning in a way that was interesting and entertaining.  Once we established a respectful and fun environment, we were able to turn to academic language and concepts of their content area classes. Within six weeks, my students would breeze past me into class at 7:30 am, smiling and asking what we were going to do that day.  Learning became fun.

Meanwhile, the 19 year-old that couldn’t read shared that he only showed up at school each day so he wouldn’t disappoint his parents---however he didn’t think actually participating was necessary.  I made it clear that I expected him to participate because his ideas and thoughts were important and that he was a leader for the others. I also expected him to learn how to read and told him that I would do anything necessary to help him, but he had to want it.  He made the decision to go for it and so I got permission for him to get out of his study hall, where he was only getting into fights, and instead he spent two 90-minute periods with me every other day. In three months he went from a pre-primer level to about a 3rd grade level in reading, his vocabulary expanded beyond count, and he suddenly found himself able to access some of the texts in his biology and math classes.  As an added bonus, he really did become a leader to others and frequently got them back in line and on topic when their behaviors threatened to disrupt the class.

3. Strategies that work

  1. Help the students to make connections between content and their own experiences

  2. Use interesting texts and other resources

  3. Give the students choices in terms of texts, products, activities and even assessments

  4. Use students’ native language as possible to facilitate understanding of critical concepts and to further hone their home language skills. (Literacy courses for “Speakers” of other languages are great ways to promote fully bi-literate students and raise students’ overall abilities).

I was unable to change the way classes were scheduled for our ELs, but I reached out to some of the content area teachers to find out their expectations and to get curriculum from them.  I designated part of each class to pre-teaching content area vocabulary, introduced question and answer frames, had them practice discussing concepts, asking questions, and used sentence starters to help them learn how to answer those questions in writing.  We then applied these skills and knowledge to completing some of the assignments for their content area classes.

Sometimes, I took the content (for instance, traits of writing) and used the students’ favorite songs to analyze them for things like word choice or descriptive language.  They were then able to better understand the concept, apply it to other writing, and easily remembered our discussion and the instruction because it was a song they liked.  After seeing how this work helped the students, the content area teachers became more willing to talk with me and to share upcoming lessons. While I wouldn’t say we were true partners, they became more willing to work with me.  Having a system in place that carefully assigned LTELs into fewer environments would have reduced the number of teachers I had to work with, and made it even easier for me to focus on the concepts and content being covered. Having an administration that encouraged these collaborative efforts by thoughtful scheduling and providing common planning time would have reinforced the importance of the success of these students.  

Since I am able to speak Spanish, I was able to use that with many of my students to help them make connections to the content.  For other students, I was able to advocate for electronic dictionaries for them to take with them to classes so that they could look up words as needed, and I encouraged them to use their home language with each other in class to discuss important concepts and to ask each other questions.  I did advocate for this practice to follow them in their other classes, with mixed success. Having administration that understood the importance of home language development and that emphasized it with the whole staff would have been very beneficial for our students.

4. Model, give examples, and be explicit---in your directions, your instruction and your expectations

Because LTELs have such mixed abilities and background knowledge, they often need real-life examples, and explicit modeling to make connections and take on new tasks in unfamiliar content areas. Since they have missed so much of key instruction and are significantly behind their peers we cannot assume that they have basics that other students might have.  We need to figure out the essential elements of what they have missed, be very explicit (with them and ourselves) about why that information or content is critical in terms of moving forward, and then facilitate opportunities to learn it and practice the accompanying language and literacy skills. The same principles apply to our expectations about behavior—other students learned how to “do school” at the same time they were learning content.  Since LTELs have typically disengaged and most likely missed quite a bit when they had lower ELD levels, they need someone to explain the rules and even more importantly, show them what those rules look like. It’s very hard to play the game, let alone win it, if you don’t know the rules.

5. Principals need to:

  1. Set up collaboration opportunities between teachers to better support the academic language acquisition of the content areas

  2. Provide training for teachers if needed so that they have the skills necessary to teach literacy skills that more typically are taught in the elementary grades---AND--- to assess students so they can more specifically target the skills needed.

  3. Work towards inclusion and co-teaching models so that ELs are included in challenging content-area classrooms.

As already described in Part 3 of this LTELs Series, staff development is critical in terms of both eliminating the creation of LTELs and also in improving the instruction for the ones currently in the system.  Especially of importance is high-quality content area instruction with English-speaking peers in a way that is scaffolded for success. LTELs need to be in college-preparatory classes that challenge their thinking and set them up for choices in the future.  This can’t happen in our current systems or ways of thinking. Kindergarten teachers can differentiate all day with widely different levels of our students, I have full confidence that with training, our middle and high school teachers can do the same, because I have seen it happen a few schools.  If we want serious, long-lasting results, we need to make such staff development a priority, with thoughtful contributions from our teachers as part of it’s design, and in a way that builds on their knowledge and facilitates their learning and progress over time.

Resources

Leading for Equity, Curriculum and InstructionConfianza: For Educators of Language Learners