The District Handbook

More young americans nowadays are being raised in homes speaking non-English, but these students are falling behind in schools where there is not a bilingual program available. According to the U.S. Department of Education, in schools without a bilingual education program, 71% of English speakers are at or above the basic requirements for fourth grade reading while merely 30% of non-English speakers reach this level. 35% of English and 8% of non-English speakers reach proficient reading levels while only 9% of English and 1% of non-English speakers perform at advanced levels. It’s evident that the availability of a bilingual program is crucial to the success of an individual who needs the resources that can be given to them through the use of bilingual education. The percentages of the non-English speaking students previously mentioned could undoubtedly be comparable to those percentages of the English speaking students if the education they were being provided with was cohesive to their comfortability, and the material being taught was in a language they could better understand.

ESL is stands for English as a Second Language, which is a program that?s mainly developed to supplement the Bilingual Education in order to give extra help to the immigrants to learn English. ?The profession of teaching English as a second language within the United States began to expand in the 1960s in response to increasing numbers of immigrant and refugee children entering the country, as well as to the growing numbers of international students attending U.S. universities? (Collier and Ovando, 1998). Students in the ESL program receive the instruction of their level of English proficiency, so they can learn the English from the very basic level. Once they get better with their English skills, they will be able to move out the ESL program and be as competitive as the native speakers of English in other subject classes. The first decades of ESL programs fails to help students with academic work in math, science, social studies, and other curricular areas but English. In order to improve this situation, ESL programs started to focus more in helping students with their academic works during the 1950s and 1960s (Collier and Ovando, 1998).

As our nation shifts towards a more culturally diverse population both educators and families have to find a common ground to ensure that English Language Learners are academically successful. All stakeholders must carefully consider the social cultural impact on an ELL education. The process of raising bilingual learners take more than a language a school and a language learned at home. The transition must have a purpose and a goal.

Dual language education benefits both English dominant students and English language learners with a goal of helping students to become bilingual, bicultural and biliterate. This paper will explore the Implications of Dual Language Immersion programs in US schools. While dual-language education has existed in the United States for roughly two centuries, and it reached its height of popularity in the 1970s, the use of dual-language education in public schools has declined significantly in recent decades due to legislative actions that have sought to limit its use. When used, dual-language education is generally seen as a way to ensure that non-English-speaking students, or students who are not yet proficient in English, are given equitable opportunities to succeed in and complete their education. While schools and teachers may use a wide variety of dual-language strategies, each with its own specific instructional goals, the programs are typically designed to simultaneously develop English fluency, content knowledge, and academic language—the knowledge, skills, and cultural proficiencies needed to succeed in an academic program.

It is no secret that the debate over what is the best course of action to educate our non-native English language students across the country is a highly charged topic that runs from the classroom to Capitol Hill. There have been many shifts in direction and focus of educational programs for English Language Learning (ELL) students during the past century in our nation's history. In 1968, with the passage of the Bilingual Education Act (Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) legislation was

It is essential to understand English language learners’ needs because ELL students face the combined challenge of learning all the academic content as other students, while also learning the language of instruction. With the rapid growth in the size of the ELL student population in the U.S., teachers who are effective recognizes ELL students unique academic needs, unique background experience, culture, language, personality, interests and attitudes toward learning for the purpose to adjust, or differentiate, their instruction to meet students’ needs.

This is a good starting point to help teachers distinguish between a true learning disability and learning English as a second language. If an ELL has a real learning disability then early detection is essential. However, if an ELL does have a learning disorder and does not receive special education for many years, because teachers were waiting for he or she to learn the language, serious consequences could happen (Haung, Clarke, Milczarski, Raby, 2011). Students could be grade levels behind their peers and could suffer emotionally and socially in and out of school. Some ELLs may be able to speak in their native language, but they may not be able to read and write in it. Finally, teachers also have to pay very close attention to ELLs. Each ELL has had a different set of experiences and ranges of educational exposure (Haung, Clarke, Milczarski, Raby, 2011). Teachers must push for appropriate professional development for teachers working with ELLs. Teachers are more prepared to deliver appropriate assessment and instructional modifications to ELLs with disabilities when they have been given appropriate professional development (Haung, Clarke, Milczarski, Raby, 2011).

The class is a mainstreamed first grade co-teach class of 34 students and two teachers. There are 16 females and 18 males that included 12 active English Language Learners (ELLs) (5 females, 7 males) and five Level 5 (proficient) students. The 12 ELL students represent five languages—Spanish (7), Chinese (1), Chin Burmese (1), and Arabic (2), Brazilian Portuguese (1). Eight of the twelve students tested at Level 1 on the WIDA language proficiency scale.

It has been estimated that by the year 2025, approximately one out of every public school student will be identified as an ESL/ELL student in the United States. ESL stands for English as a Second Language and ELL stands for English Language Learner. An ESL/ELL student can be defined as a student whose predominant language or languages at home, is other than English, and would require additional English language support to develop reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. The difference between an ESL student and ELL student is minor; An ESL student participates in programs that are customarily specialized while an ELL student partakes in a traditional educational classroom. English Language Learners have surpassed other subgroups in becoming the fastest growing of the public school population. Despite the common misjudgement of some people towards the ESL/ELL population, 76% of the ESL/ELL students in elementary schools and 56% of the ESL/ELL students in secondary schools are native-born. The highest percentages of ELL/ESL students in public schools are found in the west of the United States. Taking the average of both bigger and smaller cities, ELL students make an average of 14% of the total public school enrollment and in suburban areas, ELL students make up an average of 8.5% of public school enrollment. The ESL/ELL population has more than doubled over the past 15 years and more than half of those students struggle with their academic performance. An ESL/ELL

Hill, J.D., & Flynn, K.M. (2006). Classroom instruction that works with English language learner. Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

English Learners (EL) are any students that are learning a second language and being introduced to the English language. They can affect education

This model supports the use of both the native language and the new language within the daily teaching curriculum (Ray, 2008). The No Child Left Behind Act threatens the Dual Language method and negatively impacts bilingual education because of the high degree of emphasis that is placed on standardized testing. The weight of standardized testing that is felt from the state all the way down to the classroom level has forced curriculum to focus on the passing of these tests. Because bilingual students must take the standardized test in English, this has caused a shift in the landscape of bilingual education. Teachers of bilingual students are abandoning the DL method in favor of a more English only environment as a means to help students pass standardized tests (Ray, 2008). This negates the purpose of bilingual education and decreases the benefits that these students receive while learning in a dual language

This case study tried to identify how effective Dual Language programs are in promoting academic success and what specific factors helped the program maintain its effectiveness. It tried to identify specific strategies that made the program successful and how these strategies impacted student success. The study took place in an urban school in the state of Texas, where most of the students are English Language Learners. Interviews, focus groups, observations and the data from the English Texas Assessment in math, science and reading were used to gather data. All these components were quantified to make the data comparable and to be able to better analyzed the results.

To begin with, dual-language programs are beneficial because students enrolled in this curriculum excel in the school setting. In particular, dual-language scholars outperform monolinguals in one’s native language. Bilinguals begin to surpass students in English-only programs beginning in the fifth grade (Gándara 2). By high school, dual-language students ultimately dominate monolinguals in reclassification to English-proficiency and English language art scores (Gándara 2). This study reveals that not only are dual language learners perform extremely well on standardized tests, they are rising above those who only have knowledge of their own native language. Another study conducted by Michigan State University in 2013 supports this claim, as

ESL students are students that speak English as a second language. Presently, there is many different system to characterize this type of students (qtd in Shi, Steen 63). For example, they can be seen as “English Language Learners (ELL), English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), English Language Development (ELD), English Language Service (ELS), and