I wrote the following originally to satisfy the requirements of graduate class I took this summer. I publish it here due to the fact that many of the issues I describe herein continue to be my priority as an educator.
Since 2006, the population of English language learners (ELLs) in American K12 schools has increased by 1.2 million students. This population growth has exacerbated problems related to the identification and education of English language learners, especially in states experiencing the highest growth rates over the past decades, many of which lack appropriate structures for ELL instruction due to low or nonexistent ELL populations prior to the growth. South Carolina, for example, is one of five states to experience the most rapid growth measured between the years 2000 to 2014. These problems regarding the identification and education of ELLs must be identified and examined before critical solutions are implemented.
First, children learn language through culture but the prevailing model of ELL instruction, English immersion with occasional pullout for remedial English language instruction, disconnects the student from a known culture without providing support for adaptation to the new culture. Many ELLs experience culture shock concerning the completely culturally different practices and curriculum content in the monolingual English classroom from how they learn in the home. This disconnect leads to social isolation, especially among young ELLs, unaccustomed to the type of social interactions of their English-only speaking classmates. Thus, young ELLs develop relationships slowly with their English-only speaking peers at a time when research-based studies have proven that play and deep social interactions are the way that children learn best. Even beyond these slow-developing social interactions, ELLs struggle to gain proficiency with culturally unique aspects of language such as colloquialisms and idioms since “[l]anguage is learned within culture” and these figures of speech originate from specific cultural norms.
Additionally, the cultural disconnect, language anxiety, and inaccurate English proficiency diagnoses contribute to the growing misdiagnosis of attention and learning difficulties among ELLs. This leads to a mismatch of services for the ELL or a complete lack of adequate services. On one hand, teachers with inadequate training in this area – a large majority of teachers that ELLs receive instruction from – observe ELL performance in social settings such as recess or in the lunchroom and mistakenly believe that these students have achieved proficiency when, in reality, the student requires several more years of specialized instruction to achieve proficiency with the academic vocabulary and abstract thinking processes required in increasing amounts as the student progresses through school. As a result, these teachers are less likely to offer differentiated strategies, scaffolds, to support the students’ learning while they are in that teacher’s classroom. Obversely, ELLs tend to attend schools with remedial programs that offer an emphasis on developing English proficiency at the expense of critical content knowledge which has the compounding expense of increasing the gap between the students’ knowledge and state expectations. An additional indication of the potentially catastrophic misdiagnosis of ELLs lies in the fact that up until the fourth grade, ELLs tend to be underdiagnosed with attention and learning issues while after fourth grade, the trend reverses so that ELLs find themselves more likely to be diagnosed with learning and attention issues when their primary struggle is language proficiency. As a result, many young ELLs do not receive critical support in reading and general learning techniques at a foundational level while older ELLs find themselves held back by an emphasis on strategies to deal with learning and attention issues when their needs would be met with targeted language instruction.
Furthermore, ELL status frequently prevents gifted ELLs from partaking in advanced gifted and talented programs since many in the field of education either do not recognize the giftedness of ELL students or perceive that continued English acquisition needs disqualify these students from the services offered to other gifted students. As a comparison, 6.4% of the general English language-proficient population is identified as gifted and talented while only 1.4% of the ELL population is identified.9 ELLs are four and a half times less likely to be identified for their advanced skills than their English-proficient peers. Many mistakenly believe that ELLs should be kept out of programs for advanced students while learning English, despite evidence to the contrary that proves that gifted ELLs benefit from challenging work.
ELLs limited English proficiency also affects their overall educational outcomes due to an emphasis on education in English acquisition and decreased instruction time in other students, which causes students to toil with general curriculum due to struggles with academic vocabulary and other academic constructs of those general subjects. Although a variety of academic models exist for ELL instruction, most fail to provide sufficient time for the ELL to achieve the cognitive academic language proficiency necessary for success in the wide variety of required academic tasks in subjects ranging from math to social studies and beyond. Only in the immersion model do students obtain instruction in both English acquisition and the general curriculum without expense to one or the other. In other models where the student receives instruction in English acquisition only during related arts classes or even in place of the English-only English Language Arts classes, students miss crucial instruction time which puts them in the disadvantageous position of having to play catch up in basic subjects. These academically segregated programs rarely allow for ELLs to exit the program. Thus, the ELLs remain stuck, falling further behind for every hour of general subject instruction they miss. As the student progresses through their academic career, the missed instruction time in earlier years accumulates like high compounding interest on student loans. For example, if a student misses the instruction on multiplication facts in elementary school, either because that student did not understand the English-only instruction or because the student had been pulled out of the regular classroom for English acquisition instruction, that student will struggle in pre-Algebra and likely fail or have to expend an enormous amount of extra effort to overcome the knowledge gap, although the latter is unlikely. The deficit will increase because of the student’s inability to grasp pre-algebraic expressions and terms. This deficit will compound with each successive class, both math and science, which continue to build on the earliest lack of understanding. The above referenced deficit will exist for ELLs in all subject areas so that by the time an ELL reaches high school, even if they approach or attain English proficiency, they lack the foundational knowledge crucial for success. “If ELLs have not mastered English by high school, they have [only] a 40% chance of graduation.” The long term economic prospect for someone without a high school degree borders on an almost absolute guarantee of poverty. The difficulty these students have with the advanced analytical skill required by the new Common Core and similar standards which bear the implicit expectation of English-only instruction, sets ELLs up to fail.
Compounding the above issues is the prevailing negative public perception of ELLs and all immigrants that strongly influences the resources for and policies regarding the identification and instruction of ELLs. “The issues of immigration and children of immigration are particularly politically volatile, and these students often find themselves used as political pawns,” like the Dreamers or the recipients of DACA. This issue, which has existed for decades, has become even more politically volatile due to the recent presidential campaign, election, and actions of the current president of the United States. Anti-immigrant and English-only policy talking points win significant numbers of votes in economically depressed areas. People in these areas advocate against immigration, often claiming that immigrants not only are taking the jobs of hard working Americans but also that the children of those immigrants take advantage of the system by attending our taxpayer funded public schools. They claim that education funding could be better spent if the English acquisition instruction did not have to be funded. This preference, along with the assessment mandates discussed later, has led to the overwhelming adoption of the English-only immersion model as it appears to be the least expensive and most American model. On top of public perception, many in education view the “parents of [ELLs] who in many cases have limited formal schooling themselves” with the idea that the parents do not have the capability to be equal education partners with the teachers of the ELL students. Thus, critical connections to home life and culture as well as possible supports for the student often go unnoticed and neglected.
As a result of the above and other factors, policies across the country concerning the educational needs of ELLs, funding for ELL education, assessments of ELL learning, and qualifications for teachers of ELLs span a wide variety of philosophies and executions. Not only do the above listed items, vary but the definitions of terms used in those policies and legislations, terms for critical components, vary widely making comparative research difficult if not impossible. National standards do exist for ELL identification and instruction; however, “states are given latitude in the interpretation and procedures for identification and teaching” of ELLs. Although the idea of latitude makes sense on some levels due to the variety in ELL population and native language between states, the latitude is misapplied which leads to confusion and inadequate services for ELLs. Not only does the variety exist across different states, it also varies between districts. This variety encompasses “how English learners are designated, how their progress is measured, [and] how they are redesignated as English speakers.” The support based on these inconsistent measures means states and districts have substantial differences between them. This difference increases the detrimental effect on ELLs. Due to the highly migratory nature of the population, students receive inconsistent services in each school they attend. For example, since the definition of the crucial term “proficiency” varies across states, students with similar language abilities receive services in one school but not another. Services also vary due to inconsistent distribution of No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), Title III, identification methods ranging from informal take home surveys to formal testing,23 and teacher preparation since no formal national standard exists as to “what constitutes a ‘highly qualified’ or even reasonably prepared teacher for EL students.”
In addition, at the individual school level, most states with high and growing ELL populations face shortages of qualified teachers of ELLs, compounding the current problem of inadequately trained teachers in the classroom who also lack resources. Unfortunately, ELLs tend to “attend the most impoverished and under resourced schools which is clearly related to their growing isolation within the public education system.” These under-resourced schools already struggle to attract qualified teachers; the addition of ELLs to the student population increases the difficulty because of the shortage of qualified teachers of ELLs. Some states with the fastest growing ELL populations may need two and a half times the current number of qualified teachers of ELLs in as soon as five years. Under-resourced schools also tend to attract the least experienced teachers, teachers just out of college or entering the profession as a career change, which further disadvantages ELL instruction. On top of the teacher shortage, few instructional materials on grade level or in native languages are available for teachers of ELLs.
Lastly, invalid assessments at all levels disadvantage ELLs due to invalidity and the actions taken by educators based on those invalid results. Much of the difficulty with high stakes testing, which has become increasingly emphasized at all levels since the passage of NCLB in 2001, stems from conflicting priorities for the purpose of the tests. Should the tests measure English proficiency or should they measure content knowledge proficiency? The conflict temporarily resolves with the use of monolingual tests. “These monolingual tests neither reflect the language nor the language structures that the [ELLs] know. Nor do monolingual assessments take into account the cultural norms of the bilingual children being assessed.” These high stakes tests also include high school exit exams, required by 23 states. Students must pass these monolingual exams to earn a high school diploma on top of completing all required coursework. Thus, these monolingual exams frequently prevent many ELLs from graduating from high school. These monolingual exams are frequently invalid for ELLs due to the fact that these assessments lack cultural and construct validity and thus, produce scores which underestimate the ELLs knowledge of the subject being assessed.31 As a result of these invalid scores from invalid assessments, ELLs “experience more remedial instruction greater probability assignment to lower curriculum tracks, higher dropout rates, poorer graduation rates and disproportionate referrals to special education classes.
In conclusion, a large number of interconnected issues affect the instruction of ELLs in critical ways. The long term effect of the inadequate education of ELLs has a profound impact not only on the economic opportunities and outcomes of the ELLs but also on their families, communities, and the entire country. Proper investigation and analysis of the issues should be conducted so that remediation can be applied for the benefit of all involved, especially in the light of continued increases in the ELL student population.