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UK School to Teach ESL to ALL Students

A high school in Leeds, UK has introduced classes to teach all students English as a second language. More than 75% of students at City of Leeds secondary school do not have English as a mother tongue.

Principal Georgina Sale said all students, including those who have English as a mother tongue will soon receive one extra 50-minute session per week, in addition to any English language or literature classes already implemented in the National Curriculum.

The move comes after disappointing exam results threatened the school with closure. Sale hopes that the extra classes will “boost fundamental English skills and improve spelling and grammar” in preparation for exit exams, adding “We hope this will allow pupils who speak English as a first language as well as our multilingual learners the same opportunity to accomplish A and A* grades”.

Fifty-five different nations are represented among just 314 students at the school, including some from Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Sale claims that there also growing numbers of eastern European Roma communities at the school.

In the last two years, the school has struggled to cope with arrivals of an extra 15 nationalities at the school, with little experience or resources in the new influx of languages. However the school has made positive progress in employing teachers who speak Czech, Romanian, Russian and German; and subsequent teacher/parent meetings have been translated into Urdu, Czech, and Polish.

The new plans have been met with some criticism as classes in other subjects will be cut by 10 minutes each in order to make room for the extra language lessons, although many language professionals are supporting the schools efforts.

Dr Dina Mehmedbegovic, from the Institute of Education in London, described the move as “excellent” and that Sale is “drawing attention to something wrong in the system.”

Despite previous hurdles, Sale maintains: “We are proud to be a multicultural school and will continue to encourage new ideas to help us to be a supportive and encouraging learning environment where all pupils are given the same chances to learn.”

Dyslexia and the English Learner Dilemma

Kelli Sandman-Hurley recommends using the mother tongue to diagnose dyslexia

The American educational system has a difficult time understanding dyslexia and an even harder time identifying children with dyslexia in order to provide the correct intervention for students who are native English speakers. When a school has the added challenge of identifying struggling English language learners (ELLs), the task becomes an even more complicated process, and often, these kids are completely missed. But that does not have to be the case. Children who are learning English are just as likely to have dyslexia as their native-English-speaking counterparts, and there is a way to identify dyslexia in these children. The difference is that dyslexia might appear in the native language quite as vividly as it will when they attempt to learn English. To read the full story, click here.

April 2014

April 2014 Cover

Help for Every Struggling Reader

Cutting to the Common Core
Kinsella on Narrow Reading
Dr. Kate Kinsella advocates the use of Narrow Reading Units as a portal to word knowledge and literate discourse

Riding the Blogging Trail
Leah Stilman sees blogging as the logical development of creative writing

Dyslexia and
the English Learner Dilemma
Kelli Sandman-Hurley advocates using the mother tongue to diagnose dyslexia

Integrating Content and Language
Tania Ruiz presents educators’ impressions of the dual-language methodology sweeping Europe

Last Writes
Richard Lederer with a some departures of a timely nature

U.S. Students Outperform International Peers

A new Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report shows that U.S. 15-year-old students scored above average on the 2012 problem solving assessment in comparison to their peers in 43 other education systems. The PISA problem solving assessment, administered on computer, assessed students’ skills in solving problems set in real-life contexts for which a routine solution has not been learned.

Findings include:

•    The U.S. average score in problem solving was 508, which was higher than the OECD average (based on 28 OECD countries) of 500 and the average scores of 22 education systems.

•     Students in 10 education systems — Singapore, Korea, Japan, Macao-China, Hong Kong-China, Shanghai-China, Chinese Taipei, Canada, Australia, and Finland — had higher average scores than U.S. 15-year-olds.

•     Twelve percent of U.S. students were “top performers” (scored at level 5 or above) in problem solving, which was not measurably different from the OECD average of 11 percent.

•     Eighteen percent of U.S. students were “low performers” in problem solving (scored below level 2), which was lower than the OECD average of 21 percent.

•     There was no measurable difference in the average problem solving scores of U.S. male and female students.

View the full set of data tables at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_11.asp

PISA is coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and managed in the United States by the National Center for Education Statistics at the Institute of Education Sciences, part of the U.S. Department of Education.

Louisiana Debates Bilingual Education as a Right

Lawmakers in Louisiana are pushing to make language immersion a right.

“Every kid should have the right of a bilingual education,” said Rep. Stephen Ortego (D) of Carenco. “It’s not fair it’s the luck of the draw if you get in. We would be the first to make bilingual education a right.”

House Bill 763 is identical to Senate Bill 558, introduced by Sen. Eric LeFleur (D) of Ville Platt. This legislation would obligate schools to open an immersion program if at least 25 students requested one. Currently, over 700 Louisiana students are currently on wait-lists. The entire Arcadiana Legislative Delegation, a total of 46 members, supports the bills.

Ortego explained that the bill will focus mostly on expanding preschool and kindergarten immersion. Currently, 5,000 students are in French immersion programs, while 1,000 are in Spanish.

Another bill, HB1016 by Rep. Vincent Pierre, D-Lafayette, would create a state Seal of Biliteracy to be affixed on the high school diplomas or transcripts of students who graduate with a bilingual education. That measure is scheduled for debate in the House.

TESOL 2014 – Portland, OR

26-29 March 2014 – Portland, Oregon, USA

Come and join us on the TESOL Treasure Trail! – Booth no. 223

tesol2014

 

Cutting to the Common Core: Changing the Playing Field 2

In the second installment of a two-part article, Jeff Zwiers, Susan O’Hara, and Robert Pritchard present essential shifts for teaching Common Core Standards to academic English learners

The transition to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) offers a window of opportunity to fortify what and how we teach. It also provides a chance to reflect on how our most marginalized students most effectively learn the most difficult knowledge and skills. The CCSS challenge us to teach students much more than loosely connected pieces of knowledge and test-taking skills. They offer an opportunity to equip diverse students… To read the full story, click here.

$25K Grant Competition for All Colleges in Americas

The 100,000 Strong in the Americas Initiative is offering new grant competitions as the administration’s signature education initiative in the Western Hemisphere designed to foster region-wide prosperity through increased higher education collaboration.

Competition 3 (RFP 3): Promoting Study Abroad Partnerships for Innovation and Collaboration (Sponsored by Santander Universities, a division of Santander Bank) is open to ALL Higher Education Institutions in the Western Hemisphere and closes April 1, 2014. Grants up to $25,000 will be made.

Click here for more information

Let Learning Emerge

Diane Larsen-Freeman applies lessons from complexity theory to language education

Complexity theory (CT) deals with complex, dynamic, and nonlinear systems. When I first encountered CT some 20 years ago, it was not in the context of language. However, I couldn’t think of many things that were more complex, dynamic, and nonlinear than language (Larsen-Freeman, 1997). And it soon became evident to me that CT had the potential to teach us many lessons useful in language teaching and learning.

To read the full story, click here.

California Bill to Support Multilingual Education

Senator Ricardo Lara (D-Long Beach/Huntington Park) announced legislation that would enable California’s public schools to provide multilingual instruction, granting more students access to valuable 21st Century language skills and giving parents more choice over their children’s education.

If passed, SB 1174, the Multilingual Education for a 21st Century Economy Act, would place an initiative before voters on the November 2016 ballot to repeal prohibitions to multilingual instruction passed through Proposition 227.

For full story click here

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