Everyone’s Child

In large districts with dozens of languages, every teacher needs to consider the ELL student’s needs.

By Rhonda Barton

ANCHORAGE, Alaska—In a voice just above a whisper, the shy nine-year-old responds to some basic questions about herself during a state assessment. She can only answer a few questions, and is stumped when asked to identify common objects.

Her uncomfortable silences aren’t totally unexpected. She is a recent Hmong refugee, and the English vocabulary required for this test may be as hard to grasp as some of the other realities of a new life in a gritty Anchorage neighborhood. Not only are the words and sounds different from her native tongue, but the scene outside is equally foreign: Fellow students at Mountain View Elementary are leaving tracks on the playground with plastic snowshoes and a hulking bull moose has made himself comfortable on the edge of the school’s boundary.

From Thai to Tagalog

For Arlene Sandberg and other ESL resource teachers in Anchorage, such examples of cultural and linguistic dislocation are commonplace. Approximately 15 percent of the district’s students—some 6,613 youngsters—are English language learners. The district is home to a mind-boggling 95 different languages, and that number is likely to grow. Just this year the district had to create a code for Sudanese on its forms when two children arrived from the war-torn African nation. At Mountain View alone, a visitor can hear snatches of Samoan, Spanish, Russian, Thai, Lao, Hmong, Mien, Cambodian, German, Tagalog, Cup’ik, Yup’ik, and Inupiaq in the hallways and at recess.

Sandberg is one of 13 resource teachers who—together with bilingual paraprofessionals—serve ELL students in Anchorage’s 58 elementary schools. Under Anchorage’s formula, resource specialists are assigned half-time to schools with 100 or more limited English students; they divide the rest of their week among three other schools with smaller ELL populations. In the case of Sandberg, though, her influence ripples out to a much wider circle than her four schools.

The 26-year teaching veteran, recently named Alaska’s 2006 Teacher of the Year, shares her expertise with others through state and district workshops, sheltered instruction trainings, university lectures on bilingualism, and state-level committee work. Above all, she serves as a tireless advocate for ELL students. “I’m willing to stir the pot,” she admits. “I’m not worried about winning a popularity contest with teachers—I have to work with every single teacher in this school and everybody knows that I put students first.”

Maxine Hill, the head of the district’s bilingual education program, praises Sandberg as “an exceptional teacher who has continued to refine her skills through many staff development opportunities.” Hill adds, “She has totally embraced the philosophy of SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) in her instructional techniques in order to benefit the students she encounters on a daily basis at Mountain View Elementary School.”

Like her ESL colleagues, Sandberg spends the bulk of her time working with children who need the most intensive help learning English. But, she makes it her business to keep track of every one of the 130-plus ELL students at Mountain View. “Even though I can’t see them all, I truly know where they are [in their language development] and what they need,” she says. Their language abilities cover the full range: “Even though some kids are born in the United States and others come to us right off the airplane from another country, many have no English because they’ve been speaking their first language up until the minute they get here and then they speak it when they get home at night,” she observes.

Sharing Data and Strategies

Because the need is so great and Sandberg is stretched so thin, she tries to help classroom teachers fine-tune their skills in working with English language learners. Today, Sandberg and Trish Jackson, Mountain View’s reading coach, are planning a professional development session where they’ll present data on K–3 reading scores. They’ve highlighted the results for ELL students and are tracking their long-term progress.

Jackson and Sandberg—who together with the school psychologist make up Mountain View’s core leadership team—have worked with other teachers at their school to develop interventions for struggling readers. The strategies appear to be helping: Mountain View made adequate yearly progress for the first time last year.

The advent of No Child Left Behind and the consequences tied to AYP have had a dramatic impact on the ELL landscape, Sandberg believes. “Now we have to look at data—and look at it in a different way—and change what’s not working. Before, a lot of classroom teachers never saw their role as a stakeholder in a bilingual child’s achievement. You can’t do that anymore .... This child belongs to all of us.”

Structured Immersion

The idea that everyone is responsible for the progress of ELL students is fully embraced by the Federal Way School District in Washington. Located between Seattle and Tacoma, Federal Way is the state’s seventh largest school district with almost 22,400 students. Slightly more than 10 percent of those students are English language learners from homes with 78 different dialects. While the greatest number of students speak Spanish, Korean, Russian, or Ukrainian, teachers might encounter children whose first language is Swahili, Ilokano, Amharic, Arabic, or Urdu.

Like Anchorage, Federal Way assigns ESL specialists and bilingual paraeducators to schools based on the number of limited English students enrolled. A full-time specialist with a state endorsement provides support at schools with 100 or more ELL students, while a school with 50 ELL students merits a half-time position. However, the district has adopted a research-based structured immersion program that relies on classroom teachers in neighborhood schools. The model involves teaching grade-level subject matter in English in ways that are comprehensible and engage students academically, while promoting English language development.

Sheltered instruction is also part of the model for secondary students. Students take leveled language arts and social studies, while assigned to mainstream science and math classes.

“People are a little afraid of the words ‘structured immersion,’” notes Jean Vaughan, Federal Way’s director of ELL programs, “but our program is scaffolded. We constantly have teachers look at the state’s English language development standards, which drives the instruction.”

While newcomers at the elementary school level go directly to the mainstream classroom, they receive ELL English instruction every day for up to 40 minutes during a 90-minute block in guided reading groups that are based on the student’s language proficiency. Limited proficiency students also may get individualized tutoring in math.

At the secondary level, students are taught in sheltered English classes. Bilingual tutors are assigned to science and math mainstream teachers who also receive training in Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE) through Action Learning in California. (See page 11.) Teachers new to SDAIE (which is similar to the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol commonly used in Washington) receive mentoring and follow-up trainings, along with help from instructional design specialists.

Vaughan credits this capacity building as the reason why Federal Way’s ELL students outperform their peers on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL). In reading, 65 percent of the district’s ELL fourth-graders met standards last year (compared to 46 percent for the state at large) and Federal Way’s math scores bested the state average by 18 points. Scores for reading and math for seventh- and 10th-graders were also substantially higher than the statewide showings.

Providing for All

“All means all, according to our superintendent, and we really believe that and have moved it forward,” says Vaughan. The district’s definition of “all” even goes beyond the norm: When they saw a need to bolster Hispanic students’ WASL scores, Federal Way leaders used Title III funds to create a Latino Night School for the whole family.

Partnering with Highline Community College and a local multiservice center, the district’s night school offers a GED program, high school credit recovery, middle school classes, and adult education courses in conversational English and skill building. For the 3–10-year-old set, there are activities and homework help provided by the district’s AmeriCorps workers. The school, which operates two nights a week, also serves mothers and children from birth to toddlers. As a result of the program, WASL scores among Federal Way’s Hispanic students rose last year and the school will see its first group of adults receiving GEDs this year.

Vaughan thinks that any school might benefit from a structured immersion approach, though she admits it may be a hard sell in some communities. “There seems to be a fear that schools won’t be able to market it to their mainstream teachers, to have special learners or ELL students in each classroom for the majority of the day and have them be successful,” she says. Changing minds, though, may lie in how the system is funded. Federal Way doesn’t take basic education dollars out of mainstream classes and use them for bilingual education; consequently, mainstream teachers don’t have the expectation that ELL is responsible for the achievement of all bilingual students.

Besides yielding strong test scores, there may be another, more powerful argument for mainstreaming English language learners with scaffolded instruction. “It’s a wonderful enrichment to be able to interact and work with so many cultures and languages,” Vaughan states firmly. “It’s a true multicultural learning environment.”

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