Archive for Language Learners

There is neither time nor a reason to slow down a plan to update the English language arts and reading curriculum for public schools in Texas, State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy said Wednesday, March 19, 2008, after a Texas lawmaker pleaded for input from Hispanic experts. Hispanic children now make up a large plurality of the 4.7 million students attending Texas public schools.

“There is no way that ignoring such a sizable chunk of this population from consideration of education policy will do anything but harm the opportunity of a generation,” Representative Abel Herrero, D-Robstown, told McLeroy and a four-member board subcommittee.

Herrero represented the House Mexican American Legislative Caucus, which has asked McLeroy to include experts in Latino culture before adopting a final document. He and other advocates did not have specific examples of how a lack of such experts may have resulted in omissions in the newly released document. Read the article in The Houston Chronicle online.

He could rail against the unfairness of it all, but Robinsson Franco is resigned. The 18-year-old Honduran immigrant is among the hundreds of Seattle, Washington, public high school students taking the reading and writing WASL tests this week, even though he puts his chances of passing the 10th-grade tests this year at slim to none. “I feel a little bit scared,” he admits. “But we have to try, you know?”

The Washington Assessment of Student Learning tests have become a frustrating annual exercise for both students and educators at Franco’s school, the Secondary Bilingual Orientation Center in Queen Anne. The 263 teenage students there are all recent immigrants and refugees who don’t yet speak or read well enough in English to transfer to one of Seattle Public Schools’ traditional middle or high schools—meaning that even if they understand the material covered on a section of the WASL, there’s still virtually no way they’ll pass. Read about their plight in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer online.

Beginning next school year, all public schools in Arizona will be required to teach four hours of English a day to English-language learners (ELLs)—students who aren’t proficient in the language. But the state mandate concerns officials in some districts, who wonder where they’re going going to find the money, space and teachers to support the program. According to Patti Lopez, deputy superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District, “[The students] will be taken out of the regular classroom and grouped with students of the same proficiency level.” Read more in The Arizona Daily Star online.

It was the Philippine Department of Education that first raised the alarm in 2006 that the quality of education in the country had sunk to its lowest level, Education Secretary Jesli Lapus said. “The problem is systemic. The entire system is [seriously affected],” he said, reacting to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s admission that the state of education continued to worsen during a consultative meeting in Baguio City earlier this week.

“The issues confronting us are the [result] of decades of under-investment, understatement ... English has had to take a back seat. The reading skills also suffered with many Grade 6 students unable to read,” he said.

Consider this: Of the elementary school teachers tested for English proficiency in the school year 2006-2007 by the education department, only 60% passed. The secondary education teachers fared worse—only 20% passed, 70% were below the desired proficiency and 10% failed the test. Read more in The Philippine Daily Inquirer online.

In 2006, the International Reading Association, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Center for Applied Linguistics, the National Association of Bilingual Education, the National Institute for Literacy, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of English Language Acquisition, and Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. embarked on a collaborative effort to address complex questions on helping language-minority students improve their literacy in English.

One result of the collaboration is the new Tapestry for Teachers of English Language Learners. The goal of this resource is to present the research on second-language literacy acquisition and on instructional methods effective with language-minority students. You can access this new resource at the following page on the TESOL website.

Another outcome was a paper released October 22 titled "Key Issues and Questions in English Language Learners Literacy Research." The full text of this paper can be accessed in the Focus on Topics in Reading: English-Language Learners section of the IRA website.

 Educators and experts across the country who work with English–language learners are moving toward a consensus that the federal Reading First program needs to be refined to become more effective for children acquiring English. Administrators in several big–city districts with large numbers of such students are stepping up their training of teachers on how best to teach second–language learners to read under the No Child Left Behind Act’s flagship reading program, which serves grades K–3. The U.S. Department of Education’s 11–member Reading First Advisory Committee has enough concerns about whether ELLs are getting what they need under the $1 billion–a–year program that it set up a subcommittee to look into the issue last week. Read the article in Education Week online.

A new paper titled "Key Issues and Questions in English-Language Learners Literacy Research," released on October 22, highlights a number of important points relating to the education of English-language learners in the United States. The paper is the result of a collaboration between the International Reading Association and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to look at key issues in reading and make recommendations to the field for further investigation.

The full text of the ELL paper can be accessed in the Focus on Topics in Reading: English-Language Learners section of the IRA website.

Nyko Perez was running out of Cheerios. Sitting at a low, lima–bean–shaped table, the round–faced 3–year–old was gluing the cereal bits to a big “C” made of orange construction paper. “Quieres más? Do you need more?” instructor Camen Bisso asked him in Spanish and English. “OK, what do you say? Como se dice ‘por favor?’ ” “Please!” Nyko responded. At the new First Steps Primeros Pasos early learning center in Georgetown, Delaware, lessons are repeated in English and Spanish, and two of the three instructors are native Spanish speakers. “We deal with integration here,” said Executive Director Lynne Maloy. “We’re teaching our Spanish speakers English and our English speakers get to learn Spanish. We want everyone to have an equal chance to succeed, because education is the name of the game.” Read about the First Steps program at delawareonline.com.

An international consortium of groups interested in teaching English to young learners (TEYL) is organizing an international conference titled “The Way Forward: Learning From International Experience of TEYL.” The conference will be held at the Regional Institute of English, Bangalore, South India, January 3–6, 2008. It is aimed at decision makers in ministries, planners, academics, teacher trainers, and others concerned with state programs for teaching English to children. The registration deadline is November 30, 2007.

Details are available from the conference website, www.primaryeltconference.org, or from the organizers, Janet Enever (j.enever@londonmet.ac.uk) or Jaynee Moon (jayne.moon@virgin.net).

  Latino advocates told a House panel that the No Child Left Behind law has produced significant gains for school-age English-language learners and warned not to undermine that progress. Before the law was passed five years ago, students learning English were ignored by many schools, Delia Pompa of the National Council of La Raza told the House Committee on Education and Labor. With the law, she said, the debate has changed to: “How can schools improve the academic achievement and attainment of English-language learners?” Read more of this article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

More than 300,000 students in immigrant-rich Northern Virginia started the school year yesterday. As the number of children in the region who speak a language other than English at home is increasing, so, too, is the number learning a second language at school. The expansion of foreign language programs came amid other changes. Every Prince William County elementary school has full-day kindergarten for the first time, and Fairfax is adding all-day kindergarten in 21 schools, enabling the school system to reach 70 percent of county schools with a program many educators think is critical for building early literacy. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

One by one, Texas school districts are abandoning the bilingual education model that has been used to teach English to Spanish-speaking kids for the past 35 years. School administrators and teachers, backed by education researchers, have decided there is a better way. They call it dual language. Read more about the dual language approach in this article from The Dallas Morning News.

A federal judge affirmed Texas’ bilingual education programs for its 712,000 students with limited English skills, rejecting arguments by leading Hispanic groups that those students are receiving an inferior education in the public schools. The court concluded that the Texas Education Agency’s education theory is sound, and its implementation and enforcement of the bilingual/ESL program is adequate under federal law. Read more about the ruling in this article from The Dallas Morning News.

Spending on English instruction must be quadrupled to more than $4 billion a year for the next six years to make legal and illegal adult immigrants proficient in skills crucial to their assimilation and the economic future of a country whose population is increasingly foreign-born, a new national report says. In the first nationwide study of its kind, the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates that an additional $200 million a year is needed to improve legal immigrants’ English skills enough for them to pass a citizenship test and “fully participate in the country’s civic life.“ An additional $2.9 billion a year is required for illegal immigrants to meet those standards, the report says. Read more about the report in this article from The Washington Post.

Principal James Lujan’s secret to success started small, with eight parents who wanted to learn English. Word got around among the Spanish speakers at Eugene Field Elementary School that the principal was the best English teacher in the South Valley neighborhood. Refusing to take money for the lessons, Lujan told the grateful parents they could repay his efforts by spending an hour a night with their children on homeweork. Now, Eugene Field is among 11 district schools that made adequate yearly progress last year after two years of failing to reach the federally mandated goals for student achievement. Read more of this article from The Albuquerque Tribune.

For the first time in modern history, most of the babies being born in California are Latino, according to an analysis of state birth records through 2005. Population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau also show that for the first time in 2004 more than half of the children under age 5 in California are Latino. Judy Bugarin, a 40-year veteran of early childhood education and director of the Parkway Child Development Programs for Santa Clara County, feels responsible for better serving a student population that is now about 80 percent Latino. “Our goal is that they become fluent in English by the time they’re ready for kindergarten,” Bugarin said. “That’s where we’re trying to close the achievement gap, by supporting English so they can do well in school.” Read more of this article from the San Jose Mercury News.

About 20,000 ethnic-minority students are attending preparatory courses in Mandarin in more than 100 Chinese universities, according to China's State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC). Ethnic-minority students can choose one-year or two-year preparatory courses where they can raise their level of Chinese before entering the first year of university. The central government has adopted several policies to help ethnic-minority students, such as easier access to higher education, the SEAC said. Read the article at China Economic Net.

Utah’s first dual-immersion charter school will open this fall, where kindergarten through sixth-grade students will begin to master Spanish and English from day one. Students will normally spend every other day in a different language, whereas teachers typically stick to either Spanish or English, depending on their backgrounds. Read more of this article from The Salt Lake Tribune.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia has reiterated that the government supports teaching Liberian languages in schools throughout the country. The most appropriate start-off point, the president said, would be at the primary school level. Johnson said it was important that children grew up not only speaking their vernacular but possessing the capacity to read and write the language. “It raises the nation's vernacular to a higher level and adds more meaning to the promotion of our culture and tradition through the learning process,” a news release from the president’s office was quoted as saying. Read more here.

The U.S. Education Department plans to trim $2.6 million from Nevada’s share of funds for English-language learners, baffling state educators who say the 30 percent reduction from the past school year will jeopardize services and programs for students. Read more of this article from the Las Vegas Sun.

The Omaha school district is poised to become the only district in the state—and one of only 10 public districts nationwide—to offer a dual-language immersion program for students from kindergarten through graduation. Achievement results presented to the Omaha school board recently indicate that elementary students who are learning in both Spanish and English are scoring better in reading and math than their schoolmates who are taught only in English. Read more of this article from the Omaha World-Herald.

Here’s the plan: Put young children who struggle with English in a classroom with English-speaking students and teach in two languages. Soon, both groups of children will become bilingual and bi-literate with the youngsters helping each other develop two languages, say supporters of the dual language immersion program. But others are balking at the experiment that Texas lawmakers approved this spring, contending it’s turning classrooms into laboratories. Read more of this article from the Houston Chronicle.

Welcome to the Simplified Spelling Society. It’s been campaigning for a century to make the spelling of the English language easier and recently picketed a spelling bee in the US to make the point. Masha Bell, a member of the society and author of Understanding English Spelling, believes that reform of the spelling of the English language could help children learn to read and make life easier for some adults too. Vivian Cook, a linguist and expert in second language learning and author of Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary, believes changing spellings would be unnecessary, expensive and could harm children’s ability to read. A glossary is available at BBC NEWS, and the two debate the issue.

Despite a 5-year-old federal requirement that they create English-language proficiency standards for children who are new to the language, most states—including some with the largest numbers of English-language learners—have yet to give local school districts assistance in how to translate those standards into a curriculum. The lack of detailed guidance and workshops on how to create a curriculum for English-language learners means that districts often are on their own in figuring out how to use the new standards in the classroom. Read more of this article from Education Week.

Allison Rabenau celebrated an inauspicious milestone on the otherwise unremarkable day of Oct. 18, 2004. Six weeks into her first year as a teacher, she finally taught a class. Rabenau had left a long career as a stage manager in the commercial theater to learn how to teach English as a second language to immigrant children in New York’s public schools. The only problem, she quickly discovered, was that the avalanche of paperwork and other assignments meant she actually got to teach only sporadically. See The New York Times online to learn about how those who teach ELLs are swamped by forms, evaluations, assessments, and reports.

Confucius, the 6th century B.C. Chinese philosopher, always told his disciples to study the outside world in detail. So he would have been delighted by the announcement yesterday that five state schools in the United Kingdom are to become "Confucius classrooms," dedicated to promoting the study of Chinese culture and language. For the schools, it will mean extra money to study the subject and the chance for their pupils to go on exchange trips and summer camps to China. The first 175 pupils and their teachers will leave the UK next week to attend a summer camp in Beijing. Read more at The Independent online.

Primary school children in three school districts in England are learning six different languages from the age of nine under a pioneering new plan. The idea is to give them a taste of all six so they can then decide for themselves which language to opt for when they transfer to secondary school. The project is being piloted in Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Derbyshire. The children study French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Punjabi, and Latin for a term each before they leave primary school. The project is being evaluated by the University of Manchester with a view to promoting it nationally if it is successful. The report will be published by the end of the year. Read more at The Independent online.

Children in the polyglot Washington, DC, region often surprise their parents with language feats learned in day care. The large number of foreign-born care providers in the area enables many parents to kick-start their children's knowledge of a second or even a third language from among a growing babel that includes Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Hindi and Amharic, in addition to French and Spanish. Read more about these early second language learners at washingtonpost.com.

California has ratcheted up the standards for students to be considered fluent in English, causing fewer of them than last year to meet the bar. Twenty-nine percent of the 1.3 million students who are labeled “English learners” scored proficient on the test that measures their acquisition of the language, according to results released recently by the state Department of Education. Last year, 44 percent were considered proficient. Read more of this article from The Sacramento Bee.

Over the past few years Nelson Lauver’s nationally syndicated radio feature, The American Storyteller Radio Journal, has established a dedicated US listener base. Fans refer to his stories as unique, timeless, and great radio—and have likened his style to that of Charles Kuralt and Mark Twain. The online companion to the radio feature, theamericanstoryteller.com, offers hundreds of free mp3 stories for listening and download. Now these mp3 audio stories have also become a bonanza for those wishing to learn to speak English. The site has been inundated by visits from American immigrants as well as individuals around the globe. Read more of this article from the website urlwire.com.

Florida has been working to raise educational standards, but state legislators moved recently to lower the training requirement of reading teachers who work with students learning English. The question is whether those who teach reading in English to speakers of other languages should be required to complete 300 hours of training, as currently required, or whether 60 hours is adequate. Read more about this issue in this article from the Orlando Sentinel.

 At the core of today’s debates over school accountability lies a contentious question: Does the federal No Child Left Behind Act represent a historic advance for civil rights, or a giant step backward for the children it purports to help? Disagreement is especially acute among advocates for English-language learners. These students pose a fundamental challenge for the No Child Left Behind accountability scheme, owing to the near-total absence of valid and reliable assessments of their academic achievement. James Crawford, the president of the Institute for Language and Education Policy, looks at these issues in this opinion piece from Education Week.

We seem to be doing a bit better educating our most disadvantaged students. But many educators think that is not enough. The numbers displayed in the graphic smorgasbord known as "The Condition of Education 2007," from the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, reveal the struggles of a generation to make schools work for all children. Read the article by Jay Matthews on rating gains in our schools at The Washington Post website.

  As Congress considers the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law an analysis of recent data from standardized testing around the country shows that the fast growing number of students designated as English language learners are among those farthest behind. Read more of this article from the Pew Hispanic Center.

One day last fall, Felix Herrera was teaching science at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, when a helicopter rumbled overhead. The Army reservist's war instincts kicked in: His adrenaline surged, and his eyes shot to the window. Nothing out there. Most students had not even noticed the chopper. But one had. Herrera exchanged glances with the 14-year-old from Baghdad. "That's how my country sounds, Mister," Ameer Abdalameer said. "I know," the teacher said. Herrera has served tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. His English for Speakers of Other Languages class has many teenagers who have arrived in Arlington County from homelands torn by civil strife or war. Read the article.

 Under a federal mandate enforced this spring in Virginia for the first time, thousands of beginners in English are taking the same reading tests as peers who are native speakers. Fears that the tests would traumatize some students, even drive them to tears, haven’t been realized. But educators said many have struggled to comprehend some parts of the exam. Read more in this article from The Washington Post.

A plan by the Australian government to force Aboriginal children to learn English has ignited fierce debate, with some activists calling the plan racist and insulting. Australia's indigenous affairs minister, Mal Brough, said the compulsory teaching of English would help Aboriginal children living in remote and economically deprived communities to escape poverty and inequality and find jobs. Australia's 460,000 Aborigines make up 2% of the population and are the country's most disadvantaged group, with far higher rates of unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence and health problems. Read more at the Guardian Unlimited.

Every day at Frankford Elementary School in Delaware, a group of students and teachers face a linguistic challenge—combining English, Spanish and American Sign Language into one cohesive unit. For students like second grader Andy Macedo, dealing with all three languages is a daily chore. Born deaf to a Hispanic family, Macedo is like several other local students attempting to discover their own form of communication. Read how the school is meeting this challenge in this article from The News Journal of Wilmington.

CREATE, The Center for Research on the Educational Achievement and Teaching of English Language Learners, is a research center designed to address challenges in the education of English-language learners (ELLs) in the middle grades (4–8). The Center will hold its first conference October 1–2, 2007, at the Doubletree Hotel Chicago–Oak Brook, Chicago, Illinois. The conference title is “Academic Language and Content: A Focus on English Language Learners in Middle School.”

Featured speakers include Diane August, Alison Bailey, Jana Echevarria, Doug Fisher, David J. Francis, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, Michael P. Klentschy, Okhee Lee, Sylvia Linan-Thompson, Mary Schleppegrell, Deborah Short, Catherine Snow, Guadalupe Valdes, Sharon Vaughn, and Aida Walqui.

For information, visit the CREATE website.

As immigrants from around the world enter the United States, schools have long focused on teaching them English. But bilingualism is gaining favor among employers, educators and parents, fueling a movement to help children who are native speakers of Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic and other tongues master those first languages. Read more about the role that after-school clubs play in bilingualism in this article from The Washington Post.

  While the federal No Child Left Behind Act does not specify what kind of instruction schools should use for English-language learners, it’s not hard to find examples of schools across the country where educators say they’ve discontinued bilingual education—or feel they might be forced to do so—because of accountability requirements for English-language learners. They say the 5-year-old federal law has affected their programs because of its emphasis on testing and the fact that schools face penalties if they don’t make adequate yearly progress goals for particular subgroups of students, including English-language learners. Read more about the impact NCLB has had on bilingual programs in this article from Education Week.

Middle Eastern parents wonder why their children don't get more homework. Russian parents might expect weekly reports from teachers. Some Pakistani parents find it rude to have to make an appointment to talk to the teacher. For Canada's largest and most diverse school board – and others around Ontario with large numbers of immigrants – it's a constant learning curve to help newcomer parents adapt to this country's education system. Children of recent immigrants drop out, fail, are suspended or streamed into non-academic courses in disproportionate numbers, Ryerson University professor Mehrunnisa Ali told a Toronto District School Board parent conference over the weekend at Scarborough Civic Centre. Read the article at TheStar.com.

Missouri is grappling with a special education problem that may come as a surprise to educators elsewhere. Far from over-identifying a key group of minority students for such services, the state has found that it’s underserving such a group: English-language learners. Read more about the reluctance some Missouri educators exhibit in testing students for disabilities in this article from Education Week.

 Fairfax County school officials backed down yesterday from a vow to defy federal testing rules for students with limited English skills, saying they would give most of those students grade-level reading exams even if they were likely to stumble on items dealing with metaphors, poetry or other difficult material. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

Washington Governor Chris Gregoire is in a standoff with the chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee over the possibility of delaying the reading and writing sections of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning as a high school graduation requirement. Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe said that 41 school superintendents, primarily in districts with high numbers of low-income children and those who speak English as a second language, have asked her for the reading and writing delay. Read more of this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

 U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) said Saturday the No Child Left Behind educational law must either be dropped or drastically retooled if it is to serve, and not fail, Arizona students, particularly English-language learners. “It’s become punitive as opposed to what the intent was,” said Grijalva, who sits on the House subcommittee that will rewrite the act, giving him considerable pull in how it will fare in the House. Read more of this article from the Arizona Daily Star.

The National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) is seeking five school districts to receive an award of $600,000 to implement the highly successful Toyota Family Literacy Program (TFLP). The opportunity builds on Toyota’s commitment to this successful program, which currently serves 45 elementary schools in 15 cities nationwide.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich equated bilingual education with “the language of living in a ghetto” and mocked requirements that ballots be printed in multiple languages. “The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. ... We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto,” Gingrich said in a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women. Read more of this article from the Associated Press on CNN.com.

School officials in Montgomery County, Maryland, announced a pilot program tailored to the specific needs of recent immigrants who have had little formal education although they are reaching the age when most native-born Americans graduate from high school. Students would be taught functional English, with an emphasis on career-specific vocabulary. Other classes would explore careers, including horticulture, cosmetology and hospitality. Students also would be taught to read and write fluently in their native Spanish. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

Since 1973, Texas has required bilingual education whenever 20 or more children in a grade share another language. While bilingual programs instruct children partly in their language and partly in English so they can understand the content, immersion programs use only English. In this current legislative session, state representatives are debating a bill that would do away with requiring bilingual education, while other proposals support more scholarships for bilingual teachers in training and promote the growth of dual-language programs. Read more about this debate in this article from The Dallas Morning News.

Bilingual children who learn in their family’s language as well as English do better at school, research suggests. Even second and third generation immigrant children with English as their stronger language could benefit. A team from Goldsmiths, University of London, analysed some primary school children in England using two languages in maths and English lessons. They found that, far from confusing them, having two languages deepened their understanding of key concepts. Read more about this study in this article from the BBC news website.

New Zealand is set to become one of the first countries in the world to introduce sign language into the school curriculum. It follows the enactment of the New Zealand Sign Language Act 2006, which made sign language an official language. The Deaf Association has hailed it as another step forward in giving signing equal status to spoken languages. The sign language curriculum, which will be optional, will start in intermediate schools, but eventually roll out to include students in upper grades. Read the article in The New Zealand Herald.

Modern foreign language lessons are to be compulsory for the first time in England's primary schools. Education Secretary Alan Johnson backs the recommendation of the House of Lords, that all children should learn a language from the age of seven. The goal is to implement the language requirement by 2010, as part of the next curriculum overhaul. Read the article at BBC News online.

 The Manassas City (Virginia) School Board, which oversees a small system with a large concentration of students who have limited English, this week reluctantly abandoned an effort to defy a controversial federal rule for testing those students. Previously, the board had considered resisting the rule through a resolution similar to those adopted recently by school boards in Fairfax and Arlington counties. Read how the threat of losing aid for disadvantaged students prompted the decision in this article from The Washington Post.

America’s secondary schools educate roughly two million English language learners (ELLs), students whose literacy skills are not yet strong enough to permit them to succeed in an English-language classroom setting without extra support. As a group, they are among the country’s lowest-performing students, scoring far below the national average on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The Alliance for Excellent Education’s new issue brief, Urgent but Overlooked: The Literacy Crisis Among Adolescent English Language Learners, reviews the existing research on literacy instruction for adolescent ELLs and offers challenges for policymakers to consider.

A survey last year by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials found that in 12 states, 60 percent of the free English programs had waiting lists, ranging from a few months in Colorado and Nevada to as long as two years in New Mexico and Massachusetts. The United States Department of Education counted 1.2 million adults enrolled in public English programs in 2005—about 1 in 10 of the 10.3 million foreign-born residents 16 and older who speak English “less than very well,” or not at all, according to census figures from the same year. Federal money for such classes is matched at varying rates from state to state, leaving an uneven patchwork of programs that advocates say nowhere meets the need. Read more about the long wait that many immigrants must endure in order to learn English in this article from The New York Times.

According to private literacy program directors in the Washington D.C. region, thousands of Hispanic immigrants in the area are past school age but have no formal reading or writing skills. Becoming literate in Spanish first, they say, paves the way to learning English. Read about the progress being made in one Spanish literacy program in this article from The Washington Post.

As nearly 50,000 students sit down this testing season to tackle the Spanish-language version of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge of Skills (TAKS), they'll be answering a record number of questions developed in their native language. Texas’ effort to create questions specifically for the Spanish reading and math tests, rather than translate them from English, signifies an increasing sophistication in the state’s test-development process that experts hope will more accurately capture the academic ability of Spanish-speaking students. Read more of this article from the Houston Chronicle.

In an ever more globalized world and multi-ethnic country, more families are hiring au pairs and nannies who can teach their children a second language and familiarize them with a different culture. “The world is getting smaller, and people are realizing the importance of teaching children more about the world early and making them more competitive,” said Susan Robinson, vice president of Cultural Care Au Pair, a Massachusetts-based agency that places au pairs with U.S. families. “We're moving toward a bilingual country, and families want to expose their children to other cultures and languages at an early age.” Read the article at delawareonline.com.

 As Congress prepares to debate renewal of the No Child Left Behind law, controversy has emerged over how to measure the progress of children learning English. The federal government objected last year to the way 18 states test limited-English students. Often, federal officials indicated, the state tests for such students were not demanding enough. They said that all students in a given state must be held to the same standards. School officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, are protesting that federal mandate and plan to propose a resolution that would authorize officials to refuse to give immigrant students tests that they think most would fail. Read more about this standoff in this article from The Washington Post.

New Jersey appears to be the only state that has written into its Reading First grant application to the federal government that native-language instruction is required, with some exceptions, for children who arrive at school with no proficiency in English. Read more about New Jersey's bilingual approach in this article from Education Week.

Students at Prosperity Heights Elementary in St. Paul, Minnesota, are using identical work sheets, but they’re getting attention that’s as individual as their gap-toothed smiles. District officials tout their team-teaching model as one reason they’ve significantly narrowed the gaps between English language learners (ELLs) and their native English-speaking peers. Such collaborations between classroom teachers and ELL experts have corresponded with a steady rise in test scores for students who collectively speak more than 100 native languages. Making up 40 percent of the public school district, St. Paul’s ELLs are doing particularly well compared with other parts of Minnesota and many urban districts in the United States. That has prompted educators from as far away as Alaska and England to come see what’s at work. Read more of this article from The Christian Science Monitor.

Demand for toys that help develop dual language skills has been growing in the past five years, and toy companies, in an attempt to cater to a lucrative market, have increased the number of such toys. Toys "R" Us identified bilingual toys as the second of its top five hottest toy trends for this holiday season. Find this story in The Baltimore Sun.

A government advisor in the UK says languages should be “embedded” in the primary curriculum, and “the earlier the better.” His interim report on the decline in language study, however, does not recommend a return to compulsory language studies in secondary schools. Until two years ago, it had been compulsory for students in England to study a modern language up to age 16, but now they can stop at 14. High school students told officials languages were difficult and boring and they could not see the point. Read more about the report at the BBC News website.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has signed an agreement with the BBC to teach English by radio beginning Jan. 20 in key cities across the country. The FM radio lessons will cover comprehension, and explain the basics of English through topical and human-interest stories that will include references to the UK’s lifestyle and culture. The program will especially help young learners or job seekers in Saudi Arabia, where English-language teaching starts much later than foreign-language courses begin in Europe and other regions of the world. Visit the Arab News website.

Educators and policymakers looking for advice on the most highly charged issue affecting the education of English-language learners won’t be getting it from the U.S. Department of Education. Three guidebooks with “research-based recommendations” for teaching such students released by the department last week don’t address the issue of whether it’s more beneficial to use bilingual education or English-only methods, even though the question is prominent in research literature. Some panel members have said they deliberately sidestepped the politically charged topic. Find this article in Education Week.

English language learners must work twice as hard as their native English-speaking peers in order to meet the same accountability goals, since they are learning the English language while simultaneously studying core content subjects, according to a new report released by the Alliance for Excellent Education. The report, titled Double the Work: Challenges and Solutions to Acquiring Language and Academic Literacy for Adolescent English Language Learners, says that if the reading and writing skills of all middle and high school students are to improve, the unique needs of ELL students must be identified and addressed with targeted strategies. For further information visit the Alliance for Excellent Education website.

A study of Portuguese children at secondary schools in London showed that those who were encouraged to continue studying their native language were five times as likely to achieve top grades on their exams. The study also found that 11-year-olds who speak more than one language at home were outperforming pupils who only speak English, even in reading, in their national curriculum tests. Get details in The Independent (U.K.).

It's 8:00 p.m. at the Milford Town Library in Massachusetts, and 15 students ranging in age from young adult to retired and representing six different countries are working on their language skills at an English as a Second Language class. According to an article by Wlll Kilburn in the Boston Globe, more and more libraries, both in the Boston area and nationwide, are offering programs to teach immigrants English. For further information, read the full article.

Five years after declaring that English for adults unable to speak it would be taught for nothing because it was such an essential requirement, the British government has revised its stance. Demand for free English classes is too high, says the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), so now asylum seekers and others will have to pay to learn. This article appears in The Guardian (UK).

A Japanese teacher of English recounts having to learn her first words in an utterly foreign language — Ukrainian — and the insights that process provided her into the experience of being a language learner. Find this article in the Daily Yomiuri (Japan).

English is a foreign language for the majority of children in more than half the primary schools in central London. Pupils with English as a second language or barely speaking it at all outnumber indigenous speakers at 348 of the 695 primaries and at 53 of the 132 state secondary schools in the capital. The rapid rise in the number of non-native speakers of English will put “a heavy burden” on teachers and school systems, warns David Willetts, the shadow education secretary. Find this article in the Telegraph (UK).

While the demand for native English teachers in South Korea is on the upswing, a blacklist of native English teachers has appeared on the website of a recruiting agency that introduces these teachers to private English-language institutes in Korea. Most of the individuals on the list are charged with leaving for their home countries without notice, hence breaking their contracts. Other accusations include forging university degrees, stealing personal computers, and sexual harassment. Learn more in The Korea Times.

Census data show that in California, kids are more fluent, adults less so when it comes to speaking English. Experts say schools helped the children, and blamed the adults' problems on the growth of enclaves where people can get by day to day with limited English.

Voice of America (VOA) staff think English language learners in the United States could benefit from hearing shows in Special English, an approach to English that uses a limited vocabulary, no confounding idioms, and a slow speaking voice. There's just one catch—a 1948 law prevents VOA from broadcasting in the United States.

A Sydney-based think tank has found that bilingual teaching is one reason why many Indigenous children are underachieving. The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) report finds that Indigenous students are taught English as a second language, and at a later stage than their urban counterparts. The report also says inflexible state and territory government policies are restricting students’ progress. Get details at the Australian Broadcasting System website.

Immigration to the United States has created large numbers of people who do not speak English well or consider it necessary in their daily lives. But learning English would benefit them and promote a more coherent society. Making English the nation's official language has been proposed, but the Christian Science Monitor argues that facilitating English learning is a better approach.

Australia’s New Arrivals Program provides school-age refugees with intensive ESL training before they enroll in mainstream schools, but sometimes they need more support than the government provides. “Homework programs” staffed by older “new arrivals” are one way that need is being addressed. Find details in The Age (Australia).

A plan by the Korean education ministry to extend the teaching of English to first and second graders has given rise to a heated debate about tuition costs, educational privilege, and the optimal time to start learning a second language. Get details in the Korea Times.

For decades, Canada has worked as a society to become truly bilingual. It's not there yet—or is it? The Globe and Mail ponders the goals, benefits, and ways and means involved.

Iowa teachers say the state-funded three years of support for English acquisition for immigrants and refugees isn't enough, with evidence showing that ELL students need five years at least of specialized instruction if they are to achieve their potential.

At an elementary school on the outskirts of an oasis town along the Silk Road, Chinese authorities are carrying out a unique cultural experiment. This is a pioneering bilingual school, in which children of a minority people learn subjects not in their own language but in Chinese. Read more of this article in Asahi Shimbun (Japan).

Mexican schools once enforced a strict Spanish-only policy, much like the English-only rule being widely debated in the United States. Mexico eventually declared the policy a failure, saying it was creating generations of confused students and adding to poverty and discrimination.

Mexican educators say their experience could offer important lessons for the United States.

“Newcomer” children — those who were born and brought up outside of Japan — often require extra educational support to learn the Japanese language and adapt to Japanese culture. But for many — especially those outside the major urban areas — that support simply does not exist. Read more of this article in The Japan Times (requires registration).

Questions and controversy have arisen after the number of passing students doubled when Arizona started using a new test last year to determine whether students should be in the English-learner program and qualify for special services.

A study in California has shown that English-immersion classes show no advantage over bilingual programs.

In the six years since Arizona voters banned the use of any language except English in public schools, English-learners have performed poorly in school and on state and national tests. Teachers say the best way to teach these students is in both English and their native language; but the law doesn’t allow it. Read more about one state’s ELL quandary in The Arizona Republic.

A 1998 ballot measure limiting bilingual instruction in California schools fueled an emotional debate about how best to educate the state’s growing population of immigrant children. Now a five-year, $2.5 million study has found little difference between students who were taught in English-immersion classrooms and those enrolled in bilingual programs. This story appears in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Research at a school in Somerset, England, shows that many dyslexic children find Japanese easier to learn than French, Spanish, or German. For some, excelling in a language their peers see as exotic provides a welcome opportunity to shine. An article about the study appears in The Guardian.

It is no longer against policy to teach the national language, SiSwati, in Swaziland’s public schools, but decades of official suppression have taken their toll. Get details at IRINnews.org.

Participants from Africa and the Caribbean regions are taking part in a UNESCO-sponsored workshop on mother-tongue/bilingual literacy programs. The workshop, which runs from Dec 6 –10 in Bangkok, Thailand, “supports mother tongue instruction as a means of improving educational quality by building upon the knowledge and experience of the learners and the teachers.” Learn more about this meeting at UNESCO’s Literacy Portal.

An ESL teacher in Oregon hopes a lesson on African animals will resonate with the five students seated before her, recent arrivals from Somalia. But her attempts to make connections to the children’s distant homeland don’t always meet success. It’s not just that these young people don’t read English; they come from a people who have no tradition of reading at all. Read more of this story in The Oregonian.

When her family returned to their native Burundi after living as refugees in Tanzania for over thirty years, 15-year-old Hélène Niyonkunda faced an unexpected challenge: having to learn the language of her parents’ homeland. Find her story at IRIN News.org.

Diplomat Michael Moore explains why experts at a conference in Ethiopia last month urged African countries to reinstate their local languages in education as a key to achieving elusive economic and social growth. His essay appears in the The Guardian (UK).

English language learners face a host of challenges, and critics say one of them is California's ESL system, which lacks coordination or continuity from district to district.

Mirroring a national trend, students who speak limited English have become one of the fastest growing segments of the Arizona school population.

Spanish-speaking children and their parents in Lompoc, California are coming to the library together for a two-pronged program that offers both groups a variety of helpful literacy skills.

China has some strong programs when it comes to using the native languages of minority groups for school instruction, according to a report published in 2005 and released online in July by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO. Find a summary of the study, together with a link to UNESCO’s report, in Education Week.

The Highland Children Education Project in Cambodia provides ethnic minority children with the first two years of primary education in their own languages and in Khmer, the national language. But the project, which has been implemented in six remote villages in the northeastern province of Ratanakiri, encompasses more than instructing children in their mother tongue. For full details, see UNESCO’s Education for All website.

English learners can master social English — or basic interpersonal communication skills, often referred to as “playground English” — in a year or two. But researchers say it takes five to eight years to learn academic English, that is, to gain cognitive academic language proficiency. And this is the English students need to read textbooks, pass tests, and otherwise excel in school. In his report on language minorities for the National Center for Education Statistics, researcher Steven Klein examines the effectiveness of several approaches to English language instruction in helping students achieve these higher levels of proficiency. Read about Klein’s report in the American School Board Journal.

The relation between performance and instruction in the mother tongue is so strong that it cannot be ignored, says Duncan Hindle, South Africa’s new director-general of education. But his call for expanding home-language education is meeting opposition from parents, many of whom want their children educated in English or Afrikaans. Get details at the News 24.com (South Africa) website.

The length of time California’s ESL students have spent in the United States seems less significant than their native language and their socioeconomic status, according to a study released by the Public Policy Institute of California.

As a result of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, all states in the United States have now developed and implemented English-language proficiency standards and are annually assessing English-language learners, according to a report issued in March by the U.S. Department of Education. That's the good news. The bad news is that only two states--Alabama and Michigan--met adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals for such students in both reading and mathematics for the past school year. You can access the full Biennial Evaluation Report to Congress on the Implementation of the State Formula Grant Program, 2002-2004 through the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition website. A news article analyzing the report appeared in the March 23 issue of Education Week.

Hard to identify, obscured within another struggling yet more prominent demographic—impoverished Latinos—migrant students face the same obstacles as other low-income minority children. But migrants must also learn to navigate a world that is constantly in motion, and with each interruption to their schooling, they risk falling farther behind. An article in The Christian Science Monitor examines the special problems faced by this “invisible minority” in the age of No Child Left Behind.