Long-Term English Language Learners

I was intrigued by the title of an up-coming chat on EdWeek: Educating Long-Term English Language Learners, with this little blurb:

Many school districts are at a loss on how to best educate long-term English-language learners-students who have been enrolled in special programs to learn English for years but who have never tested as fluent in the language. Kate Menken, an assistant professor of linguistics at the City University of New York who wrote the book English Learners Left Behind: Standardized Testing as Language Policy, will answer questions about what she's learned during three years of researching long-term ELLs in New York City. The study also included an intervention in two high schools with long-term ELLs that is showing promising results.

This problem hasn't been covered in any of the books we've read so far, so I decided to investigate further, particularly since this is a seconday school problem, and (I assume) I'll be teaching secondary math. Evidently we can assume three levels of ELLs in high school:

1. Newly Arrived with Adequate Schooling
2. Newly Arrived with Limited/Interrupted Formal Schooling (also known as Students with Interrupted Formal Education or SIFE)
3. Long-Term English Language Learners...the focus of this study.

[LTELLs] are distinct from the two other groups because they are not new arrivals, but rather have been in the U.S. for seven or more years, and some are in fact U.S.-born ... As a result, they are usually orally proficient in English and often sound like native speakers ... [Which Cummins warns about.] In spite of their oral proficiency in English, these students are characterized by low levels of academic literacy in both English and their home language. As such, their reading and writing is usually below grade level in either language, and they often experience poor overall academic performance and high course failure rates ... These students are frequently misperceived as ‘failures’ of ESL and bilingual programs.
There is a fair amount of overlap between long-term ELLs and students termed “generation 1.5,” a population of mainly U.S.-educated English learners that has received attention within TESOL scholarship, particularly in studies of higher education.
(Mencken, et al, p. 2, her references removed. My comment in italics)

The typical high school assumes that ELLs have sufficient academic background from their previous school. They are not well prepared to have students in academic classes who do not have this background. I think that I, too, have been assuming that a student in Algebra I has had enough math previously to have the cognitive background to learn the difficult content. Since these students are often quite fluent in BICS speech, teachers, administrators and councilors have been assuming that they must have congenital cognitive limitations, rather than experiential limitations from inadequate schooling.

The LTELLs in NYC high schools that the authors interview for her study have a variety of backgrounds: "The vast majority of our student participants (90%) speak Spanish... [most] from the Dominican Republic, while others come from Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, Honduras, and Venezuela. The sample also included speakers of Twi, Chinese, and Garífuna." (Mencken, et al p. 7-8)

The educational experiences of the majority of LTELLs are characterized by inconsistency and transience across countries, schools, and programs. ...[W]e have identified three categories of LTELLs ...: 1) vaivén students, who have moved back and forth between the U.S. and their family’s country of origin, 2) students with inconsistent U.S. schooling, who have shifted between bilingual education, ESL programs, and mainstream classrooms with no language support programming, and 3) transitioning students, who simply require additional time to acquire another language while they are developing academic content knowledge.

As the first two categories ... make up the overwhelming majority of the students in this study, it becomes apparent that LTELLs lack stability in their schooling experiences, compounding the already difficult task of learning a language for academic use.
(Mencken, et al, p. 8-9)

The researchers quote several of the students in the paper. This one is a good example:

The changes that I been going back and forth like being in DR, then coming over here, I’m getting used to class being all in English then I go back over there and it all in Spanish… It’s that like since I been going back and forth and studying here and studying over there. Like the History Regents it’s difficult ‘cuz my mind with the history over there I know it more than here. And then I come here I’m studying the history but I don’t get everything, you know? Like there’s my head, crazy sometimes. I was telling my teacher I wish the Regents was about DR, that way I would pass it [laughs].
(Tatiana, 10th Grade LTELL, School 1, interview transcript)
(Menken, et al, p. 11)

The authors list several different causes for these students besides vaivén wbo have moved back and forth between countries:
Inconsistent U.S. Schooling

• ‘School Hoppers’
• Programming Differences from School to School
• Inconsistent School-Based Language Policies
• Absence of ELL Programming

A much smaller group were categorized as Transitioning. Generally they had just not been here long enough to get their English up to par, but because of excellent school back home, were doing quite well in most content course. The authors expect these students to move on easily.

It looks like we have to be very careful not to be taken in by a student's fluent conversational skills. When a student is having content difficulty, we should be very careful to check his background to see if he just hasn't had enough schooling. For our class, we will be writing an "Ethnography," which will include interviews with several challenged students and their families. I will try to find an LTELL for the project.