Closing the ELL Achievement Gap —A Leader’s Guide to Making Schools Effective for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students
|
Nationally, the number of children entering our schools who do not speak, read, or write English is growing much more rapidly than the number of native speakers, and this trend shows no sign of slowing. To add to the challenge, this sweeping demographic change comes just as the No Child Left Behind legislation has increased accountability for every child in our public schools to an all-time high.
Many districts and schools across the country are struggling to manage significant increases in ELL enrollments. Helping these students to achieve academically and to reach their fullest potential involves more than just English language learning interventions. |  |
|
This resource kit is strategically designed to address the linguistic and education reform practices needed to accelerate the achievement of these students. These students come from different language and cultural backgrounds with different literacy and academic proficiency levels in their native languages.
The federal government uses the term Limited English Proficient (LEP) students to refer to the linguistic and academic needs of these students. Other terms used are Second Language Learners (SLL), English Learners (EL), English Language Learners (ELL), Language Enriched Pupils (LEP), Potential English Proficient (POP), and even ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) students. For the purposes of this resource kit, the term “culturally and linguistically diverse” (CLD) students will be used. ELL, although a positive term, gives the impression that the only task the education system has is to create an infrastructure to facilitate acquisition of English. CLD goes beyond English language acquisition to encompass all the dimensions that need to be considered for the success of these students in school and in society. These education dimensions are:
This resource kit provides pertinent research premises that need to be considered in developing an education reform process and infrastructure to meet the linguistic and academic needs of CLD students. Each chapter addresses a different consideration for planning and implementing reform and sustaining long-term performance results. No matter where a state, district, or school is on the path to reform, this kit will provide support to educators and policy makers in aligning research practices to systemic reform practices and exemplary teaching practices. Included with the kit are a CD with selected items from the kit in electronic form and a 44-minute DVD is a presentation about the kit content, which was recorded at the 2009 Model Schools Conference. 252 pages Excerpt Order Form Online Store |
|