Liz King is Legislative Director for Congressman Chaka Fattah (D-Pa).  She has worked in this office since 2005, prior to which she taught middle school in Philadelphia with Teach For America for two years.  In her current role she coordinates the Congressman’s legislative agenda and advises him on education, health and social policy.  She is passionately committed to improving access and outcomes in education and to ensuring that all students’ potential is realized.  She is especially excited about the changing American demographics and the potential to bring new thinking and new thinkers to old problems.  Believing that there should always be a strong link between practice and policy, Liz volunteers as a one-on-one tutor and as a classroom volunteer.  She holds a BA in Government and Religion from Wesleyan University and an MS in Elementary Education from St. Joseph’s University.

In 2002, when President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into law, it became official policy of the United States government that all students attending public schools (with the exception of students with the most significant disAbilities) meet grade level standards by the year 2014.  For the first time, the basic expectation most parents of middle class, White, typically abled children have of their neighborhood school now applied to all classrooms, schools and districts without adjusting for race, income, first language, or IEP.  I believe that this is the most important step towards real equity for all students at the federal level since the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case desegregated schools in 1954. Read more

Dr. Carole Cobb is an accomplished curriculum designer, program developer, and coalition builder with over thirty combined years of successful teaching and administrative experiences as a public school educator, university professor, and education consultant. She is the Executive Director of Sankofa Education Alliance, a non-profit training and consulting company, whose mission is “creating healthy learning and living environments for children to excel, families to thrive, and communities to flourish”. Recently, Dr. Cobb served for four years in the Los Angeles Unified School District as its K-12 District Coordinator concentrating her efforts on eliminating educational disparities for Standard English Learners (SELs) and providing professional learning opportunities for administrators, teachers, support staff, and parents in cultural responsive educational practices to ensure equitable access to quality education for these historically underserved students.

Standard English Learners Defined

Standard English Learners (SELs) represent a population of students whose ancestral or home languages reflect unique cultural and linguistic histories other than English, and differ in structure and form from the language of school [i.e. mainstream standard American or academic English]. Their languages incorporate English vocabulary while embodying phonology, grammar, and sentence structure rules transitioned from various indigenous languages including African languages, Native American languages, Hawaiian languages, and Latin American Spanish. These languages relexify English vocabulary into their respective ancestral linguistic structure; however, because their primary language is now English, they are classified as English Only. Subsequently, these “language and linguistically-different” students do not receive the instructional support they need to become proficient in school language or mainstream Standard American English. Historically marginalized, Standard English Learners have been academically underserved in both K-12 and post-secondary educational settings.

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Sonia Nieto is Professor Emerita of Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught for 25 years. Before that, she was a junior high and elementary school teacher. She has written widely on issues of multicultural education and on the education of students of diverse backgrounds, and she has written numerous books, journal articles, and book chapters on these topics.

Sometimes as soon as I step foot in a school, I can tell of its commitment, or lack of commitment, to affirming the diversity of their students. Some things are obvious, of course: posters, bulletin boards, the nature of the books in the library, the diversity of the staff, and the language or languages displayed in the school – not only whether the home language or languages of your students are visible, but also the tone of signs in the building such as “Visitors must go to Principal’s Office,” versus “Welcome to our school! Please stop by the Principal’s Office to let us know you’re here.” Other things are less obvious: whether there is a consistent and committed outreach to all families; the curriculum and how it actually unfolds in the classroom; and whether or not students’ identities are truly accepted and honored.

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Dr. Cobb is the Administrative Coordinator for Los Angeles Unified School District’s Office of Academic English Mastery/Standard English Learner Programs. Its mission is two-fold: to eliminate educational disparities for African American, Mexican American, Native American, and Hawaiian American students; and to train teachers, administrators, and support staff in cultural responsiveness to ensure equitable access to quality education for historically under-served students.  For twenty years Dr. Cobb has been an independent training consultant, providing training in culturally relevant and responsive education; change management; leadership development; strategic planning; and coalition building.

Who are Standard English Language Learners?

Standard English Learners (SELs) are students for whom Standard English is not native, whose home languages differ in structure and form from the language of school [i.e. standard American or academic English]. These students are generally classified as “English Only” African American, Hawaiian American, Mexican American, and Native American because their home language incorporates English vocabulary while embodying phonology, grammar, and sentence structure rules transitioned from indigenous/native languages other than English including African languages, Native American languages, Hawaiian languages and Latin American Spanish.

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Olga Vásquez is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Her research examines the intersection of literacy, language, and culture in intercultural settings. As an ethnographer of education, her work covers bilingual education, culturally responsive curriculum, and access to educational resources by underrepresented groups. Over the last five years, she has been increasingly interested in the ways institutional linkages between the university and community facilitate the exchange of knowledge between two dissimilar cultural groups while focusing on how language and culture influence learning and development in after-school educational settings. Currently, she is involved in the study of sustainable innovative educational activities that provide a range of literacy activities through computer and telecommunication technology.

Every year, I teach a course called Bilingual Communication offered through the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Every year, language diversity in this class gets ever more pronounced and more interesting. Over the last ten years, I have noticed a very visible shift from a majority of Anglo and Latino students with a sprinkling of Asian students to a high percentage of Asian students with a sprinkling of Anglos and Latinos. Today, Asian students make up 48-52% of the student population at UCSD and a slightly higher percentage in this class. Forty of the 70 students enrolled in the course during the first quarter of 2010 represented a variety of Asian language groups with varying degrees of English fluency. In total, 18 languages were spoken fluently among class members. A total of 20 languages were used at home, and among class participants’ grandparents there were a total of 27 languages spoken. Only three students were monolingual English speakers. Spanish was the second most spoken language in the classroom following English. The visibility of Spanish was not because Latinos were highly represented but because Asian students and students of others ethnicities typically chose Spanish as their language of choice in high school.
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Ana Celia Zentella, Ph.D., was born and raised in the South Bronx by a Puerto Rican mother and Mexican father, taught at City University of NYC for several decades before moving to the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, where she is now Professor Emerita. Zentella is an anthro-political linguist, well known for her research on U.S.Latino varieties of Spanish and English, language socialization, bilingualism, “Spanglish”, and “English-only” laws. Zentella is presently the Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social Change at Swarthmore College (2009-2010), where she is working with her students on the publication of Multilingual Philadelphia: Portraits of Language and Social Justice

I am a proud product of New York City’s public schools in the Bronx where I attended school from kindergarten through high school, as well as college.. It wasn’t a safe or easy journey from my Puerto Rican and Mexican home in the South Bronx to completion of a graduate degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key.  I am eternally grateful to the teachers who helped me along this difficult journey.  But that was decades ago, and in many ways the journey for the children of immigrants and other linguistically and racially different groups has become even more dangerous.

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Dr. Sally Nathenson-Mejía is an Associate Professor in the Literacy, Language and Culturally Responsive Teaching program at the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Education & Human Development. Her research in secondary education for English learners is conducted in collaboration with a team of professors and educators working on two National Professional Development grants. Her research in the field of K-5 English learners’ literacy development is conducted in collaboration with teachers and administrators in the Denver metropolitan area. Dr. Nathenson-Mejia is co-author, with Dr. Maria Uribe, of the book Literacy Essentials for English Language Learners (2008). Together they are researching building-wide literacy initiatives for schools with high English learner populations. She presents and does workshops nationally on K-5 English learners’ literacy development and instructional implications.

In this space, over the past several months, educators have discussed how we must attend to the needs of English language learners and to the professional development models we are using to build capacity among teachers for working with ELL students. I would like to build on the ideas and knowledge of previous contributors by discussing efforts we are making at the University of Colorado Denver to address both of these concerns.

What is the relationship between Professional Development and student engagement/achievement?

“…students’ achievement will not improve unless and until we create schools and districts where all educators are learning how to significantly improve their skills as teachers and as instructional leaders” (Wagner et al, 2006, pg. 23).

As university faculty who specialize in teaching English learners and providing professional development for teachers, we get excited about the prospect of working with districts to help all educators improve. We want to be involved with school administrators and teachers as they find ways to impact the engagement and achievement of ELL students. It is this excitement that led us to the work we are doing with two Colorado districts that have high populations of English learners.

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Dr. Wayne E. Wright is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research areas and expertise encompass issues pertaining to language, literacy, and the unique challenges faced by English language learners. He was recently nominated for the Achievement Award for New Scholars by the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools, and currently holds several editorial positions in scholarly journals.

One of the greatest strengths ELL students bring to the classroom is their primary language (L1). Richard Ruiz (1984) reminds us that effective programs for ELLs view the primary language as a resource, rather than as a problem to be overcome. Even in non-bilingual classrooms teachers can utilize their students’ L1 in a manner which will make content-area instruction in English much more comprehensible (Wright, 2008). As Krashen (1985) has pointed out in his Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, students acquire English when they can understand messages in that language. Thus, proper use of the L1 makes English language instruction much more comprehensible, and thus students will acquire English much more quickly and effectively while at the same time mastering grade-level content. The use of students’ L1 in this manner is called Primary Language Support (PLS). Even in states such as Arizona which restrict bilingual education and require sheltered English immersion (SEI), the law makes it clear that teachers may use PLS as needed. Indeed, PLS is a critical component of sheltered English instruction, as evidenced by its inclusion in the Sheltered English Observation Protocol (SIOP) (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2004).

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Maria Adelaida Restrepo Ph,D, CCC-SLP, is an associate professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. She currently heads three funded projects on intervention for English Language Learners through Tier 2 interventions or professional training of preschool teachers, and one funded project in assessment of Spanish-speaking children. She is a bilingual Speech-Language Pathologist who has worked in schools and a variety of settings with Latin-American children and families. Her research and writing focus on best practices in speech and language assessment and intervention with bilingual populations and prevention of academic failure in children at risk due to language or environmental issues.

What is a bilingual speech and language assessment? Children who speak a language other than English and children who are bilingual need to be evaluated in their native language or the languages that they speak. When children are evaluated only in one of the languages, or in the language in which they are least proficient, such as English for English Language Learners (ELLs), they are often misdiagnosed with speech and language problems when they do not exist, or the nature of the child’s difficulty is not determined accurately (Artiles, Rueda, Salazar, & Higareda, 2005). Some times, however, we find that the monolingual speech-language pathologist (SLP) evaluating a child who is learning English overcorrects for the lack of knowledge of the child’s native language and culture, and misses that the child has a disability by attributing low performance to cultural and linguistic difference.

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Sonia Nieto is Professor Emerita of Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught for 25 years. Before that, she was a junior high and elementary school teacher. She has written widely on issues of multicultural education and on the education of students of diverse backgrounds, and she has written numerous books, journal articles, and book chapters on these topics.

Sometimes as soon as I step foot in a school, I can tell of its commitment, or lack of commitment, to affirming the diversity of their students. Some things are obvious, of course: posters, bulletin boards, the nature of the books in the library, the diversity of the staff, and the language or languages displayed in the school – not only whether the home language or languages of your students are visible, but also the tone of signs in the building such as “Visitors must go to Principal’s Office,” versus “Welcome to our school! Please stop by the Principal’s Office to let us know you’re here.” Other things are less obvious: whether there is a consistent and committed outreach to all families; the curriculum and how it actually unfolds in the classroom; and whether or not students’ identities are truly accepted and honored.

Read more

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