April 2009 | Volume 66 | Number 7 
Supporting English Language Learners 

 

Best Practices for Adolescent ELLs

Judith Rance-Roney

We need to move beyond the labels and implement proven practices that recognize students' diverse needs and strengths.

Whether adolescent English language learners are citizens, residents, or undocumented individuals, Plyler v. Doe ensures their right to an education if they meet the age limits determined in state education codes. However, in many high schools across the United States, 16- to 20-year-old immigrants who seek to attend school are discouraged from enrolling and referred to adult literacy programs offering far fewer hours of schooling.

The lack of enthusiasm for serving these students is unfortunate, but understandable. Public schools may feel they have little to gain and much to lose by enrolling older adolescents who have little or no English. No Child Left Behind demands that after one year of enrollment, ELLs must take statewide assessments, and the results must be integrated into the school's accountability measures. Enrolling large numbers of adolescent ELLs can put the school at risk of failing to make adequate yearly progress.

In these times of increasingly meager resources in which schools are paring down to essential programs and making contingency plans to deal with statewide budget cuts and federal program funding reductions, adolescent ELLs are often viewed as an unwelcome presence in schools, a drain on the limited resources available. Increasing the challenge is the reality that many immigrant adolescents enter secondary schools with a triple whammy—little or no English, interrupted or limited formal schooling, and limited literacy in any language.

 

Who Are Adolescent ELLs?

There is no more diverse learning cohort than that grouped under the term adolescent English language learner. Although many of these students are newcomers (immigrants who arrived within the past five years), others have always called the United States home. We know, for example, that 57 percent of adolescent learners classified as limited English proficient were born within U.S. borders and thus are second- or third-generation residents (Batalova, Fix, & Murray, 2007). These students have often achieved oral proficiency but lag behind in their ability to use English for literacy and content learning for reasons that may be only partly related to second-language status—for example, mobility and switching between language programs (Short & Fitzsimmons, 2007).

The particular life circumstances of any adolescent ELL will predict the individual needs that his or her school must address. Immigration status, quality of education background, native language, cultural distance from U.S. culture, expectation of remaining in the United States or reentering the country of origin, and economic resources are just a few of the variables (Lucas, 1997).

Indeed, the adolescent population of English learners is marked by its heterogeneity. The fact that the students share the label of limited English proficient (LEP) is vastly overshadowed by the variety of challenges and personal resources that they bring to schools.

Some immigrant students arrive in the United States with fully developed academic literacy in their native language and a strong record of academic achievement in their home countries. Filip, for example, entered U.S. schools in 9th grade after having attended a high-level academic school in the Czech Republic. Within two years, he had gained a command of academic English and was performing above grade level.

Contrast Filip with Ben, who emigrated from the Sudan at age 16 after experiencing the trauma of civil unrest and a severe interruption in formal schooling, which resulted in a limited foundation in literacy in any language. Rosaria, unlike either Filip or Ben, is a U.S.-born English language learner. Although her home language is Spanish, at 17, her social language outside the home is English. However, her writing exhibits many of the linguistic differences of an immigrant English learner, and she reads at the 5th grade level.

The common label adolescent English language learner, applied to all three of these students, may tempt us to assume that their academic needs are essentially the same. In reality, there is a patchwork quilt of English language learner profiles—a quilt rich with diverse life experiences, but loosely woven with common learning needs.

 

Promising Principles and Practices

It's time to move beyond the labels that confound and restrict the ways schools serve adolescent English language learners and to move these students out of the periphery of school reform efforts.

Adolescent ELLs benefit most from reforms that improve learning for all students, such as curriculum improvement, professional development, and school reorganization (Ruiz-de-Velasco & Fix, 2000). Such reforms must also take into account the particular context of each school—its demographic profile, existing program models, community culture, and so on. With this caveat in mind, a number of principles and practices support improved achievement for adolescent ELLs as well as for their native-English-speaking peers.

 

School-wide, Team-Based Support

Key question: Do educators in your school assume shared responsibility for the achievement of English language learners?

In many schools, the ELL specialist or ESL (English as a second language) teacher goes it alone. The ELL classroom is viewed as the one-stop shop for all the needs of English language learners—testing, translating, counseling, editing college applications, and even health care. Mainstream school personnel may abdicate responsibility for the needs of ELLs because they believe that the specialist understands these students better.

We need to give ELLs access to the full resources of the school. One way to accomplish this is by creating cross-disciplinary school-wide teams that may include the ELL specialist, content-area teachers who teach English language learners, counselors who specialize in the needs of ELLs, key school administrators, and other staff. Such teams should have a common planning period and should meet regularly to align curriculum; plan integrated, cross-content projects; address student concerns; and monitor student progress. School support staff (the librarian, social worker, technology leader, and so on) should attend some meetings to ensure that ELLs have access to an array of learning resources and services.