English Language Learners and the New Standards. Margaret Heritage
for what Black and Wiliam characterize as a “process used by teachers to recognize and respond to student learning, in order to enhance that learning, during the learning.” Aída Walqui is a highly accomplished champion of teacher professional development who has moved the field of English language learners from a bifurcated view of learning (in this class, we work on the student’s grammar, and in that class, we work on math) to an integrated one. Throughout her career, by her actions as well as by her shaping of the theoretical literature on second-language acquisition, she has created pathways between the two solitudes—the ESL teacher and the “mainstream” content teacher. And Robert Linquanti is the prime “policy wonk” of systems of assessment and accountability for ELLs, and has analyzed and surfed the successive waves of reform with an eye to giving all students access to meeting the standards. He is probably the most influential policy analyst and actor in the field for states and many school districts.
The book has an ambitious agenda, bringing these formidable actors together to provide a narrative to model and envision what assessment practice must look like during the present context of reform. It creates pathways between assessment and instruction, policy and practice, and above all, between language and academic content. Undoubtedly, the will for reform is still generated by the philosophy of flexibility of means for accountability of results. However, this book takes this framework and illustrates how the teaching profession can adapt and shape instruction for ELLs based on continual evidence of student learning. This is a deft move, and could not have been made at a better moment.
As the nation moves to the implementation of the new standards, readers will find great inspiration in the authors’ vision of what learning can become for ELLs, and in their real examples of the powerful pedagogy, responsive assessment, and coherent policy required to get there.
—Kenji Hakuta Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education Stanford Graduate School of Education
CHAPTER 1
ELLs and the New Standards
Meeting the Goals of College and Career Readiness
Students who are English language learners (ELLs) represent close to 10 percent of the total student population in the United States and make up its most rapidly growing sector.1 The number of students who are ELLs has grown from two million to five million since 1990, vastly outpacing the growth in the overall school population.2 However, in general, academic outcomes for ELLs remain stubbornly low. For example, according to data on reading performance from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), in 2013, on a 0–500 scale, the achievement gap between non-ELL and ELL students was 38 points at the fourth-grade level and 45 points at the eighth-grade level. At both grade levels, the 2013 reading achievement gap was not measurably different from the gap in either 2011 or 1998, when NAEP first started collecting data on ELL students’ status.3 Equally worrying is the situation in mathematics: in 2013, on a scale of 0–500, the achievement gap between non-ELL and ELL students was 25 points at the fourth-grade level and 41 points at the eighth-grade level.4 At both grades, this achievement gap was broadly similar to the gap in 1996.5
Against this background of ELL performance, the most recent reform effort in American education is the introduction of college and career ready standards, which are intended to ensure that when students graduate from high school they will be equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills essential for future success.6 College and career ready standards are a response to ongoing globalization and represent current societal expectations of the competencies U.S. students need to acquire to be productive citizens and effective contributors to a vibrant economy. No doubt the current college and career ready standards will undergo revisions and perhaps a major overhaul in the long term as the world continues to change and requirements for students need to adapt accordingly. Nonetheless, the current college and career ready standards represent some significant transformations about what students need to learn and how teachers need to teach, and they are likely to be in place for a considerable time to come. Examples of college and career ready standards include the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English language arts (ELA) and mathematics, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and corresponding standards and frameworks for English language development.7
An examination of college and career ready standards reveals their emphasis on extensive language use to engage in deep and transferable content learning and analytical practices. For example, in terms of analytical practices, the NGSS require students to ask questions, construct explanations, argue from evidence, and obtain, evaluate, and communicate information.8 The mathematics CCSS ask students to explain, conjecture, and justify in making sense of problems and solving them, and to construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.9 And among the ELA analytical practices are: engaging with complex texts; writing to inform, argue, and analyze; working collaboratively; and presenting ideas.10
The introduction of college and career ready standards by most states in the United States presents both a challenge and an opportunity for ELLs, who regularly must do “double the work”—acquire content knowledge and analytical practices at the same time as they are learning English as an additional language.11 The challenge lies in the heightened demands of the standards in terms of content expectations and what students are required to do with language as they engage in content-area learning.12 If ELL students have not been successful with prior standards, then it is highly likely that achieving more demanding ones will be challenging.
However, if the introduction of college and career ready standards represents a challenge for ELLs, it also presents an opportunity. College and career ready standards imply significant changes in educational practice, in which ELLs learn language and content simultaneously. This reformulation involves practice that is consistent with the view among second-language experts that when teachers construct powerful invitations to engage ELL students in language use in worthwhile disciplinary contexts, they can develop conceptual understandings, analytical practices, and dynamic language use in the domain, enabling them to succeed in school and beyond.13 An added advantage is that effective pedagogy for ELLs will be equally beneficial for native speakers of English who are not doing well academically because they speak a nonstandard variety of English, and have not been appropriately assisted to learn the academic and more formal uses of the language. This book is about the reformulation of practice to achieve these outcomes.
In this reformulation of practice, preparing ELL students to achieve the language and learning expectations of college and career ready standards is not the sole responsibility of a small cadre of language specialists teaching English-as-a-second-language (ESL) classes. For children entering school with little or no English, there is a pivotal role for ESL teachers to develop students’ initial English language, both social and academic, in deep, accelerated ways. However, once students have moved beyond the emergent level of proficiency in English, further development of the academic uses of language becomes the responsibility of every teacher.14 Also, teachers in math, ELA, and science cannot do all the heavy lifting. They need the support of their colleagues in other disciplines to engage ELLs in meaningful language use for discipline-specific purposes. For example, in art, students might be asked to justify their use of particular color or line forms; in physical education, students may have to explain or negotiate the rules of a game; and similarly in history/social studies, students could be asked to discuss evidence for certain claims they are making about the causes of the Civil War.15 And when teachers in other disciplines attend to ELL students’ language development, they will surely benefit the learning of their own subjects.
Assessment is an integral component of the reformulation of practice we propose. In this regard, we do not mean assessment through quizzes or other testlike events, but rather assessment that involves teachers in gathering evidence of both language and content learning while that learning is taking place, so that they can use the evidence to engage in contingent pedagogy. When pedagogy is contingent upon the students’ current learning status, the teacher is essentially meeting the student where he or she is at that moment in learning. In other words, the teacher is matching her pedagogy to the student’s immediate needs in order to move learning