From: Denise Recarte
Columbus
“Hi, how are you?”
“Fine, thank you, and you?”
“Can you tell me where I can find the post office?”
This is what learning another language can look like if you are planning a weekend trip to another country. However, this is not what learning English looks like for more than 1,200 students in the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp.
English Learners (ELs) are pulling double duty. ELs are expected to not only develop their English language skills, but they do it while learning abstract, complex and technical content alongside their native English-speaking peers.
Recently, the Indiana legislature redesigned the funding formula for ELs. The new formula provides less funding for students who are in the intermediate stages of their language journey (levels 3 and 4). It is obvious that whoever proposed this formula is unfamiliar with the language acquisition process and the context in which our students are learning and expected to perform.
Here are three important points about language acquisition that decision-makers need to know:
1. It is a multi-year process. While many programs market that you can "learn a language in two weeks," that is not the reality for our students. They are not just learning to speak English for a weekend vacation. They are required to learn to speak, listen, read and write academic content on par with their English-speaking peers, and they are tested on all of those skills annually.
2. Speaking is not necessarily fluency or literacy. Many students will advance in oral language skills more quickly than literacy skills, which can be perceived by monolingual adults to mean they "know" English. Once again, "knowing" English is much more complex than this. Students may acquire speaking skills more quickly (still may take up to a year) because it’s needed to survive and fit in. Oral language is also unstructured, flexible and informal, which allows students with less technical knowledge of the language to become fairly functional but still not enough to meet the required proficiency.
3. Students need specialized support at all levels of the language acquisition process, and that support will look different at each level. I like to use the analogy of a parent walking with their child on the beach. We hold their hand in the shallow water to help them get used to the water and the sand and the waves (and it gives the parent a sense of security) even though the water is fairly easy to walk through, but we don’t let go of their hand when the water gets deeper and the waves more perilous. That is when they need us the most. Students will spend most of their language development hovering in these perilous waters where language tasks are more difficult, abstract and technical, and the stakes are higher.
The vast majority of ELs (over 70%) are born here in Indiana — in our community. They are Americans. Although, immigrant status shouldn’t matter because all of our ancestors at some point had to go through this language learning process.
