English fluency gets boost

PORTLAND – Over the past six years, Oregon schools have become dramatically more successful at helping students from other language backgrounds master English within five or six years.

As a result, courses in English as a second language have become sparse in middle and high schools, with elementary students accounting for more than 75 percent of those who get daily help acquiring English.

As recently as 2008, it was much rarer for Oregon schools to complete the job of teaching English to non-native speakers by the end of elementary school. Instead, middle and high school students made up 40 percent of students still learning English.

Several factors have driven the change: new standards for what to teach, better teaching materials, introduction of a single test to judge English proficiency across Oregon, more accountability for schools’ results with English learners and loads of training in teaching methods that work better than the old ones.

The bottom line is that, in most districts, educators charged with teaching English to children who speak Spanish or Somali or Russian or Vietnamese at home are proving so effective that the job is substantially accomplished by the time the students get to sixth grade.

Michelle Thelander, a California-based expert who has helped schools in 10 states, including Oregon, improve their teaching of limited-English students, said she finds Oregon’s progress “reassuring” – and uncommon.

“From the data nationally, I don’t see this as a trend nationally,” Thelander said.

Many states still have staggering numbers of what experts call “L-TELs,” long-term English learners who have been taught English as a second language for at least seven years without mastering academic English, said Susana Dutro, co-founder with Thelander of the training firm E.L. Achieve.

Oregon’s director of English learner programs, Kim Miller, said the state’s improved results stem from closer monitoring and better instruction. A significant amount of that success, Miller said, can be chalked up to Dutro and her firm, which has led massive amounts of training for superintendents, principals and teachers in many Oregon school districts going back as far as 2006.

“We’re seeing highly effective teaching happening at our elementary grades,” Miller said. “They’re doing great work.”

Among the techniques: Use hand motions or gestures to help students understand new terms and remember them more easily. Use advanced language such as “prefer” and “scrumptious” rather than “like” and “good” with even the youngest learners. Explicitly teach the forms and patterns of academic English, such as how to compare and contrast and how to support an opinion with a rationale and details. Insist that students spend at least 40 percent of their language development classes not listening to the teacher or looking at the board but writing and talking, talking, talking.

Walk into Julie Sanford’s kindergarten classroom at Ventura Park Elementary, and it looks at first blush like a 5-year-old version of speed dating. The students are a mix of native English speakers and students new to English. Some sit at their desks. Some stand. Others circulate. But all are taking part in short, one-on-one conversations in English. The babble of little voices is quiet but constant. A lot of them seem to be saying something about a pocket.

Turns out the class had read aloud together the children’s story “A Pocket for Corduroy,” about a girl’s beloved stuffed bear who gets lost while seeking a pocket for his overalls.

Then Sanford told them it was time for “busy bees,” a structured oral language exercise in which half the students (the bees) buzz around and hold short conversations with students who stay in place (the flowers). It guarantees half the students are talking at any given time as the class practices a particular language technique or structure.

Today’s lesson: Using terms such as first, then, next and after to convey the order in which actions occur.

“Give me a thumbs-up if you are using your sequencing language,” Sanford says to her bees and flowers.

In a first-grade classroom nearby, students interview each other, reading questions they have written and recording the answers. Lilyanna Baker asks Meagan Squally a tough one: Do you prefer blueberries or watermelon?

David Douglas School District teachers cover new English skills in a carefully planned sequence. Teachers first model new techniques for students, then lead them in group practice, then tee them up to practice independently with another student. Busy bee conversations, peer interviews and other familiar routines help ensure that all students get a lot of practice using that week’s vocabulary and techniques.

Every Friday, teachers measure to see how well students perform.

“We’re always looking at data,” said Kelly Devlin, the district’s ESL and equity director. If students aren’t progressing, it’s addressed promptly, she said.

Old-school English as a second language classes typically pulled students out of their regular classes to learn English in a way that focused too much on the basics and didn’t necessarily jibe with the rest of their day, Devlin said: learning colors, the language of telling time, how to convert verbs to the past tense.

With in-depth training for teachers, “our awareness of what our English learners need has gotten better and our instruction has gotten better,” Devlin said. “When you look at our data, it shows that we are making progress.”