This article from our local weekly about how changes in the state’s largest school district ESL program have affected one young man was of particular interest to me as I have done volunteer work at Kateri Park.

After a 2008 audit found Portland Public Schools in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for both failing to provide students with “meaningful” access to grade level core courses and for failing to provide parents with information in their first languages.  So efforts have been made to shifts ELLs from special classes to mainstream classes even when their English skills aren’t sufficient.

Despite good intentions, the shift doesn’t represent a marked improvement, some teachers say. Now instead of getting special instruction that didn’t let students earn enough credits to get their diplomas, immigrant students are in credit-bearing core classes—but barely passing, if at all.

After writing this I discovered another article on the same topic in another small Portland paper.  It’s actually the more detailed of the two and, again, it focuses on how recent changes affect Somali and Somali Bantu students.

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times reports that many US born students who started in English language learning classes in the primary grades in Los Angeles Unified School District  are still in the specialized programs when starting high school, clearly raising a lot of questions.

Researchers found that the earlier students move into mainstream classes the likelier they are to stay in school and graduate than those who don’t which makes the following speculation very disturbing:

Though the study didn’t determine why students were staying in English language programs for so long, researchers say schools may avoid moving English learners into mainstream classes to keep test scores high.

I’d love to hear what ESL teachers in the LAUSD have to say about this.

I read Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities as a beginning teacher in the early 1990’s after studying to become and ESL teacher.  I’d read a lot about education at that point, but this was the first thing that made me cry.  Since then I’ve read everything he’s written and I even had the privilege of hearing him speak here in Portland a few years ago.  He writes so compellingly about things that really matter in our educational system but we haven’t seen the kind of progress needed yet.   Some things haven’t changed much since he began writing about educational inequality decades ago.  He spoke recently at Rhode Island College and offered up the following shameful facts:

The average black or Hispanic twelfth-grade student reads at a typical white seventh-grader’s level. Drop-out rates of black and Hispanic students have worsened since the 1980s. Schools in the Bronx, N.Y., have 32 students in a classroom. New York white suburbs cap their quota at 18 children per class.

Sobering statistics, to be sure.  A summary of his talk can be found here.

Police officers in Dallas, Texas have improperly cited drivers for not being able to speak English 38 times in the past three years according to Police Chief David Kunkle.

I only recently heard about The Class (originally released in French as Entre les Murs n 2008).   I pulled this DVD from the Netflix wrapper and popped it into my DVD player expecting a typical, uplifting teacher-as-hero story along the lines of Stand and Deliver and was pleasantly surprised by something far more nuanced and intriguing.

Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays the role of François Marin, a teacher in a racially diverse classroom in a Paris suburb.  The challenges are enormous, from students who have a poor grasp of French to rivalries between different student groups.  A few of his students appear excited about learning but most are indifferent at best if not flat out insolent.  We spend most of the movie in his tiny, claustrophobic classroom with occasional scenes taking place in the teachers’ lounge, meeting rooms, and in a small outdoor courtyard.

Teacher Marin comes off  as alternately stoic and frustrated, both full of high aspirations for his students and just trying to get through the day–an attitude reflected by most of the staff at the school as we peek in on faculty meetings and conversations.  While I have been blessed to generally have far more motivated and well mannered students, I was rather taken aback at times by Marin’s attitude towards his students, his occasional lack of sensitivity and, quite frankly, his poor classroom management skills. If I were the teacher, there would have been intervention much earlier in the year with some of the kids.  But then again, this is a film so maybe giving the students more room to act out made for a better a story.  In any case, Marin comes across as entirely believable in his unevenness in handling the class from one day to the next.

The film feels like  a documentary, complete with hand-held cameras, uneven timing, and a general feeling of of spontaneity.  The students are, in fact, played by real students, most of whom use their real names.  There’s a “making of” short movie in the special features which looks at how the students prepared for their roles through acting workshops.

As a teacher, I found it fascinating to look into a classroom in another country and see how other schools handle the same kinds of challenges we have here.  The story was very credible, both from the teacher’s point of view and the way the students are portrayed in all their lively, noisy, chaotic glory.

Dictation is one of the oldest language teaching activities. It is perhaps for this reason that it has been neglected recently by teachers, claiming that it is too teacher centered, uncommunicative, boring and old fashioned. But is dictation without any merit? Is it really old fashioned and uncommunicative?

I taught for quite a while before I ever used dictation in my classroom.  It struck me as a very old fashioned sort of activity and then somewhere along the line my students started asking for dedications.  As it turns out, they love them!

I usually read 3-5 simple sentences or questions and have students self correct or exchange papers for corrections.  I hadn’t really given this much more thought but I just read this post  at My English Pages which gave me lots of new ideas about how to incorporate more variety into dictation.

How about you?  Does dictation have a part in your classroom?

I just came across the pdf book Simple Listening Activities from Oxford University Press.  It’s full of great ideas for beginner classes.

I’ve been using the web for many years in my ESL teaching primarily emailing my students links t0 numerous websites for practicing the grammar and life skills topics we study each week.  I encourage my students to use email, show lots of BrainPop videos, and use lots of images, videos, and web-based resources to make it easier for them to settle in here in the US.

I thought I had a pretty good handle on what was out there until I had the good fortune to stumble on to Larry Ferlazzo’s bl0g which makes me realize just how much more there is out there.   Ferlazzo’s site for students contains over 9000 categorized link for student practice.  That’s right, nine thousand.  Additionally he writes a blog with daily links for ESL teachers which is an absolute gold mine.  This guy knows his stuff when it comes to the world of ESL on the web.

Teacher Magazine just published his article ELL 2.0: How to Make the Most of the Web and I think it’s absolutely worth a read.  In it he lists 13 of his very favorite websites for students and teachers, many of which were new to me.

The amount of time Ferlazzo spends doing research and then writing up his finds so they can be shared is nothing short of staggering to me and I just want to give a big Thank You for all his hard work.

I found a link to The Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes on Larry Ferlazzo’s blog tonight.  Even though it’s written for engineering professors, there’s food for thought for any teacher here.

I generally focus on writing at the sentence level with my beginning students but my high school aged kids are, of course, writing at a much higher level.  One of them is a naturally gifted writer who can produce pages of well organized, thoughtful writing on nearly any topic you can imagine.  The other is a more typical kid who has great ideas and insights but struggles in getting them on paper.  He is the kid for whom graphic organizers are a godsend.

We found a great site tonight with lots of organizers and other tools for writers.

ReadWriteThink, established in April of 2002, is a partnership between the International Reading Association (IRA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the Verizon Foundation.

NCTE and IRA are working together to provide educators and students with access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction through free, Internet-based content.

We found the persuasive essay map perfectly suited for the task at hand, and will certainly return to check out other tools such as the compare and contrast map and the literary elements map.  There’s plenty to explore here beyond the organizational tools–check it out!