Chapter 1. Who is the Second Language Learner?

Figure 1.1. English Language Learners in the United States: A Growing Population

Basic Definitions

There is often confusion about the terms used to describe students who speak a language other than English. Some of this confusion is rooted in the fact that many terms overlap, and that some terms may even mean the same thing. This section defines commonly used terms such as language minority and limited English and analyzes language proficiency and the challenge of assessing it.

Language Minority Students

School districts often begin the process of figuring out which students will need help learning English by identifying language minority students. Language minority students are those who have a language other than English in their home background. A language minority student may come from a home where English is rarely or never spoken. Or a language minority student may share a household with a parent or a grandparent who speaks a language other than English.

One common practice for identifying language minority students is to send a language survey to newly enrolled students' parents or guardians, asking them about language use in their homes. If a language other than English is spoken in a student's home, that student may be considered “language minority.” Language minority students are usually then tested for English proficiency. Language proficiency testing determines whether a language minority student is a monolingual English speaker, bilingual, or limited English proficient.

English Language Learners or Limited English Proficient Students

A limited English proficient (LEP) student is a student who by some measure, usually a standardized proficiency test, has insufficient English to succeed academically in an English-only classroom. Note that the term “limited English proficient” has provoked some controversy in the field because it is based on a deficiency model, labeling students by what they can't, rather than what they can, do. Some educators, therefore, prefer the term English Language Learner(ELL). Whichever term you use, it's important to remember that LEP/ELL students will need assistance with both English language development and content instruction in order to progress in school.

What Is Language Proficiency?

One of the difficulties in identifying students with limited English proficiency is the lack of agreement among theorists on a definition of proficiency. At a minimum, theorists tend to agree that the ability to use a language is related to the context in which it is used.

For example, if you have studied French extensively in college, you may be capable of writing essays in French on topics related to literature or philosophy. Stepping off a plane in Orly, however, you may find your French insufficient to the demands of changing money, finding a bus to Paris, or registering at your hotel. It's not that you don't know any French, but that you are weaker in some language skills than others.

Conversely, you may have been born in the United States and consider yourself a native Spanish speaker. In the absence of academic support for your native language, however, you may not have strong Spanish literacy skills. Your ability to use Spanish is perfectly adequate for the requirements of daily life, such as shopping, phone calls, and social events, but you might have difficulty making a professional presentation or writing a research paper in Spanish.

The shortage of bilingual and biliterate speakers of Spanish in the United States has had an effect on the availability of qualified teachers to staff bilingual classrooms (Fern, 1998). Native-born Spanish-speaking teachers who are not biliterate cannot themselves offer a fully enriched literacy program to their Spanish-speaking students. This self-replicating problem results from an apparent ambivalence in our civic conversation about American multilingualism and our ongoing inability to formulate sensible educational and language policies.

Language Proficiency and Schooling

Schooling appears to require particular kinds of language proficiency because school is a highly specialized context. Cummins (1981) has clarified the issues of language proficiency and context for educators. He suggests that school-related tasks require school-related proficiency, which he has labeled Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). According to Cummins, CALP is the kind of language we use in situations that don't have a lot of context-related clues. CALP is different from what Cummins calls Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS), the kind of language we use for day-to-day communication. In ordinary daily communication we can often extract meaning from the situation or context, which gives us lots of clues.

For example, you can generally get something to eat or shop for souvenirs in a foreign country even if you don't speak the language. Shopping and eating in restaurants are contexts that are comparable from place to place. When you go into a restaurant and look at the menu, or enter a store and look at the merchandise, everyone understands what you have in mind. In addition, you can use gestures and facial expressions to communicate. You can also make your needs known with a few simple words like “please” and “thank you.” Shopping and eating in restaurants are activities that relate to concrete visible objects and events; they are based on shared assumptions and scripts. That is to say, they are highly contextualized. It is easy to understand and be understood in highly contextualized situations, even if you have limited language skills, or BICS.

On the other hand, it is difficult even for fairly competent speakers of a second language to follow a university lecture about abstract ideas. In a lecture, there is little to give you a real sense of the topic or to clarify what's going on. An instructor may provide a lecture outline or make notes on the board or projection screen, but print is, by definition, extremely abstract. University lectures are decontextualized. That is to say, few communication clues exist in the lecture context. Attending a university lecture requires a particular set of highly sophisticated academic language skills, or CALP.

Even early primary classrooms are decontextualized. It's certainly feasible for a kindergarten teacher to make a lesson about the weather a concrete, hands-on experience. Children can go outside and stand in the rain or feel the warmth of the sun. And mathematics manipulatives can provide direct experience with numbers. But schooling becomes increasingly less contextualized as it becomes more advanced. Although upper primary and secondary teachers may be skilled at providing hands-on experiences across the curriculum, at higher grades much of what is taught relies on listening, reading, and writing.

And finally, what appears simple and straightforward to an adult may be abstract and difficult for a youngster. The demands of 3rd grade may not seem as challenging as those of a university class, but 3rd grade is (and should be) challenging for a 3rd grader. Put yourself in the shoes of a 3rd grader with limited English skills trying to participate in a social studies lesson. For instance, imagine yourself in a university classroom in Beijing or Cairo trying to take notes on a history or political science lecture in preparation for an examination or a research paper.

In sum, academic experiences and activities at every level are generally more abstract and lacking in context than day-to-day, real-life communication, so they present difficulties for students who have not developed academic language skills, or CALP. And commonly used proficiency tests do not always assess CALP. As a result, children who have playground English are often judged as English proficient even though they may not be able to handle the demands of schooling in their new language. Failure to distinguish between contexts unfairly sets up those students for failure.

Cultural Diversity in the Public Schools

Linguistic diversity is one simple indicator of the unprecedented cultural diversity in our public schools. But even as classrooms diversify, public school teachers tend to be overwhelmingly white and middle class. And though very few Americans can claim indigenous roots, teachers are most often from highly assimilated backgrounds characterized by mainstream values and mores. In fact, many Americans, teachers included, are so mainstream that they describe themselves as “Heinz 57” and claim to have “no culture.” That notion, however, is based on an erroneous idea of what culture really means.

What Is Culture and Who Has It?

Human beings are cultural by their very nature. We engage our world through the manufacture of artifacts, the practice of behaviors, and the development and adherence to values and beliefs. We share our culture with others in our groups and communicate our culture to our children in an ever-evolving response to the circumstances and challenges of our worlds. We don't all have the same culture, and we don't all share the same degree of relationship with our heritage or ethnic cultures, but we all have culture.

Culture is what human beings believe, think, make, and do to adapt to their environments. Bullivant (1993) posits three basic environments to which we all adapt: physical, social, and metaphysical. Bullivant's notion is best understood by exploring a simple example such as housing. All human beings create dwelling spaces, but not all of them do it the same way. The physical environment has a direct impact on how people design and build houses. For example, peaked roofs are useful where it snows, and masonry houses aren't practical where there are earthquakes.

But beyond the physical demands of the environment, houses respond to and reflect social environments. Americans usually have “family rooms,” as well as living rooms. Family rooms are more casual, usually contain a television, and get far more use than living rooms, which are considered formal. Older homes in the United States don't have family rooms, but may have big eat-in “farm” kitchens. When heating a home was difficult or central heating was unavailable, congregating in a warm kitchen made sense. This harks back to the physical environment, but most certainly shaped and was shaped by family dynamics as well. All our environments interact and overlap.

The social dimensions of housing are complex. Wealthy people often live in big houses in desirable locations. But no matter how much money you have, you can't call a realtor and make an offer on the White House, even though it may be smaller than some of the houses in the affluent part of your town!

The response to a metaphysical environment may be harder to discern than responses to physical and social environments, but such adaptations are no less real. Realtors in areas with large populations of Asian immigrants often keep lists of houses that oblige the principles of feng shui, a metaphysical system that considers the placement of houses and the configuration of interiors and furnishings essential to good fortune. For example, houses with front doors that open to face staircases are considered unlucky, as are houses on T-intersections. Orthodox Jews may have two kitchen sinks, one for meat products and another for milk products, in keeping with the requirements of kashruth, a metaphysical system that requires, among other things, the separation of meat from dairy.

And almost all of us, regardless of our ethnic or religious heritage, take pride in the look of our houses and do things simply to beautify our homes. To place a flower arrangement on a table, hang a painting, or choose a colorful rug all engage us in aesthetics, which is a response to the metaphysical environment.

Multicultural Education

The need to respond to children from many different cultural backgrounds has led some educators to express a need for multicultural education. Multicultural education, however, has been interpreted in a variety of ways. The weakest and probably the least effective approach to multiculturalism is the scatter-shot insertion of holidays and celebrations related to various ethnic groups into the curriculum. This might entail a celebration on Cinco de Mayo or recognition of contributions of African Americans during Black History Week. Multicultural educators sometimes refer to this approach as “tacos and chitlins,” or “display window” multiculturalism.

Of course, nothing is wrong with including attention to personalities and holidays in the curriculum. But culture is more than feasts and celebrations. Strong multicultural education implies the reform of schools in such a way that schooling can facilitate the academic success of students from all backgrounds (Banks, 1993). And the strongest versions of multicultural education suggest that students be prepared to identify issues and challenges in their own environments related to social justice, and that they learn the skills needed to effect societal change (Howard, 1999). This is easy to say, but difficult to do. Historically, schooling in the United States has generally supported the status quo and assimilation of newcomers and traditional minorities into mainstream culture.

The scope of this book does not allow an exploration of the dimensions and tensions of multicultural education. The key issue for educators is to understand that schooling is more than the 3 Rs—schools are brokers between home cultures, school culture, and all the cultures of the larger world. Schools need to be reflective of and responsive to the histories, values, and beliefs of students from a variety of backgrounds. And teachers need to examine their unstated and often unacknowledged assumptions and carefully consider the purposes and outcomes of schooling. Only then will schools be able to serve students from diverse backgrounds well.

Banks, J. A. (1993). Multicultural education: Characteristics and goals. In J. A. Banks & C. M. Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 3–28). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Bullivant, B. M. (1993). Culture: Its nature and meaning for educators. In J. A. Banks & C. M. Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 29–47). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

California State Department of Education (2000). Limited English proficient students and enrollment in California public schools, 1993 through 2000. Sacramento, CA: Author.

Cummins, J. (1981). The role of primary language development in promoting success for limited English proficient students. In Schooling and language minority students: A theoretical framework. Los Angeles: Evaluation, Dissemination, and Assessment Center, California State University, LA.

Fern, V. (1998, July). What is the impact of biliteracy/bilingualism on the economy? Washington, DC: National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education.

Howard, G. R. (1999). We can't teach what we don't know: White teachers, multiracial schools. New York: Teachers College Press.

Jamieson, A., Curry, A., and Martinez, G. (1999). Social and economic characteristics of students (U.S. Census Bureau Publication No. P20–S33). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration.

National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition & Language Instruction Educational Programs. The growing numbers of limited English proficient students. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Read More About . . .

• The number and distribution of second language learners at www.ncbe.gwu.edu, the Web site for National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs (NCELA), formerly known as the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education. This site is a rich resource for information about services to second language learners. Current information about demographics and policies is available on a state-by-state basis.
• Language proficiency testing in the Handbook of English Proficiency Tests by Ann del Vecchio and Michael Guerrero (Evaluation Assistance Center, Western Region, New Mexico Highlands University, Albuquerque, 1995). The handbook provides an overview of issues related to language proficiency testing and describes five frequently used tests, from both theoretical and practical perspectives.
• The distinction between cognitive and academic language proficiency and basic interpersonal communication skills in Schooling and Language Minority Students: A Theoretical Framework, edited by the California State Department of Education, Office of Bilingual Bicultural Education (Los Angeles, CSU-LA Evaluation, Dissemination, and Assessment Center, 1981). In particular, see the chapter by Jim Cummins, “The Role of Primary Language Development in Promoting Academic Success for Language Minority Students.” Cummins's theoretical framework has become part of the language educators speak when they are discussing language proficiency, and as a result this chapter can be seen as current and relevant despite its publication date.