How schools can best serve students who are limited-English-proficient (LEP) has been hotly debated for decades. The main point of contention is whether LEP students should be taught in their native languages—and if so, to what extent.
Today, this debate is intensifying as the number of LEP students rapidly rises. Between 1985 and 1992, the number of LEP students enrolled in U.S. schools increased by nearly 70 percent, to a total of more than 2.5 million students, according to the group Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). During the same period, LEP students increased from 3.8 percent to slightly more than 6 percent of the total K–12 student population, and that proportion continues to expand. "The numbers are just phenomenal," says James Lyons, executive director of the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE).
Much of the debate has focused on the relative merits of bilingual and English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) programs: which type of program serves LEP students better? In simple terms, bilingual programs provide some amount of native-language content instruction for several years, while students also learn English skills during part of the day. The chief goal of these programs is to help students make a successful transition to mainstream classes. In ESL programs, by contrast, students receive content instruction in English (sometimes adapted to their level of proficiency) and are pulled out of the classroom for part of the day to learn English skills with other LEP students. Of the two approaches, ESL programs are more common, experts say.
Advocates of bilingual programs argue that LEP students need native-language content instruction to keep pace in the curriculum with their English-speaking peers while they learn English. If they are simply immersed in English instruction, LEP students miss too much academic content, these experts contend.
Young LEP children can pick up a fair amount of conversational English from their peers, but it's a mistake to think they can dive right into academic work, says Judith Lessow-Hurley of San Jose State University, author of ASCD's Commonsense Guide to Bilingual Education. Recent research has shown that LEP students need five to seven years of concentrated instruction in English to develop real academic proficiency in the language, she says. Therefore, it is unfair to expect them to compete in an English-language environment from the beginning. LEP students who receive no instruction in their native language often develop a negative self-concept, get held back, and ultimately may drop out of school, Lyons says.
Backers of bilingual programs also contend that if LEP students develop a strong base in their first language, they will learn English more readily—although this may seem counterintuitive. Students who understand how their native language works, they say, can transfer this understanding to English. In addition, advocates claim that bilingual programs reinforce LEP students' self-esteem and help them maintain their native language.
Bilingual Drawbacks?
Some in the field dispute these views vigorously, however. One outspoken critic of bilingual education is Rosalie Pedalino Porter of the Research in English Acquisition and Development (READ) Institute. Porter, author of Forked Tongue: The Politics of Bilingual Education, became disillusioned with bilingual education as a result of her experiences as a bilingual teacher. Although LEP students at her school were supposed to be mainstreamed after their third year in the bilingual program, "it didn't happen," she states flatly. In fact, she was dismayed to find 6th graders who still could not speak, read, or write English. This phenomenon—the failure of students in bilingual programs to acquire adequate English skills—has been documented across the United States, she asserts.
The problem with bilingual education lies in the program design, not in the way teachers implement it, Porter believes. Students in bilingual programs become reliant on native-language teaching, she says; the impetus to learn English is not strong enough. And in bilingual classes, LEP students are "segregated for years from their English-speaking classmates."
LEP students are better served if they are taught in English from the beginning, Porter believes. Young children are more capable of absorbing a second language than older ones, she says, and they are less self-conscious about making mistakes. Further, they have more time to devote to the task, simply by virtue of their young age. A skillful teacher can teach them content using "simple English and lots of illustrative materials," Porter says.
Like Porter, other educators dispute the claim that LEP students taught in English cannot keep pace with native speakers. ESL teacher Donna Clovis has found just the opposite to be true of her students. "Sometimes they're doing better than their peers" when they leave her program, she says.
Clovis teaches an ESL pull-out program at Riverside Elementary School in Princeton, N.J. Students remain in the program for one to three years. Clovis's students speak 19 different native languages, including Russian, Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese, and Hebrew. Offering all of these students a bilingual program would be well-nigh impossible, she notes.
Clovis focuses on helping her students develop academic English; her instruction emphasizes reading, writing, and grammar. "I know they'll learn speaking from their peers," she says. Her class is "a forum to make the mistakes" in usage and pronunciation that students might be unwilling to make in a regular classroom.
Nevertheless, Clovis believes LEP students should be part of a regular classroom from the beginning, because they must acquire the conversation skills they need to survive and learn to pick up teachers' cues. "We want everything to be as normal as possible" for them, she says. Although her students receive no native-language instruction, they do not have low self-esteem, Clovis says; in fact, they feel they have more to offer.
What Research Says
What light does research shed on these issues? A major longitudinal study conducted for the U.S. Department of Education tracked elementary classes of Spanish-speaking LEP students from 1984–85 to 1987–88. Known as the Ramirez study, after its principal researcher, this study compared the long-term benefits of English immersion, early-exit, and late-exit bilingual programs.
In the immersion programs, all content instruction was in English, with Spanish used only for clarification. Children in these programs were to be mainstreamed within two to three years. In the early-exit programs, 20–30 percent of instruction (usually reading) was in Spanish, and children were to be mainstreamed after 2nd grade. In the late-exit programs, at least 40 percent of instruction was in Spanish, and students stayed in the program through 6th grade.
The Ramirez study found that all three programs helped LEP students improve their skills as fast as, or faster than, students in the general population. The late-exit program, however, showed the most promising results. Students in the immersion and early-exit programs had comparable skill levels in math and language arts (when tested in English) after four years, but their rates of growth slowed as their grade level increased. Late-exit students, by contrast, showed acceleration in their rate of growth and appeared to be gaining on students in the general population.
According to researcher Virginia Collier of George Mason University, nearly all the research looking at results over at least four years, including the Ramirez study, shows that the more native-language instructional support LEP students receive (if combined with balanced English support), the higher they are able to achieve in English in each succeeding academic year, relative to matched groups being schooled solely in English. Students who do not receive native-language instruction "appear to do well in the early grades, but their performance fails to match that of the norm group and gains go down as they reach upper elementary and especially secondary schooling," Collier has written.
Porter disagrees with these findings, and she too cites research to support her contention that teaching LEP students in English is best. A longitudinal study of programs in the El Paso schools commissioned by the READ Institute looked at the lasting academic effects of bilingual and English-immersion programs. The study showed that students in the immersion program outperformed their peers in the bilingual program in all subjects through 7th grade, when the latter group finally caught up.
Two key elements contributed to the success of the El Paso immersion program, says Russell Gersten, a professor of education at the University of Oregon, who was one of the study's researchers. First, the program started building academic language early on, using literature to ensure that English exposure went beyond the conversational. (Gersten notes that there is "overwhelming support" in the field for using literature and content as the vehicles for learning English, rather than a grammar-based approach.) Second, the program kept a modest native-language component for four years (decreasing each year), to provide "a safe anchor" for students.
Strikingly, the Ramirez study supports Porter's claim that bilingual programs launch too few students into mainstream classes. The study found that, despite program objectives, three-fourths of the immersion students and over four-fifths of the early-exit students had not been mainstreamed, even after four years.
Two-Way Bilingual Programs
Recently, another option for LEP (and English-speaking) students, "two-way" bilingual programs, has become increasingly popular, says Deborah Short of the Center for Applied Linguistics. In two-way programs, half the students are native speakers of English; the other half speak another language, usually Spanish. Instruction is delivered in English half the time, and in Spanish the other half. The goal is for all students to become fully bilingual and biliterate. There are about 170 such programs around the United States, Short says.
Key Elementary School in Arlington, Va., offers a two-way bilingual program in English and Spanish, says Principal Katharine Panfil. The school uses either one bilingual teacher or two monolingual teachers to deliver instruction; both approaches work, Panfil says. ("Children actually pick up language better from their peers than from the teacher," she notes.) Year to year, they alternate the language in which each subject is taught: math, for example, is taught in English one year, in Spanish the next.
The benefits of the program are many, Panfil says. "The children in the class become highly fluent in two languages," and they have positive feelings about themselves and speakers of other languages. The program has "a huge waiting list," she adds. "We can't possibly meet the demand."
River Glen Elementary School in San Jose, Calif., offers a variation on the two-way concept, explains resource teacher Linda Luporini-Hakmi. Although two-thirds of the children are English speakers, instruction is predominantly in Spanish; all students learn to speak, read, and write in Spanish. Spanish-speaking students also receive ESL instruction, while English speakers study English language arts.
In this setting, the native Spanish speakers' self-esteem "shoots up," Luporini-Hakmi says. They use their smattering of English to translate for their English-speaking peers. The mixed class gives speakers of Spanish a need to use English, while speakers of English have more opportunity to practice Spanish, she says. Another benefit of the two-way approach is that it mixes English-and Spanish-speaking students and allows them to become friends.
Whatever approach educators take to teaching LEP students, the United States needs to value bilingualism more highly, experts agree. The arrival of LEP students at the schoolhouse door should not be seen as a problem, Short says. If educators plan properly, "these kids can be a resource." Knowing other languages and cultures can only benefit students, she says. "If we start to value bilingualism, we will make the United States a stronger country."
ESL Standards in Development
ESL Standards in Development
Spurred by concern that standard-setting efforts in the subject areas might harm language-minority students, the group Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) has begun to develop standards for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction.
TESOL fears that ESL students will be considered failures if they don't meet standards set for all students, says Else Hamayan of the Illinois Resource Center, who chairs TESOL's task force on ESL standards. At the same time, however, TESOL doesn't want language-minority students to receive a watered-down curriculum. “We're having to deal with some very tough issues,” Hamayan says.
The ESL standards will go beyond specifying what students should learn in ESL classes, says Fred Genesee, TESOL's president. They will also address the pedagogy ESL students need if they are to meet subject-area standards, he says, as well as ways to modify the curriculum for these students. In addition, the ESL standards will deal with issues such as teachers' professional development and the assessment of ESL students' achievement.
Assessment is a crucial issue, says Denise McKeon of the American Educational Research Association, a past chair of the ESL task force. McKeon believes educators should provide alternative ways for language-minority students to show what they know, so there won't be “a penalty for those who know content but can't express it in English.” LEP students may understand concepts such as the evaporation cycle or mitosis and meiosis but not test well in English, Genesee says. “If use of [English] is the sine qua non of assessment procedures, then these kids will lose out.”
Hamayan hopes the ESL standards will make all educators, including non-ESL teachers, more aware of the particular needs of language-minority students. She also hopes they will help ensure that ESL teaching is “up to par.”
Appropriate pedagogy is essential if ESL students are to meet the content standards in the subject areas, Genesee emphasizes. “The easy part is saying what you want,” he believes. “The hard part is figuring out how to do it.”
