The approximately 1,200 students who attend the United Nations International School in New York City speak as many as 70 different languages (p. 64). Mais oui, you might say, of course! What else would you expect from an international school? But what if a school district has students who speak more than 70 different languages—75, to be exact—and what if they come from 99 different countries? Surely there's something international about that. Mais non, we'd reply. That's the Arlington, Virginia, public school system.
The fact is, many schools are increasingly looking “international” because diversity in the United States—both ethnic and linguistic—is growing at a clip. At a recent English Language Learners summit held in Washington, D.C., this past fall, Harold Hodgkinson, Director of the Center for Demographic Policy at the Institute for Educational Leadership, showed us the numbers, and they speak for themselves. A new wave of immigration is rolling in from such countries as Mexico, the Philippines, Korea, China, Taiwan, India, Vietnam, and Cuba. Also, the Hispanic birthrate in the United States has far outstripped the birthrates of either whites or blacks. Said Hodgkinson, “You can count your kindergarten class by the numbers. The future has already been born.”
What does all this mean for educators? That you'll most likely end up with English language learners from a variety of backgrounds in your classrooms. Yet recent statistics show that fewer than 13 percent of teachers in the United States have received any professional development designed to help them effectively teach this growing population of students (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002). Factor into this general lack of training the No Child Left Behind Act's emphasis on high-stakes testing and accountability, with its implications for English language learners. Factor in the enormous diversity in terms of language and proficiency within this population of learners. Finally, factor in the still-unsettled debate about how best to serve these students. What have you got? One complex situation.
This issue of Educational Leadership tackles the complexity of language learning from a number of perspectives. Our authors respond to the pressing needs of content teachers, who require clear strategies to effectively teach in classrooms that include increasing numbers of English language learners. The good news is that teachers do not need to master a whole new set of pedagogical tools to engage these students. But they do need to integrate various supports. For example, students master colloquial English more easily than academic English—the English that schools increasingly use in the upper grades and that high-stakes testing relies on. Several of our authors suggest ways in which teachers can incorporate academic language objectives into their daily lesson plans (see “Teacher Skills to Support English Language Learners,” p. 8; “The English They Need for the Test,” p. 45; and “The Third Language of Academic English,” p. 60).
The issue also takes a look at the program landscape—the various bilingual education, immersion, and sheltered English instruction programs currently used in schools. In “Skyrocketing Scores: An Urban Legend” (p. 37), Stephen Krashen's review of the research suggests that bilingual education is more effective than English-only programs in promoting English language learners' acquisition of literacy in English and their mastery of subject-matter knowledge. But the landscape is slippery at best: The various programs, according to Christine Rossell (“Teaching English Through English,” p. 32), tend to blur around the edges.
With so many challenges confronting educators, language can sometimes appear to be an obstacle rather than a social and academic asset. Just as language is not a liability, it's also not necessarily a luxury. In the United States, many people still see learning a foreign language as just that—a luxury—whereas the European Union holds multilingualism as a “basic necessity” for its citizens (see “Language Learning: A Worldwide Perspective,” p. 24).
Judy Abrams and Julia Ferguson (p. 66) recount how an English language learner reacted to this line of poetry from Nina Cassian: “Where the arm had been torn away a wing grew” (1976). The student exclaimed, “That's just like us learning English!” Even though there is pain and struggle in learning a new language, there is also hope. Language does operate as wings because it takes all of us to places where we would otherwise never go.
