I have a question and I hope readers can help me find an answer to it:
Do you know of any studies that compare the effectiveness of integrating Intermediate ELLs in high school mainstream classes as opposed to having separate ELL-only classes? I know it’s a tricky question, because it is also connected to the question of how well mainstream teachers are prepared to differentiate. It also seems to me that another important difference might be the impact on Long Term ELLs (The Best Resources On Supporting Long-Term English Language Learners) as opposed to students who come to the U.S. as high schoolers.
I am having a devil of a time finding answers. Any ideas?
From a parent’s perspective: Like many things about public education: I think the answers will come from having a good grasp of the family and community backgrounds of the children. Some of this information ought to come out of what studies of what you call “long term ELLS” above. But are the ELL studies comprehensive enough to take long term social environments into account?
So which students, and which teachers are we talking about?
At the upper extreme: Since I personally reside in upper middle class “high tech” good schools environments, my children and I have interacted with a number of highly educated parents who speak a language other than English at home. One particular case comes to mind. Friends from India were utterly shocked to discover how strenuously their son’s kindergarten teacher objected to the fact that they had sent their son to school without much knowledge of English. In India, their own parents had spoken Tamil, the nannies had spoken another language, and their parents, governmental civil service workers, had conducted their professional lives in Hindi, while moving all over India, dealing with numerous new languages in marketplaces and other local interactions. They, themselves, had been dropped into English language schools as children without any exposure to the language at all. All this was not seen as a problem. I tried to explain that here in the US, teachers make a very big deal out of learning new languages. I suggested that her kid should come over and play with my kids after kindergarten every day for a few weeks, and I would concentrate on pointing out English vocabulary. This worked, no problems. He also got ELL, but this may have been irrelevant or even harmful. His parents, at any rate soon objected to what they saw as the stigma of being pulled out of class, which they believed interfered with his ability to keep up with his classmates. They tried to force the school not to pull him out for ELL, and when that failed, they moved to a different school district.
In a good teacher, student mainstreaming, extreme example: One of my daughters had a friend in class that was from Denmark, whose family was here on a two year academic sabbatical. That girl’s Danish teachers had provided her with math and history workbooks, as they feared that the American educational system was so backwards that the poor girl would fall behind. However, like me, the parents had open-enrolled their child in a Boulder, Colorado elementary school that had a very strong math/science program. The teacher, looked at the math workbook with interest, and actually made copies of some of the pages. As a way of demonstrating what it meant to be in a new language environment, and also the universality of mathematical notation, she taught the entire class for two weeks out of the Danish language textbook, forcing all of the children to infer from the pictures what the math problems must be all about, and using the Danish child as the class leader in this project when students and teacher got confused. Needless to say, this daily experience must have also helped the Danish child with her own language struggles in other class subjects, although there were also lots of pull-outs at this school, and this child may have had ELL too. Pull outs at this school were no big deal because everyone was in some sort of special group and the teachers were used to the idea of students moving in and out of the classroom throughout the day. Whatever she got for ELL probably seemed very successful, even if it had nothing to do with anything.
At the other extreme, I believe we need to take into account the fact that many children (and actually not just ELL students) live in a language restricted environment. Parents work long hours, kids are home alone. Way way back, when I was in elementary school, I was allowed to teach a fellow student to read in English. The teacher did not want to bother with this, as she felt the child would “go back to wherever he came from” (presumably Mexico). If you project forward by over decades, I think this might be a multi-generational situation in which children have not been well equipped in any language. I once tutored a middle school student in this situation. Her mother worked long hours to get housing in a good school neighborhood. However this meant that the girl was home alone with her brother for long hours after school and in the summer. The boy had at least commandeered the family TV set. The girl spent her time in the bedroom, chatting on the phone with a friend in Spanish, or maybe Spanglish. At the school, the girl had been labeled as both ELL and Special Ed. I was recruited by the teacher to help because the girl was insisting that she be allowed to read the same book as my daughter was reading. This was a Tony Hillerman novel. Initially, i thought this would simply require some background in Navajo culture. (In contrast, our family had just taken a recent vacation to the Navajo nation, and while there, purchased a rug woven by a girl about the same age as mine). It turned out that the girl could read, however she had little understanding of the meanings of many of the nouns or verbs in the book. She wasn’t stupid, she was tremendously ignorant. It was like her head was a vacuum. Once pried open, she was a voracious learner. We poured through various books, especially ones with pictures, and discussed what was there. We also worked on math. I am a great believer in the concept that math education ought to require baking chocolate chip cookies from scratch and other hands on activities, along the lines of Montessori. There was nothing about her ELL or Special Ed experiences that seemed to have figured out what her actual problem was. This would mess up the statistics you are looking for, in my opinion.
So what are you supposed to do now, to answer your question? My advice is: Be skeptical. .