The Weslaco Independent School District is located at the southern tip of Texas, only seven miles from the Mexican border, and 40 percent of its 18,000 students are English language learners.
With so many Weslaco students beginning school without any exposure to English, Superintendent Ruben Alejandro knew he had to do something dramatic to move the needle on achievement. To meet the needs of these students, he has put together a comprehensive plan for ELL instruction — the centerpiece of which is an early literacy program that provides access to an online library of digital books for the entire Weslaco community.
The initiative, called “Zero to Three Weslaco Reads,” is intended to develop early literacy skills among children before they even enter the school system — and to encourage students to continue reading as often as possible through elementary and middle school.
“We needed to do something to build English vocabulary and comprehension skills among our students as quickly as possible,” Alejandro said.
The challenges that Weslaco educators face aren’t unique to that district. Nation- wide, nearly four and a half million students participate in ELL programs, according to the United States Department of Education, and this number continues to rise.
Here are three key ways that technology is improving instruction for English language learners in Weslaco and many other K-12 districts around the nation.
Although basic conversational fluency typically occurs in one to two years, it often takes English language learners at least five years to catch up to native English speakers academically, said Jim Cummins, a University of Toronto professor and ELL expert.
That’s because academic language is more complex and less accessible than conversational language, he said: It contains many low-frequency words that students find only in classrooms and in printed texts, rather than in conversation with their peers.
Also, native English speakers continue to develop their proficiency with academic English as students who are learning English are trying to catch up. In essence, English language learners “have to run faster,” Cummins said, “because they’re trying to chase a moving target.”
Spending extra time developing English literacy skills during and outside school is essential to this process, said Cummins, who recommended that educators create more opportunities for what he calls “en- gaged literacy” — and technology can help by extending students’ learning beyond the allotted class time.
For instance, Weslaco’s partnership with myON allows parents and students to download digital books from myON’s library of more than 10,000 titles to any device for reading before, during or after school. About 70 percent of these titles are nonfiction, which helps students learn the vocabulary they’ll need to support academic discourse.
“We saw this as a great opportunity to help students build their English literacy,” Alejandro said. “We wanted to expose them to the vocabulary they would need to be successful in school.”
In Nashville, TN, nearly 14,000 students (about 15 percent of the total student population) are English language learners who speak more than 130 different languages, said Kevin Stacy, ELL director for Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. The district has outlined a $38 million plan to meet their instructional needs. As in Weslaco, the plan extends beyond students and out into the larger community — and technology plays a key role.
Metro Nashville holds frequent com- munity nights in which it hosts language and literacy programs for entire families, Stacy said. In addition, the district uses cloud-based software such as Imagine Learning and Achieve3000 to support English literacy instruction, so students can access the programs from home as well as school.
Both Nashville and Weslaco have dis- covered that parents of English language learners are taking advantage of online access to instructional tools to advance their own English skills as well.
“We found that parents were reading the myON books after their kids went to bed,” Alejandro said. “Seeing parents developing their language skills was a big plus for us because it helps reinforce the language for students at home.”
To support English language learners as they develop their language skills, it’s important for educators to scaffold their instruction across the curriculum, Cummins said.
Technology can help teachers provide this scaffolding with handy supports that are embedded in the content, such as native language assistance and pop-up definitions or visual demonstrations of key vocabulary terms.
About 10 percent of the digital books within myON are available in Spanish or dual-language versions, and all titles include a built-in dictionary and audio support that can be turned on or off. Students can hear the text read aloud as the words are highlighted on the screen, so they learn to associate the written words with the sounds they are hearing, Alejandro said.
Metro Nashville is using Imagine Learning for literacy instruction as part of a station rotation and during intervention time for struggling readers and English language learners, Stacy said. The program includes a number of supports to help ELLs learn vocabulary with the help of videos, pictures, glossaries and direct translations.
For instance, before students read leveled informational texts, key words are clarified and defined in the student’s first language — and this support is available for more than a dozen different languages.
“Students coming in with low English proficiency can get instruction on day 1,” Stacy said.
The district is using Achieve3000 as a resource to help older students acquire more advanced literacy skills. The pro- gram is available in four options: English immersion, Spanish immersion, dual language and English with native supports.
By hovering their cursor over a word or menu item, students can see the English or Spanish translation of the word — and as they read informational texts, a glossary on the side of the page provides definitions and pronunciations for difficult vocabulary terms.
“No matter what level of proficiency they are at, students can get on and practice their reading skills,” Stacy said.
Because English language learners come to school with very different English competencies, technology’s ability to quickly hone in on students’ skill levels and deliver precisely targeted instruction is a huge benefit — allowing teachers to meet each child’s needs more effectively. The Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District in south Texas is using technology to help personalize instruction for its K-8 students, which is having a “big impact” on English language learners in particular, said IT lab specialist Ita Pena.
Every elementary school in this 33,000-student district has federally funded computer labs that classes rotate through for 30 minutes of daily math or literacy instruction. In kindergarten through second grade, students use Waterford Early Learning software, Pena said. In grades 3–5, they use Pearson SuccessMaker, and in grades 6-8, they use iReady from Curriculum Associates.
All three programs contain built-in diagnostic tools to assess students’ abilities and an adaptive instructional engine that serves up lessons tailored to each child’s specific skill level. What’s more, the software’s data dashboards help teachers clearly understand each child’s progress, so they can intervene with one-on-one instruction or additional support as needed.
This highly prescriptive instruction is helping English language learners close the gaps to their peers more quickly, Pena said.
In Weslaco, the myON digital library has students take an initial literacy exam and surveys them about their interests — and then the platform generates a personalized list of recommended books for each child, helping students choose titles at their reading level that will appeal to them. myON also tracks students’ literacy growth and reading activity, helping educators group students by ability so they can differentiate their instruction appropriately.
In Nashville, the use of Imagine Learning and Achieve3000 also helps teachers target their instruction more effectively.
“I’m a huge proponent of using technology for ELL instruction,” Stacy said. “It’s adaptive, so it’s constantly assessing where each child is and what he or she needs. It’s also very engaging — and it helps teachers dial in their lessons for small-group instruction.”
Many of the leading companies that make software for learning world languages have targeted the ELL market with solutions intended to help U.S. students who are not native English speakers enhance their English skills.
Cincinnati Public Schools’ campuses, for example, are among the roughly 3,000 schools nationwide that are using Rosetta Stone’s online English language modules for ELL instruction. And in collaboration with teachers and ELL coordinators in Hartford (CT) Public Schools, Middlebury Interactive Languages has developed a series of supplemental online modules for English language learners in the middle grades.
In Cincinnati, about 6 percent of the district’s 33,000 students are English language learners, but the city has seen “exponential growth” in this number over the last few years, said English as a Second Language (ESL) and Foreign Language Manager Marie Kobayashi.
“Five years ago, we had probably half that population,” she said.
To meet the diverse needs of this student population, Ohio’s third-largest school district has teamed up with a neighboring district on a state-funded grant project to offer Rosetta Stone’s ELL and World Language programs to all students, staff and parents at no cost to these users.
“Our staff need to learn how to communicate with English language learners more effectively, and ELL families need opportunities to learn English so they can participate fully in their children’s education,” Kobayashi said.
Rosetta Stone’s English Foundations content includes guided lessons in a linear progression for students and others who are just beginning to learn English. Its English Advantage content, de- signed for more advanced instruction, is presented as a series of flexible modules that teachers can customize and assign as appropriate, said Tanya Mas, Rosetta Stone’s senior marketing manager for K-12 education.
Both products include instructional videos, and both use voice recognition technology to enable students to practice their speaking skills and receive online feedback.
“The biggest challenge that students have when they are learning a new language is the fear of speaking in front of others,” Mas said. “Our voice recognition technology allows students to practice their speaking in a comfortable environment that removes this fear.”
The content covers all four domains of language instruction, Kobayashi said: speaking, listening, reading and writing. It also goes deeper than what she called “survival English” to address the academic language that students must learn to be successful.
Because the content is cloud-based, it can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection — and there are apps for using the content on a smart phone or tablet as well.
Cincinnati is in the second year of using the content as a supplemental resource, and educators report their students are learning English more rapidly, Kobayashi said. What’s more, hundreds of staff members have accessed the world language content to forge stronger connections with their English language learners.
“In the past, our staff have felt helpless not being able to communicate with families in their own language,” she said. “Now, we see them trying to talk with families. That’s something you can’t measure, when you see a family come in and the look on their faces when someone welcomes them in their own language — when they know they’re in a place where the staff is doing everything they can to make their child feel welcome.”
Hartford Public Schools has the largest percentage of English language learners in Connecticut, with close to 20 percent of students learning English as a second language.
These 3,700-plus students come from very diverse backgrounds and speak more than 80 different languages, and they are often a very transient student population — which creates a significant challenge for the district, said Monica Quinones, director of ELL services.
“We wanted a solution that could help meet the needs of our most challenging ELLs with a curriculum that was delivered on grade level, and not watered down,” Quinones said. “We also wanted to take a blended-learning approach that would offer content in different modalities, while giving students the flexibility to work at their own pace.”
District leaders turned to MIL, which developed a series of supplemental online modules for ELLs in grades 4-8 with input from Hartford educators. Hartford middle schools have used these instructional resources during their intervention blocks and in self-contained ESL classes within the pilot schools.
The curriculum aligns with themes the students already are studying, such as habitats and environments, inventions, natural disasters and mythology, as well as the Common Core standards. Each unit includes project-based activities to build students’ reading, writing, speaking and listening skills.
“We wanted to ensure that students were learning by doing,” said Aline Germain Rutherford, MIL’s chief academic officer and a tenured linguistics professor at Middlebury College. “We have tried to scaffold the activities so they can adapt to students at different levels.” The modules focus on helping
students develop the academic English they’ll need to succeed in school. Research suggests that English language learners have the most success when they see their cultural identity affirmed and can relate their own experiences to the curriculum — and this idea is reflected in the content as well.
As students progress through the units of study, they are accompanied by a virtual companion who encourages them, suggests learning strategies and offers support. Students can choose their virtual companion from a range of ethnically diverse characters.
MIL has made its new middle school ELL curriculum available to school districts nationwide, and, with Hartford’s help, the company is now developing additional ELL content aimed at high school students.
An evaluation of Hartford’s use of these materials, conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, found a steady increase in the English language assessment scores of participating students. Just as importantly, the attendance of English language learners is up significantly in the pilot schools — suggesting students are more engaged.
“Students have appreciated the blended- learning lessons, which they can complete at their own pace,” Quinones said. “They have developed pride and confidence in their learning.”