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Educational policies in Florida affect one of the United States' largest and most diverse student populations. A major consequence of the comprehensive restructuring of education for English language learners since 1990 has been a rapid move toward inclusion (mainstreaming) for these learners. The current study provides an overview of the historical background and philosophical bases of inclusion versus separation and presents recent developments affecting L2 education policy and practice in Florida. Data from interviews with 29 district‐level ESL administrators address their rationales for the models implemented in their districts and their beliefs about the effectiveness of each model. Administrators expressed both positive and negative sentiments regarding inclusion and separation. The article notes parallel trends toward inclusion and standardization in national and international contexts. Findings document how issues of equity for English language learners have been forced into the background and why the specialized nature of the ESL/EFL teaching profession is in jeopardy.

In this article we use a sociocultural framework to suggest task engagement as a viable construct in L2 learning research. Clarifying and specifying this construct has important implications for the analysis of conversational data, needed in light of claims for the causal relationship posited for certain kinds of conversational adjustments on L2 acquisition outcomes. Here we examine L2 learner data to identify task engagement as it emerges, unfolds in dialogic activity, and becomes associated with the transformation of task, self, and group. The data to be analyzed come from two pairs of L2 learners involved in jigsaw tasks, one pair using Swahili, the other Spanish; all are native speakers of English. Our concern with task engagement is motivated by methodological and theoretical issues entailed in the study of L2 learning in the interactionist perspective. We argue that a sociocultural approach offers an alternative to that perspective, from the standpoint of method and theory, resting as it does on quite a different set of underlying assumptions, to be described below. The research questions are the following. (1) How might task engagement be defined within a sociocultural framework?(2) What is the effect of task engagement on data analysis

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The third-grade classroom experiences of Mary, a child from Liberia with a limited educational and English language background, are viewed in relation to the beliefs that her teacher held about language, acculturation, natural cognitive processes, and cooperative learning. In the case of teaching linguistic minority children in mainstream classrooms, it is argued that a set of powerful ideas from a sociocultural perspective may have more influence on teachers than those deriving from an input-output model. Such ideas rest on a view of the development of language and cognition in context, as opposed to a modular view of the development of linguistic structure.IN MANY SCHOOL DISTRICTS THROUGHout the U S , there is a decreasing number of linguistic minority students whose needs to learn English are being addressed in exclusively pull-out English as a second language (ESL) environments, as inclusion models are being implemented in many K-12 settings.' In Florida, for example, a 1990 lawsuit filed on behalf of linguistic minority community groups against the Florida Department of Education resulted in a Consent Decree mandating that all teachers serving limited English proficient (LEP) students should use English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) strategies to adapt content instruction for those students (LULAC vs. Florida Board of Education, 1990). Subsequently, a massive staff-development effort has been undertaken in the state, giving teachers 60 hours of ESOL strategy training, and inclusion models are, in many cases, replacing the ESL pullout model.* It is assumed, albeit wrongly in many cases (Harper, 1996), that regular teachers are now actually using these strategies for the LEP students in their programs and are ~ ~ The Modern LanguagcJburnal, 81, i (1997) a1997 The Modern L o n e Jrmrnal 0026-7902/97/28-49 @.50/0making their courses comprehensible to these students. It is further assumed that students are also learning English through course content, a belief following from the strong promotion of &ashen's (1985) input model for second language acquisition (SLA) in Florida. The gap between classroom practice and the findings of research about second language (L2) acquisition is of immediate concern, both in district-level staff development and in teacher preparation programs to prepare a wider range of public school instructors to teach learners whose first language is not English. Compo