English Language Learners in U.S. Schools: An Overview of Research Findings

The Quality of Writing Tasks and Students’ Use of Academic Language in Spanish

“…This question is of interest above and beyond the social and economic benefits of bilingualism and biliteracy, as there is evidence that many L1 literacy skills are advantageous to literacy development in English (Dressler & Kamil, 2006;Genesee, Lindholm-Leary, Saunders, & Christian, 2005). The underlying premise of Cummins's (1979) seminal and oft-cited developmental interdependence hypothesis, broadly interpreted, holds that L1 competencies will transfer to support the same types of cognitively demanding tasks in the target language once a threshold of target language proficiency has been achieved.…”

The Effects of Two Curriculum Interventions on the Academic Achievement of English Language Learners

“…There are strong proponents of the dual language method (Alanís & Rodriguez, 2008;Genesee et al, 2005) as well as the English only method (Echevarria, Short, & Powers, 2006;Rossell, 2005). As a result, school districts may employ more than one instructional program.…”

“…Learning conversational English is not enough for ELLs to be successful in mainstream classrooms (Collier, 1995;Echevarria et al, 2006;Genesee et al, 2005;Rossell, 2005). August and Shanahan (2006) found that ELLs and their native English speaking peers had equal literacy development in the areas of decoding and spelling, but when measuring text level skills, such as reading and writing, ELLs fall behind.…”

“…Genesee et al advocate dual language immersion programs as the way for ELLs to succeed in mainstream schools. ELLs who have a strong native language become successful bilinguals who deploy bilingual strategies to figure out cognates between the two languages, use judicious translation, and use prior knowledge in the native language to figure out unfamiliar material in English (Genesee et al, 2005). Tong, Irby, LaraAlecio, and Mathes (2008) conducted a three year randomized study on the effectiveness of DL programs and found that with high quality instruction that included phonemic awareness, letter-sound correspondence, word recognition, spelling, fluency, and comprehension, ELLs shows great gains in English.…”

“…Conger found that after the first year 90% of students in the DL programs were still classified as ELL while only 66% of students in traditional ESL programs were still classified as ELL; and four years later 52% of DL students were classified as ELL while only 23% in the ESL programs were ELL (2010, p. 1112). The percentage after four years is significant because proponents of DL programs argue that it takes 4-6 years to learn English proficiently in these programs (Collier, 1995;Genesee et al, 2005;Lindholm-Leary, 200l;Thomas & Collier, 1997). Conger (2010) also found that students who tended to be older, poorer, diagnosed with disabilities, and who frequently transferred schools were less likely to become proficient in English.…”