Disturbing findings….

Nearly 30% of Los Angeles Unified School District students placed in English language learning classes in early primary grades were still in the program when they started high school, increasing their chances of dropping out, according to a new study released Wednesday…

The findings raise questions about the teaching in the district’s English language classes, whether students are staying in the program too long and what more educators should do for students who start school unable to speak English fluently.

“If you start LAUSD at kindergarten and are still in ELL classes at ninth grade, that’s too long,” said Wendy Chavira, assistant director of the policy institute. “There is something wrong with the curriculum if there are still a very large number of students being stuck in the system….”

The sooner students switch to regular classes the better, the new study showed. Students who moved out of English classes by third grade scored up to 40 points higher on standardized tests than those who stayed in the classes. If the students moved by fifth grade, they scored about 10 points higher than their peers.

Not stated explicitly, but important to note in order to comprehend the point, is that the ELL programs being evaluated are bilingual education programs (i.e., using the students’ L1 to mediate subject content while the students learn English).  This is the classic argument between proponents of bilingual education and immersion ed: immersion education proponents complain that bilingual education takes too long, and that students are not going to learn English by being taught in Spanish (or Vietnamese, or Chinese, etc.); whereas bilingual education proponents claim that immersion education simply doesn’t work well, and risks failing kids in large numbers.  As those who read this blog are well aware, I recognize good features on both sides of the debate, and there are as many success stories for each side as there are abysmal failures.  I’ve long supported a decentralization of ELL policy so that schools can decide on a local level which policy best suits their own learners, as student backgrounds can often greatly predispose the learner to more or less success in one approach vs. the other.

This report from the LAUSD provides pretty damning information points for those who would argue for scrapping bilingual education.  While the theory behind bilingual education is sound, and there are plenty of examples of thriving bilingual ed. systems to point to (one of the best in the country is about 10 miles away from me), it is practically legendary for misapplications and poor implementation — a point which, frankly, I am often annoyed by the more frothing-at-the-mouth-type supporters’ stubborn refusal to even acknowledge.  While I’m sure that one can find plenty of immersion supporters who are equally self-delusional in regards to the program’s short-comings, at least from my own perch in academia, I have yet to see one.  The important question to ask oneself, however, is why are bilingual ed. supporters so unwavering in their faith and support for the system?  The theory’s good, but really…  are we ever that sure of anything, especially a system that has such epic (although, admittedly sporadic) failures?

Though the study didn’t determine why students were staying in English language programs for so long, researchers say schools may avoid moving English learners into mainstream classes to keep test scores high.

That’s only part of the dark part of ELL policy making, I’m afraid.  ELL learners can also be a cash cow of sorts.  Federal funding for ELL is based upon head count, and thus to a less-that-perfectly-ethical administrator, there would be incentive to keep students enrolled in the ELL program, even if that entails sabotaging student success.  I would not dare to suggest that such nefarious motives are widespread throughout the system, but the LAUSD study does make one think…

postscript:  I wanted to let it go, but I just can’t.  Behold, the dumbest excuse since Flip Wilson’s “the devil made me do it”:

Mary Campbell, who is in charge of English language learning programs at L.A. Unified, said students must learn English as well as the grade-level material to move into mainstream classes. That often takes longer than learning the language, she said.

It would be risible, if it were not so serious to the educational development of so many children.  As I’ve pointed out countless times in this blog, bilingual education backers tend to completely ignore or feign ignorance of immersion schools, which parents often shell out big $$$ to send their kids to*, which, in a total immersion environment teach classrooms of kids both language and content simultaneously with high success rates.  Successful bilingual schools, as well, keep their kids at grade level while teaching the language.  Ms. Campbell is merely making transparently ridiculous excuses for sub-standard job performance.  Honestly, if you’re not managing to teach the subject matter required, either your students have problems much more profound than their English proficiency level, or (more likely!) you’re falling down on the job…

*but there are also public and low-cost experimental versions — so the disparity in success rates is not necessarily due to purely socio-economic differences.

Just wait.  This will be spun as horrible/mean/racist by various groups within the week, but the legal reasoning is very sound.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in favor of Arizona officials who had challenged lower federal court decisions that the state must provide adequate funding for its English-language learners.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote the majority opinion. In particular, Justice Alito said, the lower courts must revisit whether the federal district court made a mistake in seeking a statewide solution to the complaint that programs for ELLs in the Nogales school system were underfunded and inadequate.

“The record contains no factual findings or evidence that any school district other than Nogales failed (much less continues to fail) to provide equal educational opportunities to ELL students,” he wrote. “Nor have respondents explained how the [Equal Educational Opportunities Act] could justify a statewide injunction when the only violation claimed or proven was limited to a single district.”

The original issue was that English-language learners in Nogales, AZ (a border town wherein the majority of students come from Spanish-speaking homes) were being short-changed educationally.  One of the students’ mothers brought the issue to court under the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 (which maintains that states must provide “appropriate action” to overcome students’ language barriers) and won in 2000.  The Federal District Court found that the Nogales District schools in violation of the law because “the amount of funding the State allocated for the special needs ofELL students (ELL incremental funding) was arbitrary and not re-lated to the actual costs of ELL instruction in Nogales.”

So far, so good…

Where this case went wrong, needing appeal to the Supreme Court, was that the same District Court then later extended the ruling statewide, despite having had no evidence presented that the problem extended beyond the single school district.  In effect, then, the Supreme Court ruling was one to curtail judicial activism.  The District Court clearly exceeded their bounds in this case, and the Supremes called them on it…

Now, it could well be argued that there are other districts and schools in Arizona that suffered the same underfunding in ELL programs, but that is something that, at best, a court should be recommending an independent auditor to examine.  Instead, the court tried (successfully, initially) to legislate from the bench, and to determine allocation of educational funding itself — this is clearly a job that belongs to the legislative branch of government.

The school district (and some state officials) based their appeal as well on the fact that the facts on the ground had shifted considerably in the meanwhile, with the passage of  HB 2064 (which increased ELL funding in AZ) and No Child Left Behind statutes.  While one could probably still find individual cases of violation in any state, these are district (or individual school) problems, and clearly not indicative of education state-wide.

It’s amazing to me just how willing some are to play politics with such decisions.  While it’s laudable that the court wanted to help ELL students, still the state-wide injunction was legally indefensible.   Nevertheless, the Supreme Court split right down the middle, and the split in AZ politics has been worse. Arizona is in a strange place, politically, at the moment.  When Janet Napolitano left the role of governor to become the Homeland Security Chief in Pres. Obama’s new administration, Janice Brewer, a Republican, became the new governor amid a largely Democratic apparatus.  In one of the most striking shows of partisan rancor in the state, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard refused the request of the governor to file an brief in the case supporting the state, and instead filed a brief in favor of the parents who had originally sued the school district.

Fortunately, it seems that cooler heads have prevailed.  For now, we have the best of all possible worlds.  The kids in Nogales will receive more support, but such will not be conditioned on onerous expansion of educational expenses statewide without documented need…

Fewer proficient speakers of other languages than anyone else in Europe (except Britain), in fact…  I must confess that this came as a shock.  I worked with a few Hungarians in Taiwan, and they were all quite multilingual…

By 1990, it was no longer compulsory to learn Russian in Hungary. Students celebrated, no longer forced to learn the “language of oppression.” But fast-forward to 2009, and Hungary may be facing a foreign language gap — a 2004 study showed fewer Hungarians spoke second languages than almost any other country in Europe, except Britain. 

Hungarian academic Eva S. Balogh recounts the fall of the FL curriculum amongst the Magyar…

There seem to be some inherent warnings herein, that astute nations would want to take note of: namely that forcing language ed. breeds malcontent, but that completely removing all requirements also removes any incentive.  The other thing to note is that half-hearted teaching attempts are bound to fail — something that seems to elude many educational policy makers.

Man…  And I was all impressed that they all seem bilingual in English and Australian… (snicker)

[F.M. Downer’s] reply, in essence, was this: learning foreign languages is a good thing, but English is the language of the world. Foreign political and business leaders increasingly speak our language and we’re privileged because of that…

Three decades ago, 40% of year 12 students studied a foreign language. Now it’s about 13%, of whom less than 6% are studying Asian languages. Fewer than half of primary and secondary students study a foreign language.

A common lament across the English-speaking world.  The fact that our native language has been embraced as the lingua franca for world trade has allowed some of us to embrace the idea that we can afford to be lazy in the study of foreign tongues.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Governments across the world are recognizing that foreign language skills are going to be critical in the coming years, and are investing heavily in them.  English-speaking countries are no exception.  Australia, under their new, Chinese-fluent prime minister, is proposing to spend over $62 million (Aussie dollars, one assumes) to expand Asian language study.  Unfortunately, this is the common refrain from English-speaking governments.  They see the problem, and their only proposed solution is to throw money at it.  Not that I’m complaining (as, given my profession, I’m a likely future recipient of this sort of grant money), but money alone is not going to significantly impact public perceptions on foreign language learning.  We need to inject more urgency into FL teaching and learning in the K-12, as well as the tertiary educational systems.  We can achieve such by mandating FL coursework in the K-12 arena.  We should be sure to tighten it up to require a minimum of 4-6 total years of study in a single language as a prerequisite for high school graduation.  This would allow university-bound students to enter college already fairly conversant and literate in a language, and would ensure a usable (re. “employable”) level of language learning for students who do not pursue any higher education.  Choices would preferably be made available as early as 1st grade, which would allow for some switching along the way, as students refine what language they are personally most interested in.  This would allow some students to study a single language for a full 12 years, which, given any reasonable level of instructional quality, could pretty much ensure that those graduates were quite capable in the language.  If we are still using benchmark tests like NCLB, we could add a FL component to such.  I’m not holding my breath, though.  I’m predicting 20-30 more years of politicians whining about how we really should be studying more foreign languages, but not doing much about it beyond occasionally throwing $$$ at school systems and universities (which, mind you, I’ll gladly accept!) to offer one more learning center or language of instruction.

Latin rules!

The resurgence of a language once rejected as outdated and irrelevant is reflected across the country as Latin is embraced by a new generation of students like Xavier who seek to increase SAT scores or stand out from their friends, or simply harbor a fascination for the ancient language after reading Harry Potter’s Latin-based chanting spells…. The number of students taking the Advanced Placement test in Latin, meanwhile, has nearly doubled over the past 10 years, to 8,654 in 2007. While Spanish and French still dominate student schedules — and Chinese and Arabic are trendier choices — Latin has quietly flourished in many high-performing suburbs… where Latin’s virtues are sung by superintendents and principals who took it in their day.

A healthy trend! There are those who would mock study of a dead language as lacking any practical merit (most famously, there was a prominent Senator who attacked his colleagues’ granting of money for research into the syntactical structures of Latin), but it bears noting that studying Latin helps to develop English-speakers’ vocabulary, as well as providing a useful platform for learning other Romance languages. Ultimately, any human language is a treasure trove of information into the flexible limits and high levels of inventiveness in human communication.

The Yuma Sun stirs the waters on the old ESL education argument:

Those who teach English as a second language tend to feel a gradual approach is more effective. This involves teaching non-English speakers in their own language while helping them to learn English. They believe this approach helps keep the students up-to-date on their academic studies instead of throwing them into English-speaking classes where they may not understand the language.

But there are also proponents of another method called immersion. The goal is to have non-English speakers learn English in a relatively short period of time by concentrating on it. Instead of having students learn English over possibly years, the goal is to require use of English quickly. It is kind of a “sink or swim” approach which involves concentrated learning, and proponents say it works well.

Good points all.  The thing that most politicians and many academics seem strangely reluctant to consider, however, is the fact that people don’t all learn alike.  Children respond to different teaching methodologies according to individual personalities and aptitudes.  Thus, “one size fits all” style educational initiatives, such as title VII or California’s Prop. 227, by actually reducing the number of available options, are actually detrimental to some children.

Again, for the record, the theory of bilingual education — which due to its counterintuitive nature is often unfairly slandered by opponents — is that one can learn a foreign language better (in this case, English) is one is already literate in one’s native language.  Such has been shown repeatedly by empirical research.  The problem is that, once the bilingual ball got rolling, individual administrators, researchers, districts, etc., kept adding to the goals of bilingual programs, which began to change the nature of the programs themselves.  In theory, most bilingual programs in the U.S. are supposed to be transitional: with students staying abreast in content areas in their native language, but transitioning to all-English coursework within a roughly three-year framework.  However, many U.S. schools have taken to extending the term of bilingual support indefinitely.  Sometimes, this is with an arguably noble goal of fostering true biliteracy and biculturalism (although, the counter-argument is that the state has little/no incentive to be subsidizing defacto exercises in preserving extra-nationalism), but seemingly just as often, this is simply because the students are not ready for all-English coursework, and may never be so.  The success rates of bilingual programs depend heavily on demographic factors — family circumstances, poverty, permanence in a given area, etc. all effect academic performance.  Additionally, there are individual programs that have failed out-right, due to incompetence (or lack of understanding of pedagogical goals) of teachers and administrators.  Some teachers readily admit not using much if any English in the class because “the students don’t understand it.”  The fact that it is their very job to get the students to understand English doesn’t seem to have penetrated.  Some school systems have been called to task for using bilingual education as a virtual “dumping ground” for under-performing Latino students with no serious expectations for them to ever learn English — and by extension — to participate in any meaningful way in the larger society (e.g., such criticisms were leveled in the 1996 Latino boycott at Los Angeles’ 9th Street Elementary School).

How do we reconcile the two positions?  The key is to have a choice.  Despite what ardent English-only supporters would have you believe, there are some truly great bilingual programs out there, and despite the protests of some bilingual initiative supporters, bilingual ed. isn’t always the best option and there are some equally awesome immersion programs.   As I’ve pointed out before, I always like to remind those who claim that immersion “never works” that, in fact, people in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere pay enormous sums of money to private schools to immerse their children in a foreign language.  One of the most successful programs in my local area is a bilingual Spanish/English school where they have successfully blended immersion education with bilingual precepts to simultaneously teach Spanish to English-native children, and to teach literacy (and later English) to Spanish-natives.  Administrators and policy makers have to be able to make informed decisions based upon the unique needs of their individual student bodies and the availability of instructive resources.  I have a friend in Kansas who is a bilingual educator there.  Bilingual education is mandatory in her district, but such makes me shudder as it shouldn’t be.   From what I’ve gathered, they don’t really have the faculty to pull it off.  My friend is, in her own words, one of the “better Spanish speakers” amongst her school’s teachers, and to be frank, her Spanish, while conversant, isn’t that great.  This district would probably benefit more from being able to do targeted immersion, while having the teachers give occasional bilingual support to struggling students, rather than have teachers painfully struggle through scripted lesson plans which highlight their lack of fluency (my friend has admitted that many teachers struggle to really “explain” things to students or to respond to questions), but their hands are tied by local (or is it state?  anyone from Kansas care to opine?) ordinance.

The lack of sensible freedom in decision making has made for some ill-fitting programs.  Bilingual education is predicated on the idea of L1 literacy being the keystone to L2 achievement, but it is often foisted on older students who are already highly literate in their own language.  In these circumstances, the argument changes to “not holding back” the child’s subject learning while they learn English, but it is at this point that evidence seems to suggest that immersion works just as well as bilingual education — albeit for different learners.  There are certainly teenagers who immigrate to the U.S. and still benefit from bilingual education, but there are just as many who chafe at it, struggle to learn English, and view bilingual education as a defacto “ghettoizing” of the American educational system.  Clearly some choice in educational methods would be ideal.

Title stolen from the letters section of The Independent, wherein we find this pertinent question.

Money Quote:  In the 1960s, at my secondary school, I took French, German and Latin to A- level. At the end of seven years I came away fluent in none of them. If all that effort had been put into just one language, it most likely would have been French, and after seven years I would have been fluent in it.

The writer comes away calling for Britain to focus on a single foreign language of study.  I think the author of the letter has the right concerns, but follows them to an erroneous conclusion.  There is some natural “give and take” to the concept of offering multiple language options to students, as opposed to a monolithic language curriculum, as is the norm throughout much/most of the world.  The author correctly infers that it was the “hodge-podge” — a little bit of this, and a little bit of that — approach to language learning that allowed him to study 3 languages and master none of them.  The problem is that multiple language offerings often delude people into thinking that a little of several languages is better than a lot of a single language, and, if your goal is any sort of communicable fluency, that’s simply not the case.

Much of this confusion seems to be rooted in a complete ignorance of what actually constitutes fluency.  I had a friend in high school whose mom would always brag that he was “fluent” in 4 languages.  The truth was, he spoke 2 at a high level, and knew a smattering of 2 others.  Besides English, he had studied 2 years of high school Spanish, 1 semester of college Japanese, and had served as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan, and thus could actually speak Chinese quite well.  He tended to just role his eyes when his mom said stuff like that, because he knew well that he couldn’t actually converse beyond basic needs in Spanish or Japanese.  Many of us have initially jumped into languages with the erroneous idea that we would be able to speak within a year or two (or even less), only to find out that language learning is actually a complex and time-consuming affair.  I can remember when I was around 16, making out a roadmap of all the languages I wanted to study (there were about 30 listed) by the time I was 30 years old.  When I moved to France at age 19, I quickly discovered how much time it actually takes to learn a language.  The whole “becoming fluent via immersion in a couple of months” thing is so much malarky.  I had to immediately reassess my learning goals to correspond to the reality of how much time language study actually takes.  Now, at 30+, I speak 5 languages well, but I’ve studied 2 others which I can’t do much beyond basic needs, and I’ve got two others which I can just parrot useful tourist phrases.  I would never think to claim mastery of 9 languages.

All of this is to say that foreign language takes time, and if one takes a “sampler” approach to the courses listed in secondary (and tertiary) schools, one is unlikely to attain any meaningful level of language proficiency.  Most learners would be better served by investing the same amount of time into continuous study in a single foreign language.  However, I would completely disagree with the call for a national FL curriculum.  As I’ve stated here before, I believe that there giving children various options in language learning is an overall strength.  It allows learners to choose a language more compatible with their own likes and interests.  Additionally, it gives the nation a stronger and wider reserve of foreign language competence.  So keep the multiple offerings, but make clear to people that more is not necessarily better…

Wow!

There was something about the recent spectacle of Steve McClaren, the manager of the Dutch team FC Twente, being interviewed by a local TV channel which seemed to sum up our confused national relationship with foreign languages. Here was an Englishman who had accepted a relatively high-profile job in mainland Europe. But instead of attempting to learn to communicate in the local language, he had simply decided to speak English to the interviewer in a Dutch accent.

Wow!   I feel like I’ve wasted so much time.  Here I was trying to learn languages…  I didn’t know that simply speaking English with a foreign accent was a viable option…

Seriously, the article goes on to point out that foreign language study in the UK is in a serious bit of decline.  “The number of undergraduates studying German has plummeted to just 610 students, down from 2,288 a decade ago. French students have declined to 3,700, down from 5,655 in 1998.”

I would posit that some of this decline in enthusiasm for FL study is a reactionary to the evolving “global marketplace.”  While it is becoming obvious that foreign language abilities will be a much-needed skill in the marketplace of tomorrow (indeed, they already are!), the seeming inability to avoid foreign contact in professions and employments that haven’t traditionally necessitated such have actually had the effect of engendering some ill-will in many who would frankly be content to lead their entire lives within a 20 mile radius of where they were born.  I’ve had some discussions to this effect with students in Taiwan who wished nothing more than to purchase a tract of land and to farm.  The need for high school English conversation classes mystified them, and honestly, I’d have to agree with them.  While it’s becoming harder and harder to completely avoid any use of a foreign language, there are and will always be those for whom such is not necessary or scary to the point of being counter-productive (i.e., actually engenders hostility towards the target populace).

Additional problems arise immediately when the choice of language options is unreasonably constricted.  It could very well be that many UK youth would gladly study a language, but stifle at the choices of only French, Spanish, and/or German.  The article addresses this in calling for active programs in languages already spoken in the UK (which are already 2nd languages for many youth, and for which instructors could be found relatively easily).  It might be that today’s youth could find much more relevance in studying Urdu — probably spoken by many of their friends’ parents — than in studying German…

While politicians and pundits (and, yes, myself too) seem fond of stating that Americans should prioritize foreign language study, and make it seem like the only reason we all can’t speak Spanish, Chinese, and Pashto is laziness on our part, there are some real issues to be confronted when one seeks to introduce a new language into the curriculum.  One of the most apparent problems of adding Chinese or the like to every high school course listing is that courses cost money!!!  It takes up substancial financial resources to hire a teacher, use a room, and the like.  How much?  The Janesville, WI school board estimates:

Cost: One certified Chinese instructor. The average cost of a teacher’s salary and benefits is $54,500.

– Start an elementary program, one school at a time.

Cost: $10,580 per year for one grade level, or $63,500 per building once it’s in all grades, or $763,000 for all 12 elementary schools.

Follow the link for more analysis.

Exit note: cutting French or German was discussed but dropped.  Ultimately, that’s what I fear a lot of these schools will have to do.  There is only so much money typically set aside for foreign language study (amazingly enough, parents tend to want their kids to learn how to read and do math too!), and eventually, schools might have to re-prioritize which languages are “worth” teaching…

We should all keep it in mind that there are no shortcuts, quick fixes, no smart tricks in language studies, unlike some Japanese may have been led to believe. Token English classes in fifth and sixth grades definitely won’t do the trick. Second-language learning is a long, tedious process of memorizing words and idioms, poring over books, and grappling with a grammatical structure that has little resemblance to one’s own language. If you want to get better, you have to work harder and longer, end of story. If Japanese schools teach English as rigorously and systematically as they teach kanji, I have no doubt we would see results very quickly. (emphasis mine)

Read the article…  The writer expresses these thoughts with a clarity-of-focus that I’m not going to surpass.  At issue: the widespread (and certainly not restricted to Japan) belief that language learning is simply a matter of finding “the right trick,” as if “[w]hat they really wanted was a trick that no one else knew about, which would miraculously make them fluent in English overnight.” 

Not.Gonna.Happen….

There is no magic key.  Child learning has some verifiable effect on accent-attainment (but only in cases where study continued to adulthood), but is not the magic cure-all that some fervently believe it to be, and it certainly bears mentioning that accent and language fluency are NOT THE SAME THING.  I know childhood immigrants to the US who have flawless accents, but nonetheless highly stilted speech, as well as immigrants who speak flawless English, yet their accent is so thick one could cut it with a knife (think Kissinger).  People embrace crazy teaching methods, spend obscene amounts on computer software or electronic dictionaries, and even (in Korea) tongue surgery to supposedly improve their English.  Language learning is not a gimmick, however.  The only way to improve is to invest time and effort.  That’s it….  Time and effort…  This in turn can be effected for good or for bad by one’s feelings towards the language and the people who speak it (as if one is sufficiently predisposed towards the group, one will readily seek out opportunities to spend that time and effort). 

The author hits upon somthing important, though: “It’s more about quantity than quality. When I first came to the United States as a college student, I used to study eight hours a day outside my classes. I just read, read and read, every spare moment of the day, for two years.”   The best predictor of someone’s eventual language fluency (even in native language) is usually how much the person tends to readin that language.  As much as some don’t want to hear it, you can actually only get so far with speaking because, honestly, spoken language tends to be much more simplified than written language.  On an average day, adult speakers use fewer distinct words than would normally be found in a 5th-grade level novel.  Vocabulary, usage, and grammar can all be absorbed via reading.  This does not excuse the learner from speaking, of course — the mechanics and online processing skills of speaking require their own practice, but students who read lots will inevitably surpass those who don’t in terms of vocabulary acquisition and language control.