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Championing the Success of English Learners

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bilingual

A new EL Resource Hub and much, much more!

May 26, 2020 by Claudia Vizcarra

Our Latest Newsletter

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Now Available: New Resource Hub Gathers Tools to Bring California’s English Learner Roadmap to Life 

As California leads the way to protect our families and uphold our values in response to COVID-19, it is more important than ever for us to come together and share resources to ensure all of our students, particularly Dual Language Learners and English learners, thrive. We’re proud to partner with leading advocates to advance the California English Learner Roadmap’s vision of honoring equity, ensuring meaningful access and embracing the diversity that makes our state great. In collaboration with six other organizations committed to advancing equity in education, we’ve launched the English Learner Roadmap Resource Hub to translate vision to action across our state. Together, we will harness the power of language to prepare our students to participate in a global, diverse and multilingual world, thus ensuring a thriving future for California.

Filed Under: Blog, Home-Latest, Newsletters Tagged With: bilingual, Communities of Practice, COVID-19, English Learner Roadmap, English Learner Support, English Learners

Spanish and Korean Dual Immersion Instruction Through Distance Learning: Anaheim Elementary School District

May 18, 2020 by Claudia Vizcarra

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While most districts are struggling to address the needs of English Learners through distance learning, Anaheim Elementary School District (AESD) has kept their focus on bilingualism, biliteracy and English Learners while planning for distance learning during school closures. 

AESD is one of the largest elementary school districts in California, serving approximately 16,000 preschool through 6th grade students across 23 schools in a dynamic, standards-based learning community. The student population is approximately 52% English learners, 18% Reclassified-Fluent English Proficient (R-FEP), 2% Initially-Fluent English Proficient (I-FEP), and 26% English only students. Of their English learners, 94% have a home language of Spanish. Additionally, 86% of the students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, 11% GATE, 11% receive special education services, and 9% are homeless.

With the leadership from the superintendent, support from the Board of Education and the community, AESD has either a Spanish or Korean Dual Language Immersion (DLI) Program at all 23 elementary schools, leading to comprehensive DLI programs from TK through 6th grade.  They also offer Accelerated Language Academy or Structured English Immersion and Mainstream English Immersion for their English Learners not enrolled in DLI programs. 

Ensuring Technology Access for All Students 

Prior to COVID-19, AESD was already a 1:1 digital district with one chromebook per family. Upon announcement of school closures, parents received an email or phone call (via parent link) to pick up their chromebook with a charger at their school sites. This happened over the course of 3 days. For the families who didn't pick one up, the school site individually called each parent. They had already established a partnership/grant with T-Mobile for wireless internet hotspots allowing free access to the internet. To expand access, AESD identified companies such as Comcast and Spectrum who are offering free internet service for three months.

Delivering Content in English, Spanish and Korean 

From the very first notification of possible school closure, the district pulled together all the curriculum specialists including their digital learning specialist to create a plan for teachers to use for distance learning.  Initially until their spring break, the week of April 13th, teachers did not introduce new materials or concepts. After spring break, teachers have begun to introduce new concepts from their curriculum. A continuity plan per grade level was developed in English, Spanish (will be linked to plans in our box) and Korean (also linked to plans in box) that was structured around the hours in a minimum daily schedule with another hour for daily planning time. 

The district also took steps to ensure that units of study and materials from the core curriculum are available in English, Spanish, and Korean. All teachers received professional development and a template for their grade level, allowing them to plug in units of study from their core curriculum (commercially developed) in English and Spanish. To develop the curriculum in Korean and ensure alignment with the same themes, the district has a partnership with professors from CSU Long Beach. Korean interpreters also read stories and taped content lessons for all subject matters. The DLI teachers maintain the same language of delivery consistent with their prior classroom instruction.

In addition to the core curriculum in language arts and math, the district also developed:

  • Daily 30-minute ELD lessons delivered using Rosetta Stone Foundations (different from the commercial Rosetta Stone for world language lessons).  
  • Short lessons on how to address the social emotional needs of students, integrated into the language arts instruction. These lessons, developed by the two district social emotional specialists, came from the understanding that students are worried and often stressed about their family situation and the news about the coronavirus.
  • Weekly 30-minute music lessons in the languages of the programs, produced by music teachers.
  • Videos of short PE activities for the students to do at home. 

Accessing the Content

The district webpage has icon links in all three languages that take students directly to the online platforms needed. The core curriculum is available digitally and in all three languages for teachers to upload and send via google classroom, which is the main portal for students to access the lessons.  

While not perfect, it is very significant that distance learning is not English-only instruction and the language, academic, and social emotional needs of English learners are at the core of their developmental work for equity in distance learning. 

As Magaly Rodriquez, the district’s Dual Language Immersion Curriculum Specialist said, “These are the highlights of our process, and it is ongoing minute to minute.  All departments and everyone in the district incorporate English learners in all of our efforts.  It is a mission we take to heart. It is our reality.”

Filed Under: Blog, Home-Latest Tagged With: Anaheim Elementary School District, bilingual, Bilingualism, Biliterate, COVID-19, Distance Learning, Korean Dual Language Immersion, Spanish Dual Language Immersion

Ed Week: Who’s Earning the Seal of Biliteracy? In One State, It’s Mostly English-Learners

July 10, 2019 by Claudia Vizcarra

By Corey Mitchell on July 9, 2019 

California's statewide push to honor students who master a second language is growing—and English-language learners are benefiting the most.

In the class of 2018, 63 percent of graduates who earned the "seal of biliteracy" spoke a language other than English when they began school, a new report from Californians Together, an English-learner research and advocacy group, found. Those youths, identified in the report as heritage-language students, include current English-learners, former English-learners reclassified as English proficient, and students identified as bilingual when they began school.

Read more

 

Filed Under: Home-Latest, Media Coverage Tagged With: bilingual, Biliteracy, English Learners, multilingual, Seal of Biliteracy

Our July News: Who Receives the Seal of Biliteracy?

July 8, 2019 by Claudia Vizcarra

Click here to see our July 2019 newsletter

Filed Under: Home-Latest, Newsletters Tagged With: bilingual, Bilingualism, Biliteracy, English Learner Roadmap, Multilingualism, Seal of Biliteracy, Teacher Shortage

ACTION ALERT: Ask the Governor to Sign AB 2514 (Thurmond) – Growing Bilingual Programs

September 6, 2018 by Claudia Vizcarra

We want to thank each of you for sending letters a few weeks ago to get AB 2514 (Thurmond) out of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Our voices were heard and the bill passed out of committee unanimously with a bipartisan vote. Your help is now needed to convince Governor Brown to sign AB 2514 (Thurmond) Dual Language Grant Programs into law.

AB 2514 (Thurmond) proposes to provide up to $300,000 in grant funding to eligible schools, county offices of education and consortia so they can either expand or initiate new dual language immersion or developmental bilingual programs. What’s exciting about this bill is that grant funding would also be given to eligible schools, county offices of education, or consortia interested in establishing bilingual programs for their dual language learners in preschools!

Although no funding was allocated in this year’s budget, the signing of AB 2514 by the Governor will allow us to pursue funding next year in the 2019-2020 state budget. The bill is very clear in stating that its provisions will not be implemented if no funding is appropriated.

Letters must be sent to Governor Brown to convince him that the public and members of the education community seek his support to keep the promise of Proposition 58 by promoting and supporting dual language immersion and developmental bilingual programs.

CLICK HERE TO EMAIL THE GOVERNOR

Filed Under: Action Alerts, Home-Latest Tagged With: bilingual, Biliteracy, dual language

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