English learners are the fastest growing segment of the public
school population in the United States. The National Education
Association (NEA) predicts that by 2025 one in four
students in the U.S. will be from homes where a language other
than English is spoken. California has already reached this
threshold. Moreover, California public schools educate over
one-third of the nation’s English Learners ( Source: California
Legislative Analyst’s Office report, 2007-08.)
Critical Need in California
Of California’s 6.3 million public school students in 2008-2009,
1.5 million (24%) were considered English learners (EL) and an
additional 19 percent were former English Learners, meaning that
43 percent of the state’s school children come from non-English
speaking backgrounds. Although the vast majority of ELs in the
state are Spanish-speaking (85%), more than 50 languages are
represented in the state’s EL population. (Source: California Department of
Education Dataquest)
In a 2005 survey of over 5,000 California teachers, Patricia
Gandara (former faculty in the School, now at UCLA) and Julie
Maxwell-Jolly, (former director of the School’s Center for
Applied Policy in Education), found that most of the teachers
they surveyed felt ill-prepared to meet the needs of English
learners in their classrooms.
George Yonge, education professor emeritus, is translating
Afrikaans texts from the faculty of education at the University
of Pretoria in South Africa. Yonge says that the depth and
substance of the work done in the faculty has led to his decision
to spend part of his retirement years by making these texts
accessible to a wider audience. Read more at the
University of Pretoria’s Web site.
Standardized testing that seeks to measure students’ English
language proficiency has improved significantly nationwide since
2001, when Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act,
according to “English Language Proficiency Assessment in the
Nation: Current Status and Future Practice,” a report edited by
Professor Jamal Abedi in November 2007. Read the Executive
Summary. Abedi’s 196-page report is the first to summarize
the progress of the four effort s and to report on the current
testing landscape nationwide.
Jamal Abedi, professor of education, is an expert in the “how
to” of K-12 educational testing. He studies ways to make
assessments more accessible to all students including English
language learners and students with disabilities by examining
variables that interfere with students’ ability to properly
show what they know and are able to do..
