Approximately 1 million students in the United States are immigrants who have attended schools in the country for less than three years. Close to 700,000 students are undocumented, and about 7 percent of all students in U.S. public schools live with at least one undocumented parent, according to researchers.
Immigrant students and their families require a variety of linguistic, educational, and social-emotional support so they can have the same shot at academic success as their peers born in the United States. Researchers and educators working closely with these student populations came together on Sept. 18 in a webinar to share insights on how schools can best support multilingual English learners and their families.
Two groups focused on helping education leaders use research to inform decisions—EdResearch for Action, an initiative of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, and Results for America—hosted the webinar for an audience of policy advocates, district leaders, and teachers.
“Students who are coming in, who are immigrant students or multilingual English-learner students, they’re encountering education policies, systems, and traditions that were just not built with them or their families in mind,” said Madeline Mavrogordato, an associate professor of K-12 educational administration and policy at Michigan State University.
Schools must ensure students can access quality education
Schools are legally required to offer English-language development services to students classified as English learners. But too often, researchers such as Mavrogordato have found that such services tend to be oriented toward compliance with the law rather than focused on students’ actual needs.
For example, schools may hire one English-as-a-second-language teacher to serve hundreds of students in a district and count that as meeting their federal obligation. Yet this teacher might have newcomer students with low levels of English proficiency working alongside U.S.-born students who have been receiving English-language development services for more than six years (often referred to as long-term English learners).
These long-term students may not even require English-language development support, but rather intensive reading or writing interventions better suited to their English proficiency level, Mavrogordato said.
Schools must work to assess students’ needs and then ensure they meet them, she said.
Some students could benefit from high-dosage tutoring and after-school or summer-school programming. These strategies can even help when it comes to ensuring that older English learners can access core academic content they need to graduate on time.
One of the best settings for multilingual English learners, which is backed by research, is a classroom where students can both learn English and core academic content.
In Michigan, districts have invested in co-teaching models in which one teacher brings content expertise and the other brings language development expertise, and they work together as equals in the classroom, Mavrogordato said.
The language development teacher is not meant to be an assistant working exclusively with English learners in a classroom. The teachers co-plan and co-teach. A science teacher, for example, plans lessons around the science objectives students need to learn, while the language development teacher reviews the content and determines how to support students in learning it based on where they are in their English-language development trajectory.
To make co-teaching work, district leaders must hire specialized staff and cultivate a school culture of collaboration, Mavrogordato said.
Schools must cultivate a welcoming, multilingual culture
At a time of growing anti-immigrant rhetoric in national politics, panelists in the September webinar also highlighted the importance of a welcoming, multilingual culture in schools—while acknowledging the challenges that come with building this culture.
To Mavrogordato, it’s not enough for schools to simply say they value all cultures and languages. Schools need to do things that reinforce this belief—stocking school libraries with books in multiple languages, hiring staff who speak students’ home languages, and having educators explain to families that developing home languages outside of school can help students acquire English.
“Often, there’s just this misnomer that parents have of, ‘I can’t support [my child with their English] and my language is not valuable,’” she said.
Educators should explain to families that developing speaking and reading skills in one language can transfer over when learning another. This can go a long way toward building a multilingual school culture.
In general, immigrant students and families benefit when educators work to dispel misconceptions and assumptions that members of various immigrant groups might hold, said Jamey Olney, a middle school English/language arts and English-language development teacher in California’s central valley.
This school year, Olney is teaching students from 11 countries who speak five different languages. She led an activity in which students showed peers their hometown using Google Maps. But one student from Afghanistan worried that his peers would think he was a terrorist.
Experts say educators need to get ahead of anti-immigrant rhetoric for the benefit of all students. To build a school culture that counteracts such rhetoric, educators must collaborate with each other and communicate with students and families, with such communication all rooted in empathy, Olney said.
Olney also advises that teachers with students who spent time in refugee camps and have been through other periods of interrupted learning need to make sure they understand how much of a student’s academic performance has to do with their English–language proficiency versus their limited prior education.
“Teaching students just how to do school while they’re acculturating to a new country, while they’re learning the language of a new country, and then having these diverse languages [in a classroom], it can be very challenging at the same time,” she said.
Often, collaboration with trusted local organizations such as refugee resettlement agencies, community centers, and others can help teachers working in multicultural classrooms.
