T.ELL.E-gram

This month's highlights

Featured Articles

The English language learners (ELLs) in your classroom may represent diverse languages and cultures from around the world. The more you can learn about their backgrounds and experiences, the better equipped you will be to meet their academic needs. Learning about Your Students' Backgrounds offers valuable tips for getting to know your students' languages, cultures, values, families, and home environments.

Research supports the importance of summer reading as a means to academic achievement. The basic premise is common sense — children who read more get better at reading and therefore comprehend more of what they read. Summer Reading at the Library! has some great ideas for getting students excited about reading during those long summer days. You'll also find links to lots of other online resources on summer reading!

Research and Reports

Many immigrant students enter U.S. schools having had little or no prior schooling in their home countries. These children must master grade-level content at the same time that they are learning to speak, read, and write in English. Effective Programs for English Language Learners (ELL) with Interrupted Formal Education* discusses effective strategies for teaching English Language Learners who have not had the benefit of formal education or who have had interrupted formal education. The article includes an overview of recent research in this area, as well as recommended Asian Pacific American resources for classroom instruction.

For insight into the experience of immigrants to the U.S. from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, see Southeast Asian Americans as English Language Learners.* In this article, Phitsamay Uy, Board Chair of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, discusses the unique challenges that these students face in American schools and offers suggestions for ways in which we can provide them the support they need in order to be successful.

Left in the Margins: Asian American Students & the No Child Left Behind Act* examines the experience of Asian American English language learners in this era of high-stakes testing and school accountability. Despite the stereotype of Asian Americans as model students who always excel in school, many are in fact struggling and even dropping out of school because they do not have access to appropriate support services. This article, published by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, includes up-to-date data on Asian ethnic populations in the U.S., as well as detailed recommendations for improving schooling for Asian American English language learners.

Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap, by Alexander, Entwisle, and Olson, examines the long-term effect of differences in summer learning, which tend to be associated with family socioeconomic level. The researchers found that achievement during the first nine years of school is related primarily to school-year learning; however, the achievement gap between high-SES and low-SES students at 9th grade is more closely associated with differences in out-of-school summer learning during the elementary school years.

In the Classroom

Bright Ideas that Work: How to Support Refugee Students in the ELL Classroom

Many ELL teachers may work with refugee students in the classroom, particularly in a region of the country where large refugee communities are settling. This Bright Ideas article explores the unique challenges that both refugee students and their teachers face, as well as a number of suggestions of ways to address those challenges and a list of useful resources.

From the Classroom: Working with Chinese ELLs

In this article, Xiao-lin Yin-Croft (our From the Heart interviewee for May) offers some insight on Chinese immigrant communities in the U.S. and how cultural influences shape Chinese students' experiences in the classroom. She also describes some particular nuances that her students struggle with when learning English, including details of pronunciation, grammar, and language usage, and offers some ideas for outreach to Chinese parents.

New from Colorín Colorado! Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Resources

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month! Celebrate with the resources on our new APA page, and our APA booklist, and don't miss the great selection of books for upper elementary, middle, and high school readers on the list.

Frequently Asked Questions

When immigrant or refugee children arrive at school for the first time, they can easily feel frightened and overwhelmed. Some schools have responded to this problem by establishing newcomer programs. If you're interested in finding out more about these programs and their effectiveness, you may wish to explore:

• What are "newcomer" programs?
  What are their pros and cons?

Find the answers to these and many other Frequently Asked Questions about teaching ELLs on Colorín Colorado.

From the Heart
Building Bridges: An Interview with a Chinese Educator of ELLs

Originally from China, Xiao-lin Yin-Croft learned English as an adult and now helps young Chinese students in the U.S. bridge the cultural and language gap that they face from an early age. In this interview, Xiao-lin shares her experiences coming of age as a student in China's Cultural Revolution, and describes the strategies she uses to help her students develop the language skills they need to succeed in the U.S.

Beyond the Classroom

Book of the Month

Baseball Saved Us
By Ken Mochizuki

During World War II, Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps. Isolated and bored, baseball became a life and soul-saving pastime which successfully brought very different people together. Darkly hued illustrations evoke the difficulty of the time, based on the author's family story.

Education Week: Schools Brace for Bhutanese Wave

This article from Education Week* describes efforts of educators across the country who are preparing for a wave of Bhutanese refugees to enter their schools.

* Click here to register for free access to two Education Week articles each week.

Student Essay: Fulfilling a Family's Dream

This essay was written by a former ELL student during her participation in programs offered by College Summit, an organization dedicated to strengthening a college-going culture for all students, and for supporting low-income students' college application process. The author describes her experiences as a young girl having to care for her younger brother each day while her mother worked in the afternoon, and remembers an incident that nearly broke apart her family.

She observes that she was looking up words in a dictionary and otherwise perfecting her English while other 8-year-olds rode their bikes and went to the park. "I felt I was an adult before I was a kid," she writes.

In a Word: Transition

This month's glossary term is commonly used to refer to the change from secondary school to postsecondary programs, work, and independent living typical of young adults. It is also used to describe other periods of major change such as from early childhood to school or from more specialized to mainstreamed settings.

About the Colorín Colorado T·ELL·E-GRAM and ColorinColorado.org

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