Minnesota has joined the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment Consortium, bringing the total of states adopting the consortium’s English-language-proficiency test to 23 plus the District of Columbia. Minnesota follows Missouri in making the decision to join.

Minnesota will continue to use its current English-proficiency test to assess English-language learners for the 2010-11 school year, said Jesse Markow, WIDA’s manager of communications, in an e-mail to me. But at the start of the 2011-12 school year, the state will implement WIDA’s English-proficiency standards and assessment, ACCESS for ELLs.

Once upon a time, the consortium had only a handful of member states. But it grew as it moved beyond simply providing English-proficiency standards and an assessment that states could use to comply with provisions for ELLs under the No Child Left Behind Act. It now is a one-stop-shopping place for ELLs and assessments with a screening test for identifying ELLs, professional development tools, and research projects about assessing ELLs.

So far, though, none of the states with the largest numbers of ELLs in the country, such as Arizona, California, New York, and Texas, have joined WIDA. An education official for New York recently told me it isn’t cost-effective for states with large numbers of ELLs to join WIDA because the consortium charges the same per-pupil cost for all states, no matter how many ELLs they have. It’s more affordable for New York to have its own English-proficiency test, he said.

Christine Dufour, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Education, told me in a phone interview yesterday that Minnesota education officials estimate that using the WIDA test is going to cost more than using the state’s current test for English-language proficiency. But she said that they valued “additional features” of WIDA, such as the screening tool and professional development support.

Source: Mary Ann Zehr

English-language learners in secondary school need a separate, dedicated class for English-language development in addition to a class to learn the regular English-language-arts standards for their grade level, argue two experts on such students in a guide published by the California Department of Education for improving schooling for ELLs. The researchers frown on the common practice of school districts to stop giving English-language learners in middle or high school a set-aside class or dedicated time within another class for formal language instruction once the students have reached the high-intermediate or advanced levels of English proficiency. “This is precisely when skilled language instruction is critical to help propel them out of intermediate limbo into the advanced levels of English proficiency,” they write.

Susana Dutro, the founding partner and CEO of E.L. Achieve, an education consulting organization, and Kate Kinsella, a faculty member for the Center for Teacher Efficacy at San Francisco State University, describe how schools can design courses for ELLs in grades 6-12 in a chapter in the book, Improving Education for English Learners: Research-Based Approaches, which I’ve already previewed on this blog. A kind soul has sent me a copy and I’ve had a chance to skim it.

So much of the research I see about instruction for ELLs focuses on elementary students, not secondary students, so I carefully read the chapter on research-based approaches for teaching adolescent ELLs. Dutro and Kinsella describe what a dedicated English-language-development course looks like. Most importantly, it is aligned to English-language-development standards that take into consideration how students move from one English-proficiency level to another, they say.

The ELD course teaches students according to their current English-proficiency level. It emphasizes listening and speaking through carefully planned interactions, according to Dutro and Kinsella. It integrates reading and writing into authentic experiences. It lays out a scope and sequence for grammatical forms. It teaches vocabulary.

A reading-intervention class is no substitute for an ELD class, Dutro and Kinsella say. The ELD class is important particularly because ELLs need the chance to practice oral language, they argue.

In regular secondary English classes, Kinsella explained to me in an e-mail message sent yesterday, “The focus on literacy analysis is often devoid of focused language development that would help students capably engage in literate discourse.”

Typically, schools transition students out of a dedicated ELD class when the reach intermediate proficiency in English, she observed. “I could easily fill every work day with assisting a secondary school that is desperately seeking assistance with an evidence-based approach to accelerating the English achievement and literacy of students who have plateaued at intermediate proficiency.”

This guide has much to offer from some of the most accomplished ELL researchers in the country. The chapter on secondary ELLs seemed particular useful in my view since so many high schools seem at a loss about how to create a comprehensive program for their ELLs.

Source: Mary Ann Zehr

How federal and state laws can support relevant and engaging schooling for Native Americans will be one of the topics of a Web chat scheduled today for 3 p.m., Eastern time.

Keith O. Moore, who just started a new job as the director of the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Education, will be a guest for the chat. So will Leslie Harper, who directs an Ojibwe language-immersion school in Minnesota. Moore is a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. Harper is a member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe.

Anyone will be able to submit questions for the chat shortly before it starts. A transcript will be available afterward. I’ll be the moderator.

Source: Mary Ann Zehr

Velázquez Press in El Monte, Calif., has published a Spanish and English glossary for math terms that could be a good resource for Spanish speakers either in a bilingual or sheltered English math classroom.

Called the Velázquez Spanish and English Glossary for the Mathematics Classroom, the reference book contains more than 10,000 entries for math words or phrases that the editors have decided are typically used in math classes for grades 4 to 12. I have observed a few English-language learners at the high school level who keep a general bilingual dictionary close at hand to help them decipher what’s going on in their classes. It seems that it might be easier to find a relevant translation for words used in math class in a specialized glossary than a general dictionary.

I see that Velázquez Press has also published specialized Spanish and English glossaries for social studies and science. Each glossary costs $12.95.

Source: Mary Ann Zehr

The American Youth Policy Forum has published a policy brief about what state policymakers learned during a May “fact-finding trip” to Austin, Texas, about the education of English-language learners. The trip was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and focused on a project, also funded by the Gates Foundation, to revamp instruction for ELLs at the secondary level in Austin. (I’ll mention here as well that Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week, has received some grants from the Gates Foundation.)

The project centers on the implementation of a professional development model developed by Aída Walqui of WestEd called Quality Teaching for English Learners, or QTEL, in the Austin Independent School District. I’ve been very interested in QTEL and have been wanting to take a fact-finding trip to Austin myself to see how the approach to coaching content teachers on how to work with ELLs has been working. It’s a whole-school reform model based on the premise that all teachers in a school need to ensure that ELLs have access to rigorous academic content and that principals and other administrators need to be on board with the effort as well, according to the policy brief. You can find a description of QTEL by WestEd here.

Berkeley Policy Associates has embarked on a five-year random assignment study of QTEL being underwritten by the U.S. Department of Education, so we’re likely to hear more about the effectiveness of the educational approach in the next few years.

The participants of the fact-finding trip focused on the use of QTEL at two Austin high schools, International High School and Lanier High School. Since implementation of the approach, test scores have risen for all students at these schools, with the greatest gains for ELLs, the policy brief reports. Teachers at the schools report that QTEL has given them a common instructional language and strategies they didn’t learn in pre-service training, according to the brief.

The visit also focused on what the Texas Education Agency does to support the academic achievement of ELLs. The agency has formed a working group on ELLs with representatives of various departments who meet regularly and aim to “elevate the priority of ELL education within TEA,” the policy brief says.

The May trip included state education agency staff, state board of education members, or policy advisers for governors from Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Virginia.

Source: Mary Ann Zehr