Features

Program helps new immigrants learn English

By Rachel Searles, Special to the Daily Planet
Friday October 12, 2001

Marcelle Ching’s fourth and fifth graders were forming a line according to birthdays, from January to December. One student wanted to place a reporter in the lineup. 

“When is your happy birthday?” he asked in heavily accented English. 

This was an exercise in counting and repeating months of the year in English, something Ms. Ching’s students were practicing for only the third time since their classes at Malcolm X Magnet School started a week earlier. They are students of a Newcomer class, part of a year-long pilot program in English-immersion. It is for immigrant students in the Berkeley Unified School District who speak little to no English. 

“They are all very active learners,” said Ching of her 18 students. About two-thirds are Spanish-speaking, while others come from Germany, Bulgaria, Yemen, Korea and Brazil.  

The teachers and administrators hope that this new program will be a more effective way to teach the district’s new immigrant students. Prior to this, most newcomers were placed in classes with native English-speaking classmates and a teacher with Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE) certification.  

SDAIE-certified teachers are trained to make the regular curriculum accessible to English learners by using special teaching methods and strategies. The English learners were also pulled out of class twice a week for 45-minute lessons with an itinerant English Language Development (ELD) instructor.  

The newly-arrived Spanish-speaking students were often enrolled in Spanish-English dual-immersion programs – a program where the students begin speaking mostly Spanish in kindergarten and over five years speak and learn mostly in English. Many students entered the program at higher grade levels, where more advanced English is used. Some of these students, according to Newcomer instructor Kathleen King, would just sit through the English instruction and wait for the Spanish sections.  

“There’s not a lot of ELD taught in bilingual classes,” said King, who has also worked as a dual-immersion teacher. 

Plans to introduce a Newcomer program, which is a recommendation in the district’s Bilingual Master Plan, had been discussed for years in the instructional services department of the school district. However, it was not until this summer that concrete action was taken. Two classes at the Malcolm X school site were approved, one for second-third graders and one for fourth-fifth graders. Participation in the program is an option for all immigrant students regardless of where they live, and children who live outside the Malcolm X zone receive transportation. 

According to State and Federal Projects Manager Carla Basom, who took over the Newcomer Program in late July shortly after she joined the staff, the decision to pilot the program was partly financial, as it is more cost efficient to pay two Newcomer teachers rather than four itinerant ELD teachers. It will also provide immigrant students with stronger English skills than the pull-out method, which she acknowledged as the “least effective” way to teach ELD.  

Spanish-speaking students still have a choice between the Newcomer program and the dual-immersion program, where, because part of the instruction is in their native language, they will learn subject content more efficiently.  

“Obviously (in the Newcomer classes) they don’t have the vocabulary for a lot of the concepts, so you spend a lot of time teaching the vocabulary in English,” said Basom. Which program they choose depends on many factors, including how quickly the child can learn English and the child’s native language literacy. 

The district hopes that giving students this choice will provide programs that work for all immigrant students. “We’re trying to deliver the best instruction program to kids that we can,” said Basom. 

After a week and a half of classes, the students in Ms. Ching’s class were already showing signs of progress. “This is only the third time we’ve gone over the months of the year, and they’ve grasped it really quickly,” she remarked after the students successfully organized themselves by birthday.  

An important part of the class work for the day was learning how to follow directions: draw a circle, underline, make an X. “I’m acclimating the students to follow the directions they’re going to see in their workbooks,” explained Ching. The curriculum of the Newcomer classes is meant to gear students toward fitting into regular classrooms with a SDAIE-certified instructor. 

In the transitional Newcomer program, students should be prepared to join an SDAIE class by the end of one year. ELD instructors will return a student sooner if the student tests proficient and is deemed ready. A study of newcomer programs by Monica Friedlander of the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education at George Washington University, says students should stay in the program no longer than one year “in order to minimize the period of isolation from a mainstream program.” 

Newcomer students at Malcolm X are encouraged to interact with students from the other classes, and the ELD instructors coordinate activities with teachers of mainstream classes. “I want them to get a sense that they’re part of a greater group of kids,” said King, who teaches the second and third grade Newcomers. This interaction also gives them a chance to practice their new English with native peers.  

The district is also preparing the mainstream teachers for the Newcomer students. Using funds from a Title VII grant, the district will employ trainers to give  

these teachers SDAIE training on methods for teaching classes of mixed native and non-native English speakers. This involves modifying speech, using visuals and other media, and putting lessons into a context that is understandable for the non-native students.  

“It’s hard teaching in California nowadays,” said Basom. Under California law, all teachers must be certified to teach English learners by the year 2005. Basom said that being able to effectively teach English learners is “very complex and really requires ongoing training.”  

ELD instructors hope that the SDAIE training will help mainstream teachers deal with the problems of their immigrant students, which in the past were often left for the itinerant teachers to handle. King acknowledged the trouble with teaching a group of students with varying levels of English. “It’s very difficult to address all the students’ needs well.”