Sunday, November 18, 2007

Ana and Jorge [Sibling Edition]

I'm in [large corporate sandwich chain] getting dinner for the Masters team when P. walks in. He's a junior now, plays keeper on the school's team, tells me about a plan for two years of junior college before heading to a UC school.

P. immigrated with his family 4.5 years ago, in the middle of the seventh grade. He spent a year in our school's newcomer center -- the second half of seventh and the first half of eighth -- before entering my High Point B class. He flourished, and his newcomer teacher later fielded complaints from his 10th grade English teacher that he was "very low," with the lexile score of a ninth grader.

Buried lede: P.'s sister is my class this year, in High Point B.

Get it?

It took P. one year of newcomer work and background literacy (albeit poor) in his L1 to make it to HP B. It took his sister four and a half years of Open Court Reading and 45 minutes of ELD to reach the same academic performance level.

L1 literacy
+ newcomer center
= 1 year to reach third grade performance levels

Open Court
+ pull-out ELD
= 4.5 years to reach third grade performance levels

Yup. Design your instructional program accordingly.

2 Comments:

Blogger Liz Ditz said...

Hi Friend, I just ran across this and thought immediately of you. Probably you know about it already, but if not, may come in handy.

ColorĂ­n Colorado's mission is to find research-based and best-practice information about teaching reading to English language learners (ELLs) and use the power and reach of the Internet to make it widely available to parents, educators, and policymakers.

This month's newsletter.

10:56 AM  
Blogger Liz Ditz said...

posted too soon. This month's newsletter is all about Special Education in the ELL classroom.

10:58 AM  

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