Elements of effective bilingual literacy instruction: impacting student growth
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Date
2023
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University of Delaware
Abstract
As the number of immigrant students continues to grow nationwide, so does the population in Lindenwold Public Schools. As an elementary school in the district, School Five is no exception to the experience of the ELL student boom. With the population growing, at the various grade levels, it is essential that instructional practices meet the needs of our students. Students currently enrolled at School Five as English Language Learners in kindergarten through second grades, participate in the Bilingual Instructional Program or in the English as a Second Language Instructional Program. The Bilingual Program, as it is currently designed, provides little structure for the teachers, which in turn, greatly affects student learning. Without the adequate Bilingual Literacy Instructional Framework and components for effective instruction, ELLs will consistently lag academically. Yearly benchmarks in English literacy demonstrated that ELLs grossly under-performed during the 2018-2019 school year, with 84% of the kindergarten ELL students not meeting or approaching the end of year reading level expectations, 61% of first grade ELL students were not meeting or approaching the end of year reading level expectations, and 92% of second grade ELL students were not meeting or approaching the end of year reading level expectations. These numbers are staggering and show that the academic trajectory of ELLs in the primary grades is dismal, without addressing their academic needs. ☐ In response to ELL achievement data presented previously, I executed three improvement strategies in order to accomplish the goals of creating and implementing the Bilingual Literacy Instructional Framework, facilitating professional development of instructional staff to address both, academic and linguistic, needs of our ELLs enrolled in kindergarten through second grades, and forming of a parental focus group to address the parental concerns about language acquisition and learning at Lindenwold School Five. Implementation of these strategies demonstrated favorable results. The walkthrough data that I collected revealed that teachers demonstrated growth and improvement in the implementation of the Bilingual Literacy Instructional Framework from October to June. Data collected from the pre/post training surveys of staff as well as the data collected from informal observations demonstrated growth in the understanding and implementation of strategies on which staff members received training. The parent focus groups were effective in gathering parents’ perceptions of ELL programming at School Five. I identified among the transcripts four themes related to needs for support, bilingual program enrollment, language learning and loss, and Spanish language usage and support. ☐ A result that needs further study was the student growth in reading as measured by our school assessments. Students performed significantly better at the end of the school year than they had ever before. Although a causal relationship cannot be established, it is worthwhile to pursue this further.
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Keywords
Bilingual Literacy Instruction, Bilingual parent focus group, English Language Learners, Teacher professional development