Moving Towards an Education of Dual Languages: Teaching Language to English Language Learners

How are Schools Adapting to the Overgrowing Population of English Language Learners?

Do you ever get that feeling when you're are sitting in class and feel like the teacher is speaking a completely different language? English language learners throughout the United States feel this way every school day, not having the ability to even read this sentence. This is resulting in an achievement gap between ELL students and native speaker students. Without the understanding of language, ELL students fall behind in all four subjects of learning. To make matters worse, teachers are now worried for ELL students with the implementation of the Common Core adopted by 45 states. Pat Wingert writes in his article "The Common Core is Tough on Kids Who are Still Learning English" that with the Common Core will "stress [students'] critical thinking, deeper learning, and more sophisticated vocabularies, [having]the aim of making American students more competitive with their peers from around the world".

The Atlantic displays the need for students to learn English and the lack of teachers available to perform the job. 

Throughout the United States, there are currently 5.3 million students in kindergarten through the twelfth grade who are English language learners(Wingert 2014). The number of English learners has "grown by about 50 percent of all American students. That percentage is growing in most states and is expected to rise to 40 percent of the U.S kindergarten through grade 12 population by 2030"(Wingert 2014). With this in mind, teachers are accommodating their students in attempt to lead students towards language proficiency. With this new alignment in mind, schools are offering different ways to assist their ELL children while preparing them for the standardized testing.

With the implementation of the Common Core, teachers are finding Bilingual Education as a possible solution.
Found From Anderson's Article "The Costs of English- Only Education"

Within Pat Wingert's article "When English Proficiency Isn't Enough", he examines an elementary school's transition into the new curriculum.  The goal of the Laurel school is to incorporate new standards with the original curriculum that has worked for their 60% placed into the English Learners curriculum. For example, a incorporates the four domains for teaching ELL students of listening, speaking, reading and writing into her new standard based lesson for non-fiction.  She gives students time to discuss their readings in small and whole class discussions which led to their essay responding to the article. Although this takes longer, it gives the teacher a clear idea that ELL students are understanding the topic and analyzing what they read, using higher vocabulary and reasoning.
California schools offer another way to instruct ELL students through Bilingual Education. Melinda Anderson writes in her article "The Costs of English-Only Education" that Bilingual education will cease the gap between native English and ELL students in both the classroom and standardized testing. Its been proven to help students perform higher than ESL students, showing that two-language instruction has benefits of higher literacy skills (Anderson 2015). This program offers learning styles that help students "see themselves in the school" with the incorporation of their native language as a way to help them excel in all subjects(Anderson 2015). At the same time, it establishes communication for the students in a positive language environment. The downfall for this program however, is that there are a lack of bilingual teachers in the U.S.

With the rise of the Common Core and increase in ELL students, educators are left with the present dilemma at hand: how can we teach the new standards while maintaining ELL student success? Only educators can tackle the current language barrier at hands, as each student deserves the same quality education.