Northwest Regional Comprehensive Center

The George Washington University Center for Equity and Excellence in Education (GW-CEEE) published this Best Practices Study involving the application of a Delphi technique to obtain consensus from an expert panel about which accommodations identified in the GW-CEEE Descriptive Study were ELL-responsive. Members of the panel, relied on their professional judgment to vet a list of ELL-responsive accommodations and then mapped these accommodations to English language proficiency (ELP) levels and to selected student background variables.
Pages: 37

The National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality has released a collection of resources focusing on policy and practice relating to the preparation and certification of English language learner (ELL) teachers.

This policy database provides an overview of state-level policies related to ELL teacher certification and licensure currently in place across the country.

The Center on Education Policy recently published a report looking at how local educators perceive and act on state policies designed to help at-risk students and English language learners achieve the levels of proficiency needed to pass state high school exit examinations and graduate. The Center's findings are based on data from school observations and interviews with more than 50 school administrators, teachers, and other school staff in Arizona.

The Executive Summary of the Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth is now available. This project was funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and was conducted by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) and SRI International. The panel was appointed in 2002 by the U.S. Department of Education to conduct a review of the research on the literacy development of English language learners.

Among their findings are the following:

Focusing instruction on key components, such as phonemic awareness, decoding, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing, has clear benefits, but differences due to children's second-language proficiency make it important to adjust instruction to meet the needs of second-language learners.

Language-minority students who are literate in their first language are likely to be advantaged in the acquisition of English literacy.

In response to requests from states for assistance from the U.S. Department of Education on how to evaluate the technical quality of their ELP standards and assessments, the Assessment and Accountability Content Center recently produced a draft framework to provide states with information on suggested elements, possible considerations, and resources in order to help states evaluate and improve the quality of their current ELP standards and assessments.

The U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance developed a guide addressing the challenge of providing effective literacy instruction for English learners in the elementary grades. The guide offers five specific recommendations for district administrators and indicates the quality of the evidence that supports these recommendations.

The World-class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) Consortium at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) has created the English Language Proficiency (ELP) Standards Wizard. The wizard helps educators locate ELP standards of interest, by grade level, domain type (listening, reading, speaking, and writing) and standard type (social and instructional, language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies).

The George Washington University Center for Equity and Excellence in Education (GW-CEEE) developed this guide to support states in refining assessment policies so they are more responsive to the linguistic needs of English language learners (ELLs). It is designed to help state education agencies build policies that coherently address ELLs, and that clearly distinguish the accommodation of ELLs from the accommodation of students with disabilities. The aim of this Guide is to support states in refining assessment policies so they are more responsive to the linguistic needs of ELLs. It is designed to help state education agencies build policies that coherently address ELLs, and that clearly distinguish the accommodation of ELLs from the accommodation of students with disabilities.
Pages: 110

The Center on Instruction released a report presenting information about assessment, instructional interventions, and professional development with a particular focus on ELL students who have been identified with a language and/or learning disability or who are at risk for reading difficulties. The report also offers recommendations followed by discussion and empirical evidence for the types of instructional interventions that best serve ELLs who are at risk for reading difficulties who may or may not have an identified language and/or learning disability.