Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons^™

English Proficiency / Fluent English Proficient Students, Susan R. Adams

Susan Adams

K-12 students whose first language is not English are identified upon enrollment in U.S. schools through a home language survey and are immediately assessed to determine whether English as a second language (ESL) services are required. Students who do not pass this initial screening assessment are classified as English Language Learners (ELLs), or as limited English proficiency (LEP) students, and are identified to receive school-provided English language development (ELD) and accommodations. Students who pass the initial screener or who demonstrate English proficiency two years in a row on state-mandated annual assessments are deemed fluent or fully English proficient (FEP) students …

Success With Ell's: Writing In The Esl Classroom: Confessions Of A Guilty Teacher, Susan R. Adams

Susan Adams

"Success with ELLs" suggests effective approaches to teaching English language learners in ways that can be of benefit to all students in mainstream middle and high school English classes.

The More She Longs For Home, The Farther Away It Appears: A Paradox Of Nostalgia In A Fulani Immigrant Girl’S Life, Kaoru Miyazawa

Kaoru Miyazawa

Nostalgia, which is derived from the Greek words nos (returning home) and algia (pain), refers to longing for the loss of the familiar (Kaplan, 1987). The loss of our connection to the familiar is a painful experience as such loss is connected to a fundamental loss, the loss of ourselves. By losing a connection to familiar people, objects, and places that continue to remain the same from the past to the future, we also lose the continuity within ourselves. And this discontinuity of our past, present, and future selves creates anxiety within us (Milligan, 2003). The painful experience that accompanies …

How Should Colleges Ask About Students’ Sexual Orientation?, Tammy R. Johnson

Tammy R. Johnson

In recent years, there has been increasing interest among admission officers regarding the identification of LGBT students on campus. Reliable statistics about LGBT populations on campuses across the country are all but non-existent, and many progressive institutions are aiming to remedy that problem. It is a growing concern: How can schools provide outreach and support (and increase retention rates) for LGBT students if this at-risk population continues to be invisible? Likewise, LGBT campus groups are almost uniformly in favor of collecting reliable data that will document the presence of LGBT students on campus, which would help these groups advocate more …

Rethinking Contemporary Sub-Saharan African School Knowledge: Restoring The Indigenous African Cultures, Edward Shizha

Edward Shizha

Sub-Saharan African countries have been politically independent since the late 1950s but they have not done much to free their school curricular from remnants of colonial education. The current postcolonial African school curriculum ignores the voices, indigenous knowledges (IKs) and cultures of African indigenous populations. Students, in Africa, experience barriers in learning because of the dissonance between the school curriculum and their cultural experiences. What the schools teach, and how teachers disseminate and transmit knowledge does not reflect the cultural symbolic conventions (collaborative and participatory learning) and representations (knowledge constructs, symbols and cultural beliefs) of the students’ cultural experiences. This …

Project-Based Chinese As A Foreign Language Instruction: A Teacher Research Approach, Gulbahar Beckett

Gulbahar Beckett