Language Training Used for All Students, Not Just Immigrants

This is part of a series on immigration that is running across 12 Patch sites.

In a school district like Scotts Valley’s, one might assume there’s no need for a special language program—not for English, anyway.

Even so, the Scotts Valley Unified School District has a program for students from immigrant families—Guided Language Acquisition Design (GLAD)—and it’s committed to preparing the extra hours for teachers to be certified with the language program, district officials say.

Not only does the program help students who are considered English Language Development (ELD) students, but it’s apparently also shown to be highly effective in communicating classroom content to all students.

“I use GLAD strategies with my entire class, and I completely believe it has improved everyone’s learning this year,” said Cathy Weist, Vine Hill Elementary School’s GLAD-trained teacher.

Kathy Dunton, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction, said the methods covered in the training are appropriate for communicating to all students.

“The bulk of the training is making sure that the classroom teachers are highly confident and highly effective in their teaching,” she said.

The training will also ensure that classroom teachers at the elementary, middle and high school levels will be able to better communicate classroom content—such as subject vocabulary—with the students who need help with their English.

ELD students are those who list their primary language to be something other than English. Those students who are identified as being English Learners receive an overall score, as well as a performance level of one to five in the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Typically, students who start school without knowing English are expected to make one level of progress each year overall and in each skill domain. Some may be at the first level overall but perform higher in individual skills.

Students in levels one through three receive specialized, direct instruction outside of the classroom to learn English. Those in levels four and five receive supplemental support through their classroom teachers.

Dunton says many of Scotts Valley’s ELD students may be from immigrant families but are born in the U.S. Some of the families may have one parent who speaks English, while the other does not. Or, in some cases, both are bilingual, and a language other than English is spoken at home.

Most of Scotts Valley’s ELD students are found in the elementary schools, Vine Hill or Brook Knoll. Scotts Valley Middle School and Scotts Valley High School have much fewer numbers. Daniel Denton, vice principal at the high school, said he estimates that there aren’t more than 15 ELD students at the high school.

At Vine Hill Elementary School, Kelly Daher has taught ELD for 15 years and sees 20 students a day, three days a week, for specialized English instruction.

“I believe that it does make a difference that an English language learner receives direct explicit instruction in English,” she said. “There is a fifth-grade student that came from Peru last year. She didn't speak any English when she first came. She is doing very well now. She learns the grammar and correctly uses it. She speaks, reads and writes in English well.”  

Weist said she has a student in her classroom whose mother is of a Spanish-speaking background. With ELD, the student is completely at grade level and doing well in all areas, she said.

The ELD program also does not affect high school graduation in the Scotts Valley Unified School District, as it may in other districts.

“Based on their parents, and a lot of things, some of the students can come in on a low level and move up much more quickly than others,” Dunton said. “They want to also be at par with their classroom performance. We want them to be proficient in English and get them there as quickly as possible.”

Right now, the Scotts Valley Unified School District is arranging to perform its annual language assessments at the schools. The assessments will show how many students have progressed in the past year and how many have been reclassified—that is, progressed past the fifth level and “graduated” from the ELD program.

This article was produced through a collaboration of PatchU and the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at San Jose State University. PatchU is a Patch Media initiative to build strong relationships with colleges and universities across the country. The mission of PatchU is to connect students and faculty to opportunities at Patch. 

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