Immigrant Children Learn Academic Classes Alongside English

In most places in the United States where English is the language of the majority; the immigrants, especially their children have the opportunity to learn the language of their new home in the schools where they are enrolled.
Children of immigrants in the United States have the opportunity to learn English in schools where they are enrolled.

In New Haven, Connecticut the public schools have the English Language Learners program run by Dr. Jose Ortiz. Ortiz is in charge of the program in order to help students, the majority from Latin America, to be able to do better in school and in their lives. He has stated that he supports the program against a system whose testing requirements and mandates are putting immigrant kids in and out of New Haven public schools.

In the past, more than two thousand seven hundred English Language Learners (ELL) of New Haven were taken out of their academic classes to learn English separately from the content of the required classes. When Dr. Ortiz assumed charge of the ESL (English as a Second Language) and bilingual programs for the system, he introduced “sheltered content”. The children under that system stay in class and teachers who are doubly certified as bilingual teachers in math, science, social studies and English come in. The language development and content learning of the students are advanced simultaneously.

So far the results of the program show that two schools in the public school system with the highest concentration of ELL children have increased percentages in reading at proficiency level by the measure of state tests. The single digits rose to nearly forty percent.

One of the concerns of the mentioned program is that talented dually certified teachers are hard to find and are expensive to hire. Ortiz said that teachers who are fluent and certified in Spanish and trigonometry are the absolute key to sustaining the right momentum of the program yet the resources are diminishing and not increasing.

School officials see that immigrant children especially the South American students could pass math and science without problems, but then they would not pass tests in a language they are not proficient in.

Another concern regarding the program is that the state law only allows children to be in the ELL program for only thirty months whether they are proficient in the language or not. The mayor of the city Mayor John DeStefano asked why thirty months is not enough and Ortiz replied that research suggest that it takes at least five years for children to become fully proficient in the academic language.

The immigrant students in New Haven need to learn English in order to do good in school and to be able to adjust in their new environment. If the state will support the program and allow a longer period of language learning for the students, the expected results may be even better than the recent ones.