Breaking Language Barriers

On every student's desk in Roseann Harrison's third-grade classroom lays a blank thesaurus, which the students use to add higher-level vocabulary to their language.

"If they understand what ‘happy’ is, then they'll understand what ‘ecstatic’ is," Harrison said. "Through the use of their personal thesaurus, students can enrich their academic vocabulary. Teachers and students are held accountable as they incorporate this language into their speech and writing."

Harrison teaches at Nevada Elementary School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. More than 40 percent of the students at her school are Standard English Learners, meaning their home language is of a non-standard English variety. A large number of these students have infused English vocabulary with the grammatical structures of their Mexican-American heritage.

"Many of these children are thought of as deficient or learning disabled," Harrison said, "when in fact, this is their home language. It's an authentic language that's rule-governed."

Her school is one of 81 schools in the district that participates in the Academic English Mastery Program (AEMP), in which teachers receive training and resources to infuse academic English instruction into the classroom without segregating these students.

Program Director Noma LeMoine designed the program based on a 1988 study that determined language variation to be one of the principal barriers for student achievement. The AEMP focuses on four groups of Standard English Learners: African-American, Hawaiian-American, American Indian and Mexican-American.

"They have the lowest achievement scores and that's, in part, because we don't acknowledge the language variation issues," LeMoine said. "We do not address them systemically, but rather treat them through a deficit paradigm: 'These are just kids who don't know how to talk properly. They didn't learn correctly. They're lazy. They don't care.' Instead, teachers should be provided the methodologies to address the language acquisition needs of these students."

Learning from history

When a school becomes part of the AEMP, at least 75 percent of the teachers must agree to participate in ongoing training and professional development to improve achievement for Standard English Learners. In addition to receiving instructional materials, teachers learn the histories of these populations, which help them understand the students culturally, linguistically and experientially.

Teachers learn, for example, that 85 percent of enslaved Africans were primarily taken from Western Africa where Niger-Congo languages were spoken. They didn't speak English, LeMoine said, and they were denied access to schools for more than 200 years. They had to learn English words and integrate them into their African grammatical structures, creating a new language. With this background, LeMoine said, teachers can examine the grammatical structure of Niger-Congo languages and draw correlations to their students' speech.

Tammi Berman, another third-grade teacher at Nevada Elementary, said that the training helps change teachers' mindsets about language acquisition.