What factors contribute to success in the classroom for English Language Learners?

As schools face increasing pressure to demonstrate student achievement and learning, accommodating English language learners in the classroom presents a greater challenge nationwide. English Language Learner (ELL) students make up nearly 10 percent of all public school students, a number that has continued to increase over the past decade. Previous education research has focused largely on how to develop school characteristics conducive to language learners, or how to best measure their performance.

Recent attention has shifted to the question of how important English proficiency is for fostering academic engagement. Regardless of school or teacher quality, are the beginning English language levels of ELL students a strong determinant of their academic engagement?

In a recent study, New York University researchers Ha Yeon Kim and Carola Suárez-Orozco analyze the role of various measures of academic engagement to see how English language proficiency may impact the school performance of adolescents who are recent immigrants.

Data for the research comes from the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation (LISA) Survey. Over 400 respondents were drawn from a sample of youth from Central America, China, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico, each attending one of more than fifty different schools in the Boston and San Francisco Metro areas. This study uses results from over 350 of those students who completed the last three years of the survey, which spanned a total of five years. Students, on average, had lived in the US for about four years by the third year of the survey.

The three measures of school engagement that were most interesting to the researchers were active school participation, relatedness to peers, teachers, and school, and cognitive engrossment. Academic performance across time was measured by grade point averages for each year of the study.

The researchers found that higher English language proficiency translated to higher student grades for each year of school – significant at the 99.9 percent level – and lower rates of decline in performance – significant at the 99 percent level. Looking at the different components of academic engagement, the data revealed that students with lower English language proficiency had significantly lower levels of both behavioral and relational engagement in school. This finding is both consistent with previous research and perhaps unsurprising.

Researchers also found an association between behavioral engagement, as defined by reported class participation and homework completion, and relational engagement, as defined by supportive relationships with teachers and other students. The presence of supportive relationships was measured with an eleven-item scale that asked students about whether there were peers and adults at school who provided emotional and tangible supports. ELL students with lower English language proficiency were more likely to have lower levels of relational engagement. Because of the correlation between behavioral engagement and academic performance, researchers determined that together these factors influence academic engagement.

When researchers examined this relationship more deeply through their statistical models, they found that the direct effects that lower proficiency seems to have on decreased behavioral engagement may be at least partially explained by low relational engagement. If students with low levels of English proficiency do not form positive supportive relationships with peers and teachers over time, there may be a decrease in activities such as turning in homework and participating in class.

Researchers also found that overall academic performance for ELL immigrants with low initial English proficiency declined over time. This work suggests that both lower behavioral engagement and relational engagement may account for this, and the possible connectedness between these characteristics means that schools may want to consider the structured social supports available for ELL students. Having supportive and positive relationships between students and teachers has the potential to increase behavioral engagement in ways that may be critical to succeeding academically.

As the population of school-age children in the United States continues to become more linguistically diverse, and as the proportion of ELL students increases, studies should continue to focus on the specific ways that low English language proficiency can hinder performance. Future research that accounts for the diversity of country of origin, culture, and native language could provide important insights. Continued focus on what interventions, whether academic or social in nature, are most effective will be helpful as administrators and decision makers are faced with the challenge of improving outcomes for ELL students.

 

Article Source:  The Language of Learning: The Academic Engagement of Newcomer Immigrant Youth. Kim, H. Y. and Suárez-Orozco, C. . Journal of Research on Adolescence, 25: 229–245. June, 2015

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