TPE 1: Engaging and Supporting All Students in Learning 

CELDT

What is CELDT?

The purpose of the California English Language Development Test (CELDT) is to identify English learners (ELs; students whose primary language at home is not English including Els with disabilities) in grades K-12, determine their proficiency level in English, and assess their progress in learning English each year. It does this by testing four domains once per year until they are reclassified as fluent English proficient (RFEP). These four domains are 1) listening, 2) speaking, 3) reading, and 4) writing (California English Language Development Test, 2011). Using the information gained from the CELDT, teachers can modify curriculum to reach different levels of ELs, provide support services for ELs with lower proficiency, and provide resources for ELs parents to help their child improve their English language acquisition.

Student Example

The next steps after receiving the results of the CELDT is to have administrators, teachers, and parents collaborate to create short-term and long-term goals to help the student make greater strides toward English language acquisition. For reference, let’s look at a fourth grade EL who has just moved to California from a Spanish-speaking country. His CELDT results show that he has low-moderate levels of English proficiency. A short-term goal for this leaner would include modifications the teacher could implement to help the student be successful in her class and build on his current English skills. Slavin suggests many modifications to increase student success with English curriculum, some of which include the following: 1) use extra visual and auditory cues such as videos and pictures, 2) use cooperative learning techniques such as Think—Pair—Share to increase the practice of speaking English in class, 3) explicitly teach new vocabulary words and phrases, and 4) keep instructions short and clear (Slavin, 2018, p. 82). Students can then set short-term goals for themselves spanning one week at a time or one month at a time. For example, he could have a short-term goal to learn five new vocabulary words per week or participate in whole class discussions 5 times per week, and then slowly build on those goals. Additionally, a long-term goal could be to transition from only speaking English 30% in class to maybe 60% in three-months or six-months, depending on the learner’s progress. In addition to setting these short-term and long-term goals, teachers, students, and parents should reference and check-in on these goals regularly to monitor the EL’s progress.

How Teachers Can Support English Learners

For teachers with a variety of English proficiency levels in their classrooms, they need to be prepared to make modifications catered to each EL’s specific needs. Using the modifications described above in varying levels is one way to help meet the needs of each student. Another in-class instructional approach includes the “gradual release of responsibility model of instruction” as described by Frey, et al. in Lessons Scooped from the Melting Pot (Frey et al., 2010). Frey et al. describes the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction as guiding students toward using different skills and strategies in groups and individually to enhance English proficiency in ELs (Frey et al, 2010). One way to apply this method is to pair students with varying English ability levels to help support each other. For example, if you have a student who scored well in the listening section of CELDT but not as well in the speaking section, and you have another student who scored well in the speaking portion but not as well in the listening portion, you could pair those students together to help enhance each of those skills. For example, in a Think—Pair—Share activity, the student who is more proficient in speaking than listening could be the designated listener first, and the student who is more proficient in listening than speaking could be the designated speaker first. After both students have had an opportunity to work on the skills that they are in most need of working on, they can switch. This way, they can help build each other up, and offer tricks to each other to help in their learning process. You could apply this same idea to pair ELs with varying proficiency in reading and writing as well as any combination of the four. Furthermore, Pyle et al describes the positive impact of peer-mediated support in their article titled Academic Effects of Peer-Mediated Interventions with English Language Learners when they prove through their study that there are “medium to large effects on measures of phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and comprehension when compared to teacher-mediated comparison conditions” (Pyles et al., 2017). This exemplifies how this method of pairing students so they learn from and with each other would help students further develop their English skills.

Out-of-Class Support

In addition to the in-class modifications, teachers should also recommend out-of-class support and learning opportunities for ELs. For example, teachers at the elementary level could collaborate and come up with an after-school tutoring program with a rotating teacher helping out if there is not extra funding to bring in an EL tutor after school hours. Students could meet anywhere from once a week to five-times per week for extra help with learning English, depending on the number of teachers willing to stay after school to help out and teacher rotation schedule. One way would be to have all students who scored low in listening could meet on Mondays, low on speaking on Tuesdays, low on reading on Wednesdays, and low on writing on Thursdays, or any variation of that schedule. The key for the after-school program is to make it fun, engaging, and interactive. Especially after a long, full day of learning, when the core focus of the program is about learning new vocabulary in a fun and interactive way, students are much more likely to retain the information. Townsend’s after-school program study where she used dice games, matching games, and action jeopardy games to help ELs engage with English showed that “students increased their knowledge of the target words in the intervention, which demonstrated that strategies that had previously been shown to be effective with general vocabulary words and younger students are also effective with abstract academic words and adolescent ELLs” (Townsend, 2009).

Technology Support

Another out-of-class resource for ELs and parents could be using technology applications and language-learning platforms. Erben et al. describes the importance of using technology to help today’s ELs. Erben states, “good education is no longer about… ‘lecturing to the masses’ but, to truly reach the students in our heterogeneous classes of the twenty-first century, teachers need to move beyond the artful application of ‘good strategies’ to a more… purposeful instruction” (Erben et al, 2009, p. 5). An example of a more purposeful way to learn English is Duolingo. Duolingo is an application that can be found on most smart phones that help people trying to learn another language (Duolingo, 2018). The commitment level can vary from reminding you to practice for five minutes every day twenty minutes every day and includes help with speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It personally caters the language curriculum to where the learner is starting in their language-learning journey, and adjusts depending on how well the learner performs activities. The EL could use this application individually or with their parents to help enhance their English learning. Additionally, parents can help by checking in every day after school to reflect on what the student has learned that day. This helps all types of students, but can be especially important for ELs by increasing the time spent working with a new language.

Socio-Emotional Applications

While each of the ideas discussed above use the CELDT to help ELs become more proficient in the English language, students will likely have a more difficult time adjusting to a new way of life and a new way of learning if something is not done at schools to ensure there is an empowering school culture, so ELs can feel comfortable asking questions and applying what they are learning without fear of being ridiculed by other students or teachers. Slavin describes an “empowering school culture” as a school culture that is “conducive to the academic and emotional growth of all students” (Slavin, 2018, p. 84). Establishing and maintaining an empowering school culture will benefit all learners from all backgrounds: ELs, learners with exceptionalities, and learners with varying ethnic and cultural backgrounds. When students can feel comfortable asking questions and making mistakes, they are more likely to develop a growth-mindset. Students with a growth mindset are less likely to shut down when things get tough, and they are more likely to be resilient in their learning pursuits. Rau describes how having this mindset helps students focus on the process of learning as opposed to being fixated on and overwhelmed by all the learning that still needs to happen (Rau, 2016). Moreover, having a growth-mindset is especially important for ELs, so they will be more likely to see that becoming proficient in English can be an enjoyable and rewarding journey, and thus will be encouraged to engage more fully in English language acquisition.