GILROY
– Students are learning English at higher rates than in the
past, and district officials are crediting an immersion program
instituted last year.
GILROY – Students are learning English at higher rates than in the past, and district officials are crediting an immersion program instituted last year.
According to new test results released by the California Department of Education, 41 percent of Gilroy Unified School District students whose first language is not English were considered proficient in 2003, earning scores in the “early advanced” or “advanced” levels. Last year, 29 percent of students reached that mark, while in 2001 it was 20 percent.
GUSD English learners advanced at a faster rate than those across the county and the state.
More than a quarter of GUSD’s roughly 9,700 students are English language learners, as are about one-fourth of the 6 million students in California.
The California English Language Development Test (CELDT) is given each year to students whose home language is not English and measures reading, speaking, writing and listening skills. It is scored on a five-tiered scale from beginning to advanced.
“We’re seeing a significant improvement from kids at level one to level two, moving to level three,” said Martha Martinez, GUSD’s administrator of the English Language Learners program. “And our level fours and level fives are being reclassified at a higher percentage than before.”
Students are “reclassified” as fluent and ready for full-time instruction in English by meeting three criteria: earning a score that places them within the early advanced or advanced levels, obtaining a qualifying score on the California Standards Test taken each spring and receiving teacher approval. After the student is reclassified as fluent, they no longer take the CELDT.
“We’re moving more kids from limited English proficient to fluent,” said Martinez, who was compiling a report Monday on GUSD’s reclassification rate.
Of GUSD English learners in kindergarten through 12th grade, 38 percent were designated fluent last year, compared to 28 percent in 2002. The test was first administered in 2001, so there is no fluency data from that year.
Martinez attributes the English learner’s gains to three factors.
First, this is the second year the district has used its structured English immersion program at the elementary schools.
Last year, the district stopped its bilingual education program in favor of full-time English instruction for non-native speakers.
“Our English language learners … are receiving all of their instruction in English,” Martinez said.
Time is set aside specifically for English language development, such as building vocabulary and oral fluency.
“I think it definitely has an impact on what you’ve seen,” Martinez said.
The second factor Martinez identified is the state-adopted curriculum based on the California standards. The curriculum provides teachers with structured lessons for English learners.
Third, the district has focused on professional development over the past year and a half that targets non-native speakers. Martinez reports that more than 95 percent of elementary teachers, 64 percent of middle school teachers and 69 percent of high school teachers have received training in English as a non-native language.
“That has been a huge movement that I think has really impacted what is really happening inside the classroom for English-language learners,” Martinez said.
Spanish-language instruction does still take place in GUSD. Certain classrooms at Las Animas Elementary School are “dual immersion” classrooms, where English- and Spanish-speaking students are grouped together and receive half of their instruction in English and half in Spanish.
This is the third year that the test was administered statewide to inform districts how well they are teaching students whose first language is not English. It is taken for the first time within 30 days of the student’s enrollment in the district and is taken annually until the student is classified fluent.
Districts are required by the state to administer the CELDT, and the testing window operates from July through October. The test covers three skill areas: listening/speaking, reading and writing. Students in kindergarten are only assessed in listening and speaking.
Teachers and administrators use the test data to shape their English language development program.
“We made a note of students who had shown improvement, but more importantly, we made a note of students who had not shown growth or had actually gone down some because that’s not the trend,” said Diane Elia, principal of Eliot Elementary School.
Eliot has the largest percentage of English learners in the district, with 117 students taking the CELDT in 2003. Thirty percent of Eliot students tested last year were proficient, compared with 22 percent in 2002.
“A lot of the trends that we noticed impacted certain grade levels,” Elia said.
For example, second- and third-graders had many more students in the lower three scoring levels than the grades below or above them. A similar trend exists, most noticeably among third-graders, districtwide and statewide. English language instruction is highly oral in kindergarten and first grade, Elia said, and becomes more academic in later years.
“It’s easier for kids to develop oral language than it is for them to develop academic language,” she said. “We had a lot of discussion around ways to make the kids learn more academically in the classrooms. You really have to look at each individual kid and talk about what you’re doing in the classroom.”
GUSD students showed more improvement than those across the county and state, although they still rank just below those groups. Twelve percent more GUSD students ranked early advanced or advanced, while the increase was roughly 9 percent at the county and state levels.
