I’ve previously posted about a study that found the presence of English Language Learners in a school helped everybody (see A Look Back: New Study Finds That The Presence Of Immigrant Students In Schools Helps Everybody, But Totally Misses Obvious Reason).
Now, a new study released this week appears to complement that research by find that new English Language students help existing students, particularly the ELLs who were there previously and those who have been reclassified.
That’s huge for a school like ours which has a majority student body comprised of ELLs or former ELLs.
They sort of say, and then again they sort of don’t say, that non-ELLs are helped, too. But they definitively say that no existing students are hurt academically by the presence of new ELLs (a useful point these days with Trump’s attacks on immigrants).
Though they say they can’t provide specific causes for their findings, they do say this:
We hypothesize that three mechanisms might explain our findings. First, the increase in the number of EL students might increase funding for a school, which could be particularly beneficial for the existing EL students if these additional resources are directed to EL instruction. For example, reaching a critical mass of EL students might allow a school to employ more (or full-time) EL instructors. Second, the addition of newly arriving EL students could lead teachers to adopt instructional strategies that are more effective for EL students, such as teaching more explicit language acquisition lessons than they might otherwise do with fewer EL students. Third, EL students in receiving schools might benefit from the presence of recent immigrants in the classroom, who tend to be more academically motivated (e.g., Kao & Tienda, 1995) or could decrease existing EL students’ social isolation in school.1 While we are unable to test these hypotheses directly in this study due to data limitations, the finding that former EL students benefit from the arrival of new EL students (and not just those existing students who receive EL services alongside the newly incoming EL students) provide suggestive evidence that our third hypothesis about having more motivated peers could be an important driver of the positive spillover effects.
If you don’t want to wade through the academicease of the study, here’s a summary.
I’ve previously posted about a study that found the presence of English Language Learners in a school helped everybody (see A Look Back: New Study Finds That The Presence Of Immigrant Students In Schools Helps Everybody, But Totally Misses Obvious Reason). Now, a new study released this week appears to complement that research by ESL Web, research studies Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
