This study examined the effectiveness of Flashlight360 by continuing a retrospective, mixed-methods quasi-experimental design of ELLs in Grades 1-12 during the 2023-24 school year in a large western state school district. Outcome measures included composite, speaking, and writing achievement gains on the WIDA ACCESS assessment administered to…

With biliteracy as the goal, dual-language immersion programs offer the potential to increase literacy skills across multiple learner demographic characteristics.

Providing foundational academic support to Indiana's culturally and linguistically diverse students is a cornerstone of the state's educational goals. Over 140,000 Indiana students speak a language other than English at home, and there are over 295 different languages represented in Indiana schools. Of these, over 93,000 students have been…

English learners (ELs) represent a large and rapidly growing proportion of US public school students. Federal law requires public schools to provide ELs with linguistic supports necessary to equalize their access to instruction with that of native English-speaking students. Most ELs are eventually reclassified and receive instruction within a…

Background/Context: This paper reports the process, progress, and initial findings from a systematic review of research on English learner (EL) reclassification in the United States. EL classification is federally protected status in U.S. public schools that identifies students whose core rights must be met to support their educational access (Lau…

Over the past 40 years, Jim Cummins has proposed a number of highly influential theoretical concepts, including the threshold and interdependence hypotheses and the distinction between conversational fluency and academic language proficiency. In this book, he provides a personal account of how these ideas developed and he examines the credibility…

Research suggests that educators' use of resources influence the ground-level effects of policy. However, we know very little about educators' utilization of policy resources. This study employs a mixed-methods research design to provide empirical evidence of the policy resources available to education policy implementers and the ways in which…

Given the growing importance of English as a lingua franca, this study examines which context (classroom instruction in the students' home country vs. studying abroad in an English-speaking country) better facilitates the acquisition of English by learners of different ages: children, adolescents and adults. Participants (N = 197) completed…

The Texas Education Code (§ 29.051) requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This evaluation report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included…

The Texas Education Code (§ 29.051) requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This evaluation report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included…

The Texas Education Code (§ 29.051) requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This evaluation report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included…

Former English Learner students who have improved their facility with English to such a degree that they have been reclassified by their school districts as fluent in the English language are among the best performing students in the state. Because these Reclassified Fluent English Proficient (RFEP) students have much better academic outcomes than…

Former English Learner students who have improved their facility with English to such a degree that they have been reclassified by their school districts as fluent in the English language are among the best performing students in the state. Because these Reclassified Fluent English Proficient (RFEP) students have much better academic outcomes than…

One in five school-age children in the U.S. speaks a language other than English at home (Zeigler & Camarota, 2014). Roughly half of these emerging bilingual students (Garcia, 2009) are classified as English learners (ELs) when they enter school, meaning they do not meet state or district criteria for English proficiency (NCES, 2015). As the…

The Texas Education Code requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included in the report are…