English Language Learners at the Crossroads ofEducational Reform

LILY WONG FILLMOREUniversity of California at BerkeleyBerkeley, California, United States

In this essay, the author argues that English language earners (ELLs)can meet and exceed the Common Core State Standards, and thatmore complex materials are in fact precisely what they need. Lack ofaccess to such materials is what prevents ELLs from attaining fullproficiency in English.

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& Recently, a district administrator complained to a literacy expertinvolved in professional development that there was no way the dis-trict’s English language learners (ELLs) could handle the new Com-mon Core Standards currently being implemented in the UnitedStates. “They have neither the linguistic nor academic background toengage in the Common Core: they can’t even write complete sen-tences, and they have difficulty reading. How can they be held to thehigher language and literacy standards imposed on other students? . . .Shouldn’t there be alternative standards for ELLs just as there are forspecial ed students?” This question echoes a long history of struggleswith instruction for ELLs, thrown into sharper relief because of thenational attention to higher standards for all students embedded inthe Common Core and in the Next Generation Science Standards.

In this essay, I argue that not only can ELLs handle higher stan-dards and expectations, but that more complex materials are in factprecisely what they have needed, and lack of access to such materials iswhat has prevented them from attaining full proficiency in English todate. Far too often, educators assume that ELLs must either be given abrief, watered-down oral version of texts that other students are work-ing with, or that they must have their own texts—simplified versionslimited to simple sentences and high-frequency vocabulary. If this con-tinues, the promise of the Common Core will be withheld from ourELLs.

English language learners face obstacles in our schools stemmingfrom first, fundamental misunderstandings about what they need, and

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second how to support both language and academic development atthe same time. An obvious solution would be to give these studentsaccess to the school’s curriculum by means of their primary languagesat least part of the time while they are in the process of learning Eng-lish as a second language. Bilingual education, as the approach iscalled, has been vehemently contested despite evidence of its effective-ness when compared to other instructional approaches for educatingELLs (G�andara & Hopkins, 2010; Greene, 1998; Guti�errez et al.,2002). Another solution is to provide students with help for learningEnglish as quickly as possible, which in the view of some educators,policymakers, and voters is the only acceptable solution to the prob-lems faced by ELLs. But what help do students need, and how doschools provide such help, especially given the demographic realitiesin states and districts with large concentrations of ELLs?

A look at schools with ELLs across the country suggests that neitherlanguage learning theory nor research has influenced pedagogical ororganizational decisions in addressing these questions. There are, tobe sure, schools where administrators and teachers found ways to edu-cate ELLs so successfully that they serve as reminders that when ELLsdo not make it in school, the failure more likely accrues to the schoolrather than to the students. What we find when we look at the schoolprograms for ELLs is a compendium of practices and conditions thatadd up to a formula for disastrous outcomes. ELLs are often in class-rooms and schools filled with nothing but ELLs, learning Englishfrom, and practicing it with, one another. They are provided instruc-tion on English grammatical structures and vocabulary divorced fromcontent that might make the linguistic materials meaningful or revealhow they might be deployed communicatively. They are taught to readwith instruction focused on building decoding skills, and scant atten-tion is given to reading for understanding or for learning. The con-centration of ELLs in schools and classrooms somehow causeseducators to regard English as their students’ greatest need, ratherthan all the subjects students should be learning in school—science,history, geography, math, literature, and the arts. What little contentELLs receive comes as watered-down bits of information—not enoughdetail or development to warrant students’ attention, motivation, orlearning (see especially Vald�es, 2001). To learn a language, childrenrequire ample and close interactional contact with speakers of that lan-guage because such speakers provide them with evidence as to howthe language works in meaningful communication. But when they arein contact mainly with other English learners, the outcome is likely tobe non–target-like versions of the language (Wong Fillmore, 1992).Even then, the language learned from such interactions provides just apart of the linguistic resources that figure in proficiency.

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An even more crucial kind of language is required for academiclearning, and access to that is through literacy. The only way ELLs candiscover the workings of an academic register is by interacting withtexts in which it figures. The problem for ELLs is that the materialsthey work on in school provide no clue as to how language works inacademic discourse. Not only do the materials carry so little substancethat there is little content to be gained from reading them, they offerlittle clue as to the forms and structures of the language ELLs shouldbe learning for school. Thus, many ELLs have been barred from learn-ing the kind of English required for literacy beyond the most basiclevel, for academic development, and for reclassification from ELLs toEnglish speakers.

The results for students being schooled under such conditions arehardly surprising. Growing ranks of long-term ELLs—that is, ELLswho do not attain proficiency in English even after six or more yearsin English-medium schools (Menken & Kleyn, 2009; Olsen, 2010);poor academic performance—for example, 70% of ELLs score “belowbasic” in eighth-grade reading compared with 21% of non-ELL stu-dents (U.S. Department of Education, 2013); and a dropout rate forELLs that is unacceptably high—roughly twice that of all students(Callahan, 2013).

THE SUPPORT ENGLISH LEARNERS NEED

This essay began with the assertion that not only can Englishlearners handle more demanding materials in school, but they infact require such materials to make any progress in English and tosustain the motivation and effort required for academic develop-ment. But anyone who has worked with ELLs knows that moredemanding materials without instructional support would be disas-trous. What instructional supports are needed by ELLs to addressthe cognitive and linguistic challenges they will face across the cur-riculum and at every level? What must be included in these instruc-tional supports? Linguistically speaking, we know that there is nolanguage learning without access to input that provides evidence ofhow the language is structured and how it works to communicateinformation. We recognize that the overall language proficiencyrequired for academic development is multidimensional (Cummins,2000), and whereas the various dimensions are obviously connected,each requires access to and support for learning and developmentto take place.

Across all theories of second language acquisition, whether stronglycognitivist or sociocultural in focus (Atkinson, 2011), there is agreement

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that for robust development of a second language learners requireaccess to and interaction with people who know the language they arelearning. In both first and second language acquisition studies, research-ers find that speech works as linguistic input for language learning whenit has been produced with the learner’s needs and situation in mind; thishappens most readily in face-to-face interactions. Speakers and learners,working jointly to communicate, respond, participate, and understand—this is the support required for language learning to take place. Andthis is what must be incorporated into instruction with more challengingtexts.

But how? Many educators do use interaction as a means to motivatestudents, and to convey information, using the basic varieties of Eng-lish their students have begun to acquire. The essential challenge,however, is to help ELLs get access to academic language, the complexconstructions found in school-based texts. Written texts form anotherbody of input, but usually such texts are not available to second lan-guage learners until they reach a level of competence that allows themto learn content via independent reading. So the question emerges:How can educators more skillfully use interaction to give ELLs accessto the language of complex texts?

An approach that Maryann Cucchiara and I developed with the helpof New York City educators addresses what we regard as a key problemin the education of English learners: the language required foradvanced literacy and learning in school is treated as a prerequisite forworking with complex and demanding curricula rather than as a by-product and outcome of working with such materials. The problem forus has been to help educators recognize the impasse this creates forstudents. They try to get around it by buying into programs that prom-ise to teach academic language to English learners, but the problem isthat such language is too varied, multilayered, and amorphous to betaught in that way. Our view of academic discourse is that the manystructural features, constructions, forms, and functions of these varie-ties of English can be learned, but they cannot be usefully taught.Our perspective on language is informed by Charles Fillmore’s workon frame semantics (Fillmore, 1985) and construction grammar(1988), which recognizes the intricate and complex interplay betweenlexical-grammatical and pragmatic knowledge in any aspect of lan-guage use and understanding. Our approach to language teachingand learning is founded on research I have done over the years withschool-age English learners.

The following sentence, taken from a report about a surprising findin a New Mexico quarry, is an example of language students mightencounter in texts used in school.

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The remains of a two-legged meat-eating predator that roamed theEarth at the dawn of dinosaurs have been uncovered in an ancientbone bed by fossil hunters. (Sample, 2009)

What is special about this sentence? It is fairly typical of the lan-guage used in newspapers articles. It contains words that could beregarded as academic—remains, predator, dawn, dinosaur, ancient, fossil.Such words are easy enough to interpret, but just knowing the mean-ings of the words would not suffice to support a reading of the sen-tence. Would knowing what dawn means allow the reader to interpretits metaphoric meaning in the phrase dawn of dinosaurs?

Consider the grammatical structure of the sentence. The reader willrecognize this as a sentence expressed in the passive voice, wherebythe grammatical subject of the sentence, the remains of a two-legged meat-eating predator that roamed the earth at the dawn of the dinosaurs is reallythe object or patient, of the verb uncover. And who was it that uncov-ered this find? That information can be found in the phrase at theend of the sentence, introduced by the preposition by—by fossil hunters.The passive, the bane of college writing teachers, is both a useful andnecessary construction in newspapers and in academic writing—usedfor emphasis, for cohesion, and to maintain information flow.

The sentence we are looking at is also quite typical of academic lan-guage in terms of complexity. Notice how much information is stuffedinto this sentence, especially into what I have identified as the gram-matical subject: the remains of a two-legged meat-eating predator that roamedthe earth at the dawn of the dinosaurs. Try deconstructing it into constitu-ent pieces of information. This is about a dead something (remains); ithad two legs rather than four; it was a meat-eater rather than a plant-eater; it preyed on or hunted other animals for food; it was movingabout on the earth a long time ago; it was around when dinosaurswere just coming on the scene—in fact, around 213 million years ago!What makes such language difficult is that to understand it, the readerwould have to be able to unpack the information that it contains, andto use structural cues to interpret the intended relationships betweenthe parts. To learn to use such language, learners would have to knowhow these structural devices and mechanisms work to allow informa-tion to be put together into coherent and interpretable sentences.

The question we tackled in working with New York City educatorswas this: How does anyone learn this kind of language? We knew this:No one can be a fully proficient reader or writer without a commandof such language, and we also recognized that those of us who have itlearned it by doing massive amounts of reading and writing. The factis that academic language can be learned only from texts in which it isused, and only by interacting with those texts in nonsuperficial ways: it

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calls for the reader to read not only for meaning and understanding,but also with attention to how things are said. Discussions of such textsare an important aspect of the learning process, as are efforts to writeabout the materials in the text.1

The problem for ELLs is that they seldom if ever have opportunitiesto work with materials—texts that make use of complex structuressuch as the ones in the fossil-find sentence. The texts they were likelyto get might read like the following: “Some hunters found a fossil. Itwas in an old bone bed. It had two legs. It hunted other animals. Itlived long ago.” While the key points about the find are conveyed tothe reader, such a text would offer no clue as to how language reallyworks in written texts. But would ELLs be able to make sense of theactual account, written as it is in the complex language we looked at?

Not without help, obviously. They need help learning to unpack themeaning contained in sentences like the one we looked at. They needto have their attention called to the structures found in such sen-tences, and to notice how meaning is packed into phrases, clauses,and sentences. They need help in discovering what goes together andis intended to be interpreted as a whole—this sentence is not justabout some remains, a corpse or skeleton of something that is dead,but rather it is about the remains of something that walked on twolegs, a meat-eating critter of some sort, and so on.

When children read, they are looking for meaning, assuming theyknow that is the purpose of reading. When nothing much makessense, they tend not to notice the language itself. And that is the helpwe realized ELLs most needed from their teachers. The strategies wedeveloped in New York had kindergarten through high school teach-ers spending time each day taking their students through discussions ofone or two complex sentences drawn from texts the class was workingon in subjects such as science, history, or literature.

The selection of the texts themselves was a key. They had to be inter-esting and informative enough to be worth working on, and teacherswere encouraged to select ones that were aligned to the curricular

1 A paper by A. Palincsar and M. Schleppegrell (2014) describes a similar approach to sup-porting language and literacy development through work with complex texts. The maindifference between their approach and mine is that they call attention to the way lan-guage works in texts by teaching students a metalanguage (the nomenclature of systemicfunctional grammar) for talking about the text whereas I do not. This is not to say stu-dents should not learn grammatical terminology. First and foremost, however, they wantto know how and what things in the text mean. My experience has been that by callingstudents’ attention to various parts of the sentences they are examining, by guiding themto make sense of those parts, and by having them discuss the meaning of the parts inrelation to the whole, they come to see how things work. This does not require the useof a metalanguage per se, but relies on the power of paraphrase, which, although imper-fect, gives students and teachers a platform upon which to encounter meaning, and todiscover eventually how the language of complex texts works.

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themes they were developing in the subject. We also encouraged themto consider not just one text on a topic, but multiple texts, because thatenabled students to gain familiarity with the topic and languageneeded to talk about it. MaryAnn Cucchiara worked with the teachersand administrators in developing many activities for taking sentencesapart and putting them back together again.

The centerpiece of the strategy was an academically productive con-versation each day, led by the teacher, in which teachers guided stu-dents in looking at the featured sentence for the day. The sentencewas displayed on a chart, or on a whiteboard, and during the 15-min-ute session the teachers led students in a discussion of the variousparts of the sentence. These conversations were highly planned: teach-ers prepared themselves by studying the sentence they had selectedfor discussion and figuring out what it was saying and what made itcomplex. They began by “deconstructing” the sentence, figuring outwhat information was packed into each phrase and clause, much aswas demonstrated with the grammatical subject of the fossil-find sen-tence. They then decided how to break the sentence into chunks fordiscussion and designed some elicitation questions to get discussionstarted for each chunk.

After reading the sentence aloud a few times for the students, teach-ers asked questions such as, “So what is this sentence about?” “Take alook at this part. Who can tell me something about it? Talk to the per-son next to you and compare your ideas about what it means. Thissentence begins, ‘The remains of a two-legged predator’—what couldthat mean? Let’s see if we can figure out what it means to say, ‘theremains.’ So can anyone paraphrase that or put it in their ownwords?”

How well has the strategy worked? There are indications that it hasgiven many ELLs the boost into English and literacy they have needed.Teachers and administrators in Boston, Albuquerque, New York,Denver, Sacramento, Beaverton (Oregon), and Franklin County (NewJersey) remain supportive of the approach and continue working on itwhen they see how it enables their students to make sense of textsthat once seemed impossibly difficult for them. Time will tell whetherthe approach described here makes a long-term difference for thestudents.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to Guadalupe Vald�es, Maryann Cucchiara, and Kristi Kraemer forinsights regarding the problems discussed in this paper, and to Mary CatherineO’Connor, Amanda Kibler, and Luis Posa for making the case more clearly andfar more succinctly than it might have been made.

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THE AUTHOR

Lily Wong Fillmore retired from the Berkeley faculty of the University of Califor-nia’s Graduate School of Education in 2004. A linguist and educator, her researchand teaching focused on language and literacy development in school-age secondlanguage learners. Since her retirement, she has worked with educators in someurban school districts to apply what she learned from her research to instructionin K–12 schools.

REFERENCES

Atkinson, D. (Ed.). (2011). Alternative approaches to second language acquisition. NewYork, NY: Routledge.

Callahan, R. (2013). The English learner dropout dilemma: Multiple risks and multipleresources. California Dropout Research Project Report #19, February 2013. SantaBarbara, CA: University of California. Retrieved from http://www.cdrp.ucsb.edu/pubs_reports.htm

Cummins, J. (2000). Language proficiency in academic contexts. In J. Cummins,Language, power and pedagogy (pp. 57–85). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Mat-ters.

Fillmore, C. J. (1985). Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di Se-mantica, 6, 222–254.

Fillmore, C. J. (1988). Grammatical construction theory and the familiar dichoto-mies. In R. Dietrich & C. F. Graumann (Eds.), Language processing in social con-text (pp. 17–38). Amsterdam, the Netherlands: North-Holland.

G�andara, P., & Hopkins, M. (Eds.). (2010). Forbidden language: English learners andrestrictive language policies. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Greene, J. (1998). A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of bilingual education. Claremont,CA: Tom�as Rivera Center.

Guti�errez, K. D., Asato, J., Pacheco, M., Moll, L. C., Olson, K., Horng, E. L., Ruiz,R., Garc�ıa, E., & McCarty, T. L. (2002). “Sounding American”: The conse-quences of new reforms on English language learners. Reading Research Quar-terly, 37, 328–343. doi:10.1598/RRQ.37.3.4

Menken, K., & Kleyn, T. (2009). The difficult road for long-term English learners.Educational Leadership, 66(7). Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/apr09/vol66/num07/The_Difficult_Road_for_Long-Term_English_Learners.aspx

Olsen, L. (2010). Reparable harm: Fulfilling the unkept promise of educational opportunityfor California’s long term English learners. Long Beach, CA: Californians Together.Retrieved from http://www.californianstogether.org/docs/download.aspx?fi-leId=12

Palincsar, A. S., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2014). Focusing on language and meaningwhile learning with text. TESOL Quarterly, 48(3), 616–623. doi:10.1002/tesq.178

Sample, I. (2009). Early-bird dinosaur found in New Mexico (December 10). TheGuardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/dec/10/tawa-hallae-feathered-theropod-mexico

U.S. Department of Education. (2013). Reading assessment data. Washington, DC:Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics,National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/

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Vald�es, G. (2001). Learning and not learning English: Latino American students inAmerican schools. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Wong Fillmore, L. (1992). Learning a language from learners. In C. Kramsch& S. McConnell-Ginet (Eds.), Text and context: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on lan-guage study (pp. 46–66). Lexington, MA: Heath.

Using Big Questions to Apprentice Students IntoLanguage-Rich Classroom Practices

LORRIE STOOPS VERPLAETSESouthern Connecticut State UniversityNew Haven, Connecticut, United States

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& Classroom interaction has long been valued for the linguistic andacademic development of English language learners (ELLs). Suchclassroom interaction aids in the learners’ co-construction of contentand language knowledge (Rosebery, Warren, & Conant, 1992), theconstruction of a student’s classroom identity (Corson, 2001; Norton,1997), and the practice of academic language and subsequent develop-ment of the language and literacy of the discipline (August & Shana-han, 2008; Hall & Verplaetse, 2000).

Recently, a new reason to ensure a highly interactive classroom hasarrived in the United States. The Common Core State Standards andthe Next Generation Science Standards require that students engagein language-rich experiences throughout the content-learning process.The standards’ linguistic demands hold true not only for English lan-guage arts but also for the content areas, including social studies, thesciences, and mathematics. For students (and teachers) to survive andeven thrive in a classroom environment which adheres to these stan-dards, they must engage in ongoing, language-rich discourse (Mosch-kovich, 2012; Quinn, Lee, & Vald�es, 2012). Language-rich practicesare those highly interactive classroom practices which allow students toexpress academic thoughts in full, extended utterances; require stu-dents to express high-cognitive-level ideas both orally and in written

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