Helaine W. Marshall

Reaching ELLs at Risk: Instruction for Students With Limited or Interrupted Formal Education

The United States is receiving unprecedented numbers of immigrants, with a parallel increase in the number of English-language learners (ELLs) entering our schools. Many of these ELLs are students with limited or interrupted formal education who face great challenges, especially at the secondary level where they have little time to master academic content, develop literacy skills, and build English proficiency. Fundamental to school success for these students is their need to adjust to culturally different ways of learning. In this article, the authors examine salient academic and cultural issues and describe a new instructional model to help teachers adapt their instruction to facilitate the active engagement of this student population, as well as transition them to the learning environment of the U.S. educational system.

Reframing the Conversation About Students With Limited or Interrupted Formal Education: From Achievement Gap to Cultural Dissonance

U.S. schools face increasing pressure to ensure that all students succeed, yet the dropout rate for English learners is alarmingly high, especially for those with limited or interrupted formal schooling (SLIFE). Serving SLIFE can be challenging because they not only need to master language and content but also need to develop literacy skills and learn to operate in formal classroom settings. We describe a culturally responsive instructional model that prepares SLIFE to access curriculum and instruction, and succeed on standardized testing.

The Transformational Learning Journey of a Novice ESL Teacher of Low-Literate Adults:

This article reports on one teacher’s journey, Nan’s, as she struggled to provide appropriate instruction to low-literate day laborers in an English as a second language (ESL) class for adult learners. In her efforts to do so, Nan became inspired to implement alternative pedagogy based on a culturally responsive approach that resonated strongly with her professed educational and social justice beliefs. As researcher-practitioners, we were interested in exploring Nan’s transformational journey during her graduate studies. The culturally responsive approach she was studying and attempting to implement is itself transformative in nature, providing an excellent opportunity to examine transformational learning both in the context of a novice ESL teacher and in the implementation of this approach. This case study provides important insights into how transformational learning theory sheds light on the struggles of one woman to achieve her twin goals of reaching a marginalized group of learners she cared deeply about and earning her master’s degree in Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages.