With the implementation of Dual Language One-Way, the Bilingual and ESL, or English as a second language department, has made significant progress.
At an Ector County ISD Board of Trustees meeting in September, Executive Director of Bilingual/ESL Education Betsabe Salcido offered these facts:
- 26 percent of the top 10 students in ECISD high schools were former Bilingual/ESL students.
- 13 students, including two valedictorians and one salutatorian, were served through Bilingual/ESL. That number is 6% higher than last year.
- The Emergent Bilingual graduation rate increased from 63.5 % to 70.8%.
- The dropout rate for secondary Emergent Bilinguals was reduced from 3.6% to 3.3%.
Salcido said 90 percent of students from the program are from Odessa, but there are more newcomers in high school.
There are traveling English as a second language teachers who pull out students for 45 minutes. They also use Rosetta Stone and a translation service. Rosetta Stone is a computer-assisted language learning software, according to its website.
More than 700 students signed up for bilingual summer learning. Students in the overall program are now called emergent bilinguals.
“We are seeing improvements and in the program, especially with the implementation of the Dual Language One-Way,” Salcido said. The Dual Language One-Way program is designed to make academic content accessible to emergent bilinguals through the development of literacy and academic skills. The program develops a second language(English)for students while maintaining and respecting the student’s own language (Spanish) and culture.
There are only a few elementary schools using the late exit transitional model for their fifth grade.
Next year, Dual Language One-Way will be fully implemented at all the elementary schools, except Cameron which is Dual Language Two-Way.
“It’s our only campus that is under that model, and so they’re serving students who are identified as emergent bilinguals and also English-speaking students so it’s half and half,” Salcido said.
The Dual Language One-Way program was started at Buddy West, EK Downing and Zavala elementary schools and Carver Early Education Center.
“As our students are exposed to English, or have access to it at a much younger age, they can leverage their native language and also develop their language proficiency in their second language through the Dual Language One-Way,” Salcido said.
Research and the gains being made state and nationwide made them decide to change the program to Dual Language One-Way.
“There’s research that shows that students are gaining stronger language proficiency. Their test scores are higher. And then that piece that’s also very important — that global citizenship that they’re developing because they’re comfortable; they’re learning two languages and with language comes culture, so they also have a better understanding of both of their cultures,” Salcido said.
Associate Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Lilia Nanez said when she came to ECISD, Salcido was in year two of the pilot schools and she wanted to expand, but at a slow pace.
“Knowing what the research says and how our transitional late exit students were performing at the middle schools, it was not good because our transitional late exit kids were getting only Spanish instruction all the way through fifth grade. We had people that believed they weren’t ready for English, even though they started with us in kindergarten. And so we were just enabling kids to stay in their native Spanish language for far too long, and as a result, when they got to middle school, they struggled tremendously because there was no more of that bilingual support. There was ESL support, but it’s not as structured as the bilingual,” Nanez said.
Closing that gap was much more difficult, Salcido said.
The decision was made to move ahead quickly because it was good for students.
Looking at their graduation rate and the English I and end-of-course exam scores at the high schools, conversations came up on how they could collaborate with the high schools to help students be successful, especially with the EOC I and EOC 2 STAAR exams.
“So what we did was had conversations with them met with them and identified that it would be helpful, as we know, to support the culture to help them feel that sense of belonging at the campus. We felt that this would help our attendance rate and build that confidence and that connection with what’s happening on campus on a daily basis,” Salcido said.
“We also met with Crockett at the middle school level, and Ms. Aranda is very open to helping emergent bilinguals, working with our students, and Mr. Marquez at OHS at the time was was very open to the idea of what can we do to help our students, our emergent bilinguals,” Salicido said.
“So the Global Leadership Academy came about, finding ways to build that sense of belonging, to have conversations with our students, when it came to goal setting, preparing, planning for post secondary. What are their dreams; what are their goals; and how can we help you. This brought us back to also working with the counselors, looking at their schedules, what is it that they need to graduate and now also building writing skills for them. We brought speakers in. We brought Dr. (Jose Luis) Zelaya, who is also an emergent bilingual, and now he has his doctorate from A&M, and he had experience working with our students. His big focus is how do you leverage your educational opportunities to make generational impact and that’s within the community, in their homes, at the campus; helping our students see themselves in the future and the impact that they can have in a positive way for the community as well,” Salcido said.
They also brought in geoscientist Andres Ruzo, who discovered the Boiling River in the Amazon.
“He had been an emergent bilingual also. He struggled with math and science, but if you have that desire that passion, it is doable if we help them with the skills and the resources that they can be successful with,” she said.
Salcido said they want more students to have the skills, resources and confidence to apply to colleges and universities.
“So yes, we want them to graduate. We want them to absolutely be in the top 10, but then beyond that, we want them to experience that post secondary success, whether it’s going to college, going into a career field that they want. Goal setting is very important, but then as educators helping them achieve their dreams,” Salcido said.
Asked if the teachers have time to help students with goal setting and getting what they need to graduate, Salcido said it’s a collaborative effort.
“It takes everyone. Our department we’re not doing the work alone. It’s the teachers in the classrooms that make the difference every single day. It’s the administrators who are willing to work with us, and it’s not an easy task because they do have to look at their schedule; they do have to find the space where we can provide more support for students. Our teachers have really been wonderful. They they just they they do they work very hard and you know, they’re working with students that are developing in two languages, with two cultures, and helping them. Making sure that they have access to all the educational opportunities is very important,” Salcido said. “Our teachers are really great, and we appreciate our administrators as well, because we see what they have to do in order to make things happen for our students.”
There are three traveling ESL (English as a second language) teachers.
“They go out and serve at ESL campuses at the elementary level, pulling out identified emergent bilingual students into small-group instruction. And again, we have an ESL traveling teacher collaborating with the classroom teacher to see where we can close those linguistic gaps and also help with grade-level academics,” Salcido added.
The younger the students are, the easier it is for them to acquire new languages.
“We see them going between both languages. I think as we get older sometimes we’ll have … we’re a little bit more self-conscious of ‘are we saying it right’,” she said.
Nanez said the dual-language program is so good because they start language development in English much earlier.
“Why were we waiting until fourth grade or fifth grade with a late exit transitional model when it’s a natural process the younger you are. It’s just language acquisition. You’re learning how to speak when you’re a young child, and so it’s just a more of a natural process to learn that second language the younger you are,” Nanez said.
It is a bit more challenging for students in high school.
“It starts with getting them in the right classes. And then our teachers, it’s helpful for them to be ESL certified because they would be knowledgeable when it comes to English as a second language strategies such as sheltered instruction. What that means is that they know the instructional strategies to use in order to make the content comprehensible for our students. Some of those are using visuals, using sentence stems, pairing our students up, giving them opportunities to interact with the language in a safe space is very important. The culture of the classroom also matters, but we’ve seen it done,” Salcido said.
She added that they have seen sheltered instruction help students gain proficiency in English.
“We’re seeing success on TELPAS (Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System) for one,” she said.
Nanez said sheltered instruction works for all students.
“We are a society now where kids just get that receptive language through a device or technology, and they don’t engage in expressive language. Sheltered strategies help all kids engage in discourse, so it really does help all kids. They’re research based strategies that will help all kids, but were designed for helping students acquire a second language,” Nanez said.
It also helps native English speakers.
“Because again, our native English speakers, again, so much of it is they’re just receiving language. … Either their parents are telling them something or they’re listening to the radio, or they’re playing a game on a device and just listening. They’re receiving that language, but they’re not required to talk,” Nanez said.
If you’re in high school algebra or biology, there’s a certain level of language and concepts that are new to students.
“So these sheltered instructional strategies serve our students, but then they also serve all of our kids,” Salcido said.
She added that this year’s focus is on language language development in the sense of helping students transfer what they’re learning in their first language to their second language.
“Part of that is … building instructional strategies … in order for our teachers to be able to use the strategies to help our students make that transfer of language. Part of that is using cognates, working with suffixes, prefixes and putting them side by side in both languages and then making that linguistic connection. How is it used? What are the similarities? What are the differences between both languages?” Salcido said. “English is kind of difficult to learn because well, think of all the ways you can spell different words, you know, and then how some are pronounced and they don’t even look like the way they’re spelled.”
Salcido noted that there are short sounds in Spanish and short and long sounds in English. Students have to figure out when to use each one.
“Making those connections is critical for our students to transfer what they know in their native language and now new understanding to their English. So we’re very intentional with our professional development opportunities that we offer our teachers because we know that they’re the ones that make the difference. They are in the classroom,” Salcido said.
Nanez said she is proud of Salcido and her team.
“She was an emergent bilingual when she was young, as were many of her team members,” Nanez said. “They understand from an emotional connection and experience to what our kids are experiencing, as I was, and so their passion for it really is evident in through their work.”
