Town halls in Greater Manchester are spending more than £10m a year teaching immigrants to speak English. The Department for Schools says a growing amount of taxpayers’ money being spent on teaching English as a second language – particularly in Manchester, Oldham and Rochdale. In Manchester, the annual amount spent on teaching English as a foreign language has increased in nine years from £3m to £4.6m.

In Oldham, with its high ethnic population, the cost is now £2.1m. In Rochdale it is £1.2m. Manchester’s £4.6m bill, paid by the taxpayer, is one of the country’s highest – but dwarfed by Birmingham’s £14m a year. (more…)

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Lufkin ISD has teamed up with Nacogdoches ISD and Stephen F. Austin State University to implement project ENLACE (English Language Acquisition Center for Excellence). The project is based on the Professional Development School model and includes all professional stakeholders: teachers, counselors, principals, district leaders, and teacher educators. The goal is to support and enable the professional development of school and higher education faculty in an effort to increase learning and achievement for English Language Learners.

ENLACE, which means connection or link in Spanish, prepares teachers to effectively teach English Language Learners. The connections extend from pre-service teachers to in-service teachers; from administrators to teacher educators. By 2015, second generation children of immigrants are expected to make up 30 percent of the school-aged population. This means teachers, even those who aren’t teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, will be more likely to have students whose first language is not English. Project ENLACE is an attempt to better prepare teachers to deal with mixed language classrooms, as well as get them certified to teach ESL. (more…)

search for : English Language Acquisition Center for Excellence, English Language Learners, ENLACE, English as a Second Language, ESL

Voices filled a crowded classroom at Eastside Elementary School as Rebecca Booth led her class in a chant of the alphabet. Booth, an English as a Second Language teacher in the Rogers School District, teaches families on Tuesday and Thursday nights. About 20 parents learn English alongside their children, who are classified as English-language learners within the district’s schools. Rogers offers the classes at four sites, serving about 80 families.

It plans to add an additional site in the summer to meet increasing demand. The program is part of a national trend that’s taken root in Northwest Arkansas as its population of immigrants has grown. School districts are finding ways to draw parents of English-language learners into the classroom in hopes of increasing student achievement. (more…)

Martinsburg High School students are shining a spotlight this week on all the languages spoken and learned in their classrooms as part of a celebration of the diversity of their classmates.

National Foreign Language Week is the impetus for events that showcase different cultures and other countries with special activities like salsa-dancing lessons and Peace Corps presentations.

“As our world is globalizing, the acquisition of foreign languages is becoming more and more important,” said John Gonano, who teaches Spanish II and IV at the high school, where French and Latin classes are also offered to students. (more…)

The latest census figures released Tuesday by Statistics Canada show a large number of Canada’s new immigrants are working in a native tongue which is neither of the country’s official languages. The large rise in immigration over the past five years of people whose mother tongue is neither French nor English did not necessarily mean that more of them were using non-official languages in the workplace.

But in B.C. and Ontario, the provinces where most immigrants land, a large number reported using a language other than English or French at work. The proportion held steady at 30 per cent in B.C. over a five-year period and dipped only slightly to 20 per cent from 21 per cent in Ontario. (more…)

A recent amendment to the federal “No Child Left Behind” program is just the latest hurdle school districts all over the Northwest suburbs will attempt to clear in their battle with keeping their students on track. The amendment now demands all students to be tested in all subjects, regardless of their level of English. Before, school districts were allowed to give their students an alternative test called IMAGE.

Now every student who has been enrolled in school since last May will be asked to take the ISAT standardized test. With a vast population of non-English speaking students, school districts like Prospect Heights Elementary Dist. 23 are trying their best to prepare students for these assessment exams.

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search for : non-English speaking students

John Echevarría, president of Miami-based Universal Music Latino, had high expectations of the young Cuban American executive assistant he hired a few years ago. ”Professionally, she was very good,” Echevarría says. But she was almost incapable of writing Spanish.”

So until he replaced her with a fully bilingual Puerto Rican secretary, the Spanish-language record executive typed much of his own business correspondence. Experiences like that convince Echevarría, a Spaniard, that the city ”is losing an asset.” You have to wonder about its future as ”the capital of Latin America,” he says. The quandary: Children and grandchildren of the immigrants who made Miami a vibrant international center lack the Spanish skills on which much of the city’s success and identity are built. (more…)

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