Among the myriad challenges facing the nation’s school districts is the mounting costs of their multilingual communications. Yet with over 20% of the U.S. population speaking a language other than English, ensuring that your school’s information be made available in a language your students and parents understand is critical. The high amount of information, forms and permissions that schools distribute often present a challenge to these non-native English speakers. And unfamiliarity with the American K-12 system can equally impact the ability of LEP/ELL parents to fully participate in their child’s education.
So how can schools ensure effective communications that truly reach their growing LEP populations? What can be done to keep translation quality high while staying within budget? As part of our free webinar series at K12Translate, we are offering an installment that directly addresses these issues. Titled “Avoiding Eight Translation Traps: Planning Multilingual Communication for Your District,” the webinar will take place 11:30 a.m. (PT) on April 6th and will explore a range of strategies for responding to today’s changing K12 environment.
We hope you can join us for this webinar!
Click here to register
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Leslie
K12Translate
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Posts Tagged ‘English Language Learners’
Develop Strategies for Avoiding Translation Traps
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010The State of English Language Learners
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
I just finished reading a rather concerning Los Angeles Times article about English Language Learners in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The article discusses a study that was released on Wednesday which suggests that 30% of ELL students in LAUSD remain in English languages classes far too long – from primary grades into high school.
What the study doesn’t address is why these students remain in English Language Learning classrooms for so long. Is there an egregious lack of ELL education funding? Have culturally appropriate education translations been made available? What socio-political factors play a role in this learning gap? The article even mentions; “researchers say schools may avoid moving English learners into mainstream classes to keep test scores high.”
With such a variety of variables affecting how and when our ELL students are entering into mainstream classrooms, we need to get very serious about how we address English Language Learning. Considering 20% of elementary and secondary school children speak a language other than English at home it is absolutely crucial for our non-native English speaking students to become more competitive in school.
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Maggie
K12Translate
Is the Supreme Court determining the fate of education translation services in schools?
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
There has been a lot in the news concerning the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 Horne v. Flores ruling that says the federal government should no longer be supervising state spending on ELL education in Arizona. The highest court in the land has found that Arizona already does a sufficient job of educating ELL students, and Arizona has not broken any federal laws that require schools to provide assistance such as education translation services and bilingual programs to ELL students.
According to Richard Fry of the Pew Research Center, the five states with the highest number of ELL students are Arizona, California, Florida, New York and Texas with about 70% of the total country’s ELL student population. Of this student population, there is still a very significant achievement gap between ELL students and their fluent English speaking counterparts, “In both elementary grades and middle school grades in these states, ELL students are much less likely than white students to score at or above the proficient level in mathematics. The measured gaps are in the double-digits. For example, in Florida 45% of ELL third-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the math assessment, compared with 78% of white third-graders, yielding a white-to-ELL gap of 34 percentage points.”
In my mind, with a 34% achievement gap, I am incredibly hesitant to discontinue monitoring state spending on ELL education. It is our responsibility to ensure all students, regardless of their English fluency, are receiving the highest quality education that we can provide. If we don’t spend the money necessary for education translation services and ELL programs, our ELL students will slip through the cracks even further.
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Maggie
K12Translate
References:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/education/26educ.html?_r=3&emc=eta1
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/882/english-language-learner
New People, New Languages – Rare Languages Spoken in the United States
Monday, June 8th, 2009
As many teachers and administrators already know, requests for Languages of Limited Diffusion are on the rise among providers of K12 education language translation services. According to the UNESCO , in the world today, the number of people speaking lesser-known languages is 1.25 billion, or 20 percent of the world’s population.
Over the past five years, I have seen language requests expand outside the core languages of Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese and Chinese into languages rarely seen before in the United States such as Twi (Ghana), Karen (Myanmar/Burma) and Ilocano (Philipines).
On one hand, it is of vital importance for educators to be at the forefront of this movement in order to communicate effectively with English Language Learning (ELL) communities. On the other hand, rare languages pose significant challenges for providers of language translation services. These include limited translator availability, cost-prohibitive translations and low literacy rates within the target audience.
I will be spending the next several posts discussing new populations coming to the United States and different strategies to overcome some of the language translation challenges school districts face.
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Maggie
K12Translate
Michelle Obama highlights the necessity of K12 ELL education and effective language translation services
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
Michelle Obama’s recent commencement speech at the University of California – Merced is remarkable in many ways. But the most striking element is that instead of speaking at a well-established school such as Harvard or Stanford, Ms. Obama chose UC-Merced, a little-known, four-year-old university with a diverse student population made up of 40.3 percent underrepresented ethnic or racial groups. Many of these students are immigrants or come from English Language Learning (ELL) immigrant families.
Ms. Obama’s choice highlights a growing education trend in the United States. This emerging movement recognizes and provides high-quality education to a widely diverse population who speaks many languages and maintains distinctive cultures. This makes sense when you consider that between 1990 and 2000, non-white ethnic populations jumped from 23 percent to 30 percent and are commonly expected to account for over half the U.S. population by 2050.
During the early K12 years, ELL students and parents thrive in culturally sensitive environments that provide language translation services and embrace differences. These same students enroll in schools like the University of California – Merced, schools that celebrate our nation’s diversity.
Just ask the First Lady where our youth is headed.
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Maggie
K12Translate
