Brushing up on English over the summer
For all of the progress made with the county’s English Language Learner population during the school year, much of it can be undone during the summer, when many students spend much of their time at home and have few opportunities to hear and speak English.
To help prevent such summer learning loss, as well as to strengthen the language and reading skills of these students, a five-week Migrant/English Language Learner Summer School program was developed by the school system and is currently taking place at Warren County Middle School.
According to Dianna Zadeh, the school system’s ESOL, testing and equity director, the summer school, which is completely funded through grants, has attracted 85 pre-school though high school age students, almost 25 more that originally expected.
“About 70 percent of the students are considered migrants by the state,” she said, noting the remaining 30 percent are permanent English Language Learners. The vast majority is Hispanic, she added, though the program also includes an Indian, a Japanese and a Bosnian.
At the center of the summer school learning is Fast ForWord, an intensive, computer-based program that develops the students’ language, thinking and reading skills. In essence, Zadeh said, the program retrains the brain to allow it to learn more effectively.
Each of the program’s students, save the youngest ones, spend 100 minutes a day in a computer lab participating in the Fast ForWord program, which helps them develop listening skills, auditory discrimination skills, comprehension skills and the language foundation needed for students to read.
In using the Fast ForWord program at the center of its Migrant/ELL Summer School program, the school system has become a pilot site for the state, which seeks to see how well the computer program, which has already shown success with regular education students and will be used at the middle school during the coming school year, can be adapted for ELL students.
“We’re going to be watching these students’ TCAP scores next year very closely to see if they’ve made notable gains,” said Zadeh.