Las Americas Middle School is a newcomer program within Houston Independent School District (HISD) that serves students in Grades 4 through 8 who have been in the U.S. for less than one year. As a non-zoned school of choice, Las Americas has no attendance boundary, meaning that students and families must opt to enroll in the school. This brief…

Learning to write in middle school requires the expansion of sentence-level and discourse-level language skills. In this study, we investigated later language development in the writing of a cross-sectional sample of 235 upper elementary and middle school students (grades 4-8) by examining the use of (1) lexico-grammatical forms that support…

The Oregon English Language Learner Report is an annual publication required by law (ORS 327.016). This report provides financial information for English language learner (ELL) programs, the objectives and needs of students eligible for and enrolled in an English language learner program, and provides information on the demographics of students in…

In studies dealing with language learning strategies in the school context, the variables of proficiency and age are often difficult to isolate since students accumulate more hours of foreign language instruction as they move up from grade to grade. This study aimed to deal with these two variables independently by analysing learning strategy use…

This nonexperimental study explored the relationships among individual differences, contextual variables, and reading achievement of English language learners (ELLs) in one large urban school district in the United States. The sample comprised 840 students in Grades 3-8 and 10 nested within 37 schools. Hierarchical linear modeling results indicate…

The No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to begin testing new English Learners (EL) in English language arts within three years after they enter school and holds schools accountable for their performance on these exams. Yet very little empirical work has examined exactly how long it takes EL students to become proficient in English and how…