Project RESET engaged resettled Chin refugee teens in critical STEM literacy practices in a community-based afterschool STEM enrichment program in the United States. Over the course of nine months, the participants multimodally and multilinguistically communicated their learning about weather, climate, and climate change, while also developing…

Very large numbers of students for whom English is not their native language attend public school classrooms in the USA every year. It is estimated that there are currently about 5.3 million English learners in K-12 grades (National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition 2011). While teacher preparation programmes are required to prepare…

English Language Learners (ELLs), a diverse group of individuals from across the world who are learning English for the first time, make up the fastest growing segment of the student population in United States public schools. ELL students are tasked with the two-fold challenge of learning a new language and simultaneously keeping up with academic…

During the 2010-2011 school year, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) piloted the After-School Global Language Opportunity Benefiting All Learners (GLOBAL) program for 12 weeks at eight different school sites. This school year the program expanded to 25 weeks and 11 sites. GLOBAL is an approach to learning that allows students to develop basic…

This timely and incisive book examines the ways in which English language proficiencies develop in newly arrived immigrant students. Beginning by describing the challenges faced by children who currently attend segregated schools in many parts of the country, the authors offer a detailed account of the developing English language proficiencies of…

Throughout the nation, afterschool programs are seeing increasing numbers of English learners (ELs) among their participants. Many afterschool program practitioners, recognizing the growth in the EL population in their programs, are hungry for professional development and research to understand how better to educate this population. However,…

In the last issue of the Journal (volume 75, number 4), we read about our esteemed colleague Israel Scheffler's love affair with Hebrew. In this issue, we continue the conversation about Hebrew as part of a series of articles by distinguished senior colleagues who bring the wisdom earned by a lifelong career in Jewish education. Many of us share…

That the English learner (EL) student population is growing is not a problem, but that ELs are not generally thriving in U.S. classrooms is. ELs score lower on tests, get poorer grades, take fewer advanced or college prep classes at the secondary level, and graduate from high school at much lower rates than do native speakers of English. Moreover,…

Like many relatively affluent suburban schools, James E. Daly Elementary in Montgomery County, Maryland, has seen a rapid increase in its Hispanic and bilingual student populations. Many of the school's English language learners come from low-income, immigrant families. Zimmerman-Orozco, the school's assistant principal, describes the strategies…

This article describes a critical service-learning initiative in which college students of Spanish taught in an after-school Spanish class for young heritage language (HL) speakers at a local elementary school. We contextualize the program within broad curricular revisions made to the undergraduate Spanish program in recent years, explaining how…

Why is that English language learner sitting in the back of the classroom and not speaking up? Maybe she just needs a friend. This article shares what some schools are doing to make sure their ELL students become part of the school community.

This paper discusses the Refugee Action Support Partnership Project between the University of Western Sydney, The Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation and the NSW-Department of Education and Training (DET). The critical ethnographic method is used to evaluate the after-school homework tutoring centres as a vehicle of literacy development…

Under the larger scope of the National Partnership for Quality Afterschool Learning, SEDL funded three awardees to carry out large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCT) assessing the efficacy of promising literacy curricula in afterschool settings on student academic achievement. SEDL provided analytic and technical support to the RCT studies…

FLAME (Foreign Language Alternative Mastery Example) is a model for foreign language in the elementary school (FLES), conducted after school and focused on development of a broad vocabulary base, especially cognates and terms relevant to the student's everyday environment. In the program, FLES student teachers collaborate with a university-based…