Today, English language learners (ELLs)--students whose primary language is other than English--are the fastest-growing major school population in the United States. Between 2000-01 and 2010-11, the number of these students, whose level of English proficiency is not sufficient to support learning in a regular English language classroom, rose 18…

The classroom text for teaching the Upper Koyukon variety of Koyukon, an Athabaskan language of Alaska, consists of a series of lessons designed for use throughout a school year (September through June), with three to seven lessons for each month. The language used is relatively simple, consisting primarily of simple statements and questions. The…

The STARS (Secondary Training for Alaskan Rural Students) materials resulted from extensive rewriting of the Vocational Adult Secondary Training (VAST) materials produced by the British Columbia Department of Education, after those materials had been used with the 9th and 10th grades on Kodiak Island. Revision was done by teachers who had been…

One of two books prepared for high school level correspondence students in Alaska, this collection of lesson plans stresses problem areas in English grammar. Topics covered in the plans are (1) verbs and their subjects; (2) capitalization; (3) end punctuation; (4) adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases; (5) comparative and superlative…

In this column, the author relates her experience as a teacher in a K-12 school in Point Hope, Alaska, where most of the students spoke "village English," a form of nonstandard English mixed with the village's native language of Inupiaq. She relates how the students' reading test scores, which had been below the 25th percentile, were…