Download The Newcomer program

PORTRAITS OF EMERGING
CULTURE IN A DISTRICT
NEWCOMER PROGRAM
Megan Edmiston, Ed.D. Candidate
University of Northern Colorado
NOVEMBER 5, 2016
OBJECTIVES
This presentation will allow you:
• To analyze the emerging results of one study of a
Newcomer English Language Development
program.
• To apply knowledge gained from one study to your
own work with emergent multilinguals.
WHO ARE “NEWCOMERS”?
1. Grab a piece of blank paper and a pen/pencil.
2. Create a graphic representation of what you think of
when you hear the term “Newcomer.”
languag
e
immigration
changing family dynamics
culture
Discourse
isolation
sheltered
lowered expectations
shared responsibility
ONE DISTRICT’S NEWCOMER PROGRAM
• 4 Newcomer programs in the district
• 2 elementary
• 1 middle
• 1 high
• Newcomer programs are recommended for students
who score 1.0-1.9 on W-APT
• Transportation is provided if parents accept the
placement recommendation
• Newcomer sites have unique curricula, technology,
resources, and additional personnel
PURPOSE OF DISSERTATION
• To understand how emergent multilingual immigrant
students (Newcomers) in grades 6-8 experience an
English Language Development middle school
program designed for Newcomers
• To understand how Newcomer students individually
and collectively negotiate their multiple identities
through interactions over time in the formation of
the Newcomer program culture
DYAD ACTIVITY
What are the benefits and drawbacks of
having Newcomer-specific programs?
Directions:
1. Find a partner
2. Partner 1 speaks for 2 minutes.
3. Partner 2 speaks for 2 minutes.
RESEARCH LITERATURE HIGHLIGHTS
• Newcomer programs function as “temporary stopovers—the equivalent of
cultural and educational shock absorbers” (Friedlander, 1991).
• ”A specialized academic environment that serves newly arrived, immigrant
English language learners for a limited period of time.” (Short & Boyson, 2012)
• Newcomer programs have increased as accountability measures for
academic achievement have risen.
• 60% of Newcomer programs in 2011 database were begun in the 2000s. (Short & Boyson,
2012)
• Newcomers are often isolated, both physically and programmatically, from
multilingual and monolingual peers.
• Newcomers become both highly visible and invisible.
• Need to recognize differences among Newcomers, in terms of what they
know and how they learn. (Decapua & Marshall, 2010)
• Lack of proficiency in English is a unifying factor for Newcomers. (Case, 2015)
• Students prefer to be with other Newcomers, regardless of their first language.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1. How do Newcomer students position themselves in
relationship to their Newcomer peers?
2. How are Newcomer students positioned by their
peers, teachers, families, and the district?
3. How do Newcomers’ interpretations of their
experiences prior to and during the Newcomer
program contribute to the construction of their
literate and linguistic identities?
4. In what ways do individual identities shape the
Newcomer group culture?
PARTICIPANTS
• 6 Newcomer students, grades 6-8
• 4 Spanish speakers from Mexico
• 1 Spanish speaker from Dominican Republic
• 1 Mandarin Chinese speaker from China
• Families of student participants
• Newcomer (ELD level 1) teacher
• ELD levels 2-5 teacher
• ELD instructional assistant
RESEARCH DESIGN
Egbert & Sanden, 2014
Critical Discourse
Analysis &
Sociocultural Positioning
Theory
Postmodernism
Interactional
Ethnography
& Portraiture
Critical &
Interpretivist
Subjectivist (Epistemological and Ontological Pluralism)
METHODS
Interactional Ethnography
Portraiture
 Lens for the group culture
 Lens for individual identities
 Subjectivism of researcher
 Challenges traditional
researcher/participant dichotomy
 Make the invisible visible
 Situate language and literacy
practices in group context
 Critical eye to classroom
discourse
 Focus on the “goodness” of
marginalized voices
 Portrait/glimpse into the whole
Narrative with rich description
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
DATA COLLECTION
OCTOBER 2015-MAY 2016
• 2-3 formal classroom observations/week
• Total of 23 1-hour formal interviews:
• 3 interviews with each student participant and his/her family*
• 3 interviews with the Newcomer ELD teacher
• 2 interviews with the levels 2-5 ELD teacher
• 1 interview with the ELD instructional assistant
• Artifacts (student work, home examples, photos, etc.)
• Continuous informal observations and conversations
DATA ANALYSIS
• Concurrent with data collection
• Explicit self-awareness of myself in the data
• Coding Emergent Themes
• Individual
• Group
• Anxiety
• Comfort, but Frustration
• Isolation
• Dependence
• Relative Identity
• Narrative
NEWCOMER PORTRAITS
Teresa
Karla
Cristian
8th
Ju
6th
Raúl
Jarome
Home
Country
Mexico
Mexico
Dominican
Republic
China
Mexico
Mexico
Primary
Language
Spanish
Spanish
Spanish
Mandarin
Chinese
Spanish
Spanish
W-APT (Aug.)
1.0
2.4
3.9
1.0
4.3
4.8
1.3
2.6
2.3
1.0 (Oct.)
2.1
1.9
1.0 (Nov.)
2.6
3.2
1.8 (Mar.)
----3.1
Nurturer
Frustration
Other
Sensitive
Outsider
Anxious
Boredom
Reluctant
Leader
Outsider
Target of
Bullying
Jester
Leader
Willing
Follower
Exotic
Pleaser
Mature MetaCognition
Reserved
8th
ACCESS (Jan.)
MODEL (May)
Individual
Emergent
Themes
6th
Frustration
Lower
Expectations
Dually
Minoritized
7th
Ideal Student
Anxious
8th
Bully
Active
Identity
Construction
ANXIETY
Environment
• “At the beginning of the year, I could tell they were kind of, like, constantly nervous
and overwhelmed, um, with what’s going on. You know, outside of our classroom.”
(Newcomer teacher)
• “Pues, un cambio muy grande, es un cambio muy grande. Drástico, porque la
barrera del idioma pues aquí es muy complicado si no hablas inglés batallas para
todo en realidad.” (Karla)
Communication
• All families have received phone calls/emails/mail in English.
• All students admitted to talking rarely or never in their non-ELD classes.
Meeting Academic Expectations
• “Sometimes they give me homework and I stay try to do it and I took too long, and
my sister to do, and she said, ‘Oh my god, this is so hard!’” (Teresa)
Family Dynamics
• Every Newcomer lives with extended family
• Changes in the primary school contact
• Changes in parental involvement
COMFORT, BUT FRUSTRATION
• “Me siento más comfortable en esa clase, porque no hay muchos,
because there not much people…Muchas veces ella daba, como,
ella daba algunas cosas que yo sabía mucho. Que yo sabía ya, me lo
habían enseñado, entonces cuando la daba, me sentía, yo me sentía
mal, porque quería avanzar más adelante para las otras cosas.”
(Cristian)
• “En esa clase es como me imagino que es como para un niño
pequeño aprender inglés…Es como más tardante la clase porque no
avanzamos casi mucho.” (Karla)
• “Como que ahí es, como que me siento más agusto que en las otras
clases....Yo digo que está bien que estemos así separados…Yo me
siento como más comoda con Cristian y Karla que con Ju.” (Teresa)
• [Paraphrase] This class is too easy. I just need to refresh my memory of
what I knew before. (Jarome)
ISOLATION
• “And you know socially, they’d go and sit just them, not anyone
else. Not even talking to each other. And they were at the table
with other, like, severe needs kids. And it was kinda like they’re
being grouped with special needs/ESS kids, you know? They didn’t
know anyone, couldn’t talk to anyone.” (Newcomer teacher)
• “There are some people who can be mean for me to be Mexican
or that I don’t pronunciate like really well some things, and it’s like
rude.” (Karla)
• “En las clases me siento cómodo pero a veces como asi que yo
estoy, voy en el pasillo asi con mis amigos y me siento como si no
estuviera en las escuela.” (Raúl)
• “我需要学习适应的语言，这是困难的.”(I need to learn the language
to fit in, and that’s hard). (Ju)
DEPENDENCE
On Peers
• “I have to help Ju…Sometimes I can’t work with other people, and I have to work
with her because the teacher say, ‘You have to work with her because you are
the only person who she can talk,’ but she don’t talk, speak, in any class really.”
(Karla)
On Newcomer Teacher
• “I feel responsible for their whole world at school.” (Newcomer teacher)
On Whole Family
• English-speaking family as school contacts (sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins)
• “And whatever she doesn’t understand, she’ll text me what he wrote and then I’ll
tell her in Spanish.” (Teresa’s sister)
On Institution
• Implicit trust in the systems in place
• Feelings of being powerless to change anything
On Technology
• Google Translate
RELATIVE IDENTITY
• “With how I taught this year, it was very difficult. I started out whole
group when it was small, and then everyone started going off in
different directions, you know, making progress, not making
progress, new kids coming in needing a lot of help. I felt like when I
split them into two groups, it worked for 99% of the class…And,
when I brought them back, I felt like that was good for morale, but
it was also difficult teaching to their levels.” (Newcomer teacher)
• “Like the whole class gets bigger she just divide us like, in two
teams, who were like advanced and who were not.” (Karla)
• “The school treats her [Ju] better because she’s not the
stereotypical Spanish-speaking Newcomer. She’s the different
one.” (ELD 2-5 teacher)
• Every student said that they do not talk or work with Ju unless
required to because “she doesn’t talk” or “she doesn’t speak
English.”
OTHER OBSERVATIONS
• Despite conflicts of personality, students all said that the other
Newcomers and ELD students were their friends in the school.
• Students with educational backgrounds most similar to
traditional U.S. schools were most successful.
• Non-Spanish-speaking Newcomers experienced implicit and
explicit linguistic and cultural exclusion.
• Students and families felt inclusion in ELD, but not in the school
or district as a whole.
• Code-switching and meta-cognition was more apparent with
Spanish speakers, Karla in particular
• Spanish speakers prefer to talk with ELD Instructional Assistant
because she speaks Spanish
• When Newcomers are no longer Newcomers is nebulous
TURN & TALK
With Your Elbow Partner:
1. Do these themes reflect what you have seen?
2. What can be learned from this study?
REFERENCES
Case, A.F. (2015). Beyond the language barrier: Opening spaces for ELL/Non-ELL interaction. Research in
the Teaching of English, 49(4).
Decapua, A. & Marshall, H.W. (2010). Serving ELLs with limited or interrupted education: Intervention that
works. TESOL Journal, 1(1).
Egbert, J. & Sanden, S. (2014). Foundations of Educational Research: Understanding Theoretical
Components. New York, NY: Routledge.
Friedlander, M. (1991). The Newcomer program: Helping immigrant students succeed in U.S. Schools.
NCBE
Program Information Guide Series (8).
Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. & Davis, J.H. (1997). The Art and Science of Portraiture. San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass.
Saldaña, J. (2009). The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Thousand Oaks, CA: S AGE.
Short, D.J. & Boyson, B. (2012). Helping Newcomer students succeed in secondary schools and beyond.
Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Megan Edmiston
[email protected]
970-685-9049