Mainstream First-Grade Teachers' Understanding of Strategies for Accommodating the Needs of English Language Learners.

In this time of high stakes testing, teachers' work with English Language Learners (ELLs) becomes itself a high-stakes teaching act. Nationally, mandated testing is increasing in the schools even as school demographics are changing. The growing numbers of language-minority students come with varying levels of English proficiency, from little or none to fluent bilingualism. Teachers find it difficult to bring all their native-English-speaking children along to an acceptable level of performance in literacy and content-area subjects; ELLs present an even greater challenge, particularly for the elementary mainstream classroom teachers who are the primary language teachers for most young ELLs, yet typically have little training in ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) methods. A National Center for Education Statistics survey found that only 29.5% of teachers of ELLs (including those teaching ESOL or bilingual classes) have any related training (NCES, 1997). It is important to note that "training" in this survey could have been as minimal as a single afternoon in-service on cultural differences. What do teachers understand about how to assist ELLs in gaining language, literacy, and content knowledge? The answer to this question is particularly important in Florida, which mandates specific training for teachers working with ELLs. In 1990, Florida radically changed the way it addressed the needs of ELL students as a result of a consent decree between the Florida Board of Education and a group of eight plaintiff groups represented by Multicultural Education, Training and Advocacy (META), a law firm from San Francisco (Ariza, Morales-Jones, Yahya, & Zainuddin, 2002). The consent decree assured, among other things, that school districts would provide ELLs equal access to education by addressing six areas: identification and assessment, equal access to appropriate programming, equal access to appropriate categorical and other programs, personnel, monitoring, and outcome measures (Evans, 1997). The present study addresses two of these areas: personnel and equal access to appropriate programming.