LIST OF PRESENTERS (in alphabetical order)
For order of appearance, please see the 2005 Conference Program

Jeanette Bicais, CSU East Bay

co-presenter:
Manuel G. Correia, San Francisco Unified School District

This presentation will share the findings from two dissertations conducted at UC Berkeley employing qualitative research. The studies took place in linguistically and culturally diverse elementary schools, one being a two-way immersion Spanish classroom, and the other in several classrooms where the focal children, comprising different home languages, had been identified as remedial.

The focus was on how children incorporated their peer and home culture in official and unofficial spaces to create written texts. Within these spaces for writing, children interacted and developed a more complex view of self thereby reflecting the complexities of their peer relationships and home lives.

Implications for teachers of English Learners include the importance of designing spaces for children to interact while writing in order to foster children's understanding of classroom writing practices. In this way, teachers may promote dialogue that bridges multiple home resources to school discourses.

It is widely accepted that language minority students must learn "academic English" to succeed in U.S. schools, but how to define the term has been a matter of debate.

In this paper, I argue that in order to understand the nature of academic language, we must begin by examining the experiences of real students engaged in real school tasks. I report on the ways that 7th grade students working in linguistically heterogeneous groups used language to complete social studies projects in one predominantly Latino California middle school. Results indicate that academic language cannot be understood as a simple dichotomy between "academic" and "everyday" language.

I connect this research to language rights, in terms of students' right to use home languages and "non-academic" varieties of English in the service of their academic work, as well as their right to assistance in developing uses of English typically called for in school.

Patricia Caldera, UC San Francisco

co-presenters:
Claudia Scharff, UC San Francisco
Gloria Rodriguez Bañuelos, Stanford University

A novel multi-tiered professional development program, Quattro Alliance for Science and Language Integration, brings together four groups of participants, elementary school teachers from the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), scientists and clinicians from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), elementary school English Language Learning (ELL) students from SFUSD, and a collaborative of evaluators to: 1) explore relationships between science learning and language development through scientist-teacher partnerships, 2) increase access to rigorous science learning for ELL students, 3) generate knowledge of strategies for integrating science and language learning through engaging all participants in a professional community.

The Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) from the National Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds this program.

Daniel Choi, Arizona State University

co-presenter:
Stefan Rosenzweig, Center for Language Minority Education and Research

For the past two decades the ruling in Castañeda v. Pickard, adopted by OCR, has set a three-pronged test to provide a minimal amount of protection to English Learners. Litigation in California has been unsuccessful in overturning Prop. 227 on the basis of the first Castañeda prong. Litigation in Arizona now threatens to emasculate the second prong.

The court in Flores v. Arizona has recently ruled that a teacher who completes a mere 15 hours of training is qualified to teach English language learners. This is of course woefully inadequate according to the most reliable research. In this workshop we will discuss the current state of federal law and activities in Arizona which inevitably has implications for California as both states operate under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

This paper discusses educational language policies in the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain, and their implications for English learners in California.

I show that educational efforts to revitalize Basque have: 1) increased its use and prestige, though Spanish continues to dominate; 2) increased use of Basque by young women, because most jobs requiring Basque are female-dominated and because Basque can be used to construct a sophisticated feminine identity for the first time.

This research suggests that educational policies designed for English learners in California: 1) should examine the social meanings ascribed native languages and English, not just thier instrumental value; 2) should attend to the gender ideologies attached to language varieties inside and outside the school; and 3) should take into account that, to the extent that jobs associated with English are gendered, male and female English learners might differ in their attitudes toward and efforts to learn English.

Liz Galvin, UC Los Angeles

co-presenter:
Sandra Staklis, Stanford University

Our presentation will explore changes in the definition of language rights in the post-Soviet Republic of Latvia. While the current state language of Latvia is Latvian, there is a sizeable minority of Russian speakers (30%). Reforms have ensured the position of Latvian as the language of state-funded education.

We will discuss the way that stakeholders, both pro-and anti-reform, have used linguistic human rights arguments to bolster their case. We will also discuss the implications of this reform for higher education: are language rights applicable to higher ed? Why or why not?

Presentation on the forthcoming report:

“Listening to the Voices of Teachers of English Learners”

In 2002 an anti-bilingual education voter initiative was imported to Colorado from California. The same sponsor of California's Proposition 227, Arizona's Proposition 203, and Massachussetts' Question 2, proposed Amendment 31 in Colorado. Using the issues of language rights and language policy at the state and local levels and leveraging the grassroots power of activist groups a coalition of educators, lawmakers, policy makers, parents, students, activists, and other stakeholders were able to defeat the anti-bilingual education measure. No other similar statewide initiative has been able to achieve the same results.

This session will address the lessons learned, the power that language policy wielded in creating a successful coalition, and how the defeat of Amendment 31 has led to subsequesnt legal and political victories.

The presenter was intimately involved with the entire effort and was a litigant in 2 Colorado Supreme Court cases that addressed the legal issues.

Michael Gerber, UC Santa Barbara

co-presenters:
Chris Cate, UC Santa Barbara
Ingrid Salamanca, UC Santa Barbara

Presenting on UC LMRI Research Grant Longitudinal Study "La Patera"

Continuing Longitudinal Study of EL Students Acquisition of Reading

La Patera is a longitudinal study currently in its fifth year. English Learners (ELs) began in kindergarten and are now in fourth grade, struggling with content-area reading. Currently the assessment package of phonological awareness, memory, reading and reading comprehension assessments is being administered.

Analyses will include both the relationship between these measures and an investigation of predictive relationships of kindergarten pre-reading and early word reading data with current fourth grade outcome measures. Furthermore, a sub-study will investigate how well an instrument designed to concurrently measure reading comprehension and memory, correlates with standardized measures of both reading comprehension and memory by comparing test differences between a fourth grade class of English students with a class of ELs.

The instructional component of these students will be addressed by comparing teacher beliefs about instructing ELs and their instructional behaviors in classroom

The current assault on languages other than English--ranging from referenda in various states to vote out Bilingual Education, to the elimination of Title VII, to the punishment of teachers who dare to use languages other than English in their classrooms--marks an important turn in the politics of language policy in the United States. Never before, after the civil rights movement, has the legislative narrative been so blatantly exclusionary and racist in terms of languages other than English.

While the United States has had no overt official language policy regulated by legal and constitutional declaration, yet it has been the envy of many nations that aggressively police language use within their borders through explicit policies designed to protect the "purity" and "integrity" of the national language. They are envious that even without a rigid policy, the United States has managed to achieve such a high level of monolingualism that speaking a language other than English constitutes a real liability.

American monolingualism is part and parcel of an assimilationist ideology that decimated the American indigenous languages as well as the many languages brought to this shore by various waves of immigrants.

As the mainstream culture felt threatened by the presence of multiple languages--which were perceived as competing with English--the reaction by the media, educational institutions, and government agencies was to launch periodic assaults on languages other than English. This was the case with American-Indian languages during the colonial period and German during the first and second world wars.

The covert assimilationist language policy in the United States has been so successful in the creation of an ever-increasing linguistic xenophobia that it "legitimated" the existence of such movements as the English-Only or English for the Children, that promote a racist agenda for English only instruction in schools.

In my presentation I will look into the effects of linguistic policies (and especially the passing of Proposition 2 in Massachusetts to abolish Bilingual Education) in the education and lives of linguistic minority students.

Sehee Hong (grantee, not presenting), UC Santa Barbara

co-presenter:
Sukkyung You, UC Santa Barbara

Presenting on UC LMRI Research Grant #03-03CY-10IG-SB

Latent Growth Mixture Modeling of Language-Minority Latino Children's Growth in Mathematics Achievement

The challenge of serving language minority students in U.S. schools is a major focal point in educational research.

Latinos have been the fastest growing minority group in the school-age population over the last several decades (U.S. Department of Education, 2000). However, Latino children represent the poorest and least educated of minority groups and are associated with underachievement in U.S. schools (Lopez & Cole, 1999).

In this study, we tested if there are distinct growth patterns (e.g., high, middle, and low groups) in Latino children's mathematics growth using the newly released Early Childhood Longitudinal Study dataset. Latent growth mixture analyses show that there are four different mathematics developmental profiles. Further, we attempted to identify important factors that are positively or negatively related to successful outcomes in mathematics achievement among Latino children.

Results show that when the language of instruction and home language is English, the probability of being in the highest performing group increases.

Tom Humphries (grantee, not presenting), UC San Diego

co-presenter:
Bobbie Allen, UC San Diego

Presenting on UC LMRI Research Grant #02-02CY-01TG-SD

Portraits of Literacy: Deaf Children As Readers and Writers

Bilingual classrooms for deaf children using American Sign Language (ASL) as a primary language are rare, but numbers are increasing. Controversy about the effectiveness of ASL-English bilingual practices for deaf children exists.

Constraints based on current legislation have not prevented classroom teachers from implementing bilingual practices, yet, there has been very little research identifying effective practices. Thus, a collaborative partnership with bilingual teachers, pre-service teachers in the Master's program at the University of California, San Diego's Teacher Education Program and faculty was established.

The results of the 2-year project were identification, description and/or implementation of: (1) effective practices, (2) authentic assessment tool, (3) "The ASL Scale of Development" and, (4) literacy strategies/behaviors used by bilingual deaf children.

Some of the findings will be presented as well as practical lessons learned about deaf children as readers and writers that may be applicable across bilingual settings.

Presenting on UC LMRI Research Grant #03-03CY-02DG-SB

Studying "Success" at an "Effective" School: How a Nationally Recognized Public School Overcomes Racial, Ethnic, and Social Boundaries and Creates a Culture of Success

The Knowledge is Power Program, KIPP, is a public charter school that includes fifth through eighth grade. Seventy-nine percent of the students who attend KIPP are Hispanic (sixty to sixty-five percent of whom come from non-native English speaking families), seventeen percent are African American, and ninety percent participate in federal breakfast and lunch programs. For a school with such a population, a high percentage of low-income, minority students, one might expect rather dismal oucomes. However, KIPP is one of the highest performing middle schools in Texas. This dissertation examines how KIPP's culture contributes to its effectiveness.

In the first portion of my dissertation I argue that KIPP's effectiveness can, in part, be attributed to the ways in which they define success. Not only does the school utilize a set of definitions that rely upon outcomes to publicly demonstrate their success, but they also evoke a private, "backstage" definition of success that empowers students by giving them a sense of agency

In the second portion of my dissertation I argue that in order to understand KIPP's "successes" one must locate and define their school culture. Here I introduce the method by which I locate KIPP culture in the "doing of discipline" and their process of socialization. In the final portion of my dissertation I show how the four key cultural schemas at KIPP, the notions of choice, team and family, hard work, high expectations with no excuses, guide the structures, practice, and beliefs at KIPP.

Peter Kuhn (grantee, not presenting), UC Santa Barbara

co-presenter:
Fernando Lozano, UC Santa Barbara

Presenting on UC LMRI Research Grant #03-03CY-09IG-SB

Language, High School Leadership and the Postsecondary Outcomes of Hispanic Students

This paper asks whether high school leadership activities play an important role in the educational success of Hispanic students. In particular, can differences in these activities help explain in the Hispanic college-completion gap?

This paper addresses two specific questions: first, do Hispanic high school students participate in high school leadership activities at the same rate as their Non-Hispanic counterparts? Second, do Hispanic students benefit as much from high school leadership activities as non-Hispanic students, in terms of both, the type of college first attended and in the probability of obtaining a four-year degree?

This analysis considers the role that English language fluency plays in a Hispanic students' leadership probability and in the student's future educational success.