Access to english [electronic resource] : resources for Spanish-speaking children's academic development
Keywords: Education.

Each of the three papers in this dissertation attends to the social contexts in which Spanish-speaking children learn English in America. Opportunities to interact with English-speaking peers and access to extensive English language input are important resources for English Learners' language development. Yet, English learners "access to English" has not been directly addressed in the policy conversation about this group of students. The first paper, Home and Community Influences on Spanish-Speaking Children's Bilingual Language Development, provides a longitudinal description of Spanish-speaking youngsters' English and Spanish oral language development. Detailed information about language use in their homes and communities enables an ecological description of these children's language learning environments. The resulting analysis indicates differences in oral language proficiencies based on home language use, immigrant generation and geographic region. Interestingly, students in bilingual and English Immersion programs differed in their oral language proficiencies at the start of kindergarten and the subsequent patterns of growth. The second paper, The Classmates, Teachers and Practices in the Classrooms of English Learner Students, provides a broad description of the factors that converge to shape the educational experiences of English Learner students. A classroom typology based on the student composition is created in order to represent English Learner's access to English speakers within their classroom. Using a nationally representative sample of kindergarten students, the students, teachers and instructional practices in each type of classroom are described. Poor, non-English proficient, Spanish-speaking kindergartners are the most likely to be in linguistically isolated classrooms, made up of over 75% English Learners. These English Learner classrooms are likely to have teachers with ESL training but few years of teaching experience. English Learners in predominantly EL classrooms also spend more time on English as a Second Language instruction than those that are integrated with non-English Learner students. These differences between classrooms appear to result from both the between school and within school sorting of students. The third paper Linguistic Segregation; The Effect of Proposition 227 documents the linguistic segregation between Spanish-speaking English Learners in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) from 1994/5 to 2000/1. During this time period, California passed Proposition 227 which essentially shifted the default method of instruction for English Learners from multi-year bilingual instruction to a one-year immersion into English. This shift was purported to speed up the pace at which English Learners would be integrated into mainstream classrooms. An evaluating of this claim indicates significant, yet surprisingly small decreases in segregation of Spanish-speaking English Learners after Proposition 227. Overall, the segregation estimates across the district indicate that English Learners have very little contact with English speakers in their schools or classrooms.