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Proceedings of the Third National Research Symposium on Limited English Proficient Student Issues:

Focus on Middle and High School IssuesWashington, D.C.

August 1992

United States Department of Education Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs

September 1993

ForewordToday, more than 30 percent of the nation’s children and youth are from minority groups. If current trends inimmigration and birth rates persist, the Hispanic population will increase to 21 percent, the Asian segment to22 percent, and African Americans to almost 12 percent by the turn of the century. How to educateeffectively a student population that is rapidly becoming more linguistically and culturally diverse is one ofthe biggest challenges facing our country’s educational system. The role that social science research plays inthis regard is critical. With this in mind, the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs(OBEMLA) is taking steps to strengthen its research and evaluation component (Part B) to serve as a focalpoint and conduit for the best and most useful research findings available. The present volume, “Proceedingsof the Third National Research Symposium on Limited English Proficient Student Issues: Focus on Middleand High School Issues,” represents such an effort.

Federally funded research in the areas of cultural diversity and bilingual education has focused, for the mostpart, on narrow, costly, and methodologically flawed large-scale studies whose primary goal was to comparedifferent types of bilingual education programs in place. It is understandable that a recent review of bilingualeducation research conducted by the National Research Council argued for the need for the federalgovernment to usher in a more robust generation of research in this area. Thus, papers commissioned byOBEMLA’s Division of Research and Evaluation for presentation and debate at its third national symposiumwere selected for their potential to inform theory, policy making, and practice related to the education ofstudents at the secondary level—an area that has not been as carefully researched as education at thepreschool and elementary levels.

Currently, the primary emphasis of most instructional strategies for dealing with highly diverse middle andhigh school students is rapid acquisition of English, development of “basic skills,” and the transmission ofknowledge in classroom settings that require these students to be passive. We are learning, however, that anoveremphasis on basic skills, while subjecting students to rote learning, repetitive exercises, and superficiallevels of student/teacher interaction, is ineffective and contributes to student boredom, apathy, and lack ofmotivation, while decreasing opportunities for student engagement on higher order cognitive skills. We havealso learned that, in order to succeed academically, students must develop a high level of competence inreading and writing, usually by the late elementary grades. Students who lack this competence will have

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difficulty for the rest of their school careers. In middle school, students begin to encounter complex material,particularly in mathematics and science. Their mastery in each course determines whether they advance tohigher levels and fulfill requirements for high school graduation or college admission.

Many of the papers presented at the symposium and included in these proceedings speak directly to theissues outlined above. Together with those papers focusing on school restructuring, staff development, andnew conceptual frameworks on learning environments and student motivation, they form a compendium oftechnically sound work which, in my estimation, represents a strong launching pad for future research anddevelopment activities.

René C. Gonzalez, Ph.D. Acting Director OBEMLA

The papers in this publication were commissioned by the Office of Bilingual Education and MinorityLanguages Affairs, U.S. Department of Education. However, these contents do not necessarily represent thepolicy of the U.S. Department of Education, and endorsement by the Federal Government should not beassumed.

Proceedings of the Third National Research Symposium on Limited English Proficient Student Issues: Focuson Evaluation and Measurement was prepared by the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education. NCBEis funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Bilingual Education and Minority LanguagesAffairs, and is operated under Contract No. T292008001 by the George Washington University, School ofEducation and Human Development.

NCBE Director: Joel Gómez