The middle school challenge for English language learners of Mexican origin
English language learners of Mexican origin face numerous challenges in American middle schools, including cultural segregation and assumptions made by schools regarding the students' educational backgrounds. This article offers strategies for educators to help students overcome those challenges.
Lucia enters a U.S. middle school: A vignette
Lucia, a Mexican student who entered middle school recently in the United States, comes with a background typical of many Mexican immigrant students. Lucia’s father migrated ahead of his children to work in home construction across the border. She moved with her mother and siblings first from a rural Mexican village to a bigger city in Mexico, then crossed the border with her family to join her father. The family moved several times before settling in a small U.S. city. Lucia attended school intermittently during those two years of relocations and completed the equivalent of 4th grade in Mexico by age 13. Due to her age, Lucia entered the seventh grade in the U.S., where she finds herself not only struggling with the language gap with monolingual English-speaking teachers, but also contending with a significant gap in content knowledge.1
Facing the middle school challenge
For many students immigrating from Mexico, prior schooling may not only have been intermittent as described in the above vignette, but may have also taken place in low-resource environments both in Mexico and in the U.S. While living in Mexico, many students may have resided in rural areas where schools were understaffed and limited in teaching and learning materials. 2 After moving to the U.S., Mexican immigrant students are more likely to attend overcrowded, limited-resource urban schools with fewer certified teachers.3 In North Carolina, migration lines have been traced from rural Mexico to specific North Carolina destinations. Not only do students come largely from rural schools in Mexico, but they often hail from families whose home language is an indigenous language rather than Spanish. Upon arrival in U.S. schools, these students are assumed to be native Spanish speakers, but may in fact be minimally proficient in Spanish. In addition, these students may have had no previous exposure to English upon entry into U.S. schools.4
Gaining literacy in English may become an increasing challenge for these incoming students. In addition to education and language gaps, students may also face social and cultural barriers to learning English. Immigration patterns show that incoming families move into relational and geographic enclaves due to social and economic forces.5 This may add to the social and linguistic segregation experienced by Latinos and make the task of learning English through day-to-day interactions with English speakers difficult. In addition, Jim Cummins has underlined a delay between the acquisition of oral language and academic language pertinent to the experience of English language learners (ELLs).6 Students need an estimated five additional years of schooling to become proficient in academic reading and writing, such as reading science or social studies textbooks, after reaching oral English proficiency.
Teachers in the U.S. may assume an ELL has sufficient proficiency to read and understand academic tasks at the middle school level when they hear a student speak basic English, which leads to a lack of support and increasing rates of academic failure among ELLs. Without additional tutoring, the student may simply lose interest, run out of energy to surmount the ever-growing language and content hurdles, and eventually drop out. Indeed, the dropout rate from eighth to ninth grades sharply increases in North Carolina — from around 3% in eighth grade to about 32% of all dropouts occurring in ninth grade.7 Students may make it through middle school with difficulty, then decide to drop out when high school starts and academic pressures increase. In North Carolina, Latinos show disproportionately high rates of dropout at over 7%.8
Overcoming the challenge
Social and cultural capital (a network of people and resources from which the student gains support) are often discussed in research and writing on Latino students. Academic instrumental knowledge as a subset of social and cultural capital refers to school-specific knowledge as a type of cultural capital.9 Many children of immigrants are at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding how U.S. schools function. In 1990, the average Mexican immigrant in the U.S. had 7.6 years of schooling. In 2002, 20% of the population in Mexico had no schooling compared to 0.6% of the population in the U.S.10 Schooling experiences, thus, are less prevalent on the whole for parents of current incoming Mexican students, so access to the academic instrumental knowledge needed to help their children succeed is limited.
How can teachers and schools help students overcome the middle school challenge? Teachers and schools must work hand in hand with students, but also with the students’ parents to enlist support and build solutions.
Rueda, Monzo, and Arzubiaga outline an intervention process that works with parents and students using an additive approach.11 For example, schools and teachers find links between parents’ knowledge and practices about literacy and the school’s literacy approach. Then, schools promote a negotiation of these in relation to the student’s literacy.
The ALAS project (Achievement for Latinos through Academic Success) in Los Angeles brought improvement in school retention for a group of seventh graders. The intervention included monitoring school attendance period by period and notifying parents daily of their child’s attendance or truancy, training for the students on problem-solving skills, weekly or daily feedback to students and parents from teachers on behavior and schoolwork, training for parents on how to participate in schools and how to manage their children’s behavior, recognition and bonding activities for students, and connecting students and families with community services.12
Research on culturally relevant curriculum has also pointed out the increase in engagement among middle school students when Meso-american culture, language, and history is taught.13 Tapping into families’ cultural capital and knowledge are critical to engaging the student and the parents in the educational process. Curricular choices such as these can help teachers understand the students’ background and skills, as well as open the door to a connection with the students’ parents.
