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The stats of English Language Learners in Public Schools

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Instructional Strategies for ELL Students with Special Education Needs

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Instructional Strategies for ELL Students with Special Education Needs

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As a teacher there are many strategies that we can use in the classroom for ELLs with special needs.  We need to be willing to change our instruction to make learning easier and successful for all students.

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Special Needs and Language Learning

Your English Language Learner (ELL) students who need special education typically lag behind their peers in developing English language skills. Not only does this frustrate these students, but you may feel challenged if you are not prepared to deal with special needs. However, you can do many things to help these students using your knowledge of teaching strategies in English as a second language.

To begin, you should know for a fact that a specific student is in the special education program at your school. Never assume that a student needs special education because of low achievement. Next, you need to gather information from the special education team about the exact disability and how it affects academic performance. Once you have this information, you can target the language skill you need to determine an instructional strategy to help the student.

For example, Jean is an ELL teacher who has just learned that her ELL student Olesya has dysgraphia. This disability causes Olesya to have difficulty with handwriting, spelling, and organizing ideas, so her English writing skills are very poor. The good news is that now that Jean knows the writing skills affected by the disability, she can prepare activities to target these skills. Jean includes easy spelling activities in her lesson plans and assists Olesya while she works. Also, Jean shows students several ways to organize their ideas before writing, such as brainstorming, making a map, and drawing a story line.

Now let's look at some ideas that you can use to help ELL students who have common special needs.

Target the Skill

As you've seen, the key to determining an instructional strategy for ELLs with special needs is to target the language skills affected by their disability. Your instructional strategy may include activities using a variety of tools that can be visual, auditory, or that promote hands-on work with language.

Remember that special needs are broad. This table includes just some of the most common special needs, how they affect English skills, and teaching strategies you may choose to address them.

Note that any adjustment you make for a student with special needs should work out for the entire class. This way, you do not disrupt others or change lesson plans at the last minute.

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instructional strategies for ell students with special education needs | study.com

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Instructional Strategies for ELL Students with Special Education Needs | Study.com

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Your English Language Learner (ELL) students who need special education typically lag behind their peers in developing English language skills. Not only does this frustrate these students, but you may feel challenged if you are not prepared to deal with special needs.

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It is important for all of you to understand the legal ramifications surrounding the identification of ELL students for special education. This article does a nice job of outlining the facts.

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Many states have regulations in place to watch for special education programs to monitor referrals. If they notice that 80% of the special education program in one district has ELL students being referred, then state representatives from the state office of education will come and look into the situation.

I also know our school district has people in place to test for special education in Spanish. This really helps to determine if the student has a SLD or disability or not

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ELL learners and the need for interventions 

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ELL learners and the need for interventions 

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Trisa---These numbers testify of the growing number of English being the second language of many here in America. Although many speak English and another language, their cultural differences and having English as a second language comes with many challenges.  Many of our teachers are bi-lingual and it helps to be able to speak/communicate to certain students, but it helps to have students that work hard at learning English to complete assignments and comprehend what they are learning.

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ELL students who do not have disabilities probably need differentiation of assignments and work. I like that this abstract (I could not open the article, It was locked) talks about inclusion and helping to include students even if they speak another language. Kids learn quickly and can really grow as they learn in school. I think it creates wonderful opportunities for them to know two languages. In my daughters sixth grade class there were two girls that knew zero English. It was difficult for them to complete assignments. I liked to show them apps that would translate their work into Spanish. They really liked and understood assignments as they read them in Spanish. We used Utahs UEN library and they could listen to any article/book in Spanish

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Still learning, but I can do a few of these now....

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Still learning, but I can do a few of these now....

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Posted by: Alicia Wiser

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Although this research was conducted with adult English Language Learners, it still was relevant
as it identified some of the struggles that ELL students have in writing and then it listed some strategies that teachers can implement in their classrooms to help ELL students.

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In my district ELL students have to have two full years of ELL services before they can be referred for SPED services. I thought this article had some good ideas for helping the referral process.

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A kindergarten teacher in a San Diego public school last fall referred six of her students-all English-language learners-for evaluation for special education. All of them, as it turned out, needed eyeglasses; one needed a hearing aid. None needed to be placed in special education.

A few years ago, such simple explanations for the students' academic difficulties might not have been picked up so early. But last year, the 132,000-student San Diego district-with a history of lopsided referrals of English-learners to special education-created a step-by-step process to make sure every explanation and intervention for a child's lagging academic performance had been examined before assigning a placement in special education.

"Special education had become the default intervention," said Sonia Picos, a program manager in the district's special education department. "Special education was seen as the place with the answers, without taking into consideration what the long-term implications were going to be for the students."

Accurately identifying ELL students who also need special education services has long been a problem for educators. Historically, English-learners were overrepresented in special education, but litigation and civil rights complaints have, in more recent years, led to an equally troubling problem with identifying too few ELLs with legitimate special education needs, or not providing services to them in a timely manner.

National research done within the last decade, including a 2003 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, found that overidentification occurred more commonly in districts with small numbers of ELLs (fewer than 99 such students), and underidentification was more common in districts with larger English-language learner populations.

More recent data, however, seem to suggest that underidentification might be the larger issue on a national level: In 2009-10, English-learners comprised 9.7 percent of students enrolled in public schools, but made up 8.3 percent of public school students being served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And by 2030, English-learners will comprise an estimated 40 percent of the American student population.

The heart of the problem, educators and researchers say, is discerning whether students are simply struggling with acquiring English or truly have disabilities that are impeding their progress.

It's a challenge that the Education Department is trying to help districts tackle, starting off by commissioning an exploratory study of a half-dozen districts that will document, in detail, the procedures and techniques that educators are using to identify English-learners for special education.

Among students with disabilities, "there seems to be evidence in some areas of overrepresentation of English-learners, and in some areas of underrepresentation of English-learners," said Liz Eisner, an education research analyst with the department who is one of the staff members overseeing the new study. "I've heard educators say that it is often hard to validly identify students and disentangle the disability from the language problems."

One of the difficulties is that so many of the assessment and evaluation tools for determining whether students have disabilities are intended for students who speak a single language, usually English, and who are proficient in it.

Study's Scope

The Education Department's project will include interviews with district staff members and the collection of documents-without compromising students' privacy, Ms. Eisner said. The goal is to understand how different students' cases progress from referral to placement, or not being placed, in special education. Results are expected in late 2013.

Since the reauthorization of the idea in 2004, districts have had the option of using response to intervention, or RTI, which allows teachers to intervene when students are floundering regardless of whether the students are identified as having disabilities.

The districts selected by the department will include those that have had a long history of serving English-learners and those experiencing a surge in their ELL population, and a combination of districts that are using RTI and those that don't. RTI involves using an escalating set of techniques to address students' deficiencies when they are struggling.

Using RTI can prevent incorrect referrals to special education, but can have drawbacks, too, such as delaying a student's evaluation for a disability by a school psychologist.

San Diego's Struggle

Faced with a class action five years ago over the poor quality of its special education services, the San Diego school district hired Thomas Hehir, a Harvard Graduate School of Education professor and a former special education chief in the federal Education Department, to take a hard look at how students were faring.

Among Mr. Hehir's most jarring findings: Latino English-language learners were 70 percent more likely than their Latino peers who were not English-learners to be referred to special education.

In a follow-up study two years later, Jaime E. Hernandez, a longtime bilingual special educator in Los Angeles who helps monitor that district's compliance with a special education consent decree, examined records of San Diego English-learners placed in special education and found several red flags. English-learners were being identified for special education, on average, earlier than their non-ELL peers; they were more likely to be placed in restrictive settings; and there had been limited use of assessments in their primary language-typically Spanish-to evaluate them for special education. Mr. Hernandez also found little evidence that educators had considered extrinsic factors such as health, family conditions, or previous learning environments that could explain a child's academic struggles.

"What was obvious from that work was that we needed to be much more comprehensive in how we evaluated our English-learners, and we definitely needed much more collaboration across departments," said Sandra Martinez, the executive director of special education in San Diego.

So the district set out to create a comprehensive evaluation process for English-language learners that would "slow everyone down" and "look at all the features of a child's life" before getting to the point of referring him or her to special education, Ms. Martinez said. The goal was valid referrals and accuracy of special education decisions for ELLs, so educators and specialists from across the district-bilingual teachers, special educators, psychologists-developed a set of procedures for district staff members to follow when students are flagged as possibly needing services.

The new system, put in place last fall, starts as a "pre-referral" process that requires educators to try a series of appropriate general education interventions tailored to each student's situation before making an actual referral to special education.

In San Diego, closely examining "extrinsic factors" in students' lives is key to that pre-referral process, said Ms. Picos, including figuring out if lack of parental involvement, attendance issues, nutrition, or frequent moves, to name a few, might explain a student's academic troubles. Educators also must determine whether students have received good instruction and support in English-language development.

"This whole pre-referral process is RTI," Ms. Picos said. "If we take a close look at these extrinsic factors, we can individualize what each student needs, and in many cases, find the appropriate intervention."

Only after educators have exhausted the general education support options for ELLs and still don't see improvement do they refer students to special education for evaluation.

Talking the Talk

At that point, valid and reliable assessment of students is critical and is often where districts struggle most. Many either can't or don't evaluate students in their primary languages.

"When most of the tools that are used to assess learning disabilities are in English and were normed on monolingual English-speaking kids who are part of the dominant culture, you can't rely on that to tell you if a child with a different primary language has a learning disability or if they just don't know the language," said Kathy Escamilla, an education professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has done research on the impact of assessment practices on Spanish-speaking students.

Assessing ELLs for special education was a hot topic at a conference of the Waltham, Mass.-based Urban Special Education Leadership Collaborative earlier this year, said Will Gordillo, the director of exceptional-student education in the 177,000-student Palm Beach County district in Florida.

The multicultural team that works on evaluating ELLs for disabilities in his district includes bilingual psychologists and speech-language therapists. While most of the district's English-learners speak Spanish or Haitian Creole, the district hires interpreters and consultants when necessary to work with students and families who speak other languages.

And, as in San Diego, Palm Beach County has detailed guidelines for evaluating children. Though students ultimately may not be diagnosed with disabilities, the process may lead to providing additional language supports, Mr. Gordillo said.

An even thornier issue, Ms. Escamilla said, is how to deal with U.S.-born English-language learners who don't have strong literacy skills in their primary language. Most ELLs are born in the United States, she said, and many don't receive formal instruction in their first language, so assessing them for special education in that language "isn't reliable."

For school psychologists, questions remain about what practices will best increase the accuracy of the identification of disabilities in ELL students, said Mary Beth Klotz, the director of idea projects and technical assistance for the National Association of School Psychologists, in Bethesda, Md.

"I would start by paying extra attention to all the idea safeguards and requirements for any special education evaluation, since they ring extra true for ELLs," she said. Using multiple sources of data is important because many typical evaluation tools don't have the same reliability and validity for ELLs.

She said schools should expect evaluations for ELL students to take longer and compare their progress with that of similar students.

"If the only comparison is with an ELL student's monolingual peers," Ms. Klotz said, "the conclusions may not be meaningful, valid, or fair."

Published in Print: August 29, 2012, as Evaluating ELLs for Special Needs a Challenge

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Evaluating ELLs for Special Needs a Challenge

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A kindergarten teacher in a San Diego public school last fall referred six of her students-all English-language learners-for evaluation for special education. All of them, as it turned out, needed eyeglasses; one needed a hearing aid. None needed to be placed in special education.

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This was enlightening and very interesting. Many of these ideas would be great for not only ELL students but students in the class with lower levels. I loved her ideas of the sticky notes around the room and the picture dictionary.

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Classroom Desk Arrangements for Best Behavior

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More info: http://classroomcaboodle.com/teacher-resource/mentoring-english-language-learners/ We can give a big boost to our English language learners with a few simple classroom strategies. Here's how to make the most of every day for ESL students. Betsy Weigle | Classroom Caboodle

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Over-identification: Why ELLs may be referred to Special Education too soon

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Over-identification: Why ELLs may be referred to Special Education too soon

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This is one of the many problems that are found when trying to assess ELLs and see if they are struggling in learning the new language or if there is a disability that they need to be worried about and get help for.

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english language learners and sped - Bing video

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How to Speak English English Second Language Free Lessons What Its Like to Be an English Language Learner English Language Conversation How to Learn English Language English Language Learners in the Classroom Teaching English Language Learners English Learners 12 Months English Language Learner Dictionary Phonics English Language Learner

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This video always opens my eyes to the types of literature I am bringing into the classroom. If we are addressing the cultural differences of ELL students then we need to make sure we integrate literature that tells multiple stories.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED

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These are interesting to keep in mind.  These are the 6-8 descriptors but there are some for every grade on the website below.  Help us keep in mind what our ELL students should be able to do by each grade for each level of WIDA. This would help me as a teacher to know if the student was "level typical" for their ELL level or if there might be other concerns to possibly watch for in their academics.  You can find the others here - https://www.uen.org/core/englishlanguage/downloads/CAN_DO_Key_Uses_Gr6-8.pdf

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I thought these were some good recommendations for teachers before referring ELL students to SPED.

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Doing the groundwork before recommending an ELL for special education testing

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Special Education and English Language Learners

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Special Education and English Language Learners

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Article produced by the NEA. I found helpful information for best practices when qualifying ELL students for special education.