Many Fort Worth students backslide in online classes. It’s even harder for this group.
Medina Ali felt like she was losing her words last school year as she struggled through online classes.
Instructions from teachers didn’t always make sense. She had a hard time asking for help. And she could tell the language skills she’d worked so hard to build were eroding.
Ali, a ninth-grader at North Side High School, and her family came to Fort Worth three years ago as refugees from Ethiopia. At home, her family speaks Afar, the language of the Afar ethnic group in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. Ali learned English quickly at school, through daily interaction with teachers and conversations with other students.
But when schools shut down last spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic, those interactions stopped. In-person work with teachers moved online, where she had a harder time understanding and making herself understood. Ali’s conversations with other students ended entirely. As the weeks wore on, Ali could feel her English slipping away. It was a lonely feeling, she said.
The Fort Worth school district has 27,814 students who speak and understand limited English. Those students, categorized as English language learners, make up a little more than a third of the district’s overall enrollment. Among their families, 161 languages are spoken at home.
Teachers and experts say those students are at even greater risk than their peers of falling behind during remote learning. English language learners and their teachers rely more heavily on nonverbal cues to communicate. And students benefit more from one-on-one attention from their teachers — something that doesn’t translate well to an online class setting.
“My phrase I like to say is. ‘I have to sit right next to them,’” said Monita Sharpe, an English teacher at North Side High School.
English learners need one-on-one guidance
When schools shut down last spring, Sharpe met in person with a small group of 12th-grade English language learners so they’d be able to graduate. This year, the Fort Worth school district gave students the option of returning to school in person in September. District officials particularly encouraged students who were at greatest risk of losing ground during remote learning, including English language learners, to come back to campus.
Some of those students, including Ali, have come back to school in person. But many still work from home, Sharpe said. Many live in multi-generational households, in which older family members are at increased risk if children bring COVID-19 home from school. Others have parents or other family members who work service-sector jobs and can’t afford to stay home from work. So Sharpe and other teachers invite those students to school after hours, when there are fewer people on campus, for extra support.
Sharpe has noticed many of her English language learners become stagnant or decline during remote learning. Their teachers try to work with them, she said, but much of what goes in online classes gets lost in translation. Those students generally benefit from small-group environments and repetition. Teachers need to be able to look them in the eye and understand what they need when they don’t have the words to explain it themselves.
It’s harder for Sharpe to see what her students need when they’re online, she said. English language learners can’t always explain what they need, she said, because they don’t have the English vocabulary. When she works with those students in a classroom, she can see when they look puzzled. But even when her remote students have their cameras on, she can’t present a lesson and watch their faces at the same time, so it’s difficult to know who understands the material and who needs extra help, she said.
It seems hardest for ninth-graders, Sharpe said. Those students are already at an awkward developmental stage, and they’re new to high school, she said. Even in the best of circumstances, those students can be shy and withdrawn. English language learners have to navigate the language barrier and all the challenges associated with online learning on top of the ordinary challenges associated with being a ninth-grader. Many of those students lose confidence or shut down, Sharpe said.
School work was harder for Ali during in-person school shutdowns. She isn’t used to doing her work on a computer, she said. She had trouble understanding the written instructions she got from her teachers, so it was hard for her to figure out what was expected of her. When she’s at school, teachers can sit down with her and help her get on the right track.
Ali went back to school in October, when the district began allowing families to choose between remote learning and in-person learning. She likes going to school. It’s easier when she can see her teachers in person and ask for help, she said, and things she would have a hard time understanding in a remote learning session take her teacher just a few seconds to explain when they’re sitting side by side.
Jerry Moore, the Fort Worth school district’s chief academic officer, said in an email that the district is working to ensure English language learners have the opportunity to listen, speak, read and write across all content areas. At the district’s highest-need campuses, instructional coaches work with teachers on ways to reach English language learners, he said.
Language barrier puts learning out of reach
Elena Izquierdo, a professor of teacher education at the University of Texas at El Paso’s College of Education, said the marginalization of students with a limited grasp of English isn’t new. Historically, those students haven’t had access to the full educational curriculum because of language barriers. And despite the fact that English language learners make up one of the fastest-growing student groups in the country, only a small fraction of the nation’s teachers are certified to teach them, she said.
The pandemic has given school districts the opportunity to focus the ways they deliver education to their students, Izquierdo said. Districts need to use that opportunity to rethink how they work with English language learners, she said.
Although a lack of English proficiency is the most obvious factor limiting those students’ access to education, the particular aspects of English they need are an important consideration, she said. Students who are proficient in conversational English may not have mastered the academic vocabulary they need to learn math, science or social studies, she said. So they’re forced to learn the language they need to understand the content in their classes while they learn the content itself.
Likewise, districts haven’t historically done a good job of reaching out to those students’ families, she said. Parents who don’t speak English often have a hard time getting information from their children’s schools, she said. If they get anything, it’s often little more than copies of mailers, translated into their own languages. But there’s often no one who can explain things face to face. Those conversations have become even more difficult in the context of the pandemic, she said.
“It’s become incredibly unmanageable right now,” Izquierdo said.
Relationships with parents are important
Rebecca Callahan, a professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin, said teacher and principal training programs generally don’t offer much guidance on how to work with English language learners. Callahan and other researchers have released guidance and offered online training to help teachers reach those students more effectively during remote learning, but she acknowledged that teachers are stretched so thin this year that it’s unlikely many will have the capacity to do extra training.
A disproportionate number of those students are economically disadvantaged, Callahan said, so they’re less likely to have high-speed internet access at home. Even in districts like Fort Worth, which has provided students with mobile wifi hotspots, some may not have the bandwidth or the space at home for every child in the family to participate in remote learning at once, she said.
Building relationships with the families of English language learners is critical to helping them succeed, Callahan said. Those families often need information not just about upcoming school events, but also how schooling in the United States works.
But those relationships are difficult to build during a pandemic, she said. Furthermore, many of the tools districts typically use to communicate with families don’t always work with English learners, she said. A teacher recently told Callahan she had limited success reaching non-English-speaking families via email, but generally had more luck with WhatsApp, a text messaging app those families often use to talk to relatives outside the United States. That communication seems to go most smoothly in places where those relationships existed before the pandemic, she said.
One of those locations is Pajaro Valley Unified School District, about 17 miles east of Santa Cruz, California, which rolled out a new family engagement program designed to reach non-English-speaking families about three years ago. Alicia Jimenez, the district’s public information officer, said about 65% of the district’s students are English language learners.
Until about three years ago, most of the district’s communication happened in English, she said. But district officials recognized the importance of communicating with families who don’t speak English at home and broadened their outreach efforts in other languages, she said. Now, the district’s social media posts, parent mailings and press releases are in English and Spanish.
The district has found ways to communicate with families in other languages, as well, she said. Many Mexican immigrant families in the district aren’t proficient in either English or Spanish, but instead speak Mixteco Bajo, a centuries-old indigenous language spoken in parts of Mexico, she said. Mixteco Bajo is a verbal language without a writing system, she said, so the district works with an interpreter who communicates with parents by phone, she said.
Since the pandemic began, district leaders noticed that many families still weren’t receiving correspondence from their schools, Jimenez said. So staffers updated the district’s communications records, and the district began using messaging apps in addition to phone calls and email to contact families, she said.
Laila Ferris, chief of languages for the El Paso school district, said the district has stepped up its efforts to communicate with non-English-speaking parents during the pandemic. The district created teams of counselors, administrators and other staff members who work to get in touch with families when teachers can’t reach them, she said. The district has also begun sending resources to families of English language learners dealing with social and emotional learning, she said.
About 27% of the district’s students are English language learners, Ferris said. But there are schools in the district where nearly every student is an English learner, she said. If the district wants to help those students succeed during the pandemic, it’s critical that it continues reaching out to their families in their native languages, she said.
“That’s non-negotiable,” she said.
Schools can help some students catch up
Sharpe, the North Side teacher in Fort Worth, said she worries about the long-term effects the pandemic will have on her English language learners. When the winter semester began in early February, a few of Sharpe’s remote students returned to school in person for the first time in months. Although they were midway through the year, that day was like the first day of school for those students, she said.
The district may have time to help younger students make up the ground they lost, she said. Districts already have systems in place to help new students who are behind catch up with their new classmates, she said. Those systems can also help students who lose their English skills during remote learning, she said. But for others, including the seniors who graduated last year, the damage may be impossible to undo, she said.
“I do believe we’re going to have to play catch-up for a while,” Sharpe said. “I do believe it’s going to be lasting damage for some.”
