English as a Second Language Program Evaluation - Guilderland ...

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Part 5: Next Steps, Challenges, Future Goals for the ESL program
• Proposed implementation of an ESL/Reading Recovery Position (.5)
o This person would service students who fall into the range of needing ESL and Tier 2 and Tier 3 RtI intervention support.
o This individual would be certified in ESL and then go through the year long training to become certified in Reading Recovery.
o Reading Recovery is an appropriate intervention to support language and literacy development for English language learners.
Success is likely related to the 1:1 interactions designed for each individual learner and to the quality of the oral language exchanges
in Reading Recovery.
Supportive Research
• Neal and Kelly (1999) examined outcomes for 3,992 ELLs in Reading Recovery and found that the success rate for these children compared
favorably with the total population of Reading Recovery Children in California. They also found that the children had scores within the
average range of a random sample of their grade-level peers.
• Reading Recovery serves approximately 16,000 ELLs in the US each year, and about 15% of all Reading Recovery students.
• Sufficient research has been amassed (Askew et al., 1988; The Ohio State University and Reading Recovery Council of North America, 1999;
Brown et al., 1999) to conclude that early intervention as a system innovation can work considerably to reduce early reading failure.
• Reading Recovery, as a specific model of early intervention, achieves its stated goal to enable the lowest-performing children to accelerate
their progress in a relatively short period of time, thereby making it possible for them to “catch up” to their peers.
• Shanahan and Barr (1995), in their independent evaluation of Reading Recovery, conclude that Reading Recovery attains its stated goal by
bringing the children’s learning up to that of their average-achieving peers. They report that many children leave the program with well
developed reading strategies, including phonemic awareness and spelling knowledge.
• Fluent ESL children have a higher success rate with Reading Recovery (66.3%) compared to native English speakers (62.2%) or LEP students
(61.7%). However, it appears that limited English proficient children were just as successful as their native English speaking peers.
• The longer we wait to help children who are behind, the greater the gap between them and their peers. Children who have difficulties in
the beginning stages of learning to read fall further and further behind their classmates (Stanovich, 1996).
Challenges
• Meet all the service hour requirements of our learners since beginner and intermediate students receive 6 hours per week. Our current
teachers on staff are servicing students during all periods of the day, at any time they can get time with the students. We need to look
at the increase in staff servicing English language learners with professionals that are dedicated to our Guilderland students and their
families.