Common Core
Standards
Lily Wong Fillmore September 27-28, 2010
The buzz––many questions
Have the needs of English learners been addressed in the
common standards?
What level of English proficiency is assumed by the
standards?
The CCS do not say what to do about students at different
levels of English proficiency--so what happens to them?
My view on the CCS?
I applaud them.
They not only take on the gap
between current K-12 standards
and readiness for college and the
world beyond school....
They also force us to ask
whether the problem that has
diminished standards in K-12
schooling has also made it
The CCS document
The problem is spelled out in the Appendices––A & B lay
out a predicament in instruction that I will argue affects
ELs and language minorities disproportionately.
There has been––over the past 2 or 3 decades, a gradual
erosion in the complexity of texts students are expected to
handle and produce in school, resulting in a huge gap
between what even successful students can understand and
do at the end of high school, and what they face in college
or on the job.
Not everyone is negatively affected by the erosion of
The lucky ones are...
Kids
––
whose caretakers read to them
in the early years of life, and engaged
them in discussions of situations and
ideas drawn from books.
Kids whose teachers augmented the
materials they were working with, and
provided the help they needed to
discover how language works in texts.
How ELs and LMs fare...
If texts have been “dumbed down” in general, they have
been doubly and triply so for students who are thought not
to be able to handle the “regular” curriculum.
Language minority students find themselves increasingly
segregated whether by schools or by classes, where the
materials are pitched at a much lower level than materials
meant for mainstream students.
Will the CCS change things?
The Common Core Standards can be thought of as a
blueprint for preparing students for college and beyond,
but they can hardly guarantee that students will be better
educated a decade from now than they currently are.
California, for example, has had a superb set of standards
in place for over a decade now. Its ELA standards were
adopted in 1996, its math standards in 1997.
Take a look at how CA’s students performed in the 2009
NAEP reading test, and you’ll see what I mean.
Much depends on what happens
at the state & local levels...
That’s where decisions about
structure, instructional
approach, textbooks, and other
teaching materials are made.
Such decisions are especially
EL instruction in far too many places
A lot of attention and energy focused on turning ELs into
English speakers, and not nearly enough on educating
them.
How is the adequacy of EL programs judged at the state
and district levels? Reclassification rates! If the real
concern was in educating ELs, rapid reclassification
would not be as important as it is made out to be.
Is English the be-all, end-all? All students coming out of
our schools must know and speak English well, but as we
know, there are many students––call them language
Why bring up “language minorities”?
The instructional concerns
discussed here do not affect
ELLs exclusively.
LMs speak English, but they
too face a language barrier that
is not all that different from the
one that prevents ELs from
making progress.
All of which suggests: English
proficiency by itself is not
Confusion about what’s needed...
About what ELs and LMs need in order to meet any
curricular standards, old or new, and at every level.
A lot of confusion across the board about how to support
language and literacy development in ELs and LMs,
leaving too many students proficient in neither for much
too long.
The result: many “long term ELLs”––i.e., ELs even after 6+
years in U. S. schools, a phenomenon that has been
Counter-productive practices
Glitches galore––stemming, sadly, from some popular practices in educating ELs and in fact, any student who is perceived as being “at risk”
educationally.
Support coming from peer tutors, who are sometimes only slightly more
You might wonder––Why?
Such practices are based on the assumption that ELs and
LMs will be turned off to anything that is too hard.
Decodable, simplified texts are supposed to allow them to
learn to read on their own and have direct and immediate
access to meaning.
What’s wrong with simplified materials and approach?
Simplified + decodable usually means limited, restricted,
and thin in meaning. Most importantly, such materials
provide no access to the language of real texts.
Truth is––for ELs especially, any text is too hard to manage
initially, and they will need instructional support for a while
(although not for as long as commonly believed) to read and
interpret texts in English. Adapted texts are probably
necessary for a year or so, but not much longer than that!
Even then, there must be a gradual increase from one text to
another in the level of complexity of language and content.
What ELs and LMs need are authentic and age appropriate
texts, which they work on with appropriate instructional
support from teachers who know how to support language
development.
Academic language can only be learned from texts––by
noticing how it works in reading texts, engaging with,
Contrarian thinking...
I’m reminded of Hank Levin’s approach to educating “at
risk” students––Accelerate rather than remediate.
That might seem like contrarian thinking in the case of
English learners––how could students who have to learn
the school language possibly manage the kind of
What all students (ELs included) need
The English that figures in
complex thought and
communication: Academic
English, often mentioned,
nevertheless, under-specified
and poorly understood.
It is vocabulary, yes, but it
involves so much more.
Here’s a sample
An excerpt from a text offered as an example of materials
kids should be reading in Gr. 6-8 (see Appendix B, p.98):
“
That much-‐reviled bottleneck known as the American supermarket checkout lane would be an even greater exercise in frustration were it not for several technological advances. The Universal Product Code and the decoding laser scanner, introduced in 1974, tally a shopper’s groceries far more quickly and accurately than the old method ofinputting each purchase manually into a cash register. But beeping a large order past the scanner would have led only to a faster pileup of cans and boxes down the line, where the bagger works, had it not been for the introduction, more than a century earlier, of an even
A look at the subject of the first
sentence reveals one feature of AE!
An excerpt from a text offered as an example of materials
kids should be reading in Gr. 6-8 (see Appendix B, p.98):
“
That much-‐reviled bottleneck known as the American supermarket checkout lane would be an even greater exercise in frustration were it not for several technological advances. The Universal Product Code and the decoding laser scanner, introduced in 1974, tally a shopper’s groceries far more quickly and accurately than the old method ofinputting each purchase manually into a cash register. But beeping a large order past the scanner would have led only to a faster pileup of cans and boxes down the line, where the bagger works, had it not been for the introduction, more than a century earlier, of an even
Another complex NP in the predicate!
An excerpt from a text offered as an example of materials
kids should be reading in Gr. 6-8 (see Appendix B, p.98):
“
That much-‐reviled bottleneck known as the American supermarket checkout lane would be an even greater exercise in frustration were it not for several technological advances. The Universal Product Code and the decoding laser scanner, introduced in 1974, tally a shopper’s groceries far more quickly and accurately than the old method ofinputting each purchase manually into a cash register. But beeping a large order past the scanner would have led only to a faster pileup of cans and boxes down the line, where the bagger works, had it not been for the introduction, more than a century earlier, of an even
Bloated NPs are a hallmark
of academic discourse.
An excerpt from a text offered as an example of materials
kids should be reading in Gr. 6-8 (see Appendix B, p.98):
“
That much-‐reviled bottleneck known as the American supermarket checkout lane would be an even greater exercise in frustration were it not for several technological advances. The Universal Product Code and the decoding laser scanner, introduced in 1974, tally a shopper’s groceries far more quickly and accurately than the old method ofinputting each purchase manually into a cash register. But beeping a large order past the scanner would have led only to a faster pileup of cans and boxes down the line, where the bagger works, had it not been for the introduction, more than a century earlier, of an even
Constructions calling for complex
cognitive processing in interpretation
An excerpt from a text offered as an example of materials
kids should be reading in Gr. 6-8 (see Appendix B, p.98):
“
That much-‐reviled bottleneck known as the American supermarket checkout lane would be an even greater exercise in frustration were it not for several technological advances. The Universal Product Code and the decoding laser scanner, introduced in 1974, tally a shopper’s groceries far more quickly and accurately than the old method ofinputting each purchase manually into a cash register. But beeping a large order past the scanner would have led only to a faster pileup of cans and boxes down the line, where the bagger works, had it not been for the introduction, more than a century earlier, of an even
Comparative expressions calling for
reconstruction of missing standards
An excerpt from a text offered as an example of materials
kids should be reading in Gr. 6-8 (see Appendix B, p.98):
“
That much-‐reviled bottleneck known as the American supermarket checkout lane would be an even greater exercise in frustration were it not for several technological advances. The Universal Product Code and the decoding laser scanner, introduced in 1974, tally a shopper’s groceries far more quickly and accurately than the old method ofinputting each purchase manually into a cash register. But beeping a large order past the scanner would have led only to a faster pileup of cans and boxes down the line, where the bagger works, had it not been for the introduction, more than a century earlier, of an even
