New WIDA Bulletin: Focus on Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education

The WIDA Consortium released a new Bulletin in May 2015 titled: Focus on Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education.  It is a 14 page document with a lot of practical advice for educators of SLIFE.  The content in the bulletin contains many of the key ideas from the academic literature but  presents them in a very clear and readable format.

A highlight for me in this document was the interview with  Dr. Deborah Short, co-developer of the SIOP Model and director of research on English language learners and newcomer programs for the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education.  Some of her main recommendations for SLIFE are to:

1. Use specially designed curriculum to help fill in gaps in knowledge, particularly at the secondary level. Curriculum should integrate content and language instruction from the start, and also integrate academic and social language.
2. Ensure that students’ literacy development is appropriate to their age, not necessarily to their academic levels.
3. Train teachers to make use of the student’s home language by doing simple things like having students annotate the word vocabulary notebooks in the native language.
4. Make a separate class or two available in their first year to provide targeted interventions to help fill in the gaps in content areas and developing English skills.
5. Allow students the time to catch up, by providing programs during summer vacation or holiday vacations, after-school programs and Saturday programs during the school year.

The interview contains a number of other good suggestions and the rest of the bulletin is useful as well.  This document, combined with the most recent DeCapua and Marshall article, would provide an excellent introduction to the main ideas and strategies involved in the education of SLIFE.