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English Language Learners

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Providing English Language Learners (ELLs) equal opportunity to learn is one of the most important challenges that education institution face today. Since 2001, the No Child Left Behind Policy mandating that the U.S. elementary and secondary schools to adopt academic standards and corresponding assessment systems for all students in the U.S. public schools. This policy makes standardized testing more important and high-stake than ever before, because the consequences of these testing would determine grade promotion and college admission. Most ELL students are performing below their monolingual counterparts on standardized tests. Furthermore, nationally nearly 40 percent of English Language Learners wouldn’t graduate from high school under …show more content…
From mid-80s till 2015, Chinese economy has grown in double digits, making China the second largest economy in the world; nevertheless, these newly generated wealth is not equally distributed among the nation. A report from Forbes has shown that in 2014 the income inequality of China is close to the highest level of inequality in the world, found in Lesotho (Hsu, 2016). While China homes more billionaires than the U.S., the poorest twenty-five present only owns one percent of Chinese economy. While the rich have access to quality education, the poor are further deprived of education resource and opportunities.

The notion that school has the capacity and responsibility to bring social reform (Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, 2012) propelled educators to take on the responsibility to address the issues mentioned above. Teachers, principals, and policy makers should make pedagogical, structural, and policy level changes to meet the needs of ELLs in the U.S. and the economical unprivileged students, so that all students can have the skills to participate in social life and opportunity to climb social ladder (Counts, …show more content…
To meet these goals, education institution should develop a culture and system to support learning which is having the ability of understanding and using knowledge, rather than just remembering facts (John D. Bransford, 1999). Students with disability and ELLs are prone to have difficulties in expressing their learned knowledge through paper exams that focus on recounting of information or essays that need elaborated articulations. Therefore, designing an assessment system that could reflect students’ learning without using English academic language may allow educators to more accurately assess students’ academic attainments. One example of the more flexible assessment is through organizing and assessing academic activities such as building science projects, drawing conceptual pictures, and etc. These activities would prevent teachers from overlooking existing knowledge that can’t be expressed through language; it can also help teachers to better understand student’s ideas and reflect on what can be improved (John D. Bransford,

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