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Example research essay topic: English Language Learners Culturally Diverse - 2,817 words

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American Education and Pluralistic Society Within the last 10 years, some changes happen to the U. S. student population. English language student number has increased by 1 million students. English language learners now comprise 6 % of the total school-age population, with a disproportionate number of such students in California, Florida, New York, and Illinois.

This tendency promises that the numbers of English language students will continue to grow. These students come to school representing a diversity of languages, cultures, experiences with school, economic and social power. The school reform requires that schools become convenient place for all students. This school reform puts an enormous responsibility on teachers. Special attention has to be paid to English language learners. It demands some professional skills from people who guide the learning process.

Educators faced enormous challenges in these reforms. One of the main of them is the education of teachers. At the time, over 46 million children are enrolled in over 90, 000 public schools, and 90 percent of them are likely to graduate from high school. School expenditures have reached $ 340 billion.

The past 50 years have experienced a struggle to overcome racial, ethnic and gender barriers to equal educational opportunity. This struggle ended with the splendid results. While democrats may be encouraged by this development, they need to be wary of what historian Larry Cuban terms the "trend toward vocationalizing all academic subjects. " If we measure every school by the single standard of whether or not it teaches our children "what they need to know to compete and win in the global economy, " then the common school ideal of education for a common citizenship may continue to suffer. (Fullan, 1999). There is a conceptual agreement in the literature as to the elements of effective professional development for teachers.

It consists of principles for adult learners. It requires self-direction, readiness to learn when the need is perceived. Adult learners also desire immediate application of new skills and knowledge (Knowles, 1980). Effective professional development is inputted into the schools and teachers' work.

It requires critical reflection. Promising professional development is aligned with effective teaching and learning: "Principles that describe effective teaching for students in classrooms should not differ for adults in general and teachers in particular" (Rueda, 1998). There are some professional structures that facilitate the educational process. These are teacher networks, school partnerships, teacher study groups and some others.

What these structures aim is giving the learners the opportunity to become knowledge creators instead of being simple listeners. The above elements and structures are vital for creating professional development. But they are not appropriate for educating teachers in culturally diverse schools. Any professional development in culturally diverse schools must address specific knowledge and attitudes that are relevant to teaching English language learners. Teachers need to understand basic constructs of bilingualism and second language development, the nature of language proficiency, the role of the first language and culture in learning, and the demands that education places on culturally diverse students. Teachers have to reevaluate continually what schooling means in the context of a pluralist society; the relationships between teachers and learners, and attitudes and beliefs about language, culture, and race. (Clair, 1993).

District and school leadership must make student, teacher, and organizational learning a priority. District leaders and building principals must have current substantive knowledge about effective teaching and learning for students and adults. They must have knowledge about trends in effective professional development and the education of English language learners. In order to make teaching and learning a priority, principals must safeguard teacher and student time, engage the entire staff in taking responsibility for the education of English language learners, model collegial relationships with teachers and students, and participate actively in the learning community of the school. There must be sufficient time and resources for promising professional development to take hold.

Promising professional development is about improvement and change. The more complex the change process, the more unpredictable it is (Fullan, 1999). Introducing professional development calls for teachers to work together in new ways in order to improve schooling for all students. Learning new ways of working together and tackling the complexities of teaching in culturally diverse schools takes sustained time, focus, and resources. Although different in form and focus, the following examples highlight ongoing professional development that promotes school-based inquiry and continual improvement.

Each example brings together ESL, bilingual, and content teachers or interdisciplinary teams of teachers to support the academic success of all students. In California, Animal High School is an urban school with 1, 800 students, 94 % of whom are Latino. More than half of the student population is classified as limited English proficient. Constituting themselves as the Working Group on Race, Language, and Culture, a group of teachers set out to explore language and language development issues that helped to explain their students' performance. Professional development involved looking at research and school-based professional development models, examining student achievement data and school progress, creating a plan to improve students' literacy, peer coaching, and reporting findings to the greater school faculty. Demographic trends suggest that the profile of U.

S. public school students will continue to be diverse. Education reform requires that educators provide quality schooling for all of their students. Clearly, professional development must equip teachers for this challenge. There is growing evidence that professional development approaches that are guided by teacher input and that view teacher learning as continual and transformative makes schools a better place for students and staff.

Continuous examinations in the teaching field reveals that "when education in any way goes beyond mere technical training, it reaches very close to the very core of the ego, the self, the 'person in community. '" Those who would exclude religion from public education believe that in doing so they are helping to preserve the integrity of each domain. But they can be mistaken, because religious ideas are linked to the most fundamental cultural values, and "to discuss such matters without paying attention to life's religious values unfairly isolates education from the rest of cultural life. It is certain, the schooling context for America's youth is mostly multicultural. Unfortunately, the vast majority of research about inter-group relations in schools is now 15 to 20 years old and focuses mostly on improving relations between Whites and Blacks (Fullan, 1995). There is an empirical evidence about inter-group conflict. They are settled in many different racial and ethnic groups which exist together.

Given the enormous diversity found today in many public schools, racial and ethnic relations are more complicated than they were some years ago. Public education represents an institution through which an entire texture of American society can be experienced. In the final end, inter-group relations are no longer affected just by the competition for attention but have to consider the influence of the racial and ethnic groups. One of the main objectives now is to learn more about how schools can foster positive social relationships among students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Teachers play essential roles for the children to understand the reasons in which difference is constructed. The primary objectives of the educators is to create the conditions where children will leave their limited social space and see the opportunities to experience the worlds of those different from them.

Positive cross-ethnic relations help students explore their own individuality and expand self-identity. One of the most innovative widely prescribed strategies to manage and build upon the strength of the increasing diversity found in classrooms is the use of cooperative learning techniques (Slavin, 2002). From my own experience of interaction in the group consisting of people of difference social and ethnic backgrounds, I can say that it really helps to understand the people who totally different from you. It leads to understanding the reasons for any kind of student behavior. When you try to solve some problems together and try to achieve some academic goals, you begin to understand each other. I think, it is like synergy which appears in the result of mutual work.

I think the approach of cooperative learning described by Slavin really achieve its goals and strengthen cross-racial understanding. You begin to see that the people, who surround you, are just the same as you are. It is a great feeling of communicating with the whole world in one class. Cooperative learning involves small teams of students of different academic achievement level creating activities that promote academic success for each team member. In many cases, cooperative learning provides students an opportunity to be an academic performance group. The group is also differentiated by race, gender, and language proficiency.

Then, students are asked to work in heterogeneous groups to solve problems and complete tasks. This method builds the cross-ethnic friendships and reduces racial stereotyping, discrimination, and prejudices. It worthy to notify that positive cross-ethnic relationships are not normal or, it is rather to say, are not natural among students of different racial backgrounds. Outside the classroom, students compete for limited positions on athletic teams, newspaper staffs, and student governments - organizations that are often racially identifiable and fail to provide opportunities for positive cross-ethnic interactions. Negative stereotyping is often used to justify maintaining hostility, contempt, and resentment toward others. As it was already said, Cooperative Learning Method is designed to eliminate those prejudices.

Teacher role in building the relationship among students is also very important. In this case, the works of Vygotsky should be mentioned. Traditionally, schools have not encouraged environments in which the students play an active role in their education. Vygotsky's theory, however, requires the teacher and students play deferent roles as they communicate with each other. Instead of a teacher saying what and how things have to be done, a teacher should cooperate with the students in order to provide opportunity for them to express their own point of view. A teacher should not prohibit students from making their own choice.

This concept brought a great input into the development of the pedagogic approach and is widely practiced at school. The Cooperative Learning Group Method STAD is one commonly used form of cooperative learning. For example, seventh- and eighth-grade students in the Slavin's study were assigned to groups of four or five members who varied in gender and ethnicity. The groups also had a mix of high-, average-, and low-performing students, reflecting the composition of the larger class.

Teammates met for two 40 -mm periods each week for 10 weeks to receive instruction and then to discuss and learn English language arts material. To prepare for a weekly quiz, teammates were encouraged to help each other learn the material. Students then answered test items individually. Reward structures can be of three types: individual rewards for individual achievement, group rewards for group achievement, or group rewards for individual achievement.

When groups complete assignments, the group product receives an evaluation; however, not all members may contribute equally, and in fact there is a tendency to allow higher performing students to complete the assignment. Consequently, the reward structure used by STAD (Slavin, 1999) is a group reward to which each student contributes as a function of the weekly test score pro-rated in comparison with his or her achievement division. Another strategy for assigning group rewards for individual achievement is TGT (Slavin, 1978). Students take part in a tournament of skill-testing games at the end of each week. Each student competes, as a representative of his or her group, against similar-level students from other teams. Thus, students win points for their team if their performance compares favorably with others at their level.

Although some educators are concerned about the out group competition aroused during tournaments, outcomes are as positive as when the comparison group is a more abstract division of similarly achieving students (Hall, 2002), at least when implemented with adolescent students. Cooperative learning procedures have also been implemented and evaluated by participants in elementary schools (Musial, 2002). For example, third-grade classes in a heterogeneous school district were the focus of one study, in which teachers and students completed questionnaires concerning their experiences with the procedure, and classroom dynamics were observed (Musial, 2002). Twenty-six teachers (half of the district's third-grade teachers) completed the questionnaire, saying that they used cooperative learning groups daily in their classrooms. Most had received specialized training in the technique.

They used it for a variety of subjects, reading being the most common (92 %) and spelling the least common (46 %) activity. Although the most effective reward structure identified by researchers is group rewards for individual achievement, it was used by teachers in this study less frequently than group rewards for group products and individual rewards for individual achievement. Most but not all teachers assigned students to heterogeneous groups; some used homogeneous groupings. Regardless of the reward structure or the heterogeneity of groups, teachers generally gave high ratings to academic, social, and motivational outcomes of cooperative group learning in their classes. In other words, teachers who used the procedures frequently felt that cooperative group learning was an effective academic and motivational tool and that it increased peer instruction and cooperation. Students also evaluated the academic outcomes and the motivational outcomes positively.

Not surprisingly, the cooperative behaviors of helping and listening to others may take some time to develop; it was for this reason that the programs were developed in the first place. (Slavin, 2002). The experimental evidence on cooperative learning has generally supported the main tenets of contact theory (Allport, 1954). With only a few exceptions, this research has demonstrated that, when the conditions outlined by Allport are met in the classroom, students are more likely to have friends outside their own racial groups than they would in traditional classrooms, as measured by responses to such sociometric items as "Who are your best friends in this class?" (Hall, 2002). Another way of assessing strong and weak friendship ties was used by Hall (1984) to assess peer relations among fifth and sixth graders who had participated in cooperative learning groups.

Students rated each classmate on a 3 -point scale in terms of liking; liking a lot indicated a strong friendship tie, liking some indicated a weak friendship tie. For these students, the effect of cooperative learning groups was to increase their weak cross-race friendship ties without affecting strong ties. Similar conclusions were found when cooperative learning group experiences were compared with other race relations programs in high schools (Slavin, 1999). The dependent variables used in this analysis included the race of students' top three friends at school and peers they spoke with on the phone.

Students who had experienced mixed-race learning groups were more likely to have cross-race friends and have spoken on the phone to a cross-race peer than students who had experienced other programs such as a multicultural curriculum. Thus, cooperative learning appears to facilitate the development of positive cross-race peer relations, whether at the level of weak friendship ties or close, reciprocated friendship choices. The implications of such research results are encouraging. These findings suggest that positive social relations among students of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds help students to transcend and transform shared cultural norms and attitudes that can prohibit meaningful cross-cultural interactions. Such transformation does not require students to ignore or eliminate the differences that exist among their classmates, in their histories, communities, and families, but rather to understand them using a different cultural paradigm.

The positive social relations that are built between students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds as they work collaboratively to solve complex problems or to complete meaningful tasks are not simply a matter of students' liking each other or having positive thoughts about each other. These cross-cultural interactions are about broadening the cultural frames of reference that define the social worlds and dictate social network patterns for these students. Conclusion Cooperative learning is an instructional approach that has been shown to promote a variety of positive cognitive, affective, and social outcomes. The intent of cooperative learning is to enhance academic achievement by providing students with increased opportunities for discussion, learning from each other, and by allowing students to divide up tasks in ways that tap into their academic strengths. Cooperative learning promotes some of the most important goals in American education: increasing the academic achievement of all students while simultaneously improving inter-group relations among students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Words: 2, 704. Bibliography: Clair M. Racial Dilemma at School. New York: The Viking Press, 1993.

Dupuis V. , Musial D. , Hall G, Gollnick D. Introduction to the Foundations of American Education. (12 th ed. ) Boston: Allyn & Baeon, 2002. Fullan J. Education for Breaking Boundaries. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc. , 1999. Rueda K.

Racial Students at School. New York: Free Press, 1998. Slavin R. E. Educational Psychology: Theory and Practice. (7 th ed. ) Boston: Allyn & Baeon, 2002. Vygotsky L.

Zone of Approximate Development. New York: Science Publications, 1978


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Research essay sample on English Language Learners Culturally Diverse

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