Oregon Live – Betsy Hammond
“Over the past six years, Oregon schools have become dramatically more successful at helping students from other language backgrounds master English within five or six years. As a result, English as a second language courses have become sparse in middle and high schools, with elementary students accounting for more than 75 percent of those who get daily help acquiring English. As recently as 2008, it was much more rare for Oregon schools to complete the job of teaching English to non-native speakers by the end of elementary school. Instead, middle and high school students made up 40 percent of students still learning English. Several factors have driven the change: New standards for what to teach, better teaching materials, introduction of a single test to judge English proficiency across Oregon, more accountability for schools’ results with English learners and loads of training in teaching methods that work better than the old ones.”(more)