HELPING ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS FOCUS OF $11 MILLION IN
GRANTS TO UH
U.S. Department of Education Taps University’s TIMES
to Lead Research Efforts
HOUSTON, November 21, 2005 – A U.S. classroom environment
is designed to challenge and educate children. But when a student’s
first language isn’t English, the challenges may seem insurmountable
and an education is often put at risk.
Thanks to two U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) grants totaling
more than $11 million, researchers at the University of Houston’s
Texas Institute for Measurement Evaluation and Statistics (TIMES)
will examine ways to make classrooms more productive for students
unfamiliar with English.
USDOE’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) awarded TIMES
$9.9 million to create the National Research and Development Center
for English Language Learners (NRDCELL) and $1.6 million to continue
its earlier work on the development of the Diagnostic Assessment
of Reading Comprehension for English Language Learners.
NRDCELL is a five-year project that will research literacy and English
language development of Spanish-speaking elementary and middle school
students.
“There is a thread of research within the center that includes
designing intervention methods for students who are struggling,
modification of classroom instruction and a model of teaching called
Sheltered Instruction Observational Protocol (SIOP),” said
David Francis, director of TIMES.
The SIOP model is widely used in the U.S. to provide instruction
to English Language Learners. It involves strategic methods designed
to bolster a student’s grasp of English while simultaneously
using the language as a way of teaching the classroom’s subject
matter.
NRDCELL will team UH and TIMES with researchers from the University
of Texas at Austin, Harvard University, the Center for Applied Linguistics,
the University of California, Berkeley, and California State University,
Long Beach.
The Diagnostic Assessment of Reading Comprehension is a four-year
project that will focus on creating a test to measure reading comprehension
skills of monolingual and English-learning late elementary and early
middle school students.
“In late elementary school and early middle school, reading
becomes more demanding for students as texts use increasingly more
complex language. There has been much research about the challenges
faced by students during the early stages of learning to read,”
Francis said. “We’d like to learn more about the obstacles
encountered during later grades as children transition from ‘learning
to read’ and begin ‘reading to learn’.”
This test will determine the factors affecting students’
abilities to understand what they are reading. Among these are evaluating
students’ skills in oral language, cognition, decoding and
language processing.
“The idea is to build a test that will help teachers identify
students’ strengths and weaknesses with respect to reading
and understanding information presented in text,” Francis
said.
English Language Learners are considered among the most academically
at-risk groups in U.S. schools and on average, score lower on standardized
reading and mathematics tests than other students. The number of
students entering U.S. public schools as English Language Learners
is expected to rise in the future.
“It’s vital to focus on language-minority students because
they are at risk not to pass state-mandated assessment tests and
to drop out of high school,” Francis said. “It’s
very possible that if we can help these students to be more successful
in elementary and middle school they’ll be more likely to
graduate from high school.”
The NRDCELL and Diagnostic Assessment of Reading Comprehension research
complement ongoing projects at TIMES that also have been funded
by IES, as well as the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development. Such projects have focused on early language and literacy
development of Spanish-speaking children in kindergarten through
the third grade.
TIMES was founded in 2001 as a multi-disciplinary research center
to consolidate the methodological and statistical expertise on the
UH campus. It is a university-wide institute that conducts independent
research while offering UH researchers a variety of statistical
support services.
For more information about UH visit
the university’s ‘Newsroom’ at www.uh.edu/admin/media/newsroom.
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