ESL students fall behind -кто то говорил что обгонят

[дядя Вова]

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news ... 9b64d7&p=1

ESL students fall behind
UBC study finds almost half of Vancouver's immigrant students 'disappear' from high school

Nicholas Read and Darah Hansen
Vancouver Sun


Forty per cent of all immigrant students attending Vancouver high schools drop out before they graduate, according to a new study by University of B.C. language and literacy professor Lee Gunderson.

The study also found that students from Spanish and Vietnamese-speaking backgrounds were far more likely to drop out than Mandarin or Cantonese- speaking students, while students from India and the Philippines fell somewhere in between.

Gunderson, who followed the progress of 5,000 immigrant students in Vancouver high schools between 1991 and 2001, said the dropout rate was highest when students left English as a second language (ESL) classes, because even otherwise good students then suffered a significant loss of marks.

The study tracked the progress of the students, who came from a variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, by examining their marks in four subjects: English, math, science and social studies.

It found that 60 per cent of all the students "disappeared" before they finished Grade 12. By that, Gunderson means they no longer posted scores in any of the four subjects. Fatima Pirbhai-Illich, one of his graduate students, determined that about a third of those students either returned to high school later or finished a high-school, meaning that the rest -- 40 per cent of the 5,000 student studied -- dropped out for good.

The results, which left Gunderson "absolutely flabbergasted," are reported in his new book, English-only Instruction and Immigrant Studies in Secondary Schools: A Critical Examination, which was published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates this week.

Last year, 57,991 B.C. students, or 10 per cent of the entire student population, were ESL students. School districts receive an extra $1,100 from the B.C. Ministry of Education for each ESL student enrolled in their districts.

Immigration Canada projects that B.C. will be home to more than 60,000 new immigrants in the next five years, and 24 per cent of those will be children and youth.

According to Statistics Canada, students who fail to complete high school earn an average of $21,230 a year, compared to $25,477 who graduate high school and $48,648 for university graduates.

"The disappearance rate for the Vietnamese and Spanish-speaking students was very high," Gunderson said in an interview with The Vancouver Sun. "It was about 80 per cent. Phenomenally high."

By contrast, the disappearance rate among Mandarin-speaking students was only 30 per cent.

He said the dropout rate for students born in Canada is difficult to estimate or to find out, but guessed that it may be around 30 per cent as well.

Gunderson attributes the difficulties faced by Spanish and Vietnamese-speaking students to their socio-economic backgrounds. By and large, he says, such students came from poor refugee families for whom education was not a priority or a tradition.

"I believe it represents underlying socio-economic differences," he said. "It's clear when you visit the different students in different schools.

"For instance, the Spanish speakers. It's different now -- there are more affluent Spanish speakers coming in. But back then a huge number were from refugee families who had little or no schooling or interrupted school. Who had a traumatic educational history."

The same was true of Vietnamese-speaking students, he said, many of whom were boat-people.

By comparison, Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking students who came from Taiwan and Hong Kong respectively, came from wealthy families with a long history of valuing education.

Indian-born students, whom Gunderson considered together regardless of their mother tongues, tended to come from families with agricultural backgrounds, for whom education wasn't valued as highly as it was by Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking families.

"They had different interests, and school wasn't necessarily one of them," Gunderson said of the Indian-born students.

He couldn't say why Filipino students showed the same disappearance rate, adding that teachers in the school system had no explanation for it either.

There were comparatively few Korean, Japanese, Persian, eastern European and African students in Vancouver schools at the time of his research, so they didn't figure prominently in the study.

Fellow education experts weren't nearly as surprised by Gunderson's results as he was.

"It doesn't surprise me in the least," said Kelleen Toohey, a professor of education at Simon Fraser University. "Initially this look at graduation rates was occasioned by some research in Calgary where they were showing a 70-per-cent dropout rate and a 30-per-cent graduation rate. So a 60-per-cent graduation rate sounds pretty good against that."

Her SFU colleague June Beynon agreed.

"We just don't have the resources in the high school to respond," she said. "A lot of very good work is being done, but when you look at the magnitude of the challenges, you might almost turn it around and say, 'Wow, look at that, 60 per cent of the kids are managing [to graduate].'"

English and social studies are particularly difficult for immigrant students, Beynon says, because they are full of nuance and allusions to other cultural cues.

"One of the reasons it's assumed or inferred that a lot of ESL students are in math or sciences, is it's less nuanced," she said. "Whereas social studies and English have an intrinsic sense of the culture that is hard to develop when you're a newcomer."

ESL classes exist in the school system as a way of teaching immigrant students English and whatever the subject in question is. The idea is that as they learn math or geography, for example, they also learn English.

How many years a student spends in ESL depends on the school district and the student, says Maureen Seesahai, a retired ESL teacher in Burnaby and a consultant for the B.C. Ministry of Education. According to most models, students are allowed five years in a program where half their classes will be ESL and half will be the same as classes for Canadian-born students.

But often, said Seesahai, the student and his or her parents don't want to take advantage of all five years because of a perceived stigma around being an ESL student. They wrongly believe, she said, that ESL students are somehow relegated to a kind of high-school ghetto.

But when they do leave their ESL classes, usually in Grade 10, their marks suffer even more, said Gunderson. His study showed that even Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking students often scored average grades of below C once they removed themselves from ESL classes.

And that makes the high-school experience even harder, says Seesahai.

"Some of the kids get really upset and say they didn't think it was going to be like this," she said. "They and their parents don't want to take any time to learn English. They come here with an expectation that they'll graduate with everyone else in their age group. But that doesn't happen because it's too tough."

"You just have to put your own self in the situation," said Beynon. "Consider the education you had, consider how good your skills are, what you had to go through and then dump yourself into another language."

But if dropping out of high school represents a personal failure for students, it also represents an equally serious societal failure, says Toohey.

"I think we're doing those kids, their parents and ourselves a real disservice because a high school education is kind of a basic minimum for getting jobs in an increasingly globalized market.

"These kids are going to be on the margins of that. And I think it's really dangerous for a society not to be providing better education for these children."

She said she and a colleague did their own research around kids in a Surrey ESL co-op, and found that many of them ended up in low-level service jobs, if they were working at all.

"These kids were very disappointed they were not going to graduate from high school," Toohey said. "They had gotten some Canadian work experience, but to work at McDonald's wasn't the reason their parents immigrated to Canada in the first place."

Gunderson believes as more immigrants arrive in B.C. from more countries, all of them coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, the situation for both students and teachers will become even more complex and difficult.

"Some students from refugee families have never gone to school and are illiterate in their own languages," he said.

"I've heard of a student who comes from Somalia via a Uganda refugee camp who was 19 when she arrived here. She spoke no English and never learned to read. She was an orphan. She had almost zero knowledge of life as we know it here.

"So when she is presented to a teacher, what is the teacher going to do? I can't answer that question. What do you do? How do you live life for a child like that?"

nread@png.canwest.com

dahansen@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

[sobomax]

А при чем тут политика?

-Maxim

[дядя Вова]

А при чем тут политика?

-Maxim

Максим что можно сказать, здесь постинги если не проходят цензуру то их или удаляют или в политику переносят....

в одной из тем кто то говорил что детки новых канадцев дадут нам старикам фору , особенно с покупками яхт и дворцов... но тема была про реал эстайт и ее закрыли- наверно чтобы не мешать пузырю лопнуть...

[Froggy]

omigod!

...если читать статьи, рекламирующие всяких неучей и ленивцев, постить их всюду, а еще лучше - следовать им, то можно ва-а-а-ще закончить свои дни на улице хастингс, в коробке под звездным небом....

а я пошла читать книгу "как я заработал свой превый миллион" под редакцией ротшильда, рокфеллера и онасиса, чей английский был вторым языком, между прочим....

[дядя Вова]

omigod!

...если читать статьи, рекламирующие всяких неучей и ленивцев, постить их всюду, а еще лучше - следовать им, то можно ва-а-а-ще закончить свои дни на улице хастингс, в коробке под звездным небом....

мне больше нравится... под небом голубым...

а я пошла читать книгу "как я заработал свой превый миллион" под редакцией ротшильда, рокфеллера и онасиса, чей английский был вторым языком, между прочим....

читай не читай, один только верный путь
http://www.newsru.com/world/01sep2006/buffet1.html