Individualized Language Plans: A Potential Tool for Collaboration to Support Multilingual Students

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Four
  In Roundtable Session: Toward Understanding the Extended Stay in English Learner Status Through an Equity Lens (Table 2)

Abstract

Objectives
Researchers and practitioners have increasingly recognized the need for systemic changes to better serve multilingual students who are labeled long-term English learners (LTELs; e.g., Brooks, 2018; Clark-Gareca et al., 2020; Flores et al., 2015; Siordia & Kim, 2021). Prior studies have documented ways in which current policies and practices, including federally-mandated English learner (EL) classification and reclassification policies and the standardized English language proficiency (ELP) assessments on which these policies are based, reinforce deficit perspectives of multilingual students at the secondary level (Flores et al., 2015; Siordia & Kim, 2021; Kibler & Valdés, 2016). Thus, scholars have argued for a need to collect detailed, individualized information about students’ linguistic, academic, and cultural assets and design supports for students based on this information (Brooks, 2018; Flores et al., 2015; Siordia & Kim, 2021). However, few concrete examples exist of ways that schools and districts have implemented these ideas at a systemic level.
Drawing on three years of data collection in two rural school districts in California, we describe a tool these districts developed to foster a system of collaboration that attempts multidirectional communication between adults and students considered long-term English learners: Individualized Language Plans (ILPs). Specifically, we explore two research questions: (1) How did the district-created ILP process foster collaboration in support of students considered long-term English learners? and (2) How did the ILP process engage families and youth in the EL decision-making process?

Perspectives or Theoretical Framework
We drew on two key concepts from the literature on building caring relationships between youth, families, and adults in schools: aesthetic and authentic care (Valenzuela, 1999), as well as related concepts from the literature about communication between families and school, particularly reciprocal dialogue (Bertrand, 2014).

Methods and Data Sources
Our data included site visits, observations of classroom instruction and ILP meetings, interviews, surveys of district staff, and administrative data about student outcomes in our two partner districts, collected primarily from 2015-16 through 2017-18. We identified all excerpts from interview transcripts, field notes, analytic memos, survey responses, and district documents that pertained to ILPs and coded this data based on prior research, our conceptual framework, and themes that emerged.

Results
We found that the ILP process, in some cases, did foster collaboration in support of students considered long-term English learners and the ILP process did engage families and youth in educational decision-making processes (Bertrand, 2014; Brooks, 2022).
At the same time, we found evidence that the potential of the ILP process could be more fully realized. Though educators expressed a desire to include students and parents in the process, this did not always happen. In addition, the emphasis on assessment results within the ILP form itself and the emphasis on reclassification underlying the ILP process could narrow the focus of the conversation to academic performance only, and this could undercut broader efforts at relationship-building and multidirectional communication.

Significance
This study adds to the literature on promoting caring, reciprocal relationships and dialogue between school, families, and multilingual youth, including those considered long-term English learners.

Authors

• Karen D. Thompson, Oregon State University
  Presenting Author

• Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author