The West Covina Unified School District is providing services to English Learners to ensure that they are acquiring English-language proficiency and recouping any academic deficits that may have been incurred in other areas of the core curriculum. The two program options available to English Learner students include Sheltered English Immersion, and Mainstream English. These program options are delivered using the simultaneous approach to learning and acquiring English while the English Learners receive access to grade level core curriculum (Castañeda vs. Pickard). The West Covina Unified School District provides additional and appropriate educational services to English Learners in kindergarten through grade twelve in all classroom situations. These services are for the purposes of enabling English Learners to overcome language barriers and must be provided until they have demonstrated English-language proficiency comparable to that of the district’s average native English speakers and recouped any academic deficits that may have been incurred in other areas of the core curriculum as a result of language barriers.
Districtâs Curriculum
In order to develop proficiency in English as rapidly and as effectively as possible, each English Learner receives a daily program of instruction in English Language Development. The English Language Development Standards, adopted by the California State Board of Education and the West Covina Unified School District Board of Education, comprise the base program and curriculum that teachers teach to help children attain higher proficiency levels in English. The K-8 State Board of Education Adopted English Language Development Program is embedded in the adopted English Language Arts curriculum programs, SRA “Open Court”, Hampton Brown “Into English”, (K-5), SRA “High Point”, SRA “Corrective Reading”, Scott Forsman “ELD Accelerating English Language Learning” (6-8), and Pearson Education/Longman “New Vista”, (9-12). Research-based programs are the West Covina Unified School District’s Board of Education adopted supplemental ELD programs used in grades kindergarten through eighth. Heinle and Heinle’s Language, Rossetta Stone are textbooks and technology software in the district adopted supplemental ELD programs used from ninth grade through twelfth grade.
Administrators are encouraged to cluster students in classrooms based on CELDT levels. If clustering is not an option, the school will have a diverse range of English proficiency levels in each classroom. Therefore, it is highly recommended that each grade level team plan ELD lessons using a “team structured” approach. For example, a group of fourth grade teachers may collaborate and plan their ELD lessons together, but adjust them for the different proficiency levels of their students. Then all the students in the fourth grade, including the Fluent English Proficient (FEP) and English Only (EO) students, would be grouped into proficiency level groups, and the teachers would assign themselves to one group. One teacher might teach a lesson appropriate for all English Learners at the Beginning level. A second teacher might teach a similar standards-based lesson designed for English Learners at the Intermediate level. And a third teacher might teach a standards-based English Language Arts lesson to a group of students comprised of the Early Advanced level English Learners, and the FEP and EO students. This Team Structured ELD technique will ensure that English Learners receive differentiated instruction appropriate to their proficiency level, as classroom teachers collaborate and team-teach during ELD time.
In the West Covina Unified School District, English Learners participate daily in English Language Development lessons that are differentiated for their identified levels of language proficiency. Recommended daily minimum time allotments for each grade level are the following:
- K 30 minutes
- 1st 30 minutes
- 2nd 30 minutes
- 3rd 30 minutes
- 4th 30 minutes
- 5th 30 minutes
- 6th 50 minutes
- 6-12th 1 period
