Introducing Sheltered Instruction - Essay Example

According to the research carried out by National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition, (2002), it is known that each year proportion of non- English speaking students is increasing at more rate than actual number. And many states are not up to that level to deliver language and other services that these immigrant students actually need. As per the work by Moss & Puma (1995), Ruiz-de-Velasco (2000) & Fix and Waggoner (1999), these students have less grades and high dropout rate as compared to US-born students in spite of having high attendance rate.

It is evident from these studies that most schools are not satisfying the requirement of educating linguistically and culturally diverse students. To achieve high levels of educational standards and accommodate the requirement of 'No Child Left Behind Act (2001)', federal and state governments expect all students to have adjusted national and state assessments. English learners enter U.S schools with wide range of language proficiencies and subject matter knowledge, based on their background, socioeconomic status, age of arrival and personal experiences.

To succeed students with varieties of criteria the teacher development, program design, curriculum and materials, and instructional and assessment practices should be modified. This paper will address especially strategies for improving teacher development and instructional practices. Many standards have been . High-stake test has been adopted in many states as result of 'No Child Left Behind Act (2001)'. This was benefited to English learning students as teachers and schools concentrated on overall progress, including LEP students, so as to reach benchmarks laid.

In spite of these many adaptation, students exit before they become proficient in academic English due to several reasons.First reason is being standardized test designed for US born students, EL students at beginning level found it difficult to meet criteria as they can not read, write or speak English fluently. Thus program failed to confirm that EL students learn academic content primarily, with learning English. Second reason for failure of high-stack tests was lack of certified ESL and bilingual teachers.

To compensate this shortage, principals started hiring less-qualified teachers, using substitutes, canceling courses, increasing class size, or asking teachers to teach outside their field of preparation.The Sheltered Instruction Approach and SIOP model The growth in numbers of students learning English as an additional language and the shortage of qualified ESL and bilingual teachers raised the need of sheltered content instruction approach."sheltered instruction is an approach that can extend the time students have for getting language support services while giving them a jump-start on the content subjects they will need for graduation" (Echevarria, 2004, p.10).It is not a set of instruction techniques need to added or replaced by teacher's original techniques, but an approach that complements those methods and strategies.

Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) model has been designed for flexibility and confirmed with wide range of classroom