Academic Achievement Among ELLs: The Role of High Quality Instruction

1. The Psychological, and the Socio-Economic

The Role of Socioeconomic and Sociocultural Factors in Language-Minority Children

Engaging parents and the home community in a child's education is pivotal to their academic success, and more so to the second language minority learner. Followed up with high-quality instruction makes for a winning mix of social, emotional, and academic success. Fostering students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving abilities across content areas will go miles in expediting their progress by mediating the socioeconomic and sociocultural factors often impede language-minority students' progress.

High-quality language instruction will better prepare students for access to higher education, reduce drop out risks, and provide an achievable pathway to high academic standards that foster on-going post-K-12 success. The integration of school, family, and community are pivotal to this growth mindset. 

Poverty can be scaffolded by the presence of a good-quality family or school environment, resulting in  greater resilience and capacity-building for at-risk students. For instance, family cultural values and beliefs, family and cultural systems, attitudes, socialization patterns, and home language use are all affected by poverty.

Family structure to include number of siblings, number of family members living in the home, and size of living quarters (shared rooms, etc.).

Parent characteristics, such as degree of literacy and reading/writing in the home, level of educational attainment, occupation, degree of acculturation, and physical and mental health of parents and/or caregivers

Quality of neighborhood and community resources in the neighborhood to include availability of mentors, after school homework help, public libraries, YMCA or YWCA and other community centers, social services, accessible health care, federal and state programs for health care and food nutrition. 

References

Bradley, R. H., Whiteside, L. Y., & Mund from, D. J. (1994). Early indications of resilience and their relation to experiences in the home environments of low birth-weight, premature children living in poverty. Child Development, 65, 346–360.Clark, E. R., & Gonzalez, V. (1998).

Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 13 (4), 290–307.Sabogal, F., Marin, G., Otero-Sabogal, R., Marin, B., & Perez-Stable, E. J. (1987). Hispanic familism and acculturation: What changes and what doesn’t. Hispanic Journal of  Behavioral Sciences, 9, 397–412.References•29