Environmental Justice

Demographics

I am a multilingual learner (MLL) teacher at The John Dickinson School, a combined middle and high school located in the suburbs surrounding the city of Wilmington, Delaware. Our school is in the Red Clay Consolidated School District, the largest school district in the state of Delaware which serves the second largest population of MLL students, about 15% of students enrolled across the district.² The district’s population of MLL students has grown four percent since 2016, a statistic that is reflective of the overall trend that MLL students are the fastest growing population of students in Delaware schools. Similarly, my school’s population of MLL students is steadily growing; our number of MLL students was reported at just over 16% in the 2022-23 school year.³ While the majority of MLL students in my school are native Spanish-speakers, their families come from a wide range of Spanish-speaking countries in central and South America, as well as the Caribbean. Additionally, my MLL students represent a wide range of previous educational experiences and English proficiency levels.

I teach English language development (ELD) classes in the middle and high school to MLL students. These classes are intended to support MLL students in achieving advanced English language proficiency on the annual state ACCESS test, which measures English proficiency across academic content areas and the four language domains: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. Students must achieve a composite score of 4.7 to exit the MLL program and no longer receive language development support. Therefore, the focus of my class is the teaching of academic language, including vocabulary and grammar features, that students apply across content areas in all four language domains. The majority of my middle school MLLs are long-term English learners. A long-term English learner is a student who has not exited the MLL program in six or more years. These students often demonstrate advanced fluency in listening and speaking skills in English, but remain “stuck” at an intermediate level of reading and writing in English, preventing them from testing out of the MLL program.

Because students must show English proficiency across content areas, such as science and social studies, much of the vocabulary, grammar, and language that I teach in my ELD class must be cross-curricular by nature. The language focus of this unit will draw on science vocabulary and concepts that students will apply when writing arguments. Though typically considered a feature of English language arts classes, the structure and language used in argumentation is also a common feature of science and social science writing. Scientists gather and analyze data to develop evidence-based claims. Explicitly teaching students argument structure in the context of environmental justice will provide them with rich practice in a highly useful academic writing form that cross-curricularly supports their English proficiency in both English language arts and science content areas. Moreover, this curriculum unit will support students’ language proficiency development, most especially in the domain of academic writing, as they work toward testing out of the MLL program on the annual state ACCESS test.