47.4.1 Limitations of Standards
While policymakers and education leaders in the U.S. have set great store by the
new standards for improving educational outcomes across the board, currently,
there are limitations in the standards to achieving this aspiration. The new content
standards, specifying what all students need to know and be able to do, better reflect
a progression of learning than prior ones did. The standards also integrate content
and language to a greater extent than ever before. However, while this
inter-grade-level clarity and the emphasis on language are welcome, the standards
do not describe the intra-grade development of content learning, nor the develop-
ment of the underlying and relevant language skills necessary for reaching content
goals. The new ELA standards take account of the content standards but they focus
primarily on scholastic contexts, for example, mathematics, English language arts,
and literacy uses in history and science. While the English Language Proficiency
Development Framework (CCSSO 2012 ) focuses on making the CCRS useful for
understanding the language needed for content-area tasks, it was not designed to
help teachers understand the linguistic content of the CCRS, for instance, the
development of cohesive devices and sophistication of sentence structure.
Pre-service preparation will necessarily involve assisting candidate teachers to
acquire detailed knowledge of how content and language learning progress beyond
that currently described in the standards. At present, there is an absence of such
progressions—a void that vitiates effective preparation for teachers of ELL
students.
47.4.2 Language Knowledge—The Cinderella
of Pre-service?
Concerned about the importance of language to learning and the lack of breadth and
depth in courses on language for pre-service teachers, Wong Fillmore and Snow
( 2002 ) laid out what they believed was important for all teachers to know about
language. They proposed that teachers need to understand the structural differences
among languages, as well as cultural patterns for discourse among different lan-
guage communities. They argued that teachers also need to know how English
proficiency develops in native speakers and in speakers who are learning English as
an additional language. Furthermore, Wong Fillmore and Snow emphasized the
necessity for clear communication with students, which requires teachers to know
how to structure their own speech for maximum clarity.
Since Wong Fillmore and Snow published their paper, the demands on teachers
have grown even greater in terms of number of ELL students and communicative
demands of the CCRS. However, as we discussed earlier, a range of studies has
indicated that mainstream teachers of ELL students still do not receive adequate
preparation in their pre-service courses and few in-service teachers have
702 A.L. Bailey and M. Heritage