Article on Immigrants coming into Public Schools - average of 220,000 people coming to Canada every year creating challenges in the school system for teaching and education with many of the new citizens not having English as first language

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Toronto Star

Immigrants, ESL and Education Challenges

Sep. 25, 2004. 01:00 AM


Why Canada's schools are failing newcomers

ANDREW DUFFY
ATKINSON FELLOW

In Room 212 of Brampton's Great Lakes Public School, teacher Charlotte Mullin stands in front of a Grade 8 class in which there is one white face other than her own.

At 27, four years removed from teachers' college, her challenge is this: To explain the science of light to 30 students, few of whom grew up speaking English. In this classroom, Punjabi, Tamil, Urdu and Vietnamese are more likely first languages.

Some of the students breeze through the material, while others with more modest English skills are mystified by dense words such as phosphorescence, fluorescence, incandescence. Equipped with the boundless energy of all good teachers, however, Mullin halts her description of the types of light for a brief vocabulary lesson.

Then she presses on, circling back again and again to test students' understanding of words and ideas. She relies heavily on pictures to convey the properties of opaque, translucent and transparent materials. She keeps her instructional language simple.

"Which material likes to share the light?" Mullin asks.

"Translucent," comes the reply.

At Great Lakes Public School, more than 60 per cent of the students speak a first language other than English. In Mullin's class, one-third of students are officially designated as English-as-a-second-language learners, which means they came to Canada within the past four years with few English skills. These students are withdrawn for daily language lessons tailored to their needs, but they spend most of their day in regular classes.

For Mullin, it means she must constantly reinvent her lesson plans, infusing them with language lessons and illustrations. "This is why I chose this school," says Mullin, "I knew it would be a challenge."

Her daily challenge is one shared by teachers in every big city across Canada — and it is one that has become more pointed with each passing year. Canada has settled 3.3 million immigrants during the past 15 years, an average of 221,000 a year.

The immigrants, 60 per cent of whom come from Asia and the Middle East, are less likely to speak English at home than previous waves of newcomers. Those speaking English as a second language make up 20 to 60 per cent of the student populations in large cities such as Toronto and Vancouver.

In the Vancouver School Board, for instance, only 39 per cent of students reported English as the primary language spoken at home. Meanwhile, in the Toronto District School Board, there are 117 schools that have at least one-quarter of their enrolments made up of students who have arrived in Canada within the last five years.