School Librarians Say They Lack Materials for English Learners
By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal,01/19/2010

Many school librarians feel they lack the necessary materials to help their English Language Learners (ELL) succeed. So says a recently published report from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) that queried 5,824 people through the 2009 School Libraries Count! National Longitudinal Survey of School Library Media Programs and found that nearly 20 percent of elementary schools are faced with a quarter of their student body who are ELL.


AASL President Cassandra Barnett

However, even with such as sizeable population of students needing literary material in alternative languages, school librarians find not only that they don’t have the resources to purchase additional books and tools, but that often publishers haven’t produced them in languages that they need.
“When I’m working with students learning English I can’t just have books in Spanish,” says Cassandra Barnett, AASL president and the high school librarian at Fayetteville High School, in Fayetteville, AR. “I need book in Urdu and three different dialects of Chinese.”

And while more books are appearing in less common languages, Barnett says that often school librarians don’t have the training to know which are the best choices among these options.

“I don’t speak the language and so I have to trust the publisher to know if the materials meet their needs,” she says.

Often, school librarians rely on free-choice reading options, where ELL students pick books that appeal to them, and hopefully excite them to read and learn English. That’s a direction that 25 percent of those surveyed take. Yet more than half say that none or less than one percent of their school library collections were in non-English languages.

That challenge grows for high school librarians since not only are dual-language learning books often simplistic and geared toward younger readers, but older students can also present a learning conundrum, either they’re very literate in their own language—or not at all.

So Barnett finds that high school librarians can turn to what she calls a “more affordable option,” using high-interest, but low-level books that may not have a controlled vocabulary, but a simpler one. “And these can have a high-interest to teens,” she says.

But sometimes the only option is to get these students reading in their own language first, before they move onto to English.

“And that frustrates a lot of people who don’t see them learning English,” she says. “But it’s easier to learn English if you’re literate in your own language. So there are so many variables.”