Academic+Support+and+ESOL

At Shanghai American Puxi Campus we have both push in and pull out support for ESOL and Academic Support. We have one ESOL teacher per grade level and one Accademic Support teacher that serves all three levels. We try to keep ESOL at or below 25% at each grade level. With rare exception all of our ESOL and Academic Support Students take a global language (Chinese, French, Spanish). ESOL and Accademic Support teachers share common planning blocks with all of the core teachers and there is 30 minute time where they can meet with Specialist teachers as a group if the need arises. Pull out support is delivered in the literacy blocks. I have attached a copy of our Puxi Campus time table. 



At ISS we have an inclusion program for our students. ESL students in Middle School attend all of their regular classes in their core homeroom group and are only separated for language lessons. They do, however, receive additional support in Humanities and Science from a specialist teacher. As of January 2007 we implemented stricter Admissions policies to allow greater opportunities for academic success. English is our language of instruction. We firmly established benchmarks per grade using the Macaulitis (MAC) test and no longer admit students who are beginners above grade 6. Students who are grade 7 age but are determined to be beginners are placed in the grade 6 class, allowing them the opportunity to have an additional year of tuition in English before they reach High School. Students of grade 8 age or above who are deemed to be beginners are not accepted to ISS. In addition, the beginners in grade 6 are withdrawn from their Science and Humanities classes and taught a parallel curriculum which focuses on language and skills with a specialist teacher. They are integrated with the core homeroom class for all other lessons. Students who receive ESL are not taught another second language and thus have double English time - which is the equivalent of 75 minutes per day. Students can advance levels following teacher recommendation and updated testing which usually takes place at the end of semester. Once students are deemed to have the required skill level, they are moved across into the MYP Language A: English class. Teachers have no common planning time during the day, but an hour is allocated at the end of the day for planning/MYP meetings when not running an after school activity. (One of the activities is a fun Language Club for ESL students!)