Characteristics of these students include:
- seven or more years in U.S.
- orally fluent in English
- levels of reading and writing proficiency that are well below grade level
- frequently no literacy in home language
- Mismatch between student perception of achievement (high) and grades (low)
- some may get adequate grades, but low test scores
- often lag behind in meeting grade level standards
The students among this growing sub-group of identified English learners are often not immigrants, but rather students who have been born in the United States and attended schools for their entire lives. Some may have entered as immigrants in their early
elementary years. These students often demonstrate native like oral fluency in English yet for a variety of reasons they never achieve levels of academic proficiency in reading and writing. They fail to score high enough on standardized tests to meet redesignation
requirements. For these students the traditional sequence of classes in either the SEL or Bilingual Program does not apply. By Middle or High School most of these students are scheduled into mainstream secondary program, including English language Arts.
