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ARCO GRANT TO AID SECOND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

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The Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project (LAAMP), created in 1995 with a five-year, $53 million Challenge Grant from the Annenberg Foundation, is part of the national Annenberg Challenge to improve student achievement in America's public schools. LAAMP has collaborated with the ARCO Foundation to establish the LAAMP-ARCO English Language Acquisition Professional Development Project for teachers in LAAMP School Families. Specifically, the project has been developed to assist teachers in implementing appropriate and effective strategies for instructing students acquiring English language skills. Five distinguished professors from Los Angeles area universities participated in the project:

Alan Crawford, Ed.D., California State University, Los Angeles

Michael Genzuk, Ph.D., University of Southern California

Kris Gutierrez, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles

Magaly Lavadenz, Ph.D., Loyola Marymount University

Sharon Russell, Ph.D., California State University, Dominguez Hills

Utilizing their extensive knowledge of the field and their research findings, these professors collaborated to address the challenges that teachers face in classrooms with large numbers of English learners. With the assistance of four teachers from the LAAMP Little Lake-Whittier School Family, the professors designed a professional development plan to provide teachers with the necessary skills for instructing students acquiring English language skills.

The Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project (LAAMP), through a grant from the ARCO Foundation, has awarded The Center for Multilingual, Multicultural Research at the University of Southern California $22,000 to collaborate in the creation of a professional development model for second language acquisition programs that can be used by K-12 educators.

The award to The Center is one of only seven equal grants made to universities in the greater Los Angeles area. Dr. Michael Genzuk and Dr. Reynaldo Baca of the Center helped develop the grant and represent USC as one of the university partners. In total, $154,000 is being awarded to the seven universities by the ARCO Foundation.

The collaborative nature of the work, both between the university partners and with schools, reflects the most promising of practices for educational reform. This model has the potential to provide a tremendous long-range impact in the professional development of pre-service and in-service teachers, especially in light of class size reductions. After a year of planning, the model will be piloted in LAAMP family clusters, with a specific focus on developing academic competence and equity for second language learners.

To learn more about this effort review the:

Progress Report to the ARCO Foundation: Language Acquisition Project

This publication is available only in PDF format.

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