Education for language minority students: Recent events

[article extract] How is an education system that teaches its curriculum in the English language able to manage with students who have little or no experience with the language of instruction? If numbers are low, or if there is little assessment of later educational outcomes, then the issue may not arouse a great deal of attention. However, the number of immigrants without English is very high and increasing in many developed countries. For example, the number of students who have limited English proficiency (LEP) has doubled in the last 10 years, whilst the general school population has grown by only 12% (Kindler, 2002). Within 50 years in the United States, the proportion of children beginning school whose language is not English could be as high as 40% (Lindhlom-Leary, 2000).