Abstract
Rural and small-town communities in the United States have been rapidly diversifying over the last few decades and rural schools have faced challenges in supporting changing populations. This article builds on a limited body of education research that has focused on diversity in rural areas, driven largely in the U.S. by Latinx immigrant populations. This research draws on several data sources from multi-week visits in a mixture of new and established immigrant destinations to profile the challenges educational leaders faced developing ESL programs in five rural high schools and explores challenges such as how schools struggle to recruit and retain administrators and teachers, how they often have limited knowledge and resources to support curriculum development, and how program size limits schools’ ability to place students appropriately. The article concludes with suggestions for education programs, rural administrators, and state policy makers to better support English learners in rural schools.
Highlights
Rural and small-town communities in the United States have been rapidly diversifying over the last few decades and rural schools have faced challenges in supporting changing populations
More recent terms include English Learner (EL), learner of English as an Additional Language (EAL) and emergent bilingual—I will use English learners (ELs) in this article to reference students because of its prevalent use and its clarity for Rural Education’s diverse readership while recognizing that is limiting because of how it defines a student primarily in relation to learning English—EL will stand for English Language Learner (ELL) except when it is used in a quote from an outside source or participant
One of the primary challenges related to staffing was funding: the ability of schools to fund a dedicated English as a Second language (ESL) position and their ability to be competitive in salaries with competing districts
Summary
Rural and small-town communities in the United States have been rapidly diversifying over the last few decades and rural schools have faced challenges in supporting changing populations. This article builds on a limited body of education research that has focused on diversity in rural areas, driven largely in the U.S by Latinx immigrant populations. Other institutional terms commonly used to reference classes and curriculum are English as a Second Language (ESL—used throughout this article as it was typically used in the profiled schools to refer to classes supporting ELs language development), bilingual (in the context of bilingual education or a teacher having a bilingual teaching certification) and TESOL certification, which is commonly used to reference a certification available to teachers working with ELs. Emerging research on language support for ELs in rural schools has reported various challenges that schools face in providing language support for increasingly diverse student populations, while exploring some of the unique innovations in different districts
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