Large schools and small seeing influx of students from around the world

This town's school students speak 39 different languages, including Serbian, Bulgarian, Vietnamese, Urdu and Arabic, and its ELL students come from 15 different language backgrounds. The kids are all learning English successfully. DP

Valley becoming a global village

By Elisabeth Kilpatrick

suburbanchicagonews.com: Fourth-grader James Savas strolls into his social studies class at Kaneland's Blackberry Creek Elementary, slinging his backpack to the floor and straddling his chair backwards. He chats with the girl sitting next to him as teacher Mariann Doherty prepares her lesson in the small room plastered with globes and posters of maps.

When Doherty announces they'll be playing "Geography Jeopardy" today, James pumps his fist. "Yesssss," he exclaims under his breath. He dominates the board, whipping off Midwestern land formations with ease: tributary, wind cave, source.

Watching the class, one would never guess James wasn't a native English speaker. But he moved to Elburn from Puerto Rico less than two years ago, and his social studies class is an English Language Learner class, designed to help non-native English-speaking students learn academic English.

"To talk to (my students), you would not guess they had any kind of language interference at all," Doherty said. And yet in a general education social studies class, James was "drowning in the vocabulary."

The rural school district has seen an explosion of ELL students in the past few years, jumping from 52 in 2006 to 104 this year. And Kaneland's not alone.
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