Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School is a large inner-city school located in downtown Hamilton, Ontario. Its student body is linguistically and culturally diverse, with more than half of our students born outside Canada. Over the past few years teachers have attempted to gain a greater understanding of the characteristics of the students in their classrooms, in terms of background, English language proficiency, and academic achievement. Such a clientele in large numbers is relatively new to schools in Ontario, and little research has been done in this area.
We have conducted an extensive research study funded by OERC. This has provided us with a baseline measure of the language and academic achievement for each of the following identified groups in our school:
1) ESL students
2) Former ESL students
3) Monolingual students whose first language is English
This study, which involved 310 grade nine students, highlighted the desperate need for sound pedagogical practices to raise the literacy levels of these groups.
In response to this identified need, we would like to be part of the EvNet research network being proposed by McMaster University in order to have the opportunity to implement and study recent technology (hardware and software applications) in the field of language acquisition and remedial literacy [Project 3 (d) ]. Such a partnership would provide a controlled setting in which to implement methodologies and evaluate their success. This process would begin in grade nine, the grade for which a baseline measure and demographic data already exists.
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