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This website was created to share ideas, tools, & research by teachers, for teachers in a way that is easy to access and free.
Who are SIFE?
SIFE are Students with Interrupted Formal Education, often called SLIFE (Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education). These students are a diverse subset of emergent bilinguals (EBs) who may come from a refugee or migrant background or other situations which have resulted in interrupted access to schooling in their native country.
Invisible Barriers
Hover over the cards below to reveal some of the barriers SIFE students face in a U.S. academic setting.
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How many can you name?
Extra Academic Load
Students who are learning English concurrently with academic content areas must do more cognitive work than their fluent English-speaking peers. This extra cognitive load may not be seen or taken into account by educators.
Invisible Academic Expectations
Academia is full of rules and expectations that are not made explicit – students are expected to know them and follow them. As these are culture-specific, any student coming in from a different or no academic culture will not be aware of them.
Coded Social Interactions
Language and social interactions involve many layers of social coding, including facial expressions, body posture, eye contact, tone, and so on. In addition to learning a new language, students must also learn to read this "code," usually without any instruction.
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Deficit Mindset
The mainstream attitude towards and policies for emergent bilinguals and refugee-background students is based on a deficit mindset which can color how students are seen by educators and affect their academic outcomes.
How to transform a deficit mindset below ↓
Minority Status
Students may be switching from being in the cultural and ethnic majority to being a minority group. In some cases, a student may be the only member of their culture and ethnicity in a school.
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Cultural Incongruity
Some aspects of academic life in the U.S. may require students to abandon their cultural values. This could manifest as being reprimanded for wearing clothing appropriate to their home culture or for speaking their home language.
(Coelho, 1994)
Transforming a Deficit Mindset
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As educators, we have to recognize that we help maintain the achievement gap when we don't teach advanced cognitive skills to students we label as "disadvantaged" because of their language, race, gender, or socioeconomic status.
(Hammond, 2015)​
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A deficit mindset refers to an implicitly biased perspective that characterizes our students as lacking. It is important to think about, because, as Hammond (2015) points out in the quote above, it can actually put students at a disadvantage.
Like racism, sexism, and other "isms," it often lurks beneath the surface and pops up in everyday places. In school systems, a deficit perspective can be seen when students are labeled as "limited English proficient," when their cultural differences are looked at as barriers to success, when they are called "refugee students," a term that is inaccurate, as they have already been resettled, and which carries the connotations of helplessness and victimization (Shapiro et al., 2018), and when they are placed according to assessment scores on reading and writing skills or content areas without taking into account that those scores are based first and foremost on English language skills, and may not be valid.
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Fighting a deficit mindset starts with switching perspectives to acknowledge our students strengths, and think critically about the labels we apply and the test scores we use.
Toolkits
These toolkits are designed to provide practical information and high-impact practices and ideas to help you in your classroom.
