Background/Purpose
According to U.S. Census Bureau (2000), 4.5 million students with limited English proficiency (LEP) attend at K-12 public schools in the USA. Immigrant children among the school age-population drastically increased in urban schools. By the year 2010, children of immigrants will possibly represent 25 percent of the K-12 student population (Fix & Capps, 2005). When new comer students with LEP begin to attend urban schools, many of them came more likely from poor family and lived with parents with fewer English language skills (Fix & Capps, 2005). In urban schools, physical education teachers challenge issues of limited resources including facilities and equipment, instructional time, students' behavior problems, and lack of support by the administrators (Chen, 1998; Cothran & Ennis, 1997; Ennis, 1995, 1996, 1998; Ennis et al., 1997; McCaughtry et al., 2006a; McCaughtry at al., 2006b). Teaching students with LEP in physical education at urban school setting requires the extra time for modifying or sometime redesigning curriculum and instructions to meet individual needs of students with LEP(McGroarty, 2002; Reeves, 2002). The purpose of this study was to examine and analyze secondary physical education teachers' attitudes toward teaching students with LEP in urban schools.
Method
The research method was multiple-case study (Yin, 2003) situated in the concept of the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991). Ajzen (1991) described three different phases such as behavioral belief, normative belief, and control belief. In this study, the eight participants - urban secondary school physical education teachers (2 males and 6 females) were selected from Southeastern urban schools in Virginia. The data sources were a demographic survey, two focused semi-structured interviews, and telephone interviews. The demographic data were descriptively analyzed and the interview data was analyzed with constant comparative analysis (Merriam, 1998).
Analysis/Results
The results emerged from this study indicate that physical education teachers change academic standards for students with LEP, seek culturally relevant teaching for students with LEP, frustrate and concern about teaching students with LEP in physical education, have difficulty communicating with parents of students with LEP, and face socioeconomic challenges for maximizing resources.
Conclusions
The conclusions address physical education teachers' beliefs, perspectives, dilemmas, and challenges on teaching students with LEP in physical education. It has implications for promoting how students with LEP sucessfully integrate in these urban schools. To improve physical education teachers' experiences on teaching students with LEP in urban schools recommendations are provided.