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Initially, more than 30 immigrant students at a local high school were asked to participate in the project. The ESL program director assisted as each student received a home permission form. Some were translated into Spanish or Indonesian. Eight males and seven females returned the permission slip. Both researchers were able to complete interviews with 15 freshmen to senior students, representing nine different countries. All of these students were in the category of Newly Arrived Learners with Adequate Formal Schooling (Freeman & Freeman, 2002). For the sake of anonymity, each student chose a pseudonym. See issue website http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/ sum2005.htm

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The students were interviewed to elicit a broad range of linguistic and cultural information. Both sets of interviews were tape recorded and transcribed. An abbreviated version of Spradley’s (1977) ethnographic interviewing methodology gathered information about the ELLs’ acculturation process. The following steps were appropriate to the students’ language levels: 1) locating informants, 2) interviewing informants, 3) making an ethnographic record, 4) asking descriptive questions, 5) analyzing interviews, 6) making a domain analysis, and 7) discovering cultural themes. Transcriptions were coded into repeating and significant domains as they emerged from the data. Domain summaries were written for 14 topics the students mentioned or repeated (Spradley, 1977).
The interview technique used to learn about the students’ English proficiency is the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Language Oral Proficiency Interview (ACTFL OPI). When administered officially, the OPI is conducted by two trained and certified interviewers. Its purpose is to elicit speech samples of foreign language speakers to identify proficiency. To an untrained listener, the entire interview sounds much like an engaged conversation.
The official OPI scale range includes four major levels of language proficiency: novice, intermediate, advanced and superior. Novices in a new language have no functional ability; speech is limited to memorized material. Those nearing the intermediate level can create with language, ask and answer simple questions on familiar topics and handle a simple situation or transaction. They speak in loosely connected sentences. The characteristics of advanced speakers are that they produce paragraph-length discourse. They can narrate, describe in past, present and future time/aspect, and handle a complicated situation or transaction. Superior speakers can support opinions, hypothesize, discuss abstract topics and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations.

Results
The unofficial OPI interviews revealed that two of the students were very high novices or barely emerging intermediates, five were clearly advanced, and the remaining students were in the intermediate range. The most advanced speakers of English had certain common characteristics. They were critical of their English ability feeling the need to improve (accent, for example), yet they all liked English. The advanced ELLs had clear personal goals for their future, enjoyed reading or writing, and engaged in watching TV. They also expressed belonging to some in-group, for example, a circle friends or a sports team.
The profiles of the two weakest speakers were similar in that both had lived a relatively short amount of time in the US. Matte, a senior from Mexico, had studied in the high school for less than two years. He had advanced from no English ability to expressing himself in simply structured English. Here he was proud of his accomplishments, which included night school and work on the weekends. It appears that his prior schooling in Mexico was inconsistent or minimal. Brian, on the other hand, had a solid educational background in his native country of Malaysia where he had studied Chinese and English (8 years) besides his native language. His time in the US, one year, was even shorter than Marte’s. During the interview he spoke very little and seemed not to understand what was said to him, explaining that he had never actually used English until he arrived in his California school. As already stated, language proficiency was one of the topics that concerned the students the most. For example, Cecilia commented on her experience in her home country with learning English and then learning ESL in southern California:
Marte, who struggled with self-expression in English the most, said the following:
M: Last thing–new teachers–take patience–like for the new learning because is a hard language–so please!
Brian created a powerful image of the effort required to simultaneously learn the language of a new country and complex academic subject matter by saying that “steam … steam” would come out of his brain especially in biology class. ELLs are, indeed, faced with learning multiple Englishes concurrently: conversational or home English, work related or professional English, and formal/academic English (Baker, in Delpit, 2002, p. 51).
Irene from Ukraine, for example, thought she would never be happy in the US. Sergio, like Irene, was equally unadjusted and unhappy, having difficulty establishing friendships at school. Both felt psychologically isolated and alone and did poorly in their academic studies with the lowest GPAs among the participants. Daniel’s concern was that he wasn’t sure whether people were sincere when they spoke to him; he couldn’t read his American peers well yet. Gina’s description of her gradual acculturation included the following quote:
G: I have more Korean culture than I have American culture. The strongest developmental and acculturation areas affecting the interviewed students’ perception of their language and academic learning were the following: language skills, school as related to teachers and instruction, race, hobbies/activities, future plans, culture, friendships, homesickness, peers, career plans, support in the U.S., dating, trips home, and insider/outsider dynamics. Although outside of the scope of this paper, each domain offers rich information about the ELLs’ experience in a US high school.

Summary of Findings
The findings of this study are two-fold, touching on issues of immigrant students’ linguistic and cultural development in one high school. Second language proficiency appears to develop in sequential steps; the students’ speaking skills emerged in a predictable timetable. Those with the longest exposure to communicating with native English speakers, with the added desire for mastery, had the strongest oral skills. It is noteworthy that not one ELL had mastered English in a year! Whether or not the students had actually studied English as a foreign language in their home country seemed also of little relevance in this regard. Prior formal study of English was reported helpful when these same students engaged in reading and writing assignments at school. Although some generalities emerged from the linguistic portion of this study, each language learner’s English proficiency profile was distinctly unique.