ABSTRACT
Jane Addams's work in direct assistance to immigrant families was guided by a clear and comprehensive theoretical vision of social life. Addams should serve as the role model for English-language development (ELD) teachers who wish to connect their classroom work to the wider social needs of English-language learners (ELLs). US public schools have been asked, for better or worse, to be a primary democratizing agent. In its highest ideal the school takes all children in, offers everyone an equal chance to succeed, and rewards those who work hard with a better life. Students would have to be introduced carefully into a democratic ideology, and in place of icons, they needed to be given genuine opportunities to understand US political and social life. ELD teachers will naturally have specific language goals for their students, and making the sounds of English will certainly be among them. What linguists call phonological accuracy is more commonly understood as speaking with a "foreign accent".
