English Language Learners

English Language Learners

As educators, we are to teach to a population of students with extremely diverse needs. In a high school setting, reading skills will vary from student to student and class to class; some will be able to summarize a passage and understand some complex “SAT words” and other will need lots of scaffolding to help them understand passages that teachers may consider simple and possibly below grade level.

Some students that will require plenty of scaffolding are students who are learning the English language or are bi- or multilingual. English language learners, or ELL students, lack enough proficiency in the English language to be completely immersed in a course that is taught completely in English and quite frankly, it is ignorant and insensitive of educators who expect these students to perform adequately in school without intense scaffolding.

The school where I am completing my observations and student teaching is one-third Hispanic with a small Asian population. Some of the Spanish-speaking students in one of my CT’s Global Studies classes did not speak any English upon their arrival to her classroom. Both of the students that I observed speak Spanish as their primary language, even in the classroom. One of the young men refuses to speak English, which is proving to be very problematic for my CT.

Although they both attend an ESOL class, they are not benefiting as they should. There are scaffolds set aside for ELL students, such as providing them with texts in their native language and helping them with interpretation. However when the teacher, or even the ESOL teacher, does not speak their language, communication is extremely difficult to make demands of the simplest task.

It is easy for me to say that because I speak Spanish I can communicate with my Spanish-speaking students and tell them what I need from them, but what if I have a student who speak Russian and no English? What if my student speaks Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, but no English? I cannot say that he or she is not intelligent enough to understand the material because they speak THREE LANGUAGES!! So how can I help them?

First it is important to try to understand the background of a student from a different culture. Doing so will help me create an environment where he or she feels safe to learn content in a new way. Secondly, I need to utilize my resources, mainly ESOL teachers who have more experience and tools to teach students who are new to the English language on their level. If I have to find or translate material for them, then I need to be willing to do that. It is imperative that they understand the content that I am teaching to their classmates.

However, they also must learn English.

Personally, I feel that that is outside my realm as a social studies teacher; if I have a class full of English-speaking students with extremely limited comprehension skills in their native language, how am I supposed to teach a new language to a new English speaker? However, I have a passion for languages and know just enough from a variety of language families, so I hope that will help me with basic communication. I believe that building bridges with students is imperative. It may seem extremely idealistic, but I hope that if my hypothetical Russian-speaking student sees that I know a tiny bit of Russian, that they will see that I care about them as a person AND a student…hopefully that will motivate them to do well in American schools.

I believe that this is the most difficult of literacy strategies for a teacher to grasp, especially if he or she has almost no knowledge of another language. (There’s really no excuse for that in 2013, but that is a different story…) We can easily say that teaching students how to think historically is challenging, but possible with Tools A, B, and C. But if we cannot master basic communication with our students, how are we to teach in a manner that is most beneficial to them?

This is actually an area that I hope to become an “expert” in on a graduate level. My passion truly lies with not only working with students with limited English skills, but learning new languages as well. I hope that this journal entry will one day maybe grow into a full-blown dissertation. Time shall tell…