"ESL is for kids who don't know English! I don't want to be in here!"
"How can I get out of this class?"
I was shocked to hear these comments from my students the first year I took a new position as an ESL "unified arts"/"exploratory" teacher in my middle school. Our school is committed to full-inclusion, and for three years prior, I had been a social studies/language arts teacher whose main job was to teach these two content areas and adapt my instruction to build language proficiency for the ELL's that were on my team. Having built a positive rapport with students in the building, I took for-granted that students would totally accept a stand-alone class taught by me.
Students in my school all receive ESL and special education services through their core instruction. Because we teach them that we all have different learning needs, students are often unaware of differentiation and curriculum supports their peers are receiving in class. Generally, they are very supportive of each other's learning, and respect their needs. Creating an ESL/bilingual skills class, to give them an extra hour of language instruction a day, rocked this full-inclusion boat as students, who were used to being educated together, began to be physically separated for certain instructional hours in the day.
To change the student perception in my school about the ESL/bilingual skills class, I had to create an environment where the students felt safe and respected so that they were able to learn. This meant: addressing stereotypes associated with ELL's, explicitly teaching students about language proficiency and academic language at the middle school level, and empowering students to embrace their bilingual/multilingualism and to see themselves as fully-capable, high-achieving learners.
The most common stereotype associated with ELL's is that their English language proficiency is an indicator of their intellect. In the worst case scenario, people believe that they cannot learn until they have mastered English (something that research shows takes seven to ten years!). One of the first things students learn in my class is that there are many ways to show what they know and that language is just one of these ways. I also teach them that, because of their unique positions as English Language Learners, some of whom have also lived in other countries or gone to school in different places, they are highly intelligent and have many interesting things to teach us. We talk about what school is like in other places around the world, and celebrate students who attend Saturday culture schools. I look for opportunities to highlight students' knowledge about subjects that are unique, and constantly tell them how much I appreciate them for teaching me new things everyday.
In addition to teaching my ELL's that they are intelligent, I explain to them that my class is about giving them the academic language they need to express their intelligence in interesting ways. We do a lot of work differentiating between academic and social language. Many of my students are well-versed in their social language, and this causes teachers to assume they understand everything that is happening in class. Without structured academic language support, however, our ELL's miss deep concepts in core instruction and do not make progress in their language comprehension. I am very clear with students that our class is a place for them to practice using and understanding academic language (or the "language of school"). I challenge them to use this language in their core instruction so that they are prepared for high school, where the language gets even more complicated.
One of the ways we build academic language comprehension is to help students see how their other languages actually help them develop academic English. For speakers of romance languages, I encourage students to find cognates (words that sound similar and are spelled similarly, with the same meanings between languages). When students are taught to see their bilingualism as an asset, they feel a sense of pride in themselves as learners and they are more willing to take on academic challenges. We routinely talk about the long-term benefits of bilingualism: the range of job opportunities, travel, friendship, and education that can be had because of being bilingual/multilingual. This change in tone--from bilingualism as a deficit to an asset--recently resulted in a significant number of students self-selecting English 9 Honors, Hmong for Hmong Speakers, and Spanish for Spanish Speakers as they chose courses for high school. In previous years, our Spanish speakers, presumably ashamed of their Spanish, chose to take French, if they took any language at all. I am overjoyed to see that they are reclaiming the honor in their home language as well as challenging themselves with the English Honors course.
In conclusion, over the past three years, I have successfully built a program that has changed the way ELL students see themselves as learners. They are empowered, know they are intelligent, see bilingualism as an asset, and are building the language comprehension they need to access higher level instruction. The most recent comment I heard from a student about my class is that it's his favorite class of the day. What an amazing positive change from the negativity I experienced three years ago!
Students in my school all receive ESL and special education services through their core instruction. Because we teach them that we all have different learning needs, students are often unaware of differentiation and curriculum supports their peers are receiving in class. Generally, they are very supportive of each other's learning, and respect their needs. Creating an ESL/bilingual skills class, to give them an extra hour of language instruction a day, rocked this full-inclusion boat as students, who were used to being educated together, began to be physically separated for certain instructional hours in the day.
To change the student perception in my school about the ESL/bilingual skills class, I had to create an environment where the students felt safe and respected so that they were able to learn. This meant: addressing stereotypes associated with ELL's, explicitly teaching students about language proficiency and academic language at the middle school level, and empowering students to embrace their bilingual/multilingualism and to see themselves as fully-capable, high-achieving learners.
The most common stereotype associated with ELL's is that their English language proficiency is an indicator of their intellect. In the worst case scenario, people believe that they cannot learn until they have mastered English (something that research shows takes seven to ten years!). One of the first things students learn in my class is that there are many ways to show what they know and that language is just one of these ways. I also teach them that, because of their unique positions as English Language Learners, some of whom have also lived in other countries or gone to school in different places, they are highly intelligent and have many interesting things to teach us. We talk about what school is like in other places around the world, and celebrate students who attend Saturday culture schools. I look for opportunities to highlight students' knowledge about subjects that are unique, and constantly tell them how much I appreciate them for teaching me new things everyday.
In addition to teaching my ELL's that they are intelligent, I explain to them that my class is about giving them the academic language they need to express their intelligence in interesting ways. We do a lot of work differentiating between academic and social language. Many of my students are well-versed in their social language, and this causes teachers to assume they understand everything that is happening in class. Without structured academic language support, however, our ELL's miss deep concepts in core instruction and do not make progress in their language comprehension. I am very clear with students that our class is a place for them to practice using and understanding academic language (or the "language of school"). I challenge them to use this language in their core instruction so that they are prepared for high school, where the language gets even more complicated.
One of the ways we build academic language comprehension is to help students see how their other languages actually help them develop academic English. For speakers of romance languages, I encourage students to find cognates (words that sound similar and are spelled similarly, with the same meanings between languages). When students are taught to see their bilingualism as an asset, they feel a sense of pride in themselves as learners and they are more willing to take on academic challenges. We routinely talk about the long-term benefits of bilingualism: the range of job opportunities, travel, friendship, and education that can be had because of being bilingual/multilingual. This change in tone--from bilingualism as a deficit to an asset--recently resulted in a significant number of students self-selecting English 9 Honors, Hmong for Hmong Speakers, and Spanish for Spanish Speakers as they chose courses for high school. In previous years, our Spanish speakers, presumably ashamed of their Spanish, chose to take French, if they took any language at all. I am overjoyed to see that they are reclaiming the honor in their home language as well as challenging themselves with the English Honors course.
In conclusion, over the past three years, I have successfully built a program that has changed the way ELL students see themselves as learners. They are empowered, know they are intelligent, see bilingualism as an asset, and are building the language comprehension they need to access higher level instruction. The most recent comment I heard from a student about my class is that it's his favorite class of the day. What an amazing positive change from the negativity I experienced three years ago!
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