Understanding and Assisting
English Language Learners with Their Academic Language Learning: Reflections
from a Mother of an English Language Learner
My 8-year-old son Ben
is an ELL (English language learner) in 2nd grade. He has attended his
school for 2 years since he was 6. As he is very sociable and enjoys communicating
with people, his social English improved very fast. You can always catch him at
the swimming pool chatting with his coach about what he has gotten from Santa
or talking with his teacher about what has happened to him at his dentist’s
appointment. I can roughly evaluate his speaking as advanced level. However,
his writing has not improved as well as his speaking. I have attached one piece
of writing he wrote to me on Mother’s Day here and I can evaluate his writing
as intermediate.
I believe Ben is only a miniature of many ELLs in the United
Sates. They are good at speaking and listening but they are still struggling with
reading or writing, which is very important for their content learning. A lot
of teachers often overestimate ELLs’ language ability by evaluating it only
from their participation in classroom activities or their conversational
ability with their peers. As a matter of
fact, ELLs’ social language ability, which may be presented by their speaking
and listening abilities, is not an adequate indication of their academic
language ability.
The teacher needs to have a complete picture of ELLs’
language ability so as to provide them with sufficient assistance. Therefore,
the teacher should evaluate ELLs’ language ability from all the domains of
language (i.e., speaking, listening, reading and writing) and keep monitoring
their language development from all of these four domains.
As I pause here, a meeting with Ben’s teacher pops up in my
mind. In the meeting, his teacher was very nice and kept talking with me about
Ben’s performance at school and telling me some useful resources about English
learning. But unfortunately, in the
whole meeting, I almost had no time to write down a word as she spoke so fast
and was not aware that I may need to write down some information. This episode reminds
me of another important strategy teachers may want to use for their ELLs- ease the
pace of teaching.
By easing their pace of instruction, the teacher will
provide enough wait time for ELLs to think and follow them. In class, ELLs always face two
challenges-content and language. So, they may need more time to understand the
meaning of the words and to figure out the answers to teachers’ questions at
the same time. In this circumstance, more waiting time would be an effective technique
for them to follow the teacher. If the teacher only maintains their normal pace,
ELLs will fail to follow the teacher, which may mislead the teacher that ELLs are
struggling with the content. Actually, what they need is just more time to
think. Another way for the teacher to ease their pace of instruction in class
is to control their rates of speech. A lot of teachers are fast speakers, which
is even difficult for native English students to understand, not to mention for
ELLs. Trying to slow down their speech rate not only increases the
intelligibility of their speech but also helps to ease their pace of
instruction. When the teacher intentionally slows down their speech, they will
be more aware of the needs of ELLs and thus try to pause a little bit during
the instruction for ELLs.
In all, as long as the teacher gets a better picture of ELLs’
overall English language ability, especially their academic language ability,
and provides them with more accommodations in classroom instruction, ELLs’
academic learning will be much easier at school.
References:
Chamot, A. U., &
O'malley, J. M. (1994). The CALLA handbook: Implementing the cognitive
academic language learning approach. Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company.
Guerrero, M. D. (2004).
Acquiring academic English in one year: An unlikely proposition for English
language learners. Urban Education, 39(2), 172-199.
Mashburn, A. J., Pianta, R.
C., Hamre, B. K., Downer, J. T., Barbarin, O. A., Bryant, D., ... & Howes,
C. (2008). Measures of classroom quality in prekindergarten and children’s
development of academic, language, and social skills. Child development, 79(3),
732-749.
