ELL's Academic Language Learning

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 2^nd 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.