Your Students
Depending on where you teach, you may or may not have great ethnic and linguistic variety in your classes. If you teach in an ethnically diverse part of a metropolitan area, in a suburban school that serves a varied community of businesspeople and professionals, or in a boarding school that serves many foreign students, the composition of your class may resemble the United Nations. If you teach in a border community, a rural area where most immigrants came to work in a specific industry, in an urban ethnic enclave, or in a community that has recently welcomed a refugee population, chances are that most of your students will speak the same language. Each situation offers its own advantages and challenges. When all students speak the same language, you can note similarities and differences between their language and English and adjust instruction accordingly. If your class resembles the Tower of Babel, you will lack this advantage, but you have another. In such a class, English will be the only possible medium of communication among your students, a situation that will oblige them to use English frequently both in and out of your class.
Do not assume that you will be teaching a homogeneous group of students even if all of your students come from the same country. Your students will likely be a diverse mix of rich, middle-class, and poor, urban, suburban, and rural students hailing from deserts, prairies, mountains, and coastal plains.
If you teach in a secondary school, you will likely have a number of students who have not attended as many years of school as their age would indicate. Many countries do not have compulsory education laws like those in the United States. Mexico, the homeland of the largest number of new immigrants in the United States, requires students to attend school only through secundaria, the equivalent of our junior high school. Compulsory education laws in Mexico, however, are not always strictly enforced, and some isolated rural communities are served only by elementary schools or are not served by any schools at all.
In some states, English learners are placed according to age regardless of their prior education. It is not uncommon for high school ESL classes to include students who attended prep schools mixed with students who have attended only a few years of elementary school. This mix presents special challenges for ESL teachers. These challenges will be discussed in various chapters of this book.
The definition of English learner is not as simple as it seems. It is obvious that the recent immigrant who responds to your cheery “Good morning” with a blank stare lacks English proficiency. With children who have grown up with two languages, or with those who have been in bilingual or ESL programs for some time and have mastered most but not all English language skills, or with those who seem to have mastered oral English but lack basic academic skills, the line is not always clear.
ESL, ELL, LEP, AND OTHER ACRONYMS
You probably teach or will teach in a BE (bilingual education) or an ESL (English as a second language) program. ESL is also known as ESOL (English for speakers of other languages), EFL (English as a foreign language), and EAL (English as another language). English learners are identified by a number of acronyms. Your students will be identified either as ELL (English language learners) or LEP (limited English proficient) students, depending on the state in which you teach. They will also be labeled according to the level of their mastery of English, perhaps as NES (non-English speaker) or NFES (non-fluent English speaker) or even FES/NER/NEW (fluent English speaker/non-English reader/ non-English writer), or perhaps their level will be indicated by an acronym followed by a number. Some teachers believe that English language education suffers from ENCA (excess number of confusing acronyms). To the greatest extent possible, this book will eschew acronyms and refer to ELL/LEP/ESOL/NES/NFES students simply as English learners.
PLACEMENT IN BILINGUAL AND ESL PROGRAMS
The process of placement in and exit from bilingual and ESL programs and classification within the programs is extremely important. In some states, like Texas, these tasks fall to a campus committee. In Texas the committee is called the Language Placement Assessment Committee, or LPAC. This committee considers such data as test scores, classroom performance, and parent information.
Some states like California mandate that placement and reclassification decisions be made locally but do not specify exactly who should make the decision. Some California districts have committees similar to the Texas LPAC, while others allow these decisions to be made by the teacher, an administrator, and the students’ parents.
In all states the process will begin with a home language survey. The parents will declare which language the child speaks at home. If that language is not English, the student will be tested. For very young children, only an oral English test will be administrated. Older students will be given tests of both oral and written English and perhaps basic skills tests as well. Most students will be tested in their native language as well as in English.
Testing procedures vary from state to state. Some states have their own test, like the California English Language Development Test, or CELDT, while others allow schools to choose from a list of approved tests.
It is important that the testing be done well. It is especially easy to err with the oral language test. Someone who does not understand how to interpret the results of an oral language test might misinterpret poor listening comprehension skills that result from a short attention span as an inability to understand English, so it is important for the examiner to be trained in the use of the testing instrument. Even the most competent examiners, however, can occasionally misclassify a student. Shy students may test poorly simply because they do not feel comfortable speaking with the examiner. If a student tests out as a nonspeaker or limited speaker of both English and his or her home language, assume that something is amiss and retest. If a shy student who has been mistakenly labeled a non-English speaker proves able to speak English reasonably well in nontesting situations, call a meeting if necessary and arrange to retest and change to the appropriate classification.
SEP STUDENTS (SOMEONE ELSE’S PROBLEM)
In his science fiction spoof, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, author Douglas Adams explains that it is impossible to make an object truly invisible, but that if an object is deemed somebody else’s problem, nobody will notice it. An advanced alien civilization applied this principle to the development of an SEP (someone else’s problem) ray, which creates a force field that makes an object appear to be someone else’s problem, thus rendering it effectively invisible. Be forewarned that there could be unscrupulous individuals who will use the identification process to take difficult English-dominant students out of regular classes and place them in yours. An LEP or ELL classification is a handy way for an influential but unethical teacher to move a difficult student from his or her class. In some states, such misclassification can buy a test exemption for an academically weak student. Misclassification of English learners is most likely to happen when the ESL teacher is new on the job. By making these students someone else’s problem (yours), they make them invisible, preventing them from getting the services they need to succeed. For the students’ sake, do not tolerate such an abuse of the system.
INCLUSION AND SUPPORT IN REGULAR CLASSROOMS
Depending on your state’s rules and the individual student, some of your students may be in a bilingual or English as a second language program for several years. Clearly it is not appropriate to place students in their fourth year in American schools in the same class as those who just entered the country. Recent immigrants will need a heavy dose of oral language, while fourth- or fifth-year students may speak English fluently but remain in the program because they are still weak in English literacy skills. This sort of placement does, however, sometimes happen. If the population of English learners at your school is small, you may be the only ESL teacher for students at various stages of language learning. This does not mean that all English learners should spend all of their time in your class. After one year at the very most, English learners will benefit if they spend at least part of their school day among native speakers of English. In some cases, depending on your state’s laws and your students’ skills, it may be appropriate for an advanced but not yet exited English learner to spend the entire academic day in regular classes with the ESL teacher providing support. The same people who make placement and exit decisions can help make decisions about inclusion and support for English learners in regular classes. There will be more about English learners in regular classes in Chapter 15.