English Learners in Content Classes
Depending on student age, state rules, school policies, and the decisions of placement committees, beginning English learners may begin studying math, social studies, and science in the English language from their first day in school. English learners may be taught content in special sheltered English classes, taught by either ESL teachers (if state laws permit) or teachers who specialize in the subject taught, or they may be placed in regular content classes, with or without support from the ESL department. Each approach has its appropriate applications.
ENGLISH THROUGHOUT THE CURRICULUM
There is a saying in Spanish, quien mucho abarca, poco aprieta, or he who grasps much, holds little. Some ESL programs set ambitious goals that are never met. To fully master a language in a few years is a major task, even without having to study other subjects. To master a language while learning all other required subjects as well is even more so. To do so is a little like maintaining an A average in school while participating in half a dozen extracurricular activities. Such an accomplishment is possible, but not for all students. At least during the first year or two of study, you will be justified in stressing mastery of English, even if said mastery comes at the expense of other academics.
SHELTERED ENGLISH CONTENT CLASSES
Sheltered English instruction—also known as content ESL, English for specific purposes (ESP), content based instruction (CBI), and specially designed academic instruction in English (SDAIE)—allows English learners to study these subjects in segregated classes with special books and materials. In sheltered English classes for absolute beginners, it might be a good idea to spend the first few months working on related vocabulary using realia, pictures, and such techniques as Total Physical Response (TPR). Once students approach an intermediate command of English, they may study these subjects much as they would in regular classes, except that the teacher will control vocabulary when speaking and the textbooks will contain simpler vocabulary and structures. In sheltered English classes, beginning students will likely learn less of the subject than they would if they were studying in their native language, but they will learn more English.
CONTENT OBJECTIVES AND LANGUAGE OBJECTIVES
Again, to learn a language is no small matter. One will not master a new language in a few years by studying it only an hour or two per day. If your students are required to take all academic subjects, there will be only an hour or two left per day to specifically study English. The good news is that the content classes can also be vehicles for the instruction of English. When students reach a solid intermediate level and are able to understand much of what they hear, immersion in English may become the best lesson of all. At this point, they should be able to divine the meaning of many new expressions from the context, and they should be able to direct their own English learning with tools like bilingual dictionaries.
For less advanced students, you will want to teach all subjects with language objectives in mind. Lesson plans for sheltered science, social studies, and math classes for beginning and intermediate language learners should include both language and content objectives.
Extremely broad language objectives, such as “The learner will speak in complete sentences,” or “Students will use sophisticated vocabulary,” or “Learners will pronounce correctly” are too wide and vague to provide much guidance, and are really no better than no language objective at all. Narrower language objectives can, however, be extremely useful. Because vocabulary is key to both language learning and mastery of core subjects, the sheltered English approach is especially appropriate for vocabulary development.
A SAMPLE SHELTERED SCIENCE/VOCABULARY LESSON
A teacher in a sheltered English class can use many of the techniques described in the previous chapters either to teach new content or to use content to teach English. It is reasonable that much of the science taught to English learners be of the hands-on variety. In such a situation, you can mix science instruction with TPR. A lesson like the one that follows would be appropriate even for students who have had only a month or two of English instruction. The classic baking-soda-and-vinegar science experiment can demonstrate the nature of chemical reactions and teach a dozen new vocabulary words at the same time.
Begin by dividing the class into groups. Provide each group with a test tube, a beaker, a flask, a teaspoon, a tablespoon, and a balloon. Say, “Pick up a test tube. No, Pedro, that’s a beaker. Juan has a test tube. Juan, hold up a test tube. Everybody look at Juan. That’s a test tube.” You could say probeta, but in this case, a translation would be unnecessary and would get in the way of your students’ thinking in English.
Now, hold up a bottle of vinegar and say, “I have a bottle of vinegar that I am going to pass around. Pour about 15 milliliters into your test tube.” Hold up a graduated cylinder and pour in some vinegar. Write “15” on the board if your students are still struggling with numbers. Then pour the vinegar into your test tube. Distribute the vinegar to the groups of students. Say, “Now we will pour a few milliliters of oil into the test tube to separate the baking soda from the vinegar.” Produce cooking oil in its original container (so that students will recognize it) and pour some on top of the vinegar. Say, “The oil will separate the vinegar and the soda to prevent a chemical reaction until we are ready to produce one. Now gently pour the oil on top of the vinegar.” Demonstrate the action.
Say, “You have a teaspoon and a tablespoon in front of you [demonstrate both]. Pick up the teaspoon. No, Hideo, that’s the tablespoon. Pick up the teaspoon [demonstrate again]. Take the box of baking soda [hold up a box of baking soda]. Now measure out one half teaspoon of baking soda.” Write “1/2” on the board. If a student puts too much or too little baking soda on the spoon, point to the fraction on the board, and demonstrate. Say to the student who made a mistake, “No, Horst, you measured out a full teaspoon. I want half a teaspoon.” Point to the fraction on the board again and show the class a teaspoon that is half full.
Now say, “Gently sprinkle the soda into the test tube” as you demonstrate the action. “Be careful to not shake the test tube yet.” Early in the course, you can demonstrate negativity by shaking your head as you demonstrate an action. If you shake your head as you shake an empty test tube, your students will understand your meaning. Next, tell them to pick up the balloon. If your students are still learning colors and shapes, you can quickly review by asking who has a red balloon, who has a green one, who has a round one, and who has a long one.
Point to the mouth of the test tube and say, “This is the mouth of the test tube.” If they know the more common meaning of the word, you can alternately point to your own mouth and the mouth of the test tube and say, “This is a mouth, and so is this.” Place the balloon over the mouth of the test tube. “Now shake the test tube. [Demonstrate both actions.] When the baking soda mixes with the vinegar, it creates a chemical reaction that produces carbon dioxide.” Spanish speakers may recognize the cognates for reacción química and dióxido de carbon if you speak slowly and clearly and emphasize the words chemical reaction and carbon dioxide. Say, “The reaction will make your balloons inflate.” Demonstrate inflation with gestures. “Look, Juan’s balloon is inflating. So is Chloe’s. Which balloon has inflated the most? Which has inflated the least? Whose balloon did not inflate?”
In this lesson you will have taught the words and phrases vinegar, oil, test tube, baking soda, balloon, milliliter, half, teaspoon, shake, and inflate in a hands-on fashion, and you will have reviewed and exposed your students to several others. If your vocabulary goal for your students is 100 new vocabulary words per week in all classes combined, you will have covered half of the day’s vocabulary requirement in a 30-minute science experiment, and you will have demonstrated a scientific principle as well.
USING SHELTERED ENGLISH TO TEACH AND PRACTICE GRAMMAR
After you introduce grammatical structures, either explicitly or implicitly through modeling or pattern practice in ESL class, you can reinforce use of that structure in a sheltered content class. In a history class for advanced beginners, use of the past tense is an appropriate language objective. After all, history is about the past. Early in the course, the language objective might be the correct use of the past forms of the linking verbs was and were. Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States. Mexico was part of New Spain. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were French monarchs. Later in the courses, you could add statements in the past tense with regular and common irregular verbs. The Greeks had a democratic form of government. Columbus discovered American and claimed it for Spain. Hitler’s army invaded Poland. Later still you could add the past of less common irregular verbs as well. At different times in the social studies course, you can include negative statements in the past and later questions in the past.
When discussing the day’s news after reading the newspaper or watching a television newscast, the language objective could be the use of the present progressive. Rain is falling in Mississippi. The Fredonian army is advancing on Oceana. People in Canada are voting today.
In a lesson in which students are called on to speculate about future events, the language objective could be the correct use of the words will and might. The Olympics will take place next year, or Leaders of Pacifica might call for independence.
For more advanced English learners, the language objective of a social studies class might be the use of complex sentences to explain cause and effect. It will snow in the Northeast because a cold front is coming in from Canada, or A lot of people will be unemployed in Townsville because the tire plant will close next month.
Choosing Appropriate Materials for Sheltered English Classes
With sheltered English you will have the advantage of being able to choose appropriate materials for your students. Although the vocabulary in the regular textbooks is important, to teach grade-level English vocabulary to students who know only a few thousand words is definitely putting the cart before the horse, unless, of course, those words are cognates for words in their native language.
Avoid the temptation to select regular grade-level textbooks and then modify by translating everything into the students’ native language. If you are going to teach a subject almost entirely in another language, you should have books in that language. To help students limp through material they cannot understand with constant translation cheats them out of both English and content. It is good to have material that challenges the students; if the book is too difficult for the students to understand without constant intervention from the teacher, however, get a different book.
When choosing books for your sheltered English students, consider both age and language ability. Do not give high school students who read at a third-grade level books written for eight-year-olds. Secondary students’ background knowledge is greater than that of those in elementary school. There are a great many textbooks on the market specifically written for English learners. Take advantage of them.
WHEN ARE STUDENTS READY TO WADE INTO THE MAINSTREAM?
Sooner or later English learners will need to enter the academic mainstream. The questions of when and how long are difficult ones and will vary from student to student. Again, sink-or-swim immersion is folly, but stay-out-of–the-water-until-you-know-how-to-swim segregation is worse. We must have high expectations for English learners, and we need to keep them in contact with native speakers, but it does no good to simply drop non-English speakers into regular classes and demand the impossible.
When Are Students Ready for the Mainstream?
It is a good idea to allow students to take nonacademic classes with native speakers from their first day in school. Art and physical education classes are good places to mix with native speakers. If possible, English learners in these classes should not be seated next to other English learners. After the first semester, some students will be ready for regular math classes if tutoring support is available. An elite few might be ready for other academic classes as well. This transfer of students will reduce the number of students in your class and allow you to provide more intensive instruction for students who made less-than-adequate progress in the first semester. In the second year, you or the placement committee can decide which students are ready for one, two, or three mainstream academic classes.
Regular education teachers too often have English learners dropped into their classrooms without any guidelines for what should be expected of them. It is not enough to place students in the mainstream and give teachers orders to motivate, modify, and give passing grades. Too often, frustrated teachers of students who were mainstreamed prematurely end up encouraging their charges to simulate learning by writing something — anything, even a word-for-word reproduction of the question—in the blanks of their worksheets and tests. The message becomes, “Look busy, put something on paper, and take your C.” Unfortunately, some students who learn to get by in this manner may limp through several years of school without learning study skills, or much of anything else. Your students need not understand everything that they hear and read in regular content classes to benefit, but they must have some clues.
A very few students, the very quickest learners, will be ready to succeed in the mainstream after as little as a semester. In the higher grades these will be students who have strong academic skills in their native languages and who are willing to spend several extra hours studying with the aid of bilingual dictionaries. Most, however, will need some modifications during the first few years. The modifications must be more than simply passing them because they do not speak English.
THE POWER OF PRIOR KNOWLEDGE
Clearly the task is more difficult when the student is new to the content. If a Spanish speaker understands that células have núcleos with cromosomas inside, a lesson on cellular biology can be a useful English lesson, even if the student learns nothing new about biology. If students are familiar with the countries of Europe, they can learn their English names easily when the teacher points to them on a map and says their names. For students who know nothing of these countries, the task is more difficult. It is clearly easier to learn a new label for something than to come to understand its nature. When considering whether to place students in a sheltered English class or in the mainstream, consider their prior knowledge of the subject.
THE POWER OF INCIDENTAL LEARNING
When deciding whether to place a student in a regular class, consider the value of incidental learning there. Often students who appear to flounder in the mainstream, even some who receive failing grades there, learn a lot of language. Sometimes students who get complacent in the sheltering arms of sheltered English classes need the reality therapy that a period or two of true English immersion offers.
In this age of accountability, we teachers are expected to express our instructional intent in lesson plans, teach the material, and then prove through some sort of assessment that the material has been mastered. The downside is that this “accountability” downplays the value of incidental learning, that which does not appear on the lesson plans. If an English teacher covering a Shakespeare lesson goes off on a tangent about British royal succession and children learn about three or four kings who were not listed in the lesson plans, or a math teacher who plays classical music in the background familiarizes his students with the works of Europe’s best known composers, valuable lessons are learned, even if the teacher does not get to take credit for that learning. It has been said that people can accomplish great things when they are not concerned about who will take credit. There is no simple way to evaluate incidental learning, but ethical teachers share it whenever they can.
Incidental learning is especially powerful in language learning situations. All contact with the English language is valuable for those who are learning it. Content class teachers who perpetually feel frustrated by the difficulties their students face might be surprised at the amount of language that English learners are picking up in their classes.
One does not learn vocabulary all at once. Mastery of vocabulary may begin when a student looks up a word in a dictionary, copies it from the blackboard, or sees it demonstrated by an ESL teacher, but it is not complete until the student has heard and used the word several times. The same holds true for grammatical structures. Even if one knows the rules of English grammar, it takes months or even years to learn to apply them correctly and automatically. The modeling of correct English structures that students encounter, among other places, in the content classroom contributes to ultimate mastery.
Students sometimes report learning a word that they seemingly had never heard and then hearing it five times later that day in their regular classes. Some students also report missing words on a vocabulary test in ESL class and then hearing and understanding them in another class an hour later. Teachers report meeting English learners who had been in their classes in past years and who seemed to learn nothing there but who had since become fluent and thank the teacher for helping make that fluency possible.
Students who seem to be learning nothing in the mainstream may be picking up vocabulary and reinforcing structure as they listen, even if they appear to understand very little. There is good reason for the frustrated classroom teacher to take heart.
REASONABLE AND UNREASONABLE MODIFICATIONS IN THE INCLUSIVE CLASSROOM
Before sending students into a regular content classroom, determine which modifications are reasonable. Mainstream teachers should allow English learners to use appropriate reference materials, including bilingual dictionaries, even on tests. If students understand the content but express their knowledge imperfectly because of language difficulties, those imperfections should be given little weight in grading. Teachers might even want to consider allowing first-year mainstreamed students to answer test questions in their native language when they know the answer but cannot express it in English. The English-learner label must not, however, become a license to pass simply for showing up.
THE F WORD (FAILURE)
Unfortunately, in many schools the first priority is to get the students through in the least possible amount of time. When a student comes to an American school in tenth grade with no English skills, or in seventh grade with neither English language skills nor native-language literacy skills, it is difficult to master the language and content skills necessary to graduate by the age of eighteen. The F word (failure) is unpopular, but sometimes retention or repetition of a course can be positive. It is better to repeat a year and graduate late or finish in night school for adults than to be held to no standard and be passed on year after year, and to graduate limited in both English language and academic skills. Given the difficult situation that English learners in regular classes face, it is reasonable that they be allowed to take these classes on an A–B–C / no credit basis.
THE BRIGHT SIDE: ENRICHED CLASS DISCUSSIONS
Many regular content-class teachers have happy tales about their experiences with English learners mainstreamed into their classes. Foreign students with different points of view can make class discussions interesting. Some English learners have levels of knowledge superior to that of their American-born classmates. I was once presenting background information for Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities in an English literature class and I asked who knew about the storming of the Bastille. All five of the students who knew had attended school in Mexico. Some intermediate English learners have done better with Shakespeare than their native-English-speaking peers, perhaps because they have learned to not be frustrated by words and phrases they do not understand, or perhaps because learning English has helped them hone their skills at applying context clues.
OUT-OF-CLASS SUPPORT FOR ENGLISH LEARNERS IN REGULAR CONTENT CLASSES
ESL teachers can provide support for English learners in regular classes in a number of ways. You can offer tutoring services before or after school, or you can offer support during the regular academic day. If you have a long ESL block, you might set aside a half-hour per day for homework help or to help clarify that which is taught in the mainstream. Another option is to offer a daily homework help session in place of an elective. Administrators might complain that such a noncredit session is a waste of time. Remember the adage To grasp at much is to hold little. It is better to receive one fewer credit per year than to not understand that which is taught in content classes.
In tutoring situations, limited translation of key concepts is reasonable, even if the student is not enrolled in a bilingual program. If a student is going to spend two weeks working problems involving triangles, it is not unreasonable to spend ten minutes of tutoring time explaining the Pythagorean theory in the student’s native language. For students who spend several hours daily fully immersed in English, a bit of translation will not interfere with progress toward mastery of English.