While reading the articles by Nesbitt and Cruz on working to create a classroom environment conducive to the education of English Language Learners, I became slightly sidetracked. This detour in my attention to the assignment at hand, however, ended up being for the better. I found a clip on Youtube of a movie titled Immersion. As I watched the first several minutes of the clip, the experience seemed all too familiar and real for me. Just as the main character in the film struggles to illustrate his depth of knowledge of content material and in turn, is teased by peers and pushed aside by teachers, I had several friends growing up who were ELL students and who lived through like circumstances. At the school I attended in Georgia, all students in grades first through eighth were required to take the Criterion-Reference Competency Test (CRCT). For eighth graders, it was a high stakes test and passing the grade level depended upon passing the test. This was an issue for my friends who were brilliant students and hard-working individuals; they were proficient in math and very literate in their native language and spoke English well but the expectation to have a new learner of the English language be capable to pass the same test (which is administered in English) on the same level of a native English speaker and to compare the two test scores and deem them as accurate evaluators of students’ competencies was cruel. Smart students were essentially handicapped by a system which refused to acknowledge the injustice in the matter.
My friends failed the CRCT and came close to dropping out of school because in order to move onto high school, they would have to attend CRCT preparatory courses in the summer time and attempt to pass the test at the end of the summer (this posed an issue in itself because they all worked on farms harvesting onions in the heat of the day during the summer in order to help provide for their families).
These students (students like my friends) want to learn; they do not enjoy being teased for not having “mastered” the English language. But by the same token, many students have outside circumstances that we must be aware of as educators and which we must take into consideration as we work to connect the curriculum with each child and their learning style. In Monday’s article, “Language Learners”, by Cruz we read about various ways to make the English language, curriculum, and language acquisition process relevant to students. One example in which I feel would be successful in connecting with students and would be inclusive of ELL students would be providing students with a relevant hot topic/current event to discuss that they are aware of and interested in. As Cruz discusses, by having students work in pairs to discuss these topics they are learning from each other and working in their Zone of Proximal Development while scaffolding their English language skills.
On top of the discussions held in class and the ideas provided by course readings, I also found the website Edutopia to be filled with various articles concerning the teaching of ELL students, including the article “10 Tips for Teaching English Language Learners”. In this piece, contributor Ayanna Cooper discusses various ways to aid in reaching ELL students. CHECK IT OUT!!
The address for Edutopia is http://www.edutopia.org/blog/teaching-english-language-learners-ayanna-cooper.
Finally…the web address for the clip from Immersion is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Y0HAjLKYI. I highly suggest watching at least the first five minutes of it; it gives a humbling glimpse into the world of someone who has been submersed into a new, foreign language and is expected to leave it completely at home.
My friends failed the CRCT and came close to dropping out of school because in order to move onto high school, they would have to attend CRCT preparatory courses in the summer time and attempt to pass the test at the end of the summer (this posed an issue in itself because they all worked on farms harvesting onions in the heat of the day during the summer in order to help provide for their families).
These students (students like my friends) want to learn; they do not enjoy being teased for not having “mastered” the English language. But by the same token, many students have outside circumstances that we must be aware of as educators and which we must take into consideration as we work to connect the curriculum with each child and their learning style. In Monday’s article, “Language Learners”, by Cruz we read about various ways to make the English language, curriculum, and language acquisition process relevant to students. One example in which I feel would be successful in connecting with students and would be inclusive of ELL students would be providing students with a relevant hot topic/current event to discuss that they are aware of and interested in. As Cruz discusses, by having students work in pairs to discuss these topics they are learning from each other and working in their Zone of Proximal Development while scaffolding their English language skills.
On top of the discussions held in class and the ideas provided by course readings, I also found the website Edutopia to be filled with various articles concerning the teaching of ELL students, including the article “10 Tips for Teaching English Language Learners”. In this piece, contributor Ayanna Cooper discusses various ways to aid in reaching ELL students. CHECK IT OUT!!
The address for Edutopia is http://www.edutopia.org/blog/teaching-english-language-learners-ayanna-cooper.
Finally…the web address for the clip from Immersion is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Y0HAjLKYI. I highly suggest watching at least the first five minutes of it; it gives a humbling glimpse into the world of someone who has been submersed into a new, foreign language and is expected to leave it completely at home.