Question:
I've read the posts about ESL with interest from all the appropriate
threads . But I'm still confused about the program as it was
established. Maybe my questions have been answered already, but I
probably missed the answers if they were posted.
Was this originally a national program or set up by individual
states?
Who attends this as opposed to Bilingual- I mean we had many
Spanish only kids, so most were placed in Bilingual subject matter
classes where the teacher taught mostly in Spanish and gradually they
learned English (or were supposed to) and then went to regular
classes. So when is a child ready for ESL, where they are taught for
the one language class in English, then where do they go- regular
English speaking subject classes? or do they go back to bilingual
classes?
No one in my school ever really explained why some kids were in ESL
and then struggled the rest of the day in regular subject matter
classes, and why most were in bilingual classes until they got enough
English to go to regular classes the following year or two. I don't
remember ever having any ESL kids in Biology or Physics classes I
taught, only a few who came from the bilingual classes into my classes.
If the ESL teacher teaches in English and, as a few of you have
explained, the teacher may not be able to speak the native language(s)
of the students, how does the teacher know what the kids are trying to
convey as they struggle to translate back and forth into English??
How long will they stay there, in practice?
I'm not being sarcastic in any way, just trying as a teacher retiree and a
taxpayer to understand these programs. When non-teacher friends ask me
where their tax dollars are going, I had to admit I really don't
understand.
Answer:
ESL is not a single program. It is an acronym for those kids who speak
English as a second language. States or local districts have programs for
dealing with kids who don't understand English who are placed in their
charge - these programs are "ESL" programs.
The default ESL policy is "sink or swim" - no accomodations to the
non-English speaker who sits in a class listening to teacher and fellow
students speaking gobbledygook until it starts to dawn on him/her what they
are saying. Needless to say this is not a very successful approach.
Long before any court cases, schools developed better ways to deal with the
situation, having someone work with the student having little or no English
skill to mentor that student - at first teaching some basic English words,
and then as the child learned more English, backing up the child with
explanations and rephrasings in simpler language and/or with pictures and
props so that the child could understand what is going on. The collected
techniques for teaching a child who has limited English proficiency to
thrive while immersed in a native-English classroom are the forte of the
"ESL teacher".
Thus ESL programs are the policies of a district for providing such aid to
ESL students.
Typical for students in our local district (I am a parent of two former ESL
students), the newly admitted child who speaks little or no English is
placed in a regular class. An ESL teacher works with the child daily,
adapting classwork into something the child can do with the limited skills.
Often the child is pulled out for an hour or so for focussed work on
English language vocabulary and grammar and idiom, during which the
teaching is most akin to the French class you might take where the teacher
never speaks French and avoids responding to non-French from the students.
After about a year of this the child is capable of class participation, and
pullout is only done when there are special problems - the ESL teacher then
works in the classroom either with the student individually, or with a
group of usually slower students of which the ESL student is a member.
Here in Fairfax County, typically in the third year of ESL, the ESL teacher
does not come into class except when the child is having particular
difficulty. But the child remains an ESL student and among other things is
not expected to meet academic standards for native speakers in language
arts but instead is graded on personal progress. Usually after the third
year, the child is released from the ESL program, and no further
accomodation is made. However, former ESL status remains relevant; my son
after 5 years in the schools still had to be tested for English proficiency
as an ESL student as part of the special education testing process, to rule
out whether his academic problems were language related. If they had been,
his special ed services might have included additional ESL help.
At no time was he taught in his native language (Russian), and in fact none
of his teachers knew a word of the language
ESL is going to be the default status for a limited English proficiency
student. In the case of Spanish students in some parts of the country (and
maybe a few other languages in individual schools that are in an immigrant
ghetto of some other culture) they form a large enough percentage of the
student body that it makes sense to hire teachers who actually knows
Spanish, and who can teach subject matter in the language while the child
goes through the ESL process.
The theory is that this doesn't waste the student's time as much as the
first two years of ESL might - the child can learn material at a normal
rate in his native language while learning English, probably at a somewhat
slower rate because the pressure is reduced along with the time spent
immersed in English (that time also includes playground and home time,
since the group of Spanish speaking students tends to segregate and not
speak English outside the classroom because there are enough around to
allow this).
Bilingual education of course cannot be offered if there aren't enough
students to offer a class in each subject in that language.
Probably the ESL kids blended in, and got their ESL help mostly in English
class; if there was a Spanish bilingual program, Spanish kids probably were
not placed into an ESL program until they reached a stage that you decribed
as having "enough English to go to regular classes"; so the only ESL kids
you could have seen as ESL per se would have been those from other language
backgrounds. Possibly in high school, at least in your area, there may be
a more intense program than I described for ESL kids wherein they do not
attend any regular classes until they are capable of following the class
without standing out. There are some who feel this is the proper way to do
ESL, but as foreign language teachers know all too well, it is rather hard
to teach a second language by itself and is much better to teach the
language while conveying some content that the student is interested in or
needs to learn
I hope I answered this above. They are teaching them English, and not how
to translate back and forth from English to their native language. The
latter is a different skill, and less suitable for a second language
student immersed in an English classroom: translation is simply too slow.
Think again about the immersive French class (French I think is the
language most likely to be taught by an immersive method in this country) -
the goal is to have you think in and speak French, not translate.
ESL programs are more expensive than bilingual programs, because these are
extra resource teachers who are not teaching classes per se but floating
and helping kids in other teachers' classes. Bilingual programs have
teachers teaching regular classes in the other language and hence require
fewer regular teachers. But bilingual courses do not teach English as
quickly or efficiently. California probably went heavily into bilingual
education because of its eroded tax base under Proposition 13 as much as
because it had so many Spanish speaking students.
My kids attended a magnet elementary for ESL kids, which had maybe 150 ESL
kids from 30-40 languages in a school of 350. They had 3 full time ESL
teachers who floated from class to class and somewhat reduced class sizes,
and in the upper primary grades had a full time non-ESL resource teacher
for each grade who worked with ESL kids and slower students (typically the
upper grades had fewer kids still in an ESL program because they had
graduated from the 3 year sequence I described above). This magnet has
since reverted to a normal school because the ESL population of the
district got too large and the local school area gained too many kids from
demographic changes to justify bringing in more kids from outside.
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