There are many terms used to describe ESL/ELL and EFL instruction. For now let’s just use the acronym ELA – English Language Acquisition – to make it simple.
In my experience, certainly here in Denver Public Schools, the chasm between ELA training and TPRS has not been sufficiently addressed. In Abraham Lincoln High School in particular, where 90% of our population speaks a language other than English as their first language, this topic has not been addressed.
Even though our entire WL department uses TPRS, none of the ELA teachers do, nor do they have an inkling of what it is, and are fittingly located almost at the other end of the city block on the west side of Denver that our building occupies.
Whenever I asked my mainly Latino students if they are happy with their ELA classes, they tell me that they are not. In my view, that is because their training is too output driven. They are asked to produce writing and speech too early. Their affective filters go up, and their learning goes down.
A few meetings produced nothing and it’s almost like a pedagogical stalemate. At the district level the ELA administrators train their teachers in the use of costly textbooks in a highly prescriptive output-driven approach, while we do ours, with no textbooks, saving the district millions of dollars.
Nothing has been done, no conclusions reached, no plan made. We may as well have tried to find common ground with the Science Department at Lincoln.
(à suivre)