ELA Thoughts

3 thoughts on “ELA Thoughts”

1. Jody

   December 11, 2012 at 7:23 pm

   Many ELLs, who are in high school, have been in U.S. schools for many years, and many are born here. They have “functional” superficial English oral/aural skills, but are very poor readers and thus, poor writers.

   When they are submerged in English for most of their day, from the very beginning of their educations in this country, they are in a dark cloud of incomprehension for quite a long time, particularly if they are not already quite literate in first language. Those are lost academic years for them–years they fall behind in school as they try to acquire English oral language. Many acquire decent basic English speaking and listening skills during that time, but never arrive at “proficiency” which is denoted by high levels of literacy.

   Non-English speaking kids, who enter our school system highly literate in their first language, acquire English more quickly and do better in school. Duh. With the dismantling of bilingual programs, and current federal regulations which require kids to exit ESL programs within only a few years, we have recreated the same old shit from before: kids who limp along behind the pack, believing themselves to be deservedly deficient, who fail in our system. This is such an old story; it pains me no end.

   The point of my rant: It is totally reasonable to expect kids to write well after being in school a certain number of years. However, if we subeducate them, using a deficit model, we cannot hold them responsible for what we didn’t give them–time to learn English, aural and written comprehensible input in quantities and at a rate that is reasonable, and a way to stay even or catch up with their native-English peers EARLY ON. This system is such a lose/lose for everyone, students and teachers alike. Can you imagine if your French students were responsible for doing grade level French high school work after only two years of FSL instruction? What a joke!

   Log in to Reply
   1. Robert Harrell

      December 11, 2012 at 9:17 pm

      I can reinforce Jody’s comments. Today I was at a “Constructing Meaning” inservice (full-day release on Thursday as well – during the second week before Christmas; the timing makes a lot of sense, right?) by my district. As part of their justification for the training they gave us similar statistics: ELLs keep falling farther behind non-ELLs in high school; 43% of ELLs accepted to the California State University system have to take remedial English before they can take regular university classes. Most ELLs plateau at the Intermediate-High or Pre-Advanced/Advanced Low level, i.e. do not acquire academic language and literacy skills.

      The second element was the truism that people don’t care what you know but what you can produce.

      Therefore, we must get all of our students to produce academic language by explicitly teaching them and making them practice the language. One Special Ed teacher was excited because she could teach one of the five “Dominant Functions” each week for the first five weeks of school, and then her students would be able to use academic language (or at least the “mortar”, i.e. connectors and non-technical verbiage) in their writing. Of course there was mention of providing students with scaffolding in the form of “sentence frames”, graphic organizers, etc.

      Unfortunately, nothing was said about the “silent period” or the need for the teacher to model the language over time so that students hear and process it before producing it. There was no recognition that ELLs need to hear and read the language more than they need to practice output. The creators of this model apparently never had substantive conversations with second-language acquisition experts because the emphasis is all on quick training and then output. Nonetheless, my district is highly invested in training every teacher in the district in the method, and we are expected to apply it to our content areas within the framework of GRR (Gradual Release of Responsibility), another area in which the district is heavily invested.

      Was today’s training a total waste? By no means. If nothing else, I am reminded that I need to use structures in my own speech and writing that I want my students to acquire. If I expect them to use connectors, I definitely need to model them. That will be one thing I will consciously work on: including sequencers in telling stories so that each of the locations ties to the next, either logically or chronologically. (For example, by using “then”, “after that”, “and so”, etc. – I realize that I often leave those out while we are doing the stories and acting them out.) I will probably put up a list of connectors and “sentence frames” for my students so that I am “in compliance” with my district, but I hold no illusion that this represents true acquisition; it can, however, help my students feel good about themselves.

      Log in to Reply
      1. Ben Slavic

         December 11, 2012 at 10:17 pm

         Yes Robert this is exactly what is happening in our district. Since we have 2000 ELA teachers, it is a big waste of money.

         Log in to Reply