English 344: Tuesday, January 18th

As I begin writing this blog entry, I think back to my time student teaching. In one regular freshmen English class, I had seven ESL students, all of whom spoke Spanish as their L1 language. I had no experience working with these types of students before, and the Spanish that I speak is poor to say the least. They had very, very little experience in actual U.S. classrooms. Each student had only been in the country for a few years, and before their freshmen years in high school, had been in an ESL classroom to study the main subjects taught in school. Yet now, as they entered their first year in high school, the school administrators assumed that they could handle working side-by-side with the native speakers of English.

In our readings this week, Saville-Troike notes that how a second language is learned is profoundly influenced by social, cultural, and economic factors. All of the ESL students that I taught came from poorer backgrounds in which they never were able to build a good foundation for their first language, Spanish. Some had even been pulled in and out of school while living in Mexico, never getting a chance to feel the fluidity and connections made from continuous learning.

I believe that what I mentioned above is a critical issue for any person who is or on the path to become a secondary teacher in this country. How does one teach students a new language when their first language is extremely lacking? One unit that I taught all of the freshman was Romeo and Juliet. I will admit that Shakespeare is, at times, still hard for me to understand. I first began the unit with the accelerated students, and even they stumbled over the text time and again. As I began to teach the other students, exactly what I thought would happen did:  The ESL students had absolutely no idea what was going on. I differentiated instruction the best I could in the classes, giving the ESL students much, much easier tasks. Still, I often wondered how best to teach students English literature and writing when they had so little knowledge about Spanish in the first place. The cross-linguistic transfer mentioned in today's reading could not possible be taking place.

I will be the first to admit that I know very little about teaching ESL students, but asking teachers to teach such students to read Shakespeare or understand complex Biology terms in English without first understanding their own language seems like an extremely daunting task to me. Saville-Troike once asks why there are such widely differentiated outcomes of SLA. This will be a question that will constantly arise as I continue through my education career. However, I know this much right now: Asking ESL students to perform tasks so far above their education level when they enter U.S. schools will only push them away from wanting to learn and leave them dropping out of school when they turn 15.

Some questions that I'd like to ponder:
- How should teachers go about teaching these ESL students who lack a sufficient base in their native language?
- What should school districts do to train teachers to better handle such students?