English 344: Tuesday, April 12

I found the discussion on the six proposals for classroom teaching quite interesting. As far as the foreign language setting goes, a few of them (Get it right from the beginning, teach what is teachable to a certain extent) seemed to bring back memories of my own foreign language experience in high school. Unfortunately, I cannot say that was too successful. I do see positives and negatives for each teaching practice, as one will when examining any such practice. Once again, I will advocate that, with learning a foreign language, there is no better tool that the social interaction of being emersed in its home language context through studying abroad, etc. So instead of continuing on discussing the teaching of foreign language, I want to instead examine a few of these proposals through the lens of the ESL student in the United States, a student who is already immersed in the context (unless hidden in ESL classroom throughout the entirety of education, which is a completely different issue).

Many school districts simply do not have the means or the funding to give the ESL students the language enrichment that the need, so proposal number four, two for one, often becomes the de facto teaching method without any discussion of the matter. When ESL students are mainstreamed into content-area classrooms, that teacher must wear two hats-that of the language and of the content teacher--regardless of training in the matter. The book notes that students often need several years of language instruction before being able to learn from this method. That is all well and good, but oftentimes students don't have a choice in the matter. Thus, when it comes to ESL students in mainstream contexts, this is the model that all teachers should learn about and work with in order to effectively teach their ESL students both content and language.

I also find the "Teach what is teachable" proposal an interesting one in relation to ESL students. The labeling of the stages of a language itself appear to be problematic in that 1. this maintains that there are strict divisions in the levels of ability rather than a fluid continuum, 2. students can, thus, easily fit into said divisions, and 3. this assumes the easy labeling of divisions to be being with (meaning, when does a students move up in a stage? when they use the structure occasionally? when they are experts at using the structure? when they can simply understand it?). Teaching a classroom of mainstream students, including ESL students, using this method would be interesting. I wonder just how one would attempt to hit that next level of learning for every students, although that key word "differentiation" would clearly up come into play here. Finally, I am curious how the L1 would come into play with this proposal. Would its affects on the L2 simply disappear when one reached a certain stage? Would this be a problem even in the upper stages of language learning?