English 345: Thursday, September 22

I find today's readings interesting, partly because I believe that both content-based instruction and sheltered instruction should be ESL techniques that the content area teachers themselves in middle school and in high school should not only be aware of, but should attempt to enact in their own content classrooms. "Most schools are not meeting the challenges of educating linguistically and culturally diverse students well," the article featuring an introduction to Sheltered Instruction notes. One challenge that arises from these diverse students is that teachers who teach these students--both ESL and content area teachers--need to talk to each other about what is going on in either classroom in order to provide the most effective education for those second language learners. However, in my experience in various high school settings, I have rarely ever seen the content area teachers and the ESL teachers communicate. It has been almost like those ESL teachers were on a language island all of their own. This also may have been because, in many districts, the ESL teachers must shuttle between different schools during the day due to budget contraints--but that is an entirely different issue.

What is positive about both CBI and SI is that they somehow "force" these groups of teachers to interact. If an ESL teacher wishes to create a sheltered classroom, he or she would have to communicate with the English or the science teacher, for example, through something like weekly meetings in order to create an authentic classroom atmosphere where the ESL students are learning both the content of the course through modified instruction of the language.

These programs could then, as the article suggests, become a bridge to mainstream classrooms. Ideally, the mainstream classroom teacher, through that communication with the ESL teacher, would have learned more about language acquisition and, for example, sheltered instruction so the appropriate amount of scaffolding could continue to go on in the content classroom, but the students would then become more socialized into the high school's fabric.